The Heretic Kings Read Online Free PDF Page A

afternoon. On closer inspection it might be seen that the inferno was not one single blaze, but a huge number of lesser bonfires grouped closely together. They were silent; the wind carried the hungry roar of the flames away from him. But he could just make out the dark stick-figure at the heart of every tiny, discrete fire. Every one a heretic, yielding up his spirit in a saffron halo of unimaginable agony. Over six hundred of them.
    That, Sastro thought, is power also. The ability to withhold life.
    He stepped in off the balcony and shut the intricately carved screen behind him. He found himself in a tall stone room, the walls hung with tapestries depicting scenes from the lives of various saints. Braziers burned everywhere, generating a warm fug, a charcoal smell. Only above the long table where the others sat did oil lamps burn, hanging from the ceiling on silver chains. The day outside, with the screen closed, was dark enough to make it seem nocturnal in here. The three men seated around the table, elbow-deep in papers and decanters, did not seem to notice, however. Sastro took his seat among them again. The headache which had occasioned his stepping out on to the balcony was still with him and he rubbed his throbbing temples as he regarded the others in silence.
    The rulers of the kingdom, no less. The dispatch-runner had put in only that afternoon, a sleek galleass which had almost foundered in its haste to reach Abrusio. It had set out from Touron a scant nineteen days ago, spent a fortnight pulling against the wind to get clear of the Tulmian Gulf, and then had spread its wings before the wind all the way south along the Hebrian coast, running off eighty leagues a day at times. It bore a messenger from Vol Ephrir who was now a month on the road, who had hurtled north through Perigraine killing a dozen horses on the way, who had stopped at Charibon a night and then had hurtled on again until he had taken ship with the galleass in Touron. The messenger bore news of the excommunication of the Hebrian monarch.
    Quirion of Fulk, Presbyter of the Knights Militant, an Inceptine cleric who bore a sword, leaned back from the table with a sigh. The chair cracked under his weight. He was a corpulent man, the muscle of youth melting into fat, but still formidable. His head was shaved in the fashion of the Knights, and his fingernails were broken by years of donning mail gauntlets. His eyes were like two gimlets set deep within a furrowed pink crag, and his cheekbones thrust out farther than his oft-broken nose. Sastro had seen prize-fighters with less brutal countenances.
    The Presbyter gestured with one large hand towards the document they had been perusing.
    “There you have it. Abeleyn is finished. The letter is signed by the High Pontiff himself.”
    “It is hastily written, and the seal is blurred,” one of the other men said, the same one who had complained of the cold. Astolvo di Sequero was perhaps the most nobly born man in the kingdom after King Abeleyn himself. The Sequeros had once been candidates for the throne, way back in the murky past which followed the fall of the Fimbrian Hegemony some four centuries ago, but the Hibrusids had won that particular battle. Astolvo was an old man with lungs that wheezed like a punctured wineskin. His ambitions had been extinguished by age and infirmity. He did not want to be a player in the game, not at this stage of his life; all he wanted of the world now were a few tranquil years and a good death.
    Which suited Sastro perfectly.
    The third man at the table was hewn out of the same rock as Presbyter Quirion, though younger and with violence written less obviously across his face. Colonel Jochen Freiss was adjutant of the City Tercios of Abrusio. He was a Finnmarkan, a native of that far northern country whose ruler, Skarpathin, called himself a king though he was not counted among the Five Monarchs of the West. Freiss had lived thirty years in Hebrion and his accent was no