Brasco is a war-chaplain of the Iron of the Eternal March, attached to the legions that hold Gorath's slave provinces, and his work is the breaking of new labor. When a column of captured Drasnian is marched in off the Pesalolo coast or down out of Tamadrez, Brasco is the priest who meets them. He blesses the brand before it goes into the fire and he blesses the lash before it is used, and he tells the chained that what is being done to them is the first shaping a formless people receives, the hammer-stroke of Krondeus falling where it must. To the enslaved he is the face the faith wears, and they hate him with the particular clarity reserved for a man who calls their suffering holy.
Brasco is not a cruel man, which is somehow worse. He is not a sadist and he does not linger over the work. He believes the doctrine the way a clerk believes in arithmetic, completely and without heat, and he carries out the breaking of a province the way a clerk closes a ledger. He keeps an actual ledger, in fact, a running tally of the provinces and slave-columns he has consecrated, each entry the same neat hand. He would tell you he is merciful. The lash is the kindest tool the empire has, he would say, because the alternative to a broken slave is a dead one, and a daemon of the forge does not waste good iron.
This is exactly the man Serel refuses to be, and the schism is in some sense an argument with Brasco conducted at a distance. Where Brasco blesses the lash, Serel will not; where Brasco brands a column, Serel slips quietly among the same people offering the god without the chains. Brasco regards the dissident chaplain as a sentimentalist who has confused pity for theology, and he is not wholly wrong that Serel's mercy is also a tactic. He simply cannot see that his own certainty is the better recruiter for the schism than anything Serel says.