Chapter 178: The Mysterious Secret Temple
“One more thing,” Heather said, as if she had just remembered. “Today is a conversion day, isn’t it? How many applicants?”
“That,” Mayne said, already moving toward the door, “is confidential.”
He did not turn around.
The stairway descended for what felt like longer than any stairway should.
It hung suspended in the mountain’s interior — narrow, barely wide enough for two people abreast, curving slightly as it dropped so that the bottom was never visible from the top. The illumination came from fluorescent stones set at intervals into the wall, spaced just far enough apart that between each pair the light dimmed to near-nothing before recovering. Mayne had walked this passage more times than he could count. He still watched his feet.
At the base of the stairs, a mirror-white millstone sealed the passage. Beyond it, through a gate that opened to his approach, a group of Judges waited in a cluster — standing with the particular alertness of men about to see something they had never seen before.
He nodded to their salutes and moved past. Sixty-two applicants, O’Brien had said. The largest number in recent years. They were all volunteers; they all understood the terms. The conversion ceremony was not guaranteed. It might kill them. The only certainty on offer was the attempt, and they had still written their names on the list. He tried to consider this as a measure of something good — dedication, faith, the depth of what the Church had built in them — and mostly succeeded.
The third checkpoint. The iron gate. Then the heart of Hermes opened before him.
Even now — even knowing what was here, having made this descent more times than he bothered to count — the sight of it hit him somewhere beneath preparation. He always stopped, just for a moment, just long enough to let it register.
The cave was immense. Five or six of the aboveground Cathedral could have been dropped into it without touching the walls. But what the cave contained was not empty space: rising from the floor, climbing the walls, reaching in some cases nearly to the distant ceiling, were formations of God’s Stone of Retaliation — vast as ancient trees, clustered like frozen upwellings of some mineral tide that had surged once and been fixed in place for all time.
The largest stalagmite surpassed the Cathedral’s tower. Its color was lavender — the deep, luminous lavender that the densest formations always showed — and its light was strong enough to read by at a hundred meters. Around it, the formations shaded through dark blue toward green toward the pale, near-transparent bodies of the younger growths at the edges, the ones that had emerged only in recent generations and had not yet found their full color. The smallest were still the height of a man. The floor between them was lit in layered blues and greens, shifting where formations overlapped.
The Church sold processed fragments of this stone across the continent. Every kingdom had its supply; every interrogation chamber and prison and testing ground had its pieces. What no one outside Hermes knew — what was not recorded in any document that left this place — was that the source was here, that it was this, that the mountain itself was what produced the suppression the stones carried. The cave was not alight because someone had placed lights in it. The cave was alight because the stone was the mountain’s secret nature, growing year by year in the dark, in the quiet, in the perfect isolation of underground.
Mayne stood inside the descending cage and felt it: the moment the cave’s field enveloped him, the thing that was present in a witch and absent in a man became simply impossible in this place. Not suppressed. Erased. As if the concept of magic was a rumor the cave had heard and declined to acknowledge.
The cage took a quarter-hour to reach the floor. When Mayne stepped out he straightened his robes, settled his cuffs, and followed the messenger toward the Pantheon.
The Pantheon was older than the Cathedral above it.
That much was obvious without being told. The stones were worn to a smoothness that no tool had produced — time had done it, and hands, and the slow accumulation of weight that only centuries of use could apply. The building had existed before the New Holy City was built on the mountain’s summit, before the current Church had formalized its hierarchy, before most of what now bore the Church’s name had been imagined. The iron gate set into the mountain wall behind it connected through internal passages to the Old Holy City at the foot of Hermes — the original settlement, the first one, now largely ceremonial. In every meaningful sense, this building was the Church’s actual origin, preserved underground while the institution grew above it into something larger and less certain of itself.
Mayne entered through the hall’s great doors.
The conversion hall received him with warmth and orange light.
Candles — a thousand of them, perhaps more. Three-tiered chandeliers overhead. Iron stands ranked along the walls. Smaller holders placed in rows across every flat surface, their flames moving in the slight circulation of air that even this sealed space produced. The warmth they generated pushed the cave’s mineral chill back completely; the light they cast was entirely unlike the cold lavender outside, and the contrast between the two — stepping from one into the other — was always a minor shock.
Between the two conversion tables stood O’Brien.
He wore the red-gold vestments, the gem-set headpiece, the full visual authority of his office. He was moving along one of the tables with slow deliberateness, checking each component of the conversion equipment — adjusting a fitting here, testing a connection there — with the patience of a man performing a ritual within a ritual, who had done this so many times that checking had itself become a form of prayer.
Mayne knelt. Kissed the old man’s fingers.
“Rise, my son.” The voice was unchanged — still measured, still warm in its particular unhurried way, without performance. “There are no witnesses. No ceremony needed.”
He rose. And then could not help what he saw.
The Pope was smaller than he remembered. Not in height — O’Brien had always been slight — but in some quality that was harder to name, as if the margins of the man had drawn inward. The wrinkles were deeper, settled into crevices rather than lines. The skin had gone to an unhealthy pallor, loose-looking, dull. Brown spots had appeared on the backs of his hands, at his wrists, along his neck — the kind that came late in a life and did not go away. He moved with the particular deliberateness of someone for whom motion had become a series of small decisions.
“Your Holiness,” Mayne said, and heard something in his own voice he had not intended. “You look—”
“Old,” O’Brien said simply. “It’s all right. I know it.” He set down the instrument he’d been holding and turned to face Mayne fully, with an expression that was neither resignation nor denial — something quieter and more complete than either. “Time leaves no exceptions, and I have lived long enough to stop arguing with it. My life is running low. I will not see the end of this.” A pause. “But I will not see the end of it wondering whether I spent the time well, and that is the more important thing.” He looked at Mayne directly. “You will have to carry what I cannot finish. Do you understand that?”
“I do.”
“Then stop looking at me as if I am already gone.” There was something almost wry in it. “I still have work to do today.”
He turned back to the tables. Mayne followed him to the nearer one and stood at its side, watching the old man’s hands move.
“You have done well lately,” O’Brien said, without looking up. “The Army of Judges has grown by more than a thousand since your last major recruitment. And today’s conversion has sixty-two applicants — the highest number in recent years.” He smoothed his palm along the table’s surface. “That is more than adequate raw material for what we need. The question is what comes after this conversion, and after the next.”
Mayne let a moment pass. Then: “I want to ask you about scale.”
O’Brien’s hands slowed, but did not stop.
“I have read everything the Holy Book records about the Devils,” Mayne continued. “Their arrival, their nature, the history of the previous conflicts. I have read what it records about the God’s Punishment Army and the purpose it was formed to serve.” He paused. “But the Holy Book doesn’t record their numbers. It doesn’t describe their origin or their combat methods in any detail. It doesn’t tell me how many members of the God’s Punishment Army would be sufficient.” He looked at the Pope’s profile in the candlelight. “I have wanted to ask this for years.”
O’Brien was quiet for long enough that Mayne wondered if he would answer.
“The records you’re looking for,” the old man said finally, “are in the library at the top of the Pantheon. The secret collection. You will have access to them when you become Pope. All of your questions have answers there — you will find them.” His hands resumed their work. “What I can tell you now, without the records: the more, the better. The number we need is not a small number. It cannot be reached through ordinary means or at an ordinary pace. Everything we are doing is necessary, and what we are doing is not enough, and what comes after that will also not be enough. That is the scope of it.”
He said it as a plain thing. No drama in it. Just the weight of information delivered by someone who had lived with it long enough that even its heaviness had become ordinary.
“Now,” O’Brien said, and turned from the table to face the hall. “The Judges are waiting. I want you to preside today. I will stand here and observe.” A pause that carried something Mayne might have called gentleness. “You should begin to accumulate experience in this. The time is not far off when this responsibility will be entirely yours.”
Mayne looked at him — at this diminished figure standing in a thousand candles’ worth of warmth, having disclosed everything he was prepared to disclose and now waiting, with complete composure, for the next thing — and felt the full weight of succession settle into place.
“As you wish, Your Holiness,” he said.
O’Brien stepped back and folded his hands.
Mayne turned toward the hall’s entrance and raised his voice to carry.
“Bring them in.”