content to wait
Svavar endured. He had suffered the world long enough to know that every misery eventually ends.
These days, almost every day, Svavar saw Arlensul, unnoticed by anyone else, lurking around this camp of men with dead souls. He and she were joined in an unspoken conspiracy.
29. Connectens at Sea and Ashore
It was a cloudless day near summer's end. Gulls swooped and cursed. Harbor water stank. Brother Candle watched Connecten fighters board a dozen big Plataduran ships, the most that could be accommodated at Sheavenalle's docks. Navayan and Plataduran vessels stood out in the harbor, among coasters and fishermen evicted so the expeditionary fleet could load. Some of those had arrived already engorged with Navayan engineers, sappers, artillerists, and siege specialists.
Brother Candle wondered if King Peter considered this a rehearsal for Sublime's beloved Crusade to the Holy Lands.
Maybe. There was something going on. Peter had been doing well in Direcia, often allying himself with a lesser Praman prince to overcome a strong one. Why suddenly shift attention and key resources to fighting overseas? Peter was honorable, and dedicated to his God, but there had to be more to this than honor and love of his Queen's brother.
The Connectens boarded reluctantly. The Unbeliever sailors wore strange garb. They gabbled in a dialect that was a cousin of Connecten but so weird it went over the heads of soldiers taking ship only to avoid having to walk six hundred miles.
No one knew yet where they would debark. Sublime and Johannes Blackboots had not finalized their plans. Or, if they had, word had not been relayed to the troops.
Count Raymone paused beside Brother Candle. “Time to work up your nerve and go aboard, Master. They're already singling up the lines.'
Brother Candle sighed. His few possessions were aboard. He was not eager to follow. His reluctance was shared by his companions, each a respected cleric volunteer. Every religion in the Connec was represented in the expeditionary force, including Connecten Praman slingers from Terliaga. Their presence baffled Brother Candle more than did that of several dozen supposedly pacifist Seekers After Light.
The Plataduran Pramans made everyone uneasy. The Chaldareans could not understand why they were allied with Peter against their religious brethren. Though Chaldarean fought Chaldarean every day, across the Chaldarean world.
Brother Candle's companions were the men who had gone to Brothe.
Count Raymone had accomplished marvels in carrying out his orders from the Duke. Although he was in Castreresone when told that he would move his force by sea, he reached Sheavenalle before the Direcian fleet arrived.
The journey was Brother Candle's first aboard anything bigger than a ferryboat and his first on salt water. It was also his first aboard a platform that rolled and bucked and plunged on even me clearest, calmest day. A platform that never stopped creaking and groaning, muttering and moaning, not for a second, nor did it ever fail to make the horizon stand up at strange and terrible angles. The smell was unlike anything he had experienced before, combining barracks, stable, tar and caulk, sea, and frightful cooking, in a mix that ought to revolt the scavenger gulls following the fleet.
The sailors told him he was being too sensitive. Taro was a new ship. She had not yet begun to develop real character.
The cooking generated the worst odors.
The ship's cook served no one but the Plataduran crew. Everyone else cooked on the main deck, amidst the mob, the working sailors, and the daring robber gulls. There was no hot food when the seas roughened up. The Platadurans did not trust Connecten landlubbers not to set the ship on fire.
Sailors feared nothing so much as fire at sea.
The journey was more than just physically uncomfortable. Brother Candle was conscious constantly of the proximity and curiosity of lesser elements of the Instrumentalities of the Night. That was unnerving. Life in antiquity must have been equally uncomfortable. Man had come a long way with the slow task of taming the world.
His touch did not yet lie heavy on the sea.
Off the coastal island of Armun, the one-time summer resort of Brothen emperors, Brother Candle gathered the religious spokesmen for the Plataduran crew and the Terliagan slingers. He was distracted. Armun was far south of Brothe, not far north of Shippen. Meaning they were off the coast of Alameddine, approaching that kingdom's frontier with Calzir. And the fleet showed no sign of turning inshore.
The amateur Praman priests remained wary but Brother Candle had worn them down some by insisting that he just wanted to learn.
'I'm wondering where al-Prama stands on the Instrumentalities of the Night. They never cooperate with dogma. They revel in contradicting doctrine.'
These Praman chaplains were not inclined toward philosophical discussion. They were practical men interested only in supplying minimal spiritual support to men working far from home. They could perform the basic sacraments of their faith. And that was their limit
Brother Candle held an abiding interest in the old eternal questions. Did the minds of men create the gods and the lesser things of the night by shaping the power from the Wells of Ihrian and elsewhere? Or did the Instrumentalities of the Night feed upon that power to establish belief in the minds of those who beheld them?
The chicken or the egg riddle, some called it.
The debate often devolved into speculation about what the world would be like if there were no Wells gushing raw magical power.
For Brother Candle that was a question easily answered.
The Wells of Ihrian were not the only wellsprings of power, just the biggest and most concentrated. There were numerous smaller, remote wells where the power leaked into the world, though the flow there was more often a seep than a gush.
The calculations of generations of sorcerers found that 70 percent of the supernatural power entering the world did so within the Holy Lands. It was a big, strange world deeply scarred by the power, habitable because the power kept the ice at bay.
The world grew darker, colder, and stranger as you moved away from the magical leaks, into the bizarre realms of legend.
There were further, more troublesome questions. If human imagination created the gods and the vectors of the night, then who created Man?
Brother Candle could not conceive of a world without sentient beings to appreciate the Instrumentalities of the Night.
The Praman priests were laypeople. They saw sophistry as the work of the Adversary. They had learned the truth when they were young. No preacher who was a heretic within his own false faith would seduce them with Hell-born free thinking.
Brother Candle discovered that these Pramans believed pretty much what most Chaldareans believed. The significant point of conflict was who got to claim responsibility for the glorious revelation. The Holy Founders from Chaldar in the Holy Lands? Or the later Founding Family, from Jezdad in Peqaa?
One Praman observed, 'The real contention is idol worship.'
'Idol worship?' Brother Candle asked. 'I'm a long way separated from my Episcopal childhood but I don't remember any idols.'
'Chaldarean churches are filled with them.'
'Those aren't idols. They're statues. Images of the Founders and the saints, not the Founders and the saints themselves.'
'They're graven images. Isn't that an idol? By definition? Not the god himself but an image of the god that's
