At Faith's End

by Chris Galford

  True enough, there were scant few of theirs among the ranks. Who could trust a faith of freedom?

  “Why such fire?” the Zuti asked. “Dey all just spirit.”

  “Spirit?”

  “Spirit. How you say—piece of world. Of people. Of…more spirit. All stem from Uhnashanti. Holy Zutam tell it true. No spirit greater than other.”

  “But that’s faith,” Roswitte said. Mysterious. Pointless. All-consuming. Faith—the path to truth without the travails of reason. “When you believe strong enough in a thing, you can’t allow no rival. Muddles the water too much. To say: you’re just as right as I while believing something elsewise, makes for too many questions.”

  Vardick grunted. “Mother Church is as much a foundation as any.”

  “Aye. And for it to grow and to control the shape, your builders got to be of one mind.”

  “Law’s growth, self’s demise.” Alviss said softly.

  “More those pillars a-tumble, more uppity those selves get, yeah.” She whistled, even, feeling a little looser with herself than she had in months. Conversations still made her uneasy. “Look’it these,” she offered, hooking a thumb to the crowd. “Your lead dogs start to bark at one another and it’s like the whole pack’s gone rabid.”

  “Order’s vital. Think what these idiots might do if lords and faith weren’t there to tell them ‘stay.’” Vardick’s laugh was a coarse, barking thing. Several of the crowd turned nervously at its sound.

  The Orthodox voice rose to a fevered pitch. Red lines streaked the bearded old face as the man waved his arms to the sound. Death awaited the non-believer. In soul as well as body. Farre was naught but Mordazz—the Devil King—made flesh, in the priest’s eyes. His servants—no better than the heathen Zuti that would sweep them beneath the sands of time.

  As Roswitte watched, she slowly realized that no one defended these men. Farren or Orthodox. As they stoked the flames of hate, and the hate broiled in the eyes of the listening masses, the only thing that protected the individuals was the balance of that mass—one mass against the other. It was bravery Roswitte could admire—or arrogance she could not.

  There was no mirth in the Zuti’s own voice as he denounced the lot. “This why you fight—you weak. All one—is joke. One be all, you hope. Stupid. Holy Zutam let man be man. Own man. So when man fight, he know he fight for self, and in fight, for Zutam too. This fire—it burn only you.”

  The Brickheart bristled at the words. “Strong piece from thems what seek to gobble up the world, mudman. Keep ‘em to yourself.”

  “It’s all nonsense,” Alviss added, silencing the lot. “What matters who says it?”

  Did it matter? Roswitte had never been devout, but she knew what she believed. She looked at Alviss, wondering of the lines that moved beneath the scars. What do you believe? For her, it was the Orthodox path. Assal was Assal. Man was man. One lived their lives, walked the circle, moved on. Done—dead and gone.

  Yet death stirred questions. Fallit’s death. Kasimir’s. If all was so simple, why was there no simple point or course to agony? Why this one, not that one?

  “Like bastard,” the Zuti concluded, turning away. “What matter?”

  Careful, she wanted to say. But Roswitte would never defend Tessel. He was a usurper, nothing more. He may have used his silver tongue to snare the young lord Rurik, but it wasn’t as though that was difficult. Feed a boy love, coddle the dog in him with respect, and slap a sword in the man’s hand, and his will is for the taking. Lost and lonely souls were merely easier to win.

  A frown creased her face as she thought of him and Essa. “Perhaps the children have the right of it,” Vardick said at the same moment. All three of them regarded the master-at-arms with the same skeptical stare. He remained trained on the speaker, however—a Farren again. “They’re idiots, but they know: what’s it matter? This is all that matters.” He ground his foot against the dirt for emphasis.

  The Zuti’s eyes rolled his head away. Alviss laughed. “True. Blood and earth. That is the whole.”

  “Blood and earth,” Vardick grunted. “And a good piss besides.”

  Faith and fire or blood and earth—Roswitte couldn’t say which struck her worse. She kept her silence as the old men reminisced, but her mind secretly raced. The world was screwed up enough on its own without considering the otherworldly, true—and the children? Hardly an example to aspire to. They put the beyond behind them, and took the brunt of the blood instead.

  They dwelt on one another. Sand shifted beneath their feet and they hated just as quick. None would tell Roswitte why—not that it was any of her business. Truth be told, she knew not why she was so concerned for Essa, in particular. The girl was Pescha’s spawn—as far as she should be concerned, the girl and the rest of her brood could burn in the abyss.

  But there was something there. Something more. Perhaps she saw a bit of herself in the girl, though in truth, the two of them were nothing alike. That beauty of a thing—the only woes Essa had ever suffered were those brought on by other people. A fortunate whelp.

  Of the pair, should not her heart go out to Rurik? Her servant’s loyalty? True, she used him often enough as excuse to call upon the girl, but it was only that. She could feign devotion all she liked; the honest thought of it failed to excite. For all his father’s hopes, the boy was nothing but a ponce. He tried, but that meant little. He was incompetent. He was flighty. He was lost. She saw the way he looked at his friends. Even when they spoke to him, when they listened to him, there was a darkness there that would not sleep. He smiled, but the eyes were poor liars. Even power did not suit him, and the Bastard seemed content to heap it on his shoulders.

  More importantly: there was something he held back. She did not like secrets.

  The children were not a lot to follow. They were a lesson against.

  Shouts unsteadied the crowd as several men pressed toward the fore. Fists lanced against flesh, and Roswitte frowned for the predictability of men. Vardick rose to his feet with a beleaguered grunt, one hand dangling loose and dangerous against his blade. He was looking for an excuse, as ever. Training Rurik was not enough. The man’s blood bubbled too hot—her master’s foul-tempered dog.

  “Sit, Vardick. They will hold,” Alviss cautioned.

  The men came close, but the Kuric told it true. Men shouted, raged, but others held them back, for all the want that drank in their eyes. The noise of it nearly smothered the camp, but Roswitte pricked at something deeper, something beyond. She squinted over her shoulder, feeling a sick sensation creep up her spine.

  A few banners waved. Other soldiers, uninterested in the speech, loped on.

  The Zuti and the Brickheart bickered over nothing. Silent time had taken its toll on the both of them. The waiting—it got all men eventually. She breathed. Yes, there was something there. She rose up on one knee, peering between the rows of men. Shapes moved in a line of flickering shadows between the tents further back. Not a patrol—there was too much color to the motion.

  There were no shouts, no trumpet calls, but as she squinted the shapes into existence, she started. All men are dogs. She thought of the Bastard and Rurik, and wondered if even he could be so foolish. A few richly colored and heavily armed riders broke ahead of a line of men, shouting at the soldiers to halt. Men held pistols openly. The black parade pressed on, heedless, as the man at their heart dismissed the riders with a shake of the head, and words too far to hear.

  The speech cracked, fell apart. The fire rose and fell and rose again, but the crowd no longer listened. They looked to the west and to the clank of armor on the march, and there, every one of them beheld the fall.

  The vitality of order.

  Hands bound at his back, the lord marshall moved between a column of soldiers. They waded through the mass with little trouble, the gaping men parting as easily as wheat in the field. The column was like an arrow driving through the mass, and not one among them wore his colors. Roswitte stood, squinting at them, scrutinizi
ng. Other men moved around the column, harping. Noblemen, she realized. The soldiers kept them at bay, however, with the tips of pikes.

  Her eyes deadened on the colors, but Alviss leant them voice. “Bastard’s men.” They marched for the town, damnation and hellfire resuming in their wake.

  * *

  They came for him as the sun sank toward its nightly oblivion. There was no warning. Apparently, even for the captain that would be blamed.

  “Even you, Tessel, even you cannot do this. Tell me you are not so, so…” Rurik shouted his damnation, until the anger touched so deeply the words themselves began to catch.

  He had not intended to rage. All the way to Tessel’s post, he had tried to calm his fears. To breathe and to think. Yet the words left his mouth as soon as the door opened and their eyes met. He did not regret it. Not like he should.

  It was one of the few things he didn’t.

  Soldiers had taken Lord Marshall Othmann as the sun set and bore him into a southern exile. He and a scarce 300 men were supposedly reassigned to the aid of General Ernseldt’s forces in the south. There was no question of the truth in Rurik’s mind, however: it was meant to be a death march. It seemed that even Tessel had a breaking point, and Othmann had poked and prodded his way right over the edge.

  All the camp was in an uproar of confusion and uncertainty—a tense debacle of men all armed and ready and too long spent starving and spoiling without a fight. Every soul seemed to know. Yet Rurik had to hear of it from Othmann’s nobles. Furious nobles, rightly terrified by the insinuations of the event: a titleless man with the whims and means to kill the untouchable.

  Tessel met him with blank apathy. The other captains scoffed for him. The other captains. Further proof of the grand deception—as though the locked gates and swarms of men crawling like ants across the walls had not been sign enough. This was planned.

  Fury stole him away. He could not take any more lies. Their indifference only barreled Rurik on. “You must send for him. Bring him back, Tessel. Assal above, the man was an ass but you cannot—he is a lord, ser. Old blood. Old lord. Do you even realize…?”

  “I cannot do that,” Tessel answered swiftly, his curtness as much a dismissal as anything. But a smile eased his harsh features, and a breath settled him. He did not want to be angry. “It is done.”

  “Done? Ser, you—done?” Anger stumbled headlong into fear. If Othmann was truly dead, there was nothing anyone here could do to save their heads. The men outside would surely take them. “Tell me he still breathes.”

  Ten good men stood between the pair. Rurik’s gaze shifted past every one. At a time, he had been proud to have them, even if he didn’t agree with or trust them all. These were men strong enough to pull themselves up on their own merits—men Tessel put to use not for title or blood, but for usefulness.

  That made them no less yes-men. The difference was: they were yes-men loyal to a man, rather than a name. As all of them looked to him, riled and affronted at his lack of kind, Rurik felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. There was no appealing to these. Tessel owned them, heart and soul.

  Tessel batted a hand at him. “He lives. He simply goes to do his duty. Away from me and away from them. Without its head, what is the writhing serpent?” He looked away from Rurik, focusing, it seemed, on the hands folded in his lap. “The rest will fall in line. Then, at last, we will march.”

  “He did right.” Vogel chose that moment to assert himself as Tessel’s dog. Veins sprouted thick webs across his vulture’s neck as the man became animate, flinging his one good hand at Rurik. “Do you realize what they planned?”

  Yet that captain’s threat had ever been in his silence and his tact. Rurik found himself emboldened by the snap in demeanor, and it drew him forward. “Planning? What does it matter? I dread more what the passion of fear will wreak.”

  “Hold your tongue, boy!”

  The priest, Narve, degraded him with a loud snort. “Naturally, the lordling sides with their ilk.”

  Rurik’s hands faintly shook, but neither made a move for his sword. Several of the others, plainly, maintained no such restraint. For an instant, Rurik toyed with the consequences, wondered even if the railing crowd of lesser nobles outside the house would take the clang of steel as a rallying cry. Passion—it was always the greater force, between it and logic.

  Reluctantly, he tried to breathe the tension from his fingers.

  It was a mistake. A calculated mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. He had to believe that. Tessel had not seen the violence in their eyes as they shook him back into the waking world.

  Hands descended on him. Outside, Berric cried out like a cock at the dawning, but no one brandished steel. Rurik twisted in his sheet, the day dying around him as his eyes opened to shadows and to men. Bright colors. Weary resignation. Scabbards and swords and the rattle of so many chains. Gnarled hands took him by the collar and dragged him to his feet.

  Rurik stumbled. He was surrounded by nobles, the mark of the twilight making gargoyles of their faces. Berric and the others stood still as statues at the door, hands on their swords but surrounded by men-at-arms. Rurik was alone.

  Amidst the sweat and the flush, they demanded Othmann’s release. I don’t know. Can’t you see I don’t know? Cold eyes, darkening stances. Death—so close. Where is the lie? What happened? Othmann was taken to Tessel and taken away and his court stood in anxious disarray around Rurik. Nothing was known. The world had been subverted to guesses—questions of faith.

  I am too young.

  Why?

  The only blood I’ll ever need.

  They didn’t matter. He didn’t tell them that, though. Where, they asked? Where has he gone? What does he intend? Advisor, confidante—in the dark. He had to turn out his palms and plead ignorance, like a beggar at confession.

  A man could flout convention only so long. The Farren stain would listen. So mote it be. They left him, trembling, in the cold.

  The memory passed, but he stood still in the cold. Different faces, but the anger was all too familiar.

  “These people are not peasants, Kyler.”

  “How dare you,” shouted a bald, slant-nosed man. Bonsweid—a farmer from the eastern marches. His fire was matched only by the priest. Fortunately, one of the others put a hand against his shoulder—a subtle barrier.

  Tyler’s eyes rose narrowly. “Meaning?”

  “They are men of substance. Of power. In their minds, if not in fact. We have marginalized them. Put them to a nameless power—”

  Bonsweid nearly choked. “Nameless! Nameless, you say! The Emperor’s own.”

  “…They see neither respect nor—nor compromise. They fear and they can see the anger. Now you’ve taken the greatest among them. Who among them would not fear a purge? These are sensible men. They came to fight for Idasia, but this—”

  “Then they will fight. Put them to the front and let them taste the war we’ve all fed,” Narve snarled.

  “You’re not even—”

  Tessel raised a hand. The room seethed into silence, smoke and flame circling one another through thin eyes. “Go,” he commanded, but the room hesitated. “All of you save Rurik,” he snapped, louder this time, and the men shuffled reluctantly from the room.

  Dark stares lingered at Rurik’s back. Even those he liked, they did not trust him. They did not see an exile. They saw a nobleman. They saw a weakling and a coward that could not even be true to his own.

  What is there to trust?

  When they were alone, Tessel gestured to a chair. “Sit,” he commanded, and Rurik obeyed. Then the long fingers settled. He seemed to gather the emptiness of the wide room about him like a cloak, to beat back the chill. “You forget yourself, Rurik.”

  “And I fear you forget the art of politick.”

  There was silence between them.

  Tessel’s chair creaked as he shifted forward. “You fear, my friend. You are not the first. Breathe. You are safe here. Just answer me this: what
makes one man different from another?”

  Rurik sensed a trap. The general, his friend, leaned forward like a hawk to the kill. There was a subtle menace to the folded claws of his hands, in spite of the soothing tone of his voice and the misleading submission in his eyes. It was a kingly bearing, he realized. This man, this bastard, had he been born simply of a different mother—this man might have borne a crown.

  How fickle, fate.

  “Any number of things.”

  Tessel stared.

  “Blood. Coin. Power. Fate, I suppose.”

  A soft smile teased across the general’s features. Rurik knew he had said exactly what the man hoped for.

  “But are we not all one flesh? One mind? A sword brings power. Knowledge brings coin. With either, one can make blood reckoned, can earn names. The only thing that differs between a noble man and a working man is that they have now, while the other does not have it yet. Such things can be taken. They are always taken.”

  “And that—that is what they fear, Kyler. The—the taking.” Rurik’s mind reeled. Tessel’s ideas were not healthy, no matter how he felt. “Think of this from their perspective—”

  “A shallow enough prospect.”

  “Humor me.” Tessel rolled his eyes, but waved him on. “They resist the most because they have the most to lose here, in their way. All men fear for homes and families, but these must fear for many homes, many families. Some know not what they’ll return to—my brother, as an example—and now you take away what little assurances they have left. Now you speak of taking and taking is what they think you hope to do. Take from them. Take from the crown.

  “They want to go home! And not just them—the only thing working in your favor is that your men don’t see that common bond yet. Bonds with a noble?” He let out a short, frail laugh. “Assal’s bleeding cock, Kyler, I know you wish to honor your father, but this—men can only be pushed so far. To tell it true, I don’t even know what you hope to achieve here. And many,” again, he thought, of Ivon and Verdan and a father’s blade in his chest, “many were promised by the Emperor. With his death, there is no promise. No certainty of reward. When this is done—”