I knew better than to approach this Endrago immediately I felt as though I had reached into my purse and come forth with the winning ticket for the Sisivondal municipal lottery.
I found the Temple of Eternal Comfort without much difficulty: it was a ten-minute walk from the tavern. Despite its resonant name, it was drab and unprepossessing: a long, bare, narrow room, probably a converted shop, with a simple painted sign above its door. I saw none of the carpets and velvet hangings of which Vundafor Thorb had spoken, only some rows of wooden benches. He must have repossessed his merchandise. No one was there but a haggard, weary-looking man in shabby clothes, who was slowly sweeping the chapel floor.
I said that I wanted to speak with the priest Macola Endrago. “He comes toward evening,” the man said. “What sort of business do you have with him?”
Once again I explained that I was a stranger in Sippulgar, lonely and in need of healing, and told him that a sympathetic innkeeper had suggested I come here.
The man, who identified himself as the sexton of the chapel, Graimon Sten by name, looked surprised at that. “We get very few new communicants these days,” he said. “We have had certain difficulties, you know. Because of what happened here. But that ought not to discourage you. Macola Endrago will give you the help you need.”
I maintained my guise of ignorance. “Because of what happened here? And what was that?”
The sexton Graimon Sten hesitated a moment. Then he said, with a slight twitch of his lips, “Our founders have left us, and no one knows where they are. That shouldn’t be of any real concern: we still have our Macola Endrago, who is the heart and soul of our faith. But of course, when there’s the least hint of scandal about a chapel, or even what is suspected to be scandal—”
“Yes, the innkeeper I mentioned did speak highly of this Endrago. But what’s this about a scandal? The founders—what about them? They’ve left you, you say?” Trying to sound merely casually curious, I said, “Left you to go where? And why did they go?”
Plainly the entire topic was distressing to him. He looked downward, concentrating pointedly on his sweeping. But I persevered.
“They disappeared. Not a trace.” He paused, still avoiding my glance. Then he said, almost under his breath, “One story has it that they were murdered by a member of the congregation who held a grudge against them. His wife had died, and he was sick with grief and asked them to bring her back from the dead. He was willing to pay a huge sum of money if they would. They promised to do it, so it’s said. But they couldn’t.”
“So he went insane and killed them? You think that’s what happened to them?”
“I don’t think anything,” the sexton said. He looked up and let his eyes meet mine, but only for a moment. “Nobody pays me to think. I told you because you asked. Listen, it’s just something that I heard someone say.”
“Someone reliable?”
“How would I know. It sounds pretty wild to me. The man is still a communicant here. He doesn’t have the look of a murderer about him.”
I risked pressing him a little harder. “Even so: is it possible that the story’s true?”
“It’s possible that anything’s true. Life is full of disappointments; anger may rise up in the most surprising people. And restoring the dead was never any part of our creed here. If that was what he expected, he didn’t have any chance of getting it, did he? And that could have upset him. But what does it matter? The men are gone. We struggle on without them. Macola Endrago will be here in two hours, and I know he will give your soul the ease it needs.”
Now I had three theories: that Macola Endrago had murdered Ambithorn and Flurivole in a dispute over money, that one of their own communicants had killed them in rage because they had failed to perform a miracle for him, or that they had indulged in some rash conjuring-up of demons and had been destroyed by the very spirits they had summoned. The Endrago theory was supported to some extent by my brother-in-law’s own journal. The sexton had not put forth the angry-communicant theory with much conviction, in fact did not seem really to believe it at all. And the third, the carried-off-by-demons notion, I rejected out of hand, of course. Which left the Endrago theory as the only likely one.
But five minutes in the presence of Macola Endrago and I knew that all my conjectures about him were wrong. The man was a saint.
He was very tall, very thin, almost frail, a spidery, fleshless figure of a man, older than I had expected. His dark Sippulgaru skin seemed to have faded with the years to a light pale violet. He had a long rectangular face from which emanated the kindest of smiles and a gaze of the utmost gentleness and benevolence, and he was surrounded by such an aura of love and warmth and purity that at the mere sight of him I felt a crazy yearning to drop to my knees before him and kiss the hem of his threadbare robe. There was no mistaking his goodness: that sort of thing can’t be counterfeited. He held out both his hands to me and clasped them about mine, and murmured some sort of blessing in the softest, most whispery of voices. The Temple of Eternal Comfort might have been the shameless concoction of two callous entrepreneurs in quest of easy money, but this man Endrago, I knew at once, was the embodiment of true holiness, sincere in his beliefs, genuinely good. How my brother-in-law must have hated him! In every aspect of his character, by word and deed, this Endrago had displayed the greatest possible contrast to his employers’ crass materialistic ways.
I trust such flashes of insight when they come to me. Confronted with such incontrovertible sanctity, I was unable to spin any false stories about my visit to Sippulgar. I simply told him that my wife had asked me to come here to learn the details of her brother Melifont’s fate.
“Ah,” said Macola Endrago softly, softly: a mere faint gust of breath. “How sad it was! They summoned the irgalisteroi, your Melifont and his friend; and the irgalisteroi destroyed them. I had warned them, again and again: these spirits are real, they are dangerous. They would not listen. They thought they could use the irgalisteroi for their private profit. But they wove the spells better than they knew, and they were punished terribly for their greed and their impetuousness. As a man of your sort is surely aware, it is hard to protect fools from their own folly.”
“The irgalisteroi?”
“Yes. Proiarchis, it may have been whom they invoked. Or Remmer, more likely. I came in just as it was ending. I heard the screams: the most terrible cries of agony, they were, and there was the sound of the atmosphere collapsing around them—it is like thunder, you know, thunder right there in the room. The air grows dark. The whole world seems to shake. The sky itself is split apart. I opened the door and found that the two men had already been carried off. If I had arrived any sooner, I would have died with them.”
“You will pardon me, father,” I said, “but I am only a merchant of Sisivondal, a plain worldly man, and I know nothing of supernatural matters. Proiarchis, Remmer, irgalisteroi—these names are only names to me.”
“Ah,” he said again. “Of course.”
And he told me. There are, he explained, three classes of demons. That was the word he used, demons, and what he meant by it was the inhabitants of the invisible world, a concept that seemed not to have any fantastical connotations for him: he accepted without the least hint of skepticism the presence of unknown and unknowable worlds immediately adjacent to our own. These demons were the original prehistoric inhabitants of our planet, before even the Shapeshifters had come here. In ancient times the Shapeshifters had mastered them, though, confining them under powerful spells. The valisteroi, he said, were a group that had somehow escaped those spells and live now beyond the sphere of the sun, invulnerable to all conjuring. The kallisteroi, who dwell between the sky and the Great Moon and have a certain degree of freedom of action, are sympathetic to us and will sometimes agree to do services for us when properly asked by the adept; in any case they never do harm. And then there are the irgalisteroi, the demons of the subterranean world, who can be compelled to perform many duties, but who are angry, dangerous beings entirely capable of turning on an unskillful summoner and destroying him.