Road Brothers Page 14

  Both boys narrowed their eyes at him and made no answer.

  “He would have spent those years in torment in the fires of Hell!” Gomst moved the light below his face to lend it a demonic aspect. He would scare the sin out of William Ancrath before the child grew too old to be saved. “Burning in a lake of fire with no prospect of ever escaping. That, boys, is why you must obey the Lord in all things and cast sin aside.” He fixed Jorg with his stare, hoping for an ally. “And what is the biggest sin of all?”

  Jorg frowned. “Fornicating with camels?”

  “No! And where did you hear that?” Again Gomst had to lower his hand half-way to striking the boy.

  “It was in the bible.” Jorg clamped his jaw shut. Defiant.

  Gomst swung his glare at William. “Killing your father is the greatest sin.”

  “What are camels?” William asked.

  Gomst’s hand decided the matter for him. He smacked the youngest prince around the head, hard enough to topple him from the tomb. A moment later he pulled Jorg from atop his great-great-grandfather and started to march off, dragging the boy with him.

  “It’s for his own good! We need to put some fear into him. I can’t say what King Olidan will do to the child if he’s caught coming at him with a skewer. But it will be much worse than this! Your father is not a gentle man!”

  Jorg came tripping along behind, not trying to wrench his hand free.

  Gomst glanced back. He could see Prince William in the thickening shadows at the base of the tomb, sitting himself up and rubbing at his head. “Your brother will come running after us soon enough,” Gomst said. “He won’t stay there in the dark.”

  Gomst’s confidence in his statement began to waver as he reached the far end of the vault without any sounds of distress or pursuit. He turned back but could see nothing save darkness.

  “He can still see our light,” Jorg said.

  Gomst hesitated, uneasy, his fingers still stinging from where he slapped the boy. Any normal child would have been left sobbing and would have run after them by now, terrified. He gritted his teeth and led on, around the corner and back along the long corridor. After fifty yards he stopped. “We’ll wait here.”

  “You shouldn’t have hit him,” Jorg said. “You’ll be his enemy now.”

  “It was for his own good.” Gomst bit off the words, exasperated at finding himself having to explain his actions to a child.

  “It wasn’t for your good.” The lantern light gave Jorg’s face a sinister cast that Gomst would never have thought to see on a six year old. “You’re my enemy too now.”

  “Me?” Gomst bridled. “Why for God’s sake?”

  “You hit my brother.” Jorg sat down, his back to the wall, and said no more.

  Seconds stretched into minutes and minutes stretched beyond Father Gomst’s ability to judge. He sat beside Jorg to save his legs. His imagination ran in circles, the explanations he would offer to the king if something had gone wrong, the route he would take to escape Ancrath, the sanctuary he would seek at the cathedral… And all the while these thoughts circled the image of a small blonde child alone in the dark, lying in an ever spreading pool of blood.

  “He must be hurt!”

  “He wasn’t,” Jorg said. “I saw him get up.”

  Gomst opened his mouth again but said nothing. The walls seemed to press in from all sides. The dank air offered insufficient substance to his lungs. And the darkness crowded about them, thick with ghosts, not of the Ancraths silent in their tombs, but of the unquiet hordes who had fallen to their swords.

  At last, with the lantern’s flame starting to flicker, Gomst stood. “We have to go back.”

  “He’s beaten you,” Jorg said.

  Gomst bowed his head. It was true. “I’m a priest,” he said. “We play the long game.”

  They retraced their steps, turned the corner, walked back down the length of the vault past the empty archways to chambers where more dead Ancraths lay, and the chambers where King Olidan and Queen Rowan would one day take their final rest.

  The lantern’s flickers revealed the child crouched ghoul-like upon the black bones of Caine Ancrath. William raised his head to them, slowly, as if about to reveal a face from nightmare rather than that of a cherub.

  “I like it down here,” he said.

  “Time to come away, Prince William.” Father Gomst held out his hand.

  “If Jorg is going to be king of all the people up there … I could be king of all the dead,” William said. “Then I wouldn’t have to kill him to be king. And we could both be kings.”

  Gomst found his outstretched hand trembling. There was such a certainty in the boy, as if some far older spirit watched from his eyes. “There’s no king of the dead, William. Come with us.”

  “Is that why Father killed Justice?” William asked. “Did he send him ahead so that he would be waiting for me? Waiting to help me?”

  Gomst felt a weight upon his shoulders then, heavier than Olidan’s regard, heavier than the Tall Castle towering above him fathoms high. A simple lie. A simple lie to save a boy from his father’s wrath.

  “Is it?” William asked.

  “Yes.”

  And Gomst led both boy from darkness.

  On the stairs, with William falling behind, Jorg whispered, “You lied.”

  Gomst made no reply. Lies are soft and accommodating. The truth is hard, full of uncomfortable angles. It rarely helps anyone. Jesus said I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. But in the Tall Castle only one father mattered and he was neither Gomst nor God.

  Gomst knew himself well enough, and the truth was: lies were all that might save him.

  Footnote – I gave you Father Gomst through Jorg’s eyes, and although Jorg learned to see more as he matured we never really saw into the man. I never thought of Gomst as hero or villain, though certainly young Jorg saw him in unflattering terms. The idea of weak men representing ultimate authority interests me, and Gomst is an example of that. A man with many flaws, an average sort of man with a goodish heart, and the job to represent the ultimate power… People often ask me if I see myself more as Jorg or as Jalan (from my Red Queen’s War trilogy). Sometimes I think as an author, representing the ultimate power in my fictional worlds … I’m more of a Gomst!