Chapter 24 #2
‘Go on then, sir,’ Uli said, his voice like boulders rolling over gravel. ‘You heard Her Majesty.’
The housecarl made no move towards his blade, only flexed one boar-bristled forearm, letting the mass of coiled muscle speak for itself.
‘I would converse with His Highness, and again offer him my services,’ Torin said, not budging beneath Uli’s stare. ‘His need for them is immediate and dire.’
‘Parwys will see to its own affairs,’ Medrith said. ‘You are a guest here, Anakriarch. Test the limits of our patience at your peril.’
She gestured with her staff. Its blossoms hung dry and limp, its leaves faded—a sign, perhaps, that she had overextended her powers? Torin little understood, nor cared to understand, the particulars of heathen magic. Why bother? He did not need to study something to destroy it.
‘You ignore my warning and my offer at your peril, Your Majesty,’ Torin said, looking past the hulking wall of Uli’s shoulder and stepping forward. The housecarl chuckled and reached for Torin’s arm, ready to drag him from the room.
‘I would hear him out,’ Prince Owyn said.
Uli’s hand drifted back to his side. Torin dipped his head to the prince and waited to see if this small act of defiance would further sunder mother from son—by custom the queen held the power of the throne, after all, until the prince was crowned.
Yet her power was only ever temporary, her use of it always custodial on behalf of her fallen husband and her son soon to rule.
If Owyn directly contradicted her, not only would her refusal to heed him strain their relationship, but represent a soft coup.
She was queen in name, but steward in truth, with no true right to overrule the will of the crown prince.
And so she stepped aside, and Uli let Torin pass.
Torin dipped his head in gratitude to the prince, who gestured for him to get on with whatever his business was. With a flourish, Torin placed the sorceress’s staff on the table and drew away the cloth that wrapped it. Silver glinted in the column of light from the high window.
‘The staff of the sorceress Fola.’ Torin kept his eye on the queen, whose stolid composure faltered at the sight of the staff. ‘An interloper in your kingdom. One who openly intends to twist the horrors that plague you to her own untold ends.’
‘Yes, we know the woman,’ Owyn said. He glanced at his mother. ‘And we know also that you and she duelled in this very castle, in violation of our hospitality.’
‘And that she slipped your grasp,’ the queen added. ‘How came you by her staff?’
‘She attacked my Knight of Action, as her bodyman attacked my Knight of Stillness,’ Torin said.
A small obfuscation. Hardly a lie. One justified by his role and greater purpose.
‘Know, Your Majesty, Your Highness, My Lords, that I have felt the sting of this viper. To call it a “weapon” is to compare it too kindly to spears and swords. It is a bringer of pestilence and disease, whose blows I survived only by the grace of the Agion. A cruel device—’
‘The torturer speaks of cruelty,’ Cilbran said with a snort.
The others in the room either disregarded the jest or rolled their eyes at it.
Torin pressed on. ‘A cruel device of the First Folk’s make.
Its purpose unknown, but its effects unquestionable, and terrible.
Her willingness to not only use such a thing, but to carry it into the court of your kingdom, speaks to this Fola woman’s character.
Her incaution. Her disrespect. Her arrogance and insatiable hunger for ancient, unwieldy magics—’
‘You dislike the sorceress,’ Forgard interjected, smoothing his moustache in annoyance. ‘We understand. What is the point of this?’
Intemperate, Torin noted in his mental ledger of other people’s vices.
‘Let the inquisitor speak, Tomos,’ Afondir said. ‘He knows more of such matters than anyone else here.’
‘Does he?’ Medrith snapped. ‘Or does he braid what little he knows with lies that suit his purpose?’
‘And what “purpose” is that, Your Majesty?’ Afondir cut back. ‘The salvation of our kingdom from this curse? You have little friendship for the Mortal Church, I understand, but you are inward-looking—you and your order—and do not see the good they have done in the wider world.’
‘Enough!’ Owyn looked from his mother to Afondir and back. There was a hint of distrust, there, in both glances. ‘I would hear the man without these constant interruptions. Go on, Anakriarch.’
Torin dipped his head, then opened his box, revealing nine discs of raw iron. Each was wide enough to rest comfortably in Torin’s palm, and engraved with the sacred portrait of one of the Agion framed with the nested triangles of the iron sigil.
The prince, the counts and his advisors watched with interest—Jon Kenn with a trembling reverence, clutching his own iron sigil—as Torin placed the medallions in an oval encircling the sorceress’s staff.
‘You believe, falsely, that we intend to make you weak.’ Torin’s words were spoken to the queen, but intended for the prince’s ear. ‘That our cleansing is only a means to strip you of your magic and place you under our power. Not so.’
He held up the last of the medallions—Gorev, Agion of Honesty—to catch the fall of sunlight.
‘Our purpose is only to strengthen mortalkind. We have no interest in rule. No interest in removing the lords of this world from their thrones. Nor in enthralling their subjects. Our purpose, our holy mission, is to strengthen mortalkind. To free it from the crippling shackles of ancient power. From the nefarious influence of the First Folk, so often disguised as gifts. And from the more blatant horrors the First Folk left behind in their negligence. We envision an ordered world, freed from the chaos and confusion of the past and rebuilt, strong and stable, upon a foundation of mortal virtue. We would help to make you, and all who live in this world, better, Your Majesty, as we strive to make ourselves. Our interest is in a fulfilment of potential.’
‘So you say,’ Forgard ventured. ‘Tarebach may be far from here, but stories travel far, and we have heard stories.’
‘For order to be built, chaos must be burned away,’ Torin said simply.
‘In some places—as in Alberon, your neighbour—that process can be gradual enough not to upset the balance. But Alberon was already well on its way towards order when we arrived. Tarebach …’ He shook his head and smiled sadly.
‘Now, it is a beacon of civilisation. But it was a long, hard road from there to here. Ours is a brutal, violent history—one marked not only by internal strife, but war with neighbours, among them the City from which the sorceress Fola hails. But that depth of chaos and depravity demonstrated the necessity of the Mortal Church, and forged it. I would see Parwys spared such a traumatic rebirth—’
‘Do I hear a threat?’ the queen cut in.
‘No, Your Majesty. You hear a wish, for your sake. Dark powers threaten your kingdom. The haunting, of course, and the rimewolves that have long plagued your northern territory. And now this strange … woman … who bends a rimewolf to her will and shatters your gates with a gesture. The sorceress Fola, too, and the City she serves. It is ancient, and terrible. A contortion of the natural order by the First Folk, meant to shackle and weaken mortalkind. These forces converge on your kingdom, and more will come. It is a comfort to the wretched to have companions in the chaos they wreak, for it assuages their shame. So it was in Tarebach. Violence begets violence—horror begets horror. Chaos entangles all, corrupting even those powers we would wield for good. But decisiveness, true courage, begets a willingness to sacrifice the corrupted good.’
He placed Gorev’s medallion, completing the circle around the staff.
It clicked against the wood of the table, a quiet sound that rang in the silence of the room.
He shut his eyes, felt a quiet thrumming in the air.
A holy sign of the ritual’s readiness. As a Knight of Mediation, he was called only to the cultivation of three virtues—fidelity, justice and compassion.
Yet, as an anakriarch, tasked with the defence of the Mortal Church from threats both within and without, he had devoted himself to all nine, insofar as he was able.
Both to ensure his own stolidity as a bulwark against corruption, and to enable work such as this.
‘By the Agion,’ he intoned, feeling his blood surge with righteousness and potency.
The gentle thrum became a pulse through him like a drumbeat.
‘The Exemplary Nine, whose light of virtue is our guide-star through the dark fog of this corrupted world, I assert the primacy of Truth, of Mortality, of the Mundane against the contorted wickedness of Glamour, of Undeath, of Magic.’
Torin opened his eyes. Nine points of fire, as white as the heart of a forge, burned in the air above the medallions.
The prince watched, astonished. His mother’s face was a shadowed mask of outrage.
Jon Kenn clasped his medallion with both hands and whispered prayers, his eyes bright with rapture and wet with tears.
Uli, the housecarl, seemed ready to throw his body between the fires and the prince.
The three counts present were more subtle in their reactions, though Torin noted the slight smile that creased Afondir’s cheek.
‘Let what the Agion surround be sundered,’ Torin said, beginning the final verse of the litany. ‘Let enchantment burn away. Let the world be as it truly is, and not as our viciousness would wish it.’
The sacred flames roared. A thin smoke began to pour from the staff in their midst, and then to thicken, carrying with it a sharp, acrid scent.
Black blisters formed on the staff and expanded outwards, unfurling, their shape like twisted serpents emerging from their burrows.
At last, with a sound like cracking ice, the enchantment upon the staff gave way.
The staff snapped out to nearly twice its length; Forgard leapt away from one darting end of it with a yelp.
The fires faded, leaving no mark at all on the iron medallions.
The staff lay upon its cloth, contorted and disfigured by black, curling growths.
Silence held in the room save the soft crumbling of those charred protrusions to a greasy dust. Torin watched with a deep, almost transcendent satisfaction.
The wickedness woven into the weapon by the First Folk, drawn out and burned away.
Today, this hateful staff. Someday, all the world.
‘This is the fate that awaits your kingdom if you allow these dark forces to fester,’ Torin said, his voice still holding the weight of his invocation.
‘If you act now, decisively, you might carve the corruption out before it infects everything. We have no wish to purge Parwys entire—a cure nearly as painful as the plague. Only to lance the boils, drain the infection, and burn away the disease. Let us do our work, Your Highness.’ Again, here, the ambiguity as he let his gaze wander from Prince Owyn to the queen and back: not a challenge to her role, but a recognition of its temporary, symbolic nature.
‘Let us save what we can of your kingdom.’
‘And you think our own people incapable of that task?’ Medrith pressed, her face a storm cloud and her voice like rolling thunder.
‘Not incapable,’ Torin said. ‘But inexperienced compared to those of us who have long waged war against such wicked powers. Experience that can make all the difference when stakes are so high and time so short.’
The queen opened her mouth, but Owyn spoke before her.
‘Very well,’ he said, his affect flat, his eyes hard and cold as raw iron. ‘Tell me what you need.’