The brother nodded. He knew Wynkyn well.
Brother Guillaume greeted Wynkyn with ill-disguised distaste and impatience. He had never liked this autocratic friar from Rome, and neither he nor any other friar in his disease-ridden community could spare the time to attend Wynkyn’s demands.
“A meal only,” Wynkyn said, noting Guillaume’s reaction, “and a request.”
“And that is?”
Wynkyn nodded towards the casket. “I leave in the morning for the forest north of the city. If I should not return within a week, I request that you send that casket—unopened—to my home friary.”
Guillaume raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Your home friary? But, Brother Wynkyn, that would surely be impossible!”
“Easily enough accomplished!” Wynkyn snapped, and Guillaume flinched at the brother’s sudden anger. “There are sufficient merchant bands travelling through Nuremberg who could take the casket on for a suitable price.”
Wynkyn reached inside his habit and pulled out a small purse he had bound about his waist. “Take these gold pieces. It will be enough and more to pay for the casket’s journey.”
“But…but this pestilence has stopped all traffic, and—”
“For the love of God, Guillaume, do as I say!”
Guillaume stared, shaken by Wynkyn’s distress.
“Surely the pestilence will pass eventually, and when it does, the merchants will resume their trade, as they always do. Please, do as I ask.”
“Very well then.” Guillaume indicated a stool, and Wynkyn sat down. “But surely you will return. You have always done so before.”
Wynkyn sighed, and rubbed his face with a trembling hand. “Perhaps.”
And perhaps not, Guillaume thought, as he recognised the feverish glint in the old brother’s eyes, and the unhealthy glow in his cheeks.
Guillaume backed away a few steps. “I will send a brother with food and ale,” he said, and scurried for the door.
“Thank you,” Wynkyn said to the empty air.
That night Wynkyn sat in a cold cell by the open casket, his hand on the closed book on his lap. Because there was no one else, Wynkyn carefully explained to the book the disaster that had befallen mankind generally, and the Keeper of the Cleft specifically. The popes had abandoned the directions of God and the angels for the directions of the French king. They did not know the secrets and mysteries of the Cleft or of the book itself, for neither angels nor Wynkyn dared reveal it to them. Through his ignorance, the current pope—Clement VI—had not selected the man to follow Wynkyn.
And a woman—a woman!—had passed the pestilence to Wynkyn!
In the past few hours, as he sat in his icy cell shaking with fever, Wynkyn had refused to come to terms with the fact that he was dying. There was no one to follow him; thus how could he die?
How could he die, when that would mean the demons would run free?
In his decades of service to God and the angels, Wynkyn had never come this close to despair: not when he had first heard of his mission; not even when he had seen what awaited him at the Cleft.
Not even when the first demon he encountered had turned and spoken his name and pleaded for its life.
But now…now, this silent misery in a cold and comfortless friary cell…this was despair.
Wynkyn lowered his head and wept, a hand still on the closed book, his shoulders shaking with both his grief and his fever.
Peace.
At first Wynkyn did not respond, then, when the heavenly voice repeated itself, he slowly raised his face.
Two arm spans away the far wall of the cell glowed. Most of the light was concentrated in the centre of the wall in the vague form of a winged man, his arms outstretched.
As Wynkyn watched, round-eyed with wonder, the archangel, still only a vague glowing outline, stepped from the wall and placed his hands about Wynkyn’s upturned face.
Peace, Brother Wynkyn.
“Blessed Saint Michael!” Wynkyn would have fallen to his knees, but the pressure of the archangel’s hands kept him in his seat.
The archangel very slightly increased the pressure of his hands, and love and joy flowed into Wynkyn’s being.
“Blessed Saint Michael,” Wynkyn whispered, his eyes watering from the archangel’s glow. He blinked his tears away. “I am dying—”
For an instant, an instant so fleeting he knew he must have imagined it, Wynkyn thought he felt rage sweep through the archangel.
But then it was gone, as if it had never been.
“—and there is none to follow me. Saint Michael, what can we do?”
There is not one named, Wynkyn, but that does not mean one can never be. We shall have to make one, you and I and the full majesty of my brothers.
“Saint Michael?”
Take up that book you hold, and fold back the pages to the final leaf.
Slowly, Wynkyn did as the archangel asked.
He gasped. The book revealed an incantation he had never seen before…and how many years had he spent examining every scratch within its pages?
With our heavenly power and your voice, we can between us forge your successor.
Wynkyn quickly scanned the incantation. He frowned a little as its meaning sank in. “But it will take years, and in the meantime—”
Trust. Are you ready?
Wynkyn took a deep breath, fighting back the urge to cough as he did so. “Aye, my lord. I am ready.”
The glow increased about the archangel, and as it did, Wynkyn saw with the angel’s eyes.
Images flooded chaotically before him: bodies writhing and plunging, lost in the evils of lust, the thoughts of the flesh triumphing over the meditations of the soul.
Horrible sinners all! Where are they who do not sin…ah! There! There!
Wynkyn blinked. There a man who lowered himself reluctantly to his wife’s body, and his wife, most blessed of women, who turned her face aside in abhorrence and who closed her eyes against the repugnant thrusting of her husband. This was not an act of lust, but of duty. This was a husband and a wife who endured the unbearable for only one reason: the engendering of a child.
God’s child indeed. Speak, Wynkyn, speak the incantation now!
He hesitated, because as St Michael voiced his command, Wynkyn realised that the cell—impossibly—was crowded with all the angels of heaven. About the friar thronged a myriad glowing forms, their faces intense and raging and their eyes so full of furious power that Wynkyn wondered that the walls of the friary did not explode in fear.
Speak! St Michael commanded, and the cell filled with the celestial cry of the angels: Speak! Speak! Speak!
Wynkyn spoke, his feverish tongue fumbling over some of the words, but that did not matter, because even as he fumbled, he felt the power of the incantation and the power of all the angels flood creation.
St Michael lifted his hands from Wynkyn’s face and shrieked, and with him shrieked the heavenly host.
The man shrieked also, his movements now most horrid and vile. His wife screamed and tried desperately to push away her husband.
But it was too late.
Far, far too late.
Wynkyn’s successor had