Read Online Warlock and Son by Christopher Stasheff - Free Book Online

so flat they could see the thin dark line of trees on the other side. Strips of farmland lay all about in a crazyquilt pattern, divided by hedges. People had hewn themselves farms out of the midst of the forest. A hill rose at the eastern side of the clearing, and a village of wattle-and-daub houses clustered around it. Up near the top stood a fieldstone church-square and blocky, but with a recognizable steeple-and all about it, the grass was dotted with tombstones.
    But the procession that threaded its way through the fields wasn't winding up toward that churchyard-it was coming toward Rod and Magnus, and a newly dug grave a hundred yards off to their left. The mourners didn't seem to see them-for mourners they were, peasant folk dressed in dark clothing, the first six bearing a coffin on their shoulders, following a man in a black robe, wearing a bishop's mitre-a high, bulbous, pointed hat-and carrying a crozier, the ornate shepherd's crook. But he wasn't wearing a priest's chasuble, or even a cassock--only a long robe, like a memory of a baron's leisure clothing. Certainly the huge cross that adorned a priest's chasuble was missing.
    Magnus scowled. "Why, how is this? There is only the Abbot of the Monastery in Gramarye, and the Page 30
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    new abbot of the Runnymede chapter of the Order."
    "Apparently neither of them has heard about his rival here," Rod noted. "Of course, you can't be a bishop if you don't have a priest or two under you-but he seems to have taken care of that." Behind the bishop came three acolytes in black robes with short white tunics over them-again, like distorted echoes of the garb of Catholic altar boys. One was a teenager, his face set and solemn; the other two were younger, perhaps eight and twelve, both looking rather scared. Behind them strode a priest, very young, also wearing a black robe, with two black-cloaked women behind him, their hair hidden under white bonnets. If they hadn't been with the clergy, Rod would have taken them for peasant wives-but their presence behind the priest made him wonder.
    Then came the pallbearers, and the coffin; and behind it strode a short, stocky peasant, his square face lined with grief, his grizzled hair, his smock and leggings the color of old barn wood. Behind him came a few dozen people, young and old, parents and children, all but the babes in arms chanting a slow and mournful dirge.
    They came to the grave; the bishop turned and gestured, and the pallbearers lowered the coffin to the rope slings, then down into the grave. At another gesture, the congregation ceased its chant.
    "He lies here in sin!" the bishop cried. "In the one sin that cannot be shriven, for when a young man dies by his own hand, he condemns himself to hellfire eternal! When the spirit leaves the body, 'tis too late for remorse; the dead cannot confess! We may only hope and pray that ere the light of consciousness faded, he knew the wrong he had done, and repented of it-for even in the moment of our death, God can forgive!"
    "Praise be to God," the priest and-were they nuns?murmured.
    "Yet we must knock upon the door if it is to be opened to us!" the bishop cried. "We must confess if we are to be forgiven! Ranulf did not!"
    "This isn't going to be a whole great help to his family," Rod growled.
    "He must say what is true," Magnus murmured. "Only if he's asked."
    "He must warn the others of his flock away from the road to Hell."
    "Now is neither the time nor the place. Is he doing this for their good, or to buttress his own power?" Magnus turned to him, frowning. "Why, how would this increase his power?"
    "They have to do what he tells them to," Rod explained, "or they rot in Hell."
    "Ranulf died alone," the bishop orated, "without a priest nearby! Let us pray that God will have mercy upon his soul-but since we cannot know that, we must believe he died in mortal sin, and cannot therefore be buried in consecrated