The ritual is already steeped in falsehoods, the river girl persisted. Perhaps they ran out of energy.
Nuri carefully avoided the suggestion until he was safely seated at the base of the pine tree again, as though the clergy would somehow read his thoughts and toss him atop the pyre. He didn’t want to betray any subtle physiological symptom of unbelief while in their presence.
I shouldn’t be questioning the ritual, he scolded. I’m the reason we are here. Not just for brazenly killing the pig farmer, but because I am guilty of preference. I sinned by allowing favoritism to cloud my judgment.
To the girl, he directed a cold thought. You are not welcome here.
There was a pause as her voice built up from the depths of him, but the three words she directed in response cut right back to his core. They summarized his life on the mountaintop so aptly that all at once he felt dizzy.
Neither are you.
It was the unacknowledged truth underlying both his refusal to kill the girl for his own sin and his rejection of Duri teachings by proxy; he was not welcome among the Duri and never had been. Though neither the clergy nor the Called recruits themselves realized it, Nuri was well aware of his inability to sell out completely for the sake of God’s Will—or rather, what the Duri claimed to be His will. For instance, he should have felt guiltier for disobeying and misleading his Duri Master than he did, but he’d spent all his guilt on regret over the death of anyone at all by his blade. Coupled with the putrid smoke from the cleansing pyre, it was enough to bring tears to his eyes. Nuri carefully wiped them away and concealed his stare so his Duri Master wouldn’t notice the slip.
The weakness, he amended. Not the ‘slip’. Call it as it is.
One by one, the clergymen completed their ritual aerobics and settled back into assigned positions around the altar. By then, night had covered the mountain and a chilled silence swept over the congregation. Nuri rose and bowed dutifully toward the mountain peak as a show of respect for the departed, then turned from the crowd. The Duri Master hadn’t dismissed him directly but he knew the older man would be waylaid a while by the clergy. If Nuri hurried back to the cottage in the meantime, he might not face as harsh a punishment for his sin simply because the scar-faced monster would be too tired from the hike to bother with him before morning. By then, his anger and bloodlust would both have assuredly abated. Nuri had seen it happen before.
And then what? the girl asked as he quietly slipped through the wilderness, darting between the suyloc trees a dozen yards removed from a group of villagers also departing the ceremony. They were oblivious to his presence, otherwise they would have avoided him altogether.
And then nothing, he replied. I fulfill my purpose by serving God.
That’s a great deal more than nothing, she countered. Fulfilling what you believe is your purpose and serving God are usually two different things.
And what would you know about serving God? he demanded.
The girl didn’t respond. Before long, he reached the cottage again and collapsed into his bed, expecting it would be a long while before he found sleep. He drifted off as soon as he hit the pillow, however, and slept straight through the night until the Duri Master roused him by searing the flesh above his right wrist with a branding iron.
“Time to cleanse your soul,” the old man told him with a scowl that slammed his mouth shut despite the startling pain. “It is God’s Will.”
9
For a while, he simply floated through space.
He was distantly aware of images passing by, likely devised specifically for subliminal processing but near enough to his consciousness that he was wary of their presence.
Space, he thought. Nothing, containing everything.
Colt revealed wonderfully terrible things as he drifted through nebulae, skirted along the event horizon of a black hole that would eventually consume everyone he knew and loved, then passed through and beyond dying stars to witness the birth of new universes, galaxies, planets, and civilizations. It was a supremely humbling experience that he never quite grasped beyond a vague recollection of brilliant, heart-wrenching light and equally poignant darkness. He learned the histories of all alien races and saw every millisecond of time and space from the moment of thundering, explosive creation, but only for an instant. It was a series of great unveilings. Glimpses into the Divine Reality that existed beyond the perception of humanoid creatures and even the most spiritually advanced non-corporeal beings. And it was all punctuated by the realization of a great expansion towards truth, the calling home of his universe to its essence. The outward journey which must eventually end at the source of all things: the Omega Point.
He could not retain the knowledge or the experiences for more than a few seconds otherwise his brain would have simply overloaded, but each separate vision left an imprint on his soul. This, he understood, was the voice of God. This was His face, if He could be said to have a form at all. This was the Beginning and the End.
He didn’t need Colt to explain it to him but she was there regardless to ease him back to his reality as the flow of galaxies slowed and he witnessed himself rocketing toward a shimmering planet where city lights gleamed across large bodies of water.
Maberrya, Colt informed him.
He retrieved the planet’s history from the fading knowledge imparted to him as he drifted through space: the Divine Body incarnate. And then, the memories abruptly disappeared, yet his brain still felt stretched beyond its limit by the brief perception. He felt the harsh reality of space settle around him again. His breath sucked out from his lungs as the paralyzing cold worked its way into his body.
We won’t reach the surface in time, he told Colt without a hint of anxiety.
He knew his body would freeze and his blood boil before they hit the stratosphere even if he didn’t suffocate, and then he might burn up before he reached the planet’s surface, anyway.
And what a way to die it will be.
Memories blistered through him again. Images from his time on the distant mountaintop with the Duri Master. The countless hours he’d spent studying ancient texts and training for survival in the harshest conceivable conditions to prepare him for life among the Hidria.
Trust and surrender, Colt said.
He suddenly remembered slaughtering the men and women of a settlement in the Hiaro System once because they’d worshipped the natural world around them. They had contrived their own deities rather than acknowledge the primacy of the One True God, an action which was unfathomably heretical. Those had been some of his earliest kills, and he still remembered how a young man kneeling before an altar of twigs and carefully arranged grasses had stared at him as he approached. Eyes wide and fearful but not flinching in the face of that fear.
Acceptance.
Surrender.
A just executioner learns much about the nature of God through the salvific conjuring of blood.
It was the first line in the third book of the Hidria Catechism, the revelations and doctrine by which all Called were trained whenever they weren’t directly reading from the Book. The phrase had stuck with Nuri throughout his time on the mountain, mostly because he thought the phrasing was peculiar. Hidria were not merely executioners. They were God’s Right Hand. They were Divine Justice Incarnate. To devalue such a sacred charge to the grotesque misnomer of ‘executioner’ was jarring, and furthermore belied the import the Duri placed on the role of the mystical Hidria.
Surrender.
Even as he felt the last breath torn away from his lungs and the blue planet rushed up to meet him, Colt’s presence reassured him. He refused to believe she would kill him in such a way when there had been so many other opportunities for him to die while he had a measure of control. Here was a problem that he could not solve nor influence in any way. Here was the result of utter surrender, the contradicting imperative of the Duri faith, and he doubted that acknowledging his helplessness in the face of the lethal cosmos would mean that he had failed the trials.
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You do have control, though, Colt insisted. Her form appeared before him and matched his speed as he accelerated toward the atmosphere. Her features contorted until she looked more like a serpent than a humanoid creature and she roared an ungodly, soulless howl that made his stomach lurch more than the impossible velocity of his fall. You are Hidria. You have the power to influence all those around you.
True surrender is knowing when the All has called you to action, his Duri Master said.
Humans cannot influence the passage of space and time because they do not exist in God, Colt growled in a voice that grew deeper and more intricately layered the nearer they drew to the planet’s surface. You will die before you reach the water if you are human.
I must not be human, he reminded himself, locking his jaw and bracing against the air that tore through him. I must be Hidria.
If you weren’t Hidria, you would be dead already, Colt said.
He closed his eyes, trying to decide whether she spoke the truth or was merely attempting to distract him the way she attempted to lead all Called astray during the trials.
Yet before he arrived at a definitive answer, his body smacked against the surface of the ocean and he plunged leagues deep before daring to open his eyes. Even then, darkness enveloped him. He was too far from the surface to see anything beyond a distant glimmer reminiscent of Colt’s wavering form. His body ached from head to toe with some regions throbbing with greater poignancy than others, but he knew she had been right.
I am already Hidria or I would be dead.
Except he suspected that wasn’t quite true, either. It failed to account for the peculiarly warped reality of the trials. Even Hidria may have burned up in the atmosphere at that or been shattered into a thousand pieces upon impact with the water. The issue of immortality versus invincibility had never been adequately resolved in Duri texts, but his impression was that Hidria could be destroyed under the right—or rather, wrong—circumstances. This was something else entirely, then.
Or maybe it’s the drugs they used to induce the Hidria Trance.
He suspected that it could have been any number of things. Colt’s suggestion, however, seemed the unlikeliest. He did not believe he’d already transformed into Hidria. He didn’t feel any different physically than he had on Shehoora. In fact, he still had bite marks in his thigh and forearm from the ice-wraiths to complement the deep gash beneath his ribs from the Jhrupa.
Is it real, then? Is my body truly here or am I lying on the floor of some chamber on the forbidden mountain?
The trials were designed to test the Called’s ability to discern between reality and illusion, to draw back the curtain and glimpse the insane, incomprehensible reality that was God’s true form.
Then these are all distractions, he warned himself as he kicked his legs toward the distant light and tried to ignore his lungs’ cries for breath. My lungs are an illusion. I do not need air as long as I follow the path laid out for me.
He ascended from the frigid depths with his eyes locked on the surface, barely noting the mammoth sea monsters passing within a hundred meters of his position. If he was calm and projected an aura of control, he was confident they would leave him in peace despite their well-documented biological imperatives for food and violence. The kraken of Maberrya, he remembered, had awful reputations.
They were made that way, just as you were made to question your path and existence even if the Duri do not wish for you to do so, Colt said.
By the time he reached the surface, he could barely feel his arms and legs, but the towering city of Juriaq was ahead of him with its shining skyscrapers and bright lights, and that raised Nuri’s spirit.
He struggled to a wooden ladder, knowing he had to pull himself out of the water before hypothermia took hold. He had no desire to die unspectacularly on a dock in the slums of one of the galaxy’s largest cities. Although he’d been protected during his interstellar journey and in the ocean, instinct told him Juriaq would be a different animal altogether. Just like on Shehoora, he would be susceptible to injury once he was back within the trials’ sphere of assessment and control. Juriaq would present a different sort of danger, he knew, but it would be no easier to escape with his life than the mountain tunnels on the ice planet. In fact, the location seemed oddly appropriate for religious trials. As far as the Duri Masters were concerned, Juriaq was the most dangerous city in the galaxy as well as the largest. They’d long wished to sink the platform city into the ocean that covered the entirety of Maberrya, but the operation had proved too large and the Called too few to mount a world-spanning strike. Additionally, the melting-pot of galactic species among the populace represented far too many formidable militaries to provoke and have any hope of victory. Still, the tribunal dreamed of a day when the heathens would be brought to their knees and the flag of the cross flew from every skyscraper.
Juriaq is a cesspool of sin, distraction, and vanity, the Duri Master had warned him throughout his training. No soul visiting that wretched place escapes untarnished. To live in Juriaq is to completely sever your connection with the Divine Omega.
Nuri felt a superstitious chill as his fingers at last gripped the final rung of the ladder and he pulled himself onto the floating, wooden platform where several fishing boats were tied. Yet lying there on the dock, trying to catch his breath while warming his arms and legs the best he could, the city didn’t seem all that terrible. Imposing, surely, with buildings that sprang aggressively toward the heavens in a perpetual, ill-advised challenge of the infinite, but any evil that existed on the floating city lived within its varied inhabitants, not Juriaq itself. He had greater difficulty imagining a modern city as inherently worse than Shehoora’s mountains and temples, which had been built on black magic and wicked intent.
A desire for blind, misguided progress can be as dangerous as any weapon of the Evil One.
He quickly checked to be sure his weapons were still in place and picked himself up from the wood. There wasn’t a clear path onward save for the lone dock leading to the city proper, so there was no point lingering to mull over his options. He reminded himself that the longer he was stuck in the trials, the worse the effects would be to his overall psychological health. Now that he’d felt his mind straining to grasp even the minutest aspects of the knowledge shewn to him as he hurtled toward Maberrya, he understood why it had such a lasting effect on Hidrian sanity. Or perhaps the inevitable result of all-encompassing knowledge was a state of being which could only be described by in those generalities.
This place is truly a wonder, he thought.
Nuri had never been to Juriaq before, having only visited a two-dozen planets in his life. The Duri Masters believed their pupils should live in isolation while they trained and thus were only dispatched from the mountaintop for purging missions to learn how to kill. None among them had ever visited Maberrya to Nuri’s knowledge. As much as the Duri Masters would have liked to send an army to the ocean planet and wipe out anything and everything that moved from a comfortable orbit, there were more issues to consider than strictly the death toll. Sometimes, Nuri suspected, politics got in the way of the Duri agenda more than they would have their followers believe. Witnessing the vibrancy of the city and the warmth of the peculiar aliens he encountered as he—soaking wet—limped along the docks, he wondered if that wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
Careful, the voice of his Duri Master cautioned. That’s precisely how they lower you to their sinful level. They disarm you with kindness and good humor, yet it’s only a mask for the debauchery and Tscharia-worship taking place in their hearts and minds.
A worker hauling materials from a rusted Laruka Crab ship nodded in his direction, clearly curious how Nuri had survived the ocean and why he’d attempted to swim out there in the first place. Even with the floating city nearby to discourage the largest sea monsters from venturing too close, the water was dangerous, and even the most thick-headed of tourists knew to avoid it without a proper vessel.
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Nuri returned the nod before deciding to keep his head down until he exited the docks to avoid engaging any more locals. He didn’t feel like explaining his situation if they asked and he wasn’t truly certain any of them were real at all.
Then why are you turning away? Colt pressed. The goal of the trials is to judge whether you can sift through distractions and determine what is real and what is illusion. That is the only way to know the truth of God. You must first know truth in the universe around you.
The argument sounded like something he might hear from his Duri Master, but it reeked of a trap regardless. To engage the locals would only delay his mission and might lead to further trouble. Yet if the doorway to the next stage of the trials was hidden within the consciousness of one of these creatures, he needed to explore more than just the physical characteristics of the city. The Duri manuals on the trials did not explicitly outline whether one was supposed to interact with the aliens he or she encountered on each new world beyond engaging them in combat, but Nuri was acutely aware that his trials weren’t developing at all the way the others purportedly had.
That’s because true Hidria do not reveal the nature of their trials. Their relationships with God are personal and all-encompassing. If you are to know God, you must forget what the Duri have claimed to know for you.
Nuri frowned and climbed the ladder from the second level of the docks to the lowest level of the city streets, which themselves ascended on platforms into ten interconnected conduits that ran throughout Juriaq.
If I am to know God, he thought towards Colt, who had disappeared from his sight even though he still felt her hovering over his shoulder, then I will need time to hear Him. You are nothing but a distraction. An illusion.
He pulled himself onto the street and had his first glimpse of the West Quarter, which comprised the so-called fishing slums of the massive city. He identified the area by its reputation alone in one look though he’d never seen a holographic likeness in his life. Most of Juriaq enjoyed unfathomable wealth, but that meant all the citizens who couldn’t afford the cost of living in the three affluent sections of the city were pushed towards the docks, many within reach of the midnight sea monsters. His Duri Master had spoken at length about the misery and corruption ruling the city’s lower classes and the West Quarter was at its very heart.
Colt: The Cosmic Prayer (Hidria Book 1) Page 7