“I never thought of that. Would have been easier than the dog. Did you think of that, Coriand?”
Unsurprisingly, Sir Coriand is too focused to answer.
“I hope you read the books you chose — or at least skimmed them,” Sir Sorken says with a nasty smile flung over his shoulder. His iron-grey curls bob as he moves as if we are on an outing and not marching into evil. “I’m sure you’ve realized by now that whichever one you chose will be the guiding principle for what you are creating.”
“Creating?” Sir Owalan pauses in the chant long enough to share his confusion. “I thought we were being made Saints.”
“You’re being made gods,” Sir Sorken says, and his voice sounds satisfied. “If you live through the process. Let’s listen to the end of the instructions, shall we?”
Sir Coriand chants them out, and he does not pause, moving from what had been memorized to what is now inscribed upon the ground we pass.
“Now write out your orders. Be patient. Be clear.
For this calling borders the depths that you fear.
Join shadow to vessel, build sinew and bone,
Without conscience wrestle, to carve out a home.”
Sir Coriand turns and faces us in the open entrance to the next trial, and his face is twisted in the light of the golem’s palm candle. He’s backlit by a bright light. The combination makes him look like he is made of wax and melting.
“Alone be triumphant, in solitude shout,” he quotes. “You’ve made what the heavens themselves cannot doubt.”
And as the word “solitude” is still ringing forebodingly in my head, he spins around and enters the challenge before us. If he is not guilty of murder, then he is certainly guilty of blasphemy.
Sir Sorken looks back long enough to waggle his eyebrows at us, and then he disappears with his friend.
I brush my hand against Victoriana’s and hook my smallest finger with hers — a goodbye, perhaps.
From here in, those who will suffer will suffer. And those who will die will die. And we will likely be both. But if I can find for certain who is responsible for the deaths of the others, I will see they die first.
The dog’s tongue licks our joined fingers and I grimace. Great. We have someone’s blessing. And I don’t know if it’s a dog, or a demon, or a moldering old knight.
Chapter Thirty
Vagabond Paladin
I think we are close to the end now, my girl, and there are so many things I have not told you.
I was starting to realize how much he’d protected me from that I’d never understood. It hadn’t seemed like it when we were shivering in blasts of cold, drifting from village to village eating scraps, huddled in barns, dealing with the kinds of perversion the villagers shied away from. It had not felt it when we wrestled demons in the dark and prayed our way through the twisting turns of evil men. But the world had been simpler then than it was right now, under the ground. What Sir Branson had protected me from had not been evil, but it had been the understanding that even those who represent good can be evil, or foster evil, or fight on the side of evil. I had harbored doubts before, even in that protected state. He had stood like a shield in front of me and protected me from the worst of it.
I had not realized.
When he taught me to give thanks over scraps, he had not told me it was because greed, when rooted deep, drove the hearts of men to regard murder as a mild inconvenience.
When he taught me to welcome beggars and those who were abandoned by others, he had not told me that they were kings compared to those who wore white and rode in the name of the God.
I also failed to tell you that you were a great comfort to me. A daughter not of my body, but mine to protect, mine to train, mine to love. I loved you, my girl, as a father loves a child. I want you to know that.
I had loved him, too.
The God says you must bury me with honor. Let the honor be that you remember and let the remembrance shine light into the doubts that still endarken your heart.
I swallowed down a desire to dismiss what he was saying just so I could protect myself from what was coming next. I didn’t want him to go. And yet I needed him to go and to go soon. Time was ticking down and every demon in this arcanery must be dealt with somehow — including the one in my dog.
Sir Coriand turned and led us into the light of the trial ahead, seeming almost swallowed by it, and then his golems were swallowed next, and then those in front of me one by one.
There is a story from the ancient past of Corinna the Martyr. Corinna — by faith alone — left her family and her home, and dressed in flowing white robes — which, frankly, is a very impractical choice for travel and made me doubt the sanity of her other choices — and walked to the center of a cult of the Heart of the Bull, and there, in their underground lair, she had knelt in prayer and asked the God to vanquish her enemies, and he had shown her the one weak spot in the structure. Filled with his power, she had struck it a mighty blow, and the temple had collapsed, killing her and hundreds of worshipers. It had always struck me as odd that we told this tale, because if everyone died, then who could tell what Corinna had done?
