Falling Idols by Brian Hodge

wrapped her cloak about her and didn’t bother with shoes. For a moment she paused near Anna-Marie’s bed, in debate. The old nun slept deeply. Well, let her sleep on. Perhaps she was dreaming of fields in summer, and youth.
    Giselle ran into the night, the grass chilly and damp beneath her feet, and as the sounds, with increasing frequency, continued to roll up the hill, she pounded on the Father’s door. There was but a moment’s pause before, calmly, he called for her to enter. He sounded as if he’d been awake all night.
    Giselle shivered within her cloak, and found him sitting at his table. No lamp burned, but he’d left the curtains at his dining window pushed aside. He was a black cassock and a pale face immobile in a silver-blue flood of moonlight.
    “Sit,” he said, with hand proffered toward a chair. “We’ll wait.”
    “Do you not hear?” she cried. “They’re killing the people—”
    “No.” Slowly, Father Guillaume shook his head. “They are defending themselves. And I dare hope they finally know the taste of defeat.” He tilted his ear — such bliss! — as if the faraway crash of shattering wood were a faint strain of music. “After so many lifetimes of avoiding the eyes of men, how silent and stealthy must that creature be, when it wishes. And how powerful.”
    Giselle felt her knees go weak and she collapsed onto the chair he had offered.
    “And what lengths it will go to for the sake of love.”
    “ You set Nomad to this killing?” she cried. “How could you? How could you? ”
    “Because it is what Nomad does, Giselle. It is what Nomad is.” She sought his eyes but they were beyond seeing; his round spectacles were flat replicas of the moon. “In my own heart God is first, and my flock second. On their behalf, He did not answer. So I turned to one that would. Though perhaps Nomad was the answer to prayer.”
    Bile rose in her throat and she forced it down. “How dare you presume such a thing.”
    Father Guillaume spread his hands. “Samson slew an army of Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Did it just happen to be there? And God smiled. So before you judge … listen.”
    She had no more heart with which to argue — it hurt too much. Hers must be the same as the grieving hearts of mothers who see their sons grow out of playful innocence to be hanged as convicted murderers. All mourn for the dead, yes, but they mourn no less for the passing of what potential might have been fulfilled in the living.
    And so she listened.
    To the frantic cracks of rifles, the bursts of automatic fire. Here a scream, there the concussive blast of a grenade. And still the cries went on. The brittle sound of splintering, as she learned to distinguish wood from bone. Learned to distinguish cry of fear from cry of mortality, and the breaking point in a long, suffering wail when the former became the latter.
    And so she listened.
    As the deliverance of Château-sur-Lac went on, and on, and on.

    *

    They didn’t leave the table until after moonlight gave way to dawn, and for two hours or more it had done so in silence. Dawn came with none of its usual innocence and hope, but instead a pall of guilt and apprehension, heavy as clouds.
    “Get up, come along,” Giselle told him. “At least see what you’ve done.”
    They left the rectory and trudged out upon the hill, far enough beyond the church so that it did not block their view of the village below. Beneath the lightening sky they gazed down upon an eerie tableau where nothing moved but a wafting haze of smoke, and in a place or two, the licking tongues of dying fires. Several bodies in gray uniforms lay strewn about, more than one broken into impossible angles. Another hung limp in a charred black hole blasted through the stone wall of a cottage. Yet another had been slammed halfway through a roof. One in the street had been run through with a shattered length of timber. And the rest? Giselle hoped not to have to see them, inside their