Chapter 478 — The Siege
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
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?