Fistandantilus Reborn - Douglas Niles [36]
“Where is the prisoner?” he asked of Warden Thilt, who stood by the door, patiently awaiting his master’s command.
“Bring in the traitor!” called Thilt.
A pair of Faithguards, their leggings splattered with mud, stalked into the temple. They supported a sagging, broken man between them.
Half-dragging the wretch, they advanced to the front of the chapel, then tossed the captive, facedown, onto the floor before their high priest.
“You found him on the road south of the city?”
“Aye, Master-halfway to Kharolis,” growled one of the guards, giving the hapless prisoner a kick.
“You did well to catch him.” Kelryn remembered the hook-nosed female he had assigned to the Faithguards. “As a reward, you two shall have first use of the new supplicant. You are dismissed, with my gratitude.”
“Thank you, Master!” chorused the pair of guards, exchanging measured leers as they departed for the door. Kelryn knew they were sizing each other up, determining who would have the wench first.
“Ah, Fairman,” the high priest said with an elaborate sigh, walking a circle around the man who still lay, facedown and trembling, on the floor.
Thilt had retired to just outside the front doors, so the two were alone in the high-ceilinged temple. “Why did you decide to leave us? Have you had a weakness, a question in your faith?”
The man on the floor drew a ragged breath and found the strength to rise to his knees. He dared a sidelong look at the priest, shaking his head wearily.
“Rise from the floor, my good son,” said Kelryn, indicating a nearby bench and using the comfortable honorific he reserved for those acolytes who had come to his church as young men. “Have a seat and clear your mind. I really do desire to hear your explanation.”
Fairman, who had been a long-standing enforcer in the Faithguards, looked helplessly at the high priest. He knows his life is forfeit, Kelryn thought with an agreeable thrill of pleasure. But he also knows that the difference between a quick and merciful execution or a slow, lingering death by torture would depend upon the answers he gives.
“It was the skull, Master. I had a dream, and I saw the skull.”
Kelryn froze, chilled more than he cared to admit by the words. “And where was it?” He tried, successfully, he thought, to keep the tension out of his voice.
“I don’t know. It was dark, but I could see it clearly. And I heard it calling, telling me to go.”
“And you chose to obey the voice of a dream rather than the doctrines and the commands of your high priest.”
Fairman looked at Kelryn with an unspoken plea in his eyes. He really wants me to understand, thought the priest, mystified by the sincerity of the doomed man.
“I-I had no choice,” Fairman said miserably. “Even when I awakened, I saw those eyeless sockets, heard a summons… calling me, making me move.”
“I see.” Kelryn did not, in fact, understand the strange compulsion.
Still, he was worried. He had lost more than a dozen of his once faithful followers in the last decades. Though that wasn’t a terrible rate of attrition, those fugitives his Faithguards recaptured always reported a similar dream.
“You know, of course, that your treachery cannot be abided.”
“I know, Master,” declared Fairman miserably. He drew a breath, apparently trying to decide if he should say anything further.
“Speak, my good son,” the priest urged gently.
“There was something else in the dream-and in my thoughts, when I was awakened.”
“Something else…?”
“It was a kender, Master. The skull became a kender, and then it was the kender I was chasing. He was important. He was the skull, it seemed, though the bone was not of his own body.”
“A kender?” Kelryn mused, trying to keep his voice casual. But despite his bored facade, his alarm deepened. He himself had dreamed about a mysterious kender on more than one occasion, and fifty years ago Cantor Blacksword had ranted something about one of the diminutive wanderers