Lord of the Silent Kingdom Read Free

are transparent manipulators.”
    “Then I bow to youth’s need to make its own mistakes.”
    “Transparent.”
    Brother Candle gave up. Count Raymone would give him no foothold. It was too late, anyway. Hell’s tendrils had been creeping into the End of Connec for years. Illtempered time had begotten evil pups.
    He was wasting it trying to stem the cruel tide. His obligation now was to preserve and cherish what little he could.
    He snorted. A Seeker After Light, a Perfect, did not entertain such conceits as Hell. Hell existed only in the Episcopal mind. The more primitive Chaldarean cults, on the far reaches of the world, believed in an Adversary but not in a Pit of Eternal Torment. Brother Candle did not know how the Hell concept had crept into the western form of Chaldareanism. In other strains, as was the case in the ancestral Devedian and Dainshau religions, all punishment and reward happened right here, right now, in this world.
    The Deves and Dainshaus should have had the wickedness hammered out of them by now. Their God and the Chaldareans had been punishing them forever. “You are amused, Master?”
    “Brother. My thoughts veered to the plight of those who reject the Path. These days they must believe their gods particularly spiteful and callous.”
    “And no less do they deserve, bending their knees to the Tyranny of the Night.”
    And there lay the paradox of the world.
    God was real, if long unseen. All gods were real. Sometimes they reached into the mortal world. Every demon, devil, and sprite ever imagined was real, somewhere. Spirits of tree and river and stone were real. Things that lay in wait in the dark were painfully real and still found even in lands where the ruling faith officially denied them. Even in the End of Connec, which had been acclaimed as tame since the days of the Old Empire, night things were hidden away. The little ones remained where they’d always been, in the forests, in the mountains, in ancient stone circles ignorant people thought had been erected by giants.
    They avoided notice because in the End of Connec they were far from any source of power. They would never grow into anything more terrible than what they were. They avoided notice because whenever their presence became obvious Episcopal spirit hunters came to destroy them.
    Bigger things of the Night were bound into statues or stones and buried beneath crossroads, or into magical swords or enchanted rings seldom used because they were inherently treacherous, or into the tombstones and gateway arches of old-time pagan cemeteries. Such few as had survived the cleansing unleashed by the sorcerer-captains of the Old Brothen Empire.
    Once there had been those powerful enough to be accounted gods or godlings. Those were dead or their power and being had been scattered in a thousand fragments of broken stone by the conquering world-tamers of old. The world preferred them scattered and harmless if they could not be permanently destroyed.
    Permanent was difficult when belief could quicken the most lost from any stray wisps of power.
    There were individuals who could pull them back together. Sorcerers hungry for power. Though in the west no man had become that powerful for more than a dozen centuries. Here, men of talent were, inevitably, drawn into the Collegium. Where they endured constant monitoring by others like themselves.
    Or they perished.
    Brother Candle said, “My creed won’t let me bless what you do, Count Raymone. And yet, what you do, however ruthless, has to be done to stem the tide of darkness.”
    Where darkness and the Night were real forces, not personifications of evil. They could not be that.
    They were neither good nor evil. Not till someone decided and painted the label on, like a caste mark on the forehead. Or until someone used them to evil purpose.
    Brother Candle was at peace with his conscience. He had done all that he could do. But he was troubled, even so. More was wakening than just the rage, greed,