Chapter 12
The Heathen Funeral
If a father gives his son a gift of bread, only for it to turn to dust in his mouth, or a gift of wine, only to find it rancid vinegar on his tongue, or a gift of fine clothing, only for needles hidden in the cloth to bite his flesh, who would call that father anything but wicked?
And, if he goes on accepting the cruel gifts of his father, the son anything but a fool?
Torin shifted in his saddle, as though the discomfort rioting within him could be eased by a simple adjustment of posture. He rode at the back of the funeral procession, unable to shake the oily feeling from his skin each time he caught the Count of Afondir’s eye.
The sooner he could divest himself of Afondir’s patronage, the better.
The man was a snake. Utterly faithless and vicious.
The Mortal Church was, to him, a blade he might wield in his own bid for the throne, and nothing more.
To be used by such a person belied the virtues that were the heart of its teaching.
His disgust only deepened at the sight of the druid queen’s staff among the banners at the head of the column.
Fidelity would have him look on these heretics with pity.
It was a weakness in him, he knew, that he blamed them.
These backward folk of Parwys were as faultless for their ignorant grasping for truth and meaning as he was for the prejudices he had been taught as a child.
The path of virtue only asked for recognition of these faults and a good faith effort to overcome them.
A process the people of Parwys could begin in earnest once Torin had accomplished his duty and scoured the kingdom clean.
Yet witnessing their viciousness pained him. Another product of compassion, he reasoned, overbalancing his fidelity. Not for these nobles, but for the people they ruled, subject to the brutal power games of blind, ambitious fools.
He had not expected Prince Owyn to welcome him with open arms—his mother was a druidess, after all, and had banished the Church’s evangelists from the land—yet the boy’s rejection of his own tutor, the convert Jon Kenn, boded ill.
Worse, the prince seemed gripped by paranoia.
He distrusted his counsellors and suspected his vassals of treachery.
There might be an opportunity, there, for an outsider to worm into the cracks in the court.
And so Torin observed the court and its heathen funeral, watching for fault lines.
A distasteful business—less direct than seizing heretics and putting them to the heated knife—but the task he had been set, for the growth of the Church, the salvation of Parwys, and the cause of mortal flourishing throughout the world.
‘Are you all right, Anakriarch?’ Sir Orn leaned over in his saddle, a crease of concern on his youthful face.
‘Quite,’ Torin murmured.
Orn’s eyes narrowed. He had come to Torin’s attention after turning in a friend for entertaining heretical notions.
A balancing of fidelity and justice appropriate to their order, though it had alienated the youth from his peers.
It was not their task to show mercy, nor to elevate love and friendship over duty, but to protect the Church and those who looked to it for guidance from corruption.
‘I’ve a soothing balm in my satchel,’ Orn said, keeping his voice low. ‘If one were suffering nausea, one might spread a bit on their collarbone and breathe the vapours for relief.’
‘Later, perhaps,’ Torin said. ‘Orn, what do you make of the sorceress Fola?’
The young knight straightened in his saddle, stretching to the fullness of his height, adding another twist to Torin’s disgust as his spine extended.
He peered ahead at the sorceress, marked out by her silver staff.
She rode beside her monstrous protector, halfway between their position at the column’s rear and the prince.
‘I have never heard of this Starlit Tower she claims to hail from,’ Orn said. ‘But there are many dark corners of the world. She seems no different from the other scuttling things that dwell in such places.’
‘No?’ Torin said. ‘And what of her bird?’
Orn looked down, now towering a head and a half above Torin. ‘Her bird?’
Anwe, who rode a pace behind Torin, barked a laugh. She met Torin’s chastising glare with a twinkle of defiance, then looked away, smiling and chuckling to herself.
‘Your dear sister knight laughs because you reveal your youth in this, Orn,’ Torin said. ‘The last true crusade was fought when she and I were but novices in our orders.’
‘And you’d yet to take a first yowling breath,’ Anwe added.
Orn’s eyes lit up. ‘The City,’ he murmured. ‘Thaumedony.’
‘Indeed,’ Torin said, pleased that the youth had caught on.
‘You think so?’ Orn stretched another handspan. Torin’s stomach turned and he had to look away. Believing—truly, earnestly—that the boy ought not be blamed for what had been done to his ancestors did not make looking on him any easier.
‘What interest could the City have here?’ Orn said. ‘We’re leagues from the heart of the world.’
‘A vital question,’ Torin said. ‘One that would lend even greater importance to our mission here. If she is, indeed, a Citizen.’
Torin only knew a smattering of the Mortal Church’s history—the lore that formed the core of his ecclesiastic education, and those tales his instructors and drill officers had invoked to inspire their students.
Yet all understood that the Church had been formed, first and foremost, to balance out the influence of the City and its servants.
Left unopposed, their false belief in the benevolence of the First Folk would spread.
Even if they proved able to put the leavings of the First Folk to good use, they could not see how such dependence would forever cripple mortalkind.
Common sense told that a beggar given alms would never learn a trade.
He had no reason to, if he found the means to survive without one.
Dependence upon gifts, upon the work and understanding of others, offered no path towards the cultivation of virtue, no means of mastery over the self, to say nothing of the world.
These self-styled ‘Citizens’ would see all mortalkind reduced to dependence on long-dead benefactors.
Children of wealth, left to descend into decadence and squalor, living on their inheritance with no means of making their own way in the world.
Worse—that inheritance might be no more than a glamour hiding a pit of vipers.
‘Never doubt their grasping hand,’ Torin said. ‘They long to remake themselves into beings like the First Folk. An ambition that drives them to dredge the world for powers better left undisturbed.’
‘Why would they want to?’ Orn sounded as sickly as Torin felt.
He was pleased to hear such a note of disgust in the boy’s voice.
An anakriarch’s aide needed to feel a visceral hatred for corruption, for the First Folk, for the legacy of their generations upon generations of meddling in the world.
Torin wondered, distantly and with a note of pity, if the boy felt the same way about his own contorted body.
Not a hatred of the self, of course—that would be improper—but a hatred of what his morphology represented.
A very important and morally significant distinction.
Torin could little imagine living with such agony. Perhaps it explained the boy’s zeal, his willingness to betray not only a friend but a bedmate—a suborning of fidelity to honesty and justice.
‘They know nothing of temperance,’ Torin went on. ‘Living as they do in the corrupting luxury of their City, and so seek knowledge without its guiding and mediating hand.’
‘I can’t imagine it,’ Orn said.
‘As in all vice, they are attracted by a genuine good.’ Torin looked up at the youth to meet his eye as he delivered the crux of his lesson.
It would have been more respectful for Orn to lower himself, but Torin would exemplify fidelity for his young retainer and bend to accommodate his failings—looking up the length of that extended neck stirred his nausea anew.
‘The sneering villain who loves and hopes for nothing but the pleasure of doing evil is an invention of stories for children. We are all mortal. All prone to corruption. You must be honest, always, and recognise their mortality, and the potential in yourself for the very same failings.’
Orn nodded slowly, then turned back to the sorceress. ‘You think she is of the City, then?’
‘If she is, she’s bloody poor at hiding it,’ Anwe said.
‘She may well be,’ Torin allowed. ‘Or, she may be no more than she claims, styling herself on the myths and rumours of the City that ever swirl through the world. In either case, we ought to keep an eye on her.’
Orn lowered himself back to a more ordinary height, to Torin’s relief.
They rode in silence for the better part of the morning, trekking east along an old First Folk road.
Of all the First Folk’s leavings, their roads were the most subtly hateful, though they were no more than planes of white stone perfectly suited to their purpose.
Resilient enough not to rut or crumble after thousands of years of wagon wheels, yet pliant enough that walking upon them was no less comfortable than walking on well-kept turf.
No mortal kingdom or empire—not even purified Tarebach—could construct anything to rival them.
Thus, the placement of the roads had played as much a role in the placement of cities and growth of civilisation as the natural flow of rivers, the wealth of the land and the bones of mountains.
A potent symbol, in Torin’s thinking, for how profoundly, inescapably and insidiously the First Folk still shaped the lives of mortals, even a thousand years after their vanishing.