At the very least, it really was quite a nice cell.
The bed was comfortable, sun shone through the window without bars or anything getting in the way. They’d given me amenities, albeit the kind you see in waiting rooms, a chess set, a newspaper, a few old books. Hell, a pencil, when a guard came down and told me I had some forms to fill out before they could release me.
I didn’t like the feeling of being watched though. In a little cubbyhole, locked and barred so I couldn’t stick my hand through, was a little idol of the jailhouse’s guardian deity. I couldn’t put a name to it, but it was apparently a giant eyeball wreathed in chains, and even though the distinctive glow of inhabitation wasn’t there, I still didn’t like it staring at me all the time.
There was probably an identical idol in every cell, and half the other rooms too. Just in case somebody tried escaping or something, I guessed.
I entertained myself as best I could and tried to ignore the ache in my nose. It wasn’t broken, thank the Chartered, but horribly bloodied, and somebody had had to bandage it.
I filled out the forms as best I could. Did I want to press charges? Against who? I put down ‘no’. Did I have any complaints I’d like to raise about my treatment? No. Plus my name, basic history, what deities I was licensed to worship, the usual. They wanted a statement in writing about what I’d seen during ‘the incident’, though the papers didn’t specify which incident, it seemed to be a general form. I recounted everything leading up to Raspe’s death to the best of my ability and put it all to paper.
A guard came to collect them an hour later and let me go.
I handed him the papers through the bars and he shuffled them in his hands, just giving a cursory look to make sure they were filled out. “All looks to be in order. Can I ask what, uh-”
I’d had an extra hour or so waiting after the forms were filled out, and had done some drawings on the back of one of the newspapers I’d been given to pass the time (not covering any of the content, I’m not a monster.) I’d still been doing it when he came in, and he peered at the drawings.
“...So you, uh, think he hanged himself from the rafters with an actual rope? Heard it was divine what did it…”
I’d been drawing diagrams of the stage, trying to figure out what had happened. I rubbed the back of my neck bashfully. “Not really, there uh, there aren’t any rafters. It’d need a hole in the roof and- well, yeah. Not really possible, huh?”
I still had no clue how it had happened. And if he’d done it that way, he’d’ve needed a hole in the roof large enough to fit the machine through, and a damned dozen strong men to lift it by rope, over the course of maybe ten seconds.
“Stranger shit’s happened. But c’mon, let’s get you out of here.” He opened the cell door and led me out into the corridor. I tried to ignore the other people in cells, a combination of drunks, petty thieves and teens who’d had a bit too much fun out on the town last night. This was just a holding cell, not a proper prison, which was why I’d wound up here when I wasn’t even being charged. Just somewhere to put me whilst they figured out who’d actually started the fight, I guess, given I was out cold and they couldn’t exactly take me home. Nobody here was gonna get kept for more than an evening, but the other prisoners still jeered and hollered, a couple shouting abuse. At the guard, not me, but the volume of a drunk slurring “Lemme out you fuckin’ prick!” still made me jump.
It had been a nice cell, but this was not a nice prison.
“Can I ask, uh- paperwork asked if I wanted to press charges?” I asked, whilst we walked. The guard raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, you put no. Kind of you, guy hit me that hard and I’d be pressing, nevermind a little bird like you.” He replied, dour. I wasn’t that little, larger than average in height and width, so the absurdity meant the patronage didn’t rankle me as much as it might’ve. He seemed to realise what I meant a moment later though. “Oh, you thought- like, against the geezer for dying on you? Hah! Look, we get a lot of work outta Mordant The Black, but we ain’t worked out how ta’ sue the dead yet. Give ‘em a few years we’ll be there though, Priests’ll find a way to get even them doing paperwork.”
I chuckled. “They’re working on it. Did you, uh- is Frank in one of these? The guy who, uh, hit me?”
“Nah, he got out early, weren’t out cold for hours like you, and he had a lawyer up immediately. He’ll be down here in a day or two though I reckon, mark me.”
We passed into the guardhouse office, and the man handed papers off to the front desk, smiling. “You’re free t’go, front door’s just there.” He hucked a thumb towards a large pair of double doors. “
“Back? Why?”
“You didn’t hear?” He arched his brow. “They figure he did it, sabotaged the Godbox so it blew up. Bloody liberationists, batch of terrorists, the lot of them. Sarge’s beaming at finally having gotten an excuse to go after one’ve their head honchos, made his day. Wouldn’t know it from HIS face but his wife’s got a spring in her step, if you know what I mean.” He nudged me with his elbow, smirking smugly. I became rather abruptly aware of how busy this office was, guards hauling people through. Uncuffed, not under arrest, but clearly not being treated gently, interrogation I reckoned.
Rather abruptly aware indeed of how many were in docker’s clothing, burly men in overalls and flatcaps.
“He- he helped examine the body, he seemed decent, last, uh, last minute or so aside. And besides, he was in the audience, how could he have…?”
“Oh they all seem nice ‘til you get ‘em going. And if not him, one’ve his cronies. They’re all giving each other alibis at the minute but one’ve em’ll crack.” The guard grunted, before smiling. “Don’t you worry, we’ll make sure he can’t touch you again, yeah? Now get going. Sarge’ll kick me ass if he hears I said all that, but, well- better put your mind at rest, aye?”
Thank the Chartered for chivalry, I supposed. I took his advice, turned from the desk and went out into the Eccless city air.
As always, it wasn’t quite a refreshing breeze. The wind stank of smoke and copper, and as usual, it was bloody raining.
I stared up into the smog-covered sky as horse-drawn carriages rode past the busy street, and dodged aside past another guard manhandling a street thief into the station.
They figured Frank had done it? As a Divine Liberation society thing or… what, for the docker’s unions?
Sarah had warned me that people would be pissed at the Godbox obsoleting them, but wouldn’t the Liberation Society be happy if we got rid of divine labor? Then the gods could be free. He didn’t strike me as a complicated enough schemer to… what, sneak some liberationist or docker into the box? Manipulate the god they insisted was running it as a mechanical gnoll?
I was starting to soak, and I hadn’t exactly had a chance to bring an umbrella. I searched my pockets and found I at least had a few crowns left, so I hailed a horse-drawn cab, told them to take me home.
As I rode, I tried to figure out exactly how and why Frank might’ve killed Raspe as I watched the cobbled streets go by.
—
I had a pretty nice place in a fairly rough neighbourhood, which meant untangling my way through as many locks as I could afford before I could get inside. It was just off the Caravan Ward, where half the refugees from the Coil Crusades had ended up. Not just the human ones, and it wasn’t rare for me to wake up hearing a drunken argument between some random Gnoll refugee and an old vet who was of the mind that it was the old ladies and children fleeing the war who were to blame for their missing eye or legs or whatever the hell their particular grievance was.
The day’s paper was on the doorstep, Eccless Enquirer. I picked it up as I headed inside, locked the door behind me, and slumped into my chair, exhausted.
I put a pot of tea on. No futzing about with non-divinely generated electrics and power generators out here, that was just for the demo. I had a contract and license to draw on a tiny fragment of Lugann the Smith’s power.
“Lugann the Smith, I call upon you.” I uttered the prayer, hand on the kettle stamped with his sigil, a hammer lain on a throne. Electricity coursed through it, starting to heat the water.
Doing that reminded me to check to make sure I was topped up on my payments to Lugann. I had a sacrificial offering bowl, it was just at the back of the house. Stupid of me to worry, I knew it wouldn’t be low for another fortnight, but I got anxious if I didn’t check daily. The Idol to Lugann was, well, of a man of the same build and idiom to the dock workers who worked for Frank, but almost superhumanly strong, with a chiselled jaw. Overalls and a flatcap, a hammer slung over his shoulder, the picture of productivity.
I didn’t miss the irony that barely any manual workers actually worshipped Lugann from what I knew, hated him in fact. I’d had one construction worker try to sell me on one of the smaller gods one time, cheaper and working to better contracts, but I’d rather stick with a more reliable one. Lugann was one of the Chartered Nine, the first gods to agree to submit to the Priest’s Union’s authority hundreds of years ago. Smaller gods could run into power issues if they got low on worshippers or sacrifices, and tended to get into bureaucratic trouble, rise and fall with the seasons, or have their contracts changed by the Priest’s Union. Lugann, though, had been powering homes for centuries.
The sacrificial bowl still had about half the copper bullion bar I’d purchased to put in there left. Specially stamped with Lugann’s sigil, made it worth slightly more to him. No clue where it was all going, I guessed the god ate it or something, turned it into energy. It was vanishing neatly lengthwise like it was being cut into slices, and the freshly revealed surface always shone, getting eaten away faster than exposure to oxygen could tarnish it.
“Lugann the Smith, I call upon you. How long I got left?”
The idol’s eyes lit up with a coppery-brown sort of light. Brighter than I’d seen on Green John, it was better fed with sacrifice and worship.
“Three weeks, eleven hours, at your current average daily rate.” It said. This wasn’t really a conversation, even it sounded bored. He was probably at ten thousand houses at once, that had to be a strain on the attention. I gave him a nod and turned away, not even giving it a goodbye.
The kettle boiled, and I cursed, almost having forgotten about it. I poured out some tea and grabbed a muffin from the cupboards, not quite freshly baked but comfortable and delicious, a good way to calm down as I tried to process everything that had happened, figure out what to even do next.
I should try to re-apply for my old job in the University’s accounting department, probably. Being an apprentice was shot.
I tried reading the newspaper, see if anybody was talking about what happened. It was mostly the usual stories. The same predictions we’d be at war with the Dreaming Empire in six months that had been in the papers every six months for the last decade. Football results and the latest riot resulting from them. Controversy over whether Einherjar undead ought to be able to participate in some annual charity race or another, given they don’t get tired like mortals do. Politics, politics, politics, arguments over the last election and the next election and whether the Priest’s Union should be less involved in the political process or more involved or be disbanded entirely or just rip the mask off and decide to officially run the country like they already do in practice…
And Professor Rudolph Raspe’s murder. And murder it was being framed as, the reporter seemed very confident of that. Not a suicide, not an accidental mishap of the machine. Sabotage, this brave reporter, well, reports, as at the moment he would unveil his greatest invention the Godbox was caused to…
Explode?
I read that line again to be sure I had it right. The Godbox was caused to explode. It was reported destroyed, and the Eccless Enquirer claimed to have examined shards of the rubble.
There hadn’t been any rubble, I was fairly sure I’d’ve seen that, or heard any earth-shattering kaboom. He had witnesses attesting to hearing a bang though, right before the curtains dropped. The Parliamentarian I’d seen in the crowd was giving a statement, apparently.
I’d thought the guard would be looking for the Godbox, trying to retrieve it from wherever it was stolen away to. They thought it was destroyed? Or, no, this couldn’t possibly be an innocent mistake, there’d been enough witnesses to show it hadn’t detonated, and there was no rubble for the reporter to personally observe. The press were lying and claiming it was destroyed.
They had no interest in retrieving it. Oh, maybe in fingering somebody for the crime, but not in actually solving the problem. All the good the Godbox could have done had been lost, in a moment. Worse, all the harm it could do, if somebody had their hands on it? If-
There was a knock on my door.
I put down the tea. I’d been here ten minutes, maybe twenty. Peeking out my window, a white, red and black carriage was pulled up outside, the horses waiting patiently. Priest Union colors.
Sarah didn’t tend to take official transport down here when she came to visit. I folded up the newspaper and put it aside, went to open the door, just a crack, enough I could see through whilst a bolt-chain kept it closed and secure.
Standing there was a priest, in some of the more ornamental robes I’d seen. Or no, a bishop, she was in full ceremonial robes, not the kind you see on most priests going about their business. She had the pointed hat, red white and black trimmed robes with damned shoulderpads, tassels hanging from them. How she wasn’t boiling to death in this heat was beyond me, and indeed she looked a bit red in the face.
She was an older woman, and drowning in jewellery, a half-dozen necklaces jangled as she walked, and her earrings and bangles were all covered in sacred symbols, sacred metals and sacred gems for a dozen different gods, ranging from gleaming gold to dull simple wood.
“Excuse me, are you… Alexandria Delurge? I’d like a moment of your time, if you please.”
Posh accent, polite. I winced a little at her attempt at my name.
“Uh, De La Ruge, it means ‘of the Ruge’. Well, ‘from the’, I guess. Chartered, Ruge’s only the next biggest city in the country, figured you guys’d’ve learned how our names work now.”
She put on a polite smile, even a believable one. “Oh, goodness, I’m so sorry. I’ve only got it written and- well, yes. But nonetheless, please?”
Well, she wasn’t a common burglar. She was carrying something underarm, papers, but didn’t look like a threat to me. I unlocked the chain, let her in.
She looked around. I couldn’t read her expression to see what she thought of the place, she just gestured to a chair in the lounge and asked “May I?”
“Sure.” I replied. “Can I ask what this is- actually, one second, stay right here?”
I went to the kitchen. An irrational little voice in the back of my head said not to leave a stranger alone in there, but I didn’t think she was likely to try to palm the cutlery or anything. Besides, this was important.
I had more baked goods in my cupboard than just the muffins. I took out a tray of little glazed tarts, topped with strawberries. Sugary but lovely. Firstly, they’d calm my nerves. One of them was for me.
I brought them back into the lounge and smiled. “Want one?”
Little tip for when solicitors or pamphleteers or whatever manage to get into your home. Always offer them food. If they accept, they actually have a soul, and aren’t just little cogs working emptily for their bosses. They’re at least not likely to lie baldly to your face. Otherwise…?
“Of course.” She accepted politely, and I saw her smile as she took a bite. For all her attempts to keep her expression businesslike, she still liked it. She suppressed a murmur of pleasure.
I let out a breath as she ate, and took a bite myself. Sugary sweet, it settled my worries a bit, felt good to have something tasty in my stomach.
Still, I wasn’t here to eat. That was just basic politeness, formalities. I didn’t actually want her here any longer than necessary, soul or no. “You have my name, can I have yours, Miss…?”
“Bishop Irons. I’m a colleague of Bishop Sullivan, I believe she’s mentioned me.”
I recognised the name. Sarah had mentioned her, and it wasn’t good things. Church politics. There’d been a big schism recently with a large number of Priests leaving the union, and those who’d stayed were factionalised. Irons was with the Integralists, the second biggest faction, and who Sarah hated for… well, complicated theological reasons I wasn’t clear on the details of. Raspe had too, for complicated academic reasons I wasn’t clear on the details of.
As for me, I hated them because they’d constantly petitioned the University to pull funding from the Godbox project. It was hard to imagine she was here for any other reason than to gloat that it had finally been stopped.
“I’m afraid I’m here on business.” She continued. “I need something from you, and as much as my colleagues believe we should simply compel you to aid us, I think we’d be better off offering you something in exchange.”
She laid the papers down on the coffee table. I saw numbers, some kind of financial documents. I recognised Raspe’s name on them. They were to do with his death, then.
“Compel me. Compel me to do what?” I was on edge now, and a second bite of the tart didn’t help that. I stared, not quite hostile, but stony, meeting her eyes. She met mine, and she didn’t flinch.
“Rudolph Raspe’s, ah- Godbox…” Her expression soured at the term.
“You can call it the Ontologic Uncertainty Chamber if you want. OUC. He kind of hated the name too.” I smiled in a tentative attempt to make a connection, but she just kept a hard expression. Maybe she didn’t have a soul after all.
“The OUC has been destroyed. Raspe himself is dead. We want any and all notes you have on his work, to help further our investigation into the incident.”
“Shouldn’t the police be the one investigating?”
She waved a hand dismissively. “They can’t exactly read complicated technical documents and diagrams. Meanwhile, every engineer on the continent needs a license to worship and receive blessings from Lugann The Smith.” She didn’t seem perturbed. “We’re co-operating with them.” Or, it sounded, the cops are co-operating with the Priest’s Union.
That somewhat explained the way the news had reported on the matter, and the cops’ insistence this was Liberationist work, the Union had wanted rid of the Liberationists for years.
I rubbed the back of my neck. I hadn’t even heard what they planned to offer me for them, but I couldn’t imagine it’d be worth it. “I was thinking of trying to continue his work, actually. Make a new OUC.” I’d considered the idea, anyway. But I figured saying it like I was decided might get a little more out of her.
I was surprised to see Irons seemed pleased with the answer. Her lips quirked with the shadow of a smile. “Oh, I imagined you would. I can also imagine why you would. I understand you’ve been working with Bishop Sullivan the past few years, yes? Enjoying her patronage for your projects. There’s a thread I noticed, you wanted the OUC to help feed people, yes? Please, look at the papers.”
I did. Gathered them up. I was puzzled at first when I saw it was talking about fairly large sums of money, but not in my name. It wasn’t a bribe for me, like I’d half expected. It wasn’t a few thousand crowns for my notes and my silence. This was-
“...Money to set up a soup kitchen in the Caravan Ward.” Me and Sarah had been trying for years, it was how we’d met and gotten to know each other. The Union was a messy, awful organization, but charitable work was mandated for priests of a couple deities, mostly Hylyss.
“I fear the Integralists have gotten a reputation for being cold-hearted bureaucrats, whilst the Foundationalists care for the common worker. I assure you nothing could be further from the truth.” She spoke, but her voice didn’t have much warmth in it. She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes, her crows feet didn’t tug quite right, and those eyes were a deep, cold blue. “I want to begin remedying that. The OUC is bunk, obviously. But I appreciate the intent and what you were hoping to achieve with it. You want to help people, I want to help people. Let us help each other, hm?”
It…
Chartered gods help me, it was a lot of money. It would help a lot of people. I wasn’t sure if the Gnolls would even take Union help, but the veterans, hell, my own people, refugees from Ruge…
“But… the Godbox, if it works, if I can make a new one or hell, find the one that got stolen… it can help more than just one community.” I said. My voice was quiet, even I wasn’t quite sure if I believed that.
“If. It isn’t. It sounds ridiculous on the face of it, doesn’t it? A device that can do literally anything? Even if it was real, why did he never let anybody see the inside of it? I can’t see what he could have put in there that light would damage. I’ve talked to his colleagues and none of them can offer any kind of theory for a mechanism for how it works, can you?”
I couldn’t. And I couldn’t say doubt wasn’t gnawing at me either. Was I really so sure- could I really pass up an offer like this for, what, a best guess? My faith in a dead man I’d known barely a month?
“I’ll- I’ll consider it.”
“Consider it?” She arched her brow. I nodded, but she didn’t seem to want to take that for an answer. She let the silence hang there, until it felt awkward enough I had to speak.
“What- if I give you his notes, what’ll you do with them? If you need somebody to try to put together another box, I’m obviously qualified to-”
She held up a palm to stop me. “We aren’t interested in that. Why have you build another fraud? We want the documents so we can conclusively disprove it, is all, so the public can know the truth.”
I blinked a moment. “And if they show it works? Uh, I mean, come together to produce a machine that does?”
She gave me a flat look, unimpressed. “It isn’t. We know that already. The rest is just book-keeping, though book-keeping is very important for reassuring those less in the know.”
“You can’t know that though, you-”
“The newspapers say it’s fake and destroyed, what more do you need to know?”
“The papers are lying and you damn well know they’re lying!”
I swallowed, bashful about that outburst. We’d exchanged words quickly, even her voice had gotten clipped towards the end. I tried to smile in apology, then hide my face behind another bite of one of the tarts. At the very least, I finally broke her composure. A roll of her eyes.
“You aren’t very familiar with Integralist doctrine, are you?”
The non-sequitor almost confused me enough I stopped feeling embarrassed. I almost choked on the tart. “Uh, no?” I coughed out.
She sighed. “Suppose I told you the Coil Crusades weren’t over.” I blanched just at the thought. I guess she saw my face, since she waved a hand frivolously. “Not in any meaningful way. That the City in Silver never quite fell. Or- no, not even that, let’s say Flestival. Flestival never fell. We never quite cracked the scabmetal walls and just told the press to report we had, called it a day. They’re still holed up there, huddling in fear of our mortars, useless, unable to strike back, but not quite freed from the tyranny of their gods, not quite under Union regulation.”
I’d read the reports, that was famously one of the most brutal battles of the war. A protracted siege against walls that kept healing themselves, trying to liberate the city ruled by a tyrannical deity that reshaped its followers' flesh into twisted beasts, an entire city made of meat.
“That would be… awful. Those poor people…” I said.
“I agree. But if you went out and acted like the coil crusades weren’t over, people would think you’re mad. You’d never find proof. Goods still come in from Flestival sometimes, black-marketed out. You could never go to Flestival to check. Have you ever met anybody from there?” She paused, wanting an answer, and I shook my head. “So that would hardly be proof even in a world where it never fell. The world thinks Flestival fell. And not as in, ‘everybody in the world thinks’. Reality thinks Flestival fell, because the press say it, everybody says it, and the physical results of it like the goods, the shackled deity, the military security. Flestival won’t be invading Eccless or even Ruge in either reality, yes? And we’d presumably have told enough millions of people we shackled The Living Scab to have the belief to create our own, shackled copy.”
She was lecturing. I mean, she was a priest, it was her whole job in a sense. She was getting into a solid rhythm, an almost hypnotic cadence. Made it easy to listen and nod along.
“If you acted like Flestival hadn’t fallen, well- if you went shopping like it hadn’t you’d lose out on goods and fall behind. Panicked and prepped for an invasion that was never coming, you’d waste money. Doubted The Living Scab’s history? Lose out on the benefits of using it. Reality would punish you. Not lethally, it wouldn’t be much more of a problem than any other minor delusion like, say, thinking that nice prostitute really likes you, but still, it’d punish.” She leant forward, giving me a rueful grin. “I have a rather pragmatic theory of truth, what is true is what is most in line with reality, what it rewards or punishes you for. The OUC is gone. Acting like it didn’t blow up is only going to get reality to punish you, and acting like it’s omnipotent definitely will.”
I swallowed anxiously. That sounded rather like a threat. I tried not to let the fear show on my face.
“What, are you going to cancel my Lugann license?” That actually would rather bugger me, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.
“You’ll miss out on the chance to improve the caravan ward. Truth is what’s most in line with reality, what’s most in line with reality is the beliefs that produce the best results when you act them out in the world.” That last bit had the ring of scripture to it. Doctrine, for sure. She leant forward, stared at me, eyes hard. “If believing the OUC is real and out there hurts you and those around you, what use is the belief?”
I licked my lips anxiously. I didn’t really have an answer to that. I didn’t have any more food to hide behind so I put my hand over my mouth, pretending I was resting my chin on it, elbow on the table.
All I could come up with was one thing. “But… don’t you want to know?”
It felt limp and pathetic, and the sardonic look she gave me told me she knew it. She shuffled the financial documents she’d brought me, gathering them up.
“I don’t want you to feel pressured.” Irons raised her hands, and stood up slowly. “Thank you for your time, and for the food. Take your time to think about it, after all, I’m sure you don’t have the notes to hand. Bring those papers to any city church and they’ll get you in contact with me, hm?” She left the papers with me, smiled. “Consider how certain you are Raspe was really on to something, then decide, hm? And-”
A pause. A guilty look as she reached the door, leaving me staring blankly forward, lost in my thoughts. Right before she left, she gave me what was maybe the second genuinely human expression I’d seen from her since she entered my house.
“I don’t suppose I could have another of those tarts? They really were quite lovely.”