Oskalt (5)

My first impression of Oskalt came down to a few words.

Tension, and bleakness.

Brus had lived under the shadow of war too, but for all that it had been a city with life in it. Oskalt, by contrast, has no dream and no hope in it at all. There are no broad streets to run and play in, so there’s no sound of children laughing, and there’s no square to spread a stall in, so there’s no shouting of merchants either.

Kalen screwed up his face.

“Smells foul in here.”
“The sewers don’t seem to be properly kept.”

Filth of every kind, none of it from any source you could name, lay heaped in the streets and in the ditches beside them.

For a moment I pictured myself shoveling and hauling shit as part of whatever bothersome work I’d end up taking on in Oskalt. To set out tracking the Lucseon church and then land out of nowhere on shit-shoveling duty was something that could not be allowed 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 came into view. I hesitated, but there was no telling how long a better one would take to find, so in the end I pushed the shabby door open.

A stale reek of mold shoved its way in through the gaps in my helm.

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

“I need rooms.”
“How many.”

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

After a short hesitation, I answered.

“Make it two.”
“Six coppers a night. No breakfast, so don’t bother getting up early.”

The innkeeper counted the coins I handed him and buried his head again. He was like a sick horse in more ways than one.

Kalen and I made for the second floor. One of the steps was broken, and there was a little mishap where Kalen nearly took a fall, but in the end we reached our rooms safely.

“Ugh… that hurts. My shoulder just made a strange noise.”
“You should’ve just fallen, then. That’s what you get for straining to grab the railing.”

Kalen grumbled and disappeared into his room. He’d insisted on carrying all the baggage himself, so my hands were empty, and 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 more than a wooden frame. It was in a state that suited three coppers. Was the one small window some consolation, at least?

I took in the view through it. We were only on the second floor, but the inn stood on fairly high ground, so I could see the houses packed tight against one another. Oskalt’s layout was, in the most literal sense, a shambles. Not one broad street, and alleys spreading out like a spider’s web. If I lost my way here, Pindel Morein would stop being the problem, because I’d be the one gone missing.

Among the plain buildings, the only thing that drew the eye was the cathedral, more or less. A cathedral of a size to match Oskalt itself. Set beside the Talios church in Pirberk it would have been an embarrassment, but in truth it was the Talios church, squatting there inside the inner keep, that was the strange one. Putting up a separate cathedral like this was the ordinary way of things.

Having seen that much, I turned away from the window. I meant to walk the city myself rather than watch it from a distance.

“Kalen, I’m going to look around the city a bit more. 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 lay sprawled on the bed, whimpering.

“What’s the matter?”
“Damn staircase. My shoulder’s popped clean out of its socket.”

“…Did you try putting it back in?”

“That’s why I’m lying down. I put it back wrong. Pretty sure it’s broken now…”

“…”

My plan to pull Kalen’s shoulder out again and set it properly ran into his desperate, all-out opposition.

“Then what do you want me to do.”
“I’d rather you did nothing at all. Looks like you’ll have to go look around the city on your own for now.”

Saying he’d sort it out himself, Kalen showed me the door. It seemed I didn’t inspire much confidence.

I left the inn and, for a start, simply walked the streets wherever my feet took me. The filthy streets held no crowds, and the only sound was the twittering of the birds that showed themselves here and there.

There were three moves Pindel Morein could make in Oskalt.

Hide, run, or come to me.

If he hid, it would take a long time to find him, and if he ran, he’d 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 is hard to find because he’s one man, and finding a needle in a haystack is no easy business.

…Shall I look for the Lucseon church itself?

It’s worth asking why Pindel Morein came to Oskalt of all places. It isn’t especially close to Pirberk, and above all there’s the risk of the undead. So he had to come to Erbern even at the cost of some danger.

Why?

If Pindel Morein knows the man I was seventy years ago, he wouldn’t have counted on the undead to hold me off. That being so, the likeliest of the remaining reasons is, as you’d expect, that the Lucseon church is in Erbern. And if the Lucseon church is here, then finding it is plainly easier than finding Pindel. A group stands out more than one man does. That’s simply how it works.

Wasn’t the whole point of catching Pindel Morein to get onto Lucseon’s tail in the first place? It felt a little like the cart had got in front of the horse, but whichever road you take, all that matters is getting where you meant to go. By bringing us to Oskalt, Pindel Morein had already let some information slip.

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

For some reason, the cathedral was thronged with people. Everywhere else in Oskalt was deserted, yet the cathedral alone was full.

…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 seek out a god, and life in a fortress city can hardly be anything but hard. Even allowing for all that, though, the crowd filling the cathedral was unnatural.

A priest managing the people at the main door called out.

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

A blessing. A clergyman calling down power through a god’s authority. Not the sort of thing you’d expect at a cathedral this size.

Curious, I went over to the priest.

“You there. I have a question.”
“Yes, Brother. What can I do for you?”

The emblem on the priest’s habit told me the cathedral belonged to the Ecclesia church. The Ecclesia church isn’t merely recognized by the empire; it’s treated outright as the state religion, because the empire holds to the rather strange policy of granting freedom of religion while openly backing the Ecclesia church.

“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, and she was beaming as she spoke.

“So, you know which church we are, right?”
“Isn’t this 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 healing the weak, the sick and the suffering. So the bishop treats Oskalt’s sick free of charge. We call that the blessing.”
“The blessing? You hand out holy power to all these people, every last one of them?”
“And why not? 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 heed a god’s word are madmen, the lot of them. Doesn’t the Talios church fling its bodies onto spears and blades at a single word from Talios? Still, whatever state their minds are in, judged by results alone they’re doing good work. Setting aside whether it was 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. First I’d like to watch a blessing given. I’d be handing over my own body, wouldn’t I? 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 line 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.

Our footsteps echoed. Lamps set sparsely at even intervals lit the dingy interior. The crowd sent clinging looks my way, along with the intermittent sound of coughing. They might have been wondering what I was, or they might simply have been looking at the priest.

Before long the priest stopped at a wooden door with nothing special about it. She pushed it open, and beyond it was a room that looked just as ordinary. In truth, calling it a room was a misnomer, because the spot where the man who seemed to be the bishop stood wasn’t set apart 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 a chair, and the middle-aged man facing him, whose eyes had been closed, turned his head toward us.

“What is it, 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 smiled at us, and in that smile I felt something I couldn’t 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’s no seat to offer you. I hope you’ll forgive that.”

I found myself nodding. Not just his smile but his every word carried a force that couldn’t be disobeyed.

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

Then light gathered.

“…”

It was a miracle that fully deserved to be called a blessing. He hadn’t performed any rite worth noticing. The bishop simply closed his eyes, light gathered over the man’s whole body for the briefest moment, and then the man threw away his crutch and stood.

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

The nature of a holy power can’t be known just by looking at it. Direct contact might be another matter, as with Pormel and the pendant, but the holy power behind a wonder like this can’t be analyzed from what’s visible alone. So, if I could presume to judge by nothing but what the naked eye could see, Ecclesia was a holier god than any I knew.

“…This makes no sense.”

Though he’d just worked a miracle, the middle-aged bishop spoke evenly.

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

However great a god Ecclesia may be, this doesn’t add up. Using a god’s authority, even a little of it, plainly takes holy power to match. However vast the holy power Ecclesia sends down, it’s of no use if the bishop, the medium for that power, isn’t a vessel that can receive it. And to my knowledge, no vessel that could do this for the whole crowd outside existed anywhere in this world.

So, having watched this unfathomable sight, a miracle in the truest sense of the word, I could draw only one conclusion.

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