The Ghost's Crusade

IX: Tiernan

“Captain, you really need to come see this.”

Tiernan looked up from his breakfast of bland flatcakes and preserved fruit at the Inquisitor who had just rushed into the mess hall and come to stand across the table from him. He was the newest recruit in the regiment, fresh out of his training and not having taken his Vows more than a month ago. He was also easily excitable and tended to include the words 'spectacular' and 'awesome' in quite a lot of his reports, always underlined once or twice for emphasis. Two weeks in Tiernan had given up trying to stop the man from using such superfluous words and just let him carry on with his enthusiastic writing—honestly he believed the recruit had missed his calling as a serial author in the Empire.

Setting his knife aside, he nodded at the tousle-headed man who was standing at attention but twiddling his fingers behind his back nervously. “What's awesome and on fire now, Morray?”

“No fire, ser, I swear.” Morray jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “It's the house down the street, the one you said to watch because you thought it was a front for slave hunters? Someone... made a display. Two displays, actually.”

Tiernan elbowed the man at his side. With a heavyhearted sigh, Drystan looked longingly at his half-full cup of coffee, then rose to his feet with his friend. “This display had better involve raven-haired beauties bereft of corsets dancing sinfully in the street. I haven't had a decent cup of coffee in two months and after the reaming I got from my commander last night the only thing that will make me feel better is breasts.”

The church-raised Morray paled in absolute horror that anyone would say such a thing within the hallowed halls of a Church of Junan. The senior Inquisitor had to force himself not to laugh at the young man's wide-eyed shock and subsequent yet very predictable exclamation of, “You can say things like that? In here?”

“It's a mess hall, not the abbey,” replied Drystan with devious smirk. It was rather obvious that he was enjoying making all the blood in the poor private's body rush to his face, which was now flushed scarlet with embarrassment and only seemed to be getting more red the longer the Inferi smiled at him.

Tiernan groaned and shoved his old friend to the side to force him to leave Morray alone. “I'll see to it he confesses his transgressions later. Let's just go see what's going on.”

The young Inquisitor gathered his wits back up quickly and nodded, then turned and headed straight for the door with an awkward lock-kneed step. Once he was sure he was not going to be struck by lightning exiting the threshold of the church, he seemed to loosen up a bit.

Following Morray out of the low-ceilinged mess hall and into the vaulted ceiling main corridor of the church's area of worship, Tiernan and Drystan both paused to collect their weaponry from the small cabinet at the door. Drystan had opted, as always, to sleep with his swords and in his light leather armor, but he had left his quarterstaff at the door for some reason. It was still a mystery to him exactly where his friend had picked up the ability to use a staff of any sort; the man had never been much good at wielding anything longer than a meter, tending to hit things he never intended to strike in the first place while attempting to be heroically flashy. Once he had nearly cut his own toes off treating a greatsword like a twirling baton because a pretty housekeeper happened to be passing by the training area at the time.

Tiernan himself had doffed his formal Inquisitor armor for his favored jack of plate and a light set of reinforced leather greaves. Spending the entire day tromping through the forest and the Shalewarrens in heavy mail had been unpleasant to say the least. The soaking rain they encountered at the end of the day only made everything that much heavier and he was sure to have sore feet and shoulders for days now—not to mention all the time he had to spend the night before drying and oiling his armor so it would not catch a terminal case of rust. If they were going to be doing as much running around as he expected he was damn well going to be comfortable during the goose chase.