Free For Love of Evil by Piers Anthony Page B

or because the Lord approved and augmented their effort, the music became more than it had in the past. The voices of the other friars assumed greater stature, becoming closer on key, and blended more harmoniously with each other. The music they made together was truly beautiful.
     
    The audience responded immediately. The shoppers formed a circle around the friars, and when the song was done, dropped small coins into the extended bowls. The friars glanced down, evidently trying to mask their surprise; they had not been this generously rewarded before.
     
    Brother Humble squeezed Parry's arm. That said it all: recognition that Parry's voice had made the difference. The other friars, somewhat reserved before, now welcomed Parry completely. They might have dedicated their lives to God and poverty, but they saw no point in taking the latter to extremes.
     
    The day was a success. As they retired for the evening meal, they had more than they ever had before, for the coins had bought decent food instead of the usual scraps. More than one friar approached Parry with a message like this: "I deeply regret the sorrow that brought you here. Brother, but there can be some good even in the worst of cases. Welcome to our Brotherhood!"
     
    Parry's grief was real, and his faith was suspect, but he was as quick as the others to recognize a good situation. He had a new home.
     
    If only he could have shared it with Jolie!
     
    A year passed. Parry practiced no magic, protecting himself from discovery by the searching sorcerer. He sang with the friars, and their group nourished. They traveled from town to town, singing and preaching the glory of God and begging amls. Parry had reservations about the glory of God, because he was certain that no just God would have allowed a crusade in His name to wreak the kind of havoc it had in southern France, or to kill as perfect a creature as Jolie. But he preached the word too, for to do otherwise would have made him suspect. The sentiments were easy enough to cover: that God in His greatness deplored the conditions of the world, and required a return to the fundamental values of generosity and forgiveness.
     
    But a strange thing happened as time passed. Parry discovered that his belief began to follow his words. Generosity was good, forgiveness was good, and the ways of the Lord might be strange at times, but perhaps did have merit. He could not accept the loss of Jolie, but he was coming to accept the notion that his present life might be doing more good in the world than his past one. Before, he had helped the folk of a single village, for suitable fees; now he helped the folk of the entire nation to see the error of their ways, so like his own of prior times. Yet the evil of the deaths of his father the Sorcerer, and Jolie, and the villain woman who had helped him could not be justified by this. Had God simply come to him and asked him to become an impoverished friar, he would have done so; it had not been necessary to have good folk murdered. This was not the way of the kind of God he could accept.
     
    Where, then, had the evil originated? Parry thought about that increasingly, as the cutting edge of his grief abated and left his mind free for thought. He considered and reconsidered every aspect of it, and slowly came to the conclusion that only one entity could be responsible. That was Lucifer, the figure of evil. Lucifer must have seen the advantage in turmoil and warfare, so had generated a situation that brought war to southern France. The crusade, waged in the name of God, had actually to be the work of the Lord of Evil.
     
    This was a phenomenal revelation, and one he dared not publicize. He had trouble, initially, believing it himself. How could God tolerate such an inversion?
     
    The answer had to be that God was not paying proper attention. God was starting wormy projects, but Lucifer was perverting them almost as fast as they developed, so that in the end the gain was Lucifer's.