Oskalt (1)

One dim morning.

I found myself inside the council chamber once again, there to settle which paladin Drick would face in the paladin’s trial.

“Not that I know many of them to begin with.”

Only three of us were in the chamber: myself, Drick, and the branch head. It was hardly a gathering for trading opinions, and the whole business would be over the moment Drick settled on one paladin and gave the branch head word of it.

The talk between the two of them felt distant, as though it were reaching me underwater. For the past few days nothing at all had held my attention.

I turned my head toward the window. Through the running rainwater I could see a dreary sky. The rain drummed loud against the translucent pane.

What am I doing?

It had certainly begun as something I did for Eladin. I destroyed branch after branch of the Lucseon church, time passed, and before long a century had gone by. Sitting slumped on the ashes of the last one, I no longer knew anything at all.

What was I to do now?

If this revenge had truly been for Eladin’s sake, had I not run out of reasons to go on living?

Rather than accept that, I wandered on out of sheer inertia, chasing nothing but Lucseon’s traces. So long as the revenge went unfinished, I could keep from feeling the emptiness, the futility of it.

Eladin’s face flickered before me. I shut my eyes.

For a century I had turned my face from that fact with everything I had. What right had I now to call her to mind?

The rain at the window still had not let up. Somewhere inside the sound of it, Drick and the branch head’s talk was running on toward its close.

“…A foregone question, really. I’ll take Camilla Rosette.”

“Are you quite certain?”

Drick had named Camilla as his opponent for the trial. He had his reasons, several of them: that she was the paladin he was most used to facing, say, or that she already thought well of him. The largest, though, was surely that he wanted to land one blow on her.

After Drick and the branch head had finished, out in the cloister on the outer face of the central tower.

I stood there without moving, watching the drizzle run down off the eaves. The smell of wet earth seeped in through the gaps in my iron helm.

“What’s all this moping about?”

The voice belonged to Kalen. He was smiling warmly at me from the far side of the cloister.

“It’s nothing.”
“Nothing, is it.”

Kalen came up beside me and put a hand out past the eaves.

“It’s cold out. Aren’t you cold, sir knight?”

“…Worried I’ll freeze to death, are you?”

Drops of water struck Kalen’s arm and broke apart. He watched them quietly.

“It’s only that you don’t seem yourself.”

“…”

Had I been so far sunk in other thoughts that Kalen could catch it at a glance?

I shook my head lightly to throw off the damp.

“What makes you think so?”
“Because I was the same. The day my brother closed his eyes, I stared out at nothing for hours myself.”

Kalen’s brother.

He had been dragged off to the Slonhar-Darbar territorial war and come back short a leg. The wound had festered in the end and carried him off, had it not?

“Cruel, isn’t it.”

Just how cruel a thing is fate?

The territorial war was what had killed his brother, and at the head of it had stood none other than the Talios church. Living in fine comfort now alongside the enemy of his family, what could Kalen possibly be feeling as he stood here?

“…Kalen.”

“Yes, sir knight.”
“I’m the one who’s sorry.”

No. The cruel one is me.

The one who cut down Kalen’s comrades, the one who dragged him all the way here, had not been fate. It had been me.

Blaming fate is only a way of running from guilt.

“I didn’t bring it up to get an apology out of you.”

Kalen smiled ruefully and shook the rain lightly off his arm.

“A sense of loss isn’t what you feel when something disappears. It’s what you feel when the thing that’s gone finally becomes real to you.”

Was this thing I was feeling a sense of loss?

Having lost Eladin, and with even the revenge finished, was I only now feeling her absence as something real?

“Sir knight. Of late I’ve been feeling a very great sense of loss myself.”

Kalen turned his head. The two eyes fixed on me were stiller than I had ever seen them.

“And you don’t look to me like a man any different from that, sir knight.”

I quietly closed my eyes. I only stood there, feeling the cold inside the drizzle.

“Perhaps not.”

A strange thing. Because I could still feel the cold, I was no longer cold.

“You’ve been hard to catch sight of lately.”
“Busy doesn’t begin to cover it. These past few days I’ve not set foot in my lodgings once.”
“If the guard corps works you too hard, say so.”
“You’d have a word with them for me, sir knight?”
“I’d give them a proper scolding.”

Kalen laughed a little. A man this busy turning up at last could mean only one thing.

“The search has turned something up?”
“Yes. We got him by the scruff this morning.”

Pindel Morein.

The substance of him had only just come within our grasp.

The inner keep at the heart of the outer bailey, and the central tower at the heart of that.

And deep underground within even that.

The heresy interrogation chamber.

Kalen brought it out as we crossed the threshold.

“Things have gone a bit sideways.”
“Meaning?”
“The upshot of it is that Pindel isn’t here.”

By Kalen’s account, they had stoppered up the commercial quarter and the farming quarter and turned over every corner of the residential quarter, and not one man answering to Pindel had been found. So they had shifted the search onto eyewitness accounts, and turned up a coachman who had once taken on a passenger believed to be Pindel Morein.

“They detected holy power on the coachman, it seems. Another god’s, not Talios’s.”
“Lucseon’s, then.”

A high bishop able to work holy power is no common thing. Another god’s aura surfacing inside Talios’s own territory was by itself enough to make Pindel Morein’s hand in it a certainty.

“So they had to neutralize the holy power while they questioned him, and getting the information out of him ran a little late. I’ve not heard the full account of it myself yet.”

In the end it came to nearly a fortnight of wasted effort.

Kalen pushed the heavy iron door open. Through the sound of rusted hinges, a man’s voice forced its way out to us.

“…That’s all I know.”

“The holy power gives no further response either.”

The man who looked to be the coachman was bound to a chair, several priests ringed around him. Camilla had been putting one question after another to him; she caught sight of me and rose.

“You’ve come.”
“What have you learned?”
“A number of things.”

Kalen brought a chair over for me. I waved it away.

“Pindel Morein took the coachman in hand with holy power a fortnight ago, which is to say two days before the cordon went up. It appears to be a curse that kills the man if he lets anything slip about him.”

“The kind that deforms the body when the condition is broken?”
“Yes, that’s the one. Our own priests have seen to it for the moment.”

Deforming a part of the body.

The Lucseon church lot were fond of that method. The curse laid on the lord back in Brus would have been Pindel Morein’s work as well.

“A fortnight ago… Too late.”

“From the circumstances, we take it for the day the Apostle arrived in Pirberk.”

Pindel had left Brus a day ahead of us, and had reached Pirberk far faster. Unless the man had wings, it could not be done.

…Wings?

No. Perhaps it was not flatly impossible after all.

Could a beast not be tamed with Eladin’s holy power?

Give him an airborne beast instead of a four-legged one like Pormel, and outstripping us by a long way was not entirely out of the question. Something common enough to be put into the hands of the lord of Brus was hardly beyond Pindel’s reach.

There was never any tracking him to begin with.

If he truly goes about on the back of some giant bird, there is no way to catch him.

There was a strong chance the coachman himself was a trap of Pindel’s design.

…No.

I had the order of things wrong.

Had he dug no trap, we would never have known he had been in Pirberk at all.

A trap is for cutting off a tail already caught.

But had he dug no trap, there would have been no tail to catch in the first place, would there?

So in the end this is not a trap.

Which meant that for some reason he could no longer use whatever had carried him as far as Pirberk.

“The First Order, is it?”

Only one possibility came to me on the spot: the First Order, out killing every beast in the region it could lay hands on.

I have had help from a quarter I never counted on.

Had the Talios church’s Pirberk branch not been large enough to raise a First Order, and had that order not hunted down Pindel Morein’s familiar, finding the man would have become a distant prospect indeed.

“Well then. Where did he go?”
“To Oskalt, they say.”
“Oskalt?”

Oskalt was a fortress city of the Erbern domain, far enough off that on foot you would want to allow a month for the round trip.

“The coachman left Pirberk together with Pindel Morein a fortnight ago, reached Oskalt five days ago, and returned alone today, by his account.”
“It will be tight, going after him.”

In Oskalt there is no help to be had from the Talios church. If the man moved on once more, finding him would be twice as hard, so we had to follow as fast as we possibly could.

“Kalen and I leave Pirberk as of today. Barring some particular business, we won’t be coming back. I’ll leave Drick to you.”

Camilla would play the part of Drick’s teacher well enough. I regretted that I could not stand at his side and watch his paladin’s trial, but that too was a thing to be borne.

“…Take the First Order with you.”

“I can hardly go dragging a knight order into another domain out of nowhere, can I?”

The First Order would certainly be a great help, but with every hour pressing, commanding a large body of troops was no easy matter. Setting all else aside, arrive with a knight order in tow and Oskalt would take it for the outbreak of a war and stopper up its gates.

“I’ll have a farewell ceremony prepared at once.”
“Never mind. I’ve no taste for fuss.”

“But…”

“And there is nothing to be gained by losing more time.”

Camilla wore the face of a woman with a great deal she wanted to say. I was leaving without ever having given her the spar she had asked for a few days back, so I could hardly fail to understand how she felt.

“A shame about the spar.”
“Ah, it’s quite all right.”
“A fight with me is no pleasant business. It would only have spoiled your mood.”

Walter, after all, had blocked a swing I made with my own torn-off right arm, and complained for a good while afterward that it had turned his stomach.

“I’ll be going, then.”
“You’re leaving now?”

Camilla stopped me as I was turning away. I twisted my head around to look at her.

“I’d have to pack my things first, wouldn’t I.”

At those words, anticlimactic somehow, Camilla gave me a small smile.

“Understood. May your last holy war never come.”

The last holy war.

It means death.

The phrase was the Talios church’s civil way of saying do not come to a violent end, but to my ear it landed rather differently.

What does it mean to tell a deathless one not to die?

How is that any different from a curse to wander the battlefields forever?

I could not hide the laugh that leaked out of me.

“Camilla Rosette. May your last holy war never come.”