High Bishop Mathias had, over the course of a long and distinguished career, developed a deep appreciation for the difference between a crisis and an inconvenience. A crisis was fire in the chapel, a heretical sect in the lower quarter, or a nobleman discovering theology shortly after inheriting a lot of soldiers. An inconvenience was anything that could still, with sufficient paperwork, be made to sound deliberate, important and mostly someone else’s problem.
As the faint glow gathered beneath the crown and every eye in the hall fixed upon it, Mathias felt the matter drift, far too quickly and with too much enthusiasm, right into the crisis category.
The artifact did not blaze. It did not sing. It did not do anything so vulgar as prove a point theatrically. It merely responded.
That was worse.
Grand miracles, in Mathias’s experience, gave everyone something to talk over. There would be light, noise, perhaps some tears, certainly a great deal of kneeling, and afterwards the clergy could spend a week arguing over what exactly had been seen. The important thing was that spectacle allowed room for interpretation.
This was just enough to be undeniable and not nearly enough to be convenient.
The beer sat in its cup beneath the ancient crown, golden and innocent, glowing faintly with the sort of restrained certainty that no sensible man ever wished to see attached to alcohol.
For one long and perfect moment, the hall was silent.
Then the priests shouted, as one.
“PREPOSTEROUS!”
Mathias did not look around when they did it. He did not need to. He had spent many years working with priests and was no longer surprised by coordinated nonsense. Still, the perfect unison was new. He filed that away. Institutions developed patterns if left undisturbed long enough, much like mould.
The shout struck the vaulted ceiling and rolled back down over the crowd. It had the desired effect on some of the lesser clergy, who straightened as if they had contributed something useful. It had less effect on the artifact.
The glow remained.
Brother Gorac, who had earlier exhausted his imagination on that same word several times already, looked almost offended that everyone had borrowed it.
The priest attending the crown swallowed visibly. With evident reluctance, he reached forward and lifted the artifact from its place.
The glow faded.
A noise moved through the hall behind the brewer. Not a gasp exactly. More the uncertain stirring of a crowd attempting to decide whether it had seen something important or was about to become expensive.
The attending priest waited. He placed the crown back over the cup. The faint change came over the crown, the dim but unmistakable response. No one shouted this time. Even repetition had its limits.
Several of the clergy stared at the cup as though it had just bitten them. One priest made the sign of warding against corruption before apparently remembering what the artifact was for and lowering his hand halfway through, which only made him look as if he had become confused by his own fingers.
Behind the brewer, the crowd shifted harder now. Curiosity was turning into something sharper. Crowds almost never understood anything while it was happening. But they could smell uncertainty, and this one had just caught a strong whiff of it.
Mathias folded his hands within his sleeves and considered, not for the first time, that public inquiries were beloved by exactly the sort of men who never had to survive them.
“That is residue. Trace divinity,” said one of the senior priests at last, stating the obvious.
A third priest leaned forward with sudden, desperate inspiration. “Is this the mark of a rival power?”
Three others rounded on him at once.
“Do not be absurd.”
“You will not name factions here.”
“Have you completely lost all of your wits?” Mathias found his own voice joining them. One does not acknowledge another divine presence in a place like this.
This caused silence to fall among the clergy, but wheels were clearly spinning very fast.
The brewer, to his credit, had said nothing. He was standing very still at the podium, watching them with the peculiar caution of a man who had wandered into an argument between experts and discovered that expertise was better at complicating matters than solving them.
There was movement to Mathias’s left.
One of the younger priestesses, seated two rows back from the front, had risen slightly from her place before seeming to think better of it, then risen anyway. She still wore the plain, undecorated robes of a junior temple clerk. No rank worth mentioning. No authority to speak of.
Which meant, Mathias thought, that if she was about to speak, she was either very foolish or much brighter than her superiors.
She bowed her head just enough to be respectful and said, in a voice that carried farther than one might expect, “Your Eminence,” she said nervously. “If the gods will not accept the beer, but the crown shows divine residue, then perhaps it is not refused.”
That arrested the room better than a shout. No one liked being interrupted by youth. It hinted that age might not be as important as elders preferred to believe.
The priestess went on, wisely, before anyone could stop her.
“Perhaps it has been given to us? The… the gods do not want their gift returned.”
Mathias immediately clocked a priestess who would be promoted before the day was done. By him personally.
Then one priest, somewhere to the right and behind Mathias, exclaimed, “Of course. The gods do not accept the beer because they have gifted it to us, clearly.”
Mathias rose. He did not do it quickly. Men in his position never should. Haste suggested fear, and fear in a hat that large could spread very quickly.
The hall quieted in ripples as people noticed. Robes settled. Breathing slowed. Even the brewer looked relieved, which Mathias chose not to take personally.
“The artifact has spoken enough for today,” he said.
He pitched his voice carefully. Calm, measured, and carrying just enough fatigue to imply that the problem was annoying rather than a spiritual catastrophe. This was a useful tone. It suggested the matter had already become someone else’s problem, which was, to be fair, Mathias’s favourite category for problems.
“The inquiry will conclude pending further review. Thank you for your explanation, brewer. No one is to stand until the paladins have seen our guest out.”
“No condemnation is issued,” he continued. “No judgment is rendered. The matter will be considered internally by senior clergy.”
Brother Gorac opened his mouth. Mathias did not even look at him. “Internally.”
Gorac closed it again, though not with any sign of improvement.
The brewer nodded and turned away. He seemed to be glancing among the statues as he left, flanked by the paladins.
“You are all dismissed.”
There was a pause as the order travelled through the room and met, as orders always did, with the natural resistance of people who believed history might continue happening if only they remained seated long enough.
Then the crowd began to rise.
The sound was tremendous. Benches scraped. Cloth rustled. Voices returned in a hundred hurried murmurs, all of them asking the same question in different words. The brewer was hurried away by the paladins before anyone could decide whether he ought to be congratulated, arrested, or asked if they could get a discount.
Mathias watched the public leave with the particular weariness reserved for men who knew exactly how many versions of this story would be circulating through the city before supper.
Too many. Far, far too many.
It took some time to clear the hall. Crowds did not so much depart as erode. Eventually the doors closed, the last of the spectators were gone, and the great hall regained the hollow dignity of a place built for answers and forced, far too often, to host questions.
What remained was the senior clergy, and one nervous-looking young priestess standing near the edge of the chamber.
“Your name?” he asked.
“Uh, Sister Gladius, Your Eminence,” she said nervously, stepping forward.
“You did well today. You are being promoted. To what, yet, I do not know, but you will stay for this meeting,” Mathias said.
The mood among the remaining clergy was not anger. Anger would have been easier.
No, the atmosphere was that peculiar blend of restraint and discomfort that followed any event in which the gods appeared to have answered a question none of their servants had thought to ask.
“First, I must ask, who petitioned to do this publicly?” Mathias asked, his gaze firmly on Brother Donovan.
“Uh, that was I,” he stammered.
“I see. I shall be dispatching you with a letter to your cousin, His Holiness, to explain this fiasco in person,” he began.
“But…”
“Surely he would want to hear the bad news from family,” he said, cutting off any protests.
“This cannot stand,” said one senior priest immediately, pointing at the still shining crown.
Mathias sat again, because sitting implied control and because his knees had begun protesting.
“It already has,” he said.
“That is not what I mean.”
“I know,” said Mathias. “That does not change it.”
Another priest began, “We must issue guidance to the city at once. If this spreads unchecked…”
“It has already spread unchecked,” said Mathias. “Brother Donovan, in his wisdom, allowed three hundred citizens into these proceedings involving a brewer and a relic. What exactly did you imagine would happen?”
No one answered. This was because none of them had imagined anything at all, which was the usual cause of such situations.
Brother Halvern, newly animated by proximity to his own ambition, spoke up. “Then perhaps we should declare the beer sanctioned.”
“No,” said Mathias.
Halvern opened his mouth, then closed it again before lowering his head to think.
There were times, Mathias reflected, when being obeyed on a single syllable still made the decades feel worthwhile.
“We will not condemn it,” he said. “We will not praise it. We will not attach meaning to what we do not yet understand, and we will certainly not do so in public while every innkeeper in the city is currently inventing a version of events that profits him personally.”
He attempted to rub his temples, but the enormous hat blocked that. He began massaging his forehead instead, his fingers moving in small circles for the headache that had just brought all its friends.
A murmur of reluctant assent moved through the room.
“Uh… Your Eminence… if…” came from Sister Gladius.
“You may, Sister Gladius. You have shown and taught us much today. Speak,” Mathias said, still rubbing his forehead.
“I don’t mean to question you, Your Eminence, but… well… the people who were here…” She took a deep breath to find her resolve. “By my fault, everyone who left thinks it’s a gift from the gods.”
Mathias looked at her from between his fingers.
“There is the issue of spoilage, Your Eminence, and I would like to suggest we consider dispatching someone to the brewery permanently, even if we say nothing about the beer,” she explained.
There was a murmur of assent.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Well… I think we should bless it. And I do mean bless the place. The bre-eery? The city… rather the flock must know it is blessed.”
Mathias considered this. It was certainly true. If the city believed the place was blessed, it would explain why their beer turned so slowly. He would have preferred to ignore the whole thing, but this might work out nicely.
“It seems Sister Gladius has been particularly useful today. Very well. We will go out there three days from now. Gather every priest, priestess, and choirboy. All of it. We will all be going.”