The Song of a Poisoned Star

21

Bilen was boarding a big ship, a modern, heavily armed galleon. Unlike the merchant caravel that Molina had chartered, this was a warship borrowed from the Illian navy. She had mixed feelings about not hearing Molina's snoring; it was hard to sleep near, but she doubted she would sleep much anyway.

She wasn't afraid; not exactly. She didn't think that the bishop actually intended to kill her, at least not right now. But she was curious as to what he thought they would find in the north that the Order wanted so badly.

There are artefacts of value in old places, forgotten places, she thought. Alejo and I have uncovered enough over our time searching the Old World. But the Order never cared before; they think they're just trinkets, not esoteric enough to be worth expending a lot of time and resources to get to.

She glimpsed the Church scholars as they boarded with her. A man and a woman, pale and robed in blue, Brother Bergmann and Sister Pooth. Then they were all sent to their cabins and she was alone, accompanied only by the smell of pitch and endless creaking around her.

So, she wondered, do they have the gift of futuresight? It's particularly interesting that one of them is a woman: the Church preaches that men are superior in matters of the mind, and so women can't hold high office. However, the gift of futuresight is a little less rare in women. To see a woman clerical scholar... well, there may be other explanations, but I can't think of any.

If so this would be, of course, gross hypocrisy. The Church had been cooling on magic before the war with her Order, and had solidified its teaching to outright ban it. Now it had three precepts: that no god existed, that no magic was permitted, and once it passed through the Blue Gate, your soul was reincarnated based on your piety. It was sung at the end of every mantra: no worship, no magic, back as a man. For the church to be exploiting the gifted was against everything they stood for.

Her cabin was tiny. She put down her bag, and got into her hammock and meditated. She wanted to try and see what they were going towards, what awaited them in the North.

As always, the future was a blurry mess. She could see herself arriving in the north, and getting the message from the Watcher that Saltha had met Molina, and then disembarking onto the shore... But that was it. That didn't mean anything as such, because she knew the Order would be doing the same, and her futuresight would interfere with theirs. So, she came out of the trance and thought some more, while the boat departed from the bay.

She knew very little about the inner workings of the Church. That was by design; the Church kept much of its higher level structure and knowledge secret. There were rumours of esoteric texts that the Church guarded. The Order had managed to get a badly damaged copy of something called 'the Fourth Book' in the war, which she had read: and although it contained powerful techniques for nullifying magic, it was consistent with the Three Precepts.

So, the Church using the gifted made no sense theologically. However, politically, it made perfect sense.

It was no secret that the Church competed with the Order for soft control of the New Countries, even now. The Order's allure to the rulers of the New Countries was that it could see the future, and so was a reliable source of information. The Church had tried to destroy it through force, and it had created the brightswords and gone to war, and that had failed. So, perhaps, it was competing by copying what the Order did, instead.

She ran her fingers through the short dark hair on the back of her head, following the logic. Dammit, I wish I'd figured this out some time ago, she thought.

Does this matter? So the Church is doing something it shouldn't. It's hardly news.

Yes, it does matter. It matters, because the Church has moved into a far more aggressive phase of competition with the Order. It's abandoning more rules so that it can win. And I'm going with them to some place that the Church thinks that it can exploit to beat the Order; I'm stuck between them. Worse; stuck between the Church and two different parts of my Order.