The Invasion of the Tearling

Tyler bit back a groan. Seth and Tyler had received their ordinations in the same year, but Tyler hadn’t seen him in a long time. Ever since Seth had been given his own parish in Burnham, out in the southern Reddick, he rarely visited the Arvath. He was a good man and a good priest, so no one ever spoke of it, but all the same, everyone knew about Seth. Even back when they were all novices, Seth had always liked men. Due to Tyler’s position as a bookkeeper, he knew that Father Seth kept a companion out in the Reddick, a man far too old to be a clerical aide, although Seth’s records listed him as such. When the clerical aide had appeared, Seth’s board expenditures had increased significantly, but Tyler had never called attention to this; priests and cardinals all over the Tear kept questionable companions and paid for them with the same contortionist’s accounting. But Seth’s aide was the wrong gender, and Anders must have found out.

“I will go through the Church and root out the backsliders!” Anders thundered. Tyler had never heard Anders preach before, and a distant part of his mind noted that the man had a wonderful speaking voice, deep and booming, reaching the farthest corners of the chapel and echoing back. “We will purge and cleanse! And we will start with this creature, a priest who has not only violated God’s law, but used Church funds to subsidize his sickness! Supporting his foul lifestyle with his parish’s tithe!”

Tyler bit his lip, wishing that he had the courage to speak. It was wrong, what was happening here, and Wyde, beside him, knew it too; he looked at Tyler with helpless, gleaming eyes. Wyde and Seth had been good friends too, all those years ago, when they had all been young together.

“God has been wronged! And for every wrong, God demands vengeance!”

At this, Wyde closed his eyes and bowed his head. Tyler wanted to shout, loud echoes that would bring the vaulted ceiling down over their heads. But he remained silent.

“Seth has forgotten his duty to God! We will remind him!” Anders’s voice dropped suddenly; he had ducked behind the table. When he straightened, he was holding a knife.

“Dear God,” Wyde muttered. Tyler merely blinked in surprise, wondering if this entire evening was a dream that had suddenly veered into nightmare … the Mace’s strange visit, the disturbing sight of the guard captain in clerical robes, and now this horrible torchlit scene: Seth’s pale face, alarm dawning in his eyes as he spotted the knife in Anders’s hand.

“Strip him.”

The two aides laid hold of Seth, who began to struggle. But Seth, like Tyler and Wyde, was in his seventies now, and the two younger men overpowered him easily. One pinned Seth’s arms behind his back while the other ripped his robe down the front and tore off the remains. Tyler averted his eyes, but not before he’d seen the evidence of time on Seth’s body: a narrow, sunken white chest; arms and legs that had lost all of their taut muscle and now hung with loose skin. Tyler saw much the same thing when he looked down at his own body, a body that had grown pale and slack. He recalled a summer, half a lifetime ago, when their ecclesiastical class had journeyed all the way to the coast, to New Dover, for a look at God’s Ocean. The water was a miraculous thing, vast and sparkling and endless, and when Wyde had thrown off his robes and dashed for the cliff edge, they had all followed him without thinking, leaping off the rocks and hurtling thirty feet down. The water had been brutally cold, agonizing, but the sun had been shining, a bright golden face above the limitless blue ocean, and in that moment Tyler was certain that God was looking directly at them, that He was infinitely pleased with what they were becoming.

“Our belief has grown slack,” Anders announced. His eyes glowed with a terrible fervor, and Tyler recalled a rumor he had once heard: that during his years with the Regent’s antisodomy squads, Anders had nearly killed a young homosexual, beating him with a plank of lumber until the boy was unconscious and covered in blood. The Regent’s other thugs had to haul Anders off, or he would undoubtedly have murdered the young man right there in the street. Panic slowly dawned as Tyler realized that this was no mere shaming exercise; Seth could be in real danger. Looking heavenward, he caught sight of a hulking, white-robed figure concealed in the shadows of the gallery: the Mace, his grim visage inscrutable beneath the cover of his hood, his eyes pinned on Anders, a hundred feet below.

Good, Tyler thought, almost angrily. It’s right that an outsider should see.

“Hold him.”

Anders moved in swiftly and his hands worked with almost surgical precision, so fast that Seth barely had time to make a sound before the deed was done. But Tyler and Wyde screamed together, their voices joining a chorus of cries that echoed back and forth between the stone walls of the chapel. Tyler looked down, unable to watch, and found Wyde’s hand in his, their fingers clasped in the unconscious manner of children.

When Anders straightened, his face was splattered with bright crimson. In his hand was a dripping red mass, which he flung into the corner of the chapel. Seth had gotten his breath back now, and his first scream was a mad cacophony of sound that seemed to bounce off the highest rafters of the chapel.

“Make sure he survives,” Anders ordered the aides. “His work isn’t done.”