My Journey - by Galarn Saqwanthian

Father Fradula was easily the worst of them. As tall and imposing as he was corpulent, Fradula didn't simply enter an area. He strode into it with all the subtlety of a siege engine advancing on a fort. Nor did his manners contradict or soften the impact of his appearance. "You there, get out of the way for one of Hodierna's priests!" he would boom at a servant laden with purchases or paraplegic beggar. If they didn't move fast enough, he didn't care, not gracious Father Fradula! Bending at the waist as he sailed along, a massive arm like a small tree trunk would backhand the offender into the nearest wall. Then there would be thud-- not that Fradula heard it; for he had already advanced physically and emotionally beyond the reach of such concerns.

It was my pleasure to observe Fradula and his cronies during several years after I took up residency in Shard's Rag District, as we affectionately called it. I was studying to be a moon mage, and the same area of town that provided cheap rooms for let also housed the unforgettable Hodierna's Merciful Chapel.

Every day brought some new revelation. Like the time Brother Baptul was caught physically abusing a pair of serving girls at a local inn. (It turned out that he regularly visited them, only this time, he couldn't pay. When they told him to leave, he broke a chair and started clubbing them viciously with one of the legs.) Or the occasion when Sister Tasprite was discovered in possession of four daggers after running out of a local weapons' shop, with the merchant fast in pursuit.

And their tithing! I'd known that paladins tithe to maintain their souls' purity, because they bring those same souls into great jeopardy by all that hacking and slaying. But these clerics went around demanding donations of everybody they met. I even watched several of them expertly help themselves on occasion to the few coppers in blind beggars' cups. Everybody that could see, saw this, yet nobody spoke. No one wanted to risk getting on the bad side of the Chapel. Life was tough enough in that ghetto of new arrivals, all scrambling to climb out of the hellhole on top of the rest, without finding yourself burdened by a large dose of seemingly random bad luck.

Reading back, I realize I might have given a false impression of the Chapel's inmates. They all sound, well, eccentric, good gossip to remember and chuckle about in the great room of some inn with a group of friends. But it wasn't like that, not really. There were other crimes laid on their doorstep that were quite serious. Like the womanchild Mnelia whom Baptul got pregnant, and was found in the alley one day, kicked to death by unknown assailants. Or the ramshackle two-story bare-walls hut which all of us students jokingly called "The Mansion," and which Fradula rented at usurious rates to an astonishing seventy impoverished immigrants. Those who couldn't pay were instantly put out on the streets to gain firsthand knowledge of Shard's long winters and freezing nights. Hodierna's Ices, they were called when the Watch discovered their corpses in nearby snowdrifts and ravines.

I know what you're wondering, because we wondered about it, too. How did they get away with it all those years? We'll never know for certain; though people speculated that Somebody in High Places was a friend or relative or lover of a Chapel inmate. Or was it money? Did they pay off the proper people? None of us doubted the Chapel was rich. True, it was physically rundown, nearly bare in the public areas and looking like it had been furnished from a junk dealer's castoffs. But the cashbox that Fradula brought to the local bank branch every week, surrounded by grim, well- armed guards, chinked and chanked cheerily as he sauntered down both sides of the street.

Then, there came a day when I awoke at dawn in a foul mood. I'd been up all night, carousing with fellow students after we'd passed our final exams for entry to the Guild. My tongue tasted like mule waste, and my head throbbed like a Dragon Priest's war gong. Had been it up to me, I would have climbed back into bed, pulled the threadbare coverlet over my head and left a note to my landlord to bury my remains when the rent next came due. But there was a commotion on the street outside my window, and sleep was impossible.

I got dressed--very carefully, so as not to knock my head off my shoulders--and went downstairs. There it was easy to guess what had happened at a glance, even in my condition: a broken winch hanging outside a second story window. A load of boxes in a net, smashed in a heap on the ground, slabs of marble sending waves of white dust everywhere. A bloody smear of red trailing across to the middle of the road, where a S'kra Mur woman howled as she cradled a dead child not more than four or five years of age.

It seemed starker, more real than the casual deaths from disease and exposure which occurred all the time in the Rag District; and it was the mother's grief that did it. The presence of that caring in the face of death seemed to give it a coat of reality I couldn't recall seeing anywhere else since I'd arrived. Without thinking I approached, and became part of the small assembly of useless bystanders who could offer only mute fellowship.

The sun rose. The crowd grew. No one spoke. All business seemed to grind to a halt as it reached our street, and our street seemed to stretch in silence on all sides as far as we could know.

Suddenly the throng of people scattered to all sides, and Father Fradula swelled forth in all his corpulence. He was red in the face and clearly angry. Words came to his lips, and his arms rose far above his head; but then he saw the kid, and the words died. He looked at the child with a sense almost of wonder. Reaching out tentatively, he touched it, then quickly drew his hand back. There was a sickened look on his face as though he'd seen something he strongly wished he hadn't.

Then he swatted the babe's mother to the ground, and grabbed the child's body in a crushing grip with one hand. We all were astonished; and I suppose that is why none of us sought to stop Fradula as he stomped off back down the street. (Not that we could have effectively stopped him. But outrage makes normally sane people attempt strange and proper things.) After a moment the mother awoke from where she lay, stunned, and whimpered. The spell broke; we ran in hot pursuit of the priest.

He was in the Chapel's circular ritual area. As we arrived, he dropped the body unceremoniously on the pitted, rusty altar. At the commotion Baptul entered from a door at the back, cursing until Fradula muttered something to him. They both laughed raucously. Grabbing a candle and acting the role of sacristan, Baptul went around lighting the ritual tapers, all the way croaking out some prayer interlaced with remarks about his sexual needs. The waxy ropes burned with the stink of grime accumulated from long disuse.

Fradula kicked a dented bronze statue of Hodierna with the back of his massive heel. Amazing though it may sound, he didn't appear hurt. Instead, a metallic, discordant note loudly rang out. He repeated this several times until the door opened again, and another brother-- an Elf, Chandire was his name, I think-- entered the room stark naked, robe in hand. He gestured at us all in a manner that would have won him an instant challenge at any other time and in any other place.

But Fradula merely jerked his head at the child's corpse, its blood now oozing down into a brown pool on the bare floor. Chandire responded with rolled eyes and a huge yawn. He donned his robe and removed a clear crystal flask from within its folds. The bottle was marked with a raised image of a unicorn. Using his teeth, he easily pulled out the stopper, and shot it across the room with a sound like newly opened champagne. The stopper narrowly missed Baptul, who had begun censoring the air with smoke that had barely any fragrance left, and was probably more pocket lint than spice.

Fradula stepped behind the altar. As though on cue, his two assistants turned and drew alongside him. His meaty hands rose, his fingers splayed; and the priest and administrator of Hodierna's Merciful Chapel began intoning a prayer in some language that I'd never heard before. Occasionally he would halt, as though searching for a phrase. Whenever he did this, Chandire would say the proper continuation, and snicker. Once, Fradula reached out impassively to slap him. It was fortunate for the brother that he was quick on his feet. Otherwise, his blood would have mixed on the Chapel floor with that of the child's.

The cadences of Fradula's voice rose. Sweat poured off him like a roast boar on a spit, and he leaned heavily on both of the brothers. An anguished look crossed his normally impassive features. Then Baptul removed his necklace, containing a small bell; and with trembling hands he rang it solemnly six times.

At that, a sense of great, well-- absence, filled the Chapel. I don't know how to convey it, but it wasn't a negative thing at all. It was real, tangible: a forceful presence of sterility. A wave of despair washed through my veins. If a sword had been thrust into my hands at that moment I would have killed myself without a regret. Assuming, of course, a moon mage without any tutelage in weapons skills could do sufficient damage, even to his own person.

The next moment something else was there, in that room, something which felt just as tangible, infinitely more positive and right; and the child abruptly sat up, healthy and sobbing as though it had just lost a doll which meant the whole world gone for good and forever.

The mother croaked a name I didn't catch. Presumably her voice had been worn hoarse earlier. She ran to the altar, grasping the babe in an embrace which seemed only to annoy it more. Baptul gave her a once over with those huge, sparkling eyes of his, leered and winked; but she had no eyes for him or anything else save the squawling creature in her arms.

The majority of the onlookers (and by this time, the crowd had swollen to nearly the entire population in our little shabby corner of Shard) moved forward en masse, howling its delight. However, I returned at once to my room. What I had seen had overwhelmed me too greatly to share in the company of others. There was too much too absorb; too much that I had to sort out.

When I emerged from my room, two days later, it was to return the coveted certificate of entry into the Moon Mage Guild. I paid the rent and left with my possessions, and set out across several lands to the Crossing. Once there, I sought out the followers of Hodierna, and began my first steps as a novice cleric in her Order.

As I wrote much earlier, here, I cannot forget Hodierna's Merciful Chapel. It was a despicable place whose inhabitants made life just that much worse for nearly everyone they ever encountered. Hodierna did not desert them for all that, however. In compassion she used the tools at her disposal the one time she was called upon for assistance, and wrought a great magick even as the tools themselves were desecrating her circle of worship.

To me, this was like a star appearing in a sky that was otherwise a void. I needs must follow that star, wherever it takes me, and learn to cherish life for its own sake as my vision gradually clears. My path has been blessed, and I say prayers of thankfulness everyday when I first awaken to Hodierna, Queen of Mercy, and for Father Fradula and his throng of vicious hypocrites.