Southbound: 3

There was little learning to be had. Not that Ken avoided it, but the madness that had erupted took new shapes, new methods in its insanity, and it grew. Arthur had expected the religious fervour to die away as days came and went, and for a while it looked as if he'd been correct. Then night fell again, the new star still the brightest in the sky. It didn't matter. Mothers and fathers brought their entire families into the streets and crowded the squares in silent prayer or singing.

Krante may not have seen riots, but what had obviously been an important but boring town was now a centre of dissent.

Old men with canes sat on stools brought out from inns telling tales of the last time a god had been born. Old, but not old enough to have seen it with their own eyes, Arthur guessed, and Ken confirmed his suspicion.

They had planned to exchange Weaves in the Inn, but for once no one was interested. Taleweaver's might be a once in a lifetime experience. Gods took to the stage more seldom than that.

Ken convinced Arthur to leave the next day. Krante was becoming dangerous he said, and even though Arthur wanted to watch the madness he accepted Ken's wisdom in this case. A few fights had broken out in the darkness, and the wall of silence that met questions of if anyone had been hurt made him uncomfortable. There was an ugly undertone to how neighbours chose factions after just two nights, and they were strangers, sacrosanct or not. The outworlder presence didn't help neither.

As they rode south on the highway Arthur thought he saw smoke behind him, but he accounted it to his imagination, or hope.

They met more people than he remembered seeing the last time he made use of the white highways of Keen. It was more of an unplanned migration than an exodus. There were as many heading south as they met, and he soon stopped making any attempts at guessing the reasons for each individual to take to the road. He'd expected his own shining caravan to create more of an uproar than it did, but mostly they just received sullen stares.

From time to time he saw soldiers in uniforms coloured to stand out from the rest of the population, or from enemy soldiers on a field of battle. From what he had learned they massed soldiers on as a flat piece of ground as possible and marched into each other. The art of staying hidden was still ahead of the killers of this world. A few, he noted, mixed with the people among them. Some had discarded all but their trousers, but others kept their uniforms on, acting like guards protecting their favoured assembly of believers.

Fields lay deserted on both sides of the road, not all of course. Most were worked by men and women who shook their heads or made angry gestures at the madness passing them by.

As the days passed the randomness turned into order, or rather several kinds of order. Each roadhouse they slept in, and they got rooms only because Arthur made the most of his being a taleweaver, had tales of people gathering at shrines and temples far from the road. For each new one they visited those tales had more elements of armed protection and a little less of friendly gatherings, and it only took a few eightdays before the first story about a pitched battle around a shrine reached them.

Ken stopped Weaving at that time. He had more need of learning than of retelling, he said, but as far as Arthur was concerned he only found a comfortable excuse to avoid the risks involved in stopping the violence. We don't take sides; we don't take part. We Weave, he had said.

That was cravenness taken to the extreme, and Arthur refused to abide by it. The very next night he entered the stage knowing well ahead what he was about to Weave. They needed to understand the dark road of religious fanaticism and where it would take them.

He filled his mind with what he knew about Earth's old witch hunts. Not enough. The Spanish Inquisition would have been good enough, but Keen had one of its own. In the end he decided on the German madness that had put Earth to the torch eight hundred years earlier and gave it religious overtones that had nothing with history to do. He was there to teach them a lesson, not as an advocate of rigid adherence to facts. He imagined a modern inquisition, placed a theocracy in the place of the rulers of the time, recalled as much of the atrocities he could. He mixed it, coloured it and made himself believe it, as if he had experienced it himself. Then he carried that anguish and fury foremost to his mind, and he Wove.