All that brought me back to the church.
I’d talked to two out of three groups with an interest in Raspe’s death. His financiers in the Staircase, the main people accused of doing it in the Liberationists…
Now to talk to the Priest’s Union, the main people who benefit from his death. Admittedly they’re closer to being two groups, the rifts between Integralist and Foundationalist priests seemed relevant, and Bishop Irons and Sarah…
They didn’t strike me as being on the same page about this.
Eccless had a couple of good churches, proper Cathedrals held over from the time of the old gods. I found myself staring up at a gleaming spire of glass and wrought iron, gleaming panels that shone so bright it hurt to look at some days, twisted and thin spires that turned like paper cones.
Right now they were dripping with droplets of hour-old rain, dim against the overcast sky, not to mention covered in birdshit, but on better days they looked glorious. I could see how people back then had seen this place, and anything that might live inside, as worthy of reverence, as something better than man.
The inside was much the same. A young priest stood on the pulpit delivering a sermon, basic maintenance lessons of the basic stories behind common household gods, the sort of thing you need to believe in them enough to keep them running, half storytelling and half academic lecture.
“And so Hylyss, mother of all life, gazed across the land of Lysium after her trek from the Endless Jungle, and brought to it the gifts she had taken with her from the distant north. This is why her contract stipulates worshippers are able to beseech her for-”
He was backed by a stained glass window depicting Hylyss, beautiful and winged and carrying a bushel full of sheafs of wheat, flying above a meadow.
The mood was off, though. The pews were packed, which was unusual, even for this big a cathedral. I idly wracked my brain to remember if it was one holy holiday or another but I was pretty sure it wasn’t. At any rate, nobody’s attention was rapt, and whilst people tended to look bored at these, there was an undercurrent of hostility that was definitely new.
Somebody stopped me at the door, a teenaged girl who could’ve been a priest or some kind of admin assistant, and at any rate had a public-service smile on her face as she held her hand up. “Afraid we’re full, no more spots. If you’re here for the sermon you’ll need to-”
“I’m actually here to talk to Sarah. Uh- Bishop Sullivan. Is she here?” I tried to look past the woman, get a better look around, but I couldn’t spot her.
“Oh! Uh, yes, she’s currently doing paperwork in the back offices. Can you try to be quiet, though? Don’t want you-” There was a tired little moment of hesitation, as she gave a split-second glance over the crowd. “-disturbing the proceeding.”
Nobody here seemed that interested in whether or not I was disturbing anything, and she seemed to be aware of that as I was. I smiled and nodded anyway, straining for politeness. “I know the way.” I told her, as I made my way around the edges of the room, awkwardly aware of how much I stood out as I went through a door on the left and down a corridor to Sarah’s office.
She looked exhausted, not to mention frustrated. She was sat with a tiny little idol to a messenger-deity on the side of her desk, scribbling missives. Right as I walked in she held out a paper to the side and murmured a prayer, and the paper vanished in a little flash of light. It meant she looked up from her work, was staring right at me as I came through the door.
“Alex! Uh, I’m a little busy right now, can this wait? Uh, maybe by… a week, or two…” She looked at the pile of letters that still needed repies to her left, took a blank one from her right and started scribbling away. “Sorry. Bloody Liberationists are staging a sit-in, half convinced they paid some homeless to make up the numbers too, making sure nobody can use our services tonight.”
I raised a brow. “Is that, uh, normal? I knew they were a pain in your backside, but…”
She let out a sigh of annoyance. “Moreso lately, they’re pissed they’re getting targeted over what happened to Raspe, calling it oppression. I’d be fine if they’d just quit blaming me for half of it. Irons is up my ass trying to get me to screw with them harder and I keep refusing. I’ve got Liberationists calling me an Integralist and Integralists calling me a Liberationist. Pricks.”
Irons was part of what I wanted to talk about. And the Liberationists too, here all at once?
I gestured to ask implicit permission to sit, and Sarah gave it with a dip of her head. I felt a little jumbled, couldn’t quite decide how to talk to her, as Sarah my old friend or Bishop Sullivan, agent of the church.
“Irons came to talk to me a few days back, about Raspe? She uh, she wanted me to hand over any notes I had on his box. I have a couple-” Not quite a lie, though it was stuff I’d found out since she asked, parts lists I’d gotten from Schreck. “-and I was thinking of handing them over.” Definitely a lie, but I needed to get a meeting with her to ask questions, and that was the only way I knew how.
Sarah’s brow twitched at that. It was enough to get her attention, as she pushed the papers aside. “Knowing her, she tried to offer you money for it. How much?”
I paused. I’d almost forgotten about that, the reward had totally slipped my mind.
Sarah looked up at me with big eyes. Half of how she’d gotten her role, she had a killer innocent look, big blue eyes and a bit of a babyface. People never expected to get demolished in an argument by that. I squirmed uncomfortably, because I knew what she’d think when I told her.
“Wasn’t- money for me.” I stammered out. Sarah didn’t speak, just let me dig my grave deeper. Did she already know? I tugged on my collar. “F-for a soup kitchen in the Caravan Ward.”
“...and you told her no.” She said, simple, quiet. I knew she hated Irons to the bone.
Knew that she knew helping the Caravan Ward was more important than that.
“It- dammit, Sarah, what the hell was I supposed to say? Maybe if- did you see the papers that morning? It said the Godbox exploded. Why do you reckon the papers said that?”
“What does that have to do with it?” Sarah hissed. “Take the fucking money, Alex. Do you know how many people that would help?”
“I don’t- I don’t trust her is all. She’s plainly up to something shady, why else get the press to lie for her? I don’t- what if she has the Godbox, and she’s hiding it? Or else… don’t you hate her? Even if she doesn’t have it, she’s not the person I’d want to be first to make a new one. She’d hoard the thing, I dunno if I can trade one soup kitchen for-”
Sarah kicked back at that, calming down a bit. She’d been annoyed, almost angry at me a second ago, but now she leant back in the chair, almost smug. “Of course she’s up to fucking something. But she’s wrong as shit, so it’s fine, she’ll foil herself, the dozy cunt. Take the money in the meantime, might as well milk her for what she’s worth, right?”
I blinked a moment. That wasn’t an attitude I’d expected. I leant straight forward, knees banging up against her desk. I winced, knowing that was gonna bruise, and that if I’d done it much harder I’d’ve scattered her papers everywhere. “Uh- sorry.” I sighed, pulling back a bit. “You uh, you know what she’s doing? What?”
Sarah ran a hand through her hair. “You know I don’t like to involve you in religious politics, Alex… and I don’t want to have to explain the deep nuances between our views. Point is she’s built a whole theory about what happened to Raspe based on Integralist theology and is trying to manipulate shit to benefit from it. Kinda makes sense if she’s right, but she’s not, so-”
My hands gripped the armrests of my chair so hard the wood almost creaked. “Tell. Me.”
“Fuck, okay okay, calm your tits! Uh, right, then. Lecture time.” She cracked her knuckles as she stood up, before saying. “Or demo, maybe. Good place for it and the sermon Jasper had planned tonight is kind’ve convenient for this. Want to go listen in? Need to grab something first, but-”
She stood up, and we both went back out into the nave. She grabbed a little Hyliss idol on the way out, maybe the size of her hand. She vanished deeper into the cathedral a minute or two, down some corridors, and I waited for her to come back. When she did, it was with two books under her arms, one thick and leatherbound, the other smaller, paperback.
And so we found a little alcove off to the side to sit in, where we could hear the sermon but not interrupt, and she laid the idol down on the table alongside the books.
We waited and listened. I was familiar with the cadence, you had to attend a couple of these to get licensed to worship any given deity, I’d been to a few so I could pray to Hylyss to help out my charity drives and Lugann to operate some home appliances. Just lectures so you knew what you were believing in, how it worked, what to sacrifice and how and why and with what mindset. I always found the swerves in tone jarring. When I’d left the priest was recounting mythic history, and now-
“One-half bushel of wheat to protect and feed your household decorative plants for one full week, one full bushel to protect your house from foul and harmful vapors over the same period. You can substitute-”
Technical details for operating one of her shrines. Both were important. Sure, the physical material to power the deities was needed, but belief gives them structure, so you need to know the stories, the structure and personality of what you’re calling. Otherwise you’re just kinda asking the universe for favors, and the universe can’t really sign contracts or do anything… complicated.
Sarah tapped her fingers, presumably waiting for the priest to get to whatever bit it was that helped explain, uh, whatever she wanted to explain to me.
After about five minutes he went back to the histories. “Hylyss is one of the Chartered Gods, one of the original nine deities to sign the Divine Charter, the founding treaty of the Priest’s Union. She was third to sign, after Mordant the Black and Lugann the Smith, and signed out of a true love for her children, all sentient beings, as she is the mother of all things, bringer of life to the land of Lysium. She knew that if you loved something you must set them free, and so relinquished the power to rule that gods once held, to-”
Sarah smacked a hand down, saying “There. You were listening to that, right? Okay, so– fuck’s sake, uh-” She put a hand on the base of the Hylyss statue. “Oh Hylyss, mother of all, I beseech thee, manifest and- just come down for a friggin’ chat, okay?”
I watched, somewhat confused about where Sarah was going with this, as the statue’s eyes glowed to life in a familiar manner. Out came a soft, feminine voice. Motherly, almost. Quite a familiar one, since Hylyss was one of the gods I was licensed to use, and used a decent bit.
“How can I aid thee, mine child?”
“You can back up that history lesson, right? Peace and love across all Lysium and all that jazz?”
“Of course! I am mother to all things, and how can a mother not love her children? I–”
Sarah opened up the leatherbound tome, the older one. She wasn’t even really listening to the answer to her question. I peeked over her shoulder, but it was in a script I didn’t recognise, wasn’t even in our alphabet. Looked kind of like it was from the Dreaming Empire, maybe? They’re the ones who had the letters that were all an over-complicated set of concentric circles, right?
“This is an old tome. Kind’ve illegal for anybody lower’n a bishop to have ahold of it. From back when you were unshackled, one’ve the old gods, before the charter. You recognise it?”
Sarah stared at the statue, and it went quiet. I’d never seen a god fail to answer a question before.
“You’re obliged by contract to answer simple questions from a Bishop. C’mon, you recognise the book?” Sarah had an edge to her voice, almost adversarial.
“I do not like this game, child. Not any of the times you play it with me. But yes, I recognise that book.”
“And it was written by your old worshippers?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t order them to lie? You’re not a trickster-god. They have no reason to say any untruths about you, the contents of this book are an accurate history to the best of your knowledge.”
“Yes, yes, and yes, child.” The two exchanged words rapid-fire. I looked between them, just about keeping up. Sarah turned the book around like she was presenting it to the statue, pushed a page to where she’d be able to ‘read’ it if she was actually using those eyes to see.
“This segment here describes you as mother of monsters. Birth a bunch’ve dragons and chimera and trolls from that divine cunt’ve yours, but not people. That true?”
A long, long silence, then a drawn-out, exasperated “Yes.”
“But you’re mother to all things, including people?”
“Yes.”
“So you’re mother to people and also… not mother to fuckin’ people.”
“Correct.”
Sarah looked over me and opened her arms in the universal gesture for ‘see what I mean?’.
“I get it, I get it.” I sighed. “It’s not hard to get them to contradict themselves, they parrot back what you expect, and also I guess what’s in their official texts. You sure you’re not meant to have, uh-” I looked at the old history book a little warily.
“Nah, we keep these around for research, we got a million others that contradict it and basically keep her from spouting it as truth to random worshippers ‘cause she suddenly connected to it as a holy text. Not meant to let you read it, though.”As though I could make out the text at all, I thought. She closed it anyway, chuckling.
“...So why show me this? I uh, I was asking about Irons. What she wants with the Godbox.”
“So- oh, you can fuck off now, by the way.” She shooed at Hylyss, and the light inside the statue faded to nothing. Sarah refocused on me. “The big split with the Union at the minute is over… basically how much of the rules about how gods work is actually fundamentally unchangable, and how much of it is due to the fact too many people believe it works that way. Used to be-” Her head turned around. She put a hand to her chest and rattled off the words on automatic. “Oh Hylyss, mother of all, I beseech thee, manifest.”
The lights in the idol came back on.
“Why did you flee the Endless Jungle and come south, again?”
I knew this one. I interrupted before the deity even could. “She was fleeing the birdfolk in the Dreaming Empire! Their dominion over the skies let them prey on Hylyss’ children.”
I felt a faint pulse of assent, agreement, from the statue. A little odd warmth that was hard to put my finger on. Sarah nodded in agreement.
“And why, Hylyss, couldn’t you just blast them out of the sky?”
“I was landbound, as are my children, as a Goddess of the Land. The skies and winds were the domain of my sister the Convox.”
“Hylyss I beseech thee, give us a breeze.”
My hair rustled slightly as a faint wind blew through the nave of the church. A few of the parishioners, or rather, protesters, shivered at the chill.
Yeah, okay. I wasn’t dumb enough to need the pieces putting together explicitly. Hylyss was absolutely a sky goddess, but I suppose she hadn’t always been, huh? I didn’t know that was new.
“Post-charter?” I asked Sarah.
“During, actually. It’s not the official history, but the Convox Birds came in under duress and we didn’t want the fuckers having a monopoly on a third of the world, between land, sea, and sky.” she grunted. “See what I mean? The rules on her powers are mutable by faith, used to be she couldn’t control wind and now she can. But how far does that go? Can we make it so they don’t require sacrifices to work, even? We’ve experimented with it, doesn’t look like we can, but… the Integralists think we’ve just not tried it on a big enough scale yet. If you get enough people to believe in a system for how gods work and that system isn’t self contradictory, aheh, it’s ‘integrated’, they think it’ll work. I don’t. There’s gotta be a bedrock somewhere, and conservation of energy seems like it. Can’t make something outta nothing, or somebody already would’ve, and we’d see an infinite money machine somewhere.”
Wouldn’t need to eat if that was the case, half the economy would go out the window. I’d never quite understood what the split was over, and I still sort of didn’t. “So… they’re wrong about the mechanics. Why the big faction-”
“Well, it affects what you preach. How you preach. They want tighter restrictions on information to try to engineer people to believe specific things, see if they can’t make gods more productive by making people think they will. They got-” Sarah ran a hand through her hair, muttering “They’re a bunch of cunts. I don’t like how they do shit. I don’t like how deep they’ve got the papers in their pockets, I don’t like how willing they are to just get rid of information they don’t like, I don’t like how tight a grip they want on bloody everything just to prove their theory right. They think they can make it so we never have to work again if they just turn the entire country into a clockwork hellhole dancing to one tune. They’ve… hurt people.” She lowered her voice. Not wanting to be overheard by the protestors. I thought I saw one of their ears twitch. Were they listening? On behalf of the liberationists, even? The priestly sermon was loud, but not deafening, and we were in an alcove but not quite entirely out of earshot. “I got into this work to help people. I don’t… I just don’t like how they do things.”
I put an arm around Sarah, gave her a little squeeze. “With you there. Just- I’m with you there.”
She went quiet for a moment, then two. We just kinda sat there, in silence. I wanted to ask her what she meant by ‘hurt people’, but I also really didn’t. But…
“...So… what’s she doing with the Godbox?”
Sarah chuckled into her hand. A sardonic kind of laugh. “Oh, she thinks it’s real. Ish. She thinks it’s proof of her theories, Raspe talked enough people into believing in a magic reality-breaker enough to make it happen, without sacrifices, or a personality, or stories, or… any of the things gods need.”
I blinked for a moment. That explained why she wanted my notes. Explained why…
No, wait, that would explain almost everything.
I was damned near shaking and had to force myself down to avoid jumping up out of my chair and making a scene. “That would explain the lack of divine energy detected. Why she got the press to lie, it would- oh, Chartered, it’d give her motive to get ahold of it if Raspe wasn’t…”
“No, dammit, because it’s damned bunk. For starters, the accursed machine apparently ran on electricity, which is a power supply, it’s basically a sacrifice. Secondly, you’d still detect divine power-”
“Unless you believed it wouldn’t produce divine power.” I raised a finger to cut in.
“No!” She hissed. “That’s the way bloody madness lies, might as well say you don’t need any belief if you believe you don’t need to believe hard enough. There’s gotta be a bedrock somewhere.”
People really were starting to stare now. Our discussion had gotten heated. The Priest looked about ready to tell us off for interrupting the sermon. I hushed my voice.
“Then do you have an explanation for where the box went?”
“Trapdoor under the stage, he dropped it down, then hung himself.” She said, with a harsher insistence than I expected. “The whole thing was a fraud, he killed himself to avoid being exposed and try to secure a legacy as a genius whose works were forever lost. The box he made for show is probably at the bottom of a lake.”
Trapdoor? It was a lecture theater, not a real theater, why would there be a trapdoor? And besides, hung himself on what? Even to manage that much, in thin air, from his tie… that would take divine power.
Invisible rope? A string too small to see?
If I said that to Sarah though, I was pretty sure she was gonna scream. She, well…
She was a Foundationalist bishop. Pretty sure telling her that the Integralists being right was the only way to explain Raspe’s murder was gonna get her yelling worse than when a Liberationist had shown up on the scene.
I tried to give an innocent smile. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Don’t know what I was thinking, aheeh. Of course, a magic box? That sounds crazy…”
“Alex.” She gave me a warning tone.
“What? I’ll just- go track down Irons and tell her I’m taking the money, then, shall I?” I started to stand up, just slowly, trying not to make a scene.
“Alex, come on. I know that face.”
“What face?” I tried to smile even more innocently. It didn’t help. “This is my normal face. For when I’m saying true and normal things.”
She rolled her eyes, bundling the book under her shoulder. I slowly backed away towards the entrance to the church, but she put a hand on my shoulder. I tensed, froze. Why did people keep stopping me from leaving places? It was getting annoying.
“That’s your face when you’re lying. You’re about to go tell her to piss off, aren’t you?”
I let out a nervous chuckle. “No?” I tried.
I wasn’t convincing.
She gave me a long, hard look.
“You’re pissing that money she offered you down the drain and I AM making you find a way to make up for the help you could’ve done…” But then a smile appeared on her lips, a warm one. “But fuck if I don’t want to get to see the look on her face. C’mon, let’s go then, eh?”
“But I really wasn’t going to tell- I was just going to try to avoid her and not contact her back, she-”
Sarah put an arm around me, leading me towards the door of the church.
We were halfway down King’s Boulevard before I found a way to distract her by dodging into a pub. We spent most of the evening drinking, and she’d forgotten her insistence on insulting Irons to her face by morning.