by J. Gibson
CHAPTER IV: KEEPER
Garron
“We are joined this day with an incident recounting, a dedicated document, conveyed to Bishop Maxima Ayleth by Father Garron Latimer, regarding events said to have transpired under his guardianship at the Vale of Erlan. Am I correct?” Archbishop Sangrey’s eyes shimmered a dutiful hazel, and obsidian bejeweled her ash-blonde hair, drawn at the crown by a black ribbon.
“Aye, Your Reverency,” Garron replied.
Garron stood in the well of the council chamber, before seven of the nine archbishops who composed the Ennead, ruling body of the Matrian Church, and true power of the Sacred Empire. At the center of this group sat Breiman Umbra, the first man ever appointed Vicar of Gohheia; a face of the Church, a conveyor of its edicts, by tradition, little more than a formal title. Yet hushed condemnations within the Church had claimed that Archbishop Umbra had maneuvered to expand the title’s influence during his tenure.
Of no less importance, the six women at Umbra’s shoulders were his fellow members. Each sat on thrones of marble amidst statues, and wore black and grey robes, embroidered and lavish, in keeping with the custom of honoring the glory of Gohheia on Earth as in the Celestia. Like many of the Clergy, Garron had met the nine of the Ennead during the Idoss festivals held annually at the capital. The Fest of the All-Mother marked the sole time in which the Church permitted members of the priesthood to leave their ward villages and return to Aros.
The Grand Priory had always made Garron feel small, and this chamber was no exception. Its embowed ceilings hung massively overhead, dancing in the glow of burning tapers which draped between crimson banners bearing the sigil of the Empire, the Overcross. His eyes scanned above the walls of similarly-crimson curtains and stained-glass windows to view the sculptures of figures past, which seemed to gaze down in judgment.
Archbishop Sangrey flipped the paper in her hand over. “Archbishops Dred and Hart will not be in attendance.” Camille Sangrey spent most of her time micromanaging the affairs of the many in the Clergy beneath and even equal to her station. It had assuredly added years to his life, current events aside, when Garron retired from her primary service after he made his priesthood and received ordainment as guardian of Erlan.
“You are charged, though only as an investigative rather than punitive matter for the moment, with the act of dereliction of guardianship, of which you have confessed,” she said. “That is, the Church has found that you abandoned your station in Erlan, thereby severing your sacred vows of priesthood to maintain the village until the end of your life. Do you concur with these facts as herein defined?”
“I do.”
“You have argued in your admission that you did so because what you experienced on the night of your departure rose to a greater urgency than your duty as warden. Am I correct in defining this statement?”
“Aye, Your Reverency.”
Sangrey tapped the edges of the parchment in her hands against the table, then laid the front page face down. “The council is considering that your service to the Church has been unremitting for over forty ages, since you were a boy of late teenage. Further, we are taking into account that your work in protecting Erlan with the aid of Field Officer Emmelina Avelane of Kordyr has been well-regarded for the last decade. Do you affirm these facts as I have conveyed them to you?”
“Aye, Your Reverency,” Garron said once more.
The day he had turned himself in—pale, shaken, carved and bruised, raw at the feet and hands—he had relinquished Emmelina’s service license to the Matrian Evidentiary Office. The attendant deacon had to clean the badge to read its rank insignia and name. Garron could not bring himself to wipe away Emmelina’s dried blood.
“For the record, Officer Avelane served well as the paladin of Erlan, did she not?”
“She did, Your Reverency.”
“Do you know her location at the start of the attack?”
“I presume she had been asleep in the guard’s bothy before the commotion outside woke her and she found me. We did not discuss the matter at the time. Other concerns pressed.”
“You noted in this report that Officer Avelane initially served as a chevalier in the military, but requested a transfer to the inquisitors. From there, the Silver Knights assigned her to the Vale, as the then-Field Officer had intended to retire. You stated also that those of her graduating Knight’s Circle called her by the honorific, Emmelina the Courageous, for her bravery.”
“Protector of the innocent, defender of the weak, willing to die for the sake of honor and justice—a true adherent to the code of the Order of One,” Garron followed. “I wanted to ensure truth and fullness in her remembrance.” The air that slipped past his lips shook like water displaced by the force of a hand.
“Father Latimer,” Archbishop Holle Mallum chimed in from the far end of the table, “we know you are neither a coward nor a man who would desert his post without just cause.” The common body, and many of the government, regarded Mallum as the most virtuous of the Ennead, despite that she often defied the Clergy’s dress code by wearing colorful costumes in place of her issued robes.
Garron relaxed as she spoke.
“You have a longstanding history of adherence to the three pillars of the Mother’s Truth, and to your oaths.” She extended a reassuring smile, her eyes, the color of cocoa beans, crinkling in the frame of her light brown hair. This day, she wore bright blue and white. “We have all read your testimony summary from Bishop Ayleth. I feel confident in saying that we found it difficult to fathom. In light of the details, which are certain to find an ear in the common body soon, as is the way of rumor, we need you to tell us, with as much description as you can bear, exactly what occurred following your loss of consciousness during your encounter in the western descent.”
Garron inhaled, absorbing the dark fragrance of the coals smoldering in the braziers that surrounded the four marble pillars at his back; a faint, dirty odor. “With the Mother’s guidance,” he said, his eyes low. The mere thought of those memories caused his hands to quiver, festering as an untreated wound.
The Church’s Scribe Officiate, an elf by the look of her, sat in the corner, quill and parchment in hand, recording the assembly’s proceedings. She stopped and peered up as silence rolled through the room.
That night.
Hecos had hung low in the sky, near half down, a marker of deep evening. To affirm the hour, her celestial sisters, Senas, Enon, and Minaris, encircled and claimed the hue of midnight blue.
Time had passed, though how much, he could not be certain. His head throbbed. In the distance, he heard the howl of wolves or coyotes, he could not be sure.
Garron brought pins of cold air into his lungs. Do I live? He did not know. He drew in once more. His chest expanded. The ache in his stomach abated to a numb pulsation and he no longer felt fastened to the earth like stone.
Am I wounded? His head must be intact, for consciousness had returned. He shuddered and bent upward. Did he cry out in pain? He was ignorant of it if he had.
Nothing stirred. No movement, no sound.
He surveyed his surroundings.
Dead air swam in every direction.
The pounding in his head shattered his skull as the crashing of the surf, dragging him to sea and returning him to shore to twist in anguish. His reality offered less charity. Nearly broken, he sat alone in a woodland clearing.
Alone, save one.
Managing to rise to his feet, he stumbled over to the tree line. As he approached, he recalled another that had lay close by. A reanimated woman of the village, the one who had assailed Emmelina. The village woman had vanished, a faded stain of viscera her lone remnants.
As though in a dream, Garron gazed upon her ruined form. Dear Emmelina, valiant to the last. Like hay, her hair had turned coarse and brittle. Her eyes had sunk in, and her face, speckled in grey and black, had already fouled. Around her mouth, green and purple kisses of decay. From her ears, dried blood.
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��She had already putrefied when you awoke?” Archbishop Sangrey interrupted.
Archbishop Umbra’s dark gaze focused on Garron. “Consistent with the summary testimony delineated in Bishop Ayleth’s record.” Dry of manner, as always.
“Any mortal skilled in necromancy could’ve accomplished such in Father Latimer’s period of unconsciousness,” said another voice to Umbra’s side. Serafina Mortem. Perpetually frowning, one could hardly tell she lived until she uttered a word.
“Not in such time,” Archbishop Aramanth Delacroix interjected from the next-to-last seat at the rightmost end of the table. If anyone could be certain, she would. Aramanth Delacroix, one of the fiercest mages to ever live, master of the Aetherian arts of metaphysics and materialism, perhaps surpassed in exclusion by the Imperial Archmagister. “A mortal necromancer may find favor in his might from the God of the Dead, but our borderland wards ought to have restricted such foreign magic sufficient that even a powerful necromancer would have been rendered next to impotent. Perhaps in many hours or days, such a feat could be accomplished.”
During Archbishop Delacroix’s time as a bishop, women and men in their envy whispered the slur witch at her back. A dangerous charge, and untrue. The aftershock of her ascent had expelled these malcontents. Later, the ousted agitators spread rumors of her private love with Archbishop Sangrey, to which neither had admitted, that he knew.
“What Father Latimer has described in his testimony and now seems to have been a period of an hour or less,” Delacroix went on. “Am I correct, Father?”
“I estimated such by the depth of the snowfall.”
“‘Tis not possible we deal with a mortal culprit. I ought to know, for I imbued the wards myself.” Scarlet lips, often bent with an untroubled grin, offset Delacroix’s porcelain, chiseled features. Two long braids of flaxen at her shoulders, beginning above the ears and joining at the center of her nape, balanced her warm umber eyes. Her characteristic half-smile did not accompany her face this evening.
“We’ve asked Father Latimer to narrate to us the events,” Umbra reminded the room. “We’ll be here a fortnight if we do not let him speak.”
“Indeed,” Delacroix said.
Mortem nodded.
Umbra rolled his left hand. “Proceed, Father.”
“It,” Garron began again, “was not a natural death.”
When a body dies by normal cause, it deteriorates in a slow process. The figure becomes bloated and sore and scabbed, declines over an extended period. Upon Emmelina had been the stink of rot, but a different sort, and too pungent that shortly. Her body had hollowed and aged. In a typical decomposition, the innards decay and swell to their escape until they wither. Hers had liquefied, as though a spider had caught her in its web and drank her clean.
A shell remained.
Garron lowered himself. On bent haunches, he placed one hand to her hair, the other to her cheek. His eyes closed and his head fell back. Shoulders slumped, he wept. A cold hovered in the air, but not the frost from before, that insidious chill. The tears that streamed down his face did not freeze at his cheeks. “Emmelina!” he pleaded to the sky, to the Mother. He wept harder, his body shaking with each sob.
His head jerked as he shook, his mind swimming in misery. The song of his lament, the only sound around him. A rush of sensation in a sea of vicious nothingness. Devoid of reprieve, a hostile dream. Over ten ages he had served this place, and she had perished while he lay helpless, worthless, on the ground.
As he rose and tottered, full with grief, he found no blood on him. Had he escaped unscathed? His memory played against him. He turned to draw in details long in the distance. No life stirred anywhere, not even a trickle of flame. Emptiness called. He walked, plagued by a headache and sickness.
“I must,” he said, or begged. He remembered something; two things. Important. The girl in the storage shed, Alina, and the one in his care, Aefethla. “Please, Mother,” he may have whispered, “let them live.”
He had staggered back up the path, the decline, and the road, the distance he had traversed earlier, drifting past ruined hovels with naught a spirit to guide him, greet him, or relieve him of his burden. In his uninvited sleep, the world had iced further. Snow covered rooftops and frost crept down stone in ribbons and sheets. He saw no animals, bodies, or blood in the mounds of white. Even the wind had forsaken them.
Outside Aefethla’s hovel, he stopped. The journey there had been lengthy, but he did not remember it. His palm met the cool, rough exterior of the door. Not long ago, he sat within, tending to her, stoking the fire of her hearth, preparing her evening’s meal, reciting to her the sacred words of the Mother’s Blest Writ. As he wavered at the fore of her dwelling, he tasted fear at the back of his mouth. The thought nearly overcame him, to look upon her sunken features, pale lips; eyes dull, listless, voided.
I must. The door rested ajar. His hand swung it open with unsettling ease, hinges grating. He stepped inside with his gaze locked to the floor, allowing his sight to trail timidly up toward her bed. The room had become as a cavern. Within his chest had welled a tension that made it arduous to breathe, as if a weight pressed against it. He shook from the chill, and the terror.
Through the pool of darkness before him, nothing formed. Aefethla had disappeared from her bed, as if she had never been there. Perhaps she hadn’t. He had lost faith in his senses.
“Vor-Kaal.” The phrase rang out from Sangrey’s lips into the chamber. “Keeper of Death,” she added. “You understand the weight of this claim, Father?”
“Aye, Your Reverency.” Her words returned him from his vivid recollections to the assembly. “‘Tis the name the voice whispered into my mind.” His fingertips tingled, as though warming from a frost.
“If it were as you described,” Archbishop Mortem said, “and if the wards are as efficient as we hope, we must assume the words you report hearing were true. True, that is, in that you heard them.” She sounded incredulous. “Whether the source of those words spake truth is another matter.”
“In your testimony, you described the creature, the woman, as horned, black horns, with grey skin and white eyes,” said Archbishop Aris Crane, her dark skin aglow in the light of the hall.
“As it appeared to me.”
“As Vor-Kaal is described in Scripture,” Umbra rasped.
Garron expected that one of the Ennead would point out that most members of the Clergy could describe the appearance of Vor-Kaal, and the other Incarnations and First Gods above them. However, none did.
Delacroix leaned forward. “‘Twould not be unprecedented. Ankhev once stood in this city. The Incarnations Ruhlter, Ulraut, Taerem, and Lasson make themselves known in the world.”
“Largely in tales,” Mortem said. “Nonetheless, ‘tis so.”
“Before we proceed with that line of discussion.” Archbishop Mallum quieted her associates. “What of the girl, Father? Alina, you mentioned.”
Alina.
East, he had walked, overwrought and exhausted. The pathways now hidden under snow, he made his way toward the wood shed, to where he had instructed Alina to flee. He came to the storage and threw its door open. Alina had made it, and died, and soured. She had not melted into the air as the others of the village, as if left so that he would find her, and see, and never forget.
Kneeling once more, his hands numbed against snow and cold ground. His fingers drew into fists, squeezing ice and turning it to water. He wanted to collapse and die there with her, but he must escape. If he survived to the capital, to Aros, he could warn the Ennead and others, and he must do so in person to verify the seriousness of his allegations. Many more would die if he did not, and in horrific fashion. Children, women, men, devoured by this ghastly undeath. By sacred duty, in service of Gohheia, he could not perish.
“I ventured west again. As if gifted by the Mother, there stood a saddled steed beyond the village edge. I mounted and rode as I could. I recognized but that I must.” Garron’s voice wavered. “The cre
ature had been run near to death when I arrived at the city gate. It never yielded, as though driven by my purpose, or fed of the finest Hallion. I lost consciousness on the way, slept as it ran, but remained at its back. Nothing pursued me, as if the world had risen into the sky and faded.” He put a hand to his chin and smoothed his shaggy beard. “I wondered whether I were still there in the village, dreaming, dead—if it were real at all.”
He had lost substantial weight during his ride. There had been no food. He quenched his thirst in long swallows by the water pouch at his waist, retrieved from Alina’s body. His robes hung loosely about his form, as a curtain from a window or secondhand rags. He found himself weak, certain his muscles had atrophied. His face felt gaunt beneath his fingers, matching the thinness of his wrists.
The endless drum of hoofbeats on frozen ground remained fresh in his mind. So constant, it snuck into his sleep and dreams. He may never bear a horse’s stride again. Much of the trip from Erlan to the northern Empire was a blur to him. Days had bled together. The vision of Alina’s body in that cold, dark woodshed lingered, from first sight to that moment. It would stay with him until his final breath.
I shall not forget her, so long as I live.
“‘Twas by the All-Mother’s grace you survived the way and the frost, Father.” This time, a different one of the Ennead spoke, Archbishop Zaria Tornaeu, if Garron’s memory served. Her voice conveyed compassion.
Garron nodded to her. “I believe it so.”
“I think we have heard enough.” By Umbra’s tone, the words were more a declaration than a suggestion.
“Retire to your chamber, Father, and we shall deliberate,” Mallum followed. “Someone will be with you forthwith to render our verdict.”
Sangrey raised a hand from beside the Vicar. “Until then, remain within the grounds of the Priory.” She paused to allow him to respond, he assumed. He shook his head in accord. “You are not a prisoner, but for your safety, we shall have no choice but to return you should you leave in the interim.”