The four of us walked together to a tavern and had something to eat. I was very surprised when I saw their cooking used rice. It seemed to be what I had once known as Indica rice, probably grown in a dry field. They first stir-fried vegetables with oil and—fittingly for a port—a selection of seafood, including shrimp, shellfish, and whitefish in a flat-bottomed, shallow pan, then added the rice and water and cooked it all together.
The rice had absorbed the flavors of the fish well, and the dish was salted to perfection. I could have eaten this stuff all day. The diluted wine it was served with tasted good, too.
This was civilization. That was the only thing I could come up with to describe it. This was the taste of civilization.
Tonio and Bee were debating the meal.
“This tastes quite good, wouldn’t you say?”
“Hmm.” She didn’t sound entirely convinced. “I could have done with it not being boiled down so much.”
For these two, a traveling hawker and a troubadour, this city was a base of operations. They were probably relatively used to it.
As for Menel and me, conversation was just not what we cared about right then, so we skipped that entirely in favor of gorging ourselves on what was in front of us. And when we were done, we both ordered seconds.
Civilization really was such a wonderful, marvellous thing!
And so we reached the temple in Whitesails. It was a majestic building made of smooth white stone, with big, wide columns, column-lined walkways, statues of the gods, and a front garden full of carefully pruned plants and trees. It all looked brand new, but still it had a kind of artistic character. Menel commented under his breath that they must have spent a hell of a lot on this place.
I asked Menel, Tonio, and Bee to wait in the front garden for the time being, and I walked into the temple proper. Once inside, I thought I’d find a priest and ask to be shown to someone high ranking.
However, the first reaction that came from the young male deacon who stood before me wearing loose white robes was an uninformative ‘mmm.’ It sounded like I was giving him problems.
“You say you’ve been blessed with the protection of Gracefeel, god of the flame?” he asked.
“Yes, that’s right.”
The young deacon mmm’ed again.
“That is a deity not often seen... By our rules, we like to make use of the prayer of Detect Faith in this instance...”
“That’s perfectly fine.”
Just imagine if a priest of an evil god, not caring about the consequences of his actions, nonchalantly walked in and said, “I would like to greet the high-ranking priests.” Not all priests were trained in combat as I was, so I could see the need for a security step to check that someone suspicious stopping by—like me, the priest of a minor god—wasn’t working for an evil god and trying to conceal their identity.
“Yes,” he said, “but most unfortunately, I’m afraid that everyone sufficiently blessed to determine the faith of others is out at the moment...”
“Out?” In a large temple like this? I was surprised that was even possible.
“Yes. Attacks from beasts big and small have been on a significant rise everywhere recently. Everyone from the vice-bishop downwards is being kept very busy.”
From the vice-bishop downwards... Did he say vice-bishop?
“What are you doing that requires taking up the walkway?” someone said from behind me in a grave voice that seemed to echo. I turned around to see an incredibly fat middle-aged man, dressed in loosely fitting priest’s robes embroidered with gold and silver thread. They did nothing to hide his noticeable potbelly, nor did his big, puffy cheeks compensate for the sternness in his expression. He was wearing several gold and silver rings on his sausage-like fingers.
“B-Bishop Bagley!” The deacon twitched in surprise and visibly straightened his posture.
“I asked you what you were doing,” Bishop Bagley repeated. He looked irritated.
The deacon seemed very uneasy and didn’t look like he was going to be able to give a proper answer. Although it was slightly bad form, I decided to interject.
“It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. My name is William G. Maryblood. I was blessed with the protection of the god of the flame, Gracefeel, and have come to this Whitesails temple to introduce myself.” I put my right hand over the left side of my chest, brought my left leg back a little, and bowed. Mary had taught me this.
“Hmm. Bart Bagley. I am in charge of this temple.” Bishop Bagley bowed to me roughly in return, and then glowered at me. “Gracefeel... God of the flame. Practically a lost god. The possibility remains, of course, that what we have here is a suspicious character misusing Gracefeel’s name to carry out some nefarious plot...”
“That is a reasonable suspicion. Would you like me to perform a blessing as proof?”
Bishop Bagley snorted. “Novices are quick to turn to divine protection when in trouble. The protection received from a god is not to be brandished lightly and certainly not to be vaunted.”
Wow. I hadn’t expected that response, but now that I thought about it, he made a good point. Gus had said the same thing about magic. Blessings didn’t carry much risk, so I’d been using them more casually, but he was definitely right.
“You’re absolutely right. Thank you very much for making me aware of my naïveté.”
The bishop snorted again. “What do you understand to be the teachings of the god of the flame?”
“Light is the existence of dark. Words are the existence of silence. And living is the existence of death.”
The bishop breathed out through his nose once more. “You,” he said to the deacon. “Add him to the register and show him around the temple.”
“Huh? But... We still have the prayers of Detect Faith and Detect Lie to—”
“Idiot!” It was a thunderclap. “Did all of that simply miss your ears, you cretin?!” His voice echoed throughout the temple, lingering in the air like static in a thunderstorm. Other people were looking at us now.
“I have to put in an appearance at the Weavers’ Guild banquet—spend your time here as you please, do not cause any problems, and donate a little,” Bishop Bagley told me without pausing for breath, then clomped away to somewhere else in the temple. The deacon still had his head ducked into his shoulders.
Once the bishop had disappeared completely, the deacon finally started talking to me, in a voice that showed he was still a little shaken. “What are the odds we’d run into Bishop Bagley?” he said. “He gave us a hard time, didn’t he? I was impressed by how well you handled it.”
Then he talked about how the bishop was now a hedonist who spent a large amount of his time at banquets, never performed a single blessing, was quick to anger, and constantly complained; on the other hand, the vice-bishop was noble and wonderful and had only good things to say about him.
Not wanting to take sides, I gave some vague hums in response as we completed my registration. Then, after meeting back up with Menel, Bee, and Tonio, I had the deacon show us all around the temple and assign us a guest room. It was quite plain, but we’d at least been given more than just a bale of hay or something to sleep on; there were actually beds with sheets.
“Say,” I said, “about the bishop here, um...”
“Mmm, I don’t hear much good about him, I guess?” Bee said. “Like how he’s kinda snooty. And materialistic.”
“He also appears to have behind-the-scenes influence in the city’s commerce and industrial guilds,” added Tonio.