The sign above The Moon and Star was an extremely shocking sight to Arlo, who stopped with his hands in his pockets looking up at it until Irina bumped into him from behind. While she ill-naturedly muttered something about the forming pattern, Arlo seemed entirely transfixed, staring up at the wooden sign in a strange wash of poignant and nostalgic wonder. After squinting up at him for a moment, Irina turned to look at the sign herself. They stood there side-by-side in front of the door to the tavern for a full fifteen seconds before Irina finally asked, “Princeling. What exactly is it we’re looking at, hey?”
Wordlessly, Arlo drew out his watch and turned it over in his hand before twisting his wrist to show her the engraving on the back. Deeply hand-carved in thick lines and swooping curves an ornate crescent moon was worked around the back of the case and inside its open middle was a blazing sixteen-point star with a smaller eight point star inside it. Arlo presented this without comment, because it was obvious now that the sign was an exact match of the design stroke-for-stroke. It was rendered in wood instead of brass, and powder-green paint had long ago faded so that it was chipped mist over ugly white and grey wood; but the design from Arlo’s watch was unmistakable.
“Right, then.” Irina said after a few moments’ pause, “I see that. Give me another hint, alrigh’, princeling?”
Arlo slipped his watch back into the pocket of his waistcoat and stared up at the sign a little while longer before proceeding into the tavern. Despite the overcast sky outside, the interior was so dim that he had to blink sunspots away from his eyes as he took in the array of simple wooden tables and the row of booths on each side. They were all rough, practical things with right angles and dull dark-brown surfaces. Many were splintered or had names carved into them, but the back of the house sported a brilliantly polished bar of glossy mahogany with smooth brass trim. Behind the bar was a pair of well-loved brass tap handles and shelves displaying two rows of bottles with somewhat indistinct labels. Once the bottles were exhausted, one found themselves inspecting even more rows of hanging dry goods in the form of smoked fish, sausages, and jerky with a heavy burlap bag of salted and roasted nuts for good measure. Arlo cautiously stepped closer to the bar, and then noticed that a man was hunched over in a corner booth unmoving. He stopped and stared with some trepidation at the empty bottle standing by the man’s bent arm, but Irina happily trotted up to the bar and smacked it twice with her palm while hopping up onto a stool and doffing her cap with a joyful eye fixed on the nearer tap handle.
In the next instant, a windblown brunette woman emerged in a dirty white smock and a formerly yellow-brown apron that had been cleaned one time mainly just to see if it could be done. Arlo wasn’t sure what it would accomplish with all the stains and oil spots, but the woman of the house was wiping her hands with the wrinkled front of her apron and an expression of froward impatience until she caught sight of Irina. The face dropped at once and the woman crossed the rest of the distance with an entirely blank expression before donning a polite and patient smirk.
“Ah, Madame Tribune.” she greeted with a bobbing courtsey that could barely be detected behind the bar, “Your visit is quite the surprise. Hardly anybody ever comes to Lortar, much less anybody of your station.”
“First things first, your loveliness,” Irina quipped while hunching forward to unashamedly admire the barkeeper and the taps alike as a sailor would have, “You have got to set me up with the fattest pint of beer in the house, and if you had a cigarette as well that would be favorite.”
The mistress half-bowed and moved for the taps, saying along the way, “I’ve no cigarettes, but I do have some leaf cigarillos. They have been in the case some time, Madame Tribune, so they may be dry.”
“Cheers, love,” Irina shot back, then beckoned Arlo over with one hand while leaning over the bar and pointing at him with the other, “A second fag for my mate over here, and one of whatever he drinks as well.”
Arlo tread slowly like a cat past the sleeping or possibly dead drunkard in the booth even though the man had not moved when Irina slapped the bar. He settled on a stool next to the Tribune and looked at her curiously for a moment to observe this interesting familiarity the woman seemed to have with pubs before he noticed that the barkeeper was staring at him expectantly. He started slightly at the revelation, but at least composed himself quickly enough to ask, “Mistress, what rum have you got in the well?”
The barkeep grinned at his formality and nebbish presentation, “Wallacher’s Navy Spiced.”
“A few fingers with a splash of clove water, thank you.” Arlo replied with a satisfied nod. He watched the woman making his drink with less appreciation than Irina. It wasn’t as though the woman was not a shapely young thing with an easy smile, it was more that he was distracted. Once he had his drink in a tin mug beneath him, Arlo tapped it a few times and decided whether or not to show his watch.
He watched with the engraving on his mind while the lady in the tragic apron struck a match and leaned forward to cup it towards Irina’s exposed cheroot. In the light of the match, the green sickle-moon tattoo on her left cheek stood out starkly against the paleness of her skin while her pink, puckered lips worked the damp brown paper. The Tribune puffed at it until it was fully lit, and then leaned back with an incredibly complacent look while she cradled her beer in both hands. When the server next moved down to Arlo, he attempted to mimic the maneuver, but found himself getting a lopsided cherry on the end. The proprietress had to strike a second match for him, but after some small struggle he finally got it going.
“Anything else I can get you?” the young woman asked, though she was already filling a wooden bowl with roasted peppernuts to put between the two.
“Actually,” Arlo finally piped, “Do you know anything about the design carved on the sign outside?”
The woman behind the bar paid no attention to the way Irina gleefully tilted back her mug with a deeply satisfied and deeply unhinged gulping. She seemed completely inured to the Tribune’s type, even though Arlo felt like it was surely out-of-character for someone of such a privileged occupation. Instead, the woman handily answered his question. “I got that from the company five years ago when I bought the place off the Clannarch. This used to be a company store for the gas workers, you see, so the sign that was there before was the Haradin coat-of-arms.”
“The clan sent along a request that I replace the sign,” she went on as she took Irina’s empty mug back to the tap handle. “A sketch of that design what’s on it now, and some money to pay a local man for it to be carved. Course, I was free to use whatever design I wanted, but ol’ Treistan-hayche said it didn’t feel right makin’ me take down the clan colors and not providing something for me to put up instead. I liked it well enough, so I used it, and named the place after it as well.”
Arlo nodded along with the story. In a way, it made perfect sense. Everything came together neatly in his head. The way Treistan had been able to recognize the design on the back of his watch as his mother’s work was likely that she had sent him her sketch in a letter. It was a rather elegant patriotic design, a sort of inverted version of the Imperial moonburst, so it reasoned that Treistan would happily distribute it as a piece of generic art. Still, the effect it had on Arlo was one of a deep and somewhat hard to describe emotional resonance. It made this little tavern on some nowhere island suddenly seem incredibly important. With a soft smile, Arlo slipped his mother’s prayer charm out of the bottom button of his waistcoat and set the watch on the bar, face down. When the lady of the house returned with another foaming mug of rich golden lager for Irina to eliminate, Arlo beckoned her over to show her the watch.
Her eyes lit up in recognition of the design and she nodded her approval, “Well, then, sir, I see why you asked!”
“It’s actually my mother’s art you were sent.” Arlo explained, extremely pleased with the woman. He extended his hand over the bar to her, “Her name was Leliana Haradin. I’m Arlo Haradin-Harkon. I’m extremely happy to see the clan propagate her work in any way. I always thought her love of the arts was frowned upon.”
The mistress of the house suddenly seemed star struck, for when she reached back to grasp wrists with Arlo, she blushed and hastily pushed her unmanaged hair behind her ears with her free hand. “Abigail Hartford, sir. It is my sincere pleasure to see a Haradin here at last.”
With this, she turned to Irina and added, “I suppose this explains why a Tribune is here as well. I don’t know how the clan found out so soon, but I am mightily relieved to see you both here.”
Arlo and Irina exchanged glances now. Irina had been right that something was wrong on Lortar, it seemed. Arlo tried to surreptitiously solicit some sort of advice with his eyebrows now, tenting them bemusedly at the Tribune as if to ask her if they should reveal their ignorance. For her part, Irina just gave him a frosty glance that commanded him not to disappoint her, then turned to Abigail and asked, “Would you feel comfortable telling us everything you know about the situation here?”
“Where to begin!” retorted the other woman, throwing her hands up and turning to snatch a second lowballer so she could pour some rum for herself out of Arlo’s bottle. “I mean, I don’t know what you two have been told, of course. But it’s right awful. How did they manage to get word out? Did they smuggle a note onto the last methsel hauler? Or did somebody manage to break into the radiography shack?”
Irina wrinkled her nose, and at once Arlo realized that the Tribune was holding her cards close to her chest. He scrutinized Abigail now, trying to understand why they might need to disguise their ignorance from her. Was Irina suspecting that the bartender was somehow in on the scheme?
“I’ve been to islands like this all over the Ten Thousand Seas.” Irina finally said, very carefully and with her fingertips dancing across the top of the boarding axe in her belt. She took a long drag from her cheroot before continuing, “I’ve never seen one so quiet in the middle of the day, even for a small colony like this. Why don’t you start by telling me where the idlers, the townies, and the constables are?”
Abigail nodded, seeming to understand the nature of the Tribune’s sudden opaque demeanor as well. She swallowed twice as much rum as she had poured Arlo, then refilled her glass. It took a deep breath before she could finally answer, and she started slow.
“Those folk are all either dead or joined up with the Baxter gang.” she said, “Particularly the constables. The only one who didn’t join up or die is the former chief constable’s son who you can find in that booth over there.”
This was said with a tilt of the head towards the heap of a man in the corner booth. Irina flicked her eyes to the unmoving form, then back to Abigail. “Go on.”
So she did. “Baxter and his boys are holed up in the seafort at the northwestern end of the island. There’s maybe fifty or sixty of them altogether, but most of them are usually at the gas well or the refinery. They keep the men working, which keeps the meth flowing. Baxter’s boys also load the ships so the clan won’t discover he’s taken over the operation.”
“If this Baxter fellow has simply supplanted the local foremen,” Arlo asked now, girding his ribs because he expected an elbow from Irina, “Why does he still ship out the methsel? What is he getting out of this? Has he negotiated at all with the governor?”
Abigail shrugged. “I don’t rightly know, sire. The governor has been missing these two months since Baxter took over.”
Irina took another long pull from her cheroot thoughtfully, then said, “Tell us about Baxter.”
“Gav, he’s called, Gavin Baxter.” Abigail went on, now letting the information flow freely and quickly, “Gav was a foreman at the plant promoted from the locals. Second generation oiler in their generator room, as I understand it. A few months ago, he was caught sitting on a private horde of methsel he’d been taking a little at a time and they let him go. I know that much because he drank his last paycheck here in the same seat as good Arlo here.”
Arlo blushed slightly and looked down at his lap as though expecting to see some new defect in the stool. Abigail gave him a quick respectful nod before continuing, “After that, he was agitating some of the workers. Not that the pay is luxurious or anything, but House Haradin is fair and there’s only one or two bullies on the plant floor. Still, the way Gav sold it, it was slavery.”
“I take it that the local constables were his next target.” Irina put in now, stubbing out her cheroot and hopping to her feet. She let Abigail go on, but now she was unslinging her carbine and checking it over. She dropped the twenty-round magazine and peered at the witness holes along the back of it, then seated it back in the gun and flicked open a few pouches on her belt to check the magazines there as well.
“This clearly isn’t your first time dealing with a matter like this, Madame Tribune,” Abigail commented before continuing, “Yes, as a matter of fact he did rally a few coppers to him. When he took over, they kilt the chief. The seafort has had no garrison for some time, so it was a simple matter of moving in after that.”
“And the governor went missing right after this?” Arlo asked now.
Abigail shrugged again. “I have not seen nor heard of him. He was a useless man, sir, I tell you that. I suppose he either agreed to join up with Baxter and help hide everything from your family and the government, or he jumped rock and fled somehow.”
Irina yanked the charging handle of her carbine to check its chamber and smiled darkly at Arlo upon this revelation. She panned, “Isn’t it a shame what a weak governor will do? Hard to believe he couldn’t manage even so small an island as this one, hey?”
As he doused the cheroot he’d barely touched, Arlo narrowed his eyes down at her and replied bitterly, “I have known incompetent men to do worse with even smaller islands, but I forgive them in my heart so long as I believe they are trying their best.”
With a sneer, Irina produced a shiny silver half-moon coin and placed it down on the bar, all the while keeping her cold gaze directed at Arlo. “If I believe they are trying their best, I will forgive them, Arlo.”
Then, to Abigail, she said, “Keep the change, love. It’s a fine establishment. I hope to drink here again before I leave.”
Outside Placelle Lamella was already waiting for them. She trotted up with a look of concern painted across her heavy-lidded features and opened with, “The local chapelmaster says that the island is under the control of a band of thieves and bandits.”
Irina nodded, slightly hefting her carbine as though to alert Placelle Lamella to its presence. “We’ve heard.”
“Did he happen to tell you what they were after?” asked Arlo.
The Oathkeeper shook her head. “No, at least not with certainty. They believe the bandits are holding the governor and the island itself hostage and plan to ransom all to House Haradin or the government.”
“Government don’t negotiate with their sort,” commented Irina, “Our policy is to show up in force and give one chance for surrender before we lay siege to the island. Kill everyone who resists, let The Goddess sort it out after that.”
“Well, I certainly don’t foresee my uncle paying a ransom.” Arlo admitted, picking at his scalp above his ponytail with a slight frown, “I don’t like the idea of people getting hurt in a siege, either, but if it is what must be done…”
“You are a lousy man,” Irina sneered and gave a single hand to shoving Arlo. He looked down at her, surprised and hurt, but she rested the back of her carbine along her shoulder and jammed a finger into his face. “This is your family’s colony, rat. These men have taken over your clan’s business, bully your clan’s employees, and have subverted the will of Her Most Divine Majesty. Have you got no fire in you?”
Arlo held up both of his hands like her finger was the barrel of a pistol. He lurched away from her while she raved, but she matched him step-for-step on the open ground.
“What am I supposed to do against fifty men!?” he bawked, “They’d kill me in an instant and the island would still be in danger.”
“You have got a destroyer and its crew along with forty men of the Haradin House Guard on board pulling into this harbor in just a short while,” Irina explained, showing her teeth between every phrase with wide hateful eyes judging him, “You can lead them in an assault and retake what is rightfully yours!”
Arlo pathetically cowered under the heat of her ire, but whined back at her, “I’m no good as a fighter! If I joined them in an assault, I would be of no use, and I’d still probably die. Besides, forty against fifty is no odds.”
Now Irina slapped him. The blow turned his head and boggled his eyes. She raised her hand to slap him again, only to find it pinched between Placelle Lamella’s thumb and forefinger. The Oathkeeper loomed over her, but Irina just flashed a dirty look at the larger woman before yanking her hand free and rubbing it while she continued hurling insults at Arlo. “Spineless man that you are, you don’t throw men to their deaths if you won’t stand and fight beside them. But you could still let them tell you how to help. I cannot believe you were appointed governor of a seafort when you’re such a dog shite leader you couldn’t lead a mule out of a barn!”
Arlo thought he might cry. He knew the tears were welling up in his eyes, though they hadn’t broken the surface. It was an ugly feeling, shame biting him from one side while indignance chewed the other. It felt unjust somehow that he was expected to fight or put himself in dangerous situations. Any person, he felt, ought to be permitted to live in peace unharmed and not harm others. The stinging injustice of it fought with the memory of his failures. Gromlaw who had madly exchanged her life for his on Lost Pip’s Rock stood out the most to him, but the knowledge the other people had died in the Guild raid still weighed heavily on him. Coxswain Lately had been killed right before his very eyes in an instant, a horrible mean man who hadn’t deserved to die.
“You should have taken that job in the counting house, rat.” Irina spat. Then, she actually spat, putting a huge wad of saliva on the ground between Arlo’s feet. “I am going to bust into that radiography hut, and if there is a man inside he will let me call the Sunseeker or I will shoot him dead. I am going to call the Sunseeker and tell them to rally your House Guards. I am going to lead those men and kill these backstabbing usurpers, or I am going to die trying. Why don’t you stay here and drink yourself drunk while we lowly commoners get our boots dirty for you, sire!?”
Irina spat again at Arlo’s feet and turned on her heel, saying over her shoulder as she walked away, “I’ll come and fetch you when it’s time, soul-sucker. I know you lot get off on the killing, and an Oathkeeper ought to keep morale high for the men.”
Arlo watched her go off down the muddy street with the tails of her greatcoat billowing behind her like slack green curtains catching a breeze through an open window. He did not sob, because he was at least resilient enough not to bawl like a child, but a tear did finally break loose from his eye and roll down his cheek. The only emotion he could pin down amongst all of the chaos in his head was just the same sense that everything was so unfair, over and over again. Placelle Lamella approached him and used a gauntleted thumb to wipe the tear from his cheek before embracing him in a gentle hug.
“It’s okay, Arlo,” she murmured into his ear, “I know you’re trying your best. I love you, Arlo.”
Arlo stood and allowed her to coo at him for a long time before he finally pushed her away. Taking a deep breath through his nose, he tried not to meet her gaze while he smoothed down his overcoat and straightened his vest.
“While I wait for Irina to get the men together,” Placelle Lamella said next, “I have a task at the chapel. The priest has a number of corpses he hasn’t been able to burn properly, as his monk is dead and without access to the radio he can’t send for another. The ritual takes two, so I agreed to help him. You could come with me. The chapel master could take care of you when I go with Irina.”
There was no response from Arlo, however. He stared down at the spot where Irina had spit between his feet, though now it was impossible to tell as all had been absorbed into the mud. He breathed long, slow breaths, trying to figure out how to make the shame go away without exposing himself to the danger of the battlefield. He remembered how he had stuck his little ornate spadroon inside the Guilder during his escape from Lost Pip, the blood and the cries of the wounded men all around him. He also remembered how Lukas Gainstrom had bent him over and thrashed his back; the embarrassing humiliation whose bruises still marked him now. He wanted to be that person who did his duty so badly; just not in this way that everybody else seemed to.
“Leave me, Placelle Lamella,” Arlo said at last, “I should go and drink myself drunk while the commoners get their boots dirty for me.”
When he veered back towards the door into the Moon and Star, the Oathkeeper made to follow him at first, but he quickly gave her a firm glare and added, “Go burn your corpses so I can have some space. You can come find me when you’re done. I’ll let Abigail, the mistress, know if I go someplace else so you can find me.”
Placelle Lamella watched Arlo go into the bar with a great deal of trepidation. She was already deeply concerned for his suffering, but there was also a strange new bitter flavor in his misery that left her feeling a sense of dread. The Oathkeeper rose slightly out of the Waking Rest and opened up inside to follow him with her mind’s eye, feeling him through the wall as he drew further away from her, trying to suss out what this new, sharper sort of betrayal was he felt beneath the waves of stagnant shame and weak determination. Placelle Lamella stood still for a long time with her eyes getting wider and wider until she realized that she was completely alert. Out of the Waking Rest, her senses sharpened intensely. It had been a very long time since the heartleech had so openly drank in the world around her.
Arlo was there, the by-now familiar comfort taste, a little pink flame in her imagination that she seemed to always feel pulled towards. The barkeeper was there as well, as spiky yellow razor blades of avarice, lust, and hope wearing thin. Placelle Lamella tilted her head as she realized the woman was likely talking to Arlo at the present moment. She would’ve smiled for him if she weren’t so worried about him. There was a dull puddle in the corner of the room, blue and sad with ugly lumps of regret all thrown beneath a blanket of sleep. The houses above her contained some wives, some lovers, a distraught child in deep inexhaustible anguish. There was a man she could feel on the very furthest edge of her awareness experiencing some kind of lustful ecstasy, and she decided he must be pleasuring himself. It made a fine dessert of sorts that Placelle Lamella used as an excuse to close herself off. Her heart was pounding even as she sank back into the depths, her racing mind eagerly taking in the world with her heightened sense and the burst of amazing energy and strength she’d gotten from it all. She shoved it all down, forcing herself to turn away from the bar and walk back towards the chapel at the end of the street. The urge in the pit of her to just leave herself open was there, nagging, an ever-present funnel in the very core of her telling her that just one more indulgence would be no harm.
Placelle Lamella knew, not just from her upbringing but from hard life experience, that the urge was a liar. ‘Enough’ was not something that existed for people like her. The hunger could never truly be sated. The more she took in, the more she would need. The more she needed, the more she’d want. The urge would make her want to hurt people, to trick them into hurting each other. The urge would make her into the monster that Irina Rathbone saw when the Tribune looked her way.
She had long ago decided she would not be such a creature.
A limestone wall about fifteen paces high had been built around the chapel. The chapel itself was of limestone brick as well. It was a small building two stories tall with two one-story wings on either side of the main hall. One would be a small library containing many tomes from the Divine Orderhood given either as gifts by pilgrims or sent by the Order who fostered the priest in the first place. The other would be a home for the priest and a few monks to dwell in. A fairly common design as a starter chapel for new colonies, it was not likely more than three-hundred people could fit inside if the balcony seating had been built. Even though Lortar was said to boast nearly a thousand citizens, Placelle Lamella had a sneaking suspicion that there wasn’t really a crowding problem in the chapel on holy days.
She passed beneath the limestone arch and bowed to the green circle of stained glass above the door with her hands forming a crescent over her chest before approaching the tall red wooden double-doors and pulling one open. Shafts of golden-white sunlight slashed in through the tall gothic windows on either side of the octagonal pulpit at the bottom of an incline that used each row of the worn but still ornate wooden pews as a single step down. Looming over the center of the pulpit, stretching from floor all the way up to the bottom of an unlit wagonwheel chandelier was a stained glass representation of the Jade Queen. She was rendered as a dark green silhouette in the shape of a woman with a long neck, arms outstretched from a modest bust and narrow torso atop wide fertile hips. The swell of her thighs tapered down to a point and simply disappeared while a waterfall of prismatic hair flowed backwards from an upturned head in carefully-blown glass curls pouring like spiral rivulets, on either side of a face absent all features except for a pair of angled, stark-white eyes. Placelle Lamella flowed past the stairs on either side of the entrance that led to narrow balconies along the sides of the chamber and descended to the pulpit itself so she could kneel before her goddess. She formed her hands as though she were holding an invisible ball and closed her eyes to pray.
She prayed for Arlo first. She did not know why, but in the days since she had met him, she had prayed for him before anybody else. Placelle Lamella idly wasted a second of her prayer remembering how love tasted when other people felt it so she could repeat her frequent ritual of trying to make herself fall in love with Arlo. Satisfied to remain simply fascinated and obsessed, she quickly moved on and prayed for Irina next. The Tribune would need The Goddess to watch closely for what happened next. Finally, the Oathkeeper finished up her prayers by asking Her Most Divine Majesty to watch over her former chapelmaster and all other loyal subjects before repeating once more her oath to serve, guide, and protect every person who the Empire left behind in its endless growth across the Stone Unfurled and the Ten-Thousand Seas.
“May her kingdom surpass even her ageless eternity.” she finished before rising to her feet. There was a moment more that Placelle Lamella spent letting her droopy eyes pan around the room, indulging in the liminality of the great empty prayer hall. Normally, in such a moment, the Oathkeeper would molest her hammer the way Irina seemed to enjoy fondling her boarding axe. Considering she was likely about to use it, however, Placelle Lamella instead brushed the back of her left hand along the angle of the grip on her Oath.
The slab-sided handgun, having been forged from a case-hardened steel with ground nullstone in its alloy, was slightly warm to the touch as it still held a charge. It had been over a year since it had left its holster for anything but cleaning, ceremony, or demonstration. It had been a happy year, if a lonely one.
Placelle Lamella glided next out of the chapel and into the building’s western wing. On the other side of the eight-panel door with its brass hellebore ornament was the chapel’s library. At present, it was mostly a library for the shelves and cases. Chapelmaster Dobran, the local priest, had brought a fairly impressive collection with him for a starter hall. A newly-ordained Chapelmaster typically only had a single sea-chest of books to speak of, but Dobran had filled at least three bookcases on his own and managed to solicit four more in customary gifts and donations. These shelves were the ones near the entrance, arranged in a long reading table with multiple benches and a collection of tall lecterns with matching stools. Other shelves stood bare along the walls on all sides, those on the northernmost wall interspersed with tall windows that had empty cases beneath them. A semicircular second-level rounded the other three walls above, and it was plain to see from below that those shelves were empty as well.
Perhaps what enabled Dobran to start with such a hefty collection was his advanced years. He was clearly no freshly-minted priest with his bald pate and wispy white beard woven into a series of thin braids. The way he carelessly wore his muslin vestments beneath a heavy woolen cloak and a fur shawl to stay warm spoke volumes of how little he cared that they might be wrinkled when it came time to give a sermon, and perhaps most notably of all the fact that his rosary was made up with each bead not as simple green glass or even jade, but eighty-eight Holy Eyes on a golden wheat chain filled with flowing and shimmering liquid emerald light. One Eye alone was the mark of a worthy accomplishment, and here was an old man who had an entire rosary of them. They almost made the solid-gold crescent moon pendant look plain.
“I’ve returned, Blessed Brother.” Placelle Lamella said in a low, sweet tone, hoping she would not disturb the old man from his reading. “I hope you will not mind if we see to the dead soon. My Wayward is in dire need of guidance and the Madame Tribune is also planning a raid upon the seafort to vanquish the wicked men who have threatened the island. I wish to join in their punishment.”
Dobran actually sat in silence for a short while, finishing the section he was reading and bringing the book closed with a scarred and leathery hand before turning his misty blue eyes up to consider the Oathkeeper. Slowly, he made a crescent with one hand, then used the tip of his fingers to draw another in front of himself as he said with a worn and downtrodden tone, “Yes, I understand, Blessed Sister. I had hoped they may be convinced to release the island and surrender peacefully, but you and I both know that there is no coming back now that they have killed loyal subjects. Few would accept the Tribune’s firing squad without the chance to shoot back.”
Placelle Lamella gave a solemn nod. Even if it was not a matter of the law, it was certainly a matter of faith at this point.
“Will you help me up the side stairs?” Dobran asked, and Placelle Lamella instantly went to his side and cupped his elbow for a start to help him off the stool. The two of them shuffled, one out of extreme age and the other from her customary self-imposed lethargy. When they reached the western end of the library, there was a door between two empty shelves that led them out onto a landing at the bottom of stone steps going up to the ground level much quicker than the long staggered length of the main prayer hall.
At the top they were on soft grass in the side yard of the chapel, where a platform was built for speaking to outdoor crowds between two great hazelnut trees that both had yellow-painted wooden boards in the shapes of crescent moons hanging from their largest boughs by braided cord, drifting gently in what of the cold wind came over the limestone walls. The walls themselves on the opposite side from the chapel were tilting inwards to form awnings for people to stand beneath in the rain. Inside the awnings were sheltered frescoes in alcoves along the length, each one depicting a different saint performing a miracle from Corovokian history. Placelle Lamella could not spot her patron Saint Tetra, but she at least picked out some of her favorites. There was Saint Selene taming the Great Black Squid with her silk shawl and lifestone bangles. Saint Lister was in the next alcove, splitting Ideon the Pirate King down the middle longways with his long kriegsmesser sword. They passed Saint Sindifer, protecting faithful Guilders from heretical ones as a lone strip of green in a pitched gunfight on a city street between two bands of men in blue.
“I will warn you, sister,” Dobran said as they arrived at a covered wagon that had been left in the corner of the chapel yard, “I have only peeked inside it once and no doubt it has gotten worse since then. I am sad to say that without a monk to help me, I am too weak in flesh to lift even one of these poor souls.”
“Do not worry, brother,” rejoined the Oathkeeper as she mounted the tongue and balanced across it to lift the tarp. The stench was awful, but all she could see inside were dark shapes at first. Lifting the tarp a little more revealed no flies or maggots, oddly, but the corpses had been piled indelicately in a heap and arms were emerging at odd angles with feet and tilted necks. A bearded face stared up at Placelle Lamella from the depths with wide, milky eyes and an open mouth. A heavy dusting of buff-colored powder had been shaken across the cart before the tarp had been laid across it, seemingly arresting some of the rot, though the gory scent of putrefaction was still enough to make the eyes water and would likely have agitated the stomach of a person who actually ate food other than the occasional biscuit from her favorite person.
Placelle Lamella reached down to the exposed face and closed the eyes, then drew a sickle shape across the man’s temple before letting the tarp back down. Balancing backwards along the tongue with her arms out to her sides like wings, she now said, “Someone has spread some sort of yellow-white powder on the bodies, which I think has kept the bugs away. It did not completely stop the rot, sadly, but it may make things easier. I can easily carry two at a time.”
“Don’t strain yourself, sister,” warned Dobran with sincere concern painting his wrinkled face, “I could hardly lift two in my fitter days.”
With a somewhat bashful half-bow, the Oathkeeper simply explained, “I am no ordinary woman, sir. Do not worry about me. However, let’s do remove my cassock and the Holy Armor of Saint Tetra, first.”
“Of course!” Dobran shot back, amazed but also pleased, “We must care for the Holy Relics. Would you like me to bring you a spare smock? My monk Gister was not quite as tall as you, but he was somewhat wide of build.”
The Oathkeeper removed and carefully folded her cloak with a gentle smile before setting it on the ground and reaching for the straps on the side of the clamshell that was her cuirass. “I don’t think it will be necessary for right now. Just fetch the unguents and the firesteel. My tunic is so rough and worn that I do not think there’s much these corpses can do to worsen it.”
Placelle Lamella dropped the heavy metal plate into the grass and slipped off her leather gauntlets before plucking at the front of her sleeveless shirt to encourage some of the frigid Lortar air onto her midsection after it had spent all morning in the black-lacquered boiler. She briefly considered stripping down more to remove her shift from beneath so she might still have something to wear if her tunic were well and truly soiled, but decided against it in the end for fear that the elderly priest might return and suffer a heart attack at the sight of her bare chest.
