“No, it isn’t,” he contradicted.
Will frowned. At his elbow, the Abbess Ned pointed a dramatic hand at the frontage of the town hall, where a group of worthies in fur-lined gowns stood watching the wagon from the steps.
“There is the sink of corruption, brother!”
Ting!
“There is the source of misery. What chance have souls to see the Light, when the grasping councillors throw single mothers into the streets when they cannot pay their rent?”
Clash!
“When the taxes that should go to repairing the roads, rebuilding a hostelry after the war, and feeding the children of the poor—”
Ting!
“—instead go to line the pockets of the villains who sent strong yokels from Spine Gap to the Last Battle and yet remained at home themselves to batten and grow rich?”
Clash-Ting! Clang!
One of a number of raggedly dressed labourers waved from the back of the crowd, yelling, “No, they didn’t. They went off and fought, same as the rest of us. And what’s taxes?”
The Reverend William Brandiman shook his head in sorrow. “Ah, the power of Darkness to deceive! We here at the Holy Mission often find this. You good people do not know how much you need us. You do not know what the Light can do for your lives.”
Clash-Ting!
Will shot a look at Ned, who put his somewhat large and roughened hands behind his back, stilling the tambourine.
“You, sir, for example.” The Reverend William Brandiman pointed at a half-elf who stood, arms folded, to one side. “That wound of yours, sir, was taken from a Dark-corrupted weapon, am I right?”
The half-elf fingered his saturnine jaw, letting the crowd see the unhealed cut that wept a pale fluid. He called harmoniously, “From an orcish blade, at the Battle of Sarderis.”
“And you—and you—and you, mistress!” Will pointed in turn to a Man with an amputated arm, another hill troll with a patch over one eye, and a female elf on crutches. “All wounds of Darkness, if I am not mistaken? Yes! Ah, how you need our Mission of Light! Though healer-mages fail, and have given you up as lost, yet a prayer to the Lady, through our Holy Master, is never in vain!”
A one-legged dwarf began to weep and cry, “Heal us poor sinners!”
Ting! Clash-Ting! Ting!
Under cover of the enthusiastic tambourine the good Abbess Edwina, in a somewhat deeper voice than she had used to address the crowd, muttered, “I thought we were never going to hit it!”
The reverend slicked back his short, oiled locks. “Never fear, brother Ned. Look at them. The cannon-fodder of the battle, by the looks of it—I thought the Spine Gap levies were locally raised.”
Will reached into the back of the wagon and brought out a crate.
“These relics and devices have been blessed by our Master, the Holy One, the favoured of the Lady. Come forward, brother.” Will Brandiman beckoned the half-elf. “Let me see…prayer shawls…beads…ah, the Holy One’s sacred elixir. It is very scarce and precious, brother, but let us see if it will answer your case.”
Taking a cloth and wetting it with the liquid from the tiny green bottle, he wiped the half-elf’s face. The weeping scar came away. It left, Will was glad to see, no trace of Ned’s face-paint. A great gasp went up from the crowd.
The female dwarf bawled, “It’s a miracle!”
Clash-Ting!
Under cover of bringing out another crate, Ned growled, “Think the half-breed’ll keep his mouth shut?”
Will put the special green bottle into the back of the covered wagon. Before straightening, he murmured, “The half-elf will be out of Spine Gap in an hour; I told him we’d run this same scam down the road. We may, but he won’t be with us. I never trust convenient rogues found in taverns. Mind that bottle, and remind me to bum that rag afterwards. It’s a contact poison.”
“Well thought of, brother!” Ned Brandiman stepped forward, holding his hands out to the beings that crowded closely round the back of the wagon. “You good people! Oh, how it warms my heart to be able to help you!”
Ting-Clash! Clash-Ting-CLANG!
Ned glared back at Will, who gave the tambourine another enthusiastic shake. Continuing in a light contralto, Ned cried, “And I know that you’ll want to help us.”
Several people in the crowd called, “How?” and “Yes!”
“You all know that our Holy Master is building a prayer-wheel,” Ned said piously. “When it is complete, it will send prayers from him to the Lady of Light every day and every night, and then we can heal all the wounds the Dark dealt out in the last war, we can save each and every one of you, we can do it, yes, we can do it!”
The hill troll in the front row bellowed, “Hallelujah!”
“Oh, yes!” Ned swayed hypnotically. “As you take these prayer rugs—and prayer beads—and bottles of elixir, please give your contributions generously. No amount is too small. Or too big. Give us your money so that the great prayer-wheel can be built! Give us your money for the Holy One!”
“HALLELUJAH!”
Some thirty minutes later the Mission wagon rolled up out of the Spine Gap pass, the draught-manticore pulling with all the strength in its scarlet lion-scorpion body. Will counted copper, silver, and even the occasional gold piece into a small wooden chest.
“Hallelujah!’ Edvard Ragald Rupert Brechie van Nassau wrapped the wagon’s reins around his ankle, hitching up his nun’s robe and disclosing hirsute halfling feet. He dove into a hamper of food. Through a mouthful of roast bear and thrush-in-aspic, he remarked, “Let’s go and give the Holy One the good news.”
“About ten per cent of it.” Wilhelm Hieronymous Cornelius Mikhail Brechie van Nassau pushed the lid of the wooden chest down and grinned at his brother. “Now. About that other idea we were discussing…”
Shortly after dawn the next day, with the mountain vultures whistling and crying in the pale air, the Mission wagon creaked up the winding road and under the archway of the Mission Citadel. The air tasted thin in the halflings’ mouths, and cold chilled their fingertips and hairy toes. Will automatically tucked one hand up into his armpit, keeping the muscles warm for use, and simultaneously checking the position of one heavy throwing-dagger.
The Holy One saw their arrival from his place on the Citadel’s parapet, where the mountain wind blew across his shaved elven head. The air was, after all, no colder than camp sentry duty or a knight’s vigil in a stone chapel. The tall elf locked the fingers of his dark-skinned hands together, banishing the military thoughts and the panic that began to attend them.
“Send them to my cell.” He gestured his attendant priests to obedience. They instantly scurried away. The Mission of Light kept a soldierly discipline in its priestly ranks.
The elf wrapped his ragged white habit more firmly around his dark-skinned body. The cold of the high altitude bit into his thin fingers and the tips of his pointed ears. His long golden eyes filled with tears of mortification. When he could avoid comfort no longer, he went inside the chill stone corridors of the monastery. The black-haired halfling priest and his plain (but doubtless good-hearted) abbess sister were already waiting in the bare cell that was the Holy One’s abode.
“Sir paladin!” The Reverend Brandiman knelt on the bare flagstones. His sister curtsied low.
“Do not call me that! It is a title of shame!” The Holy One clasped one fine-fingered hand to his brow. His other hand twitched. He no longer carried weapons, not even a knife; but his hands sometimes searched for knightly accoutrements without his knowledge.