“So let it be done,” the seven others replied in unison.

Hours later, Denis Arilan paced the carpet of his room in the Bishop’s Palace at Dhassa. For him, there was little sleep that night.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Many things beyond human understanding have been revealed to thee.”

ECCLESIASTICUS 3:25

MORGAN peered out the window of the ruined tower and scanned the plain far below. Away and to the southeast he could just discern a lone horseman moving rapidly out of sight: Derry, on his way to the northern armies. Below, at the base of the tower, two dun-colored horses pulled hungrily at the new spring grass, their harness worn and common. Duncan was waiting at the foot of the ruined stairway, slapping a brown leather riding crop against one muddy boot. As Morgan stepped back from the window and began his descent, Duncan looked up.

“See anything?”

“Just Derry.” He sprang lightly across the last few feet of rubble to land in a clatter beside his kinsman. “Are you ready to move on?”

“I want to show you something first,” Duncan said, gesturing with his crop toward the ruins farther back and beginning to lead in that direction. “The last time we were here, you were in no condition to appreciate what I’m about to show you, but I think it will interest you now.”

“You mean, the ruined Portal you found?”

“Correct.”

Walking carefully, Morgan followed Duncan down the broken aisle of the ruined chapel, hand resting easily on the hilt of his sword. Saint Neot’s once had been a flourishing monastic school, renowned in its day as one of the principal seats of Deryni learning, but that had ended with the Restoration. The monastery had been sacked and burned, many of its brothers murdered on the very altar steps they now passed. Now Morgan and Duncan crossed the ruined nave of the school’s crumbling chapel to view the remains of something else lost from that time.

“There’s the Saint Camber altar you told me about,” Duncan said, gesturing with his crop toward what remained of a marble slab jutting from part of the eastern wall. “I reasoned that a Portal wouldn’t have been placed out in the open, even in Interregnum times, so I looked further. In here.”

As Duncan pointed, he ducked low to ease his way through a small opening in the crumbling wall, precariously supported by fallen and half-rotted ceiling beams. Mounds of rubble littered the floor on the other side, but as Morgan followed his kinsman through, he could see that this had probably been a sacristy or vestry.

He dusted his gloved hands together lightly as he straightened in the ruined chamber, noting the cracked marble beneath his boots, the timber beams still supporting much of the ceiling. Against the far wall, he could make out the remains of an ivory vesting altar, its panels blackened by fire, fragments of chests and moldering vestment presses to either side. More substantial rubble made the footing precarious: blocks of stone fallen from the half-tumbled walls, rotting wood, shattered glass. Footprints of small animals tracked over the heavy layer of dust that covered everything.