Tenebroum Ch. 60-61 (Patreon)

Ch. 60 - A Public Spectacle

Though it was hard, Todd forced himself to watch as his superiors put the people of Fallravea to the question. It was an ugly business that went so slowly at first that they could only redeem a few souls each day as the cultists and blasphemers denied they were ever involved in any of the terrible activities that the Templars had uncovered. The butcher who had been trafficking in corpses denied knowing that the tunnel dug into the rear of his shop was even there, and the noble families whose manses were also connected to that dark network insisted that they had despised the Count and his toadies more than anyone.

“If my family was really as close to that disreputable swine as you say, then why weren’t I or my daughters at all of his unseemly little parties this summer?” the Granddame Rockmira demanded angrily after a series of less than courteous questions.

Unlike the butcher’s tale, it was a story that had initially made sense to Todd, though he would have never contradicted his seniors by saying that. Eventually, the priests forced her into the light of truth, kicking and screaming by using brutal techniques that made Todd wince. Ultimately, both confessed and gave the names of all other local luminaries that had helped them with their misdeeds. The former eventually signed a statement that he sold human meat to unsuspecting customers for reasons related to both profit and devilry. The latter admitted that the only reason her family wasn’t fornicating with all of the other nobles as they usually did the night of the massacre was because they had been forwarned by their dark Mistress, The Drowned woman.

No one called her Oroza anymore. That was the name of a river, not of a goddess of the underworld. In private, Brother Faerbar was conflicted, though, in public, he never wavered. He’d seen signs of the river’s corruption for years, but at the same time, he’d never known any of the healers that worshiped the river goddess to have anything but spotless souls, especially during the year of the plague. It was a conundrum that he wrestled with often, but according to him, even prayer couldn’t resolve it.

“How was it that so many good people could worship such an evil thing?” he asked them all at dinner one night, but no one had a good answer.

Fortunately, there were still good people in the city, and the weight of the witness statements that their neighbors buried them with was usually enough to force a blubbering confession before it was time to bring in the thumb screws or the hot irons. That all changed a week later when their reinforcements arrived from Siddrimar.

Though the Templars might be the best-known arm of the church militant, they were not the most feared. That distinction belonged to The Penetient Seekers of Truth, or the Inquisitors as everyone called them. A hush followed in their wake when their convoy entered the city, and after that, a muted anticipation about what would happen next hung over Fallravea like a cloud.

It would not take too long to answer that unasked question, though. The Inquisitors differed from their brethren in that they preferred to do all their questioning and the associated penance under Siddrim’s light, so they only waited long enough for a scaffold to be built in the city center before they began their bloody spectacle.

Fortunately, Todd was not expected to watch them work. Still, he caught glimpses often enough while he was out and about performing other tasks for his Master as they carried out their ever-expanding carnival of mortification. For the first week, there were almost no spectators, but gradually that changed for reasons Todd didn’t really understand. He knew that people often gathered to watch hangings, but torture? That seemed too far, even if the crowd’s true interest was in justice and salvation.

Still, day by day, the crowds grew, taking some kind of comfort from the public nature of the proceedings. After that, though, things got weird. Brother Garrand had said that they would, but Todd had not fully believed him. On the ninth day of the Inquisition’s attempt to turn over every last stone of sin, people began to come forward from the crowd and confess without anyone laying a finger on them. Sometimes these crimes were significant, and other times they were only private shames, but soon enough, the Inquisitor’s cages were overflowing with those in need of salvation.

Most of those that confessed spontaneously weren’t executed, which was more than he could say about those that had been dragged kicking and screaming into Siddrim’s light thanks to a tip from their neighbors or someone that had already spent their time on that bloody stage. Todd thanked the divine for that. More than enough intersections were decorated with the flayed body of the guilty already. If his brothers started to kill everyone who had confessed to blasphemy or adultery, then eventually, there would be nowhere left to put them all.

It was a dismal time. At first, he’d been excited to strike such a blow against evil, but now he couldn’t wait to be free of this place. It was one thing to strike down the animate dead but quite another to wake up each morning to the smell of corpses and the sound of screaming. Even those things were only slightly better than acting as a nursemaid to priest-candidate Verdinen while he recovered. While that task had been easy enough while the man was unconscious, he’d become a petulant nightmare once he’d awoke to find that he was missing his right arm, and since Todd was one of the few squires that knew his letters, he was frequently forced to sit with the bitter man for hours, scribbling reports. No mark he ever made on the page was good enough, of course, but all of them were better than what Brother Verdinen was capable of with his left hand.

Thirty-eight days later, The Penetiant Seekers of Truth pronounced the city clean of all of its taint. To celebrate, they held a midnight mass in the center of the city, burning every last vestige of The Drowned Woman that they could find. Every holy symbol and tapestry in the city that was left with a river theme was thrown on the pier that night.

“So does this mean we finally get to go back to Siddramar now, sir?” Todd asked his Master the next morning after they finished their sunrise sparing session.

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “Now that the city no longer needs our swords, we travel south to Blackwater to see if the rot has spread downriver.”

“Blackwater?” Toad asked, confused. “But the taint on the river has to come from the north, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t we be following it to its source to finally purify it once and for all?”

That answer made the older man laugh louder than he should have. “You would think, wouldn’t you, but that isn’t how they see the world. To them, the water is polluted by the souls of the people that worship it when they should be worshiping the light.”

“But what if it’s the other way around?” Todd asked. “What, it’s something in the water that poisons the hearts of those who drink it?”

“Who can say?” Brother Faerbar asked philosophically. “You and I - the church relies on our strong sword arms. It would be hubris not to trust in the learned men who use their minds to do the same. The learned priests say the devil is in the heart, but my nose tells me that there is something rotten in the Wodenspines, and it will have to be addressed eventually, but if it happens after we gauge the darkness of Blackwater, it makes no difference to me.”

Todd nodded, understanding why his Master was correct, even though he knew that neither of them agreed with those morally upright words deep down.

After that moment of silence, Brother Faerbar continued. “They say that the whole area around that little port town has an evil reputation. Even the song we heard in the inn on the way here was about dead rising from the bog to protect its ill-gotten treasure.”

“I didn’t see a swamp when we traveled through,” Todd retorted after searching his memories for a moment.

“No,” his Master agreed. “You wouldn’t have. The late Lord of the region paid a king’s ransom to the mages at the Magica Collegium in Abenend to use their earth magic to dig him a canal to Garvin’s… I mean Garmoore’s Gift.”

Brother Faerbar sat down so that Todd could unlace his Gambeson. Last week they’d started renaming everything in the region that had been named for the late Lord’sLord’s family in an attempt to erase his blasphemies. Everything that had once been named for Leo, Kelvun, or Garvin was now named after an appropriate saint of Siddrim or another lesser god, though it was hard to remember so many recent changes.

There had even been a petition sent to the king to rename the whole county to something more appropriate in light of everything that had happened. The priesthood lacked the power to make those changes unilaterally; Todd struggled with a particularly stubborn knot as he recalled just how frustrated the Priest Cawleon had been frustrated by that fact. As temporary governor of the whole area, he chafed at any limit imposed on Siddrim’s vision.

In the end, the only thing that would be left to bear any of those forbidden names was little Leo Garvin the Fifth. Though only an infant and the spawn of a heretic, he would be well-taken care of for some time to come. This was because, through his guardianship, the church could lay claim to the whole area, at least until he came of age.

“It’s my understanding that late Count wasn’t specifically trying to rid himself of the swamp so much as build a path free from goblins so he could extract the riches of the earth,” Brother Faerbar continued, interrupting Todd’s wandering mind and pulling him back into the conversation.

“But if the swamp was evil, and he was evil, then why would he seek to drain it?” Todd asked, meeting the other man’s eye. “I just… Something about all this doesn’t seem to make sense, don’t you think?”

That protest brought the patient smile back to his Master’s face as it always seemed to when he’d said something that was unintentionally smart or stupid. “The only people in the world that everything makes sense to are the ones that are truly crazy. We should just be grateful that in the midst of all his other debaucheries, the late Count of Greshen cleaned up one mess and replaced it with verdant farmland. That’s one less place that evil can hide from our Lord’sLord’s light. Right?”

“Thank the light for that,” Todd mumbled, unconvinced.

That would be the last time they would spar in that benighted city because the following day would be spent packing and provisioning, and then why were back underway, traveling south on the main road, which was uncomfortably close to the river as it parallelled the Oroza south and west to their destination.

Even though it was only four nights by horse, Todd slept fitfully. For weeks he’d been forced to battle that awful tentacled abomination over and over in his sleep, but this was something new. Now in his dreams, he imagined something lurking just beneath those oily waters. It waited there each night, and though it never broke the surface, he was certain that if it had, it would have crushed the life out of all of them without issue. Even Brother Faerbar was no match for that much darkness lurking in those still nighttime waters.

Ch. 61 - Petty Little Lives

The Lich watched its finest craftsmen as they made the final few stitches on the spine of its dread book with some small part of its mind even as it gazed out over the turmoil of its kingdom. Now it was drinking deep of that suffering, but as soon as the blood-red sun finished setting, it would be time to complete the spells and unite its latest victim’s body and soul once more. For now, though, it was content to enjoy the view. The Shrines were burning in every town and village along the length of the Oroza now, and the Lich’s pet goddess was struggling against her chains even as she burned with them. She could feel the suffering of those who loved her most in the same way that she’d been able to feel it as the Lich had slowly poisoned the souls of her most devout.

Both the darkness and the light had violated her in this sense, but she could do nothing about either, not as long as she was merely a focal point for such a terrible master. She still managed to resist the magics that chained her from time to time, but years of captivity had all but broken the river Goddess’s spirit. Her purpose was to constantly absorb torrents of power only to have them stripped away while the Lich filled whole reservoirs with her tears, drop by drop. Usually, this suffering was a private treasure, but today it shared the view with someone who would soon know his own personal brand of hell as a hint of things to come.

“She will remember this moment forever,” the Lich intoned to his audience of one. “Whereas I will forget it ever happened in time, I always do. A month? A season? A year? How could I ever hope to remember every torment I inflict on this miserable world? When the darkness overshadows everything, these small sadnesses will be erased like everything else.”

The maelstrom of souls that was its heart of darkness was so tumultuous and chaotic that it often had trouble remembering anything but its current obsession and the next steps of its great work. Today in between thoughts about the mysteries of flight and breaks to enjoy the continuing efforts of Siddrim’s dogs as they ravaged the countryside, all it could think about was its newest creation which was nearing completion, hour by hour. The tome was weighty by anyone’s measure, but it wasn’t the size of the thing that would define it when the construction was complete. It was the infinite darkness that would fill its pages, one black word at a time.

“But I cannot bear to lose even the smallest of my treasures anymore, and that is why I have created you. From now on, it will be your job. To remember everything that ever happens. You shall document my every whim and whisper so that nothing is lost. Likewise, every debt, every grudge, and every obligation will be recorded along with all the ways those debts are eventually repaid in blood so that everyone will get what it is they deserve when the time comes.” As the Lich’s poison-drenched words echoed voicelessly in the darkness, the soul that was the target of that terrible message trembled from the skull that it was still bound to. The last thing it wanted was to be put to such a purpose, but it had no choice in the matter.

When the world above finally drifted into night, the Lich turned away from the spectacle to find that its book now sat finished in the middle of the heptagram binding circle as it had been for the best part of the last hour, awaiting the next step in the process.

An ugly thing, the large black tome measured a foot and a half tall, nearly a foot wide, and several inches thick. Though that wasn’t enough space to fit an entire corpse, the Lich had done its very best to waste nothing. The book was bound in Kelvun’s flesh so that his face could still be made out on the cover, his sinew had been used to stitch the thing, and even his bones had not gone to waste. Not only had they been used to make the glue for the binding, but they’d also been pulverized and added to the pulped pages of religious scrolls and rare spell books to make up the terrible paper that was at the heart of this project. Though it might seem that the slender volume had perhaps 200 pages, there were a thousand times that many hidden inside the clever working, or at least there would be once the Lich’s magic had activated the rest of them.

Though its library of heads had served it well for decades as a repository of knowledge, they were not portable, and it would soon be time to centralize that power into a single implement that it could bring with it to the battlefields of the world above. The living might not realize that the darkness would soon be upon them. Still, every day drew closer to that dread confrontation whether they knew it or not.

At an unspoken signal, zombies brought in seven severed heads and set them down at each corner of the star. In life, none of them had known a single thing about magic, but in death, all that mattered was that they were fresh meat that was less than a week old. They had been pilfered from the local graveyard shortly after the ceremonies ended and brought here to be dissected for parts.

The locals of Blackwater might think that such places protected the dead, but the evil here ran deep, so only the first few feet of ground was truly consecrated. Beneath that lay the Lich’s domain, and every week new bodies were delivered to it only to disappear into the depths like they had never been.

Their arms and legs would yet be used for new, outrageous war machines, but tonight their heads were nothing but extensions of the Lich’s will. As one, they began to sing a complex seven-part harmony. It was less of a sonata than sacrilege, and note by note, it pulled Kelvun’s screaming soul from where it had resided the last few weeks and into the infinite pages of the Lich’s new library. In time, he might be joined in there with other souls as the complexity of their task increased, but for now, his little lordling would suffer alone under the burden of transcribing everything the Lich knew.

Minute by minute the layers of enchantments and compulsions built up in a complex symphony of arcane cruelty that would have hurt the ears as much as the souls of any listeners if there had been anyone in that empty room to hear. Each line was a prohibition; it was a brand on Kelvun’s soul. The book must do this, but it couldn’t do that. It was a formula that had been borrowed from Krygain Mundi, a book that was meant for dealing with the diabolic, but there was no reason it couldn’t work on the dead, so long as small alterations were made to reflect the true nature of the bound.

Eventually, after several minutes, the singing reached a crescendo that verged on screeching as one of the head’s vocal cords started to fray, while two more were beginning to smolder even as they screamed their commandments louder and louder. Just before its tiny little implements could burst into flame, the ritual was done, smothering the room in an eerie silence that lasted until it was disturbed by the brief shuffling of pages as the book stirred briefly.

Judging the spell a success, a drudge was then allowed to bring the book to the Lich’s throne room. It held it there motionless until the thing suddenly sprang to life in its lifeless hands, opening on its own to a random blank page as it waited expectantly for its first order.

“We will start the volume with your own terrible end, Kelvun,” the Lich gloated. “You forgot that I existed, so we shall make certain that nothing else ever goes unremembered regarding our encounters.”

Suddenly the book sprang to life as line after line of dark script appeared on the page. The ink was a mixture of blood and shadows, but the handwriting was Kelvun’s formal penmanship. He’d hated those lessons his tutors had forced on him over and over with a passion, and now he would spend the rest of time doing just that. Creating short lines of text that captured every detail of an event with clean loops and tight, well space letters, the book started the section with ‘The Life and Death of Kelvun Garvin.’ It went on ceasly for seven pages, making notes about things that Kelvun had never been aware of in life as it gathered clues and facts from the vast darkness that was the Lich.

In the end, it noted correctly that it had crossed the Lich three times and ‘in his final attempt to cheat the darkness of its due, Kelvun met with a sudden violent end, which is the only possible way to pay back such debts when dealing with forces of this nature.’ Obviously, if Kelvun had known that, he would have happily paid double for the rest of his days in an effort to be as helpful to his dark benefactor as possible, but it was the Lich’s knowledge that lent to rash man the only wisdom he’d ever had in the afterlife. The Lich was pleased to note that the document didn’t fail to mention that Kelvun’s surviving son was the product of an affair that his wife had one of the many bards the house entertained while he was off on his own dalliances.

That was one of the only reasons the Lich had spared the child, of course. A mewling infant would have made a lovely morsel in its banquet of death that night, but as the only living member of Kelvun’s “lineage,” the Lich knew that would forever irritate the tormented spirit and that the church would use the child to cement their legitimacy, as any group seeking to usurp power in the region would.

To most, it would make no sense at all that the darkness was doing everything it could to invite the light into its domain, but it knew something they didn’t. It was the first lesson that it had ever learned: the safest place to hide a treasure was a few feet under an empty treasure chest. The forces of light had already found and vanquished an evil in the form of the cult of the drowned lady. They would have no need to dig deeper and find out that she was little more than a hand puppet in the grand scheme of things. She'd never been at fault in the same way that the Garvin family had never really been in charge.

Neither had done anything, yet it was their names that would bear the shame in the histories that would be written about such things. Not that history portrayed the reality of such events any more than bardic song writers did, of course. After all, Blackwater wasn’t even a swamp anymore. It was the name of a growing river port and a style of beer that was brewed there now more than a place that no longer existed.

Where once there had been a swamp brimming with disease and the unquiet dead, there was now only rich black earth and more farms every year as the population continued to blossom like the crops in the fields. People sometimes disappeared, of course, and to a man, the region experienced terrible nightmares that no one was willing to talk about openly, but that was the price that they paid for their peace, and no one seemed to think it was a high one.