As it so often happened, things didn’t go as I had planned. Not at all.

  The original idea and plan Lia and I had hatched had been to slowly increase our efforts in driving the people of the Blessed City into a frenzy. Slowly but steadily making them more irritable and paranoid, showing them that even the longest night, and subsequent rising of their deity’s power, wouldn’t stop their decline.

  We had hoped that they’d eventually leave town as spring came around, their faith in Sunna broken but their lives relatively unharmed. That way, they’d tell others of their experience, spreading the impotence of Sunna even further, hopefully keeping others from worshipping the deity. After all, everyone wanted to worship a potent deity, if they wanted to worship at all, not some weak, powerless being that couldn’t even protect their faithful. Who just couldn’t get the necessary protection up.

  Well, all that didn’t happen.

  As it turned out, we had underestimated multiple elements within our plan.

  One of those elements was the remarkable success of our efforts. After taking two days, first to teach and then to prepare some outside facilities in case I decided to kidnap one or two of Sunna’s faithful, I came back to a changed city. Maybe it was because we had tainted their salt right before I had taken my break, and Lia had gone elsewhere, too, or perhaps it was just a coincidence, but whatever the case may be, things had escalated.

  This showed the second element we had underestimated. Massively so.

  Said element was the faith, ruthlessness and sheer effectiveness of Lorgar. The guy was, quite frankly, insane, and, coming from me, that wasn’t a word I was using lightly. I had no idea how the guy thought he’d get away with it in the first place, nor could I conceive why the people of the Blessed City let him get away with it and not start setting up a guillotine or something like that.

  Now, while neither Lia nor I had been able to personally observe the events that brought the Blessed City to its current state, what we could see told both of us a lot more than we really wanted to know.

  Lorgar, and probably some of his underlings, had obviously taken their cues from the Spanish Inquisition, or some other organisation that followed the script of ruling through fear and stamping out resistance with violence, preventing further discord by intimidation.

  In an area I considered their city square, they had set up multiple large poles, and a person was bound to each of them. Each of those people was naked, but they didn’t appear cold, despite their lack of clothing; however, that wasn’t the problem. No, the problem was that each pole was surrounded by a burning light, strong enough to slowly burn the skin of those tied to it. They were all gagged, and I could faintly recognise the tracks where their tears had run down their cheeks, only to evaporate in the blazing, unforgiving light their Goddess used on them.

  I had no idea how long these people would remain tied to their poles or whether they would receive healing afterwards, but I didn’t like the look of them, as a somewhat professional healer. But there was nothing I could do without breaking past the wards. Even if I were willing to try sneaking in and trying to rescue these people, which I was not, I would have to get past a couple of guards who kept an eye on their prisoners at all times. Possible, if the wards weren’t there, but then I’d have to take care of a bunch of people. So, sadly, these people would remain where they were and continue to roast.

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  When one of the locals was working close to the wardline, I snuck into a nearby tree and tried to reach her with my Mind Magic. Delving into her mind wasn’t as simple as it had been when I probed Jeff, but it was easy enough, especially as her mind seemed to already be focused on the current situation. Not a terrible surprise, what amounted to either public torture or an execution would be on anyone’s mind, so I managed to find out quite a bit of what had happened here.

  It turned out that the people now bound to those stakes had all been involved in a brawl that raged out of control, dragging in several people and causing numerous injuries and serious property damage. Now that I had that bit about the damage, I could easily spot the damage. Where one of their dormitory buildings had stood just a few days before, only the shell remained now. It was burned and blackened, driving home that it had been a total loss, threatening to set other buildings ablaze, causing Lorgar and his primary group to intervene with some fairly serious divine magic. Sadly, the woman hadn’t actually seen that part, only the aftermath of the brawl, so she had only some hearsay and rumours, but it was enough to give me an idea of what had brought this situation about.

  She had, however, been present for the trial, if one wanted to call it that. Not that there was a whole lot of due process, fairness or anything like that, it was more of a judgment delivered by Lorgar. No defence was allowed, little evidence was presented, and the investigation sounded like a bit of a joke. However, my view on this matter may have been influenced by my awareness of the underlying circumstances. Lorgar and his buddies had simply decided they knew what was going on, namely that these people had argued with one another and things had escalated from there. They obviously hadn’t noticed that all five of the people were ones I had previously messed with, nor had they stumbled upon the tainted salt; they had simply accepted the surface circumstances without investigation.

  Within a few moments, I realised just how important and interesting this could be if Lia and I managed to set things up correctly. After all, if they failed to investigate underlying circumstances and conditions in one case, how probable would it be that they’d investigate them in another case? As long as a connection wasn’t blatantly obvious, I didn’t think it was likely that they would dig too deep and stumble over my manipulations. It would be interesting to see if one of Lorgar’s inner circle would be subjected to the same punishment if I managed to push one of them into violence.

  Regardless, it was interesting to see how deeply cowed the people here were to accept this level of punishment doled out. Had these five done something wrong? Sure, at least in the view of the locals.

  But public torture, and the current punishment was nothing but that, should be something deeply offensive to everyone living here, something relegated to the darker chapters of our history, something humanity had evolved past. However, it seemed that these people had completely embraced the changed world, abandoning the morals and standards we had all grown up with, and accepting this so-called divine punishment. Sunna’s light would, supposedly, burn away their sins, though I wasn’t sure what that would ultimately mean. Especially given that their sins, such as they were, had at least partially been induced by the manipulations of Lia and me, so how could any amount of roasting burn away something that had never been there in the first place?

  It could only work if our influence were classified as a sin, in which case, ouch. Unless the light had some purifying function, I doubted it’d be able to burn away the tainted salt these people had ingested, not without burning away large parts of their flesh.

  Regardless, I doubted that these people would be able to survive the experience without some significant magical healing, and that was assuming it ended before they died of exposure. Sure, the light was burning hot, but they were out in the open, in winter, so I did not doubt that their bodies were burning through their reserves at a rapid pace, especially when it came to water. It didn’t look like they were being watered, so who knew if they would die of the heat, of thirst or of simple exhaustion; all three were possibilities.

  Somehow, their plight didn’t sit right with me, maybe because I was the ultimate cause of their actions. And yet, I couldn’t help them, nor did I truly want to; I simply felt guilty, but not to the point of risking myself to try to rescue them.

  Instead, I slipped back into the shadows, thinking about my plans and how these changes would affect them. I would have to wait and see how far Lorgar was willing to push this punishment and how the mood in the Blessed City was, once all was said and done.