Oskalt (5)

Oskalt’s first impression came down to a few words.

Tension, and bleakness.

Brus had carried the tension of war too, and even so it had been a city with life in it. Oskalt had no dreams in it, and no hope at all. There was no broad street to run and play in, so no sound of children laughing; no square to lay out a stall, so no shouting of merchants.

Kalen screwed up his face.

“The smell here is foul.”
“The sewers don’t seem to be properly kept.”

Filth of every sort and no identifiable origin lay heaped in the streets and in the ditches beside them. For a moment I pictured myself scooping and hauling shit as part of the bothersome work I would be taking on in Oskalt. Tracking the Lucseon church only to end up, of all things, shoveling shit: that was not going to happen.

Oskalt was neither a large city nor, for that matter, a particularly small one. We walked as far as walking would take us, and a shabby old inn turned up. I hesitated, but there was no telling how long finding a better one would take, so in the end I pushed the shabby door open. A stale reek of mold shoved its way in through the gaps of my helm.

At the sound of the hinges the innkeeper, who had been lying down, lifted his head.

“I want to take rooms.”
“How many.”

I thought about it for a moment. If by any chance Pindel’s side got wind of us and sent men, we would be better off in one room than apart. Kalen’s safety, or respect for his privacy?

After a short hesitation I answered.

“Make it two.”
“Six coppers a night. There’s no breakfast, so don’t trouble yourself getting up early.”

The innkeeper counted the coins I handed over and buried his head again. He was a sick horse of a man, in more ways than one.

Kalen and I made for the inn’s second floor. One of the steps was broken and he nearly took a fall, but we reached our lodgings safely enough in the end.

“Ugh… that hurts. My shoulder just made a strange noise.”
“You should have let yourself fall, then. That’s what comes of lunging for the railing.”

Kalen grumbled and disappeared into his room. He had taken it upon himself to keep all the baggage, so my hands were empty. In the end I went into my own room as well.

A cramped room with no furniture of any kind save a bed that was barely a wooden frame.

The room was in a state that suited three coppers. Was the one small window some consolation, at least?

Through that window I took in the city from the inn’s second floor. It was no great height, but the inn itself stood on fairly high ground, and the houses packed tight one against another all came into view. Oskalt’s inner layout was, in the literal sense of the word, a shambles.

Not one broad street, and alleys spreading out like a spider’s web.

Lose my way down there and Pindel Morein would stop being the problem; I would be the one gone missing.

Among the plain buildings the one thing that drew the eye was the cathedral, more or less. A cathedral of a size to match Oskalt itself. Comparing it with the Talios church in Pirberk would have been an embarrassment, but the truth was that the Talios church, squatting in the inner keep, was the abnormal thing; putting up a separate cathedral like this one was the ordinary way of it.

I confirmed that much and turned away from the window. Rather than observe from a distance, I meant to walk the city myself.

“Kalen, I’m going to look into the city a little further. Will you come along?”

I knocked at his door, but no answer came. When I listened more closely I could hear groaning from inside. Kalen was sprawled on the bed, whimpering.

“What’s the matter?”
“That damned staircase. My shoulder’s come clean out of its socket.”

“…Did you try putting it back in?”

“That’s why I’m lying down. I put it back wrong. I rather think it’s broken…”

“…”

Kalen’s desperate, all-out opposition put a stop to my plan to pull the shoulder out again and set it properly.

“Then what do you want me to do.”
“I’d thank you to do nothing whatsoever. For now it seems you’ll have to go and look into the city on your own.”

Kalen said he would sort it out himself and showed me the door. Apparently I inspired no great confidence.

I left the inn and let my feet carry me where they would. There were no crowds in the filthy streets, and the only sound was the twittering of the birds that showed themselves here and there.

Pindel Morein had three moves open to him in Oskalt. Hide, run, or come to me.

If he hid, finding him would take a considerable time; if he ran, he would be hard to track. If he came to me, it meant Lucseon’s strength in Oskalt was enough to dispose of me.

A hidden Pindel Morein would be next to impossible to find, being only one man among many; finding a needle in a haystack is no easy business.

…Shall I look for the Lucseon church itself?

Why Pindel Morein came to Oskalt of all places bears thinking about. The city is not especially close to Pirberk, and above all it carries the risk of the undead. Which means he had to come to Erbern even at the cost of accepting a certain amount of danger.

Why?

On the assumption that Pindel Morein knows the man I was seventy years ago, he would not have been counting on the undead to hold me off. That being so, the likeliest of the remaining reasons is the obvious one. The Lucseon church is in Erbern.

And if it is here, finding it is plainly easier than finding Pindel. A group stands out more than an individual; that is simply how it works.

Wasn’t the whole reason for catching Pindel Morein to get onto Lucseon’s tail in the first place? It felt somehow as though I had the cart before the horse, but any road will do so long as it ends where I meant to go. By bringing us to Oskalt, Pindel Morein had already let a certain amount of information slip.

Just then a bell rang out somewhere and carried across the city. The source was almost directly above me. I came to myself with a start and realized I had walked all the way to Oskalt’s cathedral without noticing.

For some reason the cathedral was thronged. Every other corner of Oskalt stood deserted, and yet here the people were packed in.

…Have they smeared honey on the place?

A church does carry more weight in a fortress city than in an ordinary one. The harder life is, the more people go looking for a god, and life in a fortress city can hardly be anything but hard. Even allowing for all that, the crowd filling the cathedral was unnatural.

A priest marshaling the crowd at the cathedral’s main door called out.

“Form a line! Everyone here can receive the blessing, so don’t push!”

A blessing.

A clergyman bringing down power through a god’s authority. Not the sort of thing to come up at a cathedral this size.

Curious, I went over to the priest.

“You there. There’s something I’d like to ask.”
“Yes, Brother. What can I do for you?”

The emblem on the priest’s habit told me this cathedral belonged to the Ecclesia church. The empire does not merely recognize that church; it treats it outright as the state religion, holding to the rather strange policy of acknowledging freedom of religion while openly backing this one.

“What is all this, then?”
“Ah, you must not have been here long.”
“I arrived this morning.”

The priest was a woman with a kindly face. She beamed as she spoke.

“So then, you know which church we are, don’t you?”
“Aren’t you the Ecclesia church?”
“Yes, that’s right. The church that serves Ecclesia, the god of loving-kindness and restoration. As Ecclesia’s proxy, our church is charged with the mission of healing the weak who are sick and suffering. So the bishop treats Oskalt’s sick free of charge. We call that process the blessing.”
“The blessing? You mean holy power is dealt out to all these people, every one of them?”
“And why should it not be? Ecclesia spares no loving-kindness for anyone in need of healing.”

They save everyone for no reason but that their god told them to. Whatever the church, the ones who listen to a god’s word are madmen, the lot of them. Doesn’t the Talios church fling its own bodies onto spears and blades over a single word from Talios?

In the end, whatever state their minds are in, by results alone they are doing good work. Setting aside whether such a thing is even possible, curing every sick man was undeniably a good deed.

“Can I meet the bishop now?”
“Of course. The doors of the Ecclesia church are open to anyone. Are you ailing somewhere, by any chance?”
“No. Before that, I’d like to see a blessing given. It’s my own body I’d be handing over, isn’t it. It seemed best to see for myself.”
“Yes, as much as you like. Come with me.”

The priest led me into the cathedral without any particular suspicion. The queue that began outside ran on into the depths of the building, and every face in it was unmoved, as though the process were long familiar.

The priest’s footsteps and mine echoed. Lamps set sparsely at even intervals lit the dingy interior. The crowd sent clinging looks my way, and with them the intermittent sound of coughing; they might have been wondering what I was, or they might simply have been watching the priest.

Before long the priest came to a halt in front of a wooden door with nothing special about it. She pushed it open, and the room beyond looked just as ordinary.

Room was the wrong word for it, in truth. The spot where the one who appeared to be the bishop stood was not marked off from the rest of the space in any particular way.

The bishop, attending to the people in turn, had a face you might see anywhere. A man with a crutch sat in the chair before him, and the bishop, middle-aged, his eyes closed until now, turned his head toward us.

“Is something the matter, Priest Liria?”
“This brother here says he’d like to see how you give the blessing. It’s all right to show him, isn’t it?”

The bishop showed us a smile, and it gave me a feeling I could not name.

A smile of boundless grace and loving-kindness.

The bishop was a man who resembled the god he served.

“Of course. I’m sorry to say there is no seat to offer you — I hope you’ll forgive it.”

I found myself nodding. Not only his smile but his every word carried a force there was no disobeying.

The bishop closed his eyes again, and the man facing him shuddered. My own body twitched; the priest only stood watching with a soft smile.

Then a light gathered.

“…”

That was a miracle, and it fully deserved to be called a blessing. There had been no rite worth noticing. The bishop closed his eyes, light gathered over the seated man’s whole body for the briefest moment, and he threw away his crutch and stood.

“Aah… th-thank you. Thank you, Bishop…”

The nature of a holy power cannot be known by sight. Direct contact might be another matter, as with Pormel and the pendant, but the holy power behind such a wonder cannot be read off the visible phenomenon alone. So, presuming to judge by nothing but what the naked eye could see, Ecclesia was a holier god than anything I knew.

“…This makes no sense.”

For all that he had worked a miracle, the middle-aged bishop only spoke evenly.

“Priest Liria, please show in the next of them.”
“Yes, Bishop.”

However great a god Ecclesia may be, this does not add up. Using a god’s authority, even in a small amount, plainly requires holy power to match. Ecclesia may send down holy power without limit, but none of it is any use if the bishop, the medium of that power, is not a vessel able to receive it. And to my knowledge no vessel capable of doing this for the whole crowd outside existed anywhere in this world.

In the end, having watched that unfathomable sight, that miracle in the true sense of the word, I could draw only one conclusion.

The Ecclesia church is a body that ought not to exist.