Chapter 1400: The scepter and the sword(1)

Torchlight flickered and danced across the damp stone, bathing the small chapel in the east wing of the royal palace of Yarzat in a warm and shifting glow. It sat six chambers removed from the grand hall, where petitioners and flatterers and hypocrites shuffled through each day beneath the shadow of the throne, and the distance between the two rooms was the best thing about it.

The floor was laid with cold flags of slate, though the statues of the divine had been carved from pristine coloured marble, which said something about where the money had gone and what the builders had thought worth warming.

Alpheo sat alone upon one of the smooth oak pews, his dark eyes wandering slowly across the holy pantheon.

There was the Weaver, her stone veil draped across her face while her unseen hands spun out the threads of fate for people who would never see her working. Beside her sat the All-Knower, marble brow furrowed above an open and entirely blank tome. Farther along stood the Father Protector, wrapped in a humble sprawling cloak that concealed everything save his right hand, the index finger pointed sternly downward toward the knees of anyone with sense enough to be praying.

There ought to have been a fifth figure standing somewhere in the shadows. The Sea-God. But a man would be hard pressed to find his likeness in any temple across the principality. With sea wolves and corsairs raiding the coasts in his name every summer, most southern folk found it more comfortable to behave as though there had only ever been four.

Below the pointing finger of the Father knelt an elderly man, hands clasped tight in prayer, head bowed in submission. A pair of velvet cushions spared his frail knees the worst of the unforgiving stone. The torchlight caught his thin moving lips and his sagging skin as whispered petitions bubbled endlessly out of his throat.

Alpheo saw no reason to trouble the old man’s peace with matters of state, so he leaned back against the bench and let his gaze drift upward.

For every beat his eyes rested on the other divine figures, they lingered three times as long on the Warrior of Wrath. The statue’s carved armour concealed a formidable frame, broadsword raised high in an eternal strike, shield held low at the waist, face hidden entirely behind a cold iron visor.

The Warrior. Patron saint of lords and princes and conquerors.

Farmers and crofters had little reason to burn candles for the Warrior of Wrath. It was the highborn who invoked his name, and they did it to lend divine purpose to their slaughter, which is a service no god ever agreed to provide.

Yet, like so many holy things, his true nature had been bent out of shape by the men who claimed the loudest kinship with him. The Warrior was never meant to be a god of blood and stacked skulls. He was the champion of the fighting spirit, a holy fire meant not for wanton massacre but to shield the defenceless when the storm came down on them.

He was not the god of soldiers and sellswords. He was the god of those who fought, which is not at all the same thing.

A mother sweating through the long agony of a birth that would not come. A lonely shepherd standing with a crook between his flock and a pack of winter wolves. A peasant taking up a crude spear to keep his thatched roof over the heads of his children while armed men came up the road toward it.

He was the god of those who bled for a cause. The one who put strength into the hands of anyone who began a thing and meant to see it through to whatever end was waiting.

"I have always thought the Warrior of Wrath the most tragic of all the Five," said a rough hoarse voice out of the shadows, echoing softly against the vaulting.

"More tragic than the Sea-God?" Alpheo asked, turning his gaze from the marble blade to the old archon.

"The Sea-God is the true god of violence, if you ask me," the old man replied, a raspy sound like dry leaves shifting escaping his chest. "There’s good reason old men say as fickle as the waves. The sea builds no temples and keeps no taverns, Your Majesty. Old fishermen teach their boys that much the first time they put them on the oars. The sea is one thing and one thing only, and that is unforgiving. Once you push off the sand, there is no sanctuary anywhere."

The archon shifted slightly, a joint popping softly in the quiet and a breathy moan.

"Say what you like of the corsairs who fly his colours. They respect the deep for exactly what it is. The sea gives fish and salt to live on, coral for the crowns of princes, and wind for the sails. And just as easily it drags men down into the dark without a moment’s thought about it. People understand that bargain. Everyone knows the Sea-God is wild. Nobody has ever been surprised by him."

He sighed and shook his head.

"It is the Warrior who deserves our pity. His message was a kind one. Inspiring, even. And the men who sing his hymns loudest have dragged his likeness face down through the mud until nobody recognises it. A god of gore and iron, they have made of him.

The lords preach one thing. The priests weave a second. And the smallfolk live with the bitter truth of a third, which is the only one of the three anyone has ever tested."

The old man gestured vaguely toward the archway leading out toward the city.

"Look at our noble knights. They ought to be shields for the weak and lend their steel to good causes. Instead they are little more than glorified sellswords with better manners, hiding their greed beneath a shiny coat of chivalry.

When the hooves of a warhorse come thundering down a dirt road, the villagers do not run out to cheer. They bolt their doors and hide their daughters and count the hours until it is quiet again. That is your Warrior of Wrath, Your Majesty, as the common folk have come to know him."

"Every man carries within his breast the capacity to become a Lightbringer or the Vulture Lord," Alpheo said quietly, speaking for the first time. "The difference between them is mostly a matter of what the world put in front of him first."

"The Lightbringer, eh?" The archon let out a wry wheezing chuckle as he pushed himself up, his knees wobbling beneath him before he settled onto the wooden bench beside the prince, who had granted him no leave whatsoever to sit there. "Now there was a knight. Blessed by the gods with a sword of living fire to drive back the dark. That is the verse the priests sing loudest in the holy houses, and they sing it very beautifully. They leave out the rest of the tale just as beautifully."

"The rest?" Alpheo asked.

He had never been particularly well versed in the scriptures of the divine, though it did seem the divine took a keen interest in his affairs regardless of that.

"Well. The Lightbringer suffered the same flaw as any other creature of flesh," the old archon muttered, leaning his hands upon his knees. "He fell deeply in love with a woman. Some say she was a high lord’s daughter. Others claim she was a farmer’s girl with dirt still under her nails. He loved her to his dying day, and it was she who brought that day upon him. Ambushed in the dark by cutthroats, and his flaming steel thrown down into the black of the sea."

The old man offered a faint crooked smile.

"A blessing it was a magical blade of fire, I have always thought. Otherwise we would have every hedge knight in the South fishing rusted iron out of the mud and swearing he was the Flame reborn.Would you imagine?"

"Why did she betray him?" Alpheo asked, his eyes lingering on the dark space where the sword would have stood.

The archon shrugged his bony shoulders. "Some say for a purse of foreign gold. Others say because he would not take her to wife. Some whisper it was over a betrayal, real or imagined. And a few insist she did it out of a love that had been refused, which is the version the singers prefer, being the only one with a tune in it. We shall never know. We do not even know whether blue blood ran in her veins at all."

He looked up at the marble Warrior, his cloudy eyes catching the torchfire.

"Whatever his end, and whatever his foolishness, he was a true knight. He fought for what he believed in, without ever once stopping to ask whether being good was safe, or profitable, or wise. He simply did the thing he thought right, and paid what it cost. Now there was a man who understood the Warrior."

The old archon’s eyes twinkled as he turned his gaze sideways.

"Now. Does Your Grace understand him too? There are a great many in the provinces who whisper that something divine runs in your blood. Your legions whisper it loudest of all. They will have you as the Warrior’s own son, or at the very least his blessed champion."

Alpheo did not need to turn his head to know the old man was studying every line of his face, hunting patiently for a slip.

He let out a long quiet sigh.

"I never asked them to carve me into an idol, Your Excellency, and I have never fed the fever. The common folk possess a wild and desperate imagination whenever they cannot bring themselves to accept the simple truth that a man is only ever a man."

"And yet Your Grace has done precious little to disabuse them of it," Vesparian noted softly, one brow lifting through the wrinkles.

Alpheo turned slowly and regarded the archon with a cool unblinking stare before giving a small indifferent shrug.

"I would hardly be the first prince to shelter beneath the shadow of the divine, and I shall not be the last. Though I grant you it is a treacherous game. Quick to bloom and quicker to wither. A glorious flower to look upon in the noon sun, and entirely useless once the winter rains begin."

The king rose, his cloak sweeping across the cold slate flags, and looked up once more at the unyielding marble helm of the god.

"My hand is iron and nothing else. If the smallfolk sheltering under it would rather see a royal sceptre there, or a holy relic, than a bloody sword, well. Every man is entitled to his own foolish dreams." A faint smile touched his mouth. "And I shall hardly complain if their prayers happen to arrive at my door rather than his."