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you finish your preparations. You will wear the new vestments this morning, will you not?"
"If you wish it, Sire." Camber smiled. "I only hope I shan't outshine my brother bishops
too much. Archbishop Anscom, I know, has access to the cathedral treasures, but poor
Father Robert may be totally overshadowed."
"You need not worry for Robert Oriss," Cinhil returned smugly, pausing in the doorway.
"After all, the revival of the second archbishopric in Gwynedd is also a momentous
occasion. I've already delivered a similar set of vestments to him."
"I see."
"Of course, they aren't the same as yours. You and he are very different men."
"I shan't argue with that."
"And frankly," Cinhil concluded, just before he disappeared behind the door, "I think it's
just as well. I don't think I could cope with two of you, Alister."
"Bless you, Sire!" Camber chuckled as the door closed with a click.
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He wondered what Cinhil would think if he ever found out there were two Alisters, at
least after a fashion.
An hour later, on the stroke of Terce precisely, Camber squinted in the sunlight of the
cathedral close and waited for his part of the procession to begin moving. To either side of
him, Joram and Father Nathan stood respectful attendance, ready to escort him when the
time came. He eased the weight of his new vestments on his shoulders and stifled a yawn
as he watched the beginning of the procession start filing up the steps and into the church.
The voices of the cathedral choir, deep inside the reach of stone and glass and timber, were
discernible only as a low, muffled echo. Conversation in the close itself had ceased as the
column started moving.
Cinhil had been right about the vestments, Camber decided, as he shifted from one foot
to the other and tried not to appear as uncomfortable as he felt. The robes were heavy, and
they were hot and Camber did not even wear the great jeweled cope and miter yet. The
heat of the day was still to come, with the sun burning in a cloudless sky. Already he could
feel sweat forming beneath the heavy alb and chasuble.
With a stoic sigh, he turned inward to seek and find the controls which would lower his
body temperature just slightly. He wondered how his human compatriot, Robert Oriss,
was faring in the heat Oriss, who had no recourse to Deryni disciplines.
Ahead of them, feet shuffled and the line began to move. Most of the other bishops of
Gwynedd and the neighboring areas had come to attend the ceremony, many of whom
Camber had just met for the first time today, as Alister as well as Camber: Niallan of
Dhassa, the traditionally neutral and essentially independent bishop who would be
working closely with the new Archbishop of Rhemuth; young Dermot of Cashien, whose
uncle had been bishop before him and was whispered to have been more in kinship than
uncle to his brother's child; Ulliam of Nyford, head of the southernmost diocese, who must
cope with the ruin left by Imre's abortive attempt to build yet a third capital in Ulliam's
port city and four of Gwynedd's six itinerant bishops, with no fixed sees, whose faces
Camber was just beginning to associate reliably with names: Davet and Kai and Eustace
and Turlough.
All of the assisting prelates wore full pontificals, carried the stylized shepherds' staffs of
their offices with the crooks turned inward, since they were in Anscom's jurisdiction.
And ahead of the bishops, just now disappearing through the vast double doors, were
others of the procession in colorful array: candle bearers and crucifers, thurifers swinging
fragrant censers on long golden chains; the ecclesiastical knights, Michaelines and others,
in their mantles of azure and scarlet and gold; surpliced priests bearing the regalia which
would be bestowed on the two bishops to be made.
Next came the mitered abbots of Gwynedd Crevan Allyn of the Michaelines in his cloak
of blue; Dom Emrys of the Order of Saint Gabriel, white-haired, white-robed shadow of a
man, gliding wraithlike in the invisible mantle of his Deryniness; the masters of the Ordo
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