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  She looked briefly surprised, but then nodded. “That’s good thinking,” she agreed. He knew she was no congregation regular, but they, all of them, for their own reasons, were doing Armes’s will and were reliant on his protection. Dion’s radiant power had saved them more than once, and where they were going it would be the only light in a very dark place. Having the approval of the church personally vouchsafed to them by a powerful priest would be an added measure of protection.

  “So,” Cyrene said, striding over, “how does this work?”

  “Well . . . ,” the secretary started, but Harathes coughed to draw her attention, and put in, “Actually, given the unprecedented nature of our mission, I was hoping for something specifically tailored for us.”

  “Hm.” The old woman did not seem approving, but at the same time was not discounting the possibility. “Do you want me to send someone to the archives to find an appropriate form, or . . . ?”

  “I’ve given it some thought,” he explained, and it was true, although that thought had very much been concentrated in the last few minutes. “We are to travel to a very terrible place, where the slightest hint of division between we fellow warriors of the Light will surely spell our doom.” It all sounded properly portentous, which was what he had been aiming for. “It is the bonds of comradeship that must be strengthened between us, so that the weaker of us do not stray.”

  “You want me to fetch Lief and Penthos, then, or what?” Cyrene broke in, regarding him doubtfully.

  “No, no,” Harathes replied hurriedly. “Seriously, can you imagine any of them being fit for the blessing of Armes?”

  “Any may be touched by the Light if they are willing—” the secretary started mildly.

  “Yes. They’re not,” Harathes told her. “Just the two of us, and we will have to set a good example for our less morally upright fellows, right? A good example. No straying from righteousness, no wandering off.”

  “Now hold on,” Cyrene started, but her voice came out too loud, echoing in the bare chamber, and Harathes saw the attention of all those junior priests focus on her, clamping down on her words.

  “We need a blessing that can bind us together,” he explained hurriedly to the secretary. “We need the hand of Armes on both of our shoulders, holding us close.”

  “Harathes—!” Cyrene spat, but he held an admonitory finger up to her.

  “Remember where we are,” he instructed, relying on the awe of the High Temple to deal with any objections. Indeed, she seemed hardly able to speak, so he returned his attention to the secretary. “We need to be as one, in our divine mission. And where the one of us is the stronger vessel, the more perfect in his service to the Light, then the weaker must take strength and guidance. That’s the sort of blessing we need, exactly. You can do that, right?”

  She gazed into his face, perhaps his soul, and at last she seemed satisfied. “Draw closer,” she advised him. “I shall enjoin your vow from you.” She levered herself to her feet, leaning across the table so that he inclined himself to her automatically. “You are a warrior of the Light,” she said softly, almost too quiet for him to hear. “You go about a grand task that will result in the destruction of a monstrous evil. The footsteps you follow are of the heroes of old, who also risked all in order to defeat masters of Darkness like Darvezian. You have risked much, suffered much, and no doubt there is far more suffering in store for you and your companions.” Her voice was the merest breath, almost mesmerizing in its rhythms. “For this reason, I lay on you the blessings of the church, which must often work through those vessels, weak or strong, that it finds. Let Armes give strength to your sword and your shield, and let him lead you on a straight path through crooked places. Most of all, though, let him gift you with wisdom, because if you try that sort of trick near me again I will have you hung by one thumb, and anyway, all this has given your companion ample time to get out of the room, and probably the temple.”

  “What?” Harathes exploded, jerking back from her and casting about for Cyrene, who was indeed conspicuous by her absence. “Why, you . . . !” He choked himself off, abruptly aware of all the eyes that were upon him. “I’ll just . . .”

  “No doubt the priestess Dion will be with you shortly,” the secretary told him, her voice brooking no disagreement. “After that, no doubt you will be good enough to escort her to her chambers and keep watch outside the door while she rests. It is a great honor to serve so, ask anyone here.”

  There was a statue of Armes in the center of the Heathen’s Quarter, in form and pose identical to every other representation of the demigod hero who had heralded the coming of the Light. He had been a handsome, square-jawed man, according to the makers of icons, with a warrior’s strong frame, robed but with a sword at his side, and his arms outstretched in blessing in that particular palms-down stance that the priests all mimicked.

  Lief, Penthos, and Enth stood before it, feeling that stone regard condemn them, each for his own reasons.

  “I must say,” the wizard declared eventually, “there is a distressing lack of imagination in whoever makes images of Armes. All very uniform.”

  “There’s a whole group of priests specifically to make sure they’re identical, every representation of him to scale,” Lief explained. “It’s very important, apparently, to preserve the divine likeness.” He didn’t elaborate that he knew this because of a fake holy icon scam that had gone very badly wrong. “Well, welcome to the Heathen’s Quarter. There’s an inn, and I mean just the one inn. We’d better go and twiddle our disgustingly pagan thumbs there until someone comes to fetch us.”

  “The Heathen’s Quarter. Everyone says it like that,” Penthos muttered. “As if there’s only one heathen allowed in the place at once.”

  Lief blinked at him, thought back, then nodded enthusiastically. “You’re right. Or, it’s more like there’s just one entity that’s ‘the Heathen,’ and we’re all just bits of it. Heathen’s Quarter,” he let the words roll off his tongue. “Yeah, never thought of that before.”

  “People are staring at me,” Enth observed calmly.

  Lief glanced about, seeing that it was true. “Oh this isn’t going to go well. Seriously it’s not. Let’s get under cover at least. Enough sight-seeing.”

  There was no sign for the quarter’s single inn, because the Armesians had no other dive to distinguish it from. There was a taproom, and it was the most dispirited that Lief had ever seen. Travelers there were drinking something from small mugs in humble silence, as though if they started to enjoy themselves then Armes himself would turn up and slap them.

  “Sod this,” he muttered to himself, but no other alternatives occurred to him. “Three of your best,” he instructed the dour, judgemental-looking man who appeared to be the proprietor. The expression he received in response rather suggested that the man wouldn’t waste his best on the likes of Lief, but a boy was sent away to the cellar, and came back with little mugs of what Lief hoped was at least his mediocre.

  There were tables and chairs there. Someone had gone to some lengths to make the latter uncomfortable and the former too low, so that Penthos was constantly banging his knees. They were nailed to the floor, which said a lot about the locals’ beliefs concerning the virtue of outsiders.

  “Well, cheers,” Lief said. He sipped. Mediocre was probably over-egging it.

  Enth was not touching his, and Lief nudged him. “It’s beer. You like beer now, remember.”

  The creature shook his head. “Can’t,” he said, staring at the mug as though it contained a . . . well, not a venomous spider, Lief considered. Whatever it was that spiders didn’t like. One of those parasitic wasps or something.

  “This is the heart of the Light,” Penthos said quietly. “Such power does not respect the boundaries of the Heathen’s Quarter. It bleeds through, even into the beer.”

  Lief blinked. “Seriously?”

  The magician nodded, long-faced. “It tastes foxed even to me. To our monster it would probably be
like drinking vitriol.”

  “Can you not call him that?”

  “He’s my monster,” the wizard said petulantly. “I’ll call him what I like.”

  “I’m not a monster.”

  The two humans stared at Enth in silence.

  “You’re what I call you—” started Penthos, but Lief broke in.

  “Shut up.”

  “How dare you—!” but something in the little man’s expression, incredibly, was enough to make the magician subside.

  “Besides, you know all the stories,” the thief added unkindly, “who do they like less, the monsters or those that make them? Better for you if he’s not such a monster, eh?”

  Penthos opened his mouth, then shut it, and to Lief’s surprise a mournful expression came over his face. “You’re right, of course,” he bemoaned. “I was only trying to help. I was only trying to make this quest nonsense work. And it’s made things worse, somehow. It’s made her unhappy. Why does everything I do end up like that?”

  Lief’s eyebrows had gone past his hairline, and he tried to exchange an alarmed look with Enth, who had no equivalent look to pass back to him. “Er, right . . . ,” he ventured. “We all know you’re trying . . .” But no, enough was enough. “Look, I am not playing shoulder-to-cry-on for a man who can make whole villages explode. Just drink.”

  “It’s horrible,” Penthos said, close to tears.

  “It gets better.” Enth had not touched his but plainly he was drawing on memories of beers past. Looking at him, Lief wondered if there was something more human about him now, crept into that awkward posture and behind those nightmare eyes.

  Later on, and they had at last found a way to amuse themselves and take out their frustrations on Armesion at the same time. They were renaming the Heathen’s Quarter’s sole inn.

  “The Abomination’s Rest,” put in Penthos, giggling a little.

  “The Pit of Iniquity,” Lief decided.

  “Vice’s Last Stand.”

  “That’s a good one.” The thief considered. “The Tavern of Lost Souls? No wait, how about Archbishop Prurient’s Home for Hopeless Moral Rejects?”

  Penthos almost fell off his chair.

  “Come on, Enth, you can do one,” Lief encouraged.

  Abruptly the monster stood, and for a moment Lief thought he was going to declaim some joke name across the entire room, but then he was pointing. Cyrene had just walked in with a face like thunder. It was all rather déjà vu.

  “Is she ready? Can we leave?” Penthos demanded.

  “I can’t imagine how you found us,” Lief added sardonically.

  “Mostly from the inn sign,” she snapped.

  He frowned. “There isn’t a sign.”

  “There is now, and it’s changing every half-minute into something even less tasteful.”

  Penthos spread his hands at Lief’s interrogative glance. “What? That was the game, wasn’t it?”

  Mid-rebuke, Lief gave up. “Yes, yes it was,” he agreed. “Now—”

  But the wizard had issues of his own. “You are supposed to be guarding Dion,” he snapped at Cyrene.

  “Tell that turd Harathes,” she shot back.

  “You’ve left her defenseless?”

  She goggled at him. “In the heart of the Holy City, Penthos. And with Harathes.”

  “That sounds like defenseless to me.”

  To Lief’s surprise she actually smirked at that. “Yeah, you’re right. In fact, if I were you, I’d go over there right now to protect her from Harathes. If you must set fire to him, start with the groin. I reckon it’s just dry tinder waiting to ignite.”

  “I’m going,” Penthos announced. He frowned at Lief. “Am I going?”

  “Be calm and don’t explode anything,” Lief told him. “But why not? If nothing else it’s likely to mean Dion gets moving all the sooner.”

  Penthos was plainly not sure how to take that, but he left anyway.

  “Not sure why it’s us three that keep getting lumped together,” Lief said easily, “but pull up a horrible chair.”

  “Firstly, it’s not ‘us three,’ it’s us two and that,” Cyrene told him. “Secondly, I am sitting somewhere else, very definitely on my own.”

  “I am not a that,” Nth stated.

  Cyrene’s eyes flicked between the two of them. “Did you teach it that? Have you been getting it drunk again?”

  “It—he won’t drink the beer here,” Lief told her. “Although he’s not missing much on that score.”

  Cyrene stared into the smoky lenses of Nth’s spectacles, and the creature stared right back at her, refusing to be cowed. Lief saw her lips twitch a couple of times, perhaps to give some order to it, but she said nothing, and at last sloped off to find her separate seat.

  Shortly afterward, they arrived. There were at least a dozen of them, heavily robed figures that trooped in with the divine certainty of people who knew that they were not part of the Heathen.

  The other drinkers got up and got out, as quickly as they possibly could. Lief would very happily have joined them, save that the newcomers were surrounding his table.

  “Hello,” he said uncertainly.

  The central figure cast back its cowl, revealing an impressively bearded face, craggy with authority, steel-eyed beneath beetling brows.

  “I am Abnasio, Supreme Prelate of the Brotherhood of the Dawn,” he announced conversationally.

  Lief was pointedly not looking at where Cyrene was, across the room, because this had suddenly become the sort of situation where a hidden ally might be rather useful. “It’s an honor, your Prelat’ryness,” he said cheerily. “How can we help you?”

  “We have no business with you, my child,” Abnasio said gently. “We know you are a man of the Light, despite many temptations. You have done the world a great service.”

  Lief wondered if this would turn out to be some bizarre anti-mugging, where he would get forcibly congratulated and rewarded against his will. “Ah, well, thanks.”

  “We will take matters from here,” Abnasio explained pleasantly. “Bring the creature.”

  Immediately, three or four of them had laid hands on Nth, lunging to try to pin him to his chair. The creature slapped them away—Lief heard at least one bone break—but then Abnasio had a disc of Armes flaming golden in his hand, and Nth recoiled away from it, strength gone from him, covering his face.

  “No, wait!” Lief shouted. “This isn’t what it looks like! We’re with Dion, you know, what all that business at the gates was for? This is all part of it—!”

  “We know, my child,” Abnasio told him. “We have long awaited the fulfilling of the prophecy. Our founding father, the prophet Gamograth, foresaw that one blessed by the Light would bring to the heart of Armes’s power the means to destroy Darvezian. It only remains for us to complete the ritual and extract the means of defeating the Dark One.”

  “No, wait, we did that—” Lief started, but one of Abnasio’s heavier followers backhanded him hard enough to spill him to the floor.

  “Bring the sacrifice,” Abnasio instructed, eyes gleaming with reflected Light. “Praise be to the Light of Armes, the battle will soon be won.”

  5: Dueling Dogmas

  CYRENE HURRIED OVER TO Lief even as the last of the Brotherhood heavies were bundling Enth out of the door. She hauled him to his feet, and dragged him out of the inn, to see the regimented mob that was the followers of Gamograth disappearing around a corner. Above them, the new sign proclaiming “Archbishop Prurient’s Home for Hopeless Moral Rejects” swung disconsolately.

  “We go after them,” Cyrene decided.

  “You go get Dion,” Lief corrected.

  “And then what? First find where they go, then one of us gets Dion.”

  The purposeful monks were marching quick-time to get clear of the moral quagmire that was the Heathen’s Quarter. Cyrene and Lief set off, keeping a turn behind, always in time to catch the last trailing cassock as it passed around a corner, using the night and
the shadows, here in the heart of the Light.

  Lief had to admit that Cyrene was good at this. He wasn’t entirely sure what she had spent her early life doing, but he had never before met a wilderness runner who was much good in a city. She had it, though, that indefinable ease that let a professional like Lief pass through the still waters of a built-up place without leaving so much as a ripple. Still crazy, though. Let Harathes lust after the poor woman all he liked, Lief was happy just to know he could rely on her skills.

  “When we get there,” he murmured, “I’m going in.”

  “Are you?” Plainly she had other ideas. They padded down another street: Armesion was a dead town at night, and surprisingly poorly lit. The locals simply did not care to be abroad after dark. I should do a stint here again, have the run of the place? Lief considered, but he had never liked the city. The sheer reek of righteousness about it meant that even lifting a fat purse from a fatter archprelate brought unwanted pangs of guilt.

  “You’re going to fetch Dion and the others. I’m going in to try and spring Enth.”

  “Really?” Still unconvinced.

  “Yes,” he hissed. “And for two good reasons. Firstly, I don’t wish to be kicking my Heathen boots in some minor cleric’s waiting room for three hours because they decide that any business brought by me must be too profane to be urgent. Secondly . . .”

  Abnasio and his Brotherhood of the Dawn were slowing, becoming more confident. They had been failing roundly at “spot the pursuers” before, but apparently they were on their home turf now and barely even glancing behind them. Possibly there were other watchers, but Lief and Cyrene were flitting from darkness to darkness like ghosts.

  “Secondly what?” Cyrene demanded.

  “I don’t trust you,” he said.

  She almost broke cover, with the outrage of that. “You slimy little turd,” she told him, sotto voce, “I’m a true servant of Dion, an enemy of Darkness, and you’re just a shabby little thief rubbish enough that you got caught with your hand in the poor-box. You don’t trust me?”