Lord of Order by Brett Riley (the reading list book TXT) 📕

in the breeze like a crawdad’s antennae. I ain’t noticed much love for Matthew Rook, but we don’t seem to be losin any folks to the Troublers. We might just need to hunker down and hope the next supreme’s better.

Sometimes it seems like Santonio’s travelin a dangerous road.

He’s troubled, but he’ll never turn Troubler. Still, the next time some Washington muckety-muck comes to town, you might wanna make sure he’s gone fishin. Rook’s people don’t take kindly to talk about middle ground.

Troy considered this for a bit. Ford kept the city supplied with fresh meat, watched over the crops, drove away scavenging animals and Troublers. He had fought beside Troy countless times, had just helped him catch Lynn Stransky. If Rook were willing to toss aside such a loyal and valuable man simply for questioning methodology, then perhaps the Crusade really was losing its way.

Well, Troy said, I gotta figure out how to handle Stransky. You wanna come?

Naw. I’m old. It’s almost time for my nap.

Time for your whiskey, you mean.

Tetweiller smiled. That, too.

The old man turned and ambled toward the gates. Troy wished he too could walk away from everything awaiting him in the Temple. His bones ached, as if he were closer to Tetweiller’s age than Ford’s. On some days, gunpowder seemed to make the world turn, to raise the crops. It wore on a man. He wanted to go home and soak in a cold bath, let today’s deaths ebb out of his conscience like sweat from his pores. That house, that tub, the attendants who filled it at exactly the right times were part of the privileges that came with being the lord of order. He had earned them.

But duty came first. So despite his ringing ears and the will-sapping heat, he approached the Temple, which the ancients had called St. Louis Cathedral.

Heavenly Father, give me the strength to get through this.

Inside, Norville Unger manned the reception desk, as he did from dawn till dusk every day. Seventy years old, Unger lived in the prison out back and, in Troy’s memory, had traveled no farther from his post than Jesus’s statue, at least while on duty. He ate in his little cell and slept almost exactly eight hours a night. He took no days off. Though the guards outside searched all visitors, Unger searched them again. He interviewed them and determined their purpose, their politics, their faith. If someone made it past him, they had been deemed a loyal member of the Bright Crusade on urgent business. The only people who could enter the Temple without Unger’s say-so were the lord of order, the deputy lords, and the city’s most prominent, office-holding Crusaders like Ford and LaShanda Long, the chief weaponsmith.

The Temple’s spires—seemingly ornamental when seen from the street—had been hollowed out and fortified. Inside the Temple, at the front of the sanctuary, entrances to each spire faced Unger’s desk and opened onto narrow spiral staircases. No one except the lord of order was allowed in them without Unger’s permission. Two floors above, twins of these doors separated Troy’s office from the staircases. Only Troy and Unger possessed keys to these four doors, which proved how highly the lord esteemed his desk sergeant. Anyone climbing those staircases could move beyond Troy’s third-floor office and up to the tiny cells at the terminus of either spiral staircase, though not even Norville Unger could open the cells’ doors; the only keys sat in a locked drawer of Troy’s desk. Only the Crusade’s greatest enemies ever occupied the towers.

When Troy entered the sanctuary, Unger saluted. Congratulations on the arrest, the old man said.

Thanks, Troy said, returning the salute. The towers secure?

Unger frowned. Course they are.

Troy winked. I figured. They got the prisoner ready?

In your office now.

Okay. I’m headin up.

Beyond Unger’s desk, pews bordered the long center aisle, which led to a raised platform where New Orleans’s high minister—a pinch-faced, stoop-shouldered man named Jerold Babb, who was older than Tetweiller and wore isolated tufts of springy white hair like drifts of melting snow on his wrinkled and spotted pate—preached his sermons. Troy walked under ancient chandeliers hanging from long chains in the ceiling, their crystal globes holding thick candles, their glass fogged by time and soot and dust. The windows looking onto the alleys outside had once held stained glass, but it had been shattered during the Purge. In its place, smoked bulletproof glass had been installed, with thick iron bars bolted to the outer walls.

Despite these fortifications both within and without, the Temple’s foundation had been sinking for centuries. Yet it still stood. Most New Orleanians believed this phenomenon proved their cause was just, though the secret histories revealed that some of the first Crusaders voiced outrage at how the bones of old Catholics had been disinterred and tossed in the great river back in the time of Jonas Strickland, the Crusade’s founder. Strickland’s forces had purified those early protestors through torture and confession, and the ancient Papists had gone unavenged.

But such unpleasantries had long since vanished from the Temple grounds. Now, in this place, the high commanders of the Bright Crusade’s New Orleans chapter held their heavily guarded worship services every Sunday morning and evening. The gathered flock would file in, accompanied by the choir’s a capella humming. Once everyone had found their seats, Jerold Babb led them in pledging allegiance to the Crusade. Two songs—one by the choir, one from the full congregation—preceded a prayer from the reigning lord of order. Next came testimony from any Crusader who had traveled beyond the principality’s borders, followed by reaffirmations of faith and tributes to anyone who had distinguished themselves in the past week. These last parts were not repeated in the evening, which shortened the night service by as much as an hour. Then Jerold Babb would preach—though, these days, wheeze would have been more accurate—while drinking whole carafes of water and wiping his grizzled brow on the sleeves of his robes. His evening services seldom lasted more than