Chapter 117 She Can Manage

The stands were quiet. A young man, a flower of faded nobility, had been hacked into five parts, his heart eaten, and his soul condemned to Hell. Even then, those who supported Etenesh might have cheered.

The religious minorities, the civic unity set, the conservatives who wished to preserve the life they knew, all should be cheering.  Her family alone took up a big section of the stands. They were an ancient line and remarkably unified. They didn’t make a peep. They looked awed. And proud.

Why wouldn’t they be? A daughter of their house was graced with the faintest shadow of one of the aspects of God. For a clan of angelic summoners and mediums, it was a transcendent glory. None of them would dare raise a cheer when the hymns of the Watchers below the Chariot of God still rang in their ears.

Truth couldn’t tear his eyes away from Etenesh. He couldn’t believe what he had just seen. This wasn’t the Etenesh he had sparred with for the last week. This was someone fierce and terrible and glorious. She raised her taloned hand to the sun, singing her praises to God as the heart’s blood of his hated enemy dripped from her mouth and down her chest.

Truth had no idea what had happened, but he loved it. His mind skittered away from that thought and just watched her. Her family gloried in her nearness to God. Truth was just happy she won and was coming back to him.

That, and he really liked the new look. He wasn’t sure about the wings and the claws, but he would absolutely make them work.

Etenesh ended her song, lowering her hands. The seraphim had done its job and departed this backwater corner of existence with a few beats of its mighty wings. No less swiftly did Merkovah appear, blurring from the stands to stand by his student’s side. He looked around at the crowd, smiling proudly.

The exorcist whispered something to Etenesh, who looked up at the stands. Her eyes met Truth. And she smiled.

The pitch slowly returned to normal as Etenesh was escorted away. Her wings faded back into nothingness. Thick talons returned to slim fingers. The perfection of her form faded, too, though not entirely. From the other side of the pitch, Teacher Ferrenet descended with another anonymous-looking middle-aged man.

The other man was balding, bearded, dressed in elegant robes of turquoise and ivory. He was grieving, tears running down his face. Grieving but clinging to his dignity. Slowly he approached the bloody body and prayed over it. Servitor spirits appeared, collecting the parts and placing them in a plain wooden box.

Duke Red Valley would never again hug his third son. The body was unclean, the soul literally damned. The remains wouldn’t even be dignified with a funeral. Instead, the corpse would be discarded at sea, no longer a part of blessed Siphios.

Truth studied his face, wondering if this would become a vendetta. If he needed to kill the man. It seemed that he would not. Duke Red Valley looked sad. Grieving. Hurting. But not angry. There was despair etched into those bones.

Truth wondered if that’s what drove his son into the arms of radicals and instigators. Kids study their parents and learn from them. If Dad thought the future was hopeless, how should his hot-blooded and loving son react?

Alemu would fight to bring hope home to his Father. By any means necessary. And Etenesh had humiliated him, mutilated him, and directly cast his soul into Hell. Truth shook his head and left the stands. He wanted to go find her and tell her how proud he was. Not to mention, he was eager to hand her her first loss of the day. Very, very eager.

His hopes were dashed when he found her climbing into a clay jar, carefully easing the long feathers of her belt and crown in around her. She caught another glimpse of Truth, gave him a devastating smile, and ducked under the rim.

Masked cultists quickly covered the pot with a wooden lid, sealing it with long paper talismans. They raised the clay pot up on a wooden stretcher and carried it, and her, onto the back of a glowing cloud streaked with ivory and gold. The cloud moved with deceptive speed out of the University and out of his sight.

“Her fellow cultists?”

“Indeed. The Cult of the Treasuries of Light is going to be absolutely insufferable after this. Not that I can blame them. But still. Insufferable.” Merkovah was grinning widely, not looking bothered at all. “Heavens, did she bring them face!”

“On that subject…”

“Ah, not here. I know what you want to ask, but not here. Let’s go to my office. Jember will be ages; he’s going to be networking his ass off. He’ll be twice as insufferable as the Cult, and he’s in a different Cult!”

_______________________________________________________

“Was that really Etenesh? I have trained with her all week. We were specifically working on her aggression and courage as well as her basic combat skills. Those were her spells, but the aggression, reactivity, tactics, all were beyond what she had been capable of.” Truth cut straight to it.

“She was always fiercer than you gave her credit for. I deliberately sidelined Etenesh and Jember to give you more room to develop. It was no hardship for them. Neither are particularly bloodthirsty.” Merkovah waved away his own quibble.

“Yes, that was Etenesh, but it wasn’t just Etenesh. Remember our discussions about the nature of God?”

“Vividly.”

“Good, because it’s why the Cult, the Heaven-Beseeching Family, and the… let's call it moderate faction… are going to be completely out of hand.”  He rocked back in a comfortable, if scabrous-looking, office chair.

Truth had been condemned to the Student Chair. He wondered if Merkovah had personally ensured each leg was a different length or if it had just worn down that way. Making the wooden armrests a subtly different height was, however, clearly intentional.

“To be considered for membership in a Mystery Cult, one has to be profoundly devout. Truly, deeply, sincerely, devout. The so-called “Progressives” have their own “Blessed Orders,” but do not be deceived. These are mere social clubs. If you ever want to raise money for a flowerbed in a roundabout, I can cheerfully recommend them.” Merkovah’s tone would have been more suitable for ordering a heretic’s death by fire.

“Proper mystery cults worship God in additional ways, supplementing but subordinate to the Orthodoxy. They focus on a particular aspect of the Divine Self, expressed either in a saint or in some particular revelation. The particular nature of that worship, the aspects, and the tenants of their religious practice are, of course, mysteries known only to the adherents. And the Congregation on the Unity of the Faith, a supervisory organization within the Temple.” Merkovah’s professorial instincts had kicked in again. He shook his head and pressed on.

“I don’t know the particular details of the worship of the Treasuries of Light, but clearly, Etenesh was channeling some divine aspect. Didn’t you see the way reality shifted and bent around her? The shift in her mind? You ask about tactics and reactivity- is it so strange that an aspect of God would be fearless and ready to take every advantage?”

“God… has two sets of black and gold wings, bird claws, and is… well equipped for motherhood.”

“Your literalism never fails to surprise me, Mr. Wells.” Truth controlled a jerk and subtly gestured toward his ears. Merkovah microscopically shrugged, and Truth nodded. He respected that kind of caution.

“So?”

“So this aspect of God does, yes. Remember what I said about contradictory information?”

“Ah. Right.”

“It’s also why the Orthodoxy not only tolerates the cults but quietly cooperates with them. We know they aren’t being heretical, even if we don’t agree that this is what should be focused on.”

“Right. So, that was clearly extremely effective for her, and she’s… technically not even an initiate. She’s getting initiated now. So why doesn’t everyone just channel some aspect of God?” Merkovah almost collapsed out of his good chair, pounding his chest to stop coughing.

“Young man! Really, young man! Do you think this is easy? Even within a mystery cult, there aren’t many that could do such a thing. Some years, it might only be the most senior or devout of their cult, just one or two people out of thousands. And those thousands are among the most pious of the very pious Kingdom of Siphios. Jember has been in his cult for three years now, and he couldn’t manage a hint of what Etenesh did.”

“Is… she going to stick that way? I saw the wings and claws vanish, but-”

“Like ‘em top heavy, do you?”

“Looked balanced to me.”

“Honestly, after generations of students, I trained myself not to notice. Just better for everyone, really.”

“How is your wife?”

“Oh, thriving, thriving.” Merkovah beamed at Truth and refused to elaborate. Truth knew a losing battle when he saw it and shifted back.

“So? Is she? Going to turn back?”

“I would expect so, mostly. Some aspects may stay, either mental or physical, though I wouldn’t expect too much. It puts an immense strain on the body, mind, and soul. A bare initiate like Etenesh, well, it won’t be much, if anything, that sticks.” Merkovah shrugged.

“Think of it like this- you practice the Meditations to make you more real than the local reality. You spend hours on it, more or less daily. You are slowly accumulating local superreality, acclimatizing to it. It becomes your natural condition.” Truth nodded.

“Etenesh just had that superreality imposed on her from on high. It’s not her “normal.” She can’t tolerate it for long. You will note that for most of the battle, there were only minor… yes, yes, hohoho. MINOR physical changes compared to growing wings and claws!”

Truth thought it over. It sort of explained why Alemu had barely touched her, and the spells that did hit weren’t crippling or fatal.

She had pushed him to use his talismans and charms hard and fast, while conserving her own cosmic energy. She had controlled the battlefield. And when an opportunity came, she took it at once. Brutally so. Not exactly how he would have run the battle but… no complaints. It was good.

He thought about it a bit longer, then asked, “She has been planning this since the poisoning, hasn’t she? That’s why she was doing the ritual purification all week.”

“Longer than that- her eyes started turning ocher weeks ago. She probably thought she would do the transformation at an initiatory ritual. I knew she had been quietly looking for a sacrifice.”

“Speaking of-”

“Yes, Alemu is definitely in Hell, and his death is definitely a sacrifice. Allowable under Cannon law as he can be said to have consented to be sacrificed when he agreed to the terms of the duel. The freely given life and soul of a pious man? Quite the sacrifice. The Cult will be unbearable.”

“Wait, what? How is condemning his soul to Hell an act of piety?”

“The tortures of Hell are called “eternal” because, from the perspective of the damned, they are. From God’s perspective, however, that divine spark, their essential essence, remains within his command. God has not only lost nothing, but the sacrifice volunteered for an eternity of suffering to glorify the Divine Chariot.”

Truth just nodded. That sounded nuts to him, but he knew Merkovah would react poorly to his arguing the point. They grabbed a carpet back to Nag Hamadi, traveling in silence. Merkovah was gloating, and Truth was having a moment.

He didn’t have to look after Etenesh. He wanted to. He really liked the idea of being her protector. The strong man in her life. But she didn’t need him to be. She was entirely capable of looking after herself.

She was probably better at it than he was, all things considered. She was highly educated, with a large, supportive family, wealthy (by Truth’s definition, if not Harban’s,) a very skilled ritualist, and apparently a more than competent solo combatant. She would have an astonishing career in academia or the Temple, assuming the world didn’t end.

Etenesh didn’t need looking after. In fact, she already was looking after herself. Truth didn’t realize it, but he was smiling so much tears formed in the corner of his eyes.

Etenesh didn’t need to be saved. She could look after herself. She was someone he could trust his back to. Who would feed him even if he was crippled. Someone, at long last, who could look out for him.

Late that night, there was a knock on Truth’s cell. Etenesh was there. Her body had slimmed, and her long straight hair kinked and started flying wild again. The fire in her eyes burned all the brighter. “I came back to you.”

“You came back to me.”