Chapter 999: Snapping A Bow (Part Two)
"It wouldn’t have mattered, even if they were men who believed strongly enough to walk across a bed of coals, or generous enough to give all of their worldly wealth to the Church," Heila said, shaking her head at the clergymen from the Church.
"Your miracles aren’t miracles," Heila said flatly. "You aren’t ’conduits for the will of the Holy Lord of Light to flow through,’" she said, repeating an explanation that Ignatious had given her for how the Church was able to harness the power of sorcery without understanding it. "Your prayers and rituals are simple sorcery. The power you use has always come from your own bodies."
"Blasphemy!" Germot said, rising to his feet and pointing at Heila with trembling hands that could barely support the weight of the chains that bound him. "Complete and utter- OOF!"
Sybyll moved faster than anyone’s eyes could follow, and she struck out viciously with a fist to the middle-aged priest’s belly, driving the air from his lungs and doubling him over in pain.
-CRASH!-
The force of Sybyll’s blow was so great that it sent the Head Priest sailing through the air until he crashed into the table of refreshments, sending pitchers of wine and ale along with rows of neatly organized goblets clattering to the ground and soaking the priest’s robes in a torrent of alcohol.
Cossot and Roseen both gave startled cries, rushing out of the way of the flying priest and narrowly avoiding getting doused by the same flood of alcohol. For a moment, both women looked at each other, as if to make sure they were both fine, and then over at the collapsed priest, lying among the scattered goblets and the broken bits of table.
"I, I’ll fetch something to clean this up," Cossot said quickly, once she was certain that Roseen was fine. Before she could take more than two steps, however, Dame Sybyll’s voice froze her in her tracks.
"Leave him like that, Cossot," Sybyll said with an edge to her voice that commanded instant obedience, though she followed her words with a glance that was a bit more gentle and a gesture for the two women to move to the other side of the dais, away from the crumpled priest.
"I told ye ta’ mind yer tongue, Germot," Sybyll said sharply, without giving any respect to the man’s title. "Once more an’ I’ll tear it out," she said before the air around her seemed to shimmer as she vanished, reappearing in her seat atop the gilded throne. "Go on, Heila," she said, smiling sweetly and revealing her fangs to everyone else who was bound in chains. "There won’a be another interruption."
"R-right," Heila said as she fought down the reflex to rush over to the Head Priest’s side and check on his wounds. Already, she could see a rivulet of blood trickling down Germot’s scalp from where he’d hit his head. He looked dazed and disoriented as he lay in a growing puddle of ale and wine, but if she did that, then Germot would have succeeded in dragging things out even further. Part of her wondered if the priest was doing it deliberately after Sybyll’s comment about there only being a few hours left before sunrise.
So, even though it made her uncomfortable to leave the man lying there, bleeding and barely conscious, she did as Dame Sybyll asked and returned to the discussion about Loman’s sorcery.
"What I’m saying," Heila said as she turned back to Loman’s ragged figure. "Is that the priests of the Church believe that they are harvesting the ’faith’ of their followers. In reality, they’re draining away their lives. Just like all sorcery, if the amounts are small, then no one suffers for it, but what Loman did tonight killed two men the instant he fired his first arrow."
"His rain of arrows was even more devious," she continued. "Whoever developed the ritual, whether it was this Exemplar Domas, the current Sovereign of the Stars, or one of their predecessors who handed it down to future generations, they understood its lethality to the person who dared to use it," Heila said in a voice that dripped with condemnation.
"What, what do you mean, Lady Heila?" Diarmuid asked. He felt like many of the things he’d believed all of his life were suddenly uncertain, as if he’d only known a portion of the truth and believed blindly that he understood much more of it than he thought.
He’d always known the Church kept secrets from the faithful... some knowledge was dangerous after all. But the things the witch was saying would be considered High Heresy by the Church if they were lies. And if they were true, then he had no idea what to call them.
"Inquisitor Diarmuid," Heila said flatly as she looked at the dark-haired man whom she’d come to respect as a genuine seeker of truth. "The reason that the arrows struck indiscriminately when they fell in the plaza is because Lord Loman was no longer connected to the sorcery once he completed the ritual."
"If he had been," she explained. "It would have siphoned his life away as well. Instead, once he ’loosed his arrow’, the ritual fed off the acolytes who powered it, and it would have consumed every last one of their lives before it came to an end."
"So, whether or not Lord Loman was aware of what his sorcery would do, the person who designed the ritual most certainly was," she declared. "So, in a way, I agree with Lord Jalal. Loman was an arrow, fired from Exemplar Domas’s bow. If there’s an argument to be made that he isn’t a murderer, it’s that his teacher gave him sorcery that he didn’t understand, intending for a tragedy like this to unfold."
"No!" Loman insisted. "No, Exemplar Domas would never do that! If there’s someone to blame, if anyone is at fault, it’s me for... for having lost my way," he said as he sank to his knees. "I’m lost," he sobbed as everything seemed to crash down on him at once. "So very lost... and I don’t know if the stars can guide me home again."
He didn’t know when it had started. Things had seemed so simple when he followed Exemplar Domas, learning everything the man had to teach and hoping one day that his vision would extend as far beyond the horizon as his teacher’s had.
He thought that he had found his true calling when his brother, Owain, murdered Ashlynn Blackwell on the night of their wedding. He thought that he’d been sent back to Lothian March to expose the truth, to reveal his brother’s crime, and to take his brother’s place as the next Marquis.
Then, after struggling for months to become the sort of man his father and the people of Lothian would accept as their ruler, he thought he had realized the error of his ways. He donned the black and silver robes of a Disciple once again and stood against the demons to protect the people of Hanrahan and the entire march from the army of the Crimson Knight.
He’d been so certain as he stood atop the tower and drew his Bow of Stars against the Demon Lord of Airgead Mountain... He’d been ready to strike the blow that would purge a threat from the lands that his brother and his father before him had never managed to kill. He was certain when he let that arrow fly that he had found his purpose in life.
And now, all of it lay in ruins. Acolytes had died so he could loose that arrow, and it had only taken an arm from his enemy. More men had died for him to unleash a Rain of Judgment, a storm of arrows that was supposed to fall with the Holy Lord of Light’s own judgment, killing foes and culling the faithless from their own ranks at the same time...
But now, even Inquisitor Diarmuid looked at him like a man who had gone astray. A vampire sat upon the gilded throne of one of his father’s vassals, and she judged him a murderer... and he couldn’t even bring himself to say that she was wrong.