by Garon Whited
“Sort of,” I agreed. “I assume there was no other way to get Tianna out of their clutches?”
“I guess not, but I’m a thief, not a strategist. From what I understand, he was worried about them getting set for something like sacrificing her. I think it came down to storming the place before they were ready to kill her ritually.”
“So she was going to die unless you stormed in.”
“That’s what I understand. Certain death on one hand, possibility of life on the other.”
“Then I’ve got no reason to be upset,” I decided. Except with myself, for wallowing in self-pity when I should have been out helping rescue my granddaughter! Which I did not say aloud, and Firebrand did not repeat.
“You have no idea how glad I am to hear that,” Mary said, sincerely. “So, what do you want to do now? Do you want to go hunt for a vacation spot?”
“No. I want to find every temple, every church, every shrine to the Lord of Light and contaminate it with something radioactive. Then I want to find every prince, every duke, every baron, knight, and peasant who ever took up arms on his behalf and behead them. Then I want to find every reference to him in every manuscript, folio, or obelisk and obliterate it. I want to kill the thing they call a god.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Only…” I paused and sighed. “I want to kill an energy-state being on another plane of existence and I don’t know how.” I ground the heels of my hands into my eyes. “So much of me is angry, but so much of me is numb, too.”
“It gets better. Sort of. It takes time.”
“Maybe. But so much of my life revolves around being angry, now. It surprises me how much it always has. Bronze got angry when occasion called for it, but it seems she was the patient one, the stable one. Now I’m just me, and there’s nothing left of me but the angry parts and big, empty spaces where Bronze used to be.”
“There’s more to you than angry and empty,” Mary assured me, pressing her head against my chest. “You’re complicated. Don’t be afraid of the angry parts. You’re only angry about things that deserve it.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re so afraid of being the Demon King, you deny that part of you even exists.”
“Oh, I know it exists. I struggle with it every day. You’ve seen the hatchway to the downstairs.”
“Yes. And that tells me you don’t accept it.”
“I’m not sure I should accept it. I should be a better person.”
“Even if it means not being a whole person?”
That stung. It hurt because it poked me in the raw places where Bronze used to be, and it hurt because she might be right. I didn’t answer, but Mary didn’t insist on one. Instead, she changed the subject.
“Right now, you have an invaded city. What do you want done?”
“I think I should refer this to Lissette. She’s the Queen.”
“And you’re the boots on the ground. Besides, Dantos already spoke to her.”
“He did?”
“Of course. The Baron was killed in the fighting, so he’s in nominal charge. He says she left it up to him how to use the powers of the Demon King.”
“Oh. Interesting.”
“I suspect he’ll be the first plainsman to be given a noble title, provided he keeps the city.”
“I’m for it,” I agreed. “Wait. What about Nothar?”
“He’s out fighting, somewhere, last I heard. Seems he was more than a little upset about the Church of Light kidnapping his girlfriend. Some say he had a hot date scheduled.”
“Solstice ceremony,” I said, nodding. “Yes, that makes sense. But shouldn’t he be taking command as the new Baron of Karvalen?”
“I doubt he’s interested. At least, not right now. He wouldn’t confuse the chain of command in the middle of a battle.”
“He’s a good man,” I admitted. “All right. Let me think a minute.” Mary stopped pinning me to the wall with her hug and moved beside me, holding my arm.
“All right,” I repeated. “Help Dantos and Beltar sort out the city. Call Lissette and let her know what’s happened here—make sure she stays up to date. She’s the Queen, after all.”
“Dantos has someone on report duty, but I’ll double-check. May I ask what you’ll be doing? She’s going to ask. You know she will.”
“I’ll be trying to find a way to kick the Lord of Light in his celestial orbs.”
It’s one thing to say it, another thing to do it. Finding them was the real problem. But I needed to do something. I can’t curl up in a corner and cry forever. I don’t work that way.
So, how do you crack the nuts of a fake deity? Sadly, there only seems to be one way to attack these things—through their followers. That involves finding them, so I rang up Torvil on a pocket mirror and asked for some non-priestly prisoners. He delivered them within the hour.
I will now confess to being something of a bastard.
I asked my prisoners where they were from. Nobody wanted to answer. So I slowly and carefully crushed the life out of one of them, one piece of flesh at a time. I literally crushed him into screaming paste before their eyes.
Oh, but it felt so good! A guilty pleasure, to be sure, but one I enjoyed so much!
Then I separated my prisoners and asked them, one by one, where they were from, about the organizational structure of the Church of Light, the extent of the following, and so on. Is it really surprising I got my answers? I don’t think so. These men weren’t radical terrorist suicide bombers. They weren’t even fanatical followers. They hoped for a glorious eternity in the afterlife, but they only hoped—they weren’t certain. They were foot soldiers sent off on a war they didn’t understand, and were now in the hands of a ruthless and powerful enemy. As far as each of them was concerned, a god might be on his side, but I was in his face.
My understanding of the Church of Light has always been a little shaky. I’ve tended to try and cram it into religious structures I’m familiar with. And, within limits, I think I can.
The Church has a deveas, an absolute authority, a commander in chief. It also has a prophate, someone who speaks for their god when it’s needful for god to say something directly. These two are the very top of the pyramid. Whether there are always two or if the prophate is sometimes also the deveas, I still don’t know; this religion isn’t as open about its inner workings as some. I get the impression the deveas is more of an executive while the prophate is more of a holy man. I’m not sure the two really ever go together. Then again, Beltar does double duty. It might depend on the so-called deity.
Below them are the Patriarchs—clergy that rule over kingdoms, or rule over the Church of Light within a kingdom. From there, they have a variety of lesser clergy in a hierarchy much like any other pyramid scheme, from priest in a church to High Priest of a city on up to Patriarch of a kingdom and up to deveas of the Church.
The Hand, on the other hand, is not part of the main organization. They’re a select group and have nothing to do with the day-to-day shearing of the sheep and tending of the flock. They’re organized under what I think of as a Cardinal, who reports directly to the deveas and prophate. Sadly, how the Hand is organized, as well as any other branches of Church organization, is not something the average worshipper knows much about.
But they did know where the troops came from.
I cranked up my scrying mirror—regretting again the loss of my sand table—and did some searching. According to the captives, the armies were from four city-states in the regions east of the Sea of Grass. Talmerian was the main one, closest to the lake where the canal ended. Troops from the other three—Palmerian, Solacian, and Kalmerian—gathered at Talmerian as a staging point.
The cities were in an irregular box pattern, each city at a point, with the sides ranging from thirty to fifty miles long. Lots of farms and supporting villages stretched between them.
It was extremely tempting to drop a nuke on each of them. When the invading t
roops withdrew—and they would, if they weren’t doing it already—they could go home and draw their own conclusions. Word would get around. I found it extremely hard to resist the temptation. I really didn’t care about the cities or about inflicting apocalyptic damage.
I did care about two things.
First, those cities had children in them. They didn’t do anything to deserve being converted to blast shadows and vapor. They’re children. Their parents might be asking for sudden atomic death, but the kids were blameless.
Second—and a minor concern at the moment—was the political aspect. The Lord of Shadow and the Lord of Light can have an argument, even a fight, but doubling the size of a local lake because the city turned to plasma and ashes has political ramifications. That sort of thing is for Lissette to decide, not me. I gave up the power—excuse me; I gave up the right—to make those decisions, and I desperately wished to keep it that way.
It’s an awful thing to be a nuclear superpower when nobody knows it. I don’t get nearly the credit I deserve for my patience and self-restraint.
So, no nukes.
Probably.
What does that leave? Targeting the Church of Light, specifically? How? Really tiny nukes? That’s the problem with big explosions. They have no discrimination. They can’t be aimed at part of a population. There is always collateral damage.
I shook my head. I need a better approach.
How to target only the Church of Light? To do that, I need something common to every single structure, preferably every single priest. The priests all wear those medallions, but even if I kickstart them all into an excited state, they’ll only get sick over weeks or months of time. Besides, building a spell to do that over the entire world—repeatedly! —would require it to channel and focus energies far beyond my capacity.
Now, if I had a nexus, I could build a spell to soak up power and reinforce itself, make it grow until it was powerful enough to handle that kind of load… but this world doesn’t have nexuses. Magic works differently here.
Could I go back to Mary’s Earth? If I build such a spell at a major nexus, I could bring it back with me. I might even be able to build it, charge it, open a gate, and fire it through the gate without ever leaving the nexus point. Johann did something like it when he was trying to kill me from his homeworld.
I’ll save it for later. Let’s see what I can manage without calling in the equivalent of a nuke.
Okay, back to basics. In this world, what makes a religion? There are, from the ground up, worshippers, priests, an organization, and a supernatural entity. There are subtle gradations within these categories, but those are the basics. For example, among the worshippers as a group, you have worshippers who show up just for the high holy days, devout worshippers, worshippers who only go to church because the spouse does, and so on.
In this case, the supernatural entity—the energy-state being on the energy plane—is the one who really has it in for me. Killing it is tricky. I’d have to find a way to counter all of its accumulated force, and that’s likely to be a ridiculous amount of energy. Nuking it is unlikely to be effective. Annoying, certainly, but not effective.
So that leaves the organization, the priests, and the worshippers.
The worshippers are the foundation of the Church and the meat and potatoes of the entity. Remove the worshippers and the entity will slowly starve. Unfortunately, killing several thousand worshippers—possibly several tens or hundreds of thousands—is difficult if you don’t want to accidentally wipe out all life in the vicinity. Worse, new worshippers are relatively easy to come by. This leads to an ongoing campaign of killing them off as quickly as they can be recruited… or annihilating all life capable of contributing energy to the entity.
Another major problem with the Lord of Light is he’s fat and happy, sitting on big reserves of power, and can afford to have a protracted famine.
I could organize a mass exodus from Rethven and Karvalen. I could relocate thousands upon thousands of people through magical gates. I could put them on another world—an uninhabited world—and lock the door behind them. Then I could destroy this one. But, as before, the problem is rescuing all the children…
If I don’t have the tools to kill the entity, and starving it to death is too much of a project, that leaves me with the organization and the priests.
Priests are high-value targets. They spend a lot of time in study, prayer, meditation, and ritual, attuning themselves to the entity. They can draw a trickle of power from it through their prayers. I think they can contribute a greater fraction of their personal energies to the entity when they’re not pulling power out of it—they act as food, but also as power expenditures. Priests also make up the organization of the entity on this plane. And, best of all, priests are willing servants to the thing, old enough to make their own decisions and to be held accountable for them.
The organization of the church is less tangible. It has tangible manifestations, though. Somewhere, they have a main temple—a capitol building for the religion. They have lesser temples and churches and shrines, as well, acting as substations for the power network.
Killing priests will slow down the spread of the religion. Destroying structures will undermine it, make it seem a second-rate power. Both, taken together, may give even an energy-state being cause for concern. Eventually, anyway.
I rang up Torvil again.
“Do we happen to have some priests?”
The top of the mountain is basically a pointy bit, as one might expect from a conical structure. The mountain was busy with other things—no doubt reconstructing a good deal of damage—but it spared me enough effort to flatten out the top, raise up the sides, and build me a sort of altar arrangement. I let it work on that while I went down to my geode gate room.
The crystals were all discharged. There was barely any power in them at all.
What the hell?
Closer examination showed they were perfectly intact, but they were expending energy as fast as it came in. Something was tapping them for energy, so they weren’t charging. It was the mountain itself, sucking up energy to make up for the power drain.
Power drain?
My next question was similar to the previous one, but with somewhat more obscene language.
The power source for the mountain is a magical matter-conversion reactor producing enough energy to not only heat the place, but give it a semblance of actual life. The only things comparable to it are an open major nexus or a Krell nuclear furnace. What in the hell could it be using so much power for? Major repairs? Maybe restoring itself in the west? It did crack the western road through the Darkwood, cutting off everything west of that point. And isn’t it building a city with a giant arena in the northern Eastrange? That’s a lot of work and it could require a lot of power. It was also rearranging large pieces of terrain, building tunnels all along the eastern canal and covering them over with wildlife bridges. So, yes, it could be just that busy.
Or was the mountain using the power? What if something found a way to tap it?
I checked with the stone. Yes, the reactor was working perfectly. Yes, everything was all right. Yes, it was using all the power it could get.
This eased my mind considerably, although not completely. Finding out what was going on would have to wait. While yes-or-no answers are relatively quick and easy—only taking a minute or two per question—asking a geological formation anything resembling “Why?” “What for?” or “Doing what?” takes considerably longer. I had other fish to gut just then.
Without the power reserves in my gate room, my options were sharply limited. I needed a plan that didn’t require launching long-range spells. My original idea was to use the medallions of the captured priests as resonators, build a high-energy discharge spell tuned to them, and launch it at various cities all over the world. It would then detonate, so to speak, inside those cities and affect any other medallion like the ones I used as resonators. Those medallions would then be subject to a
rapid energy input—they would explode. The heat of vaporized gold and the resulting concussion effect would be pretty much in the center of the chest, killing the wearer.
Now I couldn’t do that. Well, yes, I could, but not as many times. I planned to use the priests wearing the amulets as human sacrifices. Without the power reserves, this method was drastically limited in the number of shots it could fire, though. It’s a truism that anything you do repeatedly will be observed, analyzed, and countered. If I didn’t hit everywhere, there would be survivors who caught on. It’s like evolution in action. Pour antibiotics into a bacterial culture. If you don’t kill all the germs, the survivors are more resistant to the antibiotics. Same thing here, only with priests instead of bacteria. They have a number of similarities.
I recognized the new feeling: Frustration. It was a much hotter feeling than the cold, unpleasant thing twisting in my chest, and much more familiar.
Well, fine. So much for my mountain-peak sacrificial altar. Fat lot of good that would do.
The sun went down, I cleaned up, and a bunch of grey sashes dragged a bunch of mouthy priests into my workroom.
I sent the grey sashes out and closed the door. They didn’t need to see this.
Morning started sneaking up on me while I sat there with the dismembered corpses. No bloodstains, of course, but enough other fluids leaked out to make the place a mess.
I will kill this celestial son of a bitch. I don’t know how. I don’t know when. If I can find a biological warfare agent to target a religious viewpoint, I’ll use it. If I can find a radiation that only kills light-worshippers, I’ll generate it. If I can find anything, any weapon at all, that kills energy beings or their worshippers, I’ll find a way to apply it.
I’ll kill it. I swear I will.
I whisked my body clean, but my soul was still swimming in it.
Thursday, June 16th