A Task is Finished
The next morning came on too fast. It seemed his eyes had only just closed when they snapped open. Mol stood beside his bed, dressed in her sky-blue robe, her hair loose, her unblinking eyes watching him carefully. Slowly, he realized he could only see her because she held a thick white candle steadily in a holder in one hand.
“Gideon and Torvul are already on their way,” she said, her voice filling the otherwise silent room. “Were fearful you two’d spent all night in yer jars,” she added. “C’mon now.”
Years of early rising had accustomed him. Allystaire went from sleep to wakefulness in one willed moment. He was standing and pulling on his trousers and belt while Idgen Marte was still sitting groggily on the far side of her bed.
Nodding, as if in approval of his quick response, Mol walked around the other bed and came to Idgen Marte’s side. She placed one hand on the woman’s knee and murmured words he could not hear, and the warrior stood up with a nod.
Soon enough they were all three walking briskly towards the Temple, Mol with her candle in the lead, Idgen Marte and Allystaire drinking mugs of tea and sharing a loaf and a thick wheel of cheese that had been waiting in the Inn. Timmar and his wife had been moving about already, after the myriad early morning tasks their establishment required.
Gideon and Torvul waited outside the doors, the dwarf examining the carving, tracing his fingers over it. The boy, only slightly taller than Mol, shivered slightly. Somewhere, someone had found boot, breeches, shirt, and vest for him, but not a cloak, and though the vest was wool, the boy was clearly cold.
Allystaire placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “We will find you a cloak or a coat today, lad. It is the kind of morning where autumn is looking towards winter and thinking of inviting him in. Only going to get colder.”
He nodded, though quickly all eyes were pulled towards Mol, who had stopped in front of the thick doors and pinched out her candle. “We do important work today, “she said, and Allystaire wondered at the way her voice seemed to switch from the uncultured tongue of an eleven year old village girl to the sonorous and wise tones of someone much older and much more educated. “This morning, when dawn breaks through the Temple windows, we will finish raising the altar. Afterwards the folk can come, with their petitions and questions. At noon, we celebrate. At sundown, a service. We’ll all know what to do.”
Slightly dumbfounded, Allystaire felt himself nodding at the statement. Of course he would speak, at the sundown service. He had no idea why or what he would say, but it seemed entirely reasonable that he would. From the corner of one eye, he noted Torvul nodding along as well.
“Tonight, the vigil. Four of us will remain outside the Temple, with one inside for two turns at a time, in the order that the Mother called us.”
“If I might pose a logistical question, what of our provisions for the day?” Torvul asked, his thick, rumbling voice made delicate by his careful choice of words.
“She will provide. Her people, our people,” Mol replied, “will bring us food.” The girl smiled, broadly, joy radiating from her features. “Today is a happy day. Try not to look so glum. You ‘specially.” She turned to Gideon, a finger aimed at his ribs. Though the boy didn’t flinch away from the touch, Allystaire saw him harden himself when Mol extended her hand, saw his lips press into a line and his shoulders and arms tighten. And though his stoic face broke into a forced-seeming smile, Mol stopped short. Instead, she took and gently squeezed his hand for a moment.
Then she looked up to the windows, and all their gazes were drawn with hers, as the first light of the sun began to filter into the Temple.
Without thinking about it, without speaking, they closed around the altar, hands reaching for it. It was a rough, three-legged thing of stone, no higher than Allystaire’s knees, no wider across than his forearm.
Allystaire’s thoughts were drawn to the Goddess, to the tests he had passed, from following the pyre of Thornhurst’s villagers out of his own high country, to tracking the reavers and bringing them to account in blood. He thought of his honesty at the Assize, his decision to speak truth and be damned for it, giving the reaver widow a small fortune and seeing her away from Windspar’s reprisals. He thought of the times, few though they were, that he had been in the Goddess’s presence, his own Ordination, Idgen Marte’s, the raising of the altar, Torvul’s Ordination, Gideon’s. He thought of the music that accompanied Her, the burning thrill of Her touch, the power of Her kiss.
He heard and felt the music of the day before, but not simply a harmony of notes, some kind of dazzling, powerful music he hadn’t words for. Allystaire found himself moving to the side, found Mol slipping underneath his arm to stand beside him, saw and heard the others moving as well—but none ever lifting their hand from the altar.
There was a sound, a great crack, the altar suddenly sprang upwards beneath his hand; he felt it smoothing out and widening, the rough surface taking on the slick patina, not of marble, but of stone lovingly crafted, smoothed and sanded over countless turns. It reached well above his waist when it stopped rising, and it had expanded. No longer a block of stone, but a ring, an oval, supported by five smooth columns as thick as his arm. Mol stood at the center with her back to the door of the Temple, he to her left, and Idgen Marte on her right. He looked up and saw he was opposite Gideon, and Torvul was opposite Idgen Marte.
The music climaxed in his mind, a note shaped and sustained by the things that they were and had been and would be: five people, broken and scarred in their own ways, inside and out, granted powers from the boundless well of compassion, love, and strength of a being he could not hope to comprehend. The Voice, the Arm, the Will, the Wit, and the Shadow; arrayed like this, he knew that it made sense. To a congregation, the Voice would be front and center and the Arm at her right, the Shadow at her left hand. The Will was behind him, the Wit behind the Shadow.
Allystaire felt symbols appear on the smooth stone that now was a ring of red and gold, the colors of the sun. His fingers traced the outline of a carving. He stepped back and peered closely: a hammer. A fairly simple sledge, roughly like the one he carried, but not unlike a craftsman’s tool for the shaping of metal or joining of wood, he thought. When he looked up, he saw that the others were examining similar carvings spread around.
Allystaire was about to open his mouth to speak when he heard Mol speak. “No use for all tha’ quiet,” she said. “Tell me what all o’ya see.”
“An eye. Wide and open,” Torvul rumbled.
“Cloud, I think.” Idgen Marte’s voice was slightly detached.
Gideon paused, his brow furrowed. “An open palm. Yet if I turn my head, a sunburst. And if I turn my head again…” He turned to Mol. “A flame.”
Mol smiled, and to Allystaire it was not the simple joyous expression of the girl he thought he’d known. Altogether too knowing, he thought. “That is as I expected,” she finally said, after wetting her lips. “They are symbols of what we are—and we will be different things to different folk. Even to ourselves.”
“A hammer,” Allystaire said, even as he bent his neck to left and right, trying to see a different shape, a different sign. He glanced at the others, and shrugged. “Still a hammer.”
“You told me once you weren’t a subtle man,” Idgen Marte jabbed, grinning. Then, with a softer smile, “But you also told me that a hammer can create as well as destroy. That it is a tool in a way a sword can never be. I think She knows that, Allystaire. As much as any of us can claim to have created all of this, you can.”
Allystaire felt Mol’s hand slip into his. “The Shadow is right. Another man looking at this altar may see a clenched fist, or a gauntlet. Or at the Pillar of the Wit, mayhap a mountain, or a stream. The sign will mean what the supplicant needs it to mean.”
Allystaire furrowed his brow. “Where did you learn a word like supplicant, Mol?”
The girl smiled knowingly. “She has been teaching me. And many of the visitors have had books with them.” Then her smile dissolved into the slightly gap-toothed one he had come to know, she tugged her hand free and went to Idgen Marte, her bare feet all but soundless on the wooden floor. Mol took the warrior’s hand and then leaned against her hip, while Idgen Marte’s arm curled around her shoulder. They held the pose for a moment before Mol broke away and her face turned serious again, her childish grin transforming into an ageless-seeming wisdom.
She didn’t say anything else. She simply knelt in front of her Pillar of the Voice and closed her eyes. Allystaire found himself doing the same. Around him, he could hear the rustling of clothing and the click of boots against wood as the others knelt. The planks were hard on his knees, but kneeling brought the hammer to his eye level, and he let his gaze unfocus as he stared in contemplation. He wondered what had brought the hammer to his hand in the first place, thought back more than a score of years to his teachers, his earliest times on campaign.
Ladislas. Lord Harding. He first suggested the warhammer to me—but he meant a spiked hammer with a small head. Never felt right. He was no longer staring at the altar, or even seeing it. Instead he was looking, as if from a great height, upon all the battlefields of his past, all at once, and seeing all the blood that had been spilled in the wars both great and small that had consumed the baronies for a generation or more, back to the death of the last Rhidalish King, whose name he couldn’t even recall.
My family was made by that war, and undone by those that followed. How many other families undone by this?
No longer did he see a battlefield. Despite his tightly shut eyes, Allystaire believed that he saw his hands, and that they were the color of blood.
For the first time since he’d left his home with equally vague senses of dread and guilt hounding his heels, he thought about the cost of everything he had done before the Goddess had found him.
I had my rules, Allystaire told himself. I hung the rapists and the murderers. But the feebleness of his defense came to him in a flash. Yet villages still burned in my wake, and I made as many widows and orphans as any other man alive. I did what I was brought up to do, and what I taught hundreds of other men to do—kill. That I tried to make it cleaner, somehow, or that I spoke of knightly ideals to the youth in my charge does not console a single widow.
Why me, Mother? Why? Allystaire had not allowed himself to ask that question since his Ordination. There’d be no time, no peace and quiet to reflect in, always too much to do. But now he could not avoid it.
You know why, Allystaire, came Her voice, ringing clear and unmistakable in his mind, shaking his entire body with its majesty. I told you why. Cut adrift from the life that had been made for you, you risked everything you had, everything you were, to save the girl whose very cries had awakened me from my long slumber, and then you risked your life to save her kith and kin. All of the knights of this world make widows and orphans, my Allystaire—you realized at long last that you cared what became of them.
Allystaire remembered, then, the fishwife he had carted off to the docks. The anger that had been coursing through him after the way Braech’s power had pressed down upon him at the Assize, turning into a fury that he’d wanted to unleash on the panders he saw working the quays.
I was with you even before then, Allystaire, the Goddess went on. I spoke to you through my Voice, I guided and prodded you. There were so many times you could have failed, turned away, or given up, and yet, with no hope of reward save the goodness of the deed itself, you persevered. That, to use your own word, was knightly.
Allystaire nodded, and felt her presence begin to recede and the physical surroundings of the Temple coalesced around him once more. His knees ached and his hands were white knuckled and shaking from the force with which he pressed them into one another.
He pulled himself up with one hand on the edge of the altar, knees creaking in protest. Around him, the others began to do the same, though all but Torvul hopped much more nimbly to their feet than he had.
Allystaire stole glances at their faces. Mol’s was as unreadable as it had been before. Idgen Marte looked determined, somehow. She always does, he thought. Only Gideon, pale and rubbing at his eyes with his fingertips, seemed to show the same kind of disquiet.
With a couple of steps, he was at the boy’s side, laying a hand on his thin shoulder. Allystaire said nothing, but Gideon spoke quietly.
“I wondered what I might have become had I not helped you,” he murmured. “And that is what I saw. Some of it. And some of what I might do, even now, in Her service. It frightened me,” he admitted. “Her own Gift frightens me.”
“As it should,” Allystaire said, quietly. “The only man fit to wield power is the one who is frightened by its consequences.”
After considering this a moment, the boy said, “Then how will we know when to employ our Gifts?”
“When it benefits someone else.”
“That is too simple,” the boy complained. “What if it is a matter of saving two lives at the expense of one? That benefits others, yes, but it also condemns another.”
“That’s faulty logic,” Torvul put in, having drifted over. “You’d not be the one doing the condemning.”
“You will know when it is time to act,” Mol said, her eyes still focused on her pillar. “You will know when it is time to employ the Goddess’s Gifts. And if you fear that you won’t, look at the people She has provided to teach you.” The girl swept her hand over Allystaire, Torvul, and Idgen Marte.
Allystaire squeezed Gideon’s shoulder then looked up towards the windows letting in the light of the risen sun. He frowned. “How long—”
“Two turns or so,” Mol said. “Probably best to spend some time thinking about what we’ll do when the folk come for noon service.” She looked to Allystaire then, lifting her eyebrows.
“I need time to think about what She showed me,” Allystaire replied. “I need to understand what it meant and how to…” He stopped and shook his head. “No. I know what it meant.” He looked from his companions to the altar, and said, “We have to put an end to the war.”