Chapter 479 — Fermentation
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The thick smoke and flames over the execution ground had not yet fully dispersed when the officiating priests and church knights turned and walked away—this spot, reeking and watched by a crowd of ignorant commoners, had put the priests and knights in a foul mood. On ordinary days they would have lingered gladly, savoring the awe and terror of the people around them, but now they plainly had no stomach for it.
There was still a mountain of trouble to deal with in the cathedral district, and the pamphlets' effects were by no means confined to the outer city.
The common soldiers in the square withdrew as well, and the gathered crowd dispersed in twos and threes. The brief burning had shaken the dead, oppressive atmosphere of the besieged city ever so slightly, yet it could not lift anyone's spirits—quite the contrary, a great fire in the square had brought people only fear and doubt.
The one burned was a homeless man who could not read... the Church had simply seized someone at random... the essence of heresy trials was intimidation and violence.
Whether the things in those pamphlets were true, the common folk might not have known before—but now the Church had at least admitted of its own accord that part of it was true.
When the crowd had all gone, only a few church menials tending the burning site still kept watch beside the execution ground; they had to wait for the fire to die down completely before clearing away the ashes, lest it start a blaze. And the last few scattered commoners drifted about the edge of the square, though the menials paid them no mind—just a pack of idle fools with nothing better to do.
Several men dressed as farmers and craftsmen's apprentices slipped into a nearby narrow alley after leaving the square, shook off all watching eyes with ease, and gathered in a half-abandoned hut.
A man with unkempt hair and sunken eye sockets spat to one side. "Those bastards... burning an innocent man just like that..."
"They always do," another youth with a dark complexion said in a low voice. "A pity we could not save that poor soul..."
The few gathered in the hut could not help but sigh quietly, and then a blurred, twisting shadow suddenly surfaced from the darkness in a corner of the hut. It trembled twice in the air, swiftly gathered and condensed into a petite figure. "We cannot save everyone, and our mission does not permit us to risk exposure to save people—when such things happen, the only way we avoid standing by is to put the skills we have learned to use, and seize every opportunity to spread chaos and division among the enemy."
Seeing the petite figure emerge, the men in the hut rose at once and bowed respectfully. "Director!"
"No titles during a mission, even when you have confirmed the surroundings are secure. Another offense and each of you gets a demerit—you still have much to learn." Amber waved a hand, and that one sentence changed the faces of everyone before her in unison. Then she looked around the room. "Still, your actions in the square were passable."
This was a special operations squad of the Military Intelligence Bureau, and Amber led it in person.
Frostgate City had been sealed off; the last time anyone had passed through its gates was twenty days ago. But for Amber, master of the profound shadow arts, smuggling a squad and a batch of supplies into Frostgate through the Shadow Realm was no difficult feat—and even without the "Director of Military Intelligence" lifting a finger, the professionally trained agents of the Bureau had plenty of skills to help them slip into the city and lie low in the outer districts.
The lax attitude of the priests and knights in the great cathedral toward the outer districts had been a great convenience to this squad—clearly, those people in the cathedral had no experience whatsoever in countering sabotage by spies. Or rather, in this age, almost anyone facing Cecil-trained intelligence agents would be riddled with holes.