Chapter 70: Foundations

Chapter 70: Foundations

The first several months Todd spent with Priest Verdenin was a dull and lonely time that made him miss the brothers he’d spent the last couple of years fighting beside. There was nothing wrong with the man that Todd could put his finger on precisely, but his presence and the way that his superior did things chaffed at him.

It wasn’t even the imperious way he used to treat Todd because he no longer seemed to value of ordering him around to do menial things. Instead, the priest practically lived in his own world. He was constantly designing strange new plumbing fixtures or deciding what parable would be the most uplifting in the south facing stained glass windows. If Todd hadn’t known better, he would have been certain that Brother Verdenin had died and been replaced by someone else during their trips into the depths of Fallravea.

From the riverboat trip to Blackwater to the way he organized things once he’d arrived, he had Todd perpetually on edge. When he started unilaterally razing buildings for the site of Siddrim’s future temple without so much as discussing it with the head of the city guard or the mayor of the burgeoning town, he’d thought there would be a riot. Instead, people just accepted it, which struck Todd as odd.

He’d known that Brother Faerbar and his fellow templars had put the fear in this town, but he hadn’t expected it to last for months in their absence. Todd and a few of his fellows could hardly be expected to stand against dozens or hundreds of angry men, but they never materialized.

Instead, Priest Verdenin began to hire the excess riffraff as laborers to clear the area and install new brick streets to replace the crude rotted boards that were the current standard throughout the town. Todd wanted no part of that, of course, though he did take two trips up the canal in the following weeks to escort the one-armed priest while they looked at likely sandstone quarries near the banks of the waterway.

It was a tense time for Todd, as he was made the leader of the small band of warriors assigned to protect the priest and his artisans. Every night he went to bed in his armor, fearing there’d be an ambush from the dark, and every morning he woke up unharmed. It was a mystery, but one he eventually chalked up to his childhood fear of the monsters that called the red hills home.

According to other members of the church that he’d spoken with, the stones of Siddrim’s temples were usually brought down from the mountains to the north, where there was a quarry with marble of the purest white. For the structure they were going to start building soon, though, the priest had received special dispensation to use sunrise colored sandstone found in the area.The origin of this chapter's debut can be traced to N0v3l--B1n.

“Don’t you see, it’s not just about cost, but the beauty!” the priest said, setting several of the rock samples they’d retrieved on the way back to the city. “The only way we ever inspire those ne’er-do-wells is to give them a taste of Siddrim’s grace they can’t help but look at every day!”

While Todd did have to admit that the shades of orange, pink, and red sandstone that the priest had chosen did look lovely together, and that they might create a very sunrise-like effect, he still harbored private reservations that he didn’t know how to express. The importance wasn’t just the color white, after all; it was the purity of the stone that came from such a high and distant field. It was the opposite of the red hills.

If you’d told him that the red color of the stone came from centuries of goblins murdering anyone that happened through there, Todd would have believed it. Centuries of mindless slaughter were pretty much the opposite of purity as far as he was concerned, but the only time Todd brought it up, the priest had laughed at him. “There’s one crucial fact your theory forgets, young man. Goblin blood is green. If it was really tainted by the cycle of death you describe, then the stones we’ve spent the last week looking at would be olive, emerald, and forest, nor orange, salmon, and coral.”

Chagrined, Todd hadn’t brought it up again, but the point festered. Eventually, he started to think he was going crazy. After all - they’d been out in the red hills for more than a week all together but they hadn’t suffered a single goblin attack. That seemed very unlikely to him. The Gift was still attacked almost every month, and the few villages left in the region also reported occasional attacks, but the small group of humans traveling alone in the wilderness had received almost no attention at all. It was almost as if the goblins had been ordered to leave their group alone, but that was impossible, wasn’t it?

“Are you sure that what you saw wasn’t just red stone dust?” the priest asked him skeptically. “Because after carving in the words of—”

“I know what I saw,” Todd shot back angrily, hurt that the priest would ever doubt him.

“Acolyte, I’ve been very lax with you and your assignments, but this behavior is completely unacceptable,” the priest admonished him. “Once you are dry, you are to copy the Psalms of Sorrow until you—”

“But Brother Verdenin—” Todd tried to interrupt, but he was cut off immediately.

“You will copy the Psalms of Sorrow, in seclusion, until you regret the way that you have treated a priest of your god!” he repeated himself in a way that would brook no argument before he stormed off, leaving Todd alone with no evidence but his own gut instincts that something was amiss and that somehow the priest that was admonishing him was in on it.

Todd spent the next three days in his small room copying the same few pages over and over as he tried to find some amount of regret for his actions. He couldn’t, though. In the end, the only thing he regretted was that he hadn’t thought to somehow take the evidence with him or shelter it from the elements.

Once he’d decided that collusion was the only possible way, he could explain what had happened, he managed to create the mien of compliance and contrition. He felt like a fraud for lying to his superior so, but he could no longer trust the man enough to tell him the truth.

So instead of working with him, he began to spy on him. Instead of wandering around the town in search of some hidden conspiracy, he began to look for one in the construction site he’d sword to protect. Each day he got up and helped the workmen with their tasks or simply supervised them as they brought the stones in from the barge while the walls steadily grew, and though he saw nothing untoward, he was sure that he was on the right trail because the longer he persisted in helping, the more Brother Verdenin found excuses to send him away.

“Todd, please fetch these manifests from the tax clerk’s office.”

“Todd, please ride upriver to see if my next shipment is on its way.”

Every week it was something new, and almost always toward dusk. Even on the nights Todd doubled back and observed the masons hard at work on their ever-growing project, he still couldn’t see anything obviously wrong, but his certainty only increased. Something was deeply wrong in Blackwater, and he needed to find out what, just like Brother Faerbar had tasked him.