Phantom (18 page)

“The army that had invaded was far too large to fit in the city, of course, and with the reinforcements arriving with each train of supply wagons the endless sea of tents spread even farther out into the countryside, blanketing the hills and valleys all around. The trees for a goodly distance had all been stripped and used for firewood throughout the previous winter, leaving the landscape around the crown city looking lifeless and dead. The new grasses never grew beneath the teeming masses of men, the countless horses, and variety of wagons, so that it seemed that Galea had been turned to a sea of mud.

“From new units just arrived, men coming up from the Old World were formed into strike forces that were sent to attack other places, to spread the rule of the Imperial Order, to establish dominion. It seemed that there was an endless supply of men to enslave the New World.

“I was working to exhaustion feeding all the officers, so I was frequently around the command personnel and often overheard invasion plans and reports of cities that had fallen, tallies of prisoners taken, accounts of the numbers of slaves sent back to the Old World. On occasion some of the more attractive women were brought back for the use of the men of rank. The eyes of these women were wild with fear of what was to become of them. I knew that their eyes would soon enough become dull with longing for the release of death. It all seemed to me one endless attack, one long endless savagery that showed no signs of ever ending.

“The city by then, of course, had been all but emptied of the people who once had called it home. Almost every male over fifteen had long ago been put to death and the handful who hadn’t had been sent off as slave labor. Many of the women—the ones too old or too young to be of use to the Order—had been put to death if they were in the way, but many
had simply been left to starve to death. They lived like rats in the dark crevices of the city. Last winter I saw droves of old women and little girls who looked like skeletons covered in a pale veneer of flesh begging for scraps of food. It broke my heart, but to feed them would only end in execution for them and for me. Still, if I could get away with it, I sometimes slipped them food—if there was any to be had.

“In the end it was as if the population of Galea’s crown city, hundreds of thousands of people, had for the most part been wiped from existence. What was once the heart of Galea is no more. It is now occupied by soldiers in the hundreds of thousands. The camp followers began setting up homes in the places long since plundered, simply taking over what was someone else’s. More people from the Old World began to drift up to take places and live in them as their own.

“The only Galean women left alive were for the most part slaves used by the soldiers as whores. After time many became pregnant and gave birth to children fathered by the soldiers of the Imperial Order. These offspring are being raised to be future zealots for the Order. Virtually the only Galean children left alive after the first year of occupation were the boys.

“Drilled endlessly in the ways of the Order, those boys became the Order. They had long since forgotten the ways of their parents or their homeland, or even common decency. They were now Imperial Order recruits—newly minted monsters.

“After months and months of training, groups of the older boys were sent to be the first wave of attackers against other cities. They were to be the flesh that dulled the swords of the heathens. They went eagerly.

“I had once thought that the brutes who are the Imperial Order were a distinctly different, savage breed of people, unlike the civilized people of the New World. After seeing how those boys changed and what they became, I realized that the people who are the Order are really no different than the rest of us, except in their beliefs and the ideas that motivate them. A crazy thought, perhaps, but it seems that through some mysterious mechanism anyone is susceptible to being beguiled into falling for the Order’s ways.”

Jebra shook her head in dismay. “I never really understood how such a thing could come about, how the officers could teach boys such dry
lessons, how they could lecture them that they must be selfless, that they must live a life of sacrifice for the good of others, and then, as if by magic, those boys would march off merrily singing songs, hoping to die in battle.”

“The premise is pretty simple, really,” Nicci said, offhandedly.

“Simple?” Jebra’s brow lifted with incredulity. “You can’t be serious.”

“Oh yes, simple.” Nicci descended the steps one at a time in a slow, measured manner as she spoke. “Both boys and girls in the Old World are taught the same things by the Fellowship of Order, and in the same basic manner.”

She came to a halt not far from Richard and loosely folded her arms as she sighed—not out of weariness, but rather with a weary cynicism. “Except that with them it’s started not all that long after they’re born. It begins with simple lessons, of course, but those lessons are expanded and reinforced over their entire lifetime. It’s not unusual to see pious old people sitting through the lectures given by brothers of the Fellowship of Order.

“Most all people are drawn toward ordered social structure and they yearn to know how they fit into the larger scheme of the universe. The Fellowship of Order provides them with a comprehensive and authoritative sense of structure—in other words, tells them the right way to think as well as a proper way to live their lives. But it’s most effective when started with the young. If a young mind is molded to the Order’s dogma then it usually becomes inflexible and fixed for life. As a result, any other way of thinking—the very ability to reason—generally withers and dies at a young age and is lost for life. When such a person is aged, they will still sit through the same basic lessons, still hang on every word.”

“Simple?” Jebra asked. “You said the premise is pretty simple?”

Nicci nodded. “The Order teaches that this world, the world of life, is finite. Life is fleeting. We are born, we live for a time, and we die. The afterlife, by contrast, is eternal. After all, we all know that people die but no one ever comes back from the dead; dead is forever. Therefore, it is the afterlife which is important.

“Around this core tenet, the Fellowship of Order ceaselessly drums into people the belief that one must earn their eternity in the glory of the
Creator’s light. This life is the means to earn that eternity—a test, in a way.”

Jebra blinked in disbelief. “But still, life is…I don’t know, it’s life. How can anything be more important than your own life?” She softened her skepticism with a smile. “Surely that isn’t going to convince people to the Order’s brutal ways, convince them to turn away from life.”

“Life?” With sudden menace in her glare, Nicci leaned down a little toward Jebra. “Don’t you care about your soul? Don’t you think that what happens to your very own soul for all eternity might be of serious and earnest concern to you?”

“Well, of course I, I…” Jebra fell mute.

As she straightened, Nicci shrugged with a mocking, dismissive gesture. “This life is finite, transitory, so, in the scheme of things, in contrast to an eternal afterlife, how important can a fleeting life in this miserable world be? What true purpose could this brief existence possibly have, other than to serve as a trial of the soul?”

Jebra looked uncomfortably dubious yet unwilling to challenge Nicci when she framed it in such a way.

“For that reason,” Nicci said, “sacrifice to any suffering, any want, any need of your fellow man is a humble recognition that this life is meaningless, a demonstration that you acknowledge eternity with the Creator in the next world to be the consequential concern. Yes? By sacrificing you are avowing that you do not value man’s realm over eternity, the Creator’s realm. Therefore, sacrifice is the price, the small price, the pittance, that you pay for your soul’s eternal glory. It’s your proof to the Creator that you are worthy of that eternity with Him.”

Richard was amazed to see how easily such a rationale—delivered by Nicci with confidence, command, and authority—intimidated Jebra into silence. While listening as Nicci towered over her, Jebra had occasionally glanced to the others, to Zedd, to Cara, to Shota, even to Ann and Nathan, but seeing none of them offering any objection or counterarguments, her shoulders began to hunch as if she wished she could disappear into a crack in the marble floor.

“If you confine your concerns to being happy in this life”—Nicci casually swept an arm out, indicating the world around her as she glided regally back and forth before them—“if you dare to revel in the senseless trivialities of this wretched world, this meaningless, brief existence, that
is a rejection of your all-important eternal next life, and thus a rejection of the Creator’s perfect plan for your soul.

“Who are you to question the Creator of all the universe? How dare you put your petty wishes for your insignificant, pathetic little life ahead of His grand purpose of preparing you for all of eternity?”

Nicci paused, folding her arms with a kind of deliberate care that implied a challenge. A lifetime of indoctrination gave her the ability to express the Order’s carefully crafted tenets with devastating precision. Seeing her standing there in her pink nightdress somehow only seemed to underscore her derision of the triviality of life. Richard remembered all too well Nicci delivering that very same message to him, only at the time she had been deadly serious. Jebra avoided Nicci’s piercing gaze, instead fixing her stare on her hands nested in her lap.

“To bring the ways of the Order to other people, Galea for example,” Nicci said as she resumed her pacing lecture, “many of the Order’s soldiers had to die.” She shrugged. “But that is the ultimate sacrifice—one’s life—in an effort to bring enlightenment to those who do not yet know how to follow the only right and true path to glory in the next world. If a person sacrifices their life in the struggle on behalf of the Order to bring salvation to backward, ignorant, and unimportant people, then they earn eternity with Him in the next world.”

Nicci lifted an arm, sheathed in the satiny, pink material of the nightdress, as if to reveal something magnificent but invisible standing right there before them. “Death is merely the doorway to that glorious eternity.”

She let the arm drop. “Because an individual life is unimportant in the scheme of things that really matter, it’s obvious that by torturing and killing individuals who resist, you are only helping to sway the masses of the unenlightened over to enlightenment—so you are bringing those masses salvation, serving a moral cause, bringing the Creator’s children home to His kingdom.”

Nicci’s expression turned as grim as her pretense had been. “People who are taught this from birth come to believe it with such blind zeal that they see anyone living in any manner other than according to the Order’s teachings—in other words failing to pay the rightful price of sacrifice in return for eternal salvation—as deserving of an eternity of unimaginable agony in the dark cold depths of the Keeper’s realm of the underworld, which is exactly what awaits them unless they change their ways.

“Very few people who grow up under this indoctrination have enough of their reasoning ability still intact to be able to think their way out of this bewitching circular trap—nor do they want to. To them, to rejoice in life, to live for themselves, is trading eternity for a brief and sinful frolic before a looming doom-without-end.

“Since they must forgo the enjoyment of this life, they are going to be only too quick to notice anyone who fails to sacrifice as they should, fails to live by the canons of the Fellowship of Order. Besides, recognition of sinfulness in others is deemed a virtue because it helps to direct those who neglect their moral duty to turn back to the path of salvation.”

Nicci leaned down toward Jebra and lowered her voice to a sinister hiss. “Much the same as killing nonbelievers is a virtue. Yes?”

Nicci straightened. “Followers of the Order develop an intense hatred for those who do not believe as they do. After all, the Order teaches that wicked sinners who refuse to repent are no less than Keeper’s disciples. Death is no more than such enemies of the righteous deserve.”

Nicci spread her arms in a forbidding gesture. “There can be no doubt about any of this since the Order’s teachings are, after all, merely the wishes of the Creator Himself, and thus divinely elicited truth.”

Jebra was now clearly too cowed to offer an argument.

Cara, on the other hand, was clearly not cowed. “Oh, really?” she said in an even, but contrary, tone. “I’m afraid that there’s one fly in the ointment. How do they know all this? I mean, how do they know that the afterlife is really anything at all like they portray it?”

She clasped her hands behind her back as she shrugged. “As far as I know, they haven’t visited the world of the dead and then returned. How would they know what it’s like beyond the veil?

“Our world is the world of life, so life is what’s important in this world. How dare they demean it by making our only life the price for something unknowable? How can they begin to claim that they know anything at all about the nature of other worlds? I mean, for all anyone really knows, the spirit world could be a mere transitory state as we slip into the nonexistence of death.

“For that matter, how would the Fellowship of Order know that these are the Creator’s wishes—or that He has any wishes at all?” Cara’s brow drew down. “How do they even know that Creation was brought about by a conscious mind in the form of some divine breed of king?”

Jebra looked relieved that someone else had finally objected.

Nicci smiled in a curious manner and raised an eyebrow. “There’s the trick of it.”

Without looking over, she lifted her arm back toward Ann, standing across the room in the shadows. “It’s the same method by which the Prelate and her Sisters of the Light know their version of the same gruel to be true. Prophecy, or the high priests, or some humble but deeply devout person has heard the intimate whispers of the divine, or has seen into a sacred vision He has sent them, or has been visited in dreams. There are even ancient texts that profess to have infallible knowledge of what is beyond the veil. Such lore is mostly a collection of the same kind of whispers and visions and dreams that in the distant past were set down as fact and have become ‘irrefutable’ simply because it is old.

“And how are we to verify the veracity of this testimony?” Nicci swept her arm out in a grand gesture. “Why, to question such things is the greatest sin of all: lack of faith!

“The very fact that the unknowable
is
unknowable is what they claim gives faith its virtue and makes it sacrosanct. After all, what would be the virtue in faith if that in which we have faith could be known? A person who can maintain absolute faith without any proof whatsoever must possess profound virtue. As a consequence, only those who take the leap of faith off the bedrock of the tangible into the emptiness of the imperceptible are righteous and worthy of an eternal reward.

“It’s as if you are told to leap from a cliff and have faith that you can fly, but you must not flap your arms because that would only betray a fundamental lack of faith and any lack of faith would infallibly insure that you would plummet to the ground, thus proving that a failure of faith is a personal flaw, and fatal.”

Nicci ran her fingers back into her blond hair, lifting it off her shoulders, and then, with a sigh, she let her arms drop. “The more difficult the teachings are to believe, the greater the required level of faith. Along with the commitment to a higher level of unquestioning faith comes a tighter bond to those who share that same faith, a greater sense of inclusion in the special group of the enlightened. Believers, because their beliefs are so manifestly mystic, become ever more estranged from the ‘unenlightened,’ from those who are suspect because they will not embrace faith. The term ‘nonbeliever’ becomes a commonly accepted form of condemnation,
demonizing anyone who chooses”—Nicci tapped a finger to her temple—“to stick to the use of reason.

“Faith itself, you see, is the key—the magic wand that they wave over the bubbling brew they have concocted to render it ‘self-evident.’”

Ann, despite the glare of contempt for a Sister of the Light-turned-traitor-to-the-cause, offered no argument. Richard thought it a rare choice on her part, and one that at that moment was particularly wise.

“There,” Nicci said, shaking a finger as she paced, barefoot, “there is the crack in the Order’s imposing tower of teachings. There is the fatal flaw at the center of all convictions contrived in the imagination of men. Such things in the end, even though they may be sincere, are nothing more solid than the elaborate product of whimsy and self-deception. In the end, without the rock of reality, an insane person who hears voices in their head is equally sincere and equally credible.

“That is why the Order vaunts the sanctity of faith and teaches that you must dismiss the wicked impulse to use your head, that you must instead abandon yourself to your feelings. Once you surrender your life to blind faith in their account of the afterlife, they claim that then, and only then, the doorway to eternity will magically open for you and you will know all.

“In other words, knowledge is to be gained only through rejection of everything that actually comprises knowledge.

“This is why the Order equates faith with holiness, and why its absence is deemed to be sinful. This is why even questioning faith is heretical.

“Without faith, you see, everything they teach unravels.

“And since faith is the indispensable glue that binds together their teetering tower of beliefs, faith eventually gives birth to brutality. Without brutality to enforce it, faith ends up being nothing more than a fanciful daydream, or a queen’s empty belief that no one will attack her throne, that no enemy will breach the borders, that no force can overthrow her defenders, if she merely forbids it.

“After all, I don’t need to threaten you to get you to see that the water in that fountain is wet or that the walls of this room are constructed from stone, but the Order must threaten people to make them believe that an eternity of being dead will be an eternal delight, but only if they do as they’re told in this life.”

As she glared into the still waters of the fountain, Richard thought that
Nicci’s blue eyes might turn that water to ice. The cold rage in those eyes was born of things she had seen in her life that he could not begin to imagine. On the dark and quiet evenings alone with her, the things she had been willing to confide in him were terrible enough.