Andric: Chapter 4

Okay, one more. Enjoy because it'll probably be a little bit before i write any more with these characters.. ~Eric

***

There was a blurry moment when Andric was suspended between unconsciousness and wakefulness, then the moment snapped and all that fear rushed back into him. He shot up into a sitting position and then reflexively covered his head with his arms. He braced himself for the rain of blows he knew was coming, but a gentle voice spoke instead.

“It’s over. Are you still in pain?”

Andric cautiously opened his eyes and lowered his arms. He took a mental inventory. He wasn’t in pain. That couldn’t be true. Not after the beating he’d taken. He should have been bedridden for days. His eyes shot to his hand. He remembered the terrible sound of the bones breaking and lightning pain of it shooting through his body. He just stared at the hand. It looked fine. He slowly closed it into a loose fist and let it open again. There was some lingering tenderness there, which he took as proof that he hadn’t just imagined it all or suffered some kind of delusional fever.

“No,” he murmured. “Just a little tender.”

He looked to where the voice had come from and froze as he saw the young woman. He knew her, or rather he knew what she was. He’d never spoken to her. He wouldn’t have dared. She was an acolyte in the temple, and he was unchosen. His eyes darted around the room. He’d never been inside the temple, but it was the only place he could be. Everything was too nice, too clean, and it all gave off an air of something. Holiness, maybe? He wasn’t sure. All he was sure about was that he was not supposed to be there.

“I can’t be here!” he shouted, staggering to his feet. “I’m unchosen! I can’t be here. I have to go!”

“It’s fine!” shouted the girl, a look an unbridled fear on her face. “You’re where you need to be.”

“No! No! I’ll be—”

The young woman stood, grabbed his shoulders, and gave him a hard shake. It was so unexpected that it snapped him out of his animal panic.

“It’s fine. We were… We were led astray about the unchosen by the head priest,” she explained.

“Led astray?” asked Andric, not sure he understood.

The young woman opened her mouth to say something, but they both froze when they heard a man screaming.

“No! No! You can’t do this to me!”

“I think I can,” said a voice that sounded like Varant might if he ever used complete sentences. “But it’s the gods that decide in the end, isn’t it? If you’ve done nothing wrong, it can’t hurt you.”

There was a moment of silence followed by a positively bloodcurdling scream of agony. The scream went on and on and on. Andric looked at the acolyte who was staring at the door. Her face was almost the same color as the whites of her eyes, which he could see clearly. There was a thin sheen of sweat on her forehead, and he could see deep bags under her eyes. He wondered what happened to her before he woke up. She also wasn’t holding him in place anymore. If anything, it seemed more like she was using her grip on his shoulders to stay upright. Andric was deeply confused about what was happening. That confusion only deepened when he heard a woman call out in a terribly unconvincing voice of fear.

“Oh no, Varant! A charred heretic! Whatever will we do?”

There was a brief pause, before the woman picked up again in a voice that dripped with vicious joy.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I got distracted at the end there. I meant to ask, whatever will we do to him?”

“The laws are clear. He’s a charred heretic. We’ll do as we please with him,” said Varant in a voice that made Andric’s bowels want to let go then and there.

It seemed he wasn’t the only one. The acolyte looked terrified. He could feel her shaking. He tried to think of something he could say, something that would be comforting, when another scream tore through the air.

“Oh dear,” said the woman. “I slipped. Well, I don’t suppose he really needed that anyway. That’s why there’s two of them, right?”

Andric shuddered. He didn’t know what the man had just lost, but he couldn’t think of anything on his body that he’d want to lose. The acolyte had started crying. It wasn’t the jerky, hiccupping crying that he’d seen some people do. In fact, she was barely breathing enough to make any noise. It was just a steady stream of tears running down the girl’s face. Andric was completely lost in the situation. He wasn’t at all sure what was happening to the priest. He didn’t know how to comfort the acolyte or even if he should. If that was Varant out there doing things to the priest, something he struggled to imagine, he had nowhere in his mind to put that idea, let alone any way to reasonably do something with it. He felt adrift in uncertainty.

He just stood there, locked in place, a young woman he barely knew clinging to his shoulders. All sense of time was lost to him. It might have minutes. It might have been hours. All Andric knew for sure was the priest had roused a terrible anger in people that he should not have. The sounds of pain and violence eventually stopped. Andric had been hoping that it would, only to discover that the silence was so much worse. Before, he’d had at least a vague sense of what was happening. Now, he only had his imagination to provide him with increasingly unlikely and terrible answers. When the door to the room opened, the acolyte finally released her grip on his shoulder and backed into a corner. She stared at the person in the doorway like he was death itself.

Andric wasn’t as automatically fearful. He’d known Varant for years. At least, he’d thought he had known the man. This Varant was a stranger to him with those cold eyes, but years of working for the man served to blunt some of the fear that had clearly infected the acolyte. Varant looked Andric up and down and nodded. He shifted focus to the acolyte, who actually whimpered.

“Thank you,” said Varant. “I’m glad you were able to help him.”

An icy chill washed through Andric. He wasn’t always the sharpest person, but even he didn’t miss the implied threat. If she hadn’t been able to help him or refused to, it would have been bad for her. The acyolyte didn’t say anything. She just pressed herself a little farther into the corner and stared at Varant without so much as blinking. If it bothered the man, it didn’t show on his face. He just looked at Andric.

“You should come with me. There are things to discuss. We both have some decisions to make about our futures.”

Andric threw a worried glance at the acolyte but dutifully followed Varant out of the room. He half-expected to see a dead body on the floor but there wasn’t one. He did see some blood on the floor, though. He also saw a blonde woman he didn’t know using a slender sword to carve something into one of the walls. He stared at the wall for a second and thought it said Zera. Before he could puzzle that out, the woman saw him. She gave him an almost aggressively cheerful smile that made him want to shrink back.

“Well, look at you up and around and not a spirit,” she said. “I thought for sure that you were going to die.”

“No, you didn’t,” said Varant.

“Okay, I didn’t,” she admitted, “but sometimes people just die. You can never be too sure.”

Andric tilted his head and tried to figure out what he was supposed to do with that comment. He glanced at Varant. The man seemed to give that madness serious consideration before he offered the woman a slow nod.

“I suppose that’s true,” said Varant.

“Naturally,” said the woman. “I said it.”

“You also said that—”

“Okay. Okay. Point taken. I’m not always right.”

Something that had been hovering in the back of Andric’s mind snapped into focus.

“What happened to Tellam?” he asked before he could think better of it.

“Who?” asked the woman.

“He’s dead,” said Varant.

Andric’s heart started to pound. If Tellam was dead, that meant his father was bound to find out. Once that happened, the man would come looking to punish someone.

“But his father,” said Andric.

“I expect he’ll be along shortly,” observed Varant.

The man was entirely too calm for Andric’s comfort.

“What will we do?” moaned Andric.

“We?” asked Varant. “We won’t do anything. I will have a word with him.”

The blonde woman directed a conspiratorial look at Andric and said, “That’s Varant’s way of saying he’s going to kill the fool. Pay close attention when it happens. It should be educational.”