sipping from your cup 'til it runneth over. Who: Amos, Rictor, & Storm What: Rictor Cassul is 1000% done. Where: The Cathedral. When: Earlier in the week. Rating: PG-13. Status: Complete.
Humming to himself, the priest walked down the pews. Green eyes traced over the clipboard in his hands, where scores of cases had been whittled down to symptoms, trends, prognoses. These documents had no answers, however, which would no doubt be of interest to his superiors—but no matter. There was much Amos Luscini had already accomplished.
Around him, white mages and holy knights filled the nave, the noises of their efforts filling the wide, hallowed hall. The sick formed queues as cots rolled in and out of the sanctuary, carrying them off to the cloister (to their death, which was to say, for a select few, to Faram). The priest reached the entrance, raising his eyes to survey the operations out front.
What he saw instead had the man’s lips curling into a small smile. “Rictor,” Amos greeted.
The holy knight jarred as if he’d been called upon by a teacher, an unruly student straightening in his chair and doing his best to look attentive, awake, and alert. Rictor had been seated in one of the pews, watching the rest of the Cathedral bustling about its business—carving out a small moment of peace and quiet to himself, piecing himself back together in a space that had once been familiar but now turned alien.
“Morning,” Rictor said, sliding his feet back down and sweeping his exhaustion aside. The priest’s presence was a comfort, a slight lessening of the weight on the knight’s shoulders.
Amos took the seat beside him, setting the clipboard down on his lap. “Good morning, Rictor. I have not had the opportunity to ask if you have been well.” Cathedral life had been a flurry of activity, countless cases blurring together like spilled paints, each death meaning almost less than the last.
“Well, I don’t have the plague,” Ric said, his voice stilted in an attempt to maintain levity, “so there’s that.”
It seemed the most they could ask for, some days, as more and more patients were wheeled into their makeshift crisis centre. They’d prepared themselves as well as possible with Luscini’s information, and yet it still didn’t seem enough.
“Anything you need me for?” the Korporal asked, hands stilling by his sides, forcibly whittling down all of his nervous energy. It was a tone of voice the Father had heard often: stubbornly helpful, determined even as Rictor sounded a little lost, a drifting soldier in need of order and direction and a superior to obey. With Black gone and Hauville busy, order seemed to be crumbling around them.
“Not as yet,” Amos replied quietly, watching as Millie and Filip wheeled in yet another gurney. As the priest had hoped, the Blades had adapted to even this matter like a well-oiled machine. With these gardists, the camaraderie ran bone-deep. “Well in hand, for now, although I expect the influx will escalate by noontime.”
They were simply building a dam against an unending ocean: holding it back but barely, treating the symptoms but not the cause.
Considering the matter, Rictor frowned. “Min’s network post,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it. Do you think I should do it?”
(Another entreaty to authority, as always.)
The priest paused then, a glimmer of hesitation that shone through his normally unfailing equanimity. The crisis centre was off the ground, running seamlessly to keep up with the waves of diseased. Rictor had done well to establish the necessary security measures; only one glance was needed to discern the masses of holy knights working in tandem with the mages of the Church, the army of the Lord congregating to do His work and spread His mercy.
The image would only improve, Amos knew, if the korporal were to wield his holy blade in this new service. However, a prickle gnawed at the spaces between the priest’s fingers, a quiet but insistent tug. “A suicide mission, some are calling it, no?”
“I think people are being over-dramatic.” Rictor’s usual humour inched back, his constant attempts to smooth out tension and replace it with flippancy and glibness.
“Perhaps,” the priest said. “Our contingent has already seen one replacement, Rictor.”
“So have others.” Talking it out with the priest, setting the dilemma on the table and analysing it between them, made the situation become clearer: the Korporal could not sit by and do nothing while his best friend volunteered, plus Ari, Kiernan, Mag, a disgraced nun, and others. He kept returning to the councilwoman’s post, weighing those names against the list of casualties (growing, but it had already absorbed his Feldwebel, his sister, his squire).
The knight’s lips thinned. He seemed to come to a conclusion.
“We should be there,” he said. “Leveren and I have some white magic. The city is at stake. The Cardinal said we should safeguard the city from Evil, wherever It should seek to thrive—and what the hell is this but evil?” A pause. “Apologies.”
Amos looked upon the holy rood in the center of the nave. It loomed above them all against its backdrop of stained glass, casting the sick in the myriad colors of Faram’s love. The Cardinal, Amos reflected, had indeed demanded as Rictor had said. A leader like theirs knew to send his crusaders into battle.
“A wise course of action, I should say.” Priest turned to knight with a wan smile. “And for a worthy cause. Faram’s cause.” He nodded toward the rows upon rows of the ill. “I will pray for your safety, of course. Have you brought this up with the Hauptmann?”
“Not yet. I wanted to run it past you first.” Confessor in more ways than one.
“Shall I speak to him on your behalf?”
“It’d be appreciated,” Rictor said. Hauville had retreated even further since this began, encloistering himself in his offices as the plague tightened its grip.
After a slight hesitance, the man shifted, the cadence between them dropping. “My sister and squire are ill,” Ric said, strained in a way that he didn’t often exhibit. “Is your family all right?”
“I apologise, Rictor. They will be in my prayers.” And, had it been anyone else, the priest would have closed it off with another bloodless smile. But: “Ruth,” Amos said, voice a near-whisper. “Naomi came to tell me.” By the kaplan’s tone, it was evident that the encounter had been no pleasant affair.
Amos never brought up his family of his own accord; it was a rare occasion that they could discuss them. “I’ll pray for her as well,” Rictor said, his voice heavy. (Ruth Luscini, another name for the scales.) The silence unspooled between them for a moment longer, until—
“Then it’s all the more important that we do something.” The Korporal’s resolve strengthened, iron in his spine and hands, the hesitance scrubbed away.
“Amen.”
The priest raised his clipboard, flipping the sheets of parchment back. The name floated up at length, the shadow ever-present at the korporal’s hip.
“Storm Kapur,” Amos said. “His condition has been… inconsistent.” Kaplan turned his gaze to korporal. “Mayhap you will want to pay the boy a visit.”
Another flicker of concern, swiftly buried under Rictor’s exterior.
The boy was only fifteen.
“I should.” And then the templar was back to his feet like donning armour once more, the priest following him down the aisle as they strode side-by-side off to the wards. Armed with his clipboard, Amos found the number for the squire’s bedside, the monastic cells having all been converted to sickbays for the duration.
Rictor was silent while he was escorted to the doorway; Amos gave the man a light pat on the shoulder before ghosting off to his next duties. Alone for a moment, Rictor allowed himself only the briefest of pauses before pushing open the door. The heavy wood, worn with the years, gave way with a moaning creak.
The boy within, wrapped in ratty sheets, barely stirred. The usual alertness, a thinly-veiled eagerness to do as his Korporal bade, was long gone, replaced by frayed-seams repose. The only noise in the room was the boy’s laboured breathing, escaped from cracked lips so bloodless as to be gray.
Rictor went motionless (almost as if he matched the boy), tensing up on the threshold, barely able to cross and enter. But he did: the man took up position at the foot of the bed, arms crossed defensively in front of him, assessing Storm’s condition with an eye trained for the battlefield and its injuries, not the ailments of an infirmary.
Even then, he did not look good.
At length, the boy opened his eyes, perhaps startled by the heavy footfalls of a holy knight’s armour. Dark eyes gazed at Rictor, glazed and unfocused. “Father…?” Storm began, his voice frailer than Rictor had ever heard it. But then the squire’s eyes seemed to refocus, settling on the brightly emblazoned cross, the red that could not be mistaken.
“Korporal,” the squire amended. Still, no one would say that Storm had joined the realm of the lucid. It seemed the plague had half a hold on his mind yet. Here the boy struggled with another greedy inhale, more wheeze than breath. “I am so tired.”
Too many people had been felled by this. They had to end it.
“Get your rest,” Rictor said, mustering up his brittle shell, piecing it back together in front of his squire. “Because I’m going to kick your ass in a spar as soon as you’re back on your feet. Training resumes once you’re well, no effort spared.”
Another attempt at being glib. And a successful one, this, for the squire offered a weak laugh (although it took a moment for Rictor to realise it was a laugh: it sounded dry and broken, a hacking wheeze more than anything else).
“I will be ready for the greatsword after this, no doubt,” Storm said. Perhaps his eyes had begun to water then; it was difficult to say, for so quickly did they fall shut. “You are well, Sir?”
“I am.” How many times had he answered that question lately?
“I am glad, Sir.”
And Rictor couldn’t seem to find other words to follow (the well of frivolous humour, a salve on the wound, had indeed run out). He tapered off into silence, and it seemed the squire’s reserves of strength, too, had run out. The quiet carried.
He stood there until his squire drifted back to sleep, Storm disappearing like being swallowed up by the ocean.