The Astrologies

Chapter 10: The Candle At Home

Flickering lamplight from out on the street casting pleasing shadows across the illuminations in the Candle's book. Wyrms and stars seemed to dance around the borders of the pages of precise script. He sat with his windows open to the mild night air. The day's troubles had been set aside for an old wine and a far older text. It was a remembrance of a philosopher by the pupils of his school, a school which was now more myth than memory. The Candle had been reading for an hour without pause, when a missing page jolted him back to his surroundings. Three sheets had been cleanly cut from the book. He pursed his lips and shifted in his chair, suddenly aware of discomfort in his back.

Distracted now, the Candle looked out the second floor window at the foggy street below. A muffled set of footsteps on the damp cobblestones came and went quickly, but the Candle saw nobody. The pages would have been interesting. The authors had been describing the debate that had discredited the philosopher's mentor. The philosophies in question were steeped in superstition and old beliefs, but the Candle knew that truths uncovered by brilliant men with limited perspectives can still be fascinating when approached with better understanding, and these were the foremost minds of their time. The Candle had sympathy for the mentor, a Tyletian by the name of Ramos, who had left his own school in disgrace and had narrowly avoided being ritually dismembered. Three hundred years of hindsight made it clear that Ramos was a necessary casualty in the expansion of the Church. At the time, Tyrus the Undying had only recently proclaimed the Empire in the name of Quelestel, and there had been a very real notion that heretics from the north might march in force on Merendir. Those were precisely the days where no stance but the absolute was acceptable. In a public debate against his most brilliant pupil, Ramos had passionately defended plurality and the coexistance of the old rituals with the doctrines of Quelestel. Ramos had lost, and now the most intimate account of the debate was likely gone forever.

The Candle wondered whether the pages had been excised purposefully, or had merely been reclaimed when materials were scarce. He had decreed that no pages should be cut from old texts, but that was a new policy. For many decades, scribes had taken pages from older works and scrubbed them clean when new paper was not available.

The Candle suspected that the pages had been cut from the book because they had been deemed an ideological threat to Church and Empire by one of his predecessors. The irony of this was that only those who were most devoted to Church and Empire had access to the library, aside from the scribes who were illiterate by tradition, and the knights who were dutifully uninquisitive. One of many massive undertakings of the Church during the reign of Tyrus the Undying had been to collect and organize the scholarship of the Empire in the impenetrable fortress that was the Library of Merendir. A few old manuscripts or reproductions were still at large, prized in underground circles of men and women who fancied themselves renegade philosophers, but honest people were not concerned with such things.

There was a slow knock on his door, and the Candle looked over at it curiously, mildly surprised that he had not been startled. He rarely had callers, and never at this hour. He struggled to his feet, went to the door, and threw back the bolt, thinking as he opened the door that he should have given more consideration to his safety.

It was only the Lash, standing motionless, already stooping in anticipation of moving through the door frame. Perhaps with slight cruelty, born of annoyance at having been disturbed from his reading, the Candle said nothing and merely watched. The Lash's mouth hung slightly open, waiting expectantly on the stair. The man was a giant, and oddly proportioned, with huge hands and broad shoulders.

"You said to tell you when I knew something," the Lash said. His voice was a hesitant rumble. He seemed to sense that he had done something wrong.

"Please, come in." The Candle stood aside, and the Lash moved through the door, removing his battered hunting cap and straightening to his full, considerable, height. The Candle sighed, confident that the Lash would not perceive the sigh as an insult. He did not bother to explain that the Lash's report might have waited until morning. Such subtleties of instruction confounded the man, and the ensuing circle of explanations left the Lash disheartened and the Candle aggravated.

"Well, what have you discovered?" The Candle asked.

The Lash had been interviewing a prisoner of particular interest to the Candle, a woman who was somehow wrapped up in the blackmail scheme involving the Lord Commander's failings and the Candle's Harvest Festival meeting at the palace boathouse. The letter that the Candle had received demanded the release of a certain prisoner who had been accused of heresy, and he had bowed to their demands. The Candle's vote had denied the consensus for conviction at the Tribunal. The prisoner had gone free, but the Candle had him followed. He had immediately gone to meet a woman— the Lash's current guest. Letters in her room matched the handwriting of the blackmail letter. They had arrested her, but the man had escaped.

A new Tribunal had been convened. Tribunals were rare, and this was the second in a matter of weeks. The Candle had observed the fervor with which certain ambitious men in the church had pursued the honor of being appointed to these Tribunals and sent a Rider to the the Most Holy Confessor. The Candle had expressed concern that the instruments of holy justice were being used to play politics. The Most Holy Confessor had replied that, while the Candle was correct in his concern, righteous zeal was to be applauded in these days of decadence and turpitude, and that there could be nothing wrong with a Tribunal, which was by nature a truth-seeking entity.

"They were both in the Order," the Lash offered, hopefully.

"Which Order?" The Candle asked, wearily.

"The Order of Learned Children of Old Blood. They call it 'The Order.'"