Bel’Esstar was swarming with patrols, Guerriors of the Commanderie policing the streets. Everywhere Acir went, he passed marching columns of grey-uniformed soldiers, heard the tread of their booted feet echoing along the wide boulevards of Bel’Esstar.
But where were the ordinary people?
Those Acir glimpsed were subdued, creeping along in the shadows, moving warily as though fearful of being stopped and questioned. When they saw him coming in his Commanderie uniform, they shrank into doorways or turned swiftly aside.
Was this the vision of Mhir’s heavenly city made manifest on earth that had first inspired him to follow Girim?
Acir stopped on a street corner, transfixed by a sudden vivid memory.
He had been on night-watch, warming his hands at a smoking brazier – the nights were bitter-cold in the desert – when Girim nel Ghislain had appeared.
‘Prince Ilsevir has fallen grievously ill.’ Girim withdrew a letter from the breast of his robe and Acir saw the royal seal attached to it. ‘He is asking to see me. I am recalled to Bel’Esstar, Acir!’ Girim took him by the shoulders, gripping him hard. ‘This is the moment we have long dreamed of. We have taken back the Poet-Prophet’s birthplace and now we shall restore His shrine. We will make His city a fit place for His second coming.’
Acir, left in command of the desert garrison, had often imagined by the watchfires in the dead of the empty desert night, the scenes of rejoicing in Bel’Esstar that greeted the Prince’s restoration to health. Acir had built a gilded picture in his mind from Girim’s letters of a city reborn to faith, a city triumphant. Girim had described how warmly the citizens had welcomed the Guerriors; the streets had been strewn with flowers. Soldiers had begged to leave the Palace Guard to enlist as members of the Commanderie.
‘We shall defend our own,’ Girim wrote, ‘from the infidel and from the unbeliever. Bel’Esstar is a fortress of faith and there we shall build our Stronghold.’
Acir looked around him. Dust blew across the empty street. In the distance he could hear the faint, frenetic chip of metal on stone from the site of the Fortress of Faith.
The gilded city of his desert dreams did not exist, maybe had never existed, he had conjured it from Girim’s letters.
There was no sense of joy – only an all-pervading fear.
The Sanctuary for the Correction and Improvement of Unbelievers had been established in the old Debtors’ Prison on scrubby waste ground to the north of the city.
As Acir approached, he noted the high fences, the watchtowers, the locked gates. He wished he did not have the feeling that Girim had assigned him here as punishment; that he too would have to be forcibly ‘corrected’ from his deviant behaviour. And this dull feeling of dread only increased as he approached the sentries at the gate and saw the look of suspicion in their eyes as his papers were demanded.
‘Please wait in the gatehouse, Captain. I will inform the Governor you have arrived.’
Captain nel Macy, Governor of the Sanctuary, came striding briskly across the courtyard to greet him. He walked with the stiff strut of a seasoned soldier who has survived many campaigns.
‘Captain Korentan! Welcome! Glad to have you with us. Let me show you what we’ve been doing here.’
Beyond nel Macy’s broad shoulders, Acir could see a group of Sanctuarees being herded across the yard; to Acir they looked like convicts, men and women dressed alike in coarse grey tunics and loose trousers.
‘Where are they going?’ he asked.
‘To work on the Fortress. Have you seen it? Isn’t it magnificent?’
‘But I understood the purpose of the Sanctuary was essentially spiritual. Not a labour camp.’
‘Healthy labour, confrère! Nothing better to improve the spirit. Keep the body active in the service of God.’
‘But look at them – exhausted, dispirited.’
One of the Sanctuarees began to cough, a racking, shuddering cough that shook his stooping frame.
‘And ill.’
‘We have a dispensary here,’ nel Macy said defensively.
‘Are you feeding them? They look thin. Wasted.’
‘They get two substantial meals a day.’ Nel Macy stopped. ‘Look, Captain Korentan, is this some kind of Rosecoeur inspection? Be frank with me. I am well aware of your long association with the Grand Maistre.’
‘I am assigned here to join your staff,’ said Acir. ‘That is all.’ So nel Macy suspected him to be an agent of the Rosecoeur; all to the better.
A cry rang out across the yard, a shrill cry of pain and outrage. Acir swung around, hand automatically reaching for the hilt of his sword.
‘Nothing to bother about. They’re just tagging a new inmate.’
‘Tagging him? Like an animal? Why is this necessary?’
‘Identification, confrère. They suffer no more pain than a woman suffers when she has her ears pierced to display her gold and pearl earrings.’ Before Acir could pursue the subject, nel Macy had steered him towards an open doorway, saying, ‘Let me show you the dormitories.’
The dank walls of the old prison had been coated with whitewash but a musty prison smell still lingered. The Governor unlocked a door and showed Acir a bare chamber fitted with bunk beds, six along each side.
‘See? All clean, all functional. Every man has his own sheet and blanket. The Sanctuarees run the laundry. We are self-sufficient here.’
On the far wall, Acir caught sight of a wooden rose, crudely painted crimson and green. The only evidence of the Faith he had seen so far in the Sanctuary.
‘We observe our devotions every morning and every night. Each officer is assigned a different dormitory,’ said the Governor, as though reading Acir’s thoughts. ‘Now – it may happen that one of our charges experiences the desire to convert. He must then undergo a series of spiritual trials. If at the end of this period he is still strong in his convictions, then we open our arms to him and welcome him into the faith.’
‘Does this happen often?’
‘The spiritual trials are, of necessity, rigorous. We have to be certain, Captain. Very certain.’
Acir stood at the barred window of his cell and gazed down into the yard.
How could the dream have turned out like this, in dour prison walls and cowed prisoners, tagged like animals? In the shadow of fear, fear which had settled over the whole city like a chill cloud, which blew through the deserted streets like the cold, dry Fevre wind?
Acir’s faith still burned in his breast, a vision of warmth, of joy, of reconciliation. How had his fellow Guerriors lost their vision, how had they come to perpetrate this atrocity upon their fellow men in the sacred name of Mhir?
‘Do not desert us in our hour of need,’ he whispered, one hand pressed to his breast. Beneath his fingers he felt the Rose graven into his flesh. The physical pain he had endured as the tattooist’s needle pricked out the intricate pattern of petals and thorns was as nothing to the agony of knowing that the cause he followed had wrought so much damage and despair.
The sky is darkening above the Fortress of Faith, a cloud rides fast on the Fevre wind, sweeping in to blot out the sun.
Duststorm – here in Bel’Esstar?
Acir gazes frantically around for somewhere to shelter – but the walls of the Fortress are open to the sky.
Dry particles of dust, grey dust, begin to swirl about the city. Dust stings his face, his upraised hands – cold, ice-cold as stinging hail. The icy dust settles over the city, choking the streets. Soon the whole city will be filled with it, smothered in it, stifled to silence.
Acir staggers into the Fortress, fighting against the gusting Fevre wind to reach the entrance to the Poet-Prophet’s shrine. Drifts of grey snowdust lie across the doorway: he tears at them with his hands, feeling each icy particle sharp as shattered glass. When he looks down at his hands, they are bleeding from a myriad tiny dust-grazes.
At last he tugs open the door and slithers down into the darkness. Dust blows in after him: he puts his shoulder to the door, straining with all his strength to close it. A gust of wind blows it open again, sending showers of dust cascading down into the tomb below.
He throws himself across the tomb, trying to protect it from the encroaching dust with his body. His lacerated hands leave smears of blood across the worn stone.
The tomb shudders.
Acir draws back, terrified.
Something has penetrated the worn stone, and is spearing its way upwards.
A thin branch of green, prickled with black thorns. At its tip a bud unfurls, crimson petals unfold.
A rose. A perfect crimson rose.
The miracle renewed. The sign of divine forgiveness.
The shrine door slams open again and the whirlwind comes tearing in.
‘No!’ he cries aloud, vainly trying to encompass the miraculous Rose in his arms.
The Rose droops in the death-cold blast. Its velvet petals, red as heart’s blood, begin to wither, frostburned.
One by one, the seared petals drop. Even as he watches the fresh green of the branch turns brown – and the dry stick crumbles away.