Page 22 of Bitter Burn
“I have the key to his server rooms,” I say calmly. “I took it the night I left. Everything in Lyonesse, we can have. I’ll be watched at first. My connection with Tristan was known at the end, so there will be more than Mark’s suspicion to deal with, it will be the club’s suspicion as well. But when the suspicion eases, as it must over time, I’ll find my chance, and the Lyonesse treasury will belong to the saints at last.”
I see something I never thought I’d see.
Greed, plain as anything, on my uncle’s face.
He buries it quickly, a thoughtful expression and a half turn away from me, but I saw it. It was real. Mortimer Cashel, the famous cipher, the smiling, inscrutable puppeteer, undone by this singular desire.
“The Scales told us Mark is moving against the Church, but we don’t know his timeline yet, and we might outrun him—or we might be able to stop him. It’s a risk, I know, but whatever is in those vaults, Uncle, if it could be yours…”
“All of it,” he murmurs, more to himself than to me, I think. “I could finally have all of it.”
“Let me atone for my failure,” I plead. “Let me return and deliver what you’d asked for. It’s not certain, and it will take time?—”
“And you will kill Mark at the end?” Mortimer asks. The mask is back, his eyes giving nothing away. “Perhaps it would be unwise to kill him before you get into the server vaults, because your access as a widow or as a murder suspect will be limited, but after…he cannot live, Isolde. He will destroy us if he does.”
“Yes.” I bow my head again to show my sincerity and to hide my face. “I will make sure I kill him this time.”
A finger touches my chin. I look up into green-blue eyes, the right different from the left in its speckling and color composition. “You must,” he commands. “You must make sure. If you fail again, if you are weak again, God will find a better tool, a sharper blade. Do you understand?”
Did you declare me an apostate? I want to ask. Did you order my death like you once ordered an evil archbishop’s? Like you ordered Mark’s?
These shouldn’t be the questions choking my throat right now, not at all. I should want to ask about Ys, I should interrogate him about his plans, his activities, Drobny and Carpathia and if he’s hoping to become the pope so he can shape the world even more explicitly to his desires.
But he is the father I wished I had, the only adult in my life who’d ever come close to understanding my grave, desperate, self-scourging heart. My actual father sold me into marriage, and now I want to know if my spiritual father sold me into death.
Because of my failures? Because of my lack of faith? Because he thought I’d been corrupted by Mark?
Or, my mind supplies, turned by him.
Turned into a double agent, pretending to work for the Church while I help Mark bring down Ys and my uncle with it.
But I see no answers in my uncle’s face now; they are too well hidden. What is clear is the threat about failure and weakness he is making now…which is perhaps its own answer.
“Yes, Uncle,” I say, swallowing against the creeping clench of betrayal at the base of my throat. I think of that painting of Abraham and Isaac hanging in the other room, of the terror in Isaac’s face. He knew that Abraham wasn’t about to stay his own knife. “I understand.”
Ten
Mark
I don’t have time, and it’s beyond defensible—just a twinge, really, at the nape of my neck and the pit of my stomach—but I stop at the National Central Library before I skulk out of the city.
For this, I wear a collar (purchased honestly at Gammarelli, like a good Roman priest) so that my nosing around is written off as pre-conclave boredom or as holy scholarly duty. I get into the library and guilt the librarian into honoring my request without any undue curiosity.
I sit in the glossy and echoing rarities room as the old volume is brought out and set on a cradle in front of me. I’ve already been asked to wash my hands; the rarities room doesn’t require gloves for this particular book as a glove’s fibers could catch on the brittle paper. They leave me with a few dire warnings in Italian and retreat to their desk on the other side of the room, and then I begin carefully lifting the cover.
When you work for the agency for too long, you develop a condition Melody calls spy brain, which is a sort of paranoid inverse of Occam’s razor. It means that when I look at a book, as I am right now, my mind goes to tags or chips hidden in the spine or maybe documents pasted under the endpapers rather than what the pages actually say.
But a subtle scan with my phone reveals nothing at all, and I detect no seams or bumps under the endpapers or the cover of the book.
So then I stop thinking like an old spy and start thinking like an archivist. Like Father Minch would have if he were still alive. I begin to read.
Or rather, I pretend to read, because the Revelata Scientia is entirely in Latin. I only know a bare handful of Latin, two scratched-out semesters of high school before I dropped it for Spanish, and it was only enough to toil through Aesop’s Fables, not enough to decipher whatever passed for “science” in 1682, when this was published.
Luckily, it’s a slim volume, and I decide to cheat. I surreptitiously take pictures of each page with my phone, page after page of unevenly printed Latin with the occasional inset drawing, and then I gently close the book and stare at it for a moment, knowing I’ve wasted time I don’t have on a feeling I can’t prove.
Why did Father Minch have you written in the margins of his Bible? I ask the book.
It doesn’t answer, and no possibilities come to me. I drum my fingers once on the table and then get up to tell the librarian I’m finished.
