To the Holy Ground (2)

The ambushers storm down the slope screaming for Mozgus' blood, avenging the loved ones slain on his orders. They clash with the Holy Iron Chain Knights, who cannot reach the carriage through the packed mass of refugees. Two attackers climb atop the wagon and wrench open its metal hatch, only for a chained iron claw to launch out, clamp onto one man's head, and hurl him away. Mozgus' disciples spill from the wagon to guard their master.

Each defender fights with a hideous instrument: the claw-thrower, a pair who wield double-gripped blades like enormous shears and halve two men at once, another who tears out eyes with twin pincers, a hulking figure who flattens victims under a great wheel, and a robed, crow-masked man whose ring-headed spear snares a throat like a collar. All of them are deformed, cloaked in black. From within, a voice grumbles at the din, and out steps Mozgus, huge, bald, and flat of face, reciting that the Lord reveres silence.

Farnese prostrates herself and apologizes for the breach in her ranks, but Mozgus forgives her, relieved that no clergy died, and explains that the masked men are torturers loyal to him alone. He has the captured rebels lined up and questions the one still pinned in the collar-spear. The man rages that Mozgus once branded his village a heretic haven and had its women and children slaughtered while the men were away, all because they asked to pause their tithes long enough to rebuild their food stores. When he spits the phrase divine punishment, Mozgus' calm shatters: veins bulge across his warping face and he crushes the man's skull with a downward swing of his scripture, then warns the crowd that only the Holy See may speak for God.

Composed again, he asks Farnese's judgment on the rest. She recites her rehearsed sentence, the pyre or the wheel, and he selects the wheel. His torturers shatter each rebel's limbs and lace them through a wagon wheel's spokes, then raise the maimed bodies on poles for the crows. One fleeing man bolts into the arms of a bandaged, dark-haired woman who gently strokes his face, until a brown-haired companion warns her off and a knight, unnerved, dismisses her as merely mad. The dark-haired woman is Casca, and she watches the carnage with an unsettling, childlike delight before being led away.

The chapter spans twenty two pages within the Conviction Arc and debuted in Young Animal issue 23 on November 27, 1998. It marks the first full showing of Mozgus' disciples and reintroduces Casca and Luca among the refugee throng.