“Sorry, man. This all seems . . . pointless.”
“I’d rather be up here than down there,” I said, peeking out at the street. I was relieved it wasn’t me doing the Purifying. But it had been, just weeks ago, and I was still complicit, still raising the alarm, still standing by and watching as people were burned, or dragged away for ‘interrogation’. Were the things we were doing wrong, or was I wrong for doubting the Exalted?
“Same here,” Bobbo sighed, returning to my side at the window. “I’m just . . . frustrated.”
“Frustrated?”
“I can’t exactly indulge in my usual pleasures under these circumstances.”
Baneful women. Bobbo liked Baneful women. It was bad enough he was giving in to his lust at all, but to do so while performing his duties as a Purifier, and with Baneful . . .
“Not much has changed,” I said.
“Keep telling yourself that. They’re watching us, you know they are.”
The dealer arrived and shortly afterwards another man approached him. We called in the signal, then stood and watched.
*
“Forgive me, for I have sinned.”
The words were moaned, whined even. Lucian had collapsed in the pew next to me, head tilted to one side, looking at me with pleading eyes. I had gone to confess to him, and found this. A sign on the doors, telling people to ‘go away’. Air that smelled of wine more than incense.
“I watched a man burn today, Lucian,” I said.
“I sent a man to burn. Or worse. Death by a thousand cuts could be an option. However they do it, it is likely to be slow, and agonising. They probably won’t let him die until they’ve broken him.”
“Who?”
“Andreas. He’s to be made an example of.”
I couldn’t understand. “Why though? Why sentence him to a horrible death and let the rest of us off with a slap on the wrist?”
“Because that’s the deal,” Lucian muttered. “Because your unit are too good at what they do and have too many members with connections. Andreas is expendable, and clearly the most subversive member of your group, so the rest of you are kept in action, albeit at a reduced capacity, and ultimately not held accountable for the orders you were given. Andreas pays the price. That’s the deal. That’s what I advised. Don’t say . . .” he faltered, looking dizzy or nauseous. “Don’t say I never do anything for you, Francois.”
I jumped out of my seat, appalled at what Lucian had done, appalled at my own relief and gratitude, and headed for the exit.
Outside, dusk was closing in. I looked at the sun setting over the trees, casting tiny flecks of bright yellow between the leaves, like deposits of gold in a stream. I sat on the marble steps of the chapel, their grandeur scuffed away by a thousand footsteps, and closed my eyes to the wonders around me, and prayed. I asked the Exalted for strength and forgiveness. I asked Him to cast away my doubts. I asked Him for help and I asked him for a sign. Trembling, tears rolling down my cheeks, I lifted my head and tried to stand. From the roof of the chapel, a raven flew like an arrow across the street and the clearing that lay on the other side, over the oak trees and towards my home, cawing.
*
I stepped across the threshold, through the door that was already ajar. What had happened?
My home was swallowed by darkness. All was silent. Is this what the Exalted had wanted me to find? Whatever had happened, He must have wanted me to get here in time to put things right. He had sent me a sign, and that must have been for a reason, so there must still be a chance. I walked in, out of the sheet of light pouring in from the front door, into the gloom, effectively blinded and forced to use my other four senses to find my way.
“Hello?” I called. Others might have tried to stay quiet, in case there was an intruder, but I was a Purifier. No intruder was going to present much of a threat, and drawing their attention would keep them away from Tanya. Besides, I had the Exalted on my side.
I pushed open the living room door, convinced I’d find nothing, that whatever had happened, or was happening, would be discovered upstairs.
There was Tanya, in her favourite spot in the chair. Head lolling. A crack of light filtered in between the curtains, illuminating her face; soft, thin lips, tired skin, vacant eyes.
“Where you been?” she slurred. Light glinted off the empty bottle as it tumbled from her loose fingers.
“Trying to figure things out.”
“Me... too.” She pushed herself upright, with great effort. “And you know what I figure out? I hate you.”
She suddenly bent down, snatched the bottle off the floor, and launched it at me. It smashed harmlessly against the wall, a few feet away.
“You don’t mean that,” I tried. I’d seen this monster before. It was the one I’d been wrestling with for years.
“Yes I do. I don’t love you. I may have to live with you, but I won’t pretend to like it anymore.” The words cut chunks out of me. I looked back on our years together and all my reasons for being with her no longer made sense. Our marriage didn’t add up. She collapsed back into the chair.
I saw myself in her then, and it disgusted me. I saw what I had been, what I had infected her with. Not the drinking, but the poisonous feelings that motivated it. The resentment, ingratitude, indifference and contempt that I had allowed to fester in me and then put into her. I knew what I had to do, no matter what the Exalted may expect from me. No matter what I’d expected from myself. I no longer wanted to salvage things.
“I’m leaving you,” I said.
“You can’t. The Procurators will never allow it.” It was an attack, but her voice cracked a little, showing that she cared. “You’ll be hounded. You’ll have nowhere to go.”
“Yes I will.”
***
When you lose someone or something that’s special to you, it’s a lot like dying. Your heart stops, feels like it will explode, and then you feel empty. Comforting assumptions that have been with you for years, keeping tiny hopes illuminated, sputter and disappear. The things you depend on abandon you. All the things you thought were solid and permanent erode and disintegrate like delicate fossils exposed to the wrong kind of air.
***
Andreas’ sister, Cassie, is often torn between her two loves—medicine and archaeology—but on this occasion, she was getting to indulge them both. She had found a mass grave containing dormant spores that indicated the cause of a recent epidemic. Cassie had been in my life for such a short time, not much longer than Sara, but she had embraced the gifts that came with being Fallen so thoroughly. Seeing her there, bent over her microscope, surrounded by cluttered slides and home made gadgets, so excited by her latest discovery, I ignobly thought, why does this dead woman get to feel so alive, when I feel so dead?
I had gone straight to her home. I had nowhere else to go. Bobbo was sleeping at the Guardian House, at least when he wasn’t in someone else’s bed. Sara wouldn’t divulge her address. It had been raining, and I must have been drenched by the time I reached Cassie’s Caldair hab-block. I couldn’t say for sure, my brain simply never stored that information. I remember I was followed by a wolf that whined at me for food until I shooed it away. The whole while, I wondered about the bird that had guided me home. Why had the Exalted sent it, if it was already too late for me to make peace? If it had come to me an hour sooner, perhaps Tanya wouldn’t have reached that state. If I’d been there for her, perhaps she wouldn’t have come to such a drastic conclusion. If we’d had one last chance to talk reasonably, perhaps we could have saved our marriage. And if and if and if.
I must have let myself into Cassie’s apartment—her door had no lock—but I don’t remember that either. She was startled when she noticed me. She rushed over, checked me for injuries, took off my wet jacket, with its Purifier emblems of phoenixes and suns.
“Are you ok? What happened?”
“My wife and I... it’s over. All our promises of forever turned out to be comforting lies.”
&
nbsp; She hugged me, the spikes of her hair prickling the side of my neck, and I quivered and sobbed until I came back to myself. At some point, I asked her why she thought the Exalted had turned on me. Why had he taunted me with that sign?
“Oh, Frank,” she sighed, stroking my hair. “He hasn’t turned on you, and he never sent any sign. He doesn’t exist.”
“But that fucking raven . . .”
“Was a coincidence.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can. If the Exalted could be that cruel . . . what would that say about Him?”
“Or maybe it’s me? If he hates me that much, what does it say about me?”
She busied herself with tidying away her microscope and other equipment. I kept talking about what I was thinking, feeling. Poured out every litre of my anguish until I suspected she had stopped listening.
“Frank!” Cassie reeled round on me, her patience broken. Then she saw the desolation on my face, and was overcome by guilt. “World, I’m sorry, after what you’ve been through tonight . . .”
“Is it bad . . .” I had to force the words out, “that I feel worse about what’s happened to my faith than I do about what’s happened to my marriage?”
Cassie leaned back on her workbench and judged me unguardedly for a moment.
“Yes.”
“But it’s how I feel. Like a piece of my soul has been torn out. I can’t decide what to believe anymore.”
She turned away again. “You know, sometimes I can’t help but envy people who can decide what they believe, who can just make themselves believe anything.”
“Making a choice is the hardest part,” I said. “If I could choose to believe anything . . .” I struggled with the words. “I’d choose to believe that I wasn’t to blame for what happened with Tanya.”
Silence. Cassie probably didn’t know what to say.
“What would you want to believe?” I asked.
“I guess I’d want to believe that I can find a cure for this damn disease. Then maybe I’d really be able to.”
It was that comment, more than anything else that night, that caused me to blurt out, “Andreas is going to be put to death.”
Cassie barely reacted, had perhaps expected this. She sat down next to me, put her hand on mine and asked, “Will you help us rescue him?”
***
Making a choice is the hardest part. Ain’t that the truth.
We believe what we’ve been taught, for the most part, assume the ideas and beliefs of the time and place we are born into. Religion, politics, values, it’s all the same. Having lived with a comforting idea all your life, it’s not easy to let go of. No matter how much experience tries to extinguish the fire of faith, you keep stoking that fire, giving it fuel, seeking its warmth, even when it’s boiled down to a small, smouldering wet cinder that can do nothing but cast up smoke to obscure your sight and suffocate you.
***
Apparently, it was Sara’s suggestion to bury me. I had lain dormant for too long, and it was widely held that burial could hasten awakening—force the conscious mind to reassert itself, to recognise the difference between death and undeath.
While I was under, wallowing in my nightmares, the others prepared. Bobbo, showing a resourcefulness and assertiveness I’d never seen from him before, convinced Lucian to divulge Andreas’ exact location.
“The boy can be remarkably persuasive, I’ll grant him that,” Lucian said later. “Persistent to a fault, kept repeating the same question, over and over. He’s an unrelenting little migraine, isn’t he?”
My role in the rescue was limited, and perhaps that’s a story for someone else to tell. It took two weeks for Andreas to heal. We all stayed at Cassie’s, although Sara and Bobbo would both occasionally spend nights elsewhere. In Bobbo’s case, it was obviously somebody else’s bed, probably a different somebody each time. Sara simply never gave any clue, and clearly wouldn’t. In the weeks I’d known her she’d not been secretively exactly, more like intensely private. We all assumed she just went home sometimes, wherever home may be.
Cassie and I would talk at length, often about Andreas, sometimes about our former lives, hers as a servant, mine as a Purifier.
When Andreas was well, he was different to how I’d known him. Angry. He would talk at length about how the beliefs of the Baneful and Fallen were superior to Realm values. He spoke about how easy it was to control his emotions, but his seething resentment, and my inability to put aside thoughts of my wife, cast doubt on his words.
He had asked us to get him books to read, some from his old home in Llangour, some from black-market dealers in Caldair. One day he was looking through an old, battered copy of the Liber Colatra.
“Listen to this,” he said, jabbing a finger at the pages triumphantly, “‘The Exalted did say, that any child born of mixed blood be burned on coals, and that any woman who does produce such tainted offspring, be she human or Baneful, must be purified by the seed of a Procurator before condemned to drown’! Not exactly what you’d expect from a loving god, is it?”
“That would have been written by primitive Colatran tribesmen,” I replied, sitting and listening patiently by his bedside. “It doesn’t justify it, but that is the way they lived, unfortunately.”
“Clearly the Exalted didn’t really say any of it, but they claim that he did. How can anyone read such things and still worship this character?”
I buried my face in my hands. I had been listening to this for two hours almost, and my endurance was running out. “Most people haven’t read it themselves. Even you hadn’t read it until yesterday, and you were a Purifier. Most people can’t read it. They only know what the Procurators tell them.”
“And the Procurators relish that freedom to be selective with what they divulge. But how can they believe in an Exalted that asks such things? I’ll tell you how—they ignore any parts they don’t like. Why put your faith in something if you have to use your own discretion to decide which parts you agree with?”
“People use it as a divining rod, I guess. They read it, and they absorb it all, good and bad—because there is good in there too –they find bits of themselves in the book, things they can relate to, and that helps them to find themselves.”
“There are plenty other things people can use to do that,” Andreas scoffed. He was getting haughty, and that was testing my patience. This was already the last thing I wanted to talk about, and the way he was going about it wasn’t making things any easier. “There’s art, literature, philosophy, music. Why would anyone swallow this twisted mess of contradictions and . . .”
“Stop it!” I snapped. “I don’t know! I . . . don’t . . . know. Okay?”
He looked stunned and confused. He probably couldn’t understand why a fellow Fallen who had been through the same enlightening, assumption-shredding process as he had, would take offence at his words.
“There’s no reason to get upset, Frank. I’m not talking about you. Even if you were a believer, it would be irrational to get offended. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, and atheist and theist ideas inevitably contradict each other. The Realm may take every comment that contradicts their beliefs as a personal attack, but we are far past that, are we not?”
“Of course we are,” I grumbled. I was getting tired of his voice to tell the truth, but it was more than that. “I knew about these passages as a mortal, and accepted them, and continued to believe that the Exalted loved and was worthy of worship. That loss still stings. It was comforting to live by the words of a kind and benevolent being. And it’s horrifying to think that we lived by words of hatred and violence, passed on by cruel bigoted men. It’s even more horrifying to think that maybe there could be an omnipotent being full of rage, that would order the murder of babies and the defilement of women.”
Andreas cocked an eyebrow, closed the Liber Colatra, and put it aside. “Do you think that’s possible?” The derision was suppressed, but still clear.
I walked over to a
chest of drawers that stood in the far corner of the room, behind the door that stood open on broken hinges. Three of the drawers were loose, and sat in the unit at haphazard angles. I needed to fix things, but there was no wood available, no screws or nails. Sara had been working on metalwork machines: a forge, a smelting machine. She had the theory worked out, but the difficulties in actually creating these were immense, and outweighed the benefits.
I wrenched one of the drawers open, balancing it with one hand while I pulled items out and piled them on the floor with the other. Then I closed the door, gathered up my collection and went back to Andreas, who was watching intensely, and put it all down on the faded blue sheets.
“These are texts and idols from twenty-five different religions banned by the Realm but still represented in Caldair,” I said. “I’ve been reading too. There are dozens of myths about how the world was created, dozens of different ideals of how we should live our lives. Famirarism, Kantarr-har, Dithuge Alliyan. They can’t all be wrong.”
“I would say ‘they can’t all be right’.”
“Perhaps there are slithers of truth in each of them. They’re all unlikely, but they’re all equally possible. They all share similar concepts of worship.”
“I oppose the whole concept of worship.”
“So if the Exalted existed, you still couldn’t love him or be grateful to him for creating us?”
“I love my sister, I’m grateful to you for what you’ve done for me. Worship is different. It’s the kind of notion that keeps dictators in power.”
“Andreas, you’re not the only one angry about being misled. You’re not the only one trying to make sense of things.”
He looked away, avoided making eye contact, but I could see the pain he was trying to hide.
*
“How is he?” Cassie asked. She was testing samples from one of her patients, and had bottles and beakers all over the room. The smell was atrocious.
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” I asked. It sounded harsher than I meant, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Mm,” she said, dipping a strip of cloth soaked in chemicals into a beaker of urine. “Will later. How is he?”
“Still incensed at the Realm and the Exalted. Don’t think I can be much help to him.” I was carrying my collection of religious artefacts, bundled up in my arms, and as I walked past Cassie, one of the statues fell to the floor with a metallic thunk. Cassie whirled round, her attention caught at last, and saw what I was holding.
Facade of Evil and Other Tales from 'Heathen with Teeth' Page 6