Perhaps they were the reason he heard the start of the chanting despite the thick stone walls: “Show us the boy! Show us the boy! Show us the boy!”
A small man with a balding crown and bushy gray eyebrows, Randal Sweetgrove, First Sunlord of Westgate, sat with his collection of sundials, hourglasses, calendar stones, shadow clocks, candle clocks, and dripping clepsydras arrayed behind him. He’d been smiling at Stedd, who was sitting on the other side of his desk, but he scowled at the noise from outside. “I thought I told Miri to send those people home.”
“She tried,” Niseus said from his station by the door. “Some went. Some didn’t.”
“I can talk to them,” said Stedd, meanwhile beginning the process of squirming out of an ornate chair that was rather too deep for him. “I feel better now, and the waveservants won’t be able to get me with Sir Niseus and the other guards protecting me.”
“Please, rest,” Randal said. “There’ll be time for speeches later.”
“But I told you,” said the boy as he completed the process of planting his feet on the floor, “I have to deliver Lathander’s message and keep traveling toward Sapra. So really, I shouldn’t waste time.”
“Sit back down!” the sunlord snapped.
Stedd didn’t resume his seat, but he did falter in surprise.
“I’m not your enemy, son,” Randal continued, “quite the contrary, and sitting here talking to you, I’ve weighed your words carefully in the hope of discovering that your notions aren’t heretical after all, just awkwardly expressed.”
Stedd shook his head. “Heretical?”
“Yes, and to my regret, after giving them a fair hearing, I can interpret them no other way. The sun god didn’t change from one incarnation to another only to revert to his previous persona a mere century later. The cycle takes millennia. It always has and always will. It can never vary because it reflects the order Amaunator embodies above all else.”
“You’re wrong,” said the boy. “Lathander came back because we need him.”
“Lad, I started my priestly training when I was as young as you are now. I’ve spent forty-five years contemplating the mysteries. Don’t you see how foolish, how insolent it is to claim you understand them better than I do?”
“I understand how it could seem that way,” Stedd replied with bitter disappointment in his voice, “and if it makes you angry, I’m sorry. But I still have to do what Lathander wants. I thought you’d help me, but if you don’t want to, I’ll go.”
“Niseus,” said the sunlord, “block the door.”
To thwart and intimidate a mere child who’d come here willingly at a temple knight’s invitation? It seemed like dishonorable behavior to say the least. But Niseus had sworn an oath of obedience, and he sidestepped to place himself in front of the exit.
“Let me out!” said Stedd.
“It will be all right,” Niseus replied. He hoped that was true.
Stedd pivoted and evidently spotted the smaller door in the back wall amid all the water clocks and such. He started to scramble around Randal’s desk.
The First Sunlord rattled off an invocation and swept his hand through the arc that symbolized the sun’s daily passage across the sky. Stedd’s muscles clenched into rigid immobility, and he pitched off balance and fell.
Randal looked to Niseus. “The paralysis won’t last long,” the high priest said. “Put the boy where he can’t get up to mischief. Lock him up with his hands tied and his mouth gagged.”
As predicted, Stedd’s muscles unlocked before Niseus finished securing him, but the boy didn’t offer any resistance. He plainly possessed his share of courage, but even so, this unexpected reversal, arriving just when he imagined he’d found friends and sanctuary, had hammered the fight out of him.
Niseus tramped back through the temple to Randal’s study. “It’s done.”
The sunlord sighed. “I take it you disapprove.”
“Explain why it was necessary.”
“Where to begin … with the obvious, I suppose. Do you think the boy’s right about our god, and I’m wrong?”
“Of course not, Saer. But if you’d seen the piles of vegetables in the marketplace and the way all the people were looking at him-”
“Creating food out of thin air is fairly basic clerical magic. If you recall, you’ve seen me do it.”
I never saw you create that much, Niseus thought, but his instincts warned him that saying so would only irritate his superior. “Then are you saying the boy really is channeling the divine?”
“He’s made contact with something. It isn’t necessarily the god we worship, and even if it is, that doesn’t mean he isn’t confused about the nature of what he’s experiencing. The higher powers are mysterious. If they weren’t, the world wouldn’t need priests.”
Niseus frowned. “All right. I see that. But does it mean we had to deal with him so harshly?”
“Considering that he refused to cooperate, yes. We live in harsh times, and a time when people can’t even see the sun. Do you think we can afford to let some illiterate farm boy wander around preaching nonsense and possibly produce a full-blown schism among the faithful?”
“I suppose not. But what do we do instead? Keep him here and teach him to believe what he ought to believe? Train him to be a true sunlord?”
Randal grimaced. “That could be seen as the waste of an opportunity.”
Niseus felt a pang of foreboding. “How so?”
“The church of Umberlee is becoming far and away the most powerful faith in Westgate. You and I can wish it were otherwise, but wishing won’t change the reality. The day may soon come when the prosperity, the dignity, indeed, the very survival of other temples depends on reaching an accommodation with Whitecap Hall.”
“And now you have something the waveservants want.”
“Judging from all the sniffing around they and their agents have done of late, they want him quite a lot. Enough, I hope, to guarantee tolerance for the House of the Sun in exchange.”
“You had this in the back of your mind from the start, didn’t you? Why didn’t you tell me before you sent me out to fetch the boy?”
“I didn’t want to take the time lest he disappear before you reached him. And, I confess, I hesitated to burden you with knowledge you’d find distasteful even though I knew the moment would arrive soon enough.”
“ ‘Distasteful’ is a mild word for it.”
“Believe me, I know. But we’ll be sacrificing a single troublemaker for the greater good. For the life of the church to which you and I have both given our lives. Can I count on you to stand by me as I carry it through?”
Niseus took a breath. “I’m your faithful servant, First Sunlord, the same as I’ve always been.”
“You’re my friend, Sir Knight, and for that, I will always be grateful.” Randal picked up a quill. “I’ll send a missive to the shark lovers informing them we have the boy, and then we can open negotiations.”
Anton had asked Dalabrac to procure a new saber for him, and the halfling had delivered a weapon that exceeded his expectations, exceptionally sharp and well balanced and with a subtle glimmer of enchantment in the curved steel of the blade. But wearing a sword on both hips, the saber on one and the cutlass on the other, made it harder to conceal the weapons under his new yellow mantle, or at least he suspected that was the case. He flipped the wings of the garment outward in the hope of eliminating telltale bulges.
Clad in his own sunlord disguise, Dalabrac looked up at him. “You keep doing that. Are you nervous?”
“All but petrified,” Anton answered drily. “Yourself?”
The Fire Knife grinned. “The same. Mind you, I wasn’t quite counting on a crowd of our young prophet’s admirers loitering in front of the temple. But if we collect him without raising a commotion and haul him out the same way we’re going in, it shouldn’t pose a problem.”
“Then let’s get to it,” Anton said. They’d waited long enough that, with any sort of luck at all, most of those who resided in the House of the Sun should already be in bed.