Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial-Chapter 8Arc 7: : The Friar’s Tale

They’d started cleaning up the bodies by the time we returned, piling them outside in the cold where the frigid air would keep them from rotting. I tried not to think too hard about that.

Of Eilidh, I saw no sign other than a pool of blood already drying by the wall. Neither did I find the Keeper or Vicar at first. Many of the guests who’d been present when the attack started and some of the whores and hired hands were gathered in one big group, talking. They quieted when they saw me, and more than a few wore hard looks. Sans was with them.

“Do not mind them,” Saska muttered to me. “They know what you once were, and what you are now, and they feel resentment. They believe you are a threat to this place.”

“Then why do you and Falstaff keep letting me back in here?” I asked.

“The Keeper believes you are useful. He is more wary of the Credo Ferrum and the faeries, and feels your mixed loyalties make you a potential friend.”

“I’ll never be that man’s friend,” I said with more heat than I meant to.

Saska’s eyes danced. “Because you watched him fondle me while you still thought I was a helpless waif? That was a fun day. The look on your face!”

I scowled, which made her grin wider. That disconcerted me. Shouldn’t she be more wary now that I’d caught a glimpse of her true form? But she acted normal, like she didn’t care. Perhaps she didn’t, or simply didn’t fear me.

She’d sent a member of the Choir running, so I highly doubted she feared me.

I couldn’t share in the attempt at humor. I’d just stood by while a Thing of Darkness had wounded one of the God-Queen’s own angels. The ramifications of that…

Saska ushered me into one of the rooms behind the bar. I recognized it as the same private lounge where I’d met her originally. The Keeper waited inside, seated on a couch while Renuart Kross sat on another of the seats arrayed around a low table.

It was the first time I’d ever seen the pretender knight out of his gray armor, ignoring the times he’d taken more fiendish forms. He was stripped down to breeches and a simple shirt, with linen strips covering most of his exposed flesh. He looked haggard, scarred, and old. I’d always placed his apparent age in the late forties, but he could have been a decade more just then. The gray in his hair looked starker.

“About time,” the Keeper snapped. “Where have you—”

He saw Saska and shot to his feet. “What happened?”

The woman waved a lazy hand. “I am fatigued, but I will recover.”

Falstaff wore an expression I’d never seen on him before, and never thought him capable of. Some mix of worry, sympathy, anger, and doubt. He quickly masked it, but the effect looked brittle. “You need rest. And food.” freёweɓnovel.com

“I will hunt later.” She nodded to Kross. “We must conduct business. This man has some questions to answer.”

Falstaff slumped back into his seat. Saska slipped past me and settled into the crook of the lanky man’s arm, snuggling close. Having glimpsed what she truly looked like, the domestic image it posed only made me feel more uncomfortable. The fact she hadn’t changed and remained covered in blood and the remnants of a ruined dress didn’t help either, though the Keeper seemed not to care.

I did not sit. We all turned to face the crowfriar. He looked up and set his jaw.

“Don’t even think about clamming up again,” Falstaff growled. “You started this mess. Why are these Church men after you?”

“It’s not just that,” I said with some hesitance. “There was an Onsolain with them, calling the shots.”

Falstaff started. Kross’s face turned ashen, which surprised me. “You didn’t know?” I asked him.

“I thought it one of the priors,” he admitted slowly. “Some of them are very dangerous. Those you encountered in the capital were bureaucrats, men and women put there to present a tame face to the Emperor. The ones who truly command the Inquisition are… quite a different group.”

“So you didn’t know about the angel?” I insisted.

He hesitated. Saska shifted against her partner. It was a small movement, casual, but had an effect. Kross squeezed his eyes shut and seemed to deflate.

“It is complicated, and you won’t believe most of it, Alken.”

“Try me.”

“Very well.” He opened his flint gray eyes and looked at me. “After you killed Horace Laudner, the Priory fell into turmoil. It was a great scandal, the revelation that the Grand Prior was conspiring with occult forces. We had some of your allies on the Ardent Round to thank for that. The Emperor’s southern wife, for one, and the Duchess of Gardend.” ṝÅＮỖΒËṩ

Rosanna and Faisa. They’d never told me, but I wasn’t surprised they’d been behind the smear campaign against the priors.

“But Horace and his circle wanted something that was always going to be too reliant on politics and popular support.” Kross leaned forward and rested his arms on his knees. “They wanted the influence to centralize the Church, create a true theocracy like back during the Crusades.”

“And your masters saw an opportunity to supplant our priests for your own purposes.” My jaw tightened.

“Indeed!” Kross’s eyes flashed in irritation. “Now are you going to let me finish my tale, or will you insist on interrupting every time you want to remind me just how evil I am?”

I glared at him, but kept silent. Saska threw me a look that might have been sympathetic. Or mocking.

Kross blew out a breath and continued. “The original plan was to slowly, over the course of generations, induct the clergy into our operation. Through contract, manipulation, coercion, and the scouting of individuals sympathetic to our methods, we would eventually own the priesthood. No doubt there would be conflict, and the Choir of Heavensreach would eventually intervene, but they are divided, distracted, wounded, and leaderless. They are unable to conduct the war as they must, so we had to take the reins.”

“The war?” I asked. That sounded familiar.

“The war,” Kross said in an insistent tone. “The only war that matters.”

He did not elaborate. I chose not to interrupt again. Another had spoken similar words not long ago, and I’d thought about them often since.

“My mission’s goal was to unify the Church here in Urn and prepare it to once again be a true instrument against the real enemy,” Kross explained. “Against the Traitor Magi, all of them, the Lords of Ruin, the legions of heretics and demons and hordes of pretenders, and all other manner of evil intent on burning all Creation into a useless wasteland.” He took a breath. “You may not like it, Alken, but Orkael was once vassal to the Throne of God. It may be a brutal tool, but Hell is an instrument of order.”

He spread his hands out, growing more flamboyant as his narrative progressed. “This land was meant to be a fortress against the Adversary. Why do you think the Onsolain tolerate all the wars and infighting amongst your nobility? The Choir wants warlords. They like your leaders as zealous brutes half a step removed from the barbarians they were before the Exodus. They want you mired in faith and ideals of crusade. They want an army.”

“So why do we need you?” I asked. “If you and the Choir are on the same side?”

Kross snorted. “We are not. The Choir here in Urn is a sad shadow of the original, fractured and confused. We are here because they are doing this badly. The truth is, half the current crop of so called angels were in fact the pagan godlings who inhabited this world before the God-Queen arrived. They have little interest in a divine crusade or some distant cosmic war for the dominance of Creation. They mire themselves in their old habits and butt heads with the Heir’s original followers, all while more cracks appear in the barriers that guard this world and the real conflict spills through.”

I glanced at Falstaff and Saska. They were listening, and did not look confused or ready to argue. Almost like none of this was news to them.

“So you’re here to put things to right?” I asked with unmasked skepticism. “Show the Choir how it’s done?”

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Kross, or Vicar — whatever I was supposed to actually call him — seemed to grow more subdued. “We worked independently for a while. We believed it would take generations to make a difference. But the situation in Urn is far worse than our intelligence led us to believe. The elven realm lost, the Archon who was tasked by the God-Queen to act as steward in Her absence murdered by his own knights. Rebels and heretics scattered across the land, and a tenuous and easily broken peace held together by a tired old soldier the only thing preventing total ruin.”

He painted such a depressed picture of my homeland. And yet… I couldn’t find the words to argue.

Kross leaned forward and lowered his voice. “And above all, a Demon Prince released into the very heart of this land. Do you even know who currently sits in the ruins of Elfhome?”

I hesitated before answering, realizing I knew little besides a name and a face that haunted my nightmares. “Ager Roth.”

Saska shivered. Falstaff’s jaw visibly tightened.

“He is a warlord of the same armies that sacked Heaven and drove the God-Queen and Her followers into these lands,” Kross said. “A general, and a contender for the Throne. I have no clue why he appeared when Tuvon was killed. He must have been waiting on the other side, stranded in the places between perhaps or simply waiting for this opportunity. The Archon was both a keeper of seals that protect this world from the greater weight of the Wending Roads, and he was himself a seal. When he died, those barriers broke and the Gorelion came through. It is quite possible that was the goal, though I cannot say why the Alder Knights would want such a thing.”

Neither could I. That day had been madness. Had the other knights even known what they did, or had Reynard and his demons tricked them? “What do you mean the greater weight of theWending Roads?”

Falstaff picked up the explanation. “The Wend that touches this sphere is a closed system. It has been for most of a thousand years now. The God-Queen of Urn wanted to stop all the madness spilling through from Onsolem, so she took the Roads and tangled them up, closed the way to the Divine Kingdom and isolated this world. Trick is, now we’re all trapped here with no way to reach more distant lands. It’s why the Sheols were made. Sanctums were needed to hold the souls of the dead since all the true afterlives were lost in the bargain. Draubard is the largest of these.”

“Not true,” Kross said. “Orkael has that honor.”

Falstaff waved a dismissive hand. “Largest here. In any case, it was all meant to be temporary. But the war’s spilling through, this world is getting more crowded with corpses and ghosts and demons and godlings who don’t know what the fuck to do, and there’s no sign of anyone’s great savior.”

Everyone fell quiet for several minutes. I sensed they were giving me time to absorb everything. I took it gratefully, feeling like a man in the desert starved for water. I’d spent my life fighting petty wars and petty villains. This all felt so much bigger.

“You see how high the stakes are,” Kross said as though reading my mind. “The war for Heaven has come to your little backwater bundle of petty kingdoms, Alken Hewer, and you must either adjust to its gravity or be crushed. Ager Roth is a weapon of armageddon. We do not know why he has been so quiet, but it is only a matter of time before he acts. We cannot afford patience or caution.”

I closed my eyes. “We’re getting off topic. What happened after I killed Horace?”

Kross nodded, acknowledging my point. “The first thing that happened was that I tried to kill Lias Hexer.”

I startled at that. “What?”

The devil laughed. “What did you expect? He is a wild card, uncontrollable and harboring his own complex ambitions. In other words, a threat. Oraise ended up being the balancing factor between us. For someone with no powers either occult or auratic, that man is very dangerous. Horace groomed him as an asset from an early age.”

“So Lias is still alive?” I asked, not sure what answer I wanted.

Kross nodded. “We came to an accord. The three of us returned to Durelyon, the traditional seat of the Priory of the Arda, and there your old friend… convinced the other priors to put him in charge. He operated behind the scenes with me and Oraise, restructuring, planning. I believe he felt guilty for what he’d done, but Master Hexer is also a very practical man. He was intent on making the best of it.”

“And how did he do that?”

“He had two things at his disposal,” Kross explained. “All the stored knowledge of the priors, their resources, which included both an army of priests and the priorguard as a militant force. And he had us.” He placed a hand to his chest. “The crowfriars. Of course, my brother and sister friars did not trust the wizard. Neither did I, but as I worked with him I began to see something they did not.”

He trailed off, compelling me to speak again. “What was that?”

Kross frowned. “Hope, perhaps? Respect? Even admiration.” He shrugged. “Lias sees how broken the world is and wants to do something about it. He refuses to rely on gods and angels to save humanity. He is an unabashed iconoclaste who wishes for humanity to take the reins of its own fate. Foolish, and yet… he can be convincing.”

“…He can be that,” I agreed after a moment’s pause.

“With the Priory’s resources and occult expertise, Lias saw an opportunity to fill the gap left by the loss of the Alder Table. A new order of knowledgeable, potent soldiers capable of facing any demon or supernatural threat. We recruited, sought expertise in… unconventional places. Master Hexer and I managed to convince Chamael to assist us, which helped give our operation a certain legitimacy.”

“How did you manage that?” Saska asked. “I would think the Cupbearer less than inclined to cooperate. He is considered among the most dutiful of all the Onsolain to their queen’s memory.”

“Exactly so,” Kross agreed. “The Saint of Blood is a compassionate spirit, and harbors many of his own doubts as to the unity of his pantheon. Lias insisted on a balancing factor against the less gentle methods of my own realm. Chamael mitigates the suffering of the Penitents, allowing them to function without being mere hollow shells of torment.”

A cold feeling found its way into my chest. “Lias is responsible for restoring the Knights Penitent?”

Kross did not let me down easy. “Yes. I believe he intended to model them after you. The originals, the ones who were made by the last Inquisition during the plague years, were tortured for sadism as much as zealotry, drawn from perceived heretics and the castoffs of society. It was all very arbitrary. But those truly spurred by their sins, given strength by their desire for redemption? They can be mighty indeed, if given the proper tools.”

I didn’t know what to say. The idea I’d inspired those wretches made me want to vomit.

Kross fell quiet, but this time it lacked the air of dramatic expectancy and instead seemed more pensive. The crowfriar’s eyes slid from my face.

“To explain the next part, you must understand something else. When the God-Queen tangled the Wending Roads, Orkael was cut off. There were members of my order in Edaea at the time, and other more distant regions. We worked for centuries to regain contact, and only managed it thanks to a particular artifact.”

The Keeper’s eyes widened. “No… you’re serious? I always wondered how you bastards managed it, but I just assumed…”

“What?” Kross asked with a faint, fatigued smile. “That we sacrificed a thousand newborn babies? Burned ten thousand holy totems? Brute force can only get you so far. We managed to find the smallest of incisions, an old wound in the Roads still latched to this world. From there, all we needed was to get a signal through.”

My head was starting to hurt. “What the goring hell are you two talking about?”

Falstaff’s face had twisted into a scowling mask. Something was bothering him deeply. “Every crowfriar mission in every land Orkael decides to infiltrate is entrusted with a device. It’s the Credo’s most treasured possession, their holy grail, their guiding angel and their iron shackle all at once.”

Kross’s smile turned thin. “You spent too much time listening to Ignatz. It is a tool. Nothing more.”

“It’s a fragment of a god,” Falstaff hissed. “Only a fool would think of it as a mere tool.”

“Can someone explain to me what the fuck everyone is talking about?” I asked in exasperation. So much for all my months playing at being a scholar. Maybe I should have brought Lisette along after all.

“It is a scroll,” Kross said. “Fashioned from skin and held on a roll of iron. We refer to it as a Zoscian Codex, or a Volumen of Zos.”

“It was made by the first king of Hell,” Falstaff said. “He was an archangel of Onsolem a very, very long time ago. He founded the Iron Tribunal, dug the first pits that held demonkind, beat back the Abyss during an ancient incursion. He wrote the Laws of Hell, and over time they were added to. The denizens of Hell call it Zos.”

Kross nodded at his former compatriot. “Every edict of devil kind, every bargain struck for a soul, every order given and nation claimed, it’s all inscribed there. Think of Zos like the god of Hell, only it’s not an individual but a construct. The Iron Tribunal reads its will and enacts it. A Zoscian is a piece of it, entrusted to a mission of crowfriars so they can forge new contracts.”

It was then I recalled what the angels of Hell called themselves. The Zosite. They were the disciples of Zos, which was not so much a being as this eldritch library of rules and contracts. It seemed so strange to me, to worship raw information like that instead of a monarch or similar leader you could relate to. I’d much rather feel some affection for the one who told me where to wield my blade.

“Which is where the trouble started,” Kross stated darkly. “The Zoscian has power. If you know the script, the language of Zos, then you can alter it, even add rules to it. There are stopgaps, ways in which it protects itself and we protect it, but to one who knows what they are doing…”

I realized the implication. “You can bend the powers of Hell to your will. Change how it works.”

“You can open the gaols that hold the demons,” Falstaff said. “Other things too, but that’s among the biggest risks.”

I sensed we were drawing closer to why Chamael and the Knights Penitent were hunting Kross. “So you have this thing? Here, in Urn?”

“It’s not exactly something I carry around,” the crowfriar said in a dry voice. “But it can be summoned. You saw it once already.”

I remembered. The thing Horace Laudner had tried to sign before I’d chopped his head off. The scroll Lias put his blood on that night. “What’s going on, Vicar? Why is the Priory hunting you?”

“The new Grand Prior believes I have betrayed him,” Kross said. “He has good reason to think so.”

“Lias?” I asked.

But Kross shook his head. “No. Lias Hexer did not want such an exposed role. He preferred to operate quietly, an advisor to the priests. The new Grand Prior is another. He seemed safe at first, amicable to our plans and good at the political side of our initiative, much less ambitious than Horace yet just as willing to dispense with convention to gain results. In truth, I dismissed him. A mistake.”

“What happened?” I asked.

Kross glanced at Falstaff, a look of worry marking his weathered features for a moment. He hesitated, then told us.

“The Zoscian has been stolen. Lias Hexer has gone missing, and is considered the most likely culprit. The Priory believes I helped him do it. I am not the one they are truly hunting.”

He met my eyes. “They are trying to find your old comrade before he uses the key to Hell’s power to do something that cannot be reversed. I have been trying to find you, Alken, because I need you to help me track him down.”