I am no poet. I can only write about what I see and hear. Marae tries to teach me so that words come easy when I write in my book. At the end of the day is when I write, long after night falls. I don’t know what day it is.

Marae is asleep now. I should sleep, but I can not. I can hear them, outside the walls. I can hear the laughing. It does not sound like laughing, but that is what it is. It sounds like dogs. Like hell. Animals outside our walls, walking like men. I can not say what it sounds like. Marae maybe could, but I have no words. They are not men. God would not make men such as this.

We are dead. I must say it to myself. I will not say it to those here with me. Women, children. Old ones. The ones who are sick, or have no arms or legs. The ones who can not fight. Now, we are all that is left to fight the ones outside. But they depend on me. I send them to make spears and load cannons. I send them to fix walls and bar gates. I try to keep them doing. Always doing. But what will I do tomorrow? Tomorrow they will come again.

We are hungry. The food is gone days ago. I am sorry for my writing. James would have written better. James is gone now, as I write before. With the other soldiers. He died. The ones outside killed him. I wish I could talk to James again.  I wish to hold him.  I will be with James soon.

Marae told me to write how long we have been here. We have been here a fortnight and three days. We hold the city for now.  I know not if we are the last to hold. If other cities fell. We get no word.

I will lead them again tomorrow. We will fight the ones outside again tomorrow. James can you see us? Your son is here. You would be so proud of him. He can not lift a spear but he runs messages and carries water. He brings bandages and food. He does not eat. I wish he would eat.

Marae has not had her baby yet. We hear of what could happen if

James, she asked me to. If the gates are broken and the ones outside come in. She asked me to

The sunset was so beautiful today James. I remember the poem you wrote me about the sunset that you gave me for our wedding. You were sad you could not afford a troth ring. I keep the poem with me. I have kept it since you went away. I keep you with me.

Are you with God, James? Is God with us?

I can still hear them, outside. I wish I could not hear them. I wish I would never hear them again.

I love you James.

I am coming.

These are the final writings of Saint Inanka Milokova, inscribed by her own hand on the eve of the fall of the Holy City of Beldevera. The Mother keep her, now and always.

~ Third Encyclical, Book of Beldevera

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

The captain told the story during the march north. They'd found the priest in a barn not far from town. Naked, on his back, splayed across an altar made with a stack of stones. His hands and feet were tied to stakes driven into the dirt floor. Outside, they drove away the crows that had found his head at the bottom of a creek bed. They never found out what happened to his heart and tongue.

The Inquisitors immediately suspected Kolsh. It is the only town for leagues in the bleak scrubland surrounding the abandoned barn, so far out of the way that most merchants avoided it. A sullen little settlement, the low, dugout hovels of Kolsh clustered around the three walls that remained of the old keep from which the village drew its name, a place that already inspired tales of ghosts and madness long before the first squatters arrived.  There was a siege, long ago, during the War. The stories say the defenders ate each other.

His name was Father Gerard, the priest in the barn. Fresh from seminary, Prelate Mikhailo had sent him to Kolsh only two seasons before, certain that his protégé could heal the place’s spiritual ills and bring her wayward folk back into the arms of the Church. The way the captain heard it, His Grace had spent a solid hour throwing up upon hearing the news, before sending his ring to the Imperceptor and retiring to his Agravinian vineyard.

The rumor is that Kolsh is overrun, that a Brood festers amongst the low houses and ruined walls. There are monsters here; half-human descendents of the dark things that dwell where the wicked go when they die.

They ask the captain about the Brood, later, once they are camped atop a low hill overlooking the lightless town in the shadow of the old keep. He doesn’t get to answer the question.

“We don’t field the Sixth Cohort because the Church needs firewood, boy.” The voice is shrill, never failing to remind those who hear it of a calf being branded. The man behind the voice is resplendent in the red hood and golden cord marking him as an Inquisitor of Ordo Rimor. In a brass tube somewhere beneath his black robes, the inquisitor carries a writ, sealed with the Imperceptor’s own ring, which allows him command of one cohort, four hundred souls bearing the shield of Ordo Exsequor, the sword arm of the Inquisition.

An emissary is sent into Kolsh to deliver terms. His horse comes galloping back to camp after dark, dragging a torso wearing the Exsequor surcoat. He is alive, his four stumps had been cauterized by flame or hot irons. They pull a bloody gag from his mouth. His tongue is gone, and he babbles and moans with madness until the captain finally ends his pain in a swift stroke.

The rest of the emissary rains down over camp shortly thereafter. A trebuchet left in the old keep still works.

The orders come down from the red hoods, they would attack before sunrise. When the morning drum sounds, half the men awaken to find the other half lying still in their tents, throats slit from ear to ear. The bodies are burned throughout the day. The soldiers try to ignore the sounds borne to them now and again from the town when the wind shifts. It sounds like laughter.

At some point during that night, all the water turns to urine.  Fifty men are gone when the sun rises, even though the price of desertion is condemnation of one’s mortal soul. The red hoods gather and whisper to each other, then they speak loudly, then they bicker. An acolyte trades gossip to an Exsequor sergeant for a sack of tobacco. There is sorcery, here, and even the inquisitors are caught off-guard by its power.

Another day and another night passes. The red hoods argue. An attack is finally planned for dawn, and twenty more have fled when the dwindling cohort awakens. Just over a hundred are left, and they charge the weakest point of the town, the makeshift wall of timber and stone blocks that stands where the old keep’s north wall once did. They are met with arrows, and are driven back. That night, half of the remaining men are hot with fever. The arrows had been covered in the blood of plague-dead.

The red hoods order that the sick men be put to death and burned. The order is refused. Mutiny is in the air, but the inquisitor bearing the Imperceptor’s seal will not hear of retreat. The red hoods huddle in the leader’s tent, fearing to walk amongst the men unescorted. A decision is made, and another emissary is sent, but not to Kolsh.

It is five days since the emissary left, and the camp looks more like a colony of lepers than an army. Only a fraction of the men remain, either too weak from hunger or thirst to flee, or dying from disease.

The galloping hooves of their horses announce them long before they wash over the crest of the hill like a thunderstorm. Black-armored and faces hidden by ghostly white masks, they descend upon the battered Exsequor camp like angels of vengeance. They rein in as one before the red hoods’ tent, all fifty moving with a fluid unity.  The Black Nuns, many call them. Women trained nearly from birth in the ways of war, dedicated to the memory of a martyr. Ready to die at any time for the Church, their swords awash in enemy blood. They are the last resort. It is a time for last resorts.

It is a night of blood and fire. When the sun rises the next day, only a single Nun emerges from the remains of Kolsh, now silent and burning behind her.  She limps, and is bleeding from dozens of wounds. It is some time before the red hoods see her clearly enough to notice that she carries something in her arms. A person. A girl, and pregnant.

The lead inquisitor protests in his branded-calf voice; all those from Kolsh are anathema, it has been declared by the Imperceptor himself! He taps the brass tube impatiently. The woman must die, and her unborn child with her, he cries.

The lone surviving nun is silent, heedless of the inquisitor’s orders. She does not look back as she mounts the nearest horse. With shrill protests echoing behind her, the nun gallops away, cradling the pregnant girl tight against her chest, upon the inquisitor’s own black stallion.