Salt, Sand, and Blood

intervened of his own accord. Had the threat from Duskhall arrived even one day later, he would have marched himself into an early grave. Gildmane expected hostility from Lord Blackheart, but not that he would put a bounty on his head. The boldness of the west. At least they make decent ale. He laughed at his own joke, then considered a final time whether he should turn in Lord Gregander’s letter to the clergy. It was blasphemy and treason to threaten a holy order, yet Trey thought it likely the saint would prefer the whole event covered up—just as he ignored Quiet Harbor. The priest there, Father Angelo of the Quiet Tower, had been requesting help for the past few years, only all his letters were addressed directly to the Temple Rock. He might as well have been throwing them into a fire pit, but all the better for us.

There was no better way to win the west in Trey’s mind than to drain their swamps. They’d ride in, armour shining, and rescue the Watchers and whatever villages they happen to come across while hunting the pagans. The bards will sing of it, Gildmane mused. The westerners do love their stories. He imagined how the songs would go, of white knights routing nests of serpents, slaying ferocious brackdragons—and other monsters, assuming the clerics’ reports were true: demons in the fog; horses torn to pieces; men returning dismembered, always to die from corruption and madness, babbling ceaselessly of the Great Dead Mother—just another reason to go and take the promising squires with them. Harpe and Leonhardt could use the experience, and Ogdon…

The captain lingered ruefully over Lord Austen’s signature. Had it not come with a substantial donation, Trey would have burned the letter as soon as it entered his office. But it would not serve his cause to ignore a benefactor, and it would certainly worsen it if the noble gossip besmirched the Cross as a band of jumped-up thieves. So he was stuck with Sylvertre, as requested by the skylord, at least until Sir Brandon could be freed from the Temple dungeons.

And how am I to manage that? he thought. It seemed an impossible task after the riots. Vaufnar’s death had sparked a fire that burned incessant for three days and three nights. Half of the Dim was destroyed, the cathedral ransacked, the accusers murdered—even their children. Gildmane stopped reading the reports after the second day. He wanted to believe that these people were worth protecting. Fortunately, there wouldn’t be any such reports on the road, nor bribes from skylords, nor child-fondling clergyman. No, all that would be left behind for Paladin Mathew Gardner and Sir Buckly Armstrong.

Trey locked the read letters in a drawer in his desk and began drafting orders for the knight and his paladin. He wrote quickly, outlining duties he knew Gardner was long familiar with. The paladin had been around since before Captain Acker, and if not for Ba’al, it would likely have been him sitting in Trey’s chair, changing fate with an iron pen and endless rolls of parchment. Gildmane wondered if that was how God saw the world, just a pile of complaints to be signed or burned. But he had no more time for musing. He, like God, must do his duty, so he sealed the orders and rose from his desk. He called for Leonhardt.

While Schirmer and his new squire were waiting for them in the yard, probably already ahorse given their northern blood, Trey had yet to even don his armour. And for that he would want Jael, but she seemed nowhere to be found. He called again, yet it was Ogdon who appeared at his office threshold. Leonhardt had gone to the Temple cloister, Sylvertre explained, but that the captain shouldn’t worry because he agreed to take over her burdens till they were on the road. Trey dismissed him forthwith, then went to donning his harness on his own. It proved trickier business than he remembered, his fingers frustrated with the knots of his cuirass and pauldrons. And in his fiddling, he fell into thinking, about how much more he valued Jael than he originally thought. She’d proven herself a competent squire, a fighter, and a firebrand hot enough to spark unrest in half the city. Why, then, has Paul yet to make a move? Vaufnar’s murder and the riots were more than enough justification for the saint to act. So why doesn’t he? What does he want with her? Influence? Control? It seemed to the captain that Paul had neither, that whatever he planned must be falling apart, like the streets of Pareo—like the country—pagans to the west, to the north, to the south, and in the east their seat of power, godless Mephisto.

Trey thought of the Shroud of Solum and the image it had shown him: a man with the mane of a lion, the Messiah, if the relic was to be believed—that it could truly be the end of days. Another musing he had no time to indulge, that the final prophecy was a piece of stained linen hidden between his stockings in the bottom of his wardrobe. He laughed, Maybe I’m the Messiah. My sigil is a lion, after all. Paul could be the False Prophet, and that just leaves the Anarch Prince.

The thoughts kept him smirking all the way to the Temple doors where at once he put them out of his head. They were blasphemous as they were absurd, and dangerous. If a deacon or vicar heard them from a slip of his tongue, in jest or true, it would give cause enough for his arrest, and then everything he’d worked so hard to produce the last nine years would vanish. It was one of the bishop’s wisdoms, “Words can be murderous.” And as he crossed south through the Temple vestibule, God kindly reminded him of that truth. For three armed men barred his path, all in crimson tabards and shirts of maille—the