‘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 theywantto?’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.
Just after mid-morning, the gently rolling plains to the south gave way to marshlands.The tittering of sparrows and sandpipers faded into the sharp bugling of marsh cranes and the buzzing of crakes.A subtle aroma of wet grass and decay wafted over the road.Round-topped barrows rose from the marshes, born by no natural process.The graves of kings, Torin surmised, though he wondered why the heathens buried their rulers so far from the seat of their power.
The road passed a hill that stood above the barrows, dominated by a vast, reaching oak.A wall of unmortared stone surrounded the base of the hill, and a few dozen houses stood in the shadow of the tree.This was, if Torin had to guess from the maps of the kingdom he had studied, Bryngodre, the sacred holdfast of the druids.One structure in particular caught Torin’s eye: a squat tower that encircled the trunk of the oak tree, built of a strange green stone whose colour, at this distance, seemed to shift and fade from the bright green of new spring to the pallid grey of old verdigris.At first, Torin took it for the dappling of light filtering through the leaves above as they drifted in the wind.But the changing colour of the stone defied any other play of light and shadow he could see.
There was power there, within the tower.Old, dark and hateful, bound by the First Folk and worshipped by these heathen fools.
Four figures dressed in animal skins and one wrapped in a cloak of pine needles and oak leaves with a headdress of antlers descended from the tower, then processed through the town and its gates to meet the prince and the queen.Druids.One held a silver censer that wafted a heavy, heady incense.Three others carried boxes of rich, dark wood carved all over with knotwork and swirling, abstract designs.The last, with the antlered headdress, carried a staff of sprouting yew to match the queen’s.They exchanged quiet words, then the four counts of the land—Cilbran, Afondir, Forgard and Glascoed—dismounted and took the king’s coffin in hand.The prince and the burly captain of the king’s housecarls joined them.The other courtiers, too, dismounted, and the five druids led the way, on foot, to the far side of the road and out into the marsh.
‘Well, I suppose it would be rudenotto,’ Torin mused, then offered Orn and Anwe each a smile before dismounting and following the heathens at their ritual.Gestures towards respect for the local traditions and superstitions were necessary, after all, to win their trust.
Torin observed the proceedings as he might watch children play a silly game, full of weight and importance to them but entirely meaningless to any adult observation.They walked to a circle of freshly laid stones, a dozen paces in diameter, and placed the king’s coffin in the centre.The druids chanted softly as they removed the lid from the coffin.The censer masked any scent of must or rot.The druids opened their boxes and placed various gems and jewellery upon the linen-shrouded body of the king, proclaiming in loud voices what each item represented: a silver dagger for his valour; a lobe of unsmelted iron ore for his piety—towards gods that were no more than the echoes of First Folk meddling, Torin was sure.Other items and other virtues which were no more than a vague gesturing at true understanding of the world.
As the ritual continued, Torin’s detachment gave way to a fresh pang of pity and grief.Deep in their souls, these people, despite their ignorance, despite their heathen blindness, truly longed for the truth.They spoke of virtues, little understanding them.With guidance, with the truths of the Mortal Church and the blessing of the Sacred Agion, they could become a shining beacon of a mortal kingdom under the auspices of the Church.
Sadly, that was not his task.That would come later, after the sickness and corruption that had given rise to these false rituals had been scoured away.After the Church had saved the kingdom from horror and earned its trust.
The prince placed the last of the trinkets beside his father, then led his mother back outside the circle.The four druids in animal skins took positions at the cardinal points of the circle, while the antlered one traced in the soil with the end of his staff.All five chanted slowly, under their breath—a chant taken up by the queen, the prince, and the four counts as the pattern grew into a complex, winding lattice of interleaved spirals.The last spiral carried the druid out of the pattern he had drawn.He raised his staff high, then thrust it into the ground.The scent of loam and summer rain filled the air.The earth rumbled and, like water gushing from an unearthed spring, the soil within the circle of stones rose and swelled, flowing upwards to enclose the king’s coffin in a barrow.The druid lifted his staff and the earth stilled.
Silence held as awe gripped the gathering—or in Torin’s case, disgust.Silence, but for the scratching of a pen nib.
The sorceress Fola, of the supposed Starlit Tower, with her silver staff balanced in the crook of her arm, held a pad of paper at her waist and scribbled with a strange cylindrical pen.Torin was too far away to see what she was drawing.He nudged Orn and pointed to the sorceress with his chin.
Subtly, Orn raised himself, peering over shoulders and heads.‘Looks like a sketch of the design the druid made,’ Orn murmured.
‘Indeed?’Torin said as the young knight nodded and returned to ordinary height.Not proof, but the agents of the City were known to fascinate themselves with the primitive rituals and magic of the heathen kingdoms.‘Not something the druids would take kindly to, I would—’
