‘Yes,’ von Schomberg said, turning away to resume his walk along the battlements.
‘It will mean a massacre.’
Bylorhof
Kaldezeit, 1111
Shouts and howls resounded through the town. Peasants thronged the streets, gathered together to watch the macabre procession creeping through Bylorhof. Twenty men, their naked bodies glistening with sweat and blood, struggled through the muddy lanes. Before them they pushed a hideous altar mounted upon the bed of a wagon. It was a ghastly, semi-human effigy, the eidolon of Bylorak. The marsh god’s statue was a monstrous thing carved from green stone, a squat, broad-shouldered man-like thing with a gaping, toadlike mouth and a single hideous eye set into its forehead. Marsh reeds formed the eidolon’s hair and swamp moss served it for a beard. In its left hand it held a fish. In its right, a human skull.
The men pushing the idol through the streets weren’t part of Bylorak’s priesthood. Most of the under-priests were dead and the chief priest had fled to a hermitage somewhere in the marsh, abandoning his temple. In his absence, fanatics of the ancient religion had taken it upon themselves to act. They had broken down the doors of the temple and stolen the image of their god, that Bylorak might witness the devotion and faith of his disciples.
Through the streets the procession crept. At every sixth step, the men pushing the idol would stop. Crying the name of their god to the heavens, they would lash themselves viciously with scourges. The whips ripped at their flesh, spattering the street with blood. After some minutes, the flagellants would stop and resume their march through the town.
Frederick van Hal watched the procession with a feeling of horror. Some of the flagellants were men he knew, pillars of the community. Terror of the plague had driven them into the madness of fanaticism. Viewing the gods of the Empire as weak and impotent, they had turned back to the old gods of the Fennones. The Black Plague had brought a second disease to Sylvania. A plague of unbelief.
The priest of Morr could almost sympathise with the desperation of the peasants. They had watched their priests and priestesses die all around them, unable to stop the plague, unable to bring the beneficence of the gods to the stricken community. If Shallya and Morr would not protect their own servants, then what hope was there for a simple commoner?
Such was the attitude of the laity, but to a clergyman, things were not so simple. Frederick understood that the gods worked through faith, that at those times when all hope was lost was when it was most important to cling to faith. The gods tested men, tested the strength of their will and determination, for only through ordeal could the true quality of man be revealed.
The priest pulled his robe tighter about his chest as a chill swept through his body. Such were the ways of benevolent gods, but there were other gods as well, gods of such malevolence as to make the cyclopean Bylorak seem beneficent and kindly. These gods were ancient and utterly malignant, daemonic things lurking just beyond the light, forever straining to cast down the world of men. Frederick had learned much of such gods when he had studied in the great librarium of the temple in Luccini, eldest of Morr’s temples in the Old World.
He had learned more when he assumed the duties of high priest at the Bylorhof temple. There was a reason he had been chosen for that duty, why the lectors decided to install an outsider to this temple. The old priest, a Sylvanian, had been removed for practising the most obscene heresies. He and all his possessions had been consigned to flame, his very name purged from the temple records. The selection of a Westerlander to replace the apostate was to be a declaration that the previous infamy had been scoured from the temple.
It hadn’t, of course. The peasants still looked upon the temple of Morr with horror and made the signs of other gods when they passed Frederick in the street. The temple of Bylorak had revived the old rites, disposing of the dead in the mire of the marsh so that none need pass beneath the gateway of Morr’s garden. Baron von Rittendahl’s wife, upon her passing, had been interred within the castle crypt without ceremony, the infamy of Frederick’s predecessor making it impossible for von Rittendahl to have a Morrite ritual — if he even wanted one.
Father Arisztid Olt had left an indelible legacy behind him… and more. When the Black Guard had come for the apostate and consigned him to the pyre, they had missed the most prized of the heretic’s possessions. Beneath the temple, in the oldest crypts, Olt had maintained a secret library — a collection of forbidden tomes and occult grimoires that eclipsed even the Luccini temple’s collection of arcane lore.
A dream had led Frederick to the hidden library. Morr was god of sleep as well as death and employed dreams to guide his servants. It was a sacrilege for a priest of Morr to ignore any dream. When Frederick’s dream showed him the old crypt and the secret door, he had taken it as a sign from his god. When he descended into the crypt, he found everything as it had been in his dream. When he followed the winding marble corridors, he followed in the steps of his dream-self. When he reached up to brush the beak of the obsidian raven carved into the face of a pillar, he could see the spectral hand of his dream-self. When the entire pillar sank into the floor, exposing a hidden doorway, Frederick knew what he would find.
It had been ten years since that discovery. It was the reason Frederick appreciated the spiritual doubts and fears of the peasants, but it also gave him an understanding of the folly to which such doubt and fear could lead. The gods could fail men, but men could also fail their gods. Evil times need not be a token of good gods, but a sending of evil ones to tempt men into the clutches of Old Night.
Frederick stirred from his recollections, staring with rising anger as he watched the flagellants lash themselves, as he noted the rapt fascination, the hopeful desperation of the spectators. Bylorak was an abomination, a relic of days when men crawled before inhuman masters. There was no salvation to be found by grovelling before the marsh god, only a path to depravity and destruction. Better to perish of the plague than live in such obscenity!
‘Stop this!’ Frederick cried out, stepping into the street. He brandished his staff, holding it before him, blocking the way. The wagon shuddered to a stop, the cyclopean visage of Bylorak glaring down at him. The flagellants came out from behind the wagon, their scourges slashing into their own backs, their voices raised in moans of outrage.
‘Defiler!’ one of the fanatics wailed, his lips flecked with foam. ‘You dare stand before his sight!’
‘Bylorak watches us all!’ shrieked another flagellant. ‘He sees us, for we are his children! He hears us, for we are his children! He helps us, for we are…’
Frederick advanced upon the shouting flagellant. ‘You are fools, bowing to a stone effigy and worshipping a monster! All men die, but while they live they must do so with decency, with honour.’
The flagellant twisted away, prostrating himself before the eidolon. ‘He helps us, for we are his children!’ Tears rolled down the fanatic’s face as he pressed his lips to the webbed feet of his god. Frederick moved to pull the man away, to restore some dignity to the naked wretch. But as soon as he reached out, his body recoiled in pain. A stone struck him in the cheek, slashing his pale skin. A second stone crashed into his side. The priest retreated as more stones came flying at him.
The barrage came not from the flagellants but from the peasants lining the street. The procession had stirred their hopes as nothing had in the past weeks and now they were aroused to violence by Frederick’s effort to save them from themselves.
‘Go back to your carrion, jackal!’ one woman cried. ‘Are you so eager to fill your garden? Is Olt’s pup trying to outdo his master?’
The jeers and the barrage of stones increased, driving Frederick into flight. Rocks pelted his body at every step, dung and offal from the gutter plastered his robes. By the time he reached the safety of a covered pigsty, the priest’s body felt like one big bruise. It took him a moment to appreciate that he owed his respite not to the security of his refuge, but to the shifting attention of the mob.