Wari the Younger, Pedagogue of the Mortal Church,Condemnation of the Interrogatory Heresy,YC773
There was a temptation to take satisfaction in the carnage as Torin surveyed the southern gatehouse of Parwys City.The heavy oaken doors had been blasted apart, leaving little more than splintered planks.Corpses lay nearby, covered in bloodstained sheets.He had arrived too late to examine them, and it would be gauche to pry beneath those coverings, though he wondered at these accounts of a wooden sword carving through steel armour.
Some of the bodies, even beneath their coverings, were badly distorted; the fury of a rimewolf’s jaws left little more than mangled remnants.A handful of the Count of Cilbran’s retinue, experts in such sport, had been tasked with hunting the beast down.It had struck without warning, shrouded in sorcery to appear as an ordinary—if overlarge—dog; so the surviving gate guards claimed, anyway.A fae monster.Another remnant of a world better left behind.
Torin could not have orchestrated a more useful sequence of events if he had tried—save for the hour he had spent heaving out his guts after suffering a blow from the sorceress Fola’s staff.A cruel weapon.Its strange power had wrung his stomach dry, twisting and squeezing until he lay in an exhausted heap, an acidic stink buried deep in his nostrils and a crust of vomit speckling his mouth.Thank the blessed Agion that he had managed not to shit himself in the process.
No matter.Anwe had recovered the hateful thing.It would soon be redeemed in service to the Church.
Returning to the castle, he met Anwe in the courtyard.Jon Kenn, the balding scholar and the prince’s tutor, tended to her most severe wounds: a deep slash from collarbone to left shoulder; a bite torn from her right thigh.The minor injuries had already clotted and begun to scab.A deep tankard of beer and a platter of cheeses and dried meats waited on the bench beside her.
‘You saw what it did to the gate?’Anwe said, licking crumbs of cheese from her fingers.She winced as Jon Kenn applied a gritty paste to her wounded shoulder.
‘I did,’ Torin said, dismounting.A stable boy appeared and took his reins.He worked stiffness from his back and shook his head.‘It baffles me, Anwe.It must connect to the horrors last night, but I do not yet see how.’
‘My prisoner might tell you,’ Anwe said with a cruel grin.‘Might take some convincing, though.’
A thrill shot through Torin.He sighed to keep Anwe from noticing.‘It would be easier if Orn would wake,’ he said.‘I do not know enough to put the questions effectively.Besides, the queen—on behalf of the prince, of course—has taken charge of your “prisoner”.I doubt she will grant me access, let alone the freedom to question as I must.She clings to her magic and her power, even at her kingdom’s expense.’
Jon Kenn winced at that.
‘What is it, man?’Torin asked.
Jon Kenn paused in his stitching.‘What you say is truer than you know.There has been a rift between the druids and the crown—between Bryngodre and Parwys—since I was a boy.Once, a new king would kneel before the druids in Bryngodre and receive their blessing, and with it, a renewal of their powers.A practice abandoned by Prince Owyn’s great-grandfather.One the queen would have him resume, though he resists her.’
‘Is it only a symbolic gesture?’Torin pressed, silently cursing the man for keeping this information for so long.‘Or is there real power in it?’
Jon Kenn quailed and shook his head.‘There is power in it, Anakriarch, I am sure.But the druids keep their secrets close, and I was never of their order.I know this—if the queen has her way, the druids will be far better equipped to resist the Church.Enough, even, to reverse our progress in Afondir.’
The mirth faded from Anwe’s expression.She reached for another bite of sausage.‘This land is wrapped in layers of evil,’ she observed.
‘Indeed,’ Torin said, stepping past her towards their rooms.‘It is past time we began to unravel them.’
On entering their guest apartment, Torin paused beside Orn, his Knight of Stillness, so brutally wounded by the bodyguard of the sorceress Fola.Gently, he laid his hand on the young knight’s brow and invoked the virtue of fidelity, taking some of Orn’s pain on to himself.It was growing easier to minister to the boy.Each time, his revulsion at Orn’s twisted morphology lessened.That, in itself, pointed to the danger of excessive compassion.Kindness to loathsome things, indulged too long, could weaken one’s resolve in the face of evil.
The sorceress’s staff stood propped beside Torin’s bed, wrapped in a stained sheet.He felt its presence, like a pair of prying eyes on the back of his neck.He retrieved a simple box with a lock of raw iron from his trunk, tucked it under his arm, and carefully took hold of the staff.The strange, textured surface of it, even through the layer of fabric, made his skin crawl.Any one of those bumps, ridges and whorled designs might trigger some release of terrible energies, at best sending him back to the chamber pot with heaving guts; at worst… who could say?He was certain that even the sorceress Fola did not know the staff’s purpose, nor what havoc its powers might wreak.
Torin carried it as one might carry a viper.He traversed the labyrinthine halls of Castle Parwys—architecture and decoration shifted from one style to the next, drifting backwards in time as he neared the royal solar.It was a risk to insert himself in this way, with neither an invitation nor a herald to announce his arrival.Yet the virtue of courage sometimes demanded risk.
This was such a time.Parwys had become the latest battleground in an ancient war between the Church and the City.Slow moving, for most of its history.A glacier grinding inexorably down the face of a mountain, promising at any moment to crack, give way, and transform into a crushing storm of ice and snow.Perhaps it was only a bias born of proximity, but Torin could not shake the belief that whatever this woman Fola pursued here in this far-flung corner of the world, it promised a turning point.A moment of acceleration; the shattering of glacier into avalanche.
A guard in the liveried armour of the royal housecarls stood beside the door to the solar.Raised voices sounded from within.The guard touched the hilt of his sword as Torin approached.
‘The crown prince and the queen regent are in a private meeting with their council,’ the guard said.‘Go back to your rooms.’
‘Please stand aside, sir,’ Torin said.The man was clearly stubborn, too courageous by half.Still, you had to give people a chance to do good, even if their failure was inevitable.‘I have news which cannot wait.’
The leather of the guard’s glove creaked as his grip tightened on his sword.‘I tell you again, churchman.Go back to your rooms.’
‘By Friour, Agion of Compassion, the Tenderhearted,’ Torin said calmly, a thrum of power burning through him, adding a note of potent resonance to his voice, ‘who with word and wisdom forged Tarebach from a hundred petty, warring kingdoms, youwilllet me pass.’
With the final words, light flared from the crown of Torin’s head.The guard rocked back on his heels.His eyes blinked rapidly, as though to clear away a fog.Though he frowned all the while, the guard removed his hand from the hilt of his sword and opened the door.
The prince stood over a map of Parwys city, surrounded by his mother, the burly captain of his housecarls, the counts of Afondir, Forgard and Cilbran, and his tutor turned steward Jon Kenn—who, it seemed, had finished ministering to Anwe and preceded Torin to this meeting.Cilbran, his bald pate gleaming in a shaft of late afternoon light, was placing wooden markers upon the map to indicate the men sent to hunt the vanished rimewolf.
‘And how, brother,’ Medrith was saying, ‘did such a beast manage to slip past Cilbran’s attentive eyes and travel so far south without being seen?’
Cilbran looked up, pulling at his blond beard in agitation, about to mount a defence when Forgard’s eye fell on Torin, drawn by the creaking of the door.
