by Garon Whited
“What’s on your mind, Dantos?”
“My lord, I am troubled by the Church of Light.”
“No surprises there. What are they up to?”
“Their congregations swell, day by day. I have sent agents into their godhouse, there to observe and then report, but those who return tell of nothing strange.”
“Those who return?” I echoed.
“Some do not.”
“Right. Well, they’re a religion. Under the law, they’re allowed to preach as long as they don’t use force to enforce faith. Do you think anyone is in the church against their will?”
“I do not know, my lord.”
“Okay. Find friends and family of congregation members and ask them what they think. Investigate. See if they’re intimidated or threatened, or if the converted are simply addicted to religious bliss. And see if they’re worried about the new converts being sucked into a cult. If there’s evidence of that sort of thing, you’ve got a case for hauling in priests and questioning them in front of a council of justice.”
“We are attempting to do so, my lord, but we have been unable to find anyone.”
“Hauling in priests for questioning?”
“Questioning friends and family, my lord.”
“What, the church is absorbing whole blocks of people? Entire families, that sort of thing?”
“I must assume so, my lord. We have not found family members, nor have we found any close friends of those who worship the Church of Light.”
“That’s… weird.” I mused on it for a moment. You can’t grab everyone in a friend circle without creating a larger circle of people outside. If you snatch Moe, then Larry, Curly, and Shemp are friends who can be worried about him. If you snatch Larry, Curly, and Shemp, as well, then all of their friends become potential worried friends. It never ends, unless you focus on snatching the homeless and the hermits. Even then, there are people who notice—maybe they don’t care, but they notice.
So, how do you build up a congregation of bliss-addicts without making anyone worry? First, you do it as a religion, which everyone simply accepts.
That’s it. One step. It was efficient, at least.
“All right,” I told Dantos, “here’s what you do. Officially, they’re just another religion. Unofficially, we’re going to violate some civil rights.”
“Civil rights?” he asked. “What are those?”
—and I was struck by the realization. There are no civil rights here. I can snatch someone off the street, interrogate him under a bare bulb and with a rubber hose, and send him on his way. I can grab a random priest, torture him until he tells me everything I want to know, then dispose of the body. Sure, murder is frowned upon, but who is going to tell me to stop? Or tell anyone with power or authority to stop anything? It’s not about the law; it’s about the power. Power, and doing as you please with it.
I’ve had moments before when I realized just how frightening my power can be. This ranks right up there in the top three.
On a slightly different level, this must be what the local so-called gods feel. The absolute freedom to do anything they like to anyone at all, simply because they can. Sure, they have a few limits, mostly based on not fighting each other directly, but some random guy on the street? Send a few of the faithful over, club him to bits, and it’s all the will of their god.
Now I see why the Lord of Light is so cheesed at me for making the authority of the king and queen superior to the religious authority. As it stands, the religions help the royalty maintain and operate the kingdom. This means the Lord of Light—if he chose to participate—would feel like a vassal. That’s not the case. It’s a cooperative effort, not an authoritarian one. But the truth isn’t important, here. All that matters is his viewpoint, and from his perspective, he would be taking orders from me.
Yeah, that’s not going to fly.
I started to bark out an order and checked myself. Instead, I asked Dantos a question.
“Did you already send word to the Queen?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“And what did she say?”
“She has yet to answer, my lord. It was only this morning.”
“All right. She’s the one who needs to give the orders. See what she has to say and go do it. However, for reference, if she tells you to kidnap someone in the Church of Light and rip the truth out of him, I’m okay with it.”
“My lord,” Dantos replied, bowing and backing away.
Mary beckoned me over to the table. I’d have gone anyway, but the food made it certain.
Sunset.
We were already in the geode room, zeroing in on Mary’s arrival point. I killed the image while holding the connection. Now was not the time to test the properties of a sunset via scrying spell.
The last of the transformation tingles faded and I put one armored boot into a bucket of blood. Mary stuck a straw into another one. While we soaked up the red fluid, each in our own way, I connected a gate, flushed it into being, and Mary took a stroll in the woods, taking the bucket with her.
With the gate closed behind her, I worked through a couple of buckets in short order, pouring them into my mouth and not caring about spillage. I took my time, since she had a tree to climb and a position to reach; she needed the head start. As the last of the blood crawled into the joints of my outer armor and soaked through to my skin, I focused on Bronze, homing in on her through our innate connection. The gate formed in a section of hallway or tunnel. I stepped through, and it shredded into nothingness behind me.
Bronze snorted smoke and pawed at the ground. No translation required.
The room was a narrow one, barely wide enough for Bronze, possibly inside a wall or other structure. Bronze leaned against one side of it and a thin plate of stone pivoted out of her way. It couldn’t rotate all the way around since it was longer than our little room was wide. The angle was enough to let us out, though, and I closed it behind us.
We were outside a city, presumably Actareyn. The road ran line-straight, almost due east. In the far distance, I could see the campfires at the extreme rear of the army. Fifty miles from here? Possibly. Sometimes distance is hard to judge, especially when there’s no horizon.
I mounted up and locked down my faceplate. Bronze put her head down, stretched her neck, and her hooves struck blue-green sparks from the road. I held on for dear life; her traction enchantments were working perfectly. If she hadn’t grabbed my arms with her mane, she would have run right out from underneath me, leaving me somersaulting backward in mid-air.
We decided never to do that during the day. It could break my neck, which would make her sad. It wouldn’t do me any good, either.
It’s still eerie, though, getting up to some ridiculous speed on horseback with nothing but the sound of the wind. I can feel the steady beat of her hooves as we barrel down the road, but I can’t really hear them. Trees flicker past on either side like a picket-fence nightmare. Smoke pours from Bronze’s nostrils and ears. She kept her mouth closed to minimize the flames. I ducked my head and started activating our prepared defensive spells.
Some troops were camped out on the edges of the road, out of the way. Most of them had banners marking them troops belonging to Lyraneyn or Hyceteyn, but I didn’t see any mercenary companies. Many of the men were wounded. We avoided these and passed them by. Their sentries didn’t even know we were there until we passed them. All in all, there were maybe three or four thousands of them, not at all what I expected from the recall orders.
Was the Church in actual command of this army? Was the Church of Light already establishing itself as a secular power? If so, could a religious war be avoided? Nasty thoughts ran through my head.
“Cavalry to Sniper, over.”
“Sniper,” Mary replied.
“Engaging.”
“Roger.”
We didn’t slow as we approached the rearguard. The objective was not to hit the army and kill our way along the road. The objective was to bullet
through the army, stomping, igniting, and slicing anything convenient, racing faster than the alarm could spread.
And we did.
Wagons we generally passed without touching, but I had Firebrand out. I laid its edge along the side of anything too big to be conveniently crashed through and it ignited whatever it touched. It also encouraged the flames for as long as we remained in range. This didn’t actually destroy wagons on the spot, but each one became a fully-involved fire fairly quickly.
Bronze stomped on anything else with a fine disregard for race, creed, or color. Her hooves are immense, larger than a dinner plate, so the grooves in the road didn’t bother her too much. Anything else, however, found the grooves to be handy vents through which to squish when she flattened it to the road.
I tried to help by lashing tendrils through anything in reach, but we were moving fast. I don’t think I actually killed anyone—I didn’t focus on any individual, just spread a general net of vitality-draining darkness ahead of us—but I tried. When we didn’t have a wagon to ignite, I waved Firebrand around at anything in reach, including heads, hands, and torsos, causing nasty cuts nearby and nasty burns farther away. I’m sure Firebrand killed several, but only a few died instantly. For my purpose, wounded men were better than dead men. A badly-wounded man is out of the fight, but he requires help, which takes another man or two away from the fight. He burdens the healers, costs magic, time, and other resources.
Shouting and screaming from behind us drew the attention of people farther forward, but by the time they woke up, got up, and looked around, we were already there, hammering down the road like a tank through a watermelon patch, with a bit more crimson in the splatter. A few people shot at us with crossbows, a few more threw things—slingers launching rocks, I think—and I distinctly remember some kid with a drum. He couldn’t have been fourteen years old, more likely twelve. He held a banner-pole in the crook of one elbow, one end of it braced in a groove in the road and pinned in place with one foot. He rattled out a beat, presumably a call to arms, and looked both terrified and determined.
Bronze didn’t trample him. We went clean over him in a leap fit for steeplechase. Mary would have been delighted to see it, but I think we were still too far away. As we went over the kid, my tendrils snatched the banner-pole straight up, out of his grip, and I hurled it into the forest.
Then it was back down to earth and back to crushing an army.
The secret is to never let them coordinate. Never let them catch their breath, give orders, form up, and work together. Killing a thousand men—one at a time—is no different from killing one man. Killing a thousand men all at the same time is a very different thing, indeed.
How long did we spend doing this? How far did we have to travel to rip through the whole army? I don’t know. We killed several people, maimed many times their number, and destroyed whole wagonloads of supplies in one run. As an army, it was a shambles. As a mob, it was still a danger. An army can march into heavy fire and still achieve victory. A mob changes its mind more easily, but doesn’t respond well to commands.
We reached the other end of the army, emerging from it onto clear road, and kept going, vanishing into the night. I wanted them to have no idea where we were or what we were doing. Bronze slowed after another mile or so and I worked a spectrum-shifting spell so her fiery breath wouldn’t shine any visible light. She was very pleased. She doesn’t get out to run as much as she would like, much less through obstacles.
Can we do it again? Firebrand demanded.
“Let’s give it a few hours,” I decided. “Mary gets to pick off the leaders, remember?”
Why does she get a turn?
“Because she’s a bloodthirsty maniac, like all the other women in my life.”
Oh.
I was surprised Firebrand accepted my flippant answer. Then I thought about it and wondered.
Bronze turned around and carried me back at a trot, cooling down as we moved. She stopped under the leaning tree of Mary’s vantage point. I stood up on Bronze’s shoulders and looked out over the mess.
Fires dotted the road, some quite large. People were fighting the larger blazes, of course, trying to avoid a forest fire. I wasn’t worried. From the smell of the forest, it rained recently. They would get it under control. More people were running around with weapons, slapping on armor, shouting questions, screaming in pain, all the usual chaos swirling around in the aftermath of a catastrophe.
I heard a cracking sound, like a whip. Above me, I detected a faint line of light in the air. Ah. Ionization from the laser. It wasn’t a visible light beam, but the intensity of the beam caused some of the air to become ionized and glow. It would be invisible during the day, of course, but at night, it left a ghostly line in the air. Still, with all the fires downrange to spoil night vision, I doubted anyone would be able to see it.
Mary’s voice whispered in my ears.
“This thing is a miracle.” Another cracking sound. “There’s no drop, no windage, no nothing. It’s the ultimate point-and-click interface.” Crack! “And the energy dumped into a head or torso does amazing things. It even melts breastplates!” Crack!
“Go for heads,” I advised.
“But molten metal dripping down inside makes them dance!” Crack!
“We want commanders dead,” I countered, “not wounded!”
“Spoilsport,” she accused, to the sound of another air-splitting Crack!
Bronze and I moved to the side of the road and waited, trying to be invisible. If anyone came this way to deal with the sniper—Mary—I wanted to be ready to surprise them.
Then again, this was the direction Bronze and I went, and they knew it. Who was going to come this way? I mean, when the Flaming Juggernaut of Doom rolls over your position and heads off down the road, is your first impulse to chase it? Even if someone did spot the ghostly line, and decided to go investigate, and decided it was worth the risk, who was going to give the order? A leader? Someone shouting orders?
Crack! Splut! Another head or throat vaporizes in a wet, steaming explosion as the laser superheats flesh to unreasonable temperatures.
I sat down in the saddle again. It might be a while. She had a hundred shots, a long corridor of targets, and time to pick and choose.
Eventually, the sharp snaps of the beam through the air stopped. A minute later, Mary joined us on the ground.
“Do we have to go back to Diogenes to get this thing recharged?” she asked.
“I don’t know. You’re the one who had the briefing.”
“Do we have a source of electricity here?”
“Not a steady one, no.”
“Too bad.” She handed up the backpack, then the laser. “It was fun while it lasted, but it was also too easy. The poor suckers never had a chance.”
“So, you’re out of charges? Or out of targets?”
“Charges. I figured once I got anyone in a fancy hat, next choice was anyone giving orders.”
“Quite right,” I agreed, and held out a hand to help her up.
Then the light started. I looked back the way I’d come at the white glow. Mary made a hissing sound and turned away from it.
Ah. A local religion at work. But what were they doing?
I stood up again, using Bronze for a vantage. The light came from a small group, five or six men in white robes, surrounding one in the center. Most had blood on them, as well as soot or smoke stains. All of them were bald and thin, but none seemed exceptionally old. They struck me as sickly, rather than ancient. Hand members, perhaps? Wasting away from radiation poisoning? I hoped so.
The light surrounding them brightened further, expanding, and people started shuffling toward them, drawn like moths to a flame. The light seemed almost tangible, swirling slowly around the priestly figures. A whirlpool in syrup? Or a watery swirl in slow motion? Either way, it continued to expand, sweeping through the people who shuffled toward it. A peculiar double-image started to form around the people, as though their dow
nstream edge was uncertain. The closer they approached and the stronger the light grew, the more pronounced it became.
It suddenly hit me. I knew what it was. The light was sweeping through them, disconnecting their spirits, sweeping them sideways, sucking them out of the bodies. It wasn’t like what I do, grabbing the energies and drawing them out. It was like drowning them, submerging them in a more powerful spirit until they dissolved and became one with it.
The bodies closest to the light fell to the ground and the spirits left behind vanished into the vortex. It spun faster, spreading even more, sweeping through people, animals, trees… I felt the road beneath me crack, separating, cutting off everything beyond the cracked portion. Whatever it was, it was drawing on every bit of life force in range—men, boys, horses, trees, even the living stone. The mountain cut itself off, well back from the drain, to keep from feeding it.
People fell more quickly. Trees darkened in my vision, turning to dead wood. The vortex of light spun faster, no longer expanding, even reversing itself. It narrowed, growing brighter, turning into an eye-searing shaft of white, towering into the sky, vaguely man-shaped with a hint of wings. It was like a rip in the curtain of reality revealing the blaze of heaven.
The light vanished, or almost. What was left was a blackened circle of death. Bodies were already desiccated, diminished, disintegrated. Everything was old and dead. I saw not one spark, not one trace of a living glow, not even the faint luminescence of life in the air or earth.
With one exception.
A tall, broad-shouldered, handsome man stood where the circle of priests once stood. He wore white robes, belted like a kilt, and brandished a mace of gold and a white shield. All around him was a white radiance, a glowing aura illuminating him and everything around him like a searchlight from the heavens.
He threw back his head and laughed. Somewhere, far beyond him, other voices screamed.