by Dave Dobson
“And did you let it go, then?”
Edmund looked troubled. “I was in the dungeon for two months. I had time to think. None of what I was doing was going to bring Cecile or Trevain back, and it was putting me and my family at further risk. I didn’t have the power to do anything, other than putting a knife in his back. And attempting that would have endangered our family, destroyed our business . . . I had others to consider, others more vulnerable and powerless than I.” He looked down at his hands.
I didn’t know what to say. I felt great sympathy for Edmund, and respect. I’m not sure I could have swallowed my anger and made such a decision. But I had no one to care for, or to care for me, other than Boog. I might well die unmourned, but at least I was not disappointing or endangering anyone else. I’m not sure what my parents would have made of my arrest, conviction, or condemnation, had they lived. Not the kind of thing that they’d be able to brag to their neighbors about, I thought. Well, one neighbor, Goodwife Frieden would be impressed, and would tell everybody she knew. Probably already had. I supposed every poor visitor to her fruit stall heard about how the little boy she used to know was a murderous traitor. I’d done her proud, if nobody else.
Boog made a breathy noise from the floor. He might have been trying to speak, but all I caught was “Hagooooomfffff.” I looked at Edmund, and he waved a hand at Boog in assent. I knelt at the side of my friend. He tried again to speak, but his lips were stiff and rubbery. “Agghaaaaaaah.”
Boog squinted hard, and his hand lifted off the ground a fraction of an inch before falling back. I took his hand and wiggled his fingers. After a time, he was able to flex them back, although feebly. I got behind him and hoisted him awkwardly up into a sitting position. He fell forward, bent double over his legs. I grabbed his shoulders and held him upward, rubbing his neck and shoulders. I panicked somewhat when he began to list leftward, but I managed to keep him up. Gradually, his strength returned, and he could hold himself up with clumsy, rubbery arms. “Thah wah noh goob,” he mumbled.
Edmund chuckled. “A bit tingly?”
Boog lifted up a hand and rubbed his mouth with limp fingers. “Mah fafe hurpff.”
Edmund smiled. “You’ll be out of it soon, I’d wager. But it looks like you’ve got a fat lip.”
“Ah sowwee… sorrrry… for da attackkkh…”
“It’s all right. You went for the weapon, after all, not me. No hard feelings.”
Boog grunted and smacked his lips a few more times. “You have…you have to teach me how to do that.” He struggled up into the chair.
Edmund stabbed his fingers towards Boog’s chest. “Just like this…” Boog yelped and cringed away as Edmund laughed. “No. Actually, it took me a few months of training to get it down. One of my postings was as a lookout in a tower. A tower overlooking a river ford. A ford that had last been passable over two centuries ago, leading to a country we conquered shortly before that. My partner and I had a great deal of time to pass.”
He spent a few minutes showing Boog the basics, and I wandered over to the window. We’d found a friend when we most needed one. But we still had no plan, no prospects, and no apparent future. Marron still held all the cards, and, to nearly everyone we were likely to meet, we were still wanted killers on the run. I pondered this for some time and came up with no more options than I'd seen before.
A flicker of motion caught my eye. Two cloaked figures, a man and a woman, walked up the road, past the mill, toward Edmund’s house. Not a problem, except that their cloaks were the crimson red of the Inquisitor’s Guild. That was a big problem. I turned back to the other two. “We’ve got inquisitors on the way,” I said, trying to keep my voice low but urgent.
Edmund acted quickly, though not in the way I would have expected. The old man leapt up and ran to the fireplace, where he gave the back wall a mighty kick, sending a shower of sparks up from the small fire. “Er,” I said, wondering if his senses had abandoned him.
“Step in!” he hissed. “Quickly!”
“But…” said Boog. “We’ll, uh, get burned. Sir."
“No, you idiot,” replied Edmund, waving at the spot he’d kicked. A small opening appeared as the stones there swung back into a recess.
I ducked into the fireplace, stepping gingerly to avoid the hot embers. The hole opened into a small space between the rear wall of the house and the exterior wall. To the left was a pile of lumber. To the right, a passageway leading sharply downward into darkness. In the shadows, I could make out sets of rough timbers holding up walls and a ceiling of dense-packed dirt. Boog scooped up his staff and leapt over the flames, pressing me deeper into the gloom. Edmund pulled a small brass candlestick from the mantel, lit it deftly in the fire, and handed it across the flames to Boog. Then he pressed on a stone, and the wall ground back again, rotating into its former position.
We heard a rapping at the main door. As he turned to respond, Edmund hissed through the narrowing crack in the wall. “Follow the tunnel. Meet me by the western bridge at midnight.”
34
Stream of Consciousness
“You look ridiculous, you know,” commented Boog.
“I don’t care,” I replied.
“You’re just going to feel worse afterward. And even then you’ll be cold and sticky the rest of the day.”
“Again, I don’t care. Not a whit. Whatever a whit is.”
Boog snorted and urged his horse past me. His undesired advice reached me from a vertical distance of perhaps ten feet, as Boog rode a tall gelding, and I was sitting chest-deep in a moderately fast-flowing part of a river. My pony drank idly nearby, his ears flipping to catch the forest sounds.
There are some who take naturally to the saddle, who develop an instinctual communion between human and steed, who can control their mounts with the faint flexing of a leg, read their thoughts through stirrup and rein, and who consider no day truly well used save those spent atop a horse. These people, I now realized, I detested. My lips and cheeks were chapped and cracking from exposure to the elements. My back and legs ached. I could scarcely walk after I dismounted, and my dismounting itself was little more than the simple application of gravity augmented by gracelessness. After five days riding, I had blisters in places I had not known could become chafed, and my posterior felt like one giant bruised slab of meat, radiating tautness and pain with every rocking nudge of my horse’s bony back.
All of which may explain my choice of seating. The cool water, fed by snow, frigid in the winter air, temporarily purged the pain, along with all other sensation, from my legs and backside. Had His Grace Prelate Jeroch of Frosthelm arrived right then, I could have done him no greater favor than to offer him a seat at my side.
Not that I was not thankful for the horses, or at least for the escape they made possible. Edmund had bought them outright, for cash, from a hostler he knew who kept a stable several miles from the edge of Middlemarsh. Though I was no expert in the value or sale of horses, I thought the price nothing less than exorbitant. But Edmund had waved off my protestations, and beyond that, had given us a supply of coin that, in the city, would have lasted me for several months or more. If his family was actually as wealthy as he claimed, then I supposed he could afford it. I was grateful for his generosity.
In addition to the money, I carried a letter from Edmund vouching for us, safely stored in a wax-sealed tube in a saddlebag. If we ever reached the border, perhaps it would keep us from being arrested on sight. Or shot, or cut down, or strung up, or drawn and quartered, or otherwise eviscerated. Edmund had an eye for self-preservation. The letter did not outright say that he had encouraged us in our struggle against (or, perhaps more accurately, our haphazard flight from) Marron, but he did say that he had met us, found us to be honest and commendable, and a credit to the Inquisitor’s Guild and to Sophie’s memory. Probably not enough to get him arrested, should we be captured, but perhaps enough to give us a chance to tell our story to the Inquisitors at the border.
I had be
come increasingly aware that I had romanticized the border to an unrealistic degree. I really had little idea what the Inquisitors did there, how they were billeted, what command structure they had, how their duties were assigned and carried out, or even what duties they had. There were several, such as Clarice, with whom I’d worked in the city, and I could count a few as (I hoped) friends, several more as acquaintances. But I didn’t even know if they worked together, under a centralized command, or as scouts separated by miles of little-traveled frontier. I wished I had paid more attention back in Frosthelm, but with the challenges of training and our first missions as provisional Inspectors, there had been little time (and, I admit, little interest) in a place and a job that seemed so distant and alien to what we were doing in town.
All this aside, Boog and I agreed we needed to try to act against Marron, or at least to warn others about his plans. If we were committed to this task, our only chance to avoid recapture was to meet up with Inspectors and convince them of the truth of our story. Of the other three branches of the Prelate’s court – the Brigade, the City Guard, the Judiciary – none would give a second thought to returning us to Marron as escaped criminals. Even the Inquisitor’s Guild was fraught with danger, since some were probably Marron’s men, others likely unwilling to believe our somewhat outlandish tale of betrayal, and still others not brave enough to stand against the new High Inquisitor even if they knew the truth.
Boog broke my reverie. “Well, if we’re to take a break for you to cool your fragile rear end, maybe you can help me figure something out.”
My curiosity was piqued. “What’s that?”
Boog stretched in the saddle. He wasn’t given to long sentences or flowery diction, but I knew from our friendship that he had an active mind. He often let his thoughts gnaw at a problem, sometimes for weeks at a time, and more than once he’d found a connection or a solution that I’d never have considered.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about Marron and his plan, and it doesn’t all make sense.”
“Why not?”
“Everything he’s done, that we know of, has been to further his own rise.”
“Or to be horrible to people who’ve crossed him,” I added, thinking of Edmund’s tale of Trevain and Cecile.
“Right. But this Faeran business doesn’t fit.”
“Why not?”
“You’ve read some of the cult teachings, right? And other descriptions of their beliefs?”
I didn’t see where he was going, but I had done some research, however rushed. “Yes.”
“What’s their goal?”
I thought for a moment. “To raise Faera from the underworld, or wherever he currently lives.”
“Is there any promise of reward? Of power?”
“Er.” I pondered. “Well, some, but it’s mostly just the glory of bringing mighty Faera back, ascension to a higher form of being, and a blessed afterlife, that kind of thing.”
“Right,” said Boog. “The kind of thing a fanatic would go for.”
“Yes,” I said slowly. “I guess so. It must be convincing, or there wouldn’t have been such a following now, or back the last time, a century ago.”
“But Marron isn’t a fanatic.” Boog shifted in his saddle, sitting straighter as he neared his main point. “He’s a sadist, a power-hungry criminal, a clever and ruthless player in the intrigues of the court. He’s destroyed many lives, but only for a few reasons – personal gain, power, or vengeance.”
“I still don’t get it,” I said.
Boog looked annoyed. “And you’re supposed to be the smart one.” He looked across the rocky ford to where the dirt track we had been following continued up the hillside, and I followed his gaze. The tall leafy trees of the lowlands were giving way to evergreens as we rose, with the gray limestone of the mountains showing through in the steeper places. Snow covered much of the ground, as we were only two weeks into the new year, but today was unseasonably warm, and some of the snow was melting. In less desperate circumstances, I would have enjoyed the scenery, very different from what I knew.
I thought a bit. “What if he’s converted? Become a fanatic?”
Boog grunted. “Maybe. But he seems pretty strong-willed to have fallen so hard for a new religion. Cults like the Faerans, they appeal mostly to the powerless, who’ve got little to lose, or to the idle, hungry for diversion, but not to the strong. And Marron hasn't changed any of his other behavior – he’s still playing the courtly game, amassing power, and hiring thugs, and murdering people, and making life miserable for those who cross him."
“Or maybe he knows something about this Faeran business that we don’t – maybe he knows how to channel the power of the god, or maybe there's a specific reward for the one who works hardest or something?” This supposition sounded weak even as I spoke it.
Boog looked at me dourly. “Possible. There’s a lot we don’t know. But I just don’t think he fits as a wild-eyed zealot, and he seems like he’d place his trust more in current, worldly power than in some long-dead prophecy.”
“So why the Faerans then? Why the dead prince, the amulet, all that?”
“For that, I think we need to figure out his motivation. You know, like we learned in the second week of lessons at the Inquisitor’s School.”
My backside was getting a bit too cold, now. I stood, stiff and awkward, and waded toward the stony bank, water raining from my clothes.
Boog watched me waddle ashore and laughed. “Perhaps you should have worn less stretchy trousers.” I looked down. The crotch of my woolen leggings now dangled to only a few inches above the top of my boots. I hoisted it up to its normal position, and it immediately sagged back down, still dripping. The leggings hadn’t fit well since my attempt at laundry in the woods back in Middlemarsh, but this was definitely worse.
“Fine, laugh all you want.” I squeezed my trousers to wring them out and tried with little success to restore them to their original form. “What do you think Marron's motivation is, then?”
“Well, Marty of the Extremely Short Legs, I think his motivation has always been to rise in power in Frosthelm.”
“I agree, but he doesn’t have much farther to rise, does he? He’s already a respected noble, with lands, estate, influence. Now he's High Inquisitor. I imagine there are a few other courtly titles he could still take over, and he could add more to his holdings. There won’t be a new Prelate unless Jeroch dies, and even then he’d have to win the election. It sounded from what Gueran said that he’s not universally liked. Or feared.”
“Exactly. He has nowhere else to go. He’s hit the limit of his birth and wealth.”
I chuckled. “Not much of a limit, from where I’m standing. So he’s raising a dead god because he’s frustrated? Or bored?”
“No, I think he’s trying to climb further, beyond his station.”
I still didn’t see where Boog was headed. “But Faera would end the world, right? And that would cost him everything.”
“Right. But suppose he didn’t really want to go all the way, but instead merely to threaten it?”
“What?”
“Aside from his family’s rank and power, he’s accomplished everything he’s done through ingratiating himself with those more powerful and threatening those weaker.”
“Or destroying them,” I added.
“Right.” Boog looked at me intensely. “But suppose he could cause the destruction of the world. Wouldn’t that make for a really good threat?”
“That’s not… But whom would he threaten?”
“The Prelate. I think he wants to be Prelate.”
My mind raced. “So, he gets the Prelate to step down, to name him successor or ruler or something, in order to save the world from destruction?”
“Yes.”
“That’s insane! The Prelate wouldn’t do it. And it’s an elected position.”
“He might step down. And the electors could give in too, and elect Marron.”
“Only if the
y believed Marron would carry out the threat.”
“Would you believe Marron if he said he’d do something ruthless and evil?”
I swallowed. “Well, I would, yes, but I’m not the Prelate.”
“The Prelate cares about the people of Frosthelm and his lands. Always has. That’s why he’s committed so fully to this border struggle. It would be far easier to hold back and let the outlying villages be raided. They’re not so important.”
“But he’s also stubborn, and I’m sure feels like he’s heir to a line of bold rulers.”
“But even the boldest know when to surrender. I don’t think he’d be willing to preside over the destruction of everything he loves."
“The nobles – the people wouldn’t accept Marron! Not under those circumstances.”
“The people don’t have to know. They could cover it up. Even if it got out, the people would come around eventually. The people follow the powerful. Marron didn’t have much trouble taking over the Guild, did he? And we think of ourselves as independent, capable, all that.”
I chewed over what Boog had said. “I don’t know… I still think he might have fallen for the cult’s teachings. Or maybe he thinks he’ll get something important or useful out of freeing Faera, other than ending the world.” I gave my distended pants one final, futile tug. “I agree that whatever he’s doing, he’s doing to increase his own power. I just don’t think the Prelate would hand everything over without proof that the Faeran prophecy is real. And beyond that, he’d need proof that Marron could – and would – raise Faera if the Prelate refused. And that seems like a big gamble for Marron, much too big a gamble to be committing the resources he’s invested.”
Boog frowned. “You might be right. Maybe we’re missing something.”