Tenebroum

Chapter 60: A Public Spectacle

Though it was hard, Todd forced himself to watch as his superiors put the people of Fallravea to the question. It was an ugly business that went so slowly at first that they could only redeem a few souls each day as the cultists and blasphemers denied they were ever involved in any of the terrible activities that the Templars had uncovered. The butcher who had been trafficking in corpses denied knowing that the tunnel dug into the rear of his shop was even there, and the noble families whose manses were also connected to that dark network insisted that they had despised the Count and his toadies more than anyone.

“If my family was really as close to that disreputable swine as you say, then why weren’t I or my daughters at all of his unseemly little parties this summer?” the Granddame Rockmira demanded angrily after a series of less than courteous questions.

Unlike the butcher’s tale, it was a story that had initially made sense to Todd, though he would have never contradicted his seniors by saying that. Eventually, the priests forced her into the light of truth, kicking and screaming by using brutal techniques that made Todd wince. Ultimately, both confessed and gave the names of all other local luminaries that had helped them with their misdeeds. The former eventually signed a statement that he sold human meat to unsuspecting customers for reasons related to both profit and devilry. The latter admitted that the only reason her family wasn’t fornicating with all of the other nobles as they usually did the night of the massacre was because they had been forwarned by their dark Mistress, The Drowned woman.

No one called her Oroza anymore. That was the name of a river, not of a goddess of the underworld. In private, Brother Faerbar was conflicted, though, in public, he never wavered. He’d seen signs of the river’s corruption for years, but at the same time, he’d never known any of the healers that worshiped the river goddess to have anything but spotless souls, especially during the year of the plague. It was a conundrum that he wrestled with often, but according to him, even prayer couldn’t resolve it.

“How was it that so many good people could worship such an evil thing?” he asked them all at dinner one night, but no one had a good answer.

Fortunately, there were still good people in the city, and the weight of the witness statements that their neighbors buried them with was usually enough to force a blubbering confession before it was time to bring in the thumb screws or the hot irons. That all changed a week later when their reinforcements arrived from Siddrimar.

Though the Templars might be the best-known arm of the church militant, they were not the most feared. That distinction belonged to The Penetient Seekers of Truth, or the Inquisitors as everyone called them. A hush followed in their wake when their convoy entered the city, and after that, a muted anticipation about what would happen next hung over Fallravea like a cloud.

It would not take too long to answer that unasked question, though. The Inquisitors differed from their brethren in that they preferred to do all their questioning and the associated penance under Siddrim’s light, so they only waited long enough for a scaffold to be built in the city center before they began their bloody spectacle.

Fortunately, Todd was not expected to watch them work. Still, he caught glimpses often enough while he was out and about performing other tasks for his Master as they carried out their ever-expanding carnival of mortification. For the first week, there were almost no spectators, but gradually that changed for reasons Todd didn’t really understand. He knew that people often gathered to watch hangings, but torture? That seemed too far, even if the crowd’s true interest was in justice and salvation.

Still, day by day, the crowds grew, taking some kind of comfort from the public nature of the proceedings. After that, though, things got weird. Brother Garrand had said that they would, but Todd had not fully believed him. On the ninth day of the Inquisition’s attempt to turn over every last stone of sin, people began to come forward from the crowd and confess without anyone laying a finger on them. Sometimes these crimes were significant, and other times they were only private shames, but soon enough, the Inquisitor’s cages were overflowing with those in need of salvation.

Most of those that confessed spontaneously weren’t executed, which was more than he could say about those that had been dragged kicking and screaming into Siddrim’s light thanks to a tip from their neighbors or someone that had already spent their time on that bloody stage. Todd thanked the divine for that. More than enough intersections were decorated with the flayed body of the guilty already. If his brothers started to kill everyone who had confessed to blasphemy or adultery, then eventually, there would be nowhere left to put them all.

It was a dismal time. At first, he’d been excited to strike such a blow against evil, but now he couldn’t wait to be free of this place. It was one thing to strike down the animate dead but quite another to wake up each morning to the smell of corpses and the sound of screaming. Even those things were only slightly better than acting as a nursemaid to priest-candidate Verdinen while he recovered. While that task had been easy enough while the man was unconscious, he’d become a petulant nightmare once he’d awoke to find that he was missing his right arm, and since Todd was one of the few squires that knew his letters, he was frequently forced to sit with the bitter man for hours, scribbling reports. No mark he ever made on the page was good enough, of course, but all of them were better than what Brother Verdinen was capable of with his left hand.

Thirty-eight days later, The Penetiant Seekers of Truth pronounced the city clean of all of its taint. To celebrate, they held a midnight mass in the center of the city, burning every last vestige of The Drowned Woman that they could find. Every holy symbol and tapestry in the city that was left with a river theme was thrown on the pier that night.

“So does this mean we finally get to go back to Siddramar now, sir?” Todd asked his Master the next morning after they finished their sunrise sparing session.

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “Now that the city no longer needs our swords, we travel south to Blackwater to see if the rot has spread downriver.”

“Blackwater?” Toad asked, confused. “But the taint on the river has to come from the north, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t we be following it to its source to finally purify it once and for all?”

That answer made the older man laugh louder than he should have. “You would think, wouldn’t you, but that isn’t how they see the world. To them, the water is polluted by the souls of the people that worship it when they should be worshiping the light.”

“But what if it’s the other way around?” Todd asked. “What, it’s something in the water that poisons the hearts of those who drink it?”

“Who can say?” Brother Faerbar asked philosophically. “You and I - the church relies on our strong sword arms. It would be hubris not to trust in the learned men who use their minds to do the same. The learned priests say the devil is in the heart, but my nose tells me that there is something rotten in the Wodenspines, and it will have to be addressed eventually, but if it happens after we gauge the darkness of Blackwater, it makes no difference to me.”

Todd nodded, understanding why his Master was correct, even though he knew that neither of them agreed with those morally upright words deep down.

After that moment of silence, Brother Faerbar continued. “They say that the whole area around that little port town has an evil reputation. Even the song we heard in the inn on the way here was about dead rising from the bog to protect its ill-gotten treasure.”

“I didn’t see a swamp when we traveled through,” Todd retorted after searching his memories for a moment.

“No,” his Master agreed. “You wouldn’t have. The late Lord of the region paid a king’s ransom to the mages at the Magica Collegium in Abenend to use their earth magic to dig him a canal to Garvin’s… I mean Garmoore’s Gift.”

Brother Faerbar sat down so that Todd could unlace his Gambeson. Last week they’d started renaming everything in the region that had been named for the late Lord’sLord’s family in an attempt to erase his blasphemies. Everything that had once been named for Leo, Kelvun, or Garvin was now named after an appropriate saint of Siddrim or another lesser god, though it was hard to remember so many recent changes.

There had even been a petition sent to the king to rename the whole county to something more appropriate in light of everything that had happened. The priesthood lacked the power to make those changes unilaterally; Todd struggled with a particularly stubborn knot as he recalled just how frustrated the Priest Cawleon had been frustrated by that fact. As temporary governor of the whole area, he chafed at any limit imposed on Siddrim’s vision.

In the end, the only thing that would be left to bear any of those forbidden names was little Leo Garvin the Fifth. Though only an infant and the spawn of a heretic, he would be well-taken care of for some time to come. This was because, through his guardianship, the church could lay claim to the whole area, at least until he came of age.

“It’s my understanding that late Count wasn’t specifically trying to rid himself of the swamp so much as build a path free from goblins so he could extract the riches of the earth,” Brother Faerbar continued, interrupting Todd’s wandering mind and pulling him back into the conversation.

“But if the swamp was evil, and he was evil, then why would he seek to drain it?” Todd asked, meeting the other man’s eye. “I just… Something about all this doesn’t seem to make sense, don’t you think?”

That protest brought the patient smile back to his Master’s face as it always seemed to when he’d said something that was unintentionally smart or stupid. “The only people in the world that everything makes sense to are the ones that are truly crazy. We should just be grateful that in the midst of all his other debaucheries, the late Count of Greshen cleaned up one mess and replaced it with verdant farmland. That’s one less place that evil can hide from our Lord’sLord’s light. Right?”

“Thank the light for that,” Todd mumbled, unconvinced.

That would be the last time they would spar in that benighted city because the following day would be spent packing and provisioning, and then why were back underway, traveling south on the main road, which was uncomfortably close to the river as it parallelled the Oroza south and west to their destination.

Even though it was only four nights by horse, Todd slept fitfully. For weeks he’d been forced to battle that awful tentacled abomination over and over in his sleep, but this was something new. Now in his dreams, he imagined something lurking just beneath those oily waters. It waited there each night, and though it never broke the surface, he was certain that if it had, it would have crushed the life out of all of them without issue. Even Brother Faerbar was no match for that much darkness lurking in those still nighttime waters.