The False Martyr

by H. Nathan Wilcox

  Teth walked to the window, watched the moon sparkling off the wide expanse of water. The sky was clear with a perfect blanket of stars peeking through the darkness. She searched for aberrations in that blanket, for the creatures circling the sky. She fully expected to see them, could not accept that she was safe here or anywhere. Only a matter of time, she told herself. And then. . . .

  She shivered despite the warmth. “Where are you, Dasen?” she asked the darkness. “We need to run. Something is coming, but I can’t get away without you.”

  #

  Teth had barely slept, but there was no more use in trying. The nightmares seemed there to meet her whenever she closed her eyes, and no amount of insisting could get her mind to relinquish them. The sun was just lighting the eastern horizon, making the wisps of clouds glow pink, but the Weavers had risen and paraded past her room what seemed like hours ago. The slap of their sandals on the stones had been as regular as the beating of their looms, the matched steps of the world’s most elite regiment on parade.

  Emerging from the silent dormitory through the eastern door, she heard the low hum of two hundred voices droning in unison where the temple defined the eastern half of the compound. The grass cracked and snapped under her bare feet as she closed on the structure. The sun was not even up and the day was already hot, the air so dry that there was not even dew.

  The temple itself was much like the other buildings in the compound, a block of spotless white stone simply but solidly built. It rose thirty feet to a sloped tile roof without the slightest adornment, nook, statue, window, or steeple to break its expanse. Three stone steps led Teth to the single door that was the building’s only entrance. She pressed her ear against the polished wood, listened to the drone of the Weavers’ meditation, then nudged the door open, and peeked inside. The temple was empty.

  Trying to follow the droning, Teth’s eyes rose past the carefully tiled floor to the rows of long wooden benches, the simple dais, and rested finally on an enormous stained-glass window. Covering the entire eastern wall, it had the shape and color of the rising sun and faced directly east so that the actual sun would shine through it as it rose above the blank prairie that stretched untamed to the horizon.

  Flanking the dais were two life-size statues of Valatarian. The statues were masterpieces. Teth knew little of art and even less of sculpture, but these were breathtaking. They were made of smooth, white stone with grey and black streaks that seemed to exist only where they were needed to create depth and shadow. The carving itself was astonishing in its detail – every wrinkle, every crease of the savior’s face was present. Valatarian stood in both, but in one, his eyes were closed, head cast back, face placid, captured in deep meditation, yet his hands stood out, fingers twisted, as if he were conducting an orchestra. The other statue showed him staring down at his subjects with cold, hard eyes. His mouth was pulled into a line, forehead crumpled, brows furrowed. His arms were stretched toward the worshippers, hands clenched in fists. Teth found herself drawing in on the statues. She shivered as her eyes bounced from one to another. They were terrifying. Councilor Torpy had always depicted Valatarian as a teacher, kind and patient. The savior shown here was a hard man. His eyes, even set in stone, were piercing, fiery things. His body was rigid, unyielding, and the lines of his face suggested the same. This was not a teacher. This was a commander, a hard lord who would broke no dispute to his iron will.

  Shivering again, Teth forced her eyes from the statues toward the walls to either side. Hanging on them, breaking each windowless expanse were a score of tapestries, each with a different, but equally complex, pattern. These were obviously the work of the Weavers. Weaver tapestries were renowned through the world for their quality, the complexity of their patterns, and their flawless execution. Teth had seen firsthand what was required to meet that standard and could barely look at the things for being taken back to the horrific scene from the previous day.

  And still, the humming continued, seemed to resonate from the very walls without any sign of the voices that made it. Creeping between the empty benches, she finally found what she was looking for. To the side of the dais, along the north-eastern corner, was a passage that was nearly lost in the gloom. The sounds of the monks resonated from the hall and filled the temple through some acoustic marvel that Teth could not begin to understand. She padded silently to the passage, glanced around the corner, and found a square room that was filled with hairless men laying over their folded knees, heads pressed to the stones. They were stacked in rows that gave each man just enough room to keep from touching his fellows. The rising sun cast beams of red and gold across their bald heads through an east-facing window that Teth could not see.

  For a long moment, she watched the monks. As one, they moved from position to position ranging from laying prostrate to standing on a single leg with arms spread. They hummed at different timbres to match each pose, flowing effortlessly and in perfect harmony from one to the next. Teth was hypnotized by the motion, by the low melodic hum, until she found herself fighting the need to join them, to match her body to theirs. She found her arms moving involuntarily, her legs – somehow painless – bending, her eyes closing, her larynx buzzing.

  And then, with a great crash, the Weavers brought their hands together and released a collective “Oohhh.” Teth jumped at the sudden sound and recovered herself just in time to dodge the first of the men as they emerged from the meditation room and walked in perfect unison to the temple.

  Not a one of the men so much as glanced at her as they walked past, close enough that their robes brushed her. They stood before the benches until they were filled. Finally, the man who had spoken to Teth the previous day, at least she thought it was the same man – it was very hard to tell among the multitude of hairless men in identical brown robes – took a place standing on the dais before them. “Sit,” he commanded, and as one, the Weavers sat.

  Only then did Teth see that one of the seats on the benches was empty. Three rows back and a few places in, it stood out as stark as the gap in a child’s mouth when his first tooth falls. Teth wondered for the briefest second if the space were meant for her. She even considered taking it.

  Then the sun broke the horizon. Almost magically, the window caught it and refracted the light into two hundred shafts that fell somehow on each of the men. The Weavers greeted the sun with a collective gasp as if receiving tremendous pleasure from a simple ray of light. Matching the gasp, the men stiffened, their heads fell back, their hands rose and contorted, and they shook. And on the dais before them, their leader took on the exact countenance of the statue to his right, head back, arms stretched, fingers twitching. He screamed, a horrifying mix of pleasure and pain. The Weavers joined him, voices rising in such decibels that Teth had to cover her ears as she ran, trembling from the temple.

  She tripped down the stairs, fell to her knees – hands scraping on the stones of the path – and retched. Images swam before her as the screams, the terrible sounds of pain and loss, transported her back to the battlefield. There was no unity in the sound, no order. It was the sound of two hundred men releasing all their emotion as one, of them giving up everything inside them. Only men facing death or caught in the greatest possible rapture could scream like that. Teth had only heard such a sound once before, and she wanted nothing more than to never hear it again.

  She stumbled to her feet and ran. She burst through the door of the dormitory and cried, “Dasen!” She stopped and looked down the dim hall, panting, in a near panic. “Dasen! Where are you? I need you! We need to go!” She ran down the hall, throwing herself against the doors on either side, forcing them open and searching each for the fraction of a second needed to confirm it was empty. “Come on,” she urged under her breath. “Where are you?”

  Door after door, she reached the end of the hall and dashed up the steps, ignoring the aching of her legs. “Dasen!” she yelled down the hall before repeating her search. She was panting, soaked with sweat by the time she reac
hed the end of the second level. She forced herself up the final flight, rounded the corner, and threw the first door open. It was sliding shut before she realized that the room had been different. There had been someone, a body covered by a blanket, lying on the bed.

  “Dasen!” she called as she burst through the door. “It’s me. It’s Teth. What happened? Are you . . . .” She threw back the blanket and staggered in shock. Dasen was dead. White skin, sunken cheeks, dead blue eyes staring into space. She panted, cried, nearly lost her balance as her knees buckled. “Dasen!” she howled. She fell to her knees by the bed, grasped the corpse, tears welling in her eyes, vision blurring. She looked down at her husband, lying cold and lifeless.

  And saw an old man. She shook her head. It had been Dasen. She had seen him, had seen his face, his eyes. But that was not who she held. She held the corpse of an ancient man. His hairless head and face were a mass of sags blotched with spots of age. His lips were pursed around a toothless mouth, his unseeing eyes were clouded with cataracts. How had she thought this was Dasen?

  Teth fell back to sitting and wept. Her head fell to her hands, supported between her knees. She trembled. “By the Order, what’s happening to me?” she asked no one. Hands shaking, eyes streaming, she pulled the blanket back over the old man and stumbled to her room. Wrung out, despondent, and fearing for her own mind, she pushed the door open, fell onto the bed, and cried herself to sleep with images of Dasen’s dead face burnt into her mind.

  Chapter 7

  The 16th Day of Summer

  The web stretched forever, connections infinite, possibilities endless. The Book called it a tapestry, a great weaving of threads extending to the ends of the world, to the end of time. Lius could see it all, every thread, every connection, all the patterns and possibilities. It was beyond overwhelming. He could not hope to trace them any farther than a few connections before he became as lost as a toddler in a wood, unsure even where he had begun and with no idea where to go.

  Running from the creatures, even escaping from the city had been easy. There, he had only needed to trace one or two connections to create the outcomes he needed, and there had been countless threads to pull to make those changes: A crumbling brick brings down a section of the catacombs. A frightened horse creates the perfect distraction in a busy intersection. A guard twists his ankle on a rock. His fellow helps him, leaving a gate unguarded. Lius had been able to see the outcome he wanted and trace it directly to himself, had only needed to understand the smallest possible section of the possibilities that stretched out forever.

  The swampy wilderness outside the city was another matter altogether. Here, alone, wet, tired, hungry, and hunted, there were almost no changes he could make, and those available led to outcomes that were small, distant, and uncertain. People were easy to influence, and the multiplied effects of their changing choices could alter the world around them in ways that were immediate and real. But the wind, the trees, the animals were nearly impossible to influence and the implications of any changes were slow and indistinct. This was the Order in its purest form, an all-powerful clock of great, grinding wheels that cared nothing for anything done by so small a grain of sand. Considering all the things he could possibly do at that moment – throw rocks, break sticks, climb trees, run, walk, jump, yell, cry, sleep – Lius could not see any of them altering the movement of those great gears in the slightest, at least not within the scope of the connections that he could trace, the span of time that could possibly save him from his hunger, his thirst, his exhaustion, or the things that followed.

  Lius traced the threads to those things, could see them as a jumble of chaos a few short connections away. He imagined them as another horde of the things that had followed him through the Hall of Understanding, but there was no way to know exactly. He could see them only for the way they affected the Tapestry around them, created chaos, distorted the patterns, made it almost impossible to predict what would be present when they had passed. The only thing that Lius could be certain of was that they were close, they were following him, and there was no way for him to stop them.

  Opening his eyes, Lius looked out at the tangle of trees and vines around him. The trees were tall and gnarled, twisted and weathered. Their leaves formed a canopy that almost completely blocked the sun. Vines connected them, long pearl strands shared by clusters of crones. Moss hung from them, the uncombed grey hair of beggars. The ground was barren, washed out, and rough. The plants that grew were stunted, designed to live off floods but transplanted in a desert. Lius looked at the waterlines on the trees. He was lucky this was not the rainy season, that the floods had not started, that this was not a swamp in reality. Still, he wondered how long it had been since there had been enough rain to flood the Vasuki River Delta. In the interminable droughts, were these wetlands ever actually wet?

  Lius considered using his new powers to find the answer. He could see and understand the clues around him, could trace the life of the plant before him, follow its strand to see when it had last been underwater. Then he remembered where he was and what was about to happen. He closed his eyes and followed the connections instead to the chaos. It was closer now, the number of connections fewer, the possibilities to change it diminished, and not a one of those possibilities bought him more than a few more hours.

  But there was something else there too, something past the creatures, something new that he had not seen in days. There were people. He knew them by the possibilities flowing from them, tiny threads that could be pulled to change the patterns around them. Lius had not seen those connections since he left the city and had never seen them so isolated, had almost missed them outside of the context he knew. The creatures stood between them, but people meant possibilities he could change, outcomes he could control, and, most importantly, a chance to survive. There was no choice. He ran toward them, toward them and the chaos that stood between.

  #

  Lius no longer needed to follow the strands of the Order to see what was following him. His eyes, sharp despite all the reading, were adequate to the task. The creatures were slinking through the trees, black shapes like the ones that had killed the Xi Valati only four nights ago – it seemed like weeks. So much had happened since then that Lius could barely remember that night. He thought back on it like a dream, doubted still that any of it had been real until he felt the weight of the box tugging at his shoulders from the pack he had stolen to carry it.

  Removing the pack, he tucked it and the book it held into a crevice beneath a tree root then covered it with leaves and dirt. If necessary, it could wait there for centuries. The box was perfectly sealed against the forces of nature and impenetrable to any but those who could read the Order. Lius had learned how to open it almost immediately but had been afforded almost no opportunity to actually read it, no opportunity to do anything other than flip the pages and stare upon the tight, uniform script of their savior.

  Remaining hidden behind the tree, Lius reached out to the Tapestry, looking again for the small band of people that might be his salvation. They were nearby, but their actions were distinct from those of the creatures – neither band realized that the other existed. But more than that, something was not right about those people. It appeared that they surrounded something that was not human. Or was it? Who or whatever it was, looked like a hole in the Tapestry. Lius could not read the possibilities that surrounded it, could not predict what it would do, or find a way to change it, yet it had strong control over the actions of those around it, resembling, in that way, not only a person, but a very influential one. Lius had never seen anything like it, could not imagine what it was or how it worked, but it appeared to acting as a stabilizing force, taking even the chaos created by the creatures so near and setting it right, restoring the pattern as if set parallel to them for that very purpose. It clearly had a role within the Order, a purpose that not even Lius could see or change. And he could only hope that purpose included saving his scrawny neck.

  Taking a deep b
reath, Lius studied the changes he could make, the outcomes they would produce, but that thing in the middle made it impossible to predict what would happen. Every time he considered the strings leading to those people, looked at how changes might impact them, they became lost to that hole in their middle. And the primary purpose of that hole appeared to be to avoid the creatures. That left Lius with only one option. He had to bring the creatures to them.

  Lius sprinted from behind the tree. He used the Order to guide his steps, to see where roots hid under leaves to trip him, where the lay of the land would speed his steps, how the blow of the breeze and chatter of the squirrels would mask the sounds of his steps, where the trees and bushes would obscure him from the creatures. It gave him an advantage, but advantages are only as good as your ability to capitalize on them, and Lius had very little ability. He was in dreadful physical condition, naturally clumsy, and already exhausted. Despite all his powers over the Order, the creatures found him within steps.

  They were on him just as fast, twenty hunters, strong and experienced and sure. Their clawed feet gripped the ground. Their hands clasped trees and threw them forward. Their gaping mouths gnawed at the air as if loosening, stretching in preparation for the taste of his flesh. Lius’ stick legs, even aided by every advantage the Order could offer, were of no use – even the Order cannot make a mouse into an eagle. Finally, Lius took the breath that might be his last, felt the claws reaching for him, ready to snatch him back, and dove.