The False Martyr

by H. Nathan Wilcox

  Shielding her eyes, she considered the garden. Its edge sloped toward the river, stopping a half-dozen paces from the sharp bank. It consisted of precisely placed trees that marked out the rhythm of the garden like drum beats in a musical score. The plants, bushes, flowers, and vines provided the melody, but it appeared to be a very simple and repetitive song with the same patterns repeated time and again like a children’s rhyme. Rising from the center of the garden, peeking just above the ring of trees that surrounded it, was a tower. The lines of grey stone looked ancient, but they were smooth, the mortar between them did not show the slightest wear. Not a spot of moss, mildew, lichen, or ivy marked them. By Teth’s reckoning, it was not an especially tall tower – those in the center of Thoren had looked taller even from a greater distance – standing maybe fifty feet. From her angle, she could see only two of the straight walls, but they seemed to meet at an angle too wide to be a square. Beyond the garden were glimpses of other buildings, but their exact size and structure were difficult to discern from between the trees and shrubs. And still, there were no people.

  Looking down, she found the path was set with cut stones of slightly varying shades of grey, brown, and white to make a repeating pattern. It took her a moment to notice that pattern. When she did, her heart leapt. Her eyes rose, and she looked with increasing urgency for movement, for some indication of life. She listened, heard the birds twittering, the whir of insects, the skittering of squirrels, and behind it all, a distant smack. She focused on that sound: Smack! Smack! Smack! It sounded with the regularity of a metronome behind everything else, set their pattern in the same way the trees set the pattern of the garden.

  Mind racing, evidence piecing together, Teth stared at her brown robe, at the pattern in the path, at the garden. She felt almost more than heard the pounding of wood, its rhythm more regular than her panting breaths. Fear rose through her, drove her miseries away, left her numb. “The Order take me,” she whispered.

  “Dasen!” she yelled with her next breath. She turned back to the hall she had just escaped and screamed, “Dasen! Where are you? Answer me!” Her voice bounced off the building and seemed to be absorbed by the garden behind her. Then silence. She yelled again, watched the rows of windows with growing desperation. There was no response. She searched the buildings, the garden, the path. Dasen was not here, somehow she knew it. They had him somewhere else. Did they know who he was, what he could do?

  “The Order be damned,” she whispered and meant it as literally as possible. She ran, ground her teeth and forced herself to ignore her body’s protests. She made it only a few feet before the path turned to the east. She followed it, watched the pattern of its mosaic repeated again and again. She came to a circle, followed it around the tower, counting its sides one, two, three, four, and hidden around the last bend would be five. She watched what could only be a temple appear down a path to the side. She considered that path, but the time wasn’t right. The temple would be empty, and they wouldn’t hold Dasen there. As much as she dreaded it, she needed a person, needed to confirm what she already knew and find out why she was here in this nightmare of her childhood, in the place she had dreaded from the moment she knew of its existence.

  Turning down the third path, she approached a long, low building with a tile roof. Like all the other buildings, it was fashioned from simple, grey stone. More importantly, it was the source of the compound’s only sound. Smack! Like a hundred men pounding boards together in unison, the sound hit Teth, reverberated through her louder and louder with each step toward its source. Smack! Smack! Smack! The pounding seemed to match her strides, her heartbeat, her breaths. Everything was contained in that rhythm. Her body shook with it.

  She burst through a door, entered the ribcage of the beast that held her, and looked upon its beating heart. Smack! Her eyes blurred, adjusting from blazing sun to dim interior. Smack! The air seemed to catch in her throat. It was heavy, musty, smelled of dye and wool and sweat. Smack! The sound was deafening, made her shake, but almost more disturbing was the silence. The absolute stillness that existed between blows. Smack! Fifty shapes formed out of the gloom. Long shapes with webs woven between them and robed men arrayed around. Smack! Two pieces of wood slammed together on each machine in perfect unison, the sound a blow as strong as any fist. Smack! Teth’s eyes dilated enough for her to finally see what she already knew was there. The arms of the looms pounded together. Smack! Men on one side sent shuttles flying between the strands to be caught by their seeming twins on the other. A final man pulled the lever that pounded the boards together, secured the thread, and switched the weft. Smack! The shuttles flew back and were caught as one. A lever was pulled. Smack!

  Teth’s eyes turned adroitly from the looms to the men surrounding them. Their hoods were thrown back, bald heads, hairless faces stared blankly forward, paying not the slightest attention to the new arrival. Smack! “Weavers,” she whispered as all her fears were confirmed. “By the great and holy Order.” Smack!

  “Dasen!” she screamed. She ran toward the closest loom, reached for the man who had just sent the shuttle spinning between the strands of the weft. “Where is he? What have you done to him?” The smack of the loom sent her back. Her groping hand caught the Weaver’s hand, kept it from catching the shuttle that was racing toward him. Smack! A look of shock appeared on the man’s young, utterly hairless, face. He dropped the shuttle. Teth watched it fall in slow motion, saw the man’s face fall with it as fear bloomed in his eyes. Smack!

  The man fell to the ground. He did not try to recover the shuttle. He did not scramble to maintain his position. He just fell to the ground, lie flat, head pressed to the stones at his feet. Hands clasped behind his back. Smack! His fellows at the loom did the same. As one they went to the ground, laid motionless. Smack! And the rest of the room continued without the slightest recognition of the damage done, of the pattern disturbed, of the tapestry ruined. Smack!

  Two men grabbed Teth’s arms from behind. They swept her feet out from under her, and she crashed, face-first, to the stones. Smack! They let her fall, forcing her, if anything, into the rocks. The air left her, her forehead bounced, her lip was split. Stars spun around her. Smack! With bleary eyes, she looked to the side and saw a man with an axe round on the man she’d disturbed. Smack! A knee came to rest on her back, strong hands secured her arms at her sides. She barely noticed as she watched the man a few feet from her mumble prayers into the stones beneath him as the executioner lifted his weapon. Smack!

  “Stop. This is not the Master’s will.” The words were said at little more than a whisper and held no urgency. Teth was not even sure it was real, but it had the desired effect. The thick blade stopped just after it had started. The man holding it stepped adroitly back from his would-be victim.

  Slowly, the offending Weavers found their feet and formed a downtrodden clump. “Leave,” the voice ordered. “You have fallen out of the pattern. You will not be seen or heard. Go.” The man spoke with not a speck of emotion, and the subjects of his scorn reacted with the same. They shuffled past with heads bowed. Teth watched the man closest to her, the one she had disturbed, the one whose head had been saved by the tiniest breath. He tried to resonate calm, to show himself unaffected by what had nearly happened, but Teth could tell that he was shaking, his breaths were pants, his legs were weak.

  “Lift her,” the voice said in a monotone. The hands on Teth did as requested, bringing her from the floor as if lifting a board from a stack.

  Shaking her head, she examined the workroom. The looms moved in the same rhythm – smack, smack, smack – as if nothing at all had happened, as if one of their number had not just been nearly executed for the simple mistake of being distracted. Teth tried to turn, to see the man who seemed to command this lunacy, but her view was blocked by the bulk of the bodies that held her. “Where am I? Where is . . . .” one of the men clamped a hand across her mouth, stifling her words. Teth bit him until she tasted his blood, but he only grunted and in
creased his grip on her arm. He made no attempt to escape her bite.

  “Release her,” the voice said. Hands fell away. Teth released the one she held in her teeth and spit his blood onto the ground only to feel her mouth fill again from the split in her lip. Fists balled, she spun on the man who was speaking.

  He met her rage with absolute calm. “The Master says you are to be allowed freedom, that we are not to harm or hinder you, but you need to know that your actions here have consequences far beyond anything you have ever known.”

  Teth barely stopped herself from jumping on the scrawny old man and beating the answers she wanted from him. She wiped the line of blood from beneath her nose, spit more of the same onto the spotless stones, and glared. The man did not seem the slightest bit concerned that she might beat his hairless face to a pulp. He looked at her with controlled indifference, but there was annoyance beneath that mask, not fear or anger, just the annoyance of a patient parent wondering what to do with an especially wicked child.

  “I cannot stop you,” the man continued in his emotionless whisper. “But I must maintain the pattern. I saw a way to save those men, but the next time, the Order may not be so forgiving. Do you understand?”

  Teth was not sure if she did. Were they really going to kill those men for not catching the shuttle? It wasn’t even their fault. She had heard stories of Weavers. She knew they were crazy, but that was too much even for the wildest tales. Considering, she studied the room, saw the men, over a hundred, move in perfect harmony – smack, smack, smack. She remembered the look of horror in the eye of the man she had disturbed. He had known even before the executioner arrived that his life was over. His had not been the look of a man who expected to be beaten or expelled. It had been the look of a man who expected to die.

  “You people are crazy,” Teth mumbled. She rubbed her forehead where it had hit the stones and spit more blood.

  “We are the last remnants of Valatarian’s true disciples. And we are your only hope,” the man replied with a frown. “Now, can we leave these men to their work? If you’ll accompany me, I can answer some of your questions.” The man gestured toward the door.

  With a final look back, Teth led the way into the blinding light of the sun. She stumbled and blinked against the scorching white, realizing only then how much cooler it had seemed in the workshop. Shielding her eyes with her hand, she looked up and found her guide was already several paces ahead of her. With a grunt, she stumbled to catch up but maintained some distance as if she had something to fear from the little old man.

  “What is your name?” she asked the man. He slowed his pace as they reached the portion of the path that ran in a circle around the tower.

  “We do not have names here,” he replied. “We exist only to provide a clear pattern for the Master. We have no more need for names than do the strands on the loom.”

  “So this is a Weaver commune?”

  “As you already knew.”

  Teth walked slowly alongside the man with her sleeve pressed to her lip. She watched the area around her, waiting for someone to spring from the bushes to carry her away and drain her will. Parents often told their unruly children that the Weavers would get them, that they would drag them away to their communes where they would have no choice but to obey. She, in particular, had lived under that threat. As a willful child with no parents, she had even believed them, had cowered in her room in fear that she be taken away to someplace where her will, her very identity was forfeit. Milne had eventually convinced her that it was all a story, that no such place existed, and that it could not contain her if it did. The assurance had dried Teth’s tears, but it had not stopped the threats.

  Now, the nightmare had become true. She felt her breath catch even at the thought. She forced her lungs to bring in air and considered what she had already done. Some of the stories said that the Weavers drugged their initiates or cast spells on them to steal their wills. Had she been drugged? The water? The bread? She felt her head spinning, her breaths increasing, her heart thumping. Were these the first indications of the poison that would soon leave her like the men in that room? She gasped, certain now that she could feel the drugs fogging her mind.

  “All those here participate of their own volition,” the man said from beside her. Did he show a smirk as he said it? “The stories you have heard are lies. Our monks are not drugged. We do not cast spell upon them. Their freewill remains, but they strive always to suppress it, to align themselves with the Order and the pattern the Master is working to maintain. Only through perfect alignment with the Order, though a perfect structure to our lives, can we provide the Master with the clear strands he needs to create the pattern that will preserve the Order from chaos. It is a calling that requires tremendous sacrifice and extraordinary discipline. We could never achieve it if all our members were not wholly dedicated.”

  Teth took a slow breath, realized how silly she was being, how she had allowed imagination to outpace logic. She opened her mouth to speak, but the man lifted a hand, and the words seemed to leave her as if the very air had been snatched from her lungs. He examined her with rheumy grey eyes without seeming to see her, as if he were trying to look through her to something inside.

  “And now you come.” He pondered that. “What you saw today is beyond rare. Not for generations have we used the axe, but the Master has allowed us no room for error. It is stretching us to our limit. We are allowed not the slightest step from the path, not a heartbeat out of rhythm, not a breath out of sequence.” He considered again, speaking as if to himself. “But he orders you brought from the river, gives you free rein.”

  Teth opened her mouth again to speak, but as she drew the breath, a huge wasp appeared before her. It hung in the air inches from her nose, stinger extended toward her as if in warning. She watched it hover, frozen in place for fear of inciting its anger. She had been stung many times by honey bees, but only once by a wasp such as this. It had stung her cheek, and for days, her eyes had been swollen to slits.

  “We do not allow outsiders here,” the man continued at the same time the wasp lost interest. Teth recovered just in time to catch what he was saying. “Not in years and not a woman ever. I do not know that one has set foot on this path in the two hundred years of its existence. Had the Master not ordered it directly, we would have left you and your companion to the river and the Order that controls it. But he knew that you would be there. He sent us to find you, told us that you are to be protected, to be given all deference even as we struggle under the strictest possible requirements.”

  He paused to let that sink in. “Obviously, you are important to the pattern. And so it must be. But you must know that you can cause great harm here. If you act as you did today, I cannot stop you, but I will have no choice but to remove those that you disturb from the pattern, and next time meditative exile may not be enough. Do you understand? If you disturb our patterns, the punishments will fall not on you, but on those you have disturbed. The men around you can be afforded no mercy, no break from the pattern they must maintain. They must remain silent, show no emotion, work in perfect unison unless the Master orders otherwise. If they do not, they are to be removed from the Tapestry. Better the death of a few than to ruin a pattern generations in its creation, than to see us all cast to the Maelstrom.” The man paused, studying Teth again. “I will leave you to ponder that.”

  He turned to go. Teth reached for him – she had to know about Dasen – but was distracted by a movement at her feet. A squirrel darted between her and the monk, close enough that she could have kicked it. A bird called out, with a screech that sounded like a child’s scream. She searched for the sound, found nothing. When she turned back, the man was gone.

  Chapter 4

  The 14th Day of Summer

  The door was locked. Ipid turned to Eia surprised and a bit embarrassed. Where was the butler that should be manning the door, the maids that should have been bustling around inside, the gardeners that should have been patrolling
the green expanse around them? He could not remember ever seeing the house so quiet. Again he tried the door. Still locked. He flashed a half-smile to Eia and brought his hand up to knock.

  His fist struck the carved oak three times. The sound echoed. There was no answer, no shuffling of feet, no shadows moving in the windows. The house was empty. Ipid remembered the letter he had sent just a few days ago. He had ordered his secretary to gather everyone and everything and leave as quickly as possible, to escape what was about to happen in the city. At the time, he had not considered that the outcome would be so horrendous and fortuitous. For as terrible as the devastation of Thoren had been, the lavish estates on this side of the river had been untouched. But there was no way that Paul could have known that, and obviously, he had taken Ipid at his word.

  “Well this is something,” he turned to Eia with a smile, “locked out of my own house.”

  “Or is it your house? Maybe all this lordship talk has been a lie. Are you trying to deceive us regarding your standing, Lord Ronigan?”

  Ipid stuttered to defend himself before he saw Eia’s smile. Of course she was joking. He had worked constantly to keep his true identity hidden. “If only I were,” he mumbled. The thought had brought back the load of responsibilities that his position carried with it. He had somehow forgotten what Arin had piled on his shoulders – the fate of an entire nation – and now wished more than anything that he were actually just another man, just another piece of flotsam caught in this storm.

  Eia rubbed his arm. “Then you would not be in this position to help your people. Surely, you have known responsibility before, have felt the pressure of men dependent upon you. The Belab would not have sent me if he did not think you could succeed.”