Interlude Six: Religion

Inquisitor Candour was having a rough day.

Thirty years an Inquisitor, and it never got any easier. She had to grin and bear it, though. Well, Inquisitors never grinned. But she bore it.

She had been a Guard, previously. She had manifested Speed. An uncommon Ideal, but the combat skills that came with it, and her proficiency with weapons, made her career choice easy.

She was good at taking orders too. She never liked making a fuss, liked simple things, like having everything neat and tidy and organised, and that was good for a Guard too. She liked helping people most of all, and that was great. The Guards helped people.

When she manifested Air, things became more complicated.

She got a movement skill, one that allowed her to flow with the wind over great distances. She could make it to the outer ring and back in three hours. She got a sensory skill, too, one that let her hear all sorts of things on the wind. It wasn’t an uncommon skill, for Air, but what was uncommon was the strength of her skill. She could hear exceptionally well. Better than anyone she knew.

She was approached by the Watch. The two skills, her Guard training, her obedience, made her the perfect candidate. They needed Idealists that could move, and quickly, and between Air and Speed, she had that covered. They needed people that could detect threats, too. They were the Watch, after all. She could hear anything, and she could move fast, and she was decent in combat. She was a shoe in.

The Watch’s role was similar to the Guards: to protect Wayrest from monsters. The Guards were a hammer, though, and a hammer was not right for every situation. Some monsters were too fast, or too slippery, for regular Idealists. They could slip past the outer ring, and kill villagers with impunity. If they could fly, they could make it all the way into Wayrest.

Hence, the Watch. They caught anything that slipped through the cracks. On occasion, if something approached from the Deep that the Guard unit in a village couldn’t handle, the Watch would bring help by way of Wayrest’s portal specialists. It didn’t happen often, thankfully.

The Watch couldn’t have someone who was just passable in combat though. Their standards were stricter than the Guards. By the time she had been with them for two years, she was a true monster in a fight.

She could be a gale, a storm, a tempest: unrelenting. She could be a breeze, a draft, a zephyr: evanescent.

She loved her time in the Watch. It provided her structure. She felt like she was truly making a difference, on a direct, individual level. And then she manifested Order.

A man in a pale green cloak turned up at her watchhouse, her supposedly secret hideout from which she operated, that only the Watch were supposed to know of.

The Inquisition. She was recruited.

The Inquisition was a branch of the Church of Truth. She believed in Goddess, most everyone did, but she had never been a zealot. She had thought only zealots were recruited by them. The man who recruited her certainly was. She couldn’t say no.

They gave her the name Candour, and told her her old life was no more.

The Inquisition had one task: to keep the city clean. Mostly, that meant finding anyone with unsavoury Ideals, and ejecting them from the city. Exiling them to the Hunters.

Candour had always thought it cruel. Turfing people out of the city, into the forest that everyone feared, was essentially a death sentence. And when it wasn’t, they were just supposed to spend their lives making sure the people who turned them out of their home were safe from monsters? It was pure cruelty. No wonder they tried to rebel every so often.

She acclimated to the Inquisition, to her new life. She was given the green vestments of her new order, and set to watching. It was what she had already been doing, so they said it should be easy for her.

It was not.

As a guard, as a watchman, she protected the city from monsters. As an inquisitor, she protected the city from its own people.

She found a loving mother who had manifested Rage when her husband was found cheating. She was exiled. The adulterer stayed.

She found an old woman, who manifested Death when her husband of seventy years passed away quietly. She was exiled. Only Candour attended the husband’s funeral.

A young, beautiful woman, who had been apprenticed to one of the hospitals for years, and hoped to manifest Healing, had instead manifested Gore while helping with the victims of a building collapse. She had been exiled.

It burned her soul. Even the good she did, didn’t feel that way.

She’d caught a few Idealists that had murdered people, and exiled them. She had caught another plotting to kill a noble, and they’d been exiled too. One Idealist she exiled, she hadn’t been told what they’d done, but she suspected they had simply got on the wrong side of the clergy. All shared the same fate: exiled, to live or die in the Deep.

The Church didn’t care. The nobles didn’t care. The Council and the Inquisition, they definitely didn’t care. Surely this wasn’t Goddess’ word? Surely a benevolent Goddess wouldn’t want people sent to struggle and die out in the wilds? It wasn’t right.

Candour had been an Inquisitor for ten years when she found Sal.

She was used to people cringing and cowering when they saw her. People slipped away like smoke, dispersed as if by magic, wherever she walked. All it took was once glance at her green cloak. No one would pretend to be an Inquisitor. That would be madness of outrageous proportions. Ever since she had first put it on, she had been feared.

So she was not surprised, when she slipped into Sal’s home, late one night, when the woman had immediately wet herself and fainted. She had known why Candour was there.

Several nights before, Candour had heard her whispering from blocks away, praying to Goddess before bed. She had asked forgiveness. She had asked for mercy. She was sobbing, heaving great, ugly gulps of air, distraught.

She had dropped a pot on her toe, and manifested Pain.

It was so absurd that it was laughable. Candour had followed her from rooftops, using Air and Speed to remain unseen, until she confirmed that the woman was indeed an Idealist. In an unguarded moment, she had seen her reading something in thin air: her wisp.

When she collapsed upon seeing her, Candour suddenly felt so very tired of it all. She was sick to death of skulking about, spying on people. Playing Goddess, deciding who could stay and who could go. This was not helping people.

She sat until Sal woke. And then she made a proposition.

That was how it began. With a simple washerwoman who had hurt her toe. She checked in on her, every so often, made it clear she could leave the city if she wanted, but that she didn’t have to. Helped her keep her secret, advised her on the best ways to do so.

Soon enough, she found more people with taboo Ideals. It was what she did, after all. She gave them the same offer. Secrecy. Help. Confidence. Every one of them took it.

She kept at it. For twenty years, her little network grew. Now, there were over a hundred people in it. She felt proud of herself, most days, but today had been a rough day.

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One of her people had been caught by another Inquisitor. They had been exiled, of course. Bless their heart, they hadn’t breathed a word of the help that Candour had given them. They’d known it would doom everyone else in the network.

It hurt, to see someone she had spent years protecting exiled for something out of their control. She’d known the man, and she’d liked him. He was a friendly carpenter who liked cards, and had manifested Gambling. Not his fault at all. He was no addict.

It wasn’t the first time one of hers had been caught by another Inquisitor. It hurt just the same every time it happened. But she was getting sick of that too. So she hatched a plan.

The Inquisitors were a secretive bunch, as you would imagine. They almost always operated completely independently, only reporting back to senior clergy. Even though her numbers had dropped when she had started her network, it had not aroused any suspicion. She still exiled anyone who deserved it, even if she didn’t agree with pushing them into the Deep.

There were enough murderers and other foul criminal Idealists that popped up in Wayrest that she could make up her numbers there, to an extent. She just had to focus on them, try harder to catch them.

She did. It wasn’t easy, but she did. She could hear everything, after all. She was very good at what she did.

So when that poor carpenter was exiled, she added another task to her list: spying on other Inquisitors. She had to be exceedingly careful, of course. They had similar skillsets to her own. But where they were good, great, even, she was exceptional. And now, she had a purpose.

Over the next few years, she saved three people from her fellow Inquisitors. It required a different approach, however. They had already been marked as suspicious, so she couldn’t simply swear them to secrecy. They would be questioned.

So she hid them. She arranged the purchase of a building from someone in her network, and for the construction of a hidden basement for it from another. She furnished it with all the necessities they could need. She had others in the network bring supplies. She personally ensured they were not watched.

As the years passed, she grew more concerned. She had ten people living in the basement now, and had had to expand it several times. She was nearing one hundred and fifty people in her network. The situation was growing precarious. She was good, but all it would take was one strong breeze to bring everything tumbling down.

She would not allow it. She grew more and more careful. Took paranoia to extreme heights.

And that was how she noticed them.

They called themselves the Redeemers, a group that was fomenting rebellion. Not openly, that would bring the Inquisition down on them immediately, but quietly, secretly.

They had already grown large. By her best count, they had several hundred members. They were zealots, just like her own Inquisitors, just of a political variety as opposed to a religious one. They were careful too, extremely so. She only noticed them because one of their meeting houses was so close to her building with the hidden basement.

She could not allow it. One of her colleagues was sure to catch wind of them sooner or later. And for a rebellion this size? They would be thorough. They would search every nook and cranny of every building nearby every single one of their known abodes.

Her basement would be found. She had to act.

She began to map them, to count their members, to figure out their structure, their leaders, their plans. It was not hard, now that she had found them. Within a month, she had a clear enough map to make a move.

This too, was part of her job as Inquisitor. Rebellion was unusual in Wayrest. Most people were content to live in safety behind the walls, and instinctively understood that to threaten the status quo was to threaten that safety. And a threat to the status quo was a threat to the Church.

The Redeemers had organised themselves into cells. It made her plan so much easier.

She descended on the hideout near her basement first, and killed the few in there outright. They were not good or bad people, but they would expose her. She had done worse, in her years.

Next, she killed all those in cells connected to the cell in that building. She felt dirty, afterwards, but relieved, too. She was in the clear, now. No one could alert the Inquisition to the hideout near her own.

She reported to her senior inquisitor immediately. She told him an incomplete version of the truth. She knew the man had no skill for falsehoods or deceit, but it still made her nervous. Her, an inquisitor of thirty-something years.

He bought her story. The Inquisition dropped on the Redeemers like a hammer. Within a night, the rebellion was pulled out by its roots.

Something interesting shook loose with the chaff, though. An enchanter had been helping them. Supplying them with enchantments, apparently. They had kept his involvement well under wraps, for her not to have sniffed it out herself.

He was being kept in a stone-tight cell, one of the rare varieties they kept for containing Idealists. An Idealist of Stone stood guard at all times, and shaped a door in or out as needed. Mostly, they just made a slot for poking food through. If the enchanter tried to inscribe anything on the cell, the guard would notice and smooth it out. It was foolproof.

Candour was curious, though. Enchanters were rare, and for one to get caught up in the Redeemers seemed odd. It prickled at her. Something told her he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, coerced maybe, or supremely unlucky, or perhaps just a fool. She had found a purpose in life, looking after such people.

Idealists with taboo Ideals were exiled. Serious criminal Idealists were exiled too. The penalty for rebellion, though, was death. The people could murder each other, but they could not be allowed to think they could rebel.

This enchanter was in a strange position, then. By all rights, they should have killed him on the spot. But Enchanting was simply too rare, too valuable. They couldn’t exile him; he was a rebel. They couldn’t execute him either; he was too valuable. He would certainly not be allowed to enchant of his own free will.

It was a conundrum. Candour thought it likely that some purpose built facility would be made, with failsafes upon failsafes, watched over by some ageing Idealists from the clergy, and he would spend the rest of his life trotting out whatever enchantments they asked of him.

It was sad. And she was curious, still. How did an enchanter end up roped into the Redeemers?

She went to see him. She spent the long minutes walking through the armoured prison bunker, as the Church called it, or the dungeon, as everyone else did, even though she hated it.

For the most part, the only people they bothered keeping captive were mundane prisoners, normal people who had committed some serious crime or another. The special cells were kept in the deepest part of the dungeon, away from all the others, separated by an entire empty floor.

She reached his cell. The only way she could tell was the presence of a man, the jailor, sitting relaxed at a small table opposite a blank wall, reading a book by lamplight. He waved a hand, opening a small gap for her to enter through, bidding her to tap five times on the wall inside when she wanted out.

She slipped inside, and the stone melded seamlessly behind her.

The cell was lit by a single, weak light rune, high on the ceiling above, well out of reach of even the tallest prisoners. The guard outside would feel any tampering, regardless. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust.

On the floor, sitting, looking a little startled, was a man of perhaps thirty. He looked ordinary.

“I suppose you’re here to torture me, or something equally horrific,” he said.

She regarded him levelly, for a moment. “I don’t torture people. I’m just …curious, I suppose. What would bring an enchanter to deal with the Redeemers?”

He snorted. “I’m not a typical enchanter, I guess. Had a rebellious youth. Truth be told, I hadn’t had anything to do with them, not for years. Then they came by one night, asking for money. Then they asked for more.”

Candour had no skills for discerning truth, but one didn’t spend thirty years as an Inquisitor without developing a nose for it. His words rang true. He didn’t strike her as a man who had had much occasion for deceit, either. He was certainly not as practised as she was.

“Why did you help them? You could have said no, could have placated them, then turned them in.”

He sighed, long and weary. “I ask myself the same thing a hundred times a day. More, even. I was… working on a project. They helped.” He shrugged.

“A project?” she asked. “What was it?”

His eyes narrowed in the dim light. “Why do you want to know? Why are you here at all? No one else has bothered to see me yet. It’s been weeks.”

“Just over one week, actually.” She paused. “I guess you could say I’m not a typical inquisitor.”

Something in her manner must have allayed whatever suspicions he had. A trusting man, this one. He shrugged again, then rolled up his sleeve.

His arm was covered in dense, black writing. At first she took it for a ritual tattoo, but the shapes were too familiar. She swore she recognised some. Then she saw his actual ritual tattoo, on the hand he was using to roll up his sleeve, and the comparison made the differences stark. It wasn’t writing, they were enchantments.

He looked up at her expectantly, this foolish, trusting man. Her instincts told her he was a good person. Her experience told her a man covered with enchantments was too dangerous to ever contain. They would kill him when they found it out.

Pieces began to tumble through her head, resolving into a plan. He was a good person, and he could be exceedingly useful.

She knew just the right wrong crowd to get him involved with.