Wherein the pious and impious meet (Ch 2)

 Guard duty consists of two parts. Vigilance, and routine. In better, perhaps mythical times, these values were instilled early in the career of anyone hoping to rise through the ranks of Tellyphill’s Shield. Some of the oldest men still thought the position held some honor. Most knew better. In truth, far from being the honorable backbone of the first city, Tellyphill’s Shield mostly served as a repository for bribes and backdoor dealings. If there was something you wanted hidden from the eye of either church or state, the Shield was a first port of call.

This was one man’s perspective. Unsurprisingly, he was not a very happy man. His name was Chy, and his job had only just begun. After much consideration and delay, he had decided to convene a meeting of the Shield’s entire senior staff. He held no authority over them but whatever credence they chose to give him. In a way, is not all authority similarly derived? Chy was overflowing with confidence: he had the backing of the heavens. Surely none in the city would dare infringe on his holy duties.

As he waited for the appointed hour, officers slowly began rolling in. A stick of a man clutching at his side sword, the frown on his worried face a seemingly permanent fixture. Next, a short but not stout cavalry man, still reeking with his stench of horse. A bearded man, a bald man, a decorated veteran of the Kazhar invasion. These and more poured into the large meeting hall. A deep murmur of concern seemed to be making the rounds. Chy hoped it wasn’t to do with him. Then he thought about it for a minute, turned and twisted the idea, and hoped he was the cause of their concern. Then he looked up from his notes and at the assembled mess, reevaluated this position, did a mental bellyflop, and decided he would just get started before he got caught up in further mental knots.

“I had expected better of you” he began. The room refused to budge. The two dozen officers who had bothered to show up muttered under their breath, not deigning to reply to slander so blatant. Even so, Chy pressed on. “You may wonder why. Aren’t these degenerate times? Aren’t all men shirking their duty and forgetting their debts?” He paused to see if he had stirred something. A younger man in the back looked around uncomfortably. The grizzled veteran directly to his left scratched his beard. A fly buzzed. The sun slowly made its way westwards, towards the lands beyond the Caspian. The light it gave was already taking on an orange tint. Undeterred, Chy pushed on: “And I suppose you would be correct to think that. However, this is the first city! Prophecies, you’re as bad as the rest of them! Where once the visions were safeguarded, where the people rose as one to proclaim the path to salvation before any others, the same decay has set in. You all sicken me.”

He droned on in this manner for some time. He brought up ancient history, from the time of the Pontiac’s sacrifice all the way to the fall of the plains to the warlords. He brought up history far more recent, clashes with warlords and the succession wars with the Khazar. He trod over these topics with the obliviousness one came to expect of Pontiac preachers. That some of these men may have lived through these wars, lost friends and comrades, seen towns razes and civilians slaughtered, none of this occurred to Chy. To him, these events were as distant as the Pontiac’s sacrifice, although were he to have studied just a town south he would’ve seen at least a hint of how the land had been scarred. And as he preached, a grumble of angry, knowing resentment began to take shape in the crowd.

He was starting to feel good about this fiery sermon. Once done chewing them out, he would head to the mayor’s office and continue his chastisement. A warm and fuzzy feeling engulfed Chy at this thought. Soon, all would be right with the world. The lazy and indolent would be discarded, the diligent would be rewarded, and the words of prophecy would once more be trumpeted from the top of every spire. As his chastisement continued, the crowd grew more and more determined to lynch him.

Just as he was prepared to finish and deliver his final admonishment, the building wave of complaint began reaching his ears. It was a most unwelcome chorus, and went something like this:

“Who even is this guy?” “Some dope from the church I think”

“Why have we been listening to him until now? We have better things to do.” “Goddesses sake, is this whiny shell of a man what represents the church nowadays?” “And he has the gall to criticize us!” “How dare he speak so of the Khazar’s army! Best men I knew…”

The muttering of complaint had reached a crescendo, as had Chy’s angry shouts of reprimand. Amid the rapidly flaming emotion, a new face entered the scene. Flustered and panting, a veil of blonde hair raised a fey alto voice over the manly choir of resentment:

“You’ve finally done it! By all the gods who’ve ever been, you’ve finally blown it all away haven’t you! It’s the mayor, isn’t it? He’s finally taking charge and blowing your rotten organization away. And he’s letting me go and why I can just imagine Eva’s face when I tell her all about this one!”

Her unrefined outburst had obviously had some intended effect. Perhaps greater eloquence or a longer speech would’ve had it. Or maybe not. As things stood, the assembled members of the Guard turned to her as one, their boiling rage spilling over towards her.

“The wench! That wench from the marshes!” “How did she get here? Why has no one stopped her?” “Don’t let a woman dictate to us! Don’t let her lies infect your souls!”

At this last utterance, coming from one of the youngest officers, Chy took offense. It was not gratitude towards this woman for having saved him from a sure lynching that drove him, but rather the same blind dogmatism that had got him into this mess. He shouted and roared above the din:

“Blasphemous fools! Every word I’ve said has been confirmed by this… this nonsense! This utter pigsty of a building is nothing in comparison to the rot that infects every aspect of your minds! It’s almost hard to believe you’re saying this!”

By now he had really gotten himself whipped up into a frenzy. Chy was barely following his original admonishment at this point. Voice cracking and face going red, shouting and screaming all mixed together in one thoroughly inelegant display.

“You dare speak so of the word of women? Do you forget that the gift of prophecy was given to the daughters alone? If the Pontiac could see you all, why she’d be sick to her stomach! She’d condemn the whole lot of you! And I thought the reports I’d been hearing had been exaggerations! Clearly, I gave you rabble far too much credit!”

But even as he said this, three men at the far end of the room from him had grabbed onto the wisp of a girl that had caused so great a commotion. They were dragging her out, kicking and screaming and swearing and swearing and swearing like no girl of such elegant appearance should be able to muster.

And as they left the room, two new men entered in their place. Not the same brand of officer that had so far graced Chy’s day. No, these men were burly and heavily armored, scowling and scarred faces towering above the rabble as though they were naught but bugs, unworthy even of the least of their attention. This air being established, they promptly reinforced it by standing in the doorway and refusing to make even eye contact with creatures so lowly as to stand at less than six feet of elevation.

So distracted and overawed was the crowd by this display, that even Chy hushed his tone some. Then, seeing the murder in the two men’s eyes, smothered even that. The room was silent.

Silent, that is, bar the two new men who had entered and promptly blocked the room’s second exit. They were cut of a mold rather like that of the first two, only their noses were not quite as ugly. Quiet and dominance being established, a black hole of authority around the room’s doors quickly took hold. Uncomfortable shuffling, along with a muffled murmur of protest passed like a wave throughout the crowd. Eventually, Chy was jostled out of his position on the speaking podium at the head of the table. By this point he barely registered protest, and simply asked one of the older looking men about the situation.

“Umm, sir, whatever could be the meaning of this… interruption? Surely in the city guard there’s no faction of brutes so brutish that they would wish to disrupt an officer of the church in his duty.”

A withering look from the man told Chy that he had committed some egregious social error. Strange, that now his status was so fallen in the man’s eyes that he could afford to pass such judgement on his conduct. Not ten minutes earlier, his every word was protected by some aura, perhaps even divinity. But now he was being treated with utter scorn.

“Well, sir preacher, you seem woefully uninformed on the current… situation in Tellyphill. Come, what do you remember about our illustrious city?”

He wasn’t even trying to hide the contempt in his voice. But whether it was for Chy as an individual, or Chy the preacher, or even Chy the man of the goddess, was impossible to tell. Still, Chy was never one to back down from a challenge, no matter how ill conceived his notion of a rebuttal was.

“I know much of Tellyphill. Biggest city between the coast and Benst, founded in time immemorial, some century before the coming of prophecy. The first city to accept the Pontiac, the first one to acknowledge the truth of her vision, the truth of her dream. A dream of opulence and splendor…”

His words began trailing off as he remembered the vision instilled in him since his earliest childhood. But he quickly broke out of his trance and continued rattling on, slightly more hurriedly.

“The city wasn’t so big in those days. But for centuries, pilgrimages were made here from far and near. The place was almost as holy as Pontiac’s point! Eventually, over ten thousand score people lived here. Bursting from within, and under the guidance of subsequent Pontiacs, the city became a polity. Became an empire. For almost two hundred years from that point on, the city was seat of power of the greatest empire, from the mountains to the grasslands. But a lack of faith began to spread throughout the city’s ruling class. The simple faith once adopted by peasant and lord alike began to erode, and as such the very fabric of Tellyphill’s dominion began falling apart. Three decades of war, internal and external, tore apart the Pontiac’s grand dream. All that’s left is the city itself, slimy and disgusting now. A city of the weak, the spineless, the unholy and the unworthy.”

He struggled to keep the pain and bitterness from his voice at this. Evidently, it was still a sore spot for him. But the man who had first challenged him was not in the least satisfied. Quite the opposite, his lip curled, his features crunching into a caricature of hatred. When he spoke, the tone was hushed and cold, almost freezing in some’s estimation.

“So. That’s the picture of us you have in that heart of yours. Well, that explains why you’ve treated us as you have. But let me tell you something myself: I’m light-captain Illdo. You may not know that name, hell I doubt you even know what that rank is, or what it means.”

Illdo practically spat this out at Chy. He paused for a moment, considering, and decided to carry through and spit at Chy’s feet. He did. He felt good about it. Now it was Chy’s turn to take on a withering glare. Illdo continued unperturbed, talking with more confidence, more passion.

“I’m not your damn teacher, sir preacher. Oh no, I couldn’t do anything so damn noble. No, all I know is the rough unholy life of a soldier. I know dirt and grime. And you bet your soul I know slimy and disgusting, as you so charmingly called our city. But let me tell you what it took me and a generation and more to have even that. It took blood. It took sweat. It took the best damn years of our lives, and more. And do you know why we needed to do that? Your neat little synopsis of our history ends, oh, some forty years ago? Do you know what Tellyphill was truly left with when the great disaster ended? Debts and threats, obligations and defeats. Hostile armies from Netk to Rohj to Ofvwich. And do you know what was in those armies? Not swords and bows, not chainmail nor catapult nor trebuchet. No, it was a magic, dark and unimaginable. The armies were crushed, scattered and routed like so much dust in a whirlwind. Before we knew it, Karg was a kingdom. The marsh broke free of our yoke, to follow their old savage ways. Meyrkopp a city more powerful, more advanced than we had been in a century. And everything else, from lake Aral to the sea was a mess of scrabbling warlords, generals who had more than enough time to buy the loyalty of distant towns and villages. Why, no wonder the empire fell apart! Can you tell me why we knew nothing of their magic? Why the generals were able to build their coalitions? Answer me preacher sir.”

All throughout this half diatribe half history lesson, a pit was rapidly growing in Chy’s stomach. At this point, many of the surrounding crowd had turned to observe what all the chatter was about. And to no one’s surprise, a murmur of support for Illdo’s words followed each of his assertions. The murmur would’ve become quite another thing were it not for the all-consuming glower of the bullies at the doors, scanning the crowd for any disturbance too great.

 Belatedly, it came to Chy’s attention that a room of some two dozen rather veteran men had been cowed by not a sixth of their number. And why was that? Why could they not force their way out should they want to? Surely at least some of them were armed. But Chy recognized that now was not the time to be making any unnecessary demands of his surroundings. So, he did all he could, and perhaps the thing he did best of all: he gathered his wits and spoke.

“I would expect it had something to do with complacency. Or maybe a fear of the unknown. After all, when all comes to you, why venture out? Best stay in the center of it all and hope the important things get filtered back to you. And-”

His initial attempt at obfuscation was almost laughed away by Illdo and his friends, because it took them not a second to interrupt him.

“Please sir preacher, don’t try to fool yourself. You know as well as I do that even at the worst of times there should’ve been some adventurous men, fools or heroes who would find out and, as you say, filter things back to the centers of power. No, the reason was that we were too pious. Too pious, you hear?”

Now something finally clicked in Chy’s head, the gears finally spinning at high speed. Why had Illdo taken such offense at first? He may pretend it was because of some historical fault in the church. At some level, that was true. Chy wasn’t amazing at analyzing the church’s mistakes, but he was good at reading people when he really had to. And finally, he could tell that Illdo’s pride was hurt at some fundamental level. And it had something to do with the title “sir”. But for all he thought and thought, he couldn’t make the connection. Why did that set Illdo off? Was it something personal? Or did the title used to mean something? Offensive? Aggrandizing?

As he thought these things through, Illdo had not been quiet. He had managed to rile up quite the wave of resentment against the church and the Pontiac among his brother officers. No longer were they simply angry at Chy and his rhetoric. No, this resentment was tapping into something ancient, at least by the puny standards of humans and their emotions. The historical failings and tragedies were all being brought up and shouted about. There was really no point to all the shouting as a consensus was reached almost immediately: Tellyphill had been betrayed. Had been destroyed. By the church. By the Pontiac. By weak men who’d forbid the future because they thought it was found in the words of a woman long dead.

Even the guards at the door were no longer willing, or maybe able, to keep the room in check: these emotions were far too overwhelming for mere intimidation trickery and charms to suppress. All of a sudden, their stature seemed less fearful, and almost… comical. Their faces not terrifying and grizzled, simply ugly.

Things turned violent. Fists began flying, and not even the most vehement of denials would save Chy’s life. So it was much to his benefit when he was saved by a power outside of his own, for not a minute of violence had passed that a tall, lithe, bushy bearded and finely honed personage strode through the main door. His presence was commanding, so much so that even the mob, in the throws of violent outrage paused their bloody work to turn to his attention.

Shocked and numb, the only thought that Chy could form through the fog of emotion and pain seemed rather irrelevant: “That’s what a truly scornful look is.”

The new man gave the room a swift observation. Decided that what he saw was not much to his liking, and spoke in a confident baritone:

“Sir Chy DeFeu, would you accept the most gracious hospitality of the city of Tellyphill?”

And with another glance around the room hastily added:

“That is, the city proper. Our esteemed institutions have not yet eroded past the point of hospitality, despite what the guard may make you think.”

The room remained silent as the mob slowly let Chy out of their clutches with half mumbled apologies, or perhaps justifications. Chy couldn’t care less what they said or did. He was safe. And he would whip them into shape. He’d planned to scour the land all the way to the Caspian in search of his mission, but he decided he’d found it: Tellyphill’s shield would be restored to its former glory, Illdo be damned, history be damned. At least, those were his thoughts as he was escorted by the four guards and the tall man towards some room or another.

Meanwhile, Illdo and his comrades looked around abashedly, barely a word passing between them. They swiftly returned to their daily duties, found the hour to be late and the day over, and returned to the mess hall to drink instead. Not a one of them even suspected the marvel they had achieved back there in the conference room.

 

Much power was stored in the hearts of men in those days, enough to overpower even the mightiest of hexes and spells. In their great folly, they believed themselves to be the lesser generation, living after the collapse of majesty and grace. If only they had seen the world a hundred years later, they would’ve known just how powerful they truly were back then.