You have to find a way out.
He glanced over his shoulder in hopes that he’d somehow missed an exit in the darkness, but there was nothing. There would be no miraculous escape, then. No one was coming to help. If he wanted to survive, he’d have to keep dodging, ducking, punching, slicing, and hacking through the hungry horde until he blazed his own way out.
The pile of bodies at his feet spared him any surprise attacks but also prevented him from moving forward. Thankfully, his assailants were only in front of him for the time being. They could only reach him from the waist up so he didn’t need to worry about his flank. It was a small blessing but a blessing nonetheless. It wouldn’t be long before he ran out of room to move his arms, however, and then he wouldn’t be able to hack or shoot.
Still, the wraiths came, and each new wave learned from the mistakes of its predecessor.
The intelligent ones knew to stay behind, he thought. They don’t have the blind recklessness of the first wave. Those ones almost always die.
But they also get the most food if they survive, Colt pointed out.
As he ducked beneath the swiping claws of a particularly terrifying ghoul with half its cheek rotted to the gums, Nuri wondered if Colt had a point or if she was merely attempting to break his concentration.
Whether she means to be or not, she’s a distraction, he decided, gnashing his teeth. The effort of hacking the blade through an ice-wraith’s neck made his shoulder pop out of its socket. An old injury, and one which usually didn’t flare up until he’d been engaged with the laser-blade for hours. It shouldn’t have been hurting so early in the trials. The weakness was a bad omen. Even if he somehow managed to break through the barrier of ice-wraiths and uncover a path through the tunnels, the mounting injuries would cause him trouble.
“AAAGGHHH!” he screamed as one of the creatures finally wrestled through the tangle of corpses and bit into his thigh. Using force only his mid-battle adrenaline was capable of mustering, he brought the hilt of the blade crashing down on the wraith’s head, cracking both its skull and its grip on his flesh with a sickening squelch. Black blood and bluish brain matter splattered his face but Nuri hardly noticed. Fury had replaced his quiet intensity. He trudged through the pile of bodies with a scream and his blade slicing curtly through the cold air.
Colt’s face appeared above the onrushing wraiths with a sour expression.
Hidria do not know rage. They are calculated. Discerning. Lethal. Terrifying in their calm decisiveness. In their detachment.
Nuri thrust the point of the laser-blade through the throat of an ice-wraith and pointedly ignored her despite the implied consequences. She may have been his guide and a part of the trial itself but that didn’t mean much to him at the moment, a fact which would surely disappoint whomever judged the worthiness of his performance. Besides, if the Duri Masters’ teachings were true, God had already determined whether Nuri would be successful, so there was no point in sweating the details. He was a warrior and there was enemy flesh to hew all around him. Tainted flesh. Emissaries of the Evil One. Hidria or no, he was doing God’s work.
Use whatever excuses and justifications you need to. Blame it on God.
Colt’s ethereal form drifted towards the ceiling. She had her arms folded over her chest and regarded him with a look of cool indifference which contrasted his unbridled emotion; a purely human trait.
Every breath you take pushes you further from the path to enlightenment. You cannot know God until you know yourself, and that means recognizing your limitations.
Still, he continued chopping through the line of ice-wraiths, advancing slowly by climbing the mound of corpses as he struck. His thrusts and hacks had lost some conviction, though, in the wake of Colt’s admonishment. Anger gradually drained from him and was absorbed by his adversaries, which The Unholy Other also claimed was the feeding method of choice for the Evil One.
But God willed it to be this way, his Duri Master cautioned.
Colt scoffed and drifted down the corridor away from him. Apparently, she’d given up.
You’re just like the wretched Duri, she accused. With free will, God cannot be your conscience. He must be invited. You must build one for yourself.
Just like who?
For a moment, he ceased fighting altogether, stunned both by her sudden disappearance and the poignancy of her condemnation. Had a servant of God just compared him to the Duri Masters as a sign of ignorance and futility? Had she spoken against the very religious order the Hidria served? It didn’t seem possible. He figured he must have misinterpreted her words in some way.
It’s a distraction, that is all, he realized. She’s doing this on purpose to test me. To make me doubt myself and thereby learn if I am capable of discerning truth from illusion.
A sharp pain in his forearm jolted him back to the situation at hand. He kicked away yet another assailant that had wedged between the corpses for a bite.
One of the Duri Masters’ mantras occurred to him as he leapt and spun sideways off the wall to his right to avoid a lunging ice-wraith: Heavy and swift is the hand of God’s Judgment. Their numbers had thinned to a mere handful and he could finally see the doorways ahead of him again. There was no sign of Colt, though. The righteous hand will not tremble, for such weakness expresses a profound distrust in the Lord’s will.
Utter calm had finally returned. Nuri walked down the corridor, now free of the corpses tangled beneath his feet, and decapitated a wraith just before its jaw clamped down on his throat.
Hidria must never question the will of God. The blood they spill is the blood of redemption, a portion of the debt repaid for the Salvation that the God Man bought for all creatures when the Sinners spilled his blood.
His eyes found a broken door hanging off its hinges a few meters ahead. There was still a faint trace of Colt’s luminescence in the frame. With a quick thrust to the abdomen of the second-to-last ice-wraith followed by a slice across the throat of the other in fast succession, he cleared his path and stood before the doorway, panting, trying to make sense of the utter darkness that led to nowhere at all. He knew it wouldn’t lead anywhere, either, until he passed through to the other side. And who knew what fresh hell awaited him there?
Tscharia waits in every new doorway.
It wasn’t a Duri saying. In fact, Nuri wasn’t sure where he’d heard that proverb at all. Perhaps it was something he’d picked up as a child before the brainwashing of the Duri had broken him on the distant mountaintop. It didn’t matter, though. He recognized the truth of the testament. There was nothing he could do about it, anyway.
Unless he appealed to Colt, the haunting visage of God’s chief advocate who had taken the form of a woman. A woman that, perhaps, he knew.
But who was she really?
We are not to question the divine mysteries, his Duri Master told him.
“If I am to know God, I need to know Him.”
His own words sounded nonsensical off his tongue, but perhaps that was the point. Perhaps he was speaking in his own riddles now because the Duri prayers had filled every part of him. Perhaps that was what it meant to be Hidria.
To be Hidria is to be inhuman, Colt’s voice beckoned.
The words gave him some pause. He’d never heard it phrased quite that way before, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it.
“It’s all meant to confound me,” he reminded himself. Somehow, speaking aloud provided the assurance he’d missed internally, perhaps because his thoughts were becoming too crowded. “These are all distractions. Even she.”
Thou shalt not suffer a distraction to live.
Yet another proverb that had been obfuscated by time as it passed through new worlds and generations.
Nuri’s head swam. He could already feel himself drowning in the swirling doctrines, mysteries, and incantations of the rite. A quest for the nature of God. He couldn’t imagine why he’d ever worried over the combat aspect of the trials, although it was possible that the danger wou
ld ramp up the further he progressed.
Only one way to find out, and only one place to go to do it.
The path to enlightenment, Colt said. Her voice was close, so close that it made the hairs on his forearms prickle with electricity. The path to God.
Gathering his breath, he leaned against the frigid stone wall and watched the tendrils of breath escape his lips. He took one quick glance at the bodies he’d left in his wake—twenty at least, and possibly more—then sheathed his blade and dipped one trembling foot into the darkness on the other side of the doorway.
Grant me complete surrender, he prayed.
And he allowed himself to fall into nothingness.
8
“Sit there and watch until I call you forward,” the Duri Master hissed.
A dozen clergymen surrounded a wooden platform in a wide clearing outside the temple. Beyond the twelve men stood two dozen heavily-armed Called soldiers in full combat armor. Each warrior’s faceplate had been activated to hide his or her gender and expression, a necessary measure to avoid distraction and favor, which—according to the Duri Masters—were two of the greatest evils to develop in an army. Once a commander favored one soldier over another, the venial sins of that soldier were overlooked, and leniency over discipline was a temptation of the Evil One. Therefore, it followed that camaraderie on the battlefield was an affront to the Divine Infinite, one which was measured in the casualties of His Holy Warriors. Failure on that scale was intolerable.
Nuri sat dutifully on the ground outside the circle and didn’t move even when the pine needles dug into his skin. Any sound he made would undoubtedly draw the ire of his Duri Master and lead to additional disciplinary measures, ones even harsher than the penitential floggings he’d already been prescribed for his indiscretion. His presence at the ceremony, in fact, was just as much a punishment as it was a solemn rite to observe the final cleansing of the sinner he’d thrust into the righteous flame.
As with any other unfortunate soul who’d been purified without the decree of a Duri Master, the pig farmer (Nuri still hadn’t learned his real name) was about to be memorialized with a funeral pyre. He would not be granted a grave like a pure follower of the faith but neither would his corpse be left for the mountain scavengers or hung in the village square as a warning to the devout. His was the purgatory of memorials: not quite reverent, but not completely spiteful, either. And because Nuri had taken the man’s life without properly consulting his Duri Master, his punishment was inevitable, as well. There were times when the oversight was excused and the warrior was spared (which, in Nuri’s mind, only proved the hypocrisy of a religious order which supposedly abhorred favoritism and leniency on the battlefield), but since he was still in training and had yet to be “broken,” this was not one of those occasions.
There’s no point in my being here, Nuri thought bitterly. I would do the same thing again if it meant I didn’t have to kill the girl.
He supposed that was his problem. All lay creatures were supposedly equal in the eyes of God so long as they ascribed to the Duri teachings, so in most cases, one murder would have carried just as much weight as any other. However, in this instance Nuri was still guilty of what his Duri Master referred to as ‘the Sin of Preference’ and needed the evil predilection beaten out of him before it poisoned his mind completely.
Will I be better off for it? he wondered. Will it strengthen my faith?
His Duri Master didn’t seem to care much about how it affected his faith, only his discipline.
But it could work the other way, too. It could make me turn against them. Do they not recognize the threat?
The twelve clergymen hummed as the pig farmer’s naked corpse was brought forth from the temple. The revered dead were wrapped in hand-stitched tunics of purple and gold before being laid in their graves, but the purged were stripped naked to expose the root of their sins.
Someday, that will be me, he thought.
A servant girl emerged gripping the old man’s decapitated head by the hair. The skin had had been cleaned for the ceremony but he somehow looked worse for it. Haunted.
Soulless.
She set the ghastly visage on his belly as soon as his body was laid atop the altar. The hollowed-out eyes stared straight at Nuri, and he couldn’t help wondering whether that was by chance or by design. When it came to the punishment of their followers, the Duri allowed few coincidences. They delighted in twisting the knife.
On cue, his Duri Master separated from the circle of esteemed clergymen and approached the corpse. “Vessels of the Divine,” he addressed the gathering, “this man was a heretic. A servant to the Evil One. He spoke blasphemy in the presence of a Called Warrior, and though the cleansing of this one was swift and lacked the divine judgment of God spoken through us, His servants, his death was no doubt justified. May his soul forever rot in the nothing space between Omega—the presence of the Divine Infinite—and Tscharia, where the Evil One dwells.”
With that, the eleven remaining clergymen advanced in unison, each dumping a modest spray of oil over the pig farmer’s body. The Duri Master turned to Nuri and motioned him forward. Seeing no other alternative, he rose obediently and tried to clear his mind with meditative breathing. He hadn’t the stomach to guess at what would be required of him. The stone steps were cold on his bare feet, but he pushed the distraction away and took his place at the Duri Master’s side.
“You must cast the match that sets him aflame,” his scar-faced teacher told him.
Nuri detected more than a little sadism lingering just below the surface of the man’s solemn facade. And why not? For the Duri Master, this was a perfect scenario. He was both daring Nuri to openly challenge him and delighting in the prospect of watching the boy sear the pig farmer’s flesh. Like all dogmatists, Nuri thought, he was out for blood and argument.
No preferences. No fear. No regret.
His hands shook but he accepted the torch the servant girl offered, anyway, and scrunched his toes together to keep from biting his lip. He couldn’t show any sign of weakness in front of the assembled clergymen, least of all his Duri Master. And why should he hesitate to set the purging flame to a man he’d already beheaded? At least he could provide some form of release for the pig farmer’s soul, be it to Tscharia, the in-between, or elsewhere in the universe. And Nuri still didn’t wholly trust the Duri doctrine that all those deemed unworthy were condemned to one or the other, either. Maybe there was hope for the pig farmer yet.
But not for you if you don’t act quickly.
Under the measured watch of the Duri Master, he touched the torch to the oil-drenched flesh of the pig farmer and stepped back as flames consumed his body. His hands continued to shake. Dread frothed in his stomach. It took all his self-control not to vomit when the first whiff of burnt hair and skin reached his nose, but such an indiscretion in the presence of the clergymen would have been just as damning as hesitation before performing the cleansing rite. Perhaps even as damning as admitting that the whole exercise was folly because he shouldn’t have killed the pig farmer in the first place. He shouldn’t have had to kill anyone at all.
How can it be God’s will to destroy His creation?
The question had hung over every combat lesson the Duri Master taught him, yet he dared not ask it for fear of retribution. Even Called soldiers had limits to the level of tolerable heresy the Duri Order endured from them before acting on it. Nuri considered himself to be one of the more audacious recruits among the Called and was more than happy to mutter a barb under his breath here and there, but that didn’t exactly mean he had a death wish. He was acutely aware of how easily it could have been him spread across the ceremonial altar with his severed head draped across his belly.
And the purging fire erasing all proof of my existence, atom by atom.
Once the initial shock subsided and he could watch the devouring flames at work without an overwhelming urge to wretch, he examined the pig farmer’s eyes closely to see if they betray
ed any semblance of spiritual cognizance. It was a widely-held belief among human colonists that a soul bound for purgatory would emit blue smoke during the Duri purging ritual. Nuri saw no such traces of blue, but it was hard to make out anything aside from the bright firelight in the dusk haze. As with all Duri teachings as well (as the contradicting superstitions of the colonists), there was no way to be certain.
Yet, either way, it didn’t change his role or the Duri Master’s expectations. He had his doubts that the pig farmer was going anywhere save the atmosphere as his ashes scattered in the wind, so why bother worrying? The state of existence between Tscharia and the Holy Realm was a matter of much debate and controversy even among the Duri Masters, but Nuri had trouble imagining the pig farmer’s spirit existing in any sort of higher plane: Tscharia, Purgatory, or otherwise.
Maybe you are already in Purgatory, then, the disembodied voice of the girl from the river said. According to the Duri, there is only one plane of existence between Tscharia and the Divine Infinite.
“Go,” the Duri Master whispered in his direction.
Nuri nodded and bowed his head as he carefully slipped between the shifting line of clergymen, who were now deep in the throes of baritone exaltations and fevered dancing.
They look so strange, he thought. So childish.
His Duri Master had never explained why dancing was a part of the ceremony nor what it was supposed to represent, which lead Nuri to believe that it had been thrown in solely for the benefit of the outsiders bearing witness to the purge. If nothing else, it added to the order’s mystique as well as the notion that Duri Masters were privy to secret knowledge, both of which ultimately kept their followers toeing the line while emboldening the precepts of the Duri Order. So long as the people believed their clergymen were able to tap a conduit to the Holy of Holies, they would fear and obey. Therefore, the existence itself of the ritual didn’t surprise Nuri so much as the idea that the Duri Masters hadn’t thought to further capitalize on their perceived mysticism by devising another elaborate falsehood surrounding the ritual’s origin.
Colt: The Cosmic Prayer (Hidria Book 1) Page 6