“Lord Vicar, your attention, please.”
Vicar Phaero had at last found a comfortable position. He had been raised as a scholar, the eighth son of a minor aristocratic family. His father used the larger part of the family treasury to buy the eldest son an officer’s badge back in their home city of Meidin. The next largest part had gone toward buying a deaconship for the second eldest son.
“Lord Vicar, about the well.”
Sons three through seven had been appointed to lower and lower positions in local bureaucracy, to better aid their elders.
“Lord Vicar, please pray to God on my son’s behalf.”
He, lowly son number eight, was born late enough that he didn’t have a nice position lined up for him, and early enough that he didn’t get spoiled with his elder brothers’ considerable incomes.
“Lord Vicar, I am innocent!”
So he was shunted off into the lower rung of academies, reading ancient texts in a dark and musty room where the spiders paid more attention in class than the students.
But he was clever, oh yes he was.
“Lord Vicar, the total comes to eighty sheep, thirty bulls, ninety sows, forty-”
Phaero knew there was always a place for someone like him: well-bred, elegant, knowledgeable, and willing to degrade himself for the rude rich. When the banker’s son needed a tutor, he didn’t just teach, he fawned and praised, and by the end of the term that dullard was convinced he had a nose for real scholarship.
“Lord Vicar, my crops are withering!”
It was all too easy to draw money out of such people. After just a decade of hard work, he bought himself a priesthood out in a little village. And there again he found easy marks all too willing to exchange wealth and influence for a well-spoken lackey.
“Lord Vicar, I would be most honored if you would attend my son’s communion.”
When a baron’s drunkard son needed to explain away his indiscretions to his lady mother, who came to his aid? Phaero did. When the local toughs needed their debtors to pay, who had a sermon about despising money at the ready? Phaero once again. He rose through the ranks, moving from place to place and reestablishing his real craft at higher and higher positions, until he bought himself a vicariate in the little walled city of Beroli.
“Lord Vicar, please cure my mother of the plague!”
After decades, he finally found a level that was just right. Beroli was large and wealthy enough that when people came to mass they wore nice, clean clothes and put coins on the collection plate instead of dead birds. It was small and poor enough that the great powers conspiring in high towers extracted tribute from it and otherwise left it well alone. It was close enough to the grand city of Anthusa, on the road to the Holy City, that there was a never ending stream of pilgrims to bilk and starving artisans to shelter. It was far enough from either city that, when the odd civil war erupted, it was out of range of most fighting, and, best of all, it was located in an area of minimal strategic importance.
“Lord Vicar, about the plague.”
It was good, easy living being second-in-command of Beroli. All the real responsibility floated up to the Count, who was experienced, well-liked, healthy, just corrupt enough, and conveniently middle-aged. The day he first sank into his new office chair, Vicar Phaero was already planning out the rest of his life. A few more decades of comfortable service to the church, then he’d buy an abbott’s seat in a relaxing monastery to live out his twilight years.
“Lord Vicar…”
It was the perfect plan.
“Lord Vicar, please!”
He raised his hand sagely, and the farmers in front of him quieted down, averting their gaze.
It had been the perfect plan, until the Demon Sultan razed Vintal’s most well-defended city while the Count had the bad judgment to be present. In a crisis of leadership, with the Beroli council so paralyzed by petty feuds that they couldn’t decide who among could call a council meeting to order, he was spontaneously promoted to the resolutely made-up position of Lord Vicar and tasked with fixing everything.
“Lord Vicar, please. Our crops are withering where they stand, and none of the saints can avert it. Our livestock are afflicted by a black pox, and… and-”
The elderly farmer sobbed pathetically, then fully broke into tears.
“My daughter and her husband… *sob*… they died in their bed two days ago. It was horrible, Lord Vicar.”
Ah, yes. The plague.
Because it wasn’t bad enough to be given all responsibility in the middle of the biggest political upheaval in living memory, there had to be a deadly, incurable blight killing everything from the worms on up.
At first, he’d been able to spin this as God’s punishment for sin. There was more than enough of it to go around in Beroli, he’d made sure of as much. But as the days turned into weeks with no sign of relief, the word on the street changed.
They’d already exiled the prostitutes and beaten the drunkards and executed the gangsters, and nothing had changed. So the problem must lie a little further up the chain.
The people of Beroli had mutated into a frenzied mob, piggybacking on feuds and heresies both real and imagined to climb its way higher and higher up the hierarchy. Yesterday, they had beaten a priest, widely known to be a simoniac, in the streets, and attached charges of diabolism, false witness, and embezzlement to the pile. The church in Beroli stood united against this outrage… right up until it became clear that Phaero wasn’t intervening to defend one of his own.
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If he defied the mob now, to defend a known simoniac, they would turn on him in an instant. If he did nothing they would keep working up the chain, and when they reached the top, none of his subordinates would protect him. After all, he had seen to it that there was not a single virtuous priest in the city.
He stood, and the farmers flinched back in the face of his towering height, courtesy of a raised platform beneath his desk. He calmed them with soothing words, told them to have faith and this trial would pass, that God had called His favored children to his embrace. He conducted them out on the street with blessings, and returned to his office to stew.
There was no easy way out of this. There might not be any way out at all.
What he needed…
“Lord Vicar!”
“What is it, sergeant?”
“We have a caravan of refugees at the north gate, coming from near the Holy City.”
That wasn’t new. The plague had started near the Holy City and spread outward, in no small part as refugees fled the blight and sought protection in Anthusa or smaller cities like Beroli.
“Figure out how many are infected among them and turn them away.”
“That’s just the issue, Lord Vicar. Not a single one of them is infected.”
That was certainly unusual.
“How many are there?”
“They say three-thousand. With the number of wagons and animals they brought, I believe them.”
That was even more unusual. Beroli had yet to see a caravan even half that size before. Phaero leaned back in his seat, inviting the sergeant to elaborate.
“They’re from the village of Inillo, a few weeks toward the Holy City. Their baron died in the invasion, and they now follow his illegitimate son, Cato of Inillo.”
The sergeant pulled out a gilded mirror whose reflection showed a man in his late twenties, well-dressed for a country boy, with full and handsome features.
“How many are armed?”
“The boy and the yeoman, Lord Vicar, and then only barely.”
Nine times out of ten, that meant the rest of the villagers weren’t cultivators. There might be as many as a few dozen warriors hidden among them, but there’s only so much one can do to hide arms and armor, and if they had real strength and numbers they wouldn’t be bothering to hide.
“Where are they going?”
“They said their original goal was to head through to Anthusa, but plenty of them want to stay in Beroli, at least for a while.”
“And not a single one is infected?”
“We checked and double checked, Lord Vicar. They offered themselves up openly for inspection, and said they were protected by their village’s patron saint. They also claim to have not lost a single person on their journey over.”
A young bastard with a few thousand followers, all mysteriously immune to the plague? That was a dangerous new ingredient.
But also, potentially, everything he needed.
“Triple check every single one of them, and if they all pass, let them in. Have their little lord meet me for vespers.”
“Yes, Lord Vicar.”
There were other, more credulous men who would have taken this to be a sign of divine favor. Others would have immediately gone to the north gate and asked the villagers who their patron saint was, and how to appease him. But Lord Vicar Phaero was no fool. Beroli had reams upon reams of saints, and they had exhausted every one of them with prayer and offerings. What patron saint would a rinky-dink village have that could cure the plague?
No, there were only two possibilities:
The first, they had started with a much larger group and cast away anyone who got sick. They had seen similar behavior in smaller groups, and while it would be unusual for so many people to enforce a lie like that and for such a crude trick to fool the sergeant, it wasn’t totally implausible. The second, they were diabolists, devil-worshiping scum whose foul master hid them from God’s wrath.
Either way, they fit his needs. Lord Vicar Phaero wasn’t expecting a cure, and didn’t need one.
What he needed was a scapegoat.
⚜ ⚜ ⚜
His Holiness Prudence IV, the late Holy Son, died two years previously, surrounded by his loved ones and showered in glory. Later that day he awoke surrounded by his loved ones and showered with glory.
That was just one of the post-transcendence perks of being the Holy Son. For anyone else, unless they were canonized as saints, some time in Purgatory was a must, but after centuries of preparation, imbuing his soul with the will of God and conversing with angels, it was a trivial matter to step directly into heaven.
So, meeting his parents, grandparents, and his great-grandfather, the former Holy Son Immaculate XIII, His Holiness Prudence IV was conducted through the pearly gates and bathed in the flowing waters of heaven. What would have taken at least a few hundred years in Purgatory was done within just two subjective years there, and was much more comfortable to boot. Heaven did not have ‘time’ in a proper sense, but the sensation of it would accompany the newly transcended soul for a while as they got acquainted with Heaven, rather like a fresh sailor getting their sea legs.
The next perk was that he jumped right up to the position of Holiness. Others, even accomplished saints, would start out as Perfections, or maybe as Judgments if they were really exceptional, but Holy Sons got to skip the line right into middle-management.
Just as his three generations of fathers were escorting him up the Mountain of Heaven to make a proper introduction with the archangels, Prudence IV made an unsound remark.
“Tell me, how long did it take them to select my replacement down there? Or are they still going at it?”
He laughed at his own joke. Heaven doesn’t have time, after all. But his three generations of fathers were rather less amused.
“What? Don’t tell me you lose your humor after an eternity?”
His great-grandfather responded.
“I wanted to brief you on this matter when we reached the top, but I suppose we shouldn’t delay.”
He looked deadly serious. With a wave of his hand, Immaculate XIII pulled aside the omnipresent coruscating golden clouds of heaven and opened a window into the mortal world. Upon the planet of Vintal, right where the Holy City should have been, a vast dark cloud sprouted like a mole on the face of the world.
“Those fuckups! When is this?”
“Now.”
“What do you mean, now?”
“I mean now, two years after your death. There was a rupture in time.”
…
“Your Holiness, you mean to say that Heaven is broken?”
“Not all of it. The archangels contained the damage, but we’re scarce on details down here. Worse, the lower heavens are stuck in linear time now.”
This was… unthinkable.
“But how does that make any sense?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
Immaculate XIII zapped Prudence IV with heavenly lightning.
“I said I don’t know. That’s why I wanted to wait until we got to the top and have the archangels brief you. Uriel is better at explaining these things than I am.”
He’d have to wait. He’d have to wait. This sense of time passing, of being trapped in a moment, wasn’t the hallucination of a newly transcended soul experiencing eternity. It was real.
“How… how long will that take?”
“I don’t know.”
The Mountain of Heaven now seemed extremely high, and extremely steep.
Prudence IV spat out a most unholy word.