by Logan Jacobs
“No, at the temple of Ukalion,” Madame Genevieve answered. “It is closed to visitors for the night. The vestals retire early. But if you go there in the morning and ask for Peryenia and tell them that I sent you there for her help in fulfilling your heart’s desire, they will not turn you away.”
“Well, thanks,” I said. I still felt pretty skeptical about this village and wasn’t sure I could trust anything that an oracle of theirs said, considering how unreliable most of the people seemed. But I thought it was at least worth a visit to see how credible Peryenia seemed. Two oracles so far had deeply influenced the course of my quest.
First, there had been Aurelana, the oracle of my temple, who had prophesied that, “The faithful will perish, save for the strongest of them all, and that one will be the vessel of Qaar’endoth. And the vessel shall be multiplied with each proof of fealty. And from the alliance of the faithless shall come the age of Qaar’endoth.”
The high priest of my old temple had interpreted her prophecy as referring to me, the sole survivor of the Thorvinian massacre of our order. It was thus from Aurelana’s words that I was given the first indication that I might be an earth walking god, destined to end Thorvinius’ reign of terror.
And then there had been Meline of the temple of Nillibet, where Florenia had been briefly forced to reside as a vestal by her noble parents before she decided to ditch out with me, Lizzy, Ilandere and Willobee. Meline had informed me that my quest would fail, unless I went “to the village of Ferndale and banished that which ailed its people.” Unless I guarded them “from new mistakes by sunlight and from old mistakes by moonlight.” So I had traveled to Ferndale and done exactly that, by helping them improve their sanitation and food handling and corpse disposal practices during the day to avoid spreading the plague that was currently rampant there, and fighting off the plague-infected undead that rose there at night so they wouldn’t eat the villagers.
I think it was in Ferndale that my band of misfits had really started working together and became a true team, and after defeating the evil local necromancer god Hakmut, I had gained my third body. The grateful baron who owned the village had also rewarded us with the peerless horses that had been carrying us ever since and promised to build me a temple with an altar that would give rise to another self once it was complete.
So, in my experience, oracles had some pretty useful tips to offer, and it wasn’t a bad idea to listen to them.
“Of course,” Madame Genevieve said, which pulled me back from my thoughts into the present. So did the wailing of one of her patrons who was clutching the wall despairingly and starting to bash his forehead against it periodically. Madame Genevieve glanced down at the dandily outfitted monkey and nodded at the troubled patron. The monkey scampered off to pull at the man’s pant leg and thrust the newly packed pipe at him until he accepted it, began to puff on it, and immediately calmed down.
“Anything else that I can help you all with tonight?” Madame Genevieve asked sweetly. “Besides the rooms and the food that you asked for?”
“Er, no, thank you,” I said. “That should do it.”
Willobee paid her out of the bulging purse from his archenemy Marvincus. Then Madame Genevieve’s monkey escorted us to our rooms and gave us the keys, and then right after my fourth self had joined us, some of her human servants carried up a simple meal of chicken and bread. It was a little plain and dry and not particularly impressive after the lavish meals we had enjoyed at The Cartwheeling Djinn, but that was probably because food wasn’t exactly the specialty of this establishment.
In the morning, we didn’t even think it was worth purchasing a breakfast. We just went downstairs and picked our way carefully around the unconscious bodies of all the patrons that had passed out on the floor in much the same positions as we had seen them in the previous night, and then went to the stables to retrieve Generosity, Virility, Fury, Slayer, and Chivalry.
Then we set out to find the village temple and pay the oracle Peryenia a visit.
It wasn’t hard to do. There was no other building of comparable size in the village. It even had an odd sort of grandeur in its own way. It looked as though the architects hadn’t really had much of a plan, and had only had assorted lumber scraps to work with, but had kept adding new towers and balconies and other extensions every time someone donated more wood, perhaps over the course of generations. It also looked like no one was bothering to maintain the temple, even though according to what Madame Genevieve had said, it remained in current use. Some of the doors dangled from their hinges, and there was moss growing on the roof and ivy climbing up the walls.
I knocked on a door anyway to be polite instead of just walking in uninvited. At first there was no response, but after Elodette banged it with her hoof, a vestal in rumpled robes with disheveled hair and extremely bloodshot eyes finally showed up.
She yawned hugely and then blinked at us and said uncertainly, “Hello?”
“Hi,” I said. “We’re here to see Peryenia. Er, Madame Genevieve sent us. Could we visit her?”
“Yeah, sure thing,” the vestal agreed. “Follow me.”
So we did. I noticed as we walked down a twisting and turning, poorly lit hallway that the vestal’s feet were bare, and she kept stumbling and having to put out a hand to the wall to catch herself. Each time it happened she exclaimed, “Whoopsie!” and giggled.
She also got lost a couple times and made us all turn around and go back the way we’d come. Elodette couldn’t fit very comfortably inside the cramped halls of the crudely constructed, labyrinthine temple, and I could tell that she was getting increasingly irritated, but eventually the vestal found her way up a set of stairs to a turret room.
She knocked on the door and yelled, “Peryenia, you awake?”
From the other side of the door came the groan of someone who was at least kind of sort of awake, but clearly didn’t want to be.
My friends and I exchanged glances. This really wasn’t like any temple we’d ever been in before.
“Yeah, she’s up,” the vestal announced. She twisted the door handle and pushed the door open. Then she squeezed past us on the landing and stumbled away. I heard her curse as she stubbed her toe.
We entered the room and beheld the oracle sitting up in her bed staring out the window.
She was clad in a white nightgown, almost skeletally slender and so pale that she was nearly translucent, with white blonde hair that looked like it had never been cut and filled up more of the bed than her body did. In her hand she held one of the same long pipes that Madame Genevieve’s patrons had been using. She took a long drag and then slowly exhaled so that her face was clouded with smoke as she turned toward us.
“So, what do you need to know?” she asked. Her eyes were a dark, inky blue. Her face might have been pretty, if she hadn’t been so terribly thin and exhausted-looking.
“How to defeat a god,” I said.
Peryenia shrugged her bony shoulders. “I’ve seen lots of visions about gods. Any one in particular you have in mind?”
Florenia whispered to my self that was standing in the back of the group, closest to the door and farthest from Peryenia, “Do you think she’s a true oracle? Or that she just has a lot of drug-induced visions like the rest of the people around here?”
Peryenia turned her dark blue gaze on the duke’s daughter. There wasn’t really any expression in them at all. “The others use the pipe to give themselves false visions,” she said. “Delusions of grandeur. Dreams come true. Or half the time, nightmares, but even those can be more thrilling than their daily lives. But I use the pipe to try to cloud out the continual flood of visions of the past, present, and possible futures that I am constantly drowning in, so that there will be a little room in my own mind for me to fit into.”
“I’m sorry I doubted you,” Florenia said.
“Why should you be sorry?” Peryenia asked. “You have a keen mind. You question everything, except Qaar’endoth. You needed one thing in yo
ur life to be certain of, and he is that for you.”
“You’ve seen me?” Florenia asked. She was trying to act composed but I could see that she was shaken.
“Yes,” Peryenia said. “I see pretty much everyone who’s contingent to a god, sooner or later.”
“Then I am… really Qaar’endoth?” I whispered.
Peryenia simply nodded, which sent a ripple effect through her yards and yards of pale hair.
“If you know all that, then you probably already know what we came here to ask about, don’t you?” Florenia asked.
“No,” Peryenia said. “I see glimpses. Not everything. There are many gods in this world, and there is no room in my mind for everything. So I have seen you before with your companions, Qaar’endoth, but your path has always seemed erratic, and I do not know what it is you seek now.”
“I seek to destroy Thorvinius the Devourer,” I said. “The god who slew my order.”
“I know of Thorvinius,” the blue-eyed oracle replied. “His doings would disturb me, if not for the fact that I have long ago grown inured to the suffering of humans.”
She took another puff of the pipe.
“Well, do you know how I can defeat him?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “But I do know that you are capable of it. You have accomplished it in one possible future, but I witnessed only the moment of your triumph, not the circumstances that led up to it. In another possible future, you and all your companions were slain by his forces.”
“Any idea how we can avoid that one?” Willobee asked hopefully.
“If you stop pursuing him, it would reduce the probability significantly,” Peryenia replied. Well, I didn’t need an oracle to tell me that. But pursuing Thorvinius wasn’t a choice. It was my purpose. Qaar’endoth’s purpose. The divine purpose that had been instilled in me along with whatever other essence it was that, according to Aurelana and now also this skeletal wisp of a woman, made me a god.
“Well, have you seen anything else about our possible futures?” I asked.
“Yes, there is one more thing,” she said. “A temple that needs you. The temple of Tarlinis. They are about to come under siege by Thorvinians, and they will certainly fall if you do not save them.”
“That’s… a prophecy?” I asked uncertainly. I hadn’t been present for Aurelana’s prophecy and didn’t know how she had delivered it exactly, but I did know the words verbatim, and they had been cryptic and sounded important. As for Meline, she had sort of blanked out and delivered a prophecy about a village that she didn’t know existed without even realizing what she had said until I told her afterward.
Peryenia rolled her eyes. “Shall I deliver it in verse?” she asked.
I guessed every oracle must be different. If Peryenia really was an oracle, anyway, and not just some kind of drug-addled compulsive liar. “No,” I said. “Do you know where the temple of Tarlinis is?”
“Yes, three or four days’ ride northeast from here,” Peryenia answered. “Not far. It’s just past the village of Galeurn. We have sent a pigeon to warn them of the impending attack, but I do not know whether they will heed the warning or not. If they do, it will help, but still, they will not be able to repel Thorvinius without you.”
“All right, thanks,” I said. “Uh, is there anything else I should know?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing else that concerns you directly that hasn’t already happened. I envy you for knowing only what you have seen with your own eyes, heard with your own ears. It must make your decisions so simple.”
I had always assumed that not having all the information made decisions harder, but I wasn’t going to argue with Peryenia, whose experience of life must have been so different from my own. “Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you then,” I said. “We’ll be going now.”
“Bothered me?” she repeated. “Oh, no, you didn’t bother me. The visions bother me. But if no one consulted me about them, they would have no purpose. I would have no purpose.”
“Well, then, I hope the rest of your day is… purposeful,” I said carefully. I didn’t want to use the usual words like “good” or “enjoy” since I wasn’t quite sure they applied here.
Peryenia actually flashed me a smile at the phrasing. Then she took another puff of her pipe and a cloud of smoke concealed her head and shoulders as she turned back to the window. I took that as a sign that we were dismissed and motioned to my companions to leave. We crept out of the room and closed the door behind us.
It wasn’t easy to find our way back out of that ramshackle maze of a temple, but with the help of Lizzy’s nose, we managed to retrace our steps and breathed deep with relief once we were outdoors in the fresh air again.
“That poor woman,” Ilandere sighed as we mounted back up on our horses again. “She didn’t seem very happy at all. It’s not like that for all oracles, is it?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I hadn’t known Aurelana, the oracle of my own temple, all that well, but I had met her a few times, and she had never seemed unhappy or ill-adjusted. All the priests, vestals, and novices had deferred to her as if she were royalty, and she had been gracious to us in return. I also knew that she didn’t have visions or deliver prophecies very frequently, and I remembered Meline making a comment to that effect too after she delivered the one about Ferndale. So maybe it wasn’t seeing into the future that was troubling Peryenia’s peace of mind, maybe it was the fact that her visions were such a constant onslaught.
“I wouldn’t wanna see into the future like that,” Lizzy said. “I like surprises. It’s more fun that way. And ever since we all joined up together, the surprises have kept coming nonstop.”
“Careful what you wish for,” Willobee groaned. I suspected he was thinking of how we had run into Marvincus, his ancient enemy, in Bjurna, and how that had turned out for him. “Not all surprises are good surprises.”
“She wasn’t really very helpful, was she?” Florenia asked. “She didn’t tell us anything about how to defeat Thorvinius’ fortress in the Cliffs of Nadirizi.”
“No, but she told us where some of his fighters will be heading next,” I said. “A smaller force than will be stationed at the fortress, presumably. So we’ll head to the temple of Tarlinis and help them. I think it might be a little out of the way, but probably not by much, since she said it was only three or four days’ ride from here.”
“Or, we could go attack the fortress of Nadirizi while some of his guys are busy elsewhere,” Lizzy suggested.
“First of all, Thorvinius commands thousands of slaves,” I said. “And plenty of them are always out raiding anyway, so the fact that some of them are absent besieging this particular temple won’t make much of a difference. Second of all, you heard Peryenia. She said we were the only ones who could save them. And I can’t let what happened to my order happen to any other order if it’s within my power to stop it from happening.”
“Well, all right,” Lizzy sighed. “But it seems to me she just assigned you a new side quest that’s just gonna be a distraction instead of helping you with the important one like you asked for.”
“An oracle has no power over what she does or does not see,” I said. “Maybe we’ll be able to turn this to our advantage somehow, and maybe we won’t. But this one’s not about us. It’s about the followers of Tarlinis, who will get slaughtered just like my order did unless we do something about it.”
“Of course we should do the right thing and help them,” Ilandere agreed. “I thought it was dreadful when Peryenia said that she doesn’t care about human suffering anymore, since she’s seen so much of it. I can’t imagine not caring.”
“Oh, is that what ‘inured’ means?” Lizzy asked. “I thought maybe it had something to do with manure, since the two words kinda sound alike.”
“You can’t care about everyone anyway, there are far too many people in the world always getting into some kind of trouble, and most of them are perfectly replaceable anyway,” Florenia asserted. “But,
of course, I do admire Qaar’endoth’s heroic impulse to save the innocent, even if they’re not actually worth his time.”
“But remember the other thing that Peryenia said, about how one possible outcome of this quest is that we all end up dead?” Willobee asked nervously. “I was wondering if maybe that whole saving people impulse might be… you know… a contributing factor that would increase the relative probability of that particular outcome. In which case, it might be something you want to start trying to repress a bit, Master.”
“I’m not going to let anything happen to any of you,” I said. “Ever. And if it does… you know, like getting turned into a toad or something… then I’ll make it right as soon as I can.”
“Hey, after this whole Thorvinius thing is over, can we go back and get revenge on Marvincus next?” Willobee asked hopefully.
“Marvincus honored his word to turn you back,” I said.
“Besides, I thought you said it was a great learning experience being a toad or some such bull shit,” Lizzy jeered. “It was real funny anyway so I ain’t mad at Sparkles for that.”
“I think after we defeat Thorvinius, we should just relax for a while,” Ilandere said. “We could go berry picking and bake pies. We could have picnics. We could--”
“Play with dolls?” Lizzy scoffed. “Braid each other’s hair? Real cute. Thanks but no thanks, horse. We’ll just find ourselves the next evil bastard whose guts need spilling and spill them for him. There’s always someone out there who’s fucking things up for the rest of the world. We can be the people who fuck that person up.”
“You mean, full-time occupational heroes?” Elodette asked with a tone of amusement. “Why, that’s pretty idealistic of you, Lizzy. I thought bandits were supposed to be out for themselves and their crews and not care about anyone else.”
“Yeah, that’s how it was,” Lizzy agreed. “But I dunno, Vander makes this hero shit kinda fun so I wouldn’t mind keeping up with it for now. If it gets boring, then maybe I could show you all how to rob dumb people too.”