Free Bell Mountain (The Bell Mountain Series) by Lee Duigon

overtake them, don’t interfere. Follow them. See to it that they get there. I want to know every single thing that happens to them, Martis. If they climb the mountain, climb after them. If they get to the top and find a bell, you are to prevent them from touching it, and no one is ever to see or hear from them again.”
    The people of Ninneburky, even the prester himself, would have been appalled to learn that the First Prester had a confidential servant whose duties included killing people. For that is what Martis did, in addition to ferreting out secrets, spying, stealing, and arranging for certain persons to be accused of and punished for crimes they hadn’t committed. Not even the other oligarchs knew about Martis. To everyone in the city, he was only a clerk in the Temple. He even looked like a clerk.
    But to Lord Reesh—who considered himself the first oligarch as well as the First Prester—he was a very necessary tool. And because he had served Lord Reesh for years, and never failed him, Martis enjoyed a certain liberty in speaking to his master.
    “Do you think a pair of children might actually climb the mountain, my lord?” he said.
    Reesh snorted, and dropped himself into the sturdy, well-padded chair behind his hardwood desk. He was old and fat, and the letter had jangled his nerves.
    “Don’t tell me you haven’t made a study of the Scriptures, Martis,” he said.
    “I am aware of the verse in Penda in which King Ozias speaks his intention to place a bell atop Mount Yul, sir. It’s not recorded whether he actually did so. I’m surprised Your Lordship takes it seriously.”
    “I know the verse, and you know the verse,” Reesh said, “but there’s no way under the sun that an ignorant boy in an upriver village knows the verse! But then he didn’t get his idea from studying the Old Books. According to the prester in Ninneburky—who’s too scared out of his skin to lie—the curs’t boy dreamed it. He dreamed about the bell on Bell Mountain!”
    “Surely someone at the chamber house put the notion in his head,” Martis said.
    “Don’t be so reasonable, Martis. It irritates me. I’m the theologian here, not you. And I say that if a child has a dream like this, there’s a fair chance that he’ll get to the top of the mountain. Besides which—I’ve had the same dream myself.”
    To this Martis had no answer, and was wise enough not to venture a foolish one.
    “I’m an old man,” Reesh went on, “and I’ve seen and heard many things. Of course there have always been lunatics who tried to climb Bell Mountain. Most of them died trying. A few, madder than the rest, pretended they’d been to the top and come back down. My predecessors in this office silenced them.
    “Even if I were convinced that these two children were as deluded as the others, now is hardly the time to indulge such fantasy. By this time next year, we shall have a major war on our hands, and we won’t want the people distracted by talk of Bell Mountain. But in this case, Martis, it’s not just idle talk and moonshine. The boy’s dream proves it.”
    “My lord, that is an extraordinary thing for you to say.”
    “Do you think it gives me pleasure to say it? I, who’ve believed in nothing all my life but the stability of the state and the mission of the Temple to hold the state together while we all try to claw our way out of barbarism?
    “Until I received this letter, I dismissed my own dreams as the ramblings of an overworked mind in its old age. Now I suppose that if we made an investigation, we’d find that many people have had this dream—the very old, the very young; slaves and shepherds and servant girls; trappers alone in the woods. You know what I mean.”
    Martis nodded. He knew. “There is a verse in Prophet Ika, I believe,” he said, “about such people having dreams.”
    Lord Reesh glared at his servant, as if to pierce him with his pale blue eyes—tired and old and watery, but for a moment keen as