Heart of Dorkness

Terror Four - Temple

My magic is settling down, and with that, I’m getting a better hang of my emotions. It always feels a bit like rubbing the gunk out of my eyes after a long rest.

Felix and I are walking down one of the busier roads in the North Quarter of Santafaria, Felix just a step ahead of me. Her head is down and her back is hunched a little, and there’s a limp to her step, but she’s still smiling.

She’s navigating the crowds better than I am.

I can’t help but bump into people and I have to jog to keep up every so often. Felix just flows around the traffic, somehow avoiding everyone.

It would be mildly impressive even if she wasn’t blind.

“I’m sorry,” I say as I come up beside her. We’re caught at an intersection, a group of people are ahead of us escorting a... cow?

I don’t know why the cow needs guards, but there it is, being protected by four farmers with clubs.

“Sorry?” Felix asks. She looks in my direction, but not quite at me, lips quirked in a strange smile.

“I’ve been kind of mean, haven’t I? I barely asked if you were okay. I didn’t even try to get help for you. You’re limping, I....”

Felix giggles. “It’s okay, Miss,” she says. “I’ve had worse.”

That twists my tummy up. The worse thing is, I’m pretty sure she’s telling the truth. Being hurt like this isn’t new to her. “I’m still sorry,” I say.

She shrugs and then turns ahead. “We can cross now.”

We move on, and soon enough we reach a spot where the crowd is a bit thicker still. A market of sorts, with shops on either side of the street and stalls set up wherever there’s enough room for them.

Merchants with classes that I quickly identify as Seller and Bargain Maker and all sorts of craftsmen are guarding their wares. Beyond them, a wall rises up. Taller than the exterior wall to the city, and looking a fair bit better maintained and guarded.

Felix reaches back, and it looks like she’s about to grab my hand, but she hesitates. “We might have a hard time crossing to Midtown,” she says.

Midtown, that’s the centre of the city, according to what I remember of my map. Not a very creatively named area, but I’m not complaining. “Why?”

“It’s for rich people,” she says. “Miss will fit in just fine, I’m sure, but they don’t allow beggars.”

“You’re not a beggar,” I say. “You’re my guide.”

There are a half dozen guards by the gate dividing the North Quarter from Midtown, all of them in the same ridged helmets as the guard I met outside, though these have much nicer uniforms. Big puff-sleeved tunics and thick padded gambesons.

The people moving to the gate are split into two lines, one for carts, with workers and folk in simple clothes, and another that looks like it’s reserved for merchants and more important people. That second line is a lot shorter.

Felix wants to go to the first—it’s obvious from the way she stands—and maybe that line would draw less attention, but I do want to get things moving, so I grab her hand, swallow my disgust at how dirty it is, and move to the second line.

It doesn’t take long that we’re standing before a guard and some sort of functionary. He looks at me, eyes lingering on my hood, then my clothes beneath. I guess looking rich has some advantages.

His lips curl a bit when he looks at Felix. “Are you of a house?” he asks.

I nod. “House Malvada,” I say.

“And your... companion?”

“She’s my guide.”

“Young lady, you are aware of what can happen to a proper young woman who spends too much time with riffraff?” he asks.

I really don’t know, but his tone is just on the wrong side of condescending. Sighing, I reach into my cloak and root around in one of the little pockets sewn into it. I pull out a small coin and reach out to him with the coin pinched between thumb and forefinger. “Can you tell me where the best inn in town is?”

He eyes the coin for only a moment before it disappears into a pocket. The guard next to him is much more alert now.

“Of course, my lady.” He tugs his shirt on neater. “If you continue down the road and past the bazaar, you’ll find yourself on Inn Street. Most of the establishments there are quite reputable, but I would suggest the Ocuous Inn. It’s somewhat difficult to find, but it is the finest inn in Santafaria.”

“Thank you,” I say before pushing past him.

I don’t want to give him time to start plotting anything.

Midtown is different from the North Quarter. The homes are bigger, and for all that a few look like they could use a fresh coat of paint, they’re still in much better shape. There aren’t any beggars here, and the streets are mostly clean.

It still smells like poop, but not nearly as badly, and most of that is drowned out by the much nicer smell of seaweed and dead fish.

“Are we going to the inn Miss Valeria?” Felix asks.

“I think we should go to the temples first,” I say. “Have you ever been there?”

Felix nods. “I have. Most of the temples are near the Roughs. The temple of the Three sometimes helps girls, and the priest of Besters disapprove of poverty, so sometimes they’ll give people food and work. They’re strange about it though.”

I nod. That makes some sense. I suppose the Temple of the Goddess of Darkness isn’t nearly as helpful to the poor and downtrodden, which is... actually kind of sad. I can’t imagine Mom working in a soup kitchen or anything like that though.

“Do you know how to get there from here?” I ask.

Felix nods. She doesn’t look my way, or turn her head to look around. Now that I’m paying attention to it, it’s kind of weird. Still, she’s smiling as strongly as ever. “This way, Miss.”

We turn off the main road, slipping between two shops and past an alley where carts are being unloaded, then it's down a long residential road. The homes here don’t have much by way of yards. They’re packed too tight for that, but they’re not ugly or anything. Most are two stories tall, some are a little wider than others. These aren’t homes built from the same mold over and over.

The roads in Midtown are tight, it would be hard for two carts to drive past each other, but they don’t have much traffic here, so maybe that’s not a concern.

“Here we are,” Felix says as we arrive on a wider street. The buildings across the street weren’t homes or businesses. “This is Templetown.”

The name fits.

It looks like every other building here is a big, ostentatious thing. Some look like churches, others are boxy and square. A few of the temples aren’t really what I’d imagine as a temple, more like a small shrine set in a nicely manicured yard, the building next to it likely a home for the priests or whatever.

I probably should have paid more attention to the gods and all of their symbols, but magic is so much cooler than studying theology. There are twenty-four minor gods, and six major. That makes for a lot of temples, even if only a quarter of them bother with that kind of thing.

Mom says that only weak gods need temples, and that things like priests are just a tool to get things done with less effort. She has a few temples though, and she was very unimpressed when I asked her if they made her weaker.

“Where’s the Dark Temple?” I ask.

Felix shrugs. “I think it’s at the end of the row. I never went there before.”

Nodding, I start walking that way. There are some priests out and about, most of them in garb that I find a little strange. The priestesses of the Three are all women, of course, and they wear specific clothes based on their age and position, Thornton’s church is easy to recognize because it has a bunch of fields around it, and his priests are more like farmers than anything else.

There are others that I don’t recognize though.

None of that matters, not when I reach the end of the street and find Mom’s temple.

Or the remains of it.

It’s supposed to be a small, simple building, covered in black stone, with little more than an altar and a home next to it for administrative things.

Now all that’s left is a burned down husk, with charred wooden pillars standing where walls once were.

“What happened?” I ask. My fists tighten.

I think that maybe my first chore isn’t going to be quite as easy as Mom made it out to be.

***