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bless the congregation for the first time, while the triumphant strains of the Te Deum
reverberated among the vaulted arches.
Afterward, in the great hall of the castle, King Cinhil held a reception and feast for the
new bishops and their brethren as lavish a celebration as had yet been held during his
reign. The event was not the glittering spectacle of the Festillic years. Cinhil instinctively
shied away from any hint of that; and besides, the ways of worldly formality were still alien
to him, and would always make him a little uncomfortable. Still, for Cinhil, it was festive.
Seating Bishop Cullen to his right, and Archbishops Oriss and Anscom to his left, on
either side of his queen, Cinhil presided over a hall of all Gwynedd's highest clergy and
baronage, drinking the health of his two new bishops and appearing almost happy,
especially once his queen had retired and he was left to the company of his male friends.
Camber left for Grecotha the next morning a long day's ride stretched out to three,
because of the panoply in which a prince of the Church was expected to travel for the first
entry into his new benefice. Cinhil had granted him an escort of a dozen knights, to guard
him on his way, and these were augmented amply by a score of the archbishop's own crack
household troops, who would stay on at Grecotha to become his own. In addition came a
full staff of chaplains, clarks, and other servants who would assist the new master of
Grecotha in setting his domain in order. Domestic servants had already been sent ahead, a
week before, to reopen what served for a bishop's residence and to provision it for
occupation.
The next weeks passed quickly, as summer eased into autumn and the daylight hours
diminished. The Diocese of Grecotha, one of the oldest in the Eleven Kingdoms, was
centered in the heart of the great university town of the same name, and had been without
a vicar for more than five years. As a consequence, its new bishop found himself much
occupied with pastoral duties.
There were ecclesiastical courts to convene, confirmations to be administered, priests to
ordain. He must make official visitations to every parish and abbey and school under his
jurisdiction, to ascertain that all were in competent hands and running as they should, and
take steps to correct, if they were not. He had also to perform the routine duties of any
ordinary priest: daily celebration of Mass, administering of other sacraments baptism,
confession, marriage, extreme unction.
All of these, well-known to Alister but new and awesome to him, Camber performed, and
learned much of himself and his fellow man in their performance. He found himself falling
into bed at night to sleep a dreamless sleep, his physical strength continually shored up by
his Deryni abilities. He wondered how ordinary men functioned under the pressures of the
job, with only their human resources to rely upon, and decided that it could only be
through the gift of Divine grace. He marvelled, under the circumstances, that he was able
to keep abreast of it at all.
And when Camber was not traveling, he was spending the bulk of his waking hours
reviewing the administrative records of his diocese and directing his assistants in the
setting up of a more efficient governing system. The office of Dean was reinstated almost
immediately, the appointment going to a quiet but competent human priest named Father
Willowen, who seemed singlehandedly to have stood between the diocese and total
administrative collapse for the entire five years of the see's vacancy.
One of the most appalling discoveries which Camber made, and which was in no way
Willowen's fault, was the deplorable state of the cathedral archives. To Camber, reared
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with a reverence for the written word which approached that of his religious faith, the state
of neglect of these important records was inexcusable.
The fault, he soon discovered, was not a recent one. It lay with the confusion which had
followed the separation of the famed Varnarite School from the cathedral chapter more
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