Tanith forces poured around the crowd to confront the armed clubs. The police were a little slow on the uptake, but their lead-shot weapons were of little use against Tanith armed forces, equipped as they were with indigo fabric reinforced with plates of ceramic. Daisy was a little envious of their heavier kit before she got close to one of them and saw the sweat on their faces. Then she was defending herself against the Waterborne. This time, they were in their cultic garb, bright blue fabric in a variety of colors. Their official byline was that they were freed from sin through baptism and that they supplied water to those seeking the One God. In practice, they were a cult which practiced “mental hygiene” and isolated those who joined from those who were not contributing to their coffers.
Daisy saw Ruler casting, and one of the Waterborne reeled, light emitting from her eyes, but the other two resisted the sorcery. They were stout, hearty types, and sorcerous spheres were resisted by the body’s humors. She didn’t have time for an investiture of water unless she wanted to be shot—check that, shot again. The indigo fabric was in fact proof against bullets, but Daisy’s arm felt numb from the impact—so she summoned up her will. She believed in the One God, she believed He had a sense of humor, and so she believed that it would be His will that the water humor bring low those who perverted His Word. Like Ruler, she got one of them. He was sneezing and coughing, phlegm dripping down his face, while the last one closed with her with a terribly dangerous dagger.
Daisy batted aside a practiced thrust, and spun her dragon staff over her hands to hit the same arm at the wrist, breaking the Waterborne’s grip, if not his wrist. Meanwhile, the one whose sinuses she had flooded was being restrained by the mob, as was Ruler’s target. She slapped her staff against the ground for a quick reversal but this time the Waterborne cultist blocked her attempt to strike his head… likely breaking his arm in the process. There were advantages to a steel quarterstaff, and strong shoulders was only one of them.
The Waterborne, seeing the way the wind was blowing, clutched his arm to his chest and tried to flee around Daisy. Knowing he would just provide information for the cult to trouble her again, Daisy put out a booted foot and tripped him, and her suspicion she’d broken his arm was confirmed when he put out his hands to catch himself and screamed, rolling to one side. She let the faithful around her restrain him and turned to see what was going on between the clubs and the Tanith forces.
She needn’t have worried. She hadn’t checked what kind of weapons the Tanites wielded, but it appeared that while they had pistols, they mostly relied upon a pair of short sticks, perhaps a foot in length, which they used with nonlethal effectiveness. The clubs who had come to beat upon the mob of aces and deuces were laying or sitting on the ground, but from what she could see they were all breathing more or less laboredly.
As soon as it became apparent that the “spades” come from “East Helland” were in fact occupying forces, the donjons responded with the cowardice of a ruling class dependent upon a lack of opposition. They retreated to the castle-cathedral of their Church and sealed themselves in. That they were depriving their populace of spiritual guidance at a critical moment in their history was likely of no moment to them, to judge from their actions. They saw the end coming and put their heads in the sand, as it were; ostriches were another kind of animal which Daisy had learned populated the northern reaches of Marz. Clarity had shown her a drawing of one.
The Tanith response to the sealing of the Church was practical. They began offloading stone from the train they had come in on, declaring that they would make a new Church, starting with the pulpit and pews, and that they would be welcoming the heroes of the Crafton Rebellion to speak at said pulpit. They did, however, put the stone to one more use. They blocked the doors of the cathedral, from the main front doors to every servants’ entrance. If the donjons who had oppressed three regions wanted to cut themselves off from the fall of their empire, they were invited to do so. Their choice, however, would be permanent.
While some of the jacks, kings, and queens had been in the cathedral with the donjons when they sealed the building, the rest took refuge in their estates. Evidently some people in Helland bore sincere faith, because Daisy wasn’t sure how else the word would have gotten out how the Tanites responded to the donjons, but royal caste members shortly emerged from their mansion estates, pronouncing that they wished to surrender and take part in whatever the new formation of society was going to look like. Daisy wondered whether they would regret their choice, as they went from cushy titled positions to being a central part of the labor required to build the new Church.
The first step in building the Church, albeit taken after sealing the old one, was picking a site for it. Much of the central city was occupied, and Tanites actually made use of town squares for festivals and markets. It was ultimately decided to take town hall and convert it. This time, there was more of a fight, but the second contingent of Tanite military was called in. While the town hall and bank was a defensible position by design, there was little to be done when your defenders were blinded or choking on phlegm and overtaken by the time they could recover. Daisy was filled with a newfound admiration for Ruler, seeing as light investitures were difficult to arrange and he was overcoming the humors of the police with nothing more than his will. She wondered if the weakness of his psi wasn’t a lack of confidence more than anything.
Once inside, there was little resistance. While the clubs there were of high rank, they were not of high ability; Daisy supposed they were complacent in their positions and the cowed status of the populace. The vault holding the treasures of, largely, the noble castes was beyond their immediate abilities to open, but a heart volunteered that it was nearly empty. However, only the royal castes had the keys to open it. Daisy dispatched soldiers to find the royals who had surrendered. Meanwhile, they explored the height and reaches of city hall. The bridges and buttress towers made defining the specific limits of the building difficult, and so they spread out and spent some time exploring.
A question struck Daisy, and so she asked the soldier accompanying her and Ruler. “This has been almost bloodless, why didn’t Tanith counter conquer Helland sooner?”
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The soldier shook her head, but she replied, “It’s only been bloodless because the people rally to your banner because of your miracles.” Daisy was about to interrupt and object when the soldier corrected herself. “Not miracles. Water sorcery. Even in Tanith things are a bit dry, it’s hard to think of it as anything but miraculous. Tanith made a counterattack against Helland… oh, sometime around the turn of the present Age. Guns were already the weapon of choice. The donjons conscripted the hearts and diamonds and sent them to… to put it in their terms, ‘waste our ammunition.’ And it worked. Scourged from behind by psi and lashes, they pressed forward with desperate determination until we had to draw our clubs. Not the suit.” The soldier laughed. “I can only imagine the complications using card suits for their caste designations has made for their conversations.”
A curious distortion of perspective caught Daisy’s attention. They had just forced the lock on a large meeting room, and the far wall didn’t reorient properly as they circled the perimeter. It was on the tip of her tongue where she had seen that before, and then it struck her. “Soulcery? Here? Where did they find someone of faith and talent…” She traced a hand across the boundary of the mural, and murmured to herself, “This must be old.” She turned to the soldier. “Seal the room, until we’re ready to see where this leads. Yes, I realize that would be easier if we hadn’t just blown the lock to kingdom come, but go get a squad and post them outside the door, holding it shut.”
When finally town hall had been explored, it looked like conversion would be a lot of work. The Tanith contingent being left behind seemed to anticipate the work with vigor. There was, however, space in the town square to set up a podium and simple block seats. Daisy began introducing Corrie and Irons in larger and larger roles, and leading studies of Scripture with other promising faithful.
The other issue Daisy raised was evicting the Waterborne cult. They had infiltrated the dispensaries, but offered only a token resistance. If anything, they seemed relieved to be taken from their positions. She supposed to herself that if one were truly fanatically devoted to one’s cult, one wouldn’t seek out the opportunity to explore a different society that you had been assured was evil. Indeed, interviewing the Waterborne, Daisy learned that they had been warned of the wickedness of the people of Marz, that they drank water for baptism because their souls were incapable of water sorcery.
Under guard, of course—Daisy was splitting squads, by this point—the Waterborne defectors actually proved quite useful. They knew water sorcery, though they couldn’t perform it until their theological questions had been answered. Breaking Watergate’s hold on the water economy was imperative, and so Daisy and Ruler set about answering, each in their own way, the questions of the Waterborne.
For instance, the necessity of baptism. Daisy affirmed that it was an important symbol, for the Precursor had baptized Christ to fulfill the scriptures—yes, even on Marz, though she supposed He might have been baptized in eka-alumina—but it did not free you from the danger of sin. It was, she supposed, comparable to declaring to the Holy Spirit, “I am here, I am ready, live in my heart and make me bear fruit!” One had to live with the Spirit, and the Spirit with one, to live a life free of further sin. “Woe to the world because of occasions of stumbling! For it must be that the occasions come”.
However, invigorated and with renewed hope for eternal salvation and the forgiveness of sins they didn’t know they could commit, the former Waterborne set about with gusto the business of extracting water from the cesspools, and also instructing the devout aces and deuces of Oracle City in the business of practicing water sorcery. It would be a slow business, enabling them to conjure water on this planet so inimical to it and so suppressed by faith, but it was a necessary one. Perhaps, in time, a strong enough tradition could be made that the desert portions of the planet could become agricultural areas.
On the subject of agriculture, there was the question of the missing food shipments to Crafton. Oracle City too was suffering a famine, unable to transport fish from Honeystone before it spoiled. Surely this was a new development, Daisy asked. She met with blank gazes. The royal castes were glad of a break from labor to be questioned again. They told her that they had put a tax upon imported salt, along with taxes on use of the rails and so on. Why? Because the dragon who sold them water was raising prices to an insane extent, and it was the only way they could afford to pay for the water they needed to survive. Daisy asked if perhaps it gave them some sympathy for those who were barely given enough water to survive, and threw up her hands and stalked off at the blank looks she received in reply.
Between the Waterborne, Tanith food delivered by ship and then rail, and a bit of sorcery, the food and water problem was resolved. With the knowledge that it was necessary, and the new unity in faith, a messenger was dispatched to Honeystone to treat the fish with acid sorcery and send it down. The acid would preserve the fish long enough to leave them edible at the end of the journey. ‘Liders were dispatched to ride the air currents some miles above the incredible heat and find out the status of South Helland. Taxes were lifted, in fact would be reversed, provided they were interested in joining the Union of States. If they weren’t, taxes would continue to be one of the three inevitabilities, but they would be left to their own business. Tanith did not have the expansionist drive Helland had possessed, a disappointment to Daisy, but she had a few ideas to motivate them when the time came.
The reply came quickly. South Helland, now Saltfarm, was declaring their independence from any outside power. They would answer only to an empowered delegate from the alleged Union of States, not trusting a ‘Lider messenger to not be another attempt by Helland to renew their subjugation. So it was that Daisy found herself gathering up her few belongings and preparing to take a train ride across the scorching heat of Marz. Further south even than Watergate, Saltfarm was across the equator. Not that this was understood by the cosmology of the people, but word of a copper sea painted a plain enough picture for Daisy.
The train itself would require an appalling amount of water, and so ‘Liders were dispatched explaining that it would be some time before they could send such a delegate, but that nobody would be arriving by rail before the delegate, least of all spade troops. Daisy spent the days waiting, where they gleaned what water they could spare to fill the reservoir tanks, checking and rechecking the runes on the train. It was beyond the capability of thermal conductivity to keep the train car habitable, and so the train was made of ventfish-derived iron and the interior coated with cold brands. To hear the conductor tell it, the runes would put off some small amount of vapor just from the moisture in the air of the car, as the metal on the outside of the car glowed red-hot and the runes drew in cold from the outside. The cars were good for a few runs, before the temperature difference deformed the car so much that it was elongated and dangerously thin from hauling a heavy load at high temperatures. Upon finding that out, Daisy set about measuring the different train cars and making sure that the one she took was the shortest of all of them. The thought of rune failure from the car splitting in an environment hot enough to make liquid seas of copper was one that would keep her up until it was time to head out.
