Noise erupted from the eight Guardians as they all reacted and tried to speak at once. Alonnen subtly braced Rexei, waited for a brief pause in the hubbub, and spoke up sharply. “Oy! With respect? Shut it! He’s not done reporting yet.”
Longshanks nodded and continued when they fell watchfully quiet. The scarf shifted off the youth’s jaw, distracting Alonnen with the dawning realization that for someone as old as Longshanks surely had to be, there was no sign of stubble, let alone the beard-shadow that should have been there on someone with such dark hair. There wasn’t much time to contemplate that oddity, however. Alonnen pulled his attention back to the subject at hand when Rexei continued.
“Mind you, I couldn’t hear all of it. They kept trying to send me off—I was playing the part of a dumb servant, a lackwit, and had been for two months, so they’d be used to talking more freely around me. But I did hear enough. He, the foreign man, wanted to bargain with them, with Mekha’s priests. Set him free and give him access to the power they raised . . . but then a novice came running up with the word that Mekha had disappeared from the power room.”
“Power room?” the woman with sun-streaked light brown hair asked.
Alonnen explained that one. “Every temple to Mekha has a set of rooms in the basement level—down where they keep the mage prisoners they drain to feed the Dead God. It’s said that Mekha divides . . . or divided . . . Himself into pieces and sent each of those pieces to a temple to be housed, so that He could drain all the locally caught and enslaved mages of their power. The power room is where He is—or was—rumored to sit and sup.”
The winces of disgust and disbelief on his fellow Guardians’ faces were mollifying to see. Not everyone understood what his fellow countrymen had suffered all along, but these mages were beginning to understand. He nudged Longshanks subtly, who nodded, swallowed, and continued.
“Right . . . So the God-piece in the local temple was summoned by some sort of shimmering light, He apparently said something about it finally being time, whatever that meant, and then vanished. I wasn’t there to see any of it, so don’t ask me whether the report was accurate,” Rexei added quickly as one of the men in the mirror drew in a breath to speak. “You have to understand, the Servers Guild was forbidden to go down to the basement level. We always cleaned the public parts of the temple, and the novices cleaned the hidden parts and . . . and took care of the prisoners and their cells.
“But then a short while after Mekha apparently vanished . . . so did everything of His. All the walls were carved with His sigils and signs, and the priests’ robes were embroidered with the same sorts of symbols. I watched it all fade from the walls right in front of my eyes, and when I looked at the priests, their robes were bare, without a single stitch of embroidery. And that was when the foreign fellow said it was most likely a sign that Mekha had been removed from power. They even used one of their Truth Stones on him.”
“I know, thanks to our little cross-guardianship conferences, that the Convocation of Gods and Man has been reinstated,” Alonnen stated. “So whatever is happening down in Nightfall, even though we cannot get through to Guardian Dominor right now or to Priestess Orana Niel, who pledged to my people for generations that she would take our complaints to the Convocation when next it took place . . . I’m pretty damn sure Mekha is gone for good . . . and good riddance, I say.
“Of course, this causes a bunch of other problems for us, things which may impact our ability to stop the Netherhell invasion, but we’ll give you our all. Now, back to the lad’s report. What else happened?” he asked Rexei.
Licking her lips, Rexei continued. “Well, I’d stashed a spare coal bucket in the next room over, so I could pretend to go get extra for the braziers, and though they kept sending me off, I heard much of it. The foreign man said, to throw off any rioting, something about setting the imprisoned mages free, if they weren’t going to be drained by Mekha anymore. And . . . it sounded like the two priests listening to him talk about conjuring powerful demons with their help were going to give it actual thought. But then everything vanished of Mekha’s, and one went running off to mirror-call the other temples.
“So I grabbed my bucket and followed to see if he was going to share the offer with the other temples, but before I could hear much, the archbishop—that’s the local high priest—he grabbed me and made me go into the basement rooms and start . . . and start bringing up the prisoners.”
Alonnen could only imagine what the youth must have seen, for his cheeks flushed and his mouth sealed for a moment in a grim line. Cupping his hands around the youth’s shoulders in silent support, he wordlessly urged Rexei to continue.
“The novices and the other servants, we brought up over a hundred and fifty of ’em, sat ’em on benches in the prayer hall. Then we guided them to the door, where the archbishop and a fellow bishop-ranked priest unlocked their spell-slave collars and pushed them out through the wardings. I got pushed out, too, and they said the temple was closed until further notice, and . . . that’s it. That’s all I know.” Rexei shrugged. “I don’t know if they’re going to take up this foreign fellow’s offer on conjuring demons or not, and . . . well, that’s all I know.”
“Before you all get your various pants wedged up,” Alonnen asserted as the others started to speak, cutting them off, “just try to remember this: We have no God now. No Patron Deity. Locally, we don’t have any problems yet, but that’s a very big yet. There’s no telling what it’ll be like here in Mekhana a day or a week from now. Riots, fighting, maybe even an invasion—no offense to any of our neighboring Guardians, such as Sir Vedell, whom I’d trust to be kind, but Guardians aren’t the ones who decide whether to make war or not. Now, I’ve got someone in the local militia who’s going to try to keep things calm around here, but there’s going to be things falling out all over this land. Power grabs, anger problems, retaliations and counter-retaliations, you name it.
“We do not have a lot of resources, training being the foremost. So if things do go sour, before you try accusing me or mine of not acting fast enough or hitting hard enough, or whatever else might or might not happen, try to keep that in mind.”
“You’ll have my sympathies, if not theirs,” Guardian Daemon stated. “Pasha’s being hit by the early stages of a civil war, with the old king’s sons and daughters and even a few cousins all fighting for the right to claim the throne. I suspect you’re about to have a far-less-organized version of that descend on everyone there, so for what it’s worth, I at least understand.”
Alonnen nodded at the blond mage, thankful for the sympathy, but Keleseth took the bit in her teeth.
“Well, that’s all to the well and good, but do try to impress on your people that you have bigger problems than the overthrow of a sadistic God,” she stated.
“Ha! That’s a laugh,” Guardian Sheren scoffed. “You’re the Guardian of the City of Delights, Keleseth. Try to impress anything serious on your own people, and we’ll see how far you get.”
“Oh, and like your Menomonite committees are any more organized or fast acting?” Keleseth shot back.
“Stop it!” The sharp protest came from Rexei. Alonnen lifted his brows but let the youth speak. “This isn’t the time or place for . . . for petty quarrels! You’d think you were apprentices from different guilds, squabbling like children over whose guild is run better or worse than the other. If a Guardian is anything like a Guild Master, then set a good example. Is that clear?”