Working God's Mischief

37. The Mother Sea: Pilgrims

Brother Candle argued that he had lived a long, productive life. He had had a positive impact on the world. He had done his share. It was time the world let him go home to the Light. The Good God had prepared him a place.

The Widow and the Vindicated did not agree.

Never had he been so sick for so long.

Kedle, her henchmen, and the Terliagan seamen all promised that he would get over it.

They lied. He was still at the rail, still limp, when Darter made port at al-Stikla, on the heel of Firaldia, which was as far east as Terliagans were willing to travel.

There were pirates in the eastern Mother Sea. Also, the Dateonese and Aparionese were lethally jealous of their monopolies. They even fought one another, constantly.

There was a long delay at al-Stikla. Passage east, for groups, was scarce and dear. Countless pious pilgrims and bloodthirsty adventurers wanted to get to the Holy Lands in time to participate in the great event of the age.

At shared prayers Kedle murmured, “You would think that supernatural forces were at work.”

The Perfect harrumphed. Solid ground had yet to restore his good temper. “Of course they are! Weren’t you paying attention?”

Lady Hope had visited Darter several times.

Kedle blushed. The Perfect noticed and was startled. Was there something physical between Hope and the Widow?

Oddities suddenly lined up and made sense, then, though he had trouble getting his mind around the situation. That was plausible only on an intellectual plane. “It doesn’t matter.”

“You are too liberal, Master.” Kedle paused. “It’s … I can’t help myself.”

“Let’s not talk about it.” After his own pause, “She has that effect on me and I’m older than stone, nor ever owned strong appetites.” Kedle’s had been strong from the first. “Just ask the blessing of the Light.”

Hope was not the only supernatural visitor. The monster bird with the damaged wing sometimes circled while Darter was at sea. Brother Candle thought the ship was being shadowed by something in the water, too. He was too miserable to care much but did mention it to the crew, whereupon the Terliagans grew excited.

There was no such beast native to the Mother Sea.

Kedle observed, “We must be caught inside a bigger story than the one we can see.”

Brother Candle agreed. He had no doubts about that.

He did wish that the Good God was the sort who stepped in on behalf of his followers.

Brother Candle did not like being afraid. Being an object of interest to the Night-in particular to those parts of the Night that dogma proclaimed to be unreal-was scary in the extreme.

* * *

Kedle found a fat Dateonese transport, purpose-built to carry pilgrims, that had room for the Vindicated. Such vessels reaped grand profits by shifting the pious and ambitious.

They did not want to accept the Widow. She was bully enough to get her way. The holy man with the tattoos was terrifying, too. His tattoos looked like they could come to life.

The ship’s master finally took them aboard, though, because the approaches to the Holy Lands had become so dangerous. Consiglieri Reversi Ono must pass along shores where she was likely to encounter pirates, privateers, or warships from Lucidia or Dreanger. Even ships from Aparion and the Eastern Empire could be troublesome.

* * *

Brother Candle could not believe it. The passage from al-Stikla east was worse than the first leg. Consiglieri Reversi Ono left shallow coastal waters for a direct run across those deeps where the big waves stalked. Two days out he begged to be put to death.

Cruel people all, the Vindicated and crew only mocked his misery.

* * *

Pirates caught Consiglieri off the south coast of the Antal, just days from the Holy Lands. A swarm of small ships closed in, under the illusion that the Dateonese could be captured easily. Brother Candle was too sick to wonder. Though the seas were minimal he was preoccupied with his misery.

The pirates soon learned that they had made a lethally bad choice.

They were not accustomed to having to do much real fighting. Kedle and the Vindicated slaughtered them like the amateurs they were.

A pirate no older than fourteen came at the Perfect. Brother Candle thought his death was upon him. He was too sick … But his serpents were not. Two came out. The boy went down.

People saw it happen. The fighting slackened. A man who might have been the boy’s father wailed, charged, and died of lightning snakebite.

Awed, the pirates began a loud debate.

Then someone aboard one of the pirate craft howled an alarm.

A war galley was headed for the tangle. Its sails were Aparionese. More so even than the Dateonese the Aparionese were merciless toward pirates. They hunted pirates down. They destroyed whole villages suspected of harboring pirates.

There was a particularly dire air about this monster galley.

Brother Candle could only observe, later, that it was a strange old world, and cruel.

The galley broke unfamiliar colors. For the pirates escape was improbable already. That warship lay in the hands of the Night, no doubt about that. Kedle and Brother Candle smelled a smell like Lady Hope, only older, heavier, and darker. Hints of shadow swarmed around the vessel. Another ship, in the distance, noted earlier but paid little heed, began to show flashes of light and puffs of smoke. Thumps came rolling across the water. The vessel caught fire.

Shadows danced round the vessels trying to run from Consiglieri. They brought loud bangs. “Firepowder,” Kedle reported. “Top grade and delivered by sorcery. We have found ourselves somebody really, really bad, old man.”

“Somebody with a grudge against pirates, perhaps?”

The galley loomed massive. Her falcons grumbled, hurling shot that ripped away pirate sails, rigging, even a mast. The attack continued till the pirate fleet had been reduced to wreckage, corpses, and derelicts.

The Aparionese captain came alongside Consiglieri, called a taunting reminder that Dateon owed Aparion a favor.

Brother Candle recognized several of the men at the other ship’s rail as a bloody Kedle loudly suggested that the Aparionese kiss her sweet arse. Their interference had been neither necessary nor requested.

The Perfect forgot his stomach. “Girl. Girl child. Dear girl. Kedle. Shut up. You’re insulting the Commander of the Righteous himself.”

That got through, accentuated by the odor of the Night. “You’re kidding.”

“No. Those standards belong to the Righteous and the Grand Duchy of Eathered and Arnmigal. The Commander is fourth from the left, grinning like he hears every word I’m saying. I saw him closer than this when he was Captain-General.”

“What the hell is he doing out here?” She waved, making a conciliatory gesture that might be taken for belated gratitude. Then, “Crap. You are telling it straight.” A boy had joined those men. He had been at Mestlé. He had negotiated with Hope.

The Perfect said, “I expect he’s headed for the Holy Lands. The Enterprise is his show.”

Kedle growled. “Where is Hope when I need her?” And was startled. The Instrumentality joined the men at the rail yonder. She smiled and tossed an intimate wink.

The galley began to pull away, moving swiftly under oars.

* * *

Hope visited that night. She was low-key, preferring to attract no attention. She crowded into the tiny cabin with Kedle and Brother Candle. The space was too hot and too intimate for the Perfect. She said, “You had a serious encounter today, loves,” with scarcely a hint of accent. “You caught the eye of the Commander of the Righteous. He will be watching.”

Kedle shrugged, indifferent. Brother Candle, though, caught the resonance of facts unstated beneath Hope’s statement. “Meaning?”

“He remembered you, Uncle. Kedle, he worked out who you are even before his son told him. He explained why you’re here. He doesn’t know who Kedle Richeut is but he certainly knows what she is.”

Kedle admitted, “I’m confused.”

“Understand this, beloved. My whole family is with him, supporting him. They could be here now, in a shadow or in the flame in the lamp, and even I wouldn’t know. So from now on, wherever you go and whatever you do, you may be watched by someone more powerful than me. You don’t want to disappoint them.”

Obliquely, Brother Candle observed, “You seem more substantial, somehow.” And, therefore, a greater danger to his soul-though she no longer taunted his worldly side.

The Instrumentality hugged herself, grinned, said, “I made it all the way to the Well of Peace. I’m strong again. I’m young and beautiful. And I talk too much.”

She was, for a moment, very much like a stunningly bright and beautiful, mischievous fifteen-year-old. But how was that unlike what she had been that first night in Antieux? Brother Candle could not define it but the difference was there. Perhaps it was a lessened malicious cynicism.

“Oh, my!” For an instant he had pictured her as she had been that night, in alluring mode, but now fully armed with divine power.

Tinkling laughter. “Dear Brother, I love thee too well to destroy thee that way. I have warned ye both. It’s time for me to go.” She eyed Kedle briefly, yearning plain. A sigh and a shiver, then she just shriveled into a wisp and was gone.

Brother Candle stared, silent. The last he had seen was a conspiratorial wink. Kedle said, “I’m going to sleep, now.” Restlessly, no doubt.

The Perfect went up on deck and contemplated the myriad stars. The sky was cloudless, the air crystalline, the darkness complete. The starscape was astounding. He might fall into it if he did not keep his grip on the rail. In just minutes he counted eleven shooting stars.

Suddenly, like taking a body blow, he realized that he had not been seasick since that boy’s father tried to kill him.

Thought conjured the demon misery.

He groaned and leaned over the rail.

A dozen porpoises paced Consiglieri, trailing bioluminescent wakes. A large darkness lazed along beneath them. The porpoises were not troubled.

* * *

There was an encounter with a Lucidian war galley as Consiglieri neared Shartelle. The galley came on aggressively, but at six hundred yards sheered off and fled away as though her commander was convinced that he had come within a gnat’s whisker of some diabolic Unbeliever ambush.

“What was that?” Kedle wondered.

Brother Candle was too miserable to care. He was obsessed with counting the hours till the torment ended. Forever. Never again would he board a ship. He would die first.

He told the Episcopal captain that, should he have spent his life in error as a Seeker and the Brothen Episcopals had it right, he was bound for heaven anyway. He had done his time in Purgatory.

The Dateonese crew found him endlessly amusing.

* * *

The Connec was hot. The Holy Lands were hotter. Back home the cool of the sea rolled in over the land come evening, making the nights tolerable. At Triamolin the heat of the land rolled out to broil the sea.

Even Kedle was awed. “And it isn’t yet fully summer.”

There had been ample warning. Connectens of the noble and knightly classes had made pilgrimages to Vantrad and Chaldar before. Some had tarried for years, helping thwart the villainies of those emissaries of darkness, the Pramans. Many of those veterans were willing to share their experiences endlessly.

They had declared that no one ever accepted the truth till they met it head-on for themselves.

Triamolin offered another lesson. The Widow and the Vindicated would not be celebrated in the Holy Lands. They were almost unknown. Those who had heard of them were not impressed. There were hard men everywhere in the Holy Lands. The hard men of Triamolin were of Arnhander extraction, in the main. They had no love for the bandits and rebels who had undone the sainted Anne of Menand. Anne’s unwavering favor had sustained their crusader state for a decade.

Brother Candle suspected that disembarking at Kagure or Grove would have been wiser. Those counties had been established by fighters from the Connec.

Kedle told him, “I may have outwitted myself again.”

“Again?”

“Again. I do it all the time. I’m just clever about covering it up. Like a cat. I don’t let the rest of you know. Come. Let’s find a Brotherhood hospice.”

They learned that there were three of those, two of which had opened in the past two months. All three were stuffed with armed pilgrims who had arrived with no plans beyond reaching the Holy Lands. None of the three had room to squeeze the Vindicated in, nor could they handle the animals the Vindicated had brought. A soldier older than Brother Candle suggested that they camp in the countryside. The road east led to pastureland eight miles out. Others were camped there already but the water and grazing remained adequate and the locals were not too predatory when marketing victuals. They would be wise to post sentries, though.

“Needs must needs must,” Kedle grumbled. She did not like that one miserable choice. Eight miles. Animals took longer to get their land legs than did people. Even that brief journey could decimate those that had survived the passage.

It would take a month for the Vindicated to become an effective fighting force again.

* * *

The campsite was not ideal. The best ground was occupied already. Kedle was not prepared to muscle someone and start a feud. She had come to the Holy Lands amply supplied with enemies already.

Her two tagalong gifts from Socia began hauling water immediately, leaving their worshipped mistress, whose wounds still hampered her, to try setting up her tent by herself. Water would remain a constant problem because so much would have to be carried so far.

She fought the canvas and tent poles with help from no one but the old cripple from the siege of Arngrere, known as Grandfather Arcot. She had a bad leg herself. Grandfather Arcot had problems with his arm, facial scars, and lacked three fingers on his right hand. The two of them were not well made for handling common camp chores.

Someone asked, “Could you use some help, then?” in heavily accented Connecten.

Kedle started to snap something in character for Kedle Richeut, nasty or sarcastic or both, but Lady Hope came to mind. Not quite sure why, she held her tongue.

The speaker was the commander of a battalion camped close by. He had watched the Vindicated arrive. It looked like he knew who she was. She thought she ought to know him, too, though she was sure their paths had not crossed before. The feeling waxed as she took his measure.

Grandfather Arcot chirped, “Little help here, please?”

The visitor stepped in as Kedle responded. He got hold of an obstreperous tent pole. “I have three hundred bored soldiers just sitting around. They’re gonna start getting into mischief if I don’t give them something to do.”

Oddly, he seemed disinterested in her as a woman but intrigued by Kedle Richeut, the Widow.

She ignored that, listened to what he said.

In her camps there was always work enough to exhaust everyone by the end of the day. To the Widow all the world was enemy territory. She insisted that the Vindicated take that to be true wherever they were. They had been warned already that trouble might be coming here.

“Why not? I’ll use whatever help I can get so long as the helpers don’t have sticky fingers.”

The visitor put on a dramatic show of being appalled. “Madam! Please! You are speaking to the chief law officer of the Mother City!”

Grandfather Arcot declared, “Not a thunderclap of reassurance to a Connecten, fella.” He lost control of the canvas he was wrangling. His eyes had gone hard.

The visitor considered Arcot’s face, hand, and arm. “Unhappy encounter with the minions of law and order?”

Kedle said, “With minions of Brothe. At Antieux.”

“Ah. Of course. Some of us can’t put the bad times behind us.”

Still wrestling canvas and poles, Kedle demanded, “Who the hell are you?”

He got no chance to reply. A small man had appeared. “Word just came in, Boss. He’s unshipping at Shartelle.”

“Hey! Bo! I really hoped he’d give it a skip. Guess he couldn’t ignore the challenge of cracking the tough nut first.”

“Just Plain Joe will be there. I’m tempted to go see him.”

“Not smart in this country. You don’t go anywhere on your own. You’re a westerner, you’re prey.” He faced Kedle. “Some crusaders are worse than most Pramans. I’m told.”

The smaller man bobbed his head nervously. “Rogert du Tancret.”

“And the Queen.”

Kedle eyed the smaller man. “I’ve seen you before.”

“I doubt that, ma’am.” His nerves worsened, though. He was lying.

She sniffed out the cleverest lies easily, these days. This man was, suddenly, desperate to be away from her.

The other interposed himself smoothly. “I would be Colonel Ghort,” he said, while the little man slipped away, studying his surroundings with ferocious care.

“All right. I remember who he is. Or was, maybe.” The little fellow had been a Brothen spy in Antieux, pretending to be a Seeker from Firaldia. He had been bold enough to engage in a doctrinal debate with Brother Candle before vanishing so completely that he might never have existed.

“He’s a good man.”

She shook her head, unsure that she had her facts right, then focused on Ghort. Pinkus Ghort. Sometimes Colonel Ghort. Lately, Captain-General of the Patriarchal armies Ghort. “I appreciate the offer of assistance. Being Khaurenese I would have no trouble accepting. The Good God knows we could use a hand. But these are the Vindicated, mostly from Antieux. Chances are they would consider you a gift from God.”

“Oh, sigh. I had nothing to do with the Antieux massacre.”

“You’re older than I am, and more experienced. You have to know that you being guilty, or not guilty, means about as much to them as it did to Bronte Doneto, whatever hat he wore whenever.”

Ghort managed a grin. “You’re probably right. It’s an awful old world, chock full of human beings, and human beings are such unreasonable, irrational beasts. Worse than the gods themselves. All right. I tried to forge some solidarity. Now I’ll go somewhere where I won’t be so much of an object of temptation.”

Kedle thought she felt the snicker of an invisible, amused entity. Hope? There must be news.

Ghort said, “Come visit me. My guys don’t hold any grudges.”

More amusement.

Kedle watched the man amble off. “What the hell was that?”

“You vamp.” Grandfather Arcot wore a big, scar-distorted grin. “Let’s talk about it after we’re done here.” He was making no headway with the tent.

“Yeah. All right. I’m coming. It’s just … That was so damned odd. I can’t figure what he wanted.”

The very air whispered, Perhaps he noted that you are a woman and recalled that he is a man. The same air slithered under the edges of the tent and lifted it up.

“There we go!” Grandfather Arcot declared. “That’s what I wanted to see. So. You’re curious, go on and visit him. You lads! Lend a hand, you don’t want to sleep in the rain.”

The Arnhander boys from Arngrere put their buckets aside.

The Widow continued to stare after the Captain-General. Hope continued to envelop her in silent amusement. Pinkus Ghort was still officially Captain-General, was he not?

What was his game?

What, for that matter, was he doing in the Holy Lands?

Maybe she would go visit, just to unravel that mystery.

* * *

Brother Candle wakened from the deepest, most satisfying, most refreshing sleep he had enjoyed since leaving Antieux. Lady Hope, faintly radiant, was shaking him. She had been in his dreams … and was here now in actuality …

She grinned wickedly. “What a wicked old devil you are, thinking like that! Too bad. We don’t have time. The enemy approaches.”

Groggily, he stumbled to Kedle’s tent. A dozen Vindicated had crowded in already, few more alert than he was. None paid the Instrumentality any heed.

Kedle was not sleepy. She was excited. Flushed. Breathing fast. “We’re all here, now. These are the facts. Pramans have been gathering in the hills to the east. They’re mostly regional, modestly armed, but led by professionals from Lucidia. They don’t know us. They just see a chance to grab some plunder.”

Brother Candle asked, “What about the others camped around here?”

Kedle did not answer the question he thought he had asked. “I sent the boys … They’re on their own. We’ll get hit first, anyhow. We’re closest to the hills.”

This must be what that old man at the hospice had meant when he said they should post sentries. Local opportunists-not necessarily Praman-considered pilgrims a resource best exploited while still muddled from travel.

“These raiders have done this before. They have the impudence to sell the captured arms in Kagure or Grove.” Ominously, “Healthy captives get sold to slavers and sent east. The rest…”

She did not have to explain.

“We have been warned.” She did not explain that, either. The Vindicated no longer asked. “We have a few hours to prepare. Let’s make a statement they’ll hear from one end of the Holy Lands to the other. These dogmatic snakes need to know that the Vindicated have come.”

Brother Candle shivered at her intensity.

“I want toddlers in Shamramdi, Begshtar, Mezket, Souied ed Dreida, even Jezdad, to wake up screaming at night because they think the Vindicated are coming. I want Indala himself pissing down his leg.”

Hope chided, “That’s a bit of an overreach, darling.”

The men chuckled.

“I want it. I don’t expect to get it. We’ll start by making the camp look unprepared. Pickets should be drowsing. We’ll offer an obvious, safe path to the command tent, where they can lop the head off the dragon before it knows that it’s in trouble.”

The boys from Arngrere oozed into the tent. The bolder of the two gave a nod and thumbs-up despite all the eyes upon him.