Wild card 14

I'm woken up by a hammering pounding on the door to my private sleeping chamber slash workspace. I yawn heavily, wiping the crust out of my eyes, an unpleasant taste in my mouth. That means I was snoring, and sleeping with my mouth open, two things my wife has made very clear are a problem. Her solution being to poke me until I roll over, which isn't often because our usual sleep schedules have about an hour and a half of overlap, and according to her I usually don't start snoring until I've been asleep at least an hour or so.

"I'm up, I'm up," I say, trying to reboot my brain. Coordination is mostly offline, memory is spotty, concentration is shot. No idea how long I've been asleep, but it definitely wasn't long enough. Either that, or I was woken up at a very bad point in my REM cycle. Something like that.

Then I open my eyes again. "Fuck," I mutter to myself. "Need to sit up."

The pounding continues, and I open my eyes. "God DAMMIT," I growl angrily, getting to my feet and almost falling over. I scrub my face with my hand.

"I'm up!" I shout. The pounding gets louder.

I stagger my way over to the door, catching a whiff of myself and wincing. Blech. I open the door.

Vanion is there, along with two knights. "Sorry for the hour," Vanion says, "But right now the best time for teaching is morning directly after sixth bell. It's the easiest place to fit it in around the training schedule."

I groan. "Not after supper or something?" I scrub my face with my hand again; my face is greasy and I've got a bit of a headache developing behind my eyes.

"Runs into other matters that the chapterhouse must deal with, I'm afraid." Vanion looks sympathetic but unyielding.

"Right... right. Okay." I take a deep breath, wincing at a catch in my back, and I stretch, feeling it ache a little more before a nice pop and the catch lets go. "Right. Okay, let's do the thing. The teaching thing."

"Teaching 'Alter Object' as you said, last night."

"Right. That." I feel a bit of irritation as the knights accompanying Vanion try and fail to completely suppress their smirks. I think a moment. "Can I request someone to add to my list of students?"

Vanion nods.

"I'd like to include Sir Atris."

Vanion thinks about this for a moment, then nods. "That can be arranged."

"Once someone starts on this class, they stay," I emphasize. "No quitting half way. A little knowledge is dangerous, and a half taught spell invites experimentation and temptation to play with things that aren't understood. That's big time bad. Uncontrolled mana discharges or improperly boundaried spells are how wizard towers burn down, and if you think cut stone can't burn, that just means the fire wasn't hot enough. Once it's started, it's followed through until the spell is learned."

"That sounds completely reasonable," Vanion reassures me.

"Alright. Let's do this, then."

A quick personal ablution via Prestidigitation, and I'm wearing one of the long, plain smock-frocks that seem to be popular here, my denim and shirt left behind in my chambers until I get around to decontaminating them later. I've accepted some local sandals, refitting them to myself with Alter Object as I did with the smock. It's not strictly necessary; clothes and bedsheets and furniture function just fine for me. Still, I like my loose clothes to be sort of billowy fit, just because I'm more comfortable when I can shake my arms and expel any hot arm from against my skin. I tend to put out a lot of body heat, so that sort of thing makes the difference between comfort and misery for me.

My class consists of Vanion, Sir Atris, and Vanion's companions today, Sir Bannon and Sir Typhus. All four of them watch me attentively.

I've never been a teacher. What the hell am I doing? This is crazy.

"Okay," I say by way of greeting. "Understand, I'm not a teacher by trade. So we're gonna go through this with some basic vocabulary and if you have a question, raise your hand so I can finish my thought and call on you. Everyone here literate?"

A quartet of nods.

"Good. That helps a lot. I recommend a slate for everyone and some chalk, something you can draw on to get the pictures secure in your mind..."

Two hours passes by deceptively fast. They pick up the spell's lexicon quickly enough; supervising them lets me catch some mistakes before anything bad happens. Thankfully, they're still at the stage of practicing each gesture slowly and carefully, enough so that I can stop any mispronunciations or poorly executed finger positions in time to adjust the spells into harmlessness. Then, I'm off to my laboratory to practice. Or my penitent's cell, but whatever.

When I get back there, my body reminds me that my sleep was disrupted; I take the chance to catch a fast nap before I wake up somewhere around noon and get to work. I can feel myself progressing my very basic understanding of Faerie Fire into something more refined, more matured. It's not a fast journey, but it's moving in the right direction, and that's all I demand.

And so my new, hopefully temporary, life falls into a routine. Wake up in the morning. Teach class. Nap. Work. Wander around and let my mind decompress while accompanied by one or another of Vanion's knights. Teaching helps; it turns out that the Pandions are excellent students. Not quite there yet with the spell, but progressing faster than I would have guessed. And working with them helps me with my own studies - I've been here five days and my Faerie Fire has already had some major breakthroughs, including the most important one: the ability to burn away poisons.

It's right around this point that the Pandion chapterhouse receives a letter. "Anthon, there has been something of a change in plans," Vanion announces as I open my door.

"Why, I'm doing great this morning, I slept nicely for a couple hours, thank you for asking," I respond with as deadpan an expression as I can manage. "Did you want some breakfast before we start?"

He looks at me with a stern frown. "Your clever words are not appreciated this morning, Anthon," Vanion informs me. "There is business I must attend to in Demos - and if the man Ineed to speak to has already left, then Chyrellos. Obviously, to keep my word both to Sparhawk and to yourself, you must come with - as will the other students in your instruction. For that matter, I want him to meet you - he's a good judge of character and a former member of the Pandion Order."

I grunt, a little surprised. "I see. Well, I need little enough preparation except to pack what I've accumulated and I'll be ready to go. Although I would appreciate the ability to make use of more of my magic, such as Phantom Steed, Unseen Servant, Haste, and Blink. And Fire Bolt, for defense." I almost add Blood Money to the list, but common sense tells me that neither Vanion nor Sparhawk would appreciate what, to them, would seem a magic counterfeiting spell - and for that matter, even if it does make real money, that doesn't alleviate the dangers imposed by inflating money supply even on a small scale.

"I can allow all of those, save with limitations on the last you mentioned, your fire spell." Vanion is cautious, of course - and I honestly don't much blame him anymore. "I want to see what you can do with it before I grant any blanket permissions for that one."

"Of course. Where do you want the demonstration?" I ask.

"Upstairs in the courtyard, we have training dummies to set up," he informs me.

"Actually, I do have one last spell I'd like permission to use: Disguise Self."

"Which one is that?" he asks.

"My ability to change forms. I am somewhat lacking in stamina as I am, and I don't want to slow you down."

"I don't see anything wrong with that."

"I wasn't being pithy when I asked if you wanted some breakfast, though," I add. "Have you eaten?"

"I have not," he admits.

"Then break your fast with me. Maybe add the other members of our magic class to the mix as well."

I spend a few minutes putting all my scattered things into my Pocket spell, including some potted herbs, several bottles of Witch's Brew, collected piles of cloth, chunks of metal and finished knick knacks I've manufactured from them. I covert my mirror back into a steel lump and a chunk of glass, cast Prestidigitation to clean my blanket, roll it up, and feed it into the pocket. I have a general sense for how much the pocket can hold; the entrance is small but it's got a huge volume inside it and I've barely even made a dent in how much space it has. I can't store furniture in it - yet - but that's a matter of fitting the furniture in rather than lacking the room.

"Where... does that all go?" Vanion asks. "When you do that."

"I don't suppose the term 'extradimensional volume' means anything to you?" I ask.

"That didn't translate, no," he says.

"Yeah, I guessed it wouldn't. Just chalk it up to 'magic backpack' and leave it at that."

The last thing I take is the slate, eraser wool, and the stub of chalk. Collecting the chalk from the surface of the slate and the wool lets me Alter it onto my writing chalk again, but it's smaller than when I first received it; too much dust that flies off somewhere on air currents and the like. Even to magic, it seems entropy is a stalwart foe.

Although I wonder how entropy accounts for things like Goodberry.

Questions for later. My penitent's chamber lay empty, now, save for the desk and the bed that were here when I arrived. "I think I'm ready to go," I say.

"Good. It's not exactly an emergency, but generally speaking, it's considered at the very least prudent to be prompt when you have a message for a Church Patriarch."

I hum. "Question. Would they know of, or desire my presence there?" I ask thoughtfully.

"As yet, none of the Church's hierarchy knows about you save for the Chapterhouse here and Sparhawk's entourage," Vanion replies. "As to if they'd wish to, you would be a curiosity to some, a threat to others, and a blasphemy to some few more," he admits reluctantly. "Assuming your talents were discovered. Without them, you'd be a puzzle to even be accompanying us and it would be considered insulting to the Church for a heathen presence in anything of substance."

I nod. "Maybe it would be better if I wasn't in a human form as we travelled? To prompt fewer questions?"

I take on the form of a dog, but rather than the scruffy, half starved mutt I'd been with Sparhawk, I instead become a full grown, somewhat oversized alabai. They're one of the biggest dog breeds I can think of; in Uzbekistan, they're called wolfhounds, but they're know to even be able to fight off tigers. A dog my size and build would be easily understandable as a companion for some Knights.

"Unless you want to be kenneled when we arrive," Vanion says, attempting not to laugh, "I recommend against it. Although... you make quite an impressive dog, I must admit."

I give him a deep, resounding bark before turning back to myself. "Yeah, that's a valid point. It's an idea to keep in mind for the future, though."

"Only if you really like the idea of biting things. Just a dog, then?"

"I can take on different forms, general or specific. Humans, birds, beasts, insects, what have you." I shrug. "I can impersonate a person, right down to the bones and muscle. Without casting it again, it'll last three days or so."

Vanion stares at me impassive for several seconds. "You will not teach ANYONE this ability. I find the idea it exists to be terrifying to begin with, and the notion of someone being able to simply go out and do something terrible while wearing my face makes me itch. You will only ever wear your face."

"That'd look awfully funny if I need to change into a woman at some point," I observe.

"You can-" he cuts off, then grimaces. "You will only wear someone else's face when specifically ordered, and only for so long as it's necessary."

"I can't frame people," I remind him. "I wouldn't, because I find it personally reprehensible, but I literally CAN'T do it, even if ordered. That would be, in my eyes, a legitimately evil act no matter who it was done to. And I can't do things that would be, in my assessment, evil."

"I only find that slightly reassuring."

"It's the best I can offer you," I say with a helpless shrug.

"We'll discuss that later. We're going out to the practice yard; I want to see that fire spell."

We adjourn to the courtyard. Despite the early hour, men are already training in the third of it that's been set up for such things - a stretch of interior yard about fifty feet wide and two hundred long. Men sparring in circles with weighted wooden swords and full armor, others doing blade drills in a line, and others still practicing shield bashes against wooden training dummies.

We draw more than a little attention. I wasn't personally military, but I knew guys who were, and a unit of soldiers is going to gossip fit to rival the nosiest of neighborhood knitting circles. Since I've been here a week, I can only assume that the curiosity and rumors about me are rather wild at this point - and if they aren't yet, they're probably going to be.

Vanion sets up a series of training dummies, and I put them through the inferno. Scaling up from a glowing red heat to incandescent yellow all the way through a brilliant white that's somewhat painful to look at directly. I demonstrate a tiny dart of fire, an explosive blast, a steady gouting cone of fire. I even form the fire into a focused, concentrated whip, as hot as I can manage - hot enough that it strikes concussive explosions on contact, blasting apart the sturdy rope bound training dummies in a few hits each. Fire burns for long seconds like pooled napalm where bits of the stricken targets have landed, and I sheepishly find myself extinguishing them with water from the well partway through my demonstration. Vanion is... quiet.

"That was a considerable demonstration," he said finally in a display of tactful understatement.

"I... yeah, it does feel a bit excessive," I agree after a moment.

"It's not unheard of for Church Knights to rain fire on their foes, but usually it's a collective effort," he observes. "The last time such spells were made use of with any real frequency was during the Zemoch war. And the answer to the use of this spell in combat is a firm 'no'."

I sigh, grimacing. "There's no changing your mind or at least receiving a waiver on that circumstantially?"

"Brushing aside that there's fairly little use for it," he replies. "It's a bad look for the Pandion order for someone associated with it to be burning people alive, and we generally don't do much of it unless there's an open state of war against an enemy engaged in similar levels of cruelty and destruction. Given what you mentioned about your kind having been burned alive by the dominant religion when you came from, I'd honestly think you'd be less eager to do that to people."

"It's not like I'm eager, it's just I don't have many other strong combat options," I reply. "But fine, I can understand the limitation. That still leaves me, not quite helpless per se, but likely limited mostly to that biting you were so disparaging of earlier."

"You have nothing else, then?" he asks pointedly.

"Nothing so effective as tooth and claw," I say. "My other magical attacks are all very basic. Short ranged, weak, slow, and generally speaking little more than unfriendly party tricks."

"But you DO, in fact, have other spells that you can fight with," he counters. "Such as?"

"A thrown projectile of a weak acid, a spell to shove an opponent away from me, one to open small bleeding cuts on a foe I touch with my bare hand, a thrown shard of sharp crystal, a burst of energy that briefly distracts, a small blast of energy like a punch that can induce nausea," I take a breath, pausing, then start counting off on my fingers, "the ability to throw a single mildly enhanced punch, a mild breeze of wind, a small swarm of biting insects, a short duration curse that causes mildly annoying inconveniences for about an hour, a tiny bolt of very weak lightning, a magical missile roughly equal to a punch in strength, a mock weapon of energy that doesn't actually do anything except look like I'm wielding a weapon, a short ranged beam that chills a target and covers them with a small amount of frost, a spark that acts more like a stiff cleaning brush on a pot or a pan, create a ghostly bow with which I've never practiced and fires more or less ordinary arrows, a very light shove in all directions weaker and shorter range than the other spell that shoves, and a spray of sticky ropes like a large spider's web." I finish my recital somewhat breathlessly. "Of all my attacking spells, the only one that isn't completely, bare bones basic in efficacy is my fire spell." I shrug helplessly. "I'm probably lucky to know even that much. I'm not sure how my spells were selected or advanced when I got them, but fighting wasn't much of a priority, even defensively speaking."

"Your other spells don't sound useless. But more importantly, they don't sound excessive either. If you need to defend yourself, use your blinding spell or the spells that push people away from you."

"Slow and weak," I remind him. "It takes anywhere from four to ten seconds to cast them. You're a fighting man; how long is ten seconds in combat? Not an actual question, mind you, just trying to make a point."

"Anthon," he says pointedly, "you'll be traveling with four Pandion Knights of the Church. Your magic aside, there is little enough you could do if they can overpower us."

What can I even say to that? "I'll make do, then, I suppose." Although, my Disguise Self is advanced enough that I can adopt biologically possible forms from the animal kingdom - and with an American college education, that is a very sizeable arsenal to draw from.

He's right, I realize. I am too eager to have access to Fire Bolt. And I even know why. It's not because I like the idea of burning someone to death, but simply because being able to cast Fireball has always been something of a rite of passage for any mage. How absolutely juvenile of me.

I look up at the morning sky. "Sorry, Vanion. I was so enthused by the idea of having the ability to throw fire around, I didn't really think through all of its implications."

"So it seems." He claps me on the shoulder companionably, a somewhat uncomfortable gesture that I try to not wince at. "No fool like an old fool, hmm?"

"Yeah. And I'm starting to get why whoever did this to me tied me to your knight Sparhawk, gave me the strictures they did: I could very easily have done something thoughtlessly that I'd regret for the rest of my life."

"Sounds like the act of that God of yours you talked about, I think," Vanion suggests.

I don't much care for the idea. "At most, he's probably a guardian spirit," I disagree, "assuming he's anything more than wishful thinking and my imagination. I'm pretty sure anything on the level of a god isn't going to care about someone like me for good or ill."

We leave the Pandion chapterhouse around mid-morning, four knights in formal armor, six novitiates in chain, and myself. A cart and several draft horses accompany us, carrying encampment, feed, food, and firewood. The tents outside the chapterhouse remain partially staffed, by men who play act at road building but haven't made appreciable progress since the night I got here. It's not like they're laying foundation, concrete, using grading machinery or working from a plan set down by civil engineers. They're barely doing anything beyond moving cobblestones from one pile to another. As we depart, the 'roadlayers' aren't exactly subtle about sending a man to one of the larger tents, presumably to inform the guy in charge of our departure and perhaps get orders for what to do about it.

Vanion plainly doesn't care. Horses all around save for me, who has been cleared for the use of Phantom Steed just so they don't have to worry about making sure I know how to ride a horse. There's a certain caution the horses demonstrate around me at first, giving my summoned steed the side eye occasionally, but the steed remains a steadily traveling thing that makes no sudden moves. Within a few hours, the horses acclimate to its presence.

"Vanion, while we ride, can I ask about a few things? I'm not very clear on the political situation nor any of the historical context of the people, cultures, and nations you talk about. Think I could get a condensed history lesson while we travel?"

"I don't see why not," he concedes. "I suppose the important parts, just so you understand the current conflict, start around the time that the current nations formed from the splintered fragments of the early empire. King Abrech had gotten himself killed fighting Eshandist heretics in Rendor. The various dukes of his empire had gotten their hands on the techniques for making steel, because Abrech had thoughtlessly agreed to give it to them when they asked under the pretext of needing it to better combat the Eshandists in their territories. As a result, Elenia and Arcium declared their independance and self governance. The satelite regions of Pelosia, Cammoria, and Lamorkand found themselves adrift from their distant rulership. Local charismatic leadership was able to keep order and provide stability - although in the case of Lamorkand, stability has a flexibly definition - and each of them coalesced into nations in their own right within a generation."

"Sounds about right," I comment thoughtfully, filing away the implications about Lamorkand for later. "Warlords build empires, but nations live and grow under men who can make sure the lights stay on and the garbage gets hauled away on time."

"That... is a fairly concise assessment, yes," Vanion agrees. "Now understand, around this time Eshand, the radical religious leader that started the Eshandist rebellion in the first place, had died. For reference, Eshand had introduced a dogma to his followers, mostly nomadic shepherds, the concept that worship of God should be anti-hierarchical. No Archprelate, no Primates, no Patriarchs. Individual priests should make their own decisions to tend to the souls of their congregations."

Given Vanion's reference to this notion as heretical, I choose not to mention that Wicca teaches that each person's relationship to the divine is personal. No need to stir up that kind of trouble, especially not now, and I haven't given much credit to the notion of a personally involved Divine since I was in my late twenties anyway. He continues, "The war against the Eshandists continued without Abrech, though. The Church did not take kindly to Eshand's teachings, and his disciples had more or less infested the continent and were eagerly stirring up unrest at every opportunity. The Church worked hard to keep up the fight, but by the time they'd gotten the heretics dealt with in the major kingdoms here on Eosia, Eshand had died, his considerably less fanatical disciples had taken the reins, and Rendor itself - far to the south across the Arcian Strait and the Inner Sea - had consolidated firmly into a Eshandist state.

"This signaled a change in the war to something a little more sedate, and for about three centuries, it was largely confined to raids across the Inner Sea and the Strait back and forth. Territory wasn't the goal on the Rendorish side, simply slaves and pillage, and the Church wasn't able to drum up enough religious zeal among the Dukes and Kings of the Eosian nations to do more than occasionally strike back, as they were far more busy with their own internal politics. This left the Church with the quandary of how to suppress the Eshandists, and they convened in Chyrellos to seek alternatives, eventually deciding to found the four militant orders of the Church: Pandion, Alcione, Genidian, and Cyrinic. Each would be centered in their own home kingdoms, but their first duty and loyalty would be to the Elenic Church. The Pandion order was based in Elenia - this nation - while the Alciones would be drawn from the kingdom of Deira, Genidians from Thalesia, and Cyrinics from Arcium."

I grunt. "What about, ah... Cammoria, Lamorkand, and Pelosia?" I ask.

"All poorer regions. Farmland is much less productive there, and it was considered to be not worth the costs involved to establish their own orders. The Church in those regions does tend to funnel promising candidates with the suitable temperament to the Pandions, Alciones, or Cyrinics."

"And the Genidians?" I prompt.

"Thalesia is its own special case; it's considered cruel to ship out raw recruits to a region that devolves for six months into a frozen waste largely infested by Trolls and Ogres," Vanion explains. "In the long run, it starts to hurt morale - and Genidians are fecund enough anyway that they didn't really need the extra numbers."

I snort my amusement. "Well, if it's frozen over half the year, I suppose they have to keep warm somehow." Vanion laughs. I continue, "I imagine Sir Ulath is representative of his people?"

"More or less, yes."

"Alright. The war is cooling off, the Orders are created, what then?"

"I was coming to that. The Orders were established; they received far greater training than most soldiers plus instruction in the secret arts of Styricum - magic - and they proved to be a highly effective fighting force. They were motivated, ambitious, and very good at their jobs, and over the next decade or so, the four orders swept across Rendor quite handily. The region was divided up into four duchies, law and order restored, and the Church reassured, somewhat prematurely, that the heresy had been stamped out. It was, of course, around this time that the Zemochs decided to invade."

"Ah, here we go," I say under my breath.

"Now, the Zemochs up until this point were largely disregarded by the rest of Eosia. Unsurprising, given how far away Zemoch was from anything the western Eosian kingdoms cared about. As such, the sudden Zemoch invasion caught everyone flat footed. The Knights of the Church were all in Rendor consolidating their position when word reached Chyrellos that Emperor Otha of Zemoch had amassed an enormous army and was marching it into Lamorkand. His followers were fanatical, inured to cruelty, suffering, and human empathy by their worship of Azash - whose religious rites are obscene, torturous, and bloody. Even so, the invasion might have been turned back by the more conventional armies of Eosia were it not that the Zemochs were bolstered by monsters, creatures beholden to Azash."

I nod my understanding.

"When the Church understood the nature of what the Elenic nations were facing, they recalled the Church Knights from Rendor and sent them east, gathering the armies of everyone they could in the process, to meet the Zemochs in battle before they could get any further. This had the added effect of stopping the Church Knights from finishing their work in Rendor, and as such Eshandists who had gone to ground subsequently became so firmly entrenched that they've become all but impossible to root out. Sects keep cropping up, and they have been for five hundred years, now, like the current figurehead for the Eshandist movement, Arasham.

"That matters to us, but I'll come back to it later. We're still at the Zemoch invasion. The Church Knights were on the march, Eosia was sending its armies. The largest military forces ever mobilized met in Lamorkand, and near the shores of Land Randera began a single conflict that stretched for three straight days. Day and night were irrelevant; the battlefield was swept by waves of darkness and lit by sheets of fire and strokes of lightning. Entire regiments were lost to rifts that opened in the earth to swallow them whole. Liquid rock rose from the earth, trapping or incinerating men on both sides. The Church Knights were instrumental in providing an answer to Zemoch priests and Azash's monsters, their concerted efforts matching the best that the mystic forces arrayed against them could muster, and freeing the conventional soldiery of the Eosian army to confront and hold the Zemoch hordes. After three days of this, the Zemochs finally broke and ran, their monsters slain, their priesthood decimated, and both their numbers and their will to fight broken."

I look over my shoulder, squinting at the distance behind us and wishing devoutly that I had my glasses; the part of my mind not occupied with Vanion's history lesson is more concerned about those men who were camped outside the chapterhouse walls. Are they following us? I have no way of knowing. Vanion goes on, "Eosia, however, was barely any better off. About half of the Church Knights lay dead on the field of battle; the nations of Eosia each numbered their dead by the tens of thousands at the lowest. The western kingdoms had stripped the countrysides of every able bodied man to repel Otha's army, and crops had been left inadequately tended from wildlife, disease, and weeds. Because of the fighting, the harvest was late, further reducing what food could be gathered for winter, and so many men had been killed or maimed that there wasn't enough manpower to plant in the following spring. The result was famine, bad famine, both in the East and the West. For about a century, there was no room to do more than try to recover, and because the Orders were forced by necessity to labor the fields with the peasantry, they became quite secularized.

"The Church in Chyrellos was neglectful and somewhat prone to excess, further distancing the Church from the Knights, and the Orders had been severely depleted. The Orders had originally been envisioned as more or less militant monks, to retreat to their chapterhouses to meditate and pray when not on the field of battle or training, but with the already thin numbers of peasantry there were few to recruit, and almost none of those were willing to BE recruited. The heads of the Orders got together to discuss the matter in full, before they marched on Chyrellos to present the problem to the Church Hierarchy in somewhat forceful terms. In light of these problems and the continued need for Church Knights - the Church had not forgotten that despite the victory at Randera, the homelands of Zemoch were completely untouched by the fighting, unlike their own - the Church Hierarchy decided to rescind the requirement of celibacy and chastity among the militant Orders despite their official standing as Clergy."

"You'd think religious men would figure out that vows of Celibacy and Chastity, faithfully upheld, are not hereditary," I observe sourly. "Eventually, you run out of people willing to trade sex lives for spiritual enlightenment. Either openly or in secret."

Vanion grimaced. "It can be counterproductive, agreed. At any rate, the increased secularization of the Church Knights has itself resulted in our greater involvement in politics, and the Church now hires its own soldiers to do tasks they once would have relegated to the Church Knights. The divide between us has grown, and despite the fact that we're all notionally part of the same greater organization, in practice there have been some significant rifts between certain factions of the Hierarchy and the four Orders. Which brings us to now, and the Primate Annias."

"Hold up a moment," I say. "We're talking about, conservatively, more than a hundred thousand dead then in that Randera region, if I'm understanding the numbers you're throwing around correctly."

"At least two hundred thousand, actually, not counting the Zemochs there," he replies.

I level a serious gaze at Vanion. "This search of theirs is a hopeless longshot, isn't it?"

"Of course it is," Vanion agrees. "At least for the purposes of saving the Queen. It can't be an accident that you were sent to us after the revelation that Bhelliom was the only thing in the world that had the power to save her. Why do you think we're so adamant about protecting you?"

I think about this for a few seconds. "I don't like what that implies about their chances about getting the Bhelliom before the Zemochs do," I admit.

"Neither do we."