27: The Master's Servant

“Father, it was terrifying!”

“It was awful!”

“We didn’t know what to do!”

Faaral hushed the two young men with a raised hand. They had come to him with a wild and surprising story about a strange woman and a floating sign. He didn’t quite know what to make of it.

“Tell me again, child, and this time slowly,” he said. Both men started to talk at once, but, realising what they were doing, they stopped and looked at each other.

“Well,” started one. The other nodded and kept silent. Faaral focused his attention on that one. “We were out helping Myrten clean up...”

“The builder,” the other interrupted.

“Myrten, the builder, yes. He had organised some folks to clean up the King’s Gloves, ‘cause of course you know it was pretty heavily damaged, by the...”

“By the dragon.”

“The dragon, yeah. So Laron was climbing up to try and fix the sign when he slipped and fell...”

“But he didn’t fall!”

“Yeah, he didn’t fall. He just dangled there in mid-air, like he was hanging on to something, except he wasn’t! He wasn’t hanging on to anything!”

The other young man took over.

“That’s when we saw the woman. She was shouting something at Laron, something like ‘get the sign, get the sign.’ But Laron just dropped to the ground, and then the sign just broke off and floated over to the woman like someone was carrying it, but there wasn’t!”

“No-one was carrying it!” interjected the first man.

“No-one!” said the second again. And then they both stopped talking and looked at Faaral expectantly, as though for answers.

Faaral didn’t have answers. He wished he did. The Master hadn’t seen fit to explain the dragon or anything that had happened in the two days since the attack.

“And this woman,” he said. “Did you know her?”

“No, father,” said the first. “None of us knew who she was.”

“And you were all with Myrten, yes?”

“The builder,” said the second.

“Myrten the builder,” said the first.

“Might Myrten know who she was?” asked Faaral. The two young men looked confused.

“I don’t know,” said the second.

“Maybe,” said the first.

Faaral sighed.

“Very well, you can go. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I will pray for the Master’s guidance.”

The two young men retreated from Faaral’s office. Since the Primate was lost, and most of the upper leadership, responsibility for the Church’s business had fallen to him and a number of priests of lower rank.

He wasn’t ready for it. He didn’t feel that he was the person to lead the church. He had never wanted to be Primate.

The cathedral had, mercifully, been spared the worst of the dragon attack. As a result Faaral had instructed that the Church’s resources be used to help those who had been worst hit in the attack – the homeless, the hungry. He should have known that something political would come up eventually. It always did.

He stood up from his desk and stretched, walked slowly to the next room, where he had a library of old books. There was one in particular that he was looking at a few days ago, after a severely injured young man had been brought to him. The young man had been stabbed through the chest, presumably with a sword. The Master had healed that man, even though Faaral was convinced that he was Upraised.

Why had the Master healed an Upraised? The Upraised were the enemy of the church, and of all good law-abiding people. They were antithetical to the Church’s doctrines. They wielded power that only the Master should hold. Faaral had been trying to figure this out when the dragon had come.

And there was the other thing. The Master had allowed a dragon – a mythical creature – to devastate His city.

And now there was this report of the strange woman in the city who was clearly also demonstrating Upraised powers.

The Church remembered what the common people had forgotten. Since the time of the Cataclysm, the founders of the church had enforced the idea that the Upraised were not real. Over time, they had ben relegated to the status of children’s stories – tales used to frighten the young into compliance. Magic had become a myth. Monsters had become allegories. But prior to the Cataclysm, they had all been very real.

The Master had of course taken care of the problem. The Upraised had brought the world to its knees. After all, who could oppose those who commanded magical powers? Normal people had been slaves at best, insects to be crushed underfoot at worst. They had thrown themselves on the Master’s mercy, and He had responded. He threw down the towers of the Upraised. He collapsed their mines. He destroyed their floating cities and erased every last one of them from the world.

Faaral was left with two burning questions. The first – how and why had magic, monsters and the Upraised themselves returned? Was it a sign of something? Was the Master testing his servants? The second – why had Faaral not had the Upraised that had come into his power killed? The young man, Somon, critically injured in the castle and assumed dead, had been brought to the cathedral and the Master had healed him. Why? Why healed and not killed?

Faaral stayed up late into the night, praying and reading, and trying to figure out the answers to these questions.

In the morning he had decided on a course of action. He would have to have the strange woman found. He would have to interrogate her. And then he would have to execute her.