by Daniel Ford
Then he turned back to Rede, whose hands now lay feebly at his side, his sightless face turned toward a small ray of sun pushing through the last of the thunderheads. Allystaire placed the palm of his left hand across the monk’s maimed eyes, kneeling, placing the other upon the altar.
Mother, please. Please, Allystaire thought, as he reached into the place he’d reached twice before; there was the sensation of dipping his hand into a well to draw forth water, but by the time he brought it to the surface, it had slipped through cupped fingers, leaving behind only drops that dried upon his skin as soon as he felt them. He tried again, and it was as though his hands had punched into cold stone instead of descending into water. He almost drew back, had the sensation of pain spreading along his knuckles, but he pressed harder against the monk, gritting his teeth. He reached again—again, stone.
“Rede,” he gasped, in a sudden flare of insight, “did you do this willingly? Did you give your eyes to Urdaran in mad devotion?”
The young priest twisted and writhed under his grip, screaming raggedly, his voice a hoarse animal cry of pain.
“Answer me! You must!”
“No! They told me I had a Gift, that the Inward Eye would reveal secrets to me. Portents and omens. Gave me no choice!”
Allystaire felt Idgen Marte’s and Mol’s hands settle upon his shoulder; he spared a glance for them. They had shuffled closer, but both kept one hand on the altar and one upon him.
“Do you want that Gift? If you wish it gone, speak now! Now, man, or I cannot save you!”
With a weak, tearless sob, Rede nodded his head beneath Allystaire’s hand. “They took my eyes! Why? I begged them not to. I want to live, but not in this darkness, not with this great…thing…in my head…”
Allystaire closed his eyes and whispered, “Please, Mother. This man is yours; his suffering makes him so. Please.”
Idgen Marte and Mol’s fingers curled tightly into his shoulders; he reached once more into the well of love, of forgiveness, of bright sorrowful compassion; but now the well had become a stream, a lake, and his hands brought forth a wave of it and poured it over Rede’s eyes and face. A cascade of warm power poured from the paladin’s hand; the Goddess’s love roared in his ears like a wind. Allystaire felt the man writhing again, heard him scream in agony that tailed off into a whimper. Allystaire fell backwards, the strength drained from his limbs, but he saw Rede shift against the altar and lift his sweat-soaked head and blink against the sudden burst of sun through the dead and drifting storm.
Blink—and shield his eyes.
Allystaire sat on the hay-strewn dirt, stunned. Idgen Marte and Mol both collapsed against the altar, but Idgen Marte lifted her face, and with the familiar twisted grin he hadn’t seen in days, uttered three careful, quiet words.
“He will see.”
He smiled back at her, the truth of her words landing snugly in his gut. He pushed himself to his feet, unsteadily, with one hand braced against the altar for support. Rede covered his face with his hands and breathed deeply; slowly he parted his fingers, but shut them quickly, covering his eyes from the resurgent late afternoon sun. Allystaire bent and helped the man to his feet.
“Move your hands,” he said, gently. “This light is of She who healed you. It cannot hurt you.” He reached up and firmly, but lightly pushed Rede’s hands away from his face. The monk blinked a few times, his eyes watering and bleary, but whole, brown, and healthy. He turned his gaze from Allystaire to the walls around them, to the crowd of villagers that was slowly gathering, to the sun above them, then to the altar. He turned around, placed his hands upon the stone, staring intently, tracing his fingers upon it.
“There’s…writing here…glowing…I can’t…” Rede leant far forward over the smooth-grained stone, his legs quivering beneath him so intensely that Allystaire prepared to catch him should he fall. The monk became fixated upon whatever he saw. Allystaire saw only the smooth stone surface, but his mind returned to the weeks before, when the Goddess had come to them, and he remembered her finger moving upon the stone in tracery.
“Stay this madness! Childe Rede, return to me and let us leave this place of sin behind us!”
Allystaire, Idgen Marte, Mol, and the village folk all turned to the old monk, who was being led up the path by his guide, each holding one end of the old man’s stick.
“You have allowed them to pollute you, Rede! You have allowed worldliness and concern for the self to pollute your Inward Gaze—”
The old priest was cut off with a loud thwack as he walked straight into the back of his stunned, silent boy, who’d dropped the stick and was staring open-mouthed at Rede. It took a moment for the youth to remember his charge, and to turn and right the old man before they could both tumble in a heap, but almost instantly the lad turned back to Rede, who looked up from the altar with a wide, unsettling smile upon his face.
That is a mad grin if I have ever seen one, Allystaire thought suddenly. I do not like the feel of it.
“Begone from here, you wretched old beggar,” Rede called with surprising vehemence, stumbling away from the altar with halting steps. “You aren’t—”
He was cut off as the youth started shouting, and as Allystaire stepped behind him and half-seized him, half-propped him up.
“He has eyes, Father! Eyes! Great Urdaran! Eyes!”
“What are you babbling about? The only eyes he has are those which Urdaran will grant him, to peer into the secrets of the mind, to—”
“No, Father, he has his eyes. The ones he was born with,” Allystaire said, still propping up the rictus-grinning Rede with one arm. “What you and your God took from him, my Goddess has returned.”
“Goddess? Fortune worshippers, eh? An unusual faith for peasants.” The monk spat the word like a curse. “You lie,” he raged, striking the dirt with his stick like a club, bending his knobbled knees beneath his dark robes. “Fortune grants no such powers. Nothing is given to Her servants but tricks of the eye and the mind, the will to peddle influence with the rich, and the accumulation of the filth of life!”
“It is no trick, and I am neither a peasant nor a servant of Fortune.”
“Sorcery then! Sorcery most foul!” He raised his arms theatrically and, with a new tack, addressed the crowd that he could not see but could doubtless sense. “People! Good folk! If you have a sorcerer in your midst, he is a most foul being and must be destroyed! Fetch wood and oil and seize him!”
He got as far as seize before his words were overrun with a chorus of buzzing, angry calls and shouts. The monk drew in a deep breath, preparing to shout above the din, but Allystaire raised a hand, and the villagers fell silent.
“I think you will find your orders to burn me for a warlock poorly received, Father,” the paladin said, working hard, and not entirely successfully, to keep a hint of mockery from his words.
“Then you have turned their very minds to your own ends!”
“Enough, Gaumm. Enough.” Rede’s voice was weary, but firm, and he took halting, careful steps away from Allystaire to approach the old priest. He patted the youth on the shoulder, who still watched him with shocked eyes and slack jaw. “The man who addressed you, this Allystaire, is no sorcerer, and you know it.” He gripped the old Urdarite’s shoulder; the monk tried to push away, but couldn’t. Rede’s hand was white-knuckled, his eyes shining large in his face. “You know now why we came. What I told you in the inn is still true. We came seeking him. This Allystaire,” he said. “And the woman, and the child,” he added, “who joined him, somehow, in healing me. This is what we felt in the world; a Goddess waking! A paladin striding the world! Search inwardly, as you always told me to do, and you will know.” He turned to the ground and drew a deep breath, and Allystaire thought he looked like nothing so much as an impersonation of Gaumm.
“I have felt Her and seen Her cleansing light!”
Something
in Rede’s voice twisted the word cleansing in a way that sent chills down Allystaire’s spine. I do not like the sound of that word in his mouth, he thought. Hairs rose on the back of his neck, and he turned to Idgen Marte, whose eyes were wide and whose cheeks were taut, and Mol, whose equally wide eyes were staring daggers at the recently healed man.
“It filled me! It drove the disease from my body and granted me back my eyes with the power of Her purity, Her white-hot flame against the cold void of Urdaran—” Rede’s eyes were wide and unblinking, his voice rising to a pitch as fevered as his skin had been a few moments ago.
“Enough, Rede,” Allystaire called, quickly and in his authoritative captain’s voice. “The Goddess healed you with Love, not flame. With Compassion. We will speak of it later.” He stepped down the track after Rede, stopping in front of Gaumm and the youth.
“Father, I still mean what I said. None here will harm you. You may stay as long as you wish and be provisioned.”
“No!” The monk raised his hands in a warding sign against evil, fingers crossed in intricate patterns, and spat to the side. “We will tarry here not another moment! Come, boy! Lead me from this wretched place.”
The boy looked up at the priest and reflexively reached out for the end of the man’s stick, but his eyes flitted from Rede to Allystaire, settling on the latter.
“Are you a paladin, m’lord?” His whisper was feather-soft, his eyes wide in awe.
Smiling despite himself, Allystaire nodded. “Aye. And my name is Allystaire, not my lord.”
The lad nodded, dodging a poorly aimed cuff from the priest behind him, who then swung his stick weakly and thumped it against the lad’s shoulder.
“I want t’stay with you!” he burst out to Allystaire. “I’d rather be your squire than an old man’s dogsbody!”
“What is your name, lad?” Allystaire frowned faintly.
“Isaak.”
“Isaak, you have promised to aid Father Gaumm, yes? You are pledged to him?”
The lad nodded quickly. Behind him, the Urdarite monk began tapping in front of him with his stick, doddering off without guidance, using his stick to find the edges of the track.
“Then with him you must go. He is your responsibility; pledges like that may not be broken lightly. Return Father Gaumm to a refuge, a place of safety—a temple or a keep where he is welcome—and think on your future. If you wish to come to the worship of the Goddess…well, I cannot promise to make you a squire, but none who come to Her willing will be turned away. Do you understand?”
Isaak swallowed and nodded sadly, but turned away and quickly caught up with the old monk, seizing the end of his stick and leading him at a faster, but still sedate, pace. He threw a look back over his shoulder, grimacing, and Allystaire offered him a gentle, encouraging nod.
Rede all but ignored them, having returned to studying the altar.
“I take it that you have abandoned Urdaran’s service, then,” Allystaire called out to him, turning from the sight of Isaak leading Gaumm away in the last of the afternoon’s light. Rede laughed bitterly but did not yet answer, so absorbed was he in the study of the altar.
An idea suddenly occurred to Allystaire, and he yelled, “Norbert!” The tall and no longer quite as gangly youth bounded up to Allystaire, who ordered, “Back to the inn; get together some food. Jar of wine or two. Then back here on the double and run it off to them,” he said waving a hand toward the young boy and the old monk, who were making slow progress. “They do not seem likely to get far.”
Before Allystaire had even finished speaking, Norbert was running off at full gallop. Turned into quite the runner, that one, Allystaire noted to himself. He turned back toward Rede and the altar. Idgen Marte and Mol had recovered; the former peered over the robed man’s shoulder to see what he stared at, while the latter stood up on the tips of her toes, fingers on the altar. Rede turned and swatted at one of her hands, snorting.
“Away from here, child.”
“You’ve no right to tell me—” Mol’s protest was cut short as Rede turned and smacked her hand again, louder this time, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“’Tis no place for lasses sticking their noses.”
He didn’t finish his sentence, because faster than Allystaire could’ve followed, Idgen Marte lashed out with a straight, short punch that drove her knuckles behind Rede’s right ear. He gasped in pain and fell forward, clutching at the back of his head.
Idgen Marte was drawing her arm back for another blow when Allystaire’s bellow cut across the field.
“Hold! No one does violence in the temple of the Mother except at greatest need!” He felt, as he said them, the rightness of his words. Add it to a list of rules before you leave, he thought, immediately wondering if the thought had been his alone. He began taking short, slow, deliberate steps back up the field to the temple, giving himself time to think.
Idgen Marte dropped her hand but glared menacingly at the loudly protesting former Urdarite, then turned the full force of her anger toward, if not on, Allystaire himself. “How dare he,” she snarled.
Rede finally hauled himself back to his feet and turned his shocked, aggrieved features toward Allystaire. “Who are they to even be here, Paladin? Why is the Goddess’s holy place trampled by all of these…” He trailed off as Allystaire closed in on him and loomed over him, his mouth set in a tight, grim line.
“These what? Poor folk? They are Her people. As for them,” Allystaire nodded toward Idgen Marte and Mol, “they are, as am I, Her servants.” Rede looked back over his shoulder and flushed, though whether in anger or embarrassment, Allystaire couldn’t say.
Rede sputtered, “Servants? But they are…they’re not…”
“Think carefully on your next word, friend Rede. Whatever it is you are about to say that they are or are not, understand that the Goddess has spoken to them, called them, chosen them; She has identified them as Her Voice and Her Shadow. That is who they are.”
The flushing in his cheeks spread to his neck, and Rede bowed his head. “I am sorry, Paladin. I was—in my haste and delirium over the Goddess’s healing—I must…” He gestured to the altar.
“Whatever it is you see on the altar, Rede, study it. Copy it. Draw it. Are you lettered?”
Rede cleared his throat. “I was, until. Well I suppose I am again. Still. At that. Usually the acolyte who serves as a guide will—”
“Good,” Allystaire said, trampling over what he sensed was a lecture about to be delivered. “Idgen Marte, Mol, would you please go fetch ink, parchment, and a pen? You will find them all among my things.”
Warrior and girl-priestess nodded and walked off. Rede continued to stare at the altar stone, and Allystaire asked, “What do you see?”
“I am not entirely sure. Runes that I do not recognize, though mayhap someone else will. A kind of small drawing, I think. Of what, I don’t know.”
Allystaire nodded, looked down at the altar, seeing only bare grey stone. “How do you see them?”
Rede thought for a moment on this, and said, “Have you ever stared too long at a light, and then turned your gaze to shadow? Or even looked at the sun?”Allystaire nodded, and Rede went on, “Like the glow in your eyes then. Only it doesn’t move when I move my gaze. It is just…there.”
“Fading?”
“Not at all.”
“Good. Then you can take a moment to tell me why you and your companions came to Thornhurst.”
As Allystaire spoke, a pounding of feet on the track signaled Norbert’s arrival, and just as quickly he was galloping up the road and over a slight rise, a large sack slung over one shoulder, a leather strap holding two thick clay jars dangling from a hand. “Norbert,” Allystaire called out as the lad ran past, “see if you cannot talk them into staying. Insist that they are welcome here.” Norbert might have waved an acknowledgement on his way past
; it was hard to say.
“The Urdarites felt something come into the world,” Rede said. “Some power. They wanted to know it, to quell it, or to seize it if they must.”
“And you said it is the Goddess they felt?”
“And you,” Rede pointed a long, slightly dirty finger at Allystaire’s chest. “The sensing of something, some power, has been sporadic. A splash in a great pool weeks ago. Other ripples, some mild, some great bursts of power, since.”
“How do they feel these things?”
Rede looked up from the altar and shivered, shutting his eyes and curling his arms for a moment around his thin torso. “With the Inward Eye. When an Urdarite gives up his eyes, something replaces them,” he said, tapping the middle of his forehead. “You cannot see, yet it…it shows you things. It judges. It—I didn’t like it,” he suddenly said, turning away and shuddering again.
“Why would you come seeking us out?” Allystaire’s eyes narrowed as he studied Rede. Now, able to look at the man instead of the dying, blind monk, he took in his features. A beak of a nose set beneath wide, hungry eyes; gaunt cheeks; lank hair; and a manner that varied wildly between halting and darting made Rede somehow both pitiable and off-putting, even unnerving. “Does Urdaran not ask you to withdraw from the world?”
“Urdaran does,” Rede answered darkly. “But that does not mean He, or His priesthood, wish to see new things arise. All of the Temples seek power in their own way. Braech has the water, the wind, and the rage of them made manifest in men; Fortune directs the streams of gold and silver. Urdaran moves to the fonts of power and obscures them. None of the Temples will permit a new power to arise and challenge it; they sponsor the Temples Minor and then absorb them…”