“It’s too late. I’m running out of time,” Nuri told the alien with genuine sadness. His eyes wandered up to the light-show through the broken windows of the building across the way, knowing his path to Prime and the true nature of God led him through those haunted hallways and the stores of drugs the West Q gangs stocked up for sea transport throughout the other sections of Juriaq.
“I can pay you,” the Fronov persisted. He’d finally managed to get enough breath to level his voice, but the desperation was still evident as he backpedaled toward the beat-up hover car. His eyes never left Nuri, but Nuri’s focus had been drawn elsewhere. First to the God symbol, then further down the street towards the city’s center, where the more affluent neighborhoods (everywhere but the West Quarter) were no doubt bustling with midday activity as the system’s center of commerce and entertainment welcomed new promises and opportunities brought in by the afternoon crowds.
Godlessness, the Duri Master seethed while the neon lights caught Nuri’s attention and drew him toward the heart of the city. Sinners.
Seeing that Nuri was otherwise occupied, the Fronov eased his way onto one leg and began to shuffle away as quietly as he could manage with his ribcage cracked and his insides bleeding.
“Not yet,” Nuri said. He fired one shot into the Fronov’s side without taking his eyes from the gleaming city and stepped over the alien as he cried out in agony.
This is the perfect opportunity to prove yourself, his Duri Master insisted. You can wipe out this whole godless city. It is clearly an outpost of the Evil One where corruption and debauchery reign.
Moaning softly, the Fronov collapsed face-first onto the street. Defeated.
Kill them all. That is the way of the Hidria.
He could picture himself doing it. Two-hundred million souls were a lot to sacrifice, but in the grand scheme of things, they were nothing. His training had prepared him to deal with large cities on a solo mission, since Hidria always operated individually to prevent a tainted collective perception. Sometimes, one Hidria was even tasked with assassinating another Hidria if he or she fell too far beyond the veil of reality and could no longer distinguish truth from illusion.
You know what to do. Work your way down into the giant repulsorlifts that keep the city afloat. Blow them to pieces and all of Juriaq will be swallowed in the redemptive waters like Atlantis of old.
It was simple when he really got down to it. If he devoted himself, he could accomplish the task in a matter of weeks, and yet no Called or Hidria before him had done so.
Why?
Distractions, Colt warned. You’re straying from the path. You know where to go from here. Do not confuse the voice of men for the voice of God.
Nuri froze and shook his head. She’s right, he thought. But why would the Duri Master be the one to distract him from killing the despicable crime lord groveling at his feet?
Because he doesn’t just want to see one or two sinners in Juriaq die. He wants all of Maberrya to burn.
He stared at the building again. The God symbol had disappeared, leaving only empty windows and a faint crunching sound that whistled out through the open doors. He’d never felt so utterly alone in his life, and it was a peculiar feeling considering that he was surrounded by the most heavily-populated city in the known galaxy.
“He’s left me,” he whispered in horror, as he stared at the building. “I’m all alone.”
“Please,” the Fronov begged, reaching out in supplication.
Nuri didn’t even look when he pulled the trigger, but he felt the splatter from the alien’s exploding head against his skin.
There is no greater lie than Death, Colt whispered in his ear.
Her mist-like form swirled around him. He closed his eyes, holstered his rifle, and followed her toward the building, forgetting all about the unconscious survivor he’d left by the vending machine.
You need to learn how to avoid distraction, she told him as he walked unsteadily toward the open doors of the massive, abandoned building. These are all illusions.
The idea made his eyes widen, but surely there couldn’t be pain in his shoulder and legs then, could there? If none of it was real?
You are not really here.
But it couldn’t all be illusion. Some of it was true or there would be no way for him to discern reality from the obfuscation of the veil.
“Prime,” he muttered as he reached the sidewalk. A swirl of wind carried colorful debris past him.
It should have occurred to him earlier, he supposed, but now he believed the trials could only have one endpoint, and it was also the beginning. He had to reach Prime, the last planet, and ascend the Holy Mountain to reach the Divine Infinite. It was the only way he would know God, to gaze upon Him on His throne and allow reality to envelop him.
“Prime,” he said resolutely.
He took one last look at the defiled streets of Juriaq, feeling a pang of sadness that he hadn’t gotten the chance to see the true majesty of the famous city during his time in the West Quarter, then stepped through the open doors of the abandoned building to surrender himself once again.
10
This is not how Time has remembered it, but this is how it was.
The howling of the jackals kept Nuri awake well into the witching hour. He heard his Duri Master through cracks in the wall of his bedchamber, mumbling passages from The Divine Incendiary. The text was a forbidden follow-up to the written word of God and was purported to contain Divine revelations from beyond the Milky Way galaxy.
The words inexplicably disturbed Nuri. Everything about The Divine Incendiary disturbed him, in fact, though he couldn’t quite explain how even to himself. He supposed some of his apprehension owed to the temperament of his Duri Master when he read the book, which usually coincided with his secret alcoholism and a general rage at the state of the despicable creatures of the galaxy. It almost always ended with his Duri Master sobbing off into another corner of the hut, cursing God and his own sinful ways where he assumed Nuri couldn’t hear him. Afterward, he would mutilate himself as punishment. It happened often, and each scar on the Duri Master’s face was uglier than the last.
Tonight, he obsessed over a particularly controversial book in the middle section of The Divine Incendiary, one that detailed the nature of the physical God in the physical universe, and how He might be reached through the means of an exploratory spacecraft.
“And Man will set foot on that Holy Mount, and he will see that God has, indeed, created all things from the beginning of Time. And by reaching the Omega, he shall be saved.”
Chapter seventeen, verses nineteen and twenty, Nuri thought. He was forbidden from reading the book as well, of course, but his curiosity had gotten the better of him and eventually he had committed most of the passages to memory. They disturbed him but they were delightfully disturbing, much the same way the Divine Book Revelations sent shudders through him and awakened a unique brand of cosmic paranoia and insanity which delighted the intellectual buried beneath his Duri training.
There was a crash from the other room as the Duri Master pounded his fist on the wooden table and hurled something into the fireplace. The jackals continued to howl up and down the mountain.
Nuri squeezed his eyes shut, knowing he was expected to wake at the first sign of dawn to complete his chores and meditation before he departed to participate in the sacred purging of a moon colony that worshipped an alien deity instead of God. It was no use trying to fall asleep, though. As long as his Duri Master was in the next room, sweating out a private catastrophe of faith at the bottom of a flask through the words of a forbidden book, Nuri couldn’t drop beyond consciousness even with the aid of his strongest meditation techniques. Resigned, he opened his eyes and looked out the window at the towering yellow moon illuminating the valley.
The village was quiet. The murder of the old man had been all but forgotten now that Nuri’s exile and humiliation had ended. No one spoke about the incident openly anymore, which was l
ittle help to Nuri’s search for answers to his endlessly multiplying questions. He still could not grasp the distinction between killing the old man and killing entire colonies of innocent settlers for their beliefs. Colonists who likely had never been exposed to the Divine Word in the first place.
It’s all fake, that’s why, he thought bitterly. Dissent is forbidden so no one acknowledges the glaring inconsistencies in Duri dogma. The village has been bought and paid for. The citizens are mindless followers who take everything at its surface value, which may be the greatest sin of a follower.
He rolled away from the window, struggling to quiet his discontent. For years, he’d had no choice but to indulge the falsehoods of the Duri religion, and slowly his mind had begun to dull from the injustice of it all. He was terrified that eventually his own complacency would win out and he would transform into a soulless creature like the masses asleep in the valley below him.
It is all illusion. None of this is real.
As he stared at the sagging wooden beams over his head, pale smoke began to swirl through the cracks and took shape before his eyes. A creature, or maybe a spirit.
Chapter thirteen, verse nine: The fog of Illusion is the nature of Evil.
A face formed and hovered over him, staring raptly at his unflinching expression. When he reflected on the apparition the next morning while boarding a Duri Fighter bound for slaughter, he was stunned by his own lack of terror. In the moment, however, he wasn’t the least bit surprised to see the face of the girl by the river—the one whom he’d refused to kill—emerge from the tangled mist.
“You’re alive,” she whispered to him.
It wasn’t until years later that he wondered whether it was a question or a statement, and what the implications might have been for either meaning depending how he interpreted her visitation. At the time, he simply nodded. “You are, too,” he whispered. “Did you make it to the forbidden mountain?”
Her form swirled again and she drifted to the floor, where she solidified in the girl’s physical form. “Yes,” she said, “and no.”
He sat up, carefully avoiding the telltale creaks of his wooden bedframe so the Duri Master wouldn’t hear him while in the throes of desperate fury toward his own lacking faith. “What do you mean? Did they kill you?”
The girl sat down on his bed, heedless of the loud crackling of the floorboards beneath her, and shrugged. “No one ever truly dies. Our bodies merely transfigure into the perfect form of energy that encompasses the universe.”
Nuri shuddered and moved his legs away from her. “That’s heresy. They’ll crucify you for speaking it and leave your body for the Shuloc Crows. You’ll be an example to the rest of the villagers.”
“I am not a villager,” she said.
He fell quiet, trying to guess her true nature and intentions while they held stares.
“We were born to suffer,” Nuri said finally, once the gleam of her human eyes bore too deeply into his soul for comfort. “We cannot reach Prime without suffering. Our own misery purifies us, and that of the ones we offer up to God to honor his blood sacrifice.”
She took his hand. He was shocked by the frigidity of her grip. “Where is Prime?” she asked.
He scoffed, trying to mask his confusion over their physical proximity. “No one knows where Prime is. If we knew, we would be there already and there would be no more suffering for any of us.”
“You sound like you’re quoting The Divine Incendiary. You could get into a lot of trouble for that.”
His expression soured at once and he withdrew his hand from hers. “Why are you here?” he demanded. “What are you?”
She continued staring at him for a moment, then slowly rose from the bed and crossed to the other side of the room. She looked out the window through the heavy, purple leaves of a loolom tree that obscured the view of the ancient ruins, where it was said that God’s angels had crashed millennia ago on their way to a human colony. The girl turned her back on him and gestured through the window-frame.
“There are ghosts here,” she said. “Victims.”
Swallowing hard, Nuri rose and tossed aside the bedclothes. The floor was warm against his feet. Warmer than it should have been on a mountain night, even in the summer. Nevertheless, he shuddered when he put his weight on the wood and stepped carefully to the girl’s side.
“Are you a ghost?” he asked.
She turned with her eyes glowing and her hair waving in the breeze through the open window. The cries of the jackals had risen in pitch and volume. They seemed closer to the cottage on the mountain than Nuri ever remembered them.
“What do you think I am?” she asked.
Her brow furrowed, as though she truly relied on his judgment to grasp her identity rather than merely playing at mysticism.
Nuri carefully considered her visage, ignoring his human preferences in favor of his Higher Judgment as one of the Called. Once he’d worked out the spiritual arithmetic, he frowned and turned toward the window. “You are a distraction, whatever your nature may be, and therefore you are a sin.”
“How do you define a distraction?” she asked, turning his shoulders with her frigid touch so that they faced each other again. Inches away from touching lips, he realized. More intimate than Nuri had ever been with a girl.
A woman, he amended.
“Is the classification of ‘distraction’ subject to the weaknesses of the beholder?”
His eyes widened. All breath had sucked out from his lungs, though he wasn’t sure if it was the girl’s presence alone or the shock of her cold touch. “I don’t know,” he said truthfully, despite his Duri training and despite knowing better. “I suppose so.”
“Would I be considered a distraction to one who did not find me appealing in a physical and intellectual capacity?”
Nuri shrugged out of her grip and turned away, hanging his head in shame. “No,” he said. “You would not.”
“Do you believe me inherently evil? Do you think I am an emissary of Tscharia because you prefer me over the other villagers? Over an old pig farmer?”
His stomach lurched at the mention of the old man he’d killed to spare her life. He clenched his fists at his sides and dropped to his knees, stifling the guilt and embarrassment that had draped over his shoulders like a cloak of misery since he’d taken the farmer’s life in front of the villagers. “No,” he confessed through pursed lips. “I am weak.”
The girl knelt before him, brushing hair from his forehead. “Do you care for me?”
The jackals howled beneath his window. Outside his bedroom door, the Duri Master cursed and sloshed a wine bottle as he frantically expelled the uncertainty that had usurped his heart like a cancer through The Divine Incendiary.
We all have secrets, he thought. Secret hearts and secret sins. There is only one who sees through them.
“Do you?” she persisted.
He nodded, averting his eyes. Not daring to say the words aloud lest the fury of God and his Duri Masters condemn him.
Unshaken, she nodded back and rose abruptly to her feet. “Then I will go now to the forbidden mountain. Not because I am a distraction to you but because you care.” Her physical form began to waver and then pull apart, reassembling in the pale smoke that hovered over his bed. “You will see me again,” she whispered, then ascended through the cottage roof toward the heavens.
Nuri did not bother watching after her. He merely remained kneeling on the warm wooden floor, listening to the cries of the jackals and the feverish recitation of verses from The Divine Incendiary drifting through the cracks in his bedroom walls.
In the morning, he rode the Duri ship to a moon colony and slaughtered its inhabitants in the name of God.
11
This was entirely different.
Nuri had stepped through the open door of a building in the West Quarter of Juriaq, but he wasn’t on Maberrya anymore. He wasn’t on Prime, either. He was back in the stone hallways where the trials began, back where he’
d encountered the Watchman. It was a different section of the temple and Colt was nowhere to be found, but the corridors were otherwise identical to the ones he’d previously explored. They extended in both directions with wooden doors on either side of the hallway and no indication of which he was to open next.
Humans are always seeking overt signs of where they must go to fulfill their destinies. You must not be human.
He drew his laser blade and ignited the beam to get a better look at the faintly glowing walls. There were no roadmaps to guide him this time. Not even grooves from countless millennia of Hidria exploration into each portal. Just uniform blocks of stone seamlessly mortared one after another against each other.
A man who does not know the correct path to follow has lost sight of the God King. He is in danger of wandering into the perils of Tscharia.
Nuri brushed the wet hair from his forehead and started down the hall, ignoring the frantic voice of his Duri Master spouting passages from The Divine Incendiary. It didn’t seem to matter much where he went since there was no indication of a pre-ordained path and Colt was gone, but as he walked, he wondered yet again whether that meant he’d already failed the trials. Maybe this was his slow preamble to waking life, a settling designed to ease him back to consciousness rather than cause irreparable brain damage during the journey back through the veil. At least this particular brand of failure was preferable to being killed by Colt during the trials. At least he would have his life.
Why would you want to go on living if you fail the trials? Wouldn’t you prefer your consciousness reaches Prime as soon as possible?
It was the great dilemma of a devout life to have such a deep need for communion with the Divine Infinite and yet delay the transfiguration as long as possible. The Duri Masters refuted the so-called paradox exposed by those outside the Duri faith by claiming that one could only achieve transfiguration and communion with the Divine Infinite through a lifetime of service to God’s Holy Agenda. Nuri believed that wholeheartedly, yet even he acknowledged that some of his belief was tainted by the very human fear of death and the unknown.
Colt: The Cosmic Prayer (Hidria Book 1) Page 9