My training took the better part of six years, in which time I enthusiastically apprehended the skills I would need as a soldier, as a mage, and as a de facto cleric of the Blood God. I was good. Far better than my recruiting class, better, even, than many of the Knights in full standing. But it had turned out that despite these products of my hard work, my most interesting quality to chapterhouse leadership was actually my pedigree. I was, of course, Piraean, but more uniquely, I was of the noble class–albeit its bourgeois fringe.
As it was, the fight against the Atheists was angling more and more uphill with each passing year. The Knights had little difficulty eliminating the radical elements who made themselves visible, but they were having a much more perilous time navigating the invisible gauntlet of small resistances the Atheists placed in their way. Delayed responses from the Piraean Council, effectively tying the Knights’ hands in civil matters; the ubiquitous threat of petty theft and vandalism that compromised the movement of Blood Knight assets throughout the city; and the occasional assassination of Knights on patrol–retributed fiercely, but not fiercely enough to outweigh the attrition–all combined to ensure that the Knights’ existence in Piraeus remained decidedly hostile. And where new Atheist aggressors seemed to spring up almost passively, owing to the unrest sowed by the noble families, new Knights…took six years to train.
It was, as the Knight Captain told me in a private meeting two weeks before my knighting ceremony, unsustainable. Indeed, though I was not a Knight yet myself, I had felt the effects of the Atheists’ resistance keenly. I had long since lost count of the meals I had skipped due to supply shortages, and just the previous month, Cassandra of Coralta–the Knight who had intervened on my father’s behalf at the city gates over a decade ago–had been killed when a group of Atheist riverwalkers pushed her from a pier in the harbor and held the water around her head until she asphyxiated. She had been a mentor to me since I enlisted, and the rage that filled me when I heard the news has, to this day, only been equaled once.
It was for this reason especially that I was receptive to the assignment the Captain had for me in that meeting. We could no longer ignore the Atheists’ inner workings, he said. In all likelihood, they had an agent, an informant in the chapterhouse, and there was little we could do about it. We simply could not afford to purge every Piraean from our ranks, and there was little else to go on. The only sensible course of action was to manufacture a spy of our own. I had the right characteristics, he said, and there was no one whose loyalty he trusted more. It was a light blow to my pride that I would not have my knighthood recognized for some time–perhaps for years–but he knighted me there in his office. Then, following a public and ignominious display of my expulsion from the chapterhouse for “disloyalty and heresy”, I was left on the streets of Piraeus to begin my mission.
Were the Atheists a centralized organization, I have little doubt that my chances of infiltration so soon after my exit from the chapterhouse would have been zero, pageantry or no. But I knew they were not, and I knew the city guard had reason enough not to be suspicious of a new recruit.
If any faction had suffered worse attrition than the Knights in the Atheists’ protracted rebellion, it was Piraeus’ armed forces. Since it was of the utmost importance that the Atheists did not establish anything resembling a fighting force, the guards and the navy had permanent places on the Knights’ list of usual suspects for any Atheist activity needing investigation. Needless to say, damage to their ranks–both collateral and targeted–was substantial, and they were in constant need of new recruits to keep their numbers stable. I had the martial skills they required, and they certainly did not have the luxury of investigating the unstated suspicions of the Piraean nobility. They accepted my application without question, and within a few months, my history of allegiance to Piraeus’ “illegal occupiers” had been buried if not forgotten entirely.
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