Chapter 974: An Unexpected Response
"The Lothians will arrive to tear you down from that throne, and they’ll bring the full might of the church with them to do it! So count your days, you demon temptress, because you don’t have many left!"
Ian Hanrahan’s defiant warning of rescue and retribution unleashed a wave of whispers and mutters among the crowd, but if the captive baron expected his words to serve as any kind of rallying cry, he was doomed to be disappointed.
The Church had already sent some of their mightiest miracle workers. A Templar with a Holy Light Blade, an Inquisitor, and the Disciple of an Exemplar. Of those three, one suffered such a crippling defeat that he still lay in a healers tent. According to some rumors, his eyes had been burned away and he could no longer bear to be in the presence of his own Holy Light Blade.
Meanwhile, the greatest hope the people had of finding salvation tonight, the Disciple of the Exemplar, stood bound in chains before them, his robes hanging in bloody tatters as proof that even he couldn’t resist the demons. And when it came to the Inquisition... Inquisitor Diarmuid’s presence on the dais made it clear that the only path the Church had managed to find through this nightmare was surrender and capitulation to the demon’s demands.
Compared to the ’saviors’ they had already lost, what more could the Church send without dispatching reinforcements all the way from the Holy City?
Head Priest Germot doubted there would be any rescue at all before the soldiers from across the sea arrived to take up the banner of a Holy War. Lothian March was too far away, and the fall of one of the baronies on the very edge of the Kingdom of Gaal wasn’t consequential enough to make the old men in the Holy City send one of the few Exemplars they had.
When it came to relying on the Church to send aid... at best, help was five or six months away. At worst, events in Hanrahan Barony would cause people to rethink the Holy War, bolstering their forces further inland before marching west more than a year from now. By then, Germot was afraid that the Church wouldn’t come as rescuers, but instead as purifiers.
Humans who were captured by demons that managed to escape, or had the good fortune to be rescued, had a chance to safely return to life in the Kingdom of Gaal. The Inquisition would examine such people thoroughly and so long as they were appropriately thankful to the Holy Lord of Light for delivering them salvation from demon hands and showed no sign of embracing heretical thoughts, they could go about their lives as usual.
But the scale of what Dame Sybyll had done was utterly unprecedented. She hadn’t come to take prisoners, she had come to sit on the throne as their ruler! Within a month, anyone still living in the walls of Hanrahan Town or on the farms that surrounded it, would likely be declared a heretic for choosing to live under demonic rule.
When the Church finally sent people to Hanrahan Barony, they wouldn’t be giving the common folks their old lives back... they would ’liberate’ them in fire and blood, burning out the heresy until there was no one left alive who had willingly served the demons.
Sir Thorryn’s expression was nearly as grim as Head Priest Germot’s when he considered how the Lothians would respond to this nightmare. Perhaps Bors Lothian would send out his armies to retake Hanrahan Barony but doing so would require rallying the other barons, assembling soldiers and preparing for a siege. Organizing that sort of campaign would take months at best, and help wouldn’t arrive until the snows melted and the roads were usable again.
More likely, Bors Lothian would send a small raiding force to rescue his son, or perhaps he would even bargain with the demons to see Loman freed. But as much as Sir Thorryn hated the notion of living under the rule of a murderous demon, he struggled to believe that the forces of the March could do anything against the powerful demon army that had conquered their town in the span of a few hours.
Only a few people seemed to take Ian Hanrahan’s threat seriously, and Roseen was one of those people.
"Cossot," she whispered as she clutched her friend’s hand, hiding herself behind the taller woman and looking at the shackled baron in genuine fear. "If, if the Church comes, and they find out we were serving a dem-, er, serving Dame Sybyll..."
"Then she’ll protect us," Cossot whispered, giving her friend’s hand a reassuring squeeze. She hadn’t taken her eyes off Dame Sybyll the entire time, and the crimson haired knight didn’t look the least bit concerned about the former baron’s threat. "She’s kind to common people," Cossot said. "And even if the Lothians send their army and she has to leave her home again... I, I think I’d go with her."
"Cossot!" Roseen hissed. "You can’t be serious!"
"You heard what the old baron said," Cossot said, finally turning her gaze on her friend. "When Dame Sybyll accused him of wanting to use her body for ’entertainment’, he said she should have accepted the offer," Cossaid said with the first sparks of genuine fury flickering in her eyes. "If he gets his throne back, do you think it would be good for us to be here? Don’t say you’ve never seen him looking at you that way, I know you have!" she added pointedly.
"But, but if the Lothians and the Church come for her," Roseen stammered only to trail off when she saw Cossot shaking her head.
"She waited all these years to come home," Cossot said, turning her admiration-filled gaze back to Dame Sybyll. "Now that she’s finally here... I don’t think she’ll let anyone drive her away again."
Across the great hall, there were similar murmurs. Many who had seen the demons attack first-hand expressed similar doubts about whether or not the Lothians and the church could truly rescue them. And a small but growing number of people, like Cossot, were starting to wonder if they might be better off now Dame Sybyll had taken the throne. After all, if there was one thing her ’tale of woe’ made clear, it was that she understood painfully well how hard the life of the common folk could be, and just how much some of them suffered under the rule of distant and uncaring noblemen.
But if the lackluster response from the people of Hanrahan disappointed Ian Hanrahan, the response from the ’demons’ in the room absolutely infuriated him.
-CHUFF CHUFF CHUFF CHUFF CHUFF-
-FRRRRRRUUUUUP FRUUU FRUUU FRRRRRRUUUUP FRUUU FRUUU-
-AAAAAAAWWWOOOOOOOO-
Everyone seated near the ’demon’ section of the great hall shifted nervously in their seats and some fell over as they scrambled to their feet, tripping over themselves in their haste to escape the demons. To a few, it sounded like a quarter of the great hall had turned into a barnyard filled with howling dogs, squawking birds and snorting pigs.
To others, it sounded like Ian Hanrahan had succeeded in provoking the fear and fury of the demons when he threatened them with counter-attack by the combined forces of the Church and the Lothian March.
It wasn’t until the tiniest demon of all, a mousy woman who stood only a few feet tall, joined in with a light, musical -TEE HEE HEE HEE- that the people sitting closest to the demons realized the demons weren’t angry or shouting...
They were laughing.