Purity of Mind

Chapter 14: Lady of the Hearth

I remembered what I'd once knew about the history of the pure. The last one to go public in Opal had been kidnapped and counter-kidnapped repeatedly. "What is this place?" I asked finally.

"It's the Ward." She said, emphasizing the last word. "It keeps them safe from us, and vice versa."

I looked around; it continued to just be us in the backyard. No other residents had shown themselves, and the guard would be on patrol a bit longer before coming back. "It looks more like they just keep you all here."

"Ward," she replied, "Warden. Not as similar in my language, but still. Similar purpose. You're right, though it's a comfortable jail."

I was eager to ask more but made sure to keep hold of my persona, even if she couldn't read my mind. "Can't you just... go? 'And theirs was power like unto a city', as the scriptures say, right?" I'd finally remembered the verse.

"A city's more than it was." She said. "Though I imagine you're right. These walls couldn't hold any of us if we were truly determined, but it's not the walls that do the work. I tried once, you know. Melted my way out, cut a swath through any that tried to stop me." She was grinning, and I wasn't sure I liked the way she looked when she spoke like that. Her milky eyes were staring at the fire she'd started in the pit. "But then I woke. All an illusion. All lies. That's the way of it, here. Even the half-breeds are a match for us."

She was probably used to saying things like that and not having people understand her. I suspected I knew what she was referring to, and I couldn't let on. Bishop had reported one of the enforcer halflings had been an Illusionist, and now I knew exactly what they were enforcing.

"And you can't ever leave?" I asked.

The woman shook her head. "We can," she said sadly. "There's a cost to staying, and there's a cost to leaving. Stay, and the Doctor visits once a month and uses his magic to make sure you can't bear a child. Can't have more Pure or half-breeds turn up, after all. Leave, and you have to leave married to a commoner. Someone who won't breed Pure."

The Doctor, I assumed, was the Witchdoctor that Bishop had tried to capture. Birth control via magic was an unreliable method at best, but if anyone could pull it off a Witchdoctor could. They had that much control over the mind-body connection.

A Witchdoctor would, due to that same power, be able to keep themselves alive for nearly as long as a Pure Mind could. But if the enforcers were the children of my target that put them well below this woman's age.

"Was it always this way?" I asked in a somewhat hushed whisper, trying to re-gather the youthful innocence I'd been playing at.

"No, it used to be worse." She answered. "Or better, depending on who asked. There was another way out, decades ago. You just had to make a deal with the devil."

I shivered. Everyone knew a scary story or two about people selling their souls to the Void in exchange for worldly power. Given that, of late, I'd discovered a great many things I'd assumed stories were actually true, I was entirely prepared to take this statement at face value.

"Have you studied the Ten?" She asked, in the same tone of voice that I'd heard missionaries use.

"It's the Nine in Opal, Ma'am." I said by way of answer. I didn't really want to try to talk my way out of getting converted right now.

She just nodded. "Fair enough, there's no chapter for the Lord of Lies, and who'd believe it if there were? They don't even teach that here, anymore. Want to forget the whole mess. And like I said, how I was raised, you didn't take a name in vain, not even the forgotten one. So we had a nickname for our personal adversary."