Chapter 478 — The Siege

A protracted siege is the deadliest blow to morale and cohesion, and no one is exempt—not even the church's priests, whose faith and convictions had once seemed so unshakable.

When the situation was stable and no major interests were at stake, the church could still maintain a balanced and united front. Though factions ran rampant both inside and outside the great cathedral, and priests and clergymen at every level were entangled in conflicts of interest great and small, at least everyone still kept up a show of unity for the sake of their fellow churchmen—in short, they gave the Holy Light a little face, and whatever disputes they had were kept off the table so as not to harm the church's collective interests.

But once there was nothing left for the church to gain—indeed, once the church itself had become a source of danger—that veneer of unity would split apart from the inside out.

Not everyone supported the orders from the Holy Spirit Plains. Though former Southern Bishop Lemont held the highest authority in Frosthold Cathedral, even he could not forge every priest of the Holy Light into a single unbreakable bloc—as a diocese on the kingdom's frontier, the Southern Church had harbored a mass of internal divisions from the very beginning.

The native-born priests had always resisted directives from the Holy Spirit Plains; the young reformers promoted over the past two years to expand the diocese's influence were forever at odds with the old guard of the great cathedral; the lower clergy hoped to gain more autonomy in this land so far from the church's center, while the upper priests fretted constantly that those "savage, crude, uncivilized" country clergymen would preach whatever they pleased and distort the scriptures. And among them all, there were even priests whose consciences were not yet dead, filled with revulsion at the church's increasingly vile conduct over the past two years...

Amid such tangled conflicts, former Southern Bishop Lemont had taken nearly all the church's topmost strength with him to wage war on the Cecil family—and in truth, that too had been a move born of helplessness.

If he could defeat the oldest family in this land in that war, and win greater prestige among the coalition of more than forty noble houses, then the Leice Frost Church would undoubtedly cement his position in this diocese, and most of the undercurrents in Frosthold Cathedral would be calmed—if not for the fact that the Cecils were a whole pack of monsters, his odds of success would have been quite high.

Unfortunately, he failed.

His failure even dragged the entire Southern Church into opposition against the Duchy of Cecil, and the faith of the Holy Light now stood in danger of being forcibly eradicated from this land.

The priests who had never supported Lemont's reckless venture were naturally seething with resentment, and since Lemont hailed from the Holy Spirit Plains, a great many native-born priests wavered along with him. As conditions in Frostgate grew worse and the shadow of insufficient supplies began to surface, order in the outer city deteriorated day by day, and a great mass of lower clergy accumulated enormous bitterness: they could not bring their families into the inner city as the high priests did—they themselves lived in the "little chapel district" adjoining the outer city—and the chaos of the outer city had inevitably spilled over onto them, worsening with every passing day...

At this critical juncture, the leaflets circulating into the city undoubtedly made everything worse.

Almost everyone could guess this was a Cecil "plot"—but so what? Was anything on those leaflets false?

The upper ranks monopolized the right to interpret the scriptures; the mid-ranking priests amassed vast wealth through indulgences; those exalted priests of the Holy Spirit Plains grew fat and sleek in their rich lands while dictating to the hard-pressed South. And now disaster had struck: the bishop was dead, a great host of church knights was dead, the enraged Cecils had blockaded the entire church, and the consequences were to be borne by everyone within it—who would not rage?

Bishop Flanberon's face was dark as he crumpled the printed sheet in his hand and burned it to ash with holy light, while his mind raced through calculations—

Crude as the Cecils' propaganda was in its language, the damned thing was that its contents were almost entirely true.

Anyone who had close dealings with the Yaochen Church, anyone who could so much as brush against the circle of priests, could see the truth of it.

These things were being spread in secret; four days should not have been enough to spread them through the whole city... so they had to be stopped from fermenting any further, at once.

He looked at the priest before him: "Go at once and notify the Disciplinary Brethren—confiscate every pamphlet circulating among the churches. And have those exiled knights go with the church knights to the outer city and search house to house. Anyone, for any reason, found holding such pamphlets must surrender them immediately; those who refuse shall be treated as heretics."

"Yes."

"And one more thing," Flanberon added. "Anyone who hands them in willingly, or reports someone harboring them, gets a ration reward."

The church knights of Frosthold Cathedral and the exiled knights who had thrown in their lot here swiftly set to work.

The long-sealed gates of the chapel district opened, and fully armed knights poured out to search house by house for "heretical evidence." Priests escorted by knights walked the streets, broadcasting through divine arts, warning all commoners hiding propaganda materials—and through all this, the outer city plunged abruptly into ever greater chaos.

Those "seasoned" knights could not possibly have emerged from bursting into homes and searching for materials without leaving a trail of wreckage.

Nor was it only the outer city that fell into chaos; within the chapel district of the inner city, the atmosphere turned tense at once.

Disciplinary Brethren in black robes, their scalps tattooed, walked silently into one small chapel after another and began interrogating every monk and low-ranking priest. Great quantities of pamphlets were dug out from the corners of those chapels or from the persons of the clergymen, and the clergymen who had hidden them were punished on the spot—first a uniform confinement, then flogging and divine chastisement.

The church's transcendents could not be punished before commoners; to preserve the church's dignity, all punished clergymen, once their chastisement was done, were kept locked in the confinement cells until they had completed thorough repentance and could be released.

Within a single day, several thousand copies of propaganda material were confiscated from every quarter of the city—some pamphlets, some leaflets—and Bishop Flanberon was utterly astonished when he saw that great heap of printed matter: he had not expected there to be so many.

The print quality of these materials was exquisite, the text clear, the layout neat—nothing at all like the crude products of wax-stencil printing. He could not imagine how the Cecils had managed such fine printing—and in such quantity.

But however it was done, these things had to be destroyed at once.

All the confiscated pamphlets were gathered together and sent to the great square outside the chapel district for public burning. Heraldry-clad couriers in livery and robes ran three circuits through the city, driving every commoner out of their homes to watch the burning in the square.