Published at 1st of December 2023 10:41 am

Chapter 42 The Drowned Woman

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When Paulus watched the Templar’s party leave via the muddy road to the north instead of by riverboat, that was his first real evidence that something was wrong with the Oroza. Until that point, he’d convinced himself that it was in his own head, at least partly. After all, just because the plague had been called the drowning didn’t mean it actually had anything to do with the water, and plenty of people besides him were allergic to shellfish.

But something would have to be done if the devoted could feel the poison in that river enough that they knew to avoid it. His first thought was to go straight to Kelvun, but his Lord was already downriver, giving the river the tithe he gave yearly for her annual bounty.

It was a strange sort of way to throw gold away as far as he was concerned. Still, the bards credited his generosity as the reason that the river had taken mercy on their land alone and shielded them when so many others had suffered previously. From the reports he had received now that the worst was over and the graves were being dug, as much as a third of the city had expired in some parts of Dutton. It was a monstrous thing, but just because Fallravea had seen less than two hundred burned on the plague pyres didn’t mean that the river goddess had their best interests at heart.

So Paulus did his job and built a new spy network over the following weeks. Lord Garvin was always eager to pay for those, and fabricating a fake threat to hide the investigation’s real target was easy enough. Paulus hired spies and paid informants, and he started digging. It turned out that sending his men to join the mystery cults blossoming in the city was easy enough, but keeping them from finding religion in the process was much more challenging. He chose snub-nosed realists - men that cared more about coin than miracles. Men who were past redemption by anyone’s measure, but time and time again, within weeks of joining the cult, they would come back to him to proselytize instead of inform.

Cutting them into pieces before he was done with them didn’t reveal much, either. They sang like men with nothing to hide, which baffled him to his core.

“How did a minor cult that worshiped a small god as the healer and the water bearer become this?” he demanded, slamming a paper down in front of the subject of his latest interrogation.

Brynn hadn’t been a bad sort. He’d been reliable enough for following the Count’s mistresses to ensure they weren’t being unfaithful to their Lord in between the times he was unfaithful with them. Still, it had only taken three weeks as an acolyte at the temple of the water dragon to begin to show the worrying signs of disloyalty.

“I don’t know!” the man cried. “It’s just what’s on the wall! I swear it.”

The paper had the charcoal sketch that the man had drawn last week when he’d been admitted to a temple underneath the temple that was open to the public. It was the first time that one of his men had gotten so far without showing signs of reverence for the very thing he was supposed to be spying on. Still, a week later, everything had changed.

“I know it’s on the wall, you fool,” Paulus said, holding the hot iron close enough to the other man’s face to watch him squirm, even though he couldn’t get far because he was bound to the same chair that everyone who was put to the question sat in. “You told me as much - what I want to know is how they… How you could worship this. It’s not a goddess; it’s a monster!”

“Monster? She is the goddess - the river dragon. She protects us all from—” Paulus grew tired of the other man’s babbling and prodded him in the chest with his brand just enough to get him to shut up. “Ahh, please… no more, I beg of you.”

“This is not a goddess or a dragon,” Paulus shot back, holding up the picture again. “It’s an abomination.”

Though the sloppy lines and poor drawing ability of his spy hid many of the details, he had no idea whether that made the creature depicted more or less hideous. The description that Brynn had offered him at the time had been hideous enough to give him a sleepless night. It was even more frightening that the man saw beauty where he’d seen only the grotesque before.

“You told me that they worship a corpse,” he said, jabbing his finger at the part that was supposed to be the decaying body of a woman in the center, “A corpse that is being devoured by a monster that lurks beneath the river.”

“The drowned woman is not a corpse,” Brynn said, flinching as he eyed the poker. “Not completely, anyway. She’s not dying… she’s coming back to life as the waters regenerate her and conquer death. She—”

“And what about the monster then?” Paulus asked. He was tired of going over the same ground over and over, but it was getting late, and he was out of questions. Soon enough, he would end this conversation by granting a merciful death to his former agent. Then after he dumped the body, he would get well and truly drunk to blot out the dreams that always seemed to follow the discussions like this.

“That’s not a monster any more than she is a corpse. They are one and the same. She is the goddess but also the river dragon, and she has nothing to fear, for death can never truly claim her as long as the water flows.” After that, Paulus stopped paying attention to what Brynn was saying and walked behind the man, putting the red-hot poker back in the fire before he mercifully snapped the man’s neck mid-sentence.

That made four good agents that had been swallowed up by this dark devotion in just the last month and probably another dozen before that. The worst part was that he couldn’t understand how this strange goddess could swallow up a man’s soul as easily as the river would swallow up this body later. It managed to make almost instant believers of hard men, which was a miracle that was more generally reserved by fat sacks of silver.

Paulus shook his head, baffled as he tried to make notes while the interrogation was still fresh in his mind. Why was there one painting of the goddess for public consumption and another altogether more gruesome one in private? Why did they seem to be digging mysterious tunnels underneath Fallravea, and what were they for?

The more he learned, the more questions he had, but he still didn’t have quite enough to go to Kelvun and ask the guards to storm the temple. Without actual evidence of treachery, the lecherous young fool was as likely to execute him as he was to act on the information.

Paulus knocked loudly on the door three times. That was the signal for his henchmen to come in here and start wedging Brynn into a barrel for easy transport down to the south dock. Once there, they’d tip it into the water, and it would become the problem of someone downriver. As they wrestled the barrel downstairs and into the back of the wagon, he wondered if acts like this had caused the problem. The river had never struck him as tainted before the goblins had tried to burn down the city and devour everyone in it. Maybe the sheer amount of dead that had been dumped into it over the years finally turned it from the clear water he’d taken for granted his whole life into something darker.

It was an interesting thought, but it wouldn’t change anything, just like he wouldn’t change anything unless he figured out a way to delve deeper into the mystery. He kicked himself for not trying to reach out to that Templar surreptitiously before he’d left the city. Kelvun might have skinned him for such initiative when he found out, though, and he would find out because the servants of Siddirm were anything but subtle.

If they decided that there was true evil afoot, inquisitors would surely follow, and righteous though he might think he was, Paulus was under no illusions that he would fail to measure up to their standards.

No, the better plan was to keep siphoning extra funds from Lord Garvin while he gathered string, he decided, taking the opportunity on the short ride down the waterfront to scheme. That way, once he was safely outside the reach of all parties, he could send an anonymous message to the holy city and watch the whole thing burn down from a safe distance. That might be another year or two. Then he would fake his own death and disappear somewhere quiet in the mountains, far from any rivers and scheming nobles.

Paulus didn’t even bother to dismount from the wagon when they parked it halfway down the pier, just before it narrowed enough that horses could go no further. He never did on nights like these. His hands were already dirty enough, and he saw no need to help the burly men he paid for this sort of thing do their job.

If he trusted them a little more, then he wouldn’t even be here to watch them, but he knew all too well what happened when a body that was supposed to be gone forever reemerged somewhere it wasn’t supposed to, and he would make sure that didn’t happen on his watch.

“Come on then,” he called out after them as they rolled the barrel down the pier. “We don’t have all night.”

There were a few trading barges moored further down, but any guards they might have seen knew better than to see what strangers might be up to, even on a clear night. With the fog spreading across the river as it often did at this late hour, they wouldn’t be able to see more than silhouettes taking cargo back to their boat in the same way that he could only dimly make out the lights of the city behind him. Regardless, he watched the dim shadows of his men push the barrel into the water with a splash he could hear from here before they started turning around and making their way back.

But no sooner did he look away than the quiet night was suddenly shattered by a sudden, terrible crunch that sounded like shattering timbers. He looked around, but there was no obvious source. All he could say with any certainty was that it had come from further down the pier.

Paulus hopped off the wagon and stood there, torn between going to investigate and going back to shore. Only when he looked to his men to see if they were running back or taking their time did he realize they had vanished.

Part of him wanted to stare in disbelief, but the rest of him wanted to run. He settled for backing away very slowly while he studied the night for any clue as to what might have happened. He was sure either of them might have been stupid enough to blunder off the pier into the water, but both at once? That seemed unlikely.

“Sten? Walten?” he called out hesitantly. “Quit your bumbling and get back here right n…”

The words died in his throat, and the fog cleared enough that he could see something huge looming out of the water. From this distance, it was impossible to say, but it looked almost like the silhouette of a lake serpent or a —

Paulus started to run as fast as he could towards the shore. No sooner had he sprung to life than the monster behind him thundered to life and started to chase him, smashing the docks to flinders as it approached.

In the dark, he tried to focus on the uneven planks before him, but his mind was haunted by what he’d seen. Even though it was like Brynn’s picture, he still couldn’t believe it. The monster rising up out of the river behind him. The thing smashing boats and wrecking the waterfront wasn’t just a river dragon. It was The River Dragon, and embedded in its chest, locked behind ribs of what looked to be rusting steel, was the drowned woman caged inside its terrible corpse.

It wasn’t a metaphor. It was real, but the way it was gaining on him, though, he doubted he’d ever get to share that terrible truth with anyone…

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