Chantry of Tranquility

The Chantry of Tranquility keeps the hospital in Haudh-Gwenn, and it will treat anyone who comes through the door without asking how they came to need it. Its members go masked: gray robes, an off-white mask, no name offered and none wanted. The first visit costs nothing.

Where the faith itself came from was never written down, and it has no founder anyone can name and no holy text. What it has is a goddess, Isara the Gentle Healer, one article of doctrine, and a town that has been well served by both for longer than anyone in it can date.

The Hospital

Past the doors is one great ward, cot after cot, on the model of a field hospital of a couple of centuries ago. The beds are deliberately plain and the mattresses plainer, so that they can be burned or thrown out when they have to be. About forty of them when the party first counted; fifty by a count taken four seasons later. Glass-covered oil lanterns, and enough incense burning that the air is hazy at head height. Behind the ward run a hallway of doors and a stair up to the head’s private loft, which is choked with the same incense, richly but wornly furnished, and cluttered with scrolls and a scrying crystal.

They will lock your belongings in a trunk for a donation. They will also hide you. When Casper arrived hunted, the senior healer on duty offered him sanctuary and a mask to be anonymous behind, and asked the party to talk him into staying. Anonymity is the order’s real currency. A masked figure in gray is nobody in particular, and that is the whole of the point.

There is also a basement. A member let slip a direction to it in the fifth season and caught themselves a moment too late. What is down there was never discovered.

Masks and Ranks

The habit does not change with rank; the quality of it does. Baku’s mask is ornate and so smooth that shadows moving across it keep suggesting expressions that are not on it, and her robes are cut from a thread count nobody else’s are. The Slumbering Queen’s mask goes the other way, simple to the point of grace, near enough a mirror that a visitor sees their own silhouette in it and not their reflection. Robes and masks are lent out freely enough that Mikhail talked a set out of them for a disguise and then kept it.

The order recites its own order of precedence. At the top is the Slumbering Queen, who runs the place, or at least that is the name she goes by. Beneath her sit the Drowsy Duchess and the Drowsy Duke, and beneath them the Comatose Counts, then the Inert Knights, then the Torpor Keepers, then the Dreamers. Everyone outside the faith is the Awakened, and a newcomer works up from there.

Baku is the Drowsy Duchess, an aged hobgoblin, and she holds the faith and the mind: prayer, counsel, night terrors, whatever ails a person where medicine cannot reach. Müde, likewise a hobgoblin and likewise masked, is the Drowsy Duke, and he holds the medicine. Both taught Mikhail, and taught different things: Müde is the hospitalar and had him on wounds, the body and the ward, while Baku trained him in the healing of mind and spirit, which is psychology and not magic. A Comatose Countess serves under him and rode to the Crack to manage Gwenivere Velmont’s withdrawal. When Mikhail first asked about volunteering he was sent up to a Count, who turned out to be indisposed.

What They Practice

The doctrine is the dreaming. When the body dies the mind goes into the dreaming, and the soul persists there for ever after, and the order will not presume past that to say what is granted or denied to the dead. The goddess it serves is Isara, and it holds that the Slumbering Queen was Isara’s gift to it. Told by Mikhail that the reagent behind the Queen’s miracles was souls, burned as fuel and destroyed outright, the Duke did not flinch. He read it as ancestors granting one last blessing to their descendants: “If you must sever a foot to save the leg, you sever the foot.”

The order calls itself a faith. Gwenivere, who has sold it supplies for years, calls it a cult and means it as description rather than insult: it uses volunteers as a way of spreading the faith, and anybody willing to donate a serious quantity of time is given better medicine and real training for it, on the reasoning that aid ought to be put to work and health ought to be carried elsewhere. Members earn their place in part by pilgrimage, walking out to the towns to lend aid, and to the Free Folk most of all, because the free towns are the ones without supplies.

Two things the Chantry makes are known well outside it. The first is the restorative brew, a bitter tea that will bring a badly wounded person back quickly and charge fever, nightmares and a mild hold on them for the service. The second is the dream catcher.

A dream catcher shields a sleeping mind from night terrors, which is why the horrors ease inside the Chantry walls and why people come there specifically to sleep. Now and then one grants some other vision instead, or a lesser nightmare. A dream strong enough will stain the catcher that took it, and a scryer can read the stain back as memory. The weaving was taught to the Chantry by the Slumbering Queen, which means the order is older than she is and its signature craft is not. What Haudh-Gwenn remembers of her arrival is an epidemic of nightmares that stopped when she appeared.

The Chantry does not take sides and it charges for the privilege. No free aid to any party in any fight, but its members can be hired, at a discount, by whoever asks properly. Its gifts, when it gives one, are rarely objects: what arrives is more often a nudge toward a person or a choice, and it arrives the way a dream does.

Leon Yaegar went there for medicine for the mind and has praised what it did for him ever since. Jaden came out of three weeks of Chantry treatment an unrecognizably gentler person. Mikhail volunteered, was taken as the Slumbering Queen’s personal student, and later walked the streets in borrowed robes treating routine complaints for nothing, which did the order’s name more good than the disguise cost it. Professor Ashanti al-Hassan was Chantry-taught, and has lately begun to doubt some of what she was taught. The councilwoman Khadija Dalzen keeps the order funded.

The Schism

The Slumbering Queen vanished the night the gnolls raided Haudh-Gwenn, and the seat at the top has stood empty since. What went with her was the craft. The dream catchers began unbinding, patients started waking haunted and some of them weaker than they had gone to sleep, and two died. Beltran’s people had already tried to plant spies on the staff, and when that failed they began injuring townsfolk to get their own through the doors as patients.

She was found, in the end, though not by the order and not in any way the order could act on. The Queen takes the body of Gwenivere Velmont, the Haudh-Gwenn herbalist, while Gwenivere sleeps, and she has been at the Crack since the withdrawal that severed Gwenivere from the ooze went wrong. She is her own person for all that, with her own will and her own name; what she is made of is Gwenivere’s own dreams, given a shape and a body by something old and buried beneath Haudh-Gwenn that the herbalist had settled on top of without knowing it. Baku rode out there herself to supervise the withdrawal and was put in a cell for her trouble, and let out again during the Shahid festival. The Duke’s position was that she could not come back while the ooze existed and that the choice was not hers, and he has been told one thing about her: that she is alive.

Nothing about the succession was ever formalized. Baku is next in line and everyone knows it; the Duke has an equal say and holds the hospital; and that gap is the engine of everything that has happened since.

The Duke chose the order’s survival. He gave two thirds of the beds, and the whole of the priority, to Beltran’s guard, which kept the doors open under a man who was taking the city apart. By the time the party crossed the great hall in the fifth season there were seven patients in fifty beds and three of the seven were guards.

The beds were the visible half of it. The thread the order held on by was handed to it by Beltran himself, in a bargain he took to the full council; Haudh-Gwenn does not vote in public the way Loshev does, so which councilors backed it the Duke could not say. Asked on the night Beltran died why he had ever shown the man a favor, he refused to answer until morning, and in the morning answered in full.

The healers sent out to treat Beltran’s army after the gnoll fighting did not come home. They heard whispers in the field, turned, took the supplies with them and went over to Orsugo. They call themselves the Chantry of Purification and follow a Burning Duchess nobody has yet laid eyes on. Their doctrine is that there is no healing without fire, and that without great pain to burn out the filth the corruption will only fester. It was not one or two who left. Several did.

With two thirds of the beds gone to the guard and ordinary townsfolk crowded out of what was left, Baku’s answer was to open a second hospital and not tell the Duke. It is an old shop with a barn built onto the back of it, in a poor quarter of the town, and the healers inside wear ordinary clothes and no masks at all. Claiming membership at that door earns nothing; they will stand there and ask medical questions until they are satisfied. Isara’s grace to the few, one of them said on opening it.

Where It Stands

Both hospitals are running past capacity. Since the Queen was taken out of the city the flock has thinned and the trained hands have gone, and the order left more wounds untreated and took more avoidable amputations in the week the city rose than in the whole year before it. Its own physicians are not sleeping either: the nightmares she had been holding down spread across the whole of Haudh-Gwenn once she was gone. What has held is the sanctuary. The doors were shut to all but the critically injured for the length of the rising, a wartime hospital being a known killing ground and a light wound being how a murderer walks in. When a mob came to the threshold for a wounded guard who had been let through, Mikhail turned it around by agreeing with every word of it and then naming Isara, and the crowd went home.

The party’s standing with the Chantry is good and is not friendship. Baku treats them as allies against a shared enemy and has held her quarrel over the Queen in abeyance while Beltran was the larger problem. After the fire in the sixth season the party came back to the hospital to be put together again, and confirmed a standing arrangement while they were there: they fetch her something, and she sends two trained physicians, her dos amigos, to the raid. What she wants fetched was never written down, and the arrangement is still open. So is the briefing the party owes the order on everything they have not told it.