At a glance
- Opens
- on your next entry to the gutter’s square after the King
- Required
- the Bishop’s rite, once all six houses have ended
- Boss
- the Bishop
- Earns
- the chain off the stair behind the orphanage altar
The route
- The great canonisation. The gutter church is full: the freed in white (fewer for every townsman Wick drank), the mummers’ costumes, the washerwomen. From the pulpit the Bishop thanks the Blessed Hand and preaches.
- You may sit through it, walk out, or kill a kneeling head in the nave.
- The heads hunt him. Every surviving head comes to the gutter to force a fight.
- The last houses, if any remain, open; their households know what is coming.
- The priest’s last visit. On one path he comes radiant, with a key; on the other he does not come at all.
- The children at the orphanage gate call him by a name that depends on what he has done.
- The Bishop’s rite. When all six houses have ended, the Bishop stays at the altar and will not let him pass.
It is the one sermon in the game you can find no logical flaw in, only a moral one. Listen to all of it: the rite after it is taught by it.
We did not send for the hand that made them. The Blessed Hand came to us unbidden. Give thanks for it.
The boss: the Bishop
The full panel is sealed in The Bosses, because the fight itself is a revelation of what you have done all game. In short: he is armoured, and what armours him is in the window you have watched since the first hour.
Secrets
Sealed · After the first houseThe homily, and what kneels in the aisleBreak the seal to read
The homily’s argument, in the Bishop’s words: force costs blood, and faith costs bread; the saint who took your sons holds them now, and asks only for light; the halo is kinder than the rope. The surviving heads kneel in the aisle and ask to be next. With no saints made, the homily turns against Wick and the council, and the kneeling heads beg in the street.
They made a saint of you before you died. The book is in his chapel.
They make a saint of any corpse. I am not one.
Sealed · Mid-gameThe key, and the chainBreak the seal to read
On the path of kills the priest comes down the visitors’ stair radiant, with the key to the chapel stair.
He gives you the key. He never once gave you a door.
A key is a door. I take it.
On the path of mercy he does not come, and the chair by the stair stays empty; the grate is unlocked anyway. On either path the key opens nothing yet: the stair behind the orphanage altar stays sealed with the priest’s red wax until the Bishop’s rite is resolved.
The council sits in their halls now. Many hands. They will not give them back.
Sealed · The endingThe Bishop’s riteBreak the seal to read
Every saint Wick made is a re-leaded light in the rose window, and each is a ward on the Bishop: a shaft of light falls on him, and blows ring off. The beam breaks a light out of the glass, but fizzles if cast from inside a shaft. When a ward breaks, he turns to that light and kneels to pray it back, open from anywhere. Every head Wick spared can be brought from the pillory to testify under a light and put it out for good.
Beaten, he asks: “Let me go to them. Let me go to my sister.” Killed, he gets no seat and no saint; nobody thanks Wick; no candle goes out; he dies afraid, because he believed. Spared, he takes a seventh stand in the pillory, and the church loses its voice. Either way the chain comes off the chapel stair, and not before.
He believes them. Ask yourself where he thinks they went.