The Lord Ah-Ren will punish those who do not know Him, and He will exalt those who worship Him. The worst is appointed for those who knew Him but forsook Him; for the apostate, the Lord Ah-Ren has reserved a great portion of His hatred. It would be better if they took their own lives before the wrath of the Lord is visited upon them.
-Gospel of Lucence, Tract 41, Lines 16-20
The Everswamp
Three days had passed since they had become thirteen believers in all. Those weaker in the faith had already taken to bickering quietly among themselves and the strong were not much better, wallowing in their private silences. No one dared question their faith, though, nor their mission, or at least not aloud.
The green-gray light grew sickening. The rotting stench of the bog laid its hooks in Beam’s nose, clinging there, and yet she could never quite get used to it. Long, muscular shadows stalked them from under the murky surface. She was too afraid to say anything about what she saw down there. It was as if speaking it would make it more real somehow, more dangerous.
“I’ll take over watch now, my lady,” said Glimmer, rising from her sleep. “You get some rest.”
Beam wanted to protest politely, but she had not even this left in her. “Thank you,” she said, and handed over the oars to her second convert gently.
She might have declined under better circumstances, but even with the glut of venison from their miraculous hunt, she was still weak with hunger. She ate and ate of the meat and she was still sick from craving more. Something different. Despite the humidity of the bog, her skin was growing dry and scaly at the elbows, and she was always cold, even layered in her warmest clothes. The bones in her wrists and ankles were more pronounced. It was nothing compared to her youngest disciple, Aurora; the teenage girl was wasting away with the jagged cheekbones and sagging face of a much older woman.
Soon it would all be over. Ah-Ren would deliver them from this suffering. Beam was sure of it—she had not broken the faith.
She reclined in the back of the boat. The odor of the place, her thirst, and her gnawing hunger aside, she found some lullabying comfort in the rhythmic motion of the boat through the water. Her eyes eased shut.
For a blissful moment, she forgot all about their predicament, the arduous journey behind and ahead of them, and she forgot about the Gospel of Lucence and what she’d done. What had to be done.
“We’re well past the halfway point now. I can see it. The end. Can you see it?” said Hjarsant.
Beam picked up her head. “What?” Dusk had fallen around her, but a shaft of setting sunlight still knifed through the dense canopy, enough to illuminate a mound of dry land that had swollen up from the surface of the water like a pregnant belly. “Thank you, Glint.”
“Don’t call me that. I’m not special anymore.”
The sound of metal scraping stone filled her ears. Familiar. The boat took a sharp turn around a bulging tree trunk and was set to come ashore on the new little crest of camping ground when Beam focused her vision and realized it was not land after all, but rather a pile of bloated corpses. Corpses all the way down.
Their eyes were all hollow of their souls, each staring straight ahead wherever they lay. Some blue. Some green. All glossed over in a milky film of white never to blink again.
Two eyes were visible near the front of the mound, big, brown, innocent eyes like a deer’s. They looked up at Beam.
“No!”
She jerked awake.
Glimmer looked over her shoulder at Beam, turning her head slowly with great care, like someone trying gingerly to take a bone away from a dog. In the past, Glimmer would have fawned over Beam at a moment like this, dropping everything to tend to her—Glimmer was a goodhearted young woman—but all she said was, “Another bad dream?” All Beam did was nod. “This place will do that to a person.”
“But we have not broken the faith,” said Beam, and it felt like a lie when she said it. “Have we?”
“Oh, no, Lady Beam!” “Never!” “No, I swear it!” “I haven’t! I never will!” All her disciples shook their heads fervently, swearing to the Lord Ah-Ren that they never lost faith even for a moment. Doubt was a poison, and in the Everswamp, it was everywhere. It was in the fog that glided over the shallow dark. It was in the stench they breathed.
“I swear I’ve kept the faith,” said Glimmer. When she met Beam’s gaze again, she had tears in her eyes. “You believe me. Don’t you, Lady Beam? You must believe me!”
“You are a good disciple,” Beam answered her. “This will all be over soon. I’m sure of it. Soon, we’ll be where we were meant to be.” Glimmer nodded, and a single tear rolled down her cheek, but she didn’t so much as blink. She didn’t seem to take much comfort from these words, either. She just turned away and went back to her duty keeping watch for gators and other hazards.
Luster rowed the boat in the seat ahead of her. He hadn’t turned back once this whole time.
***
More days passed in the Everswamp. Beam lost track of the time. They had surely been in the bog too long by now, but by how much they’d underestimated the journey, she wasn’t sure. All she knew was that the canopy was thickening. The light was thinning. The air was dense and wet, and even breathing had become noticeably difficult.
The venison was gone. Every morsel of meat was eaten, the bones sucked clean. The meat had been plentiful, but it was too lean to sustain them—it was Lambent who first brought this to the attention of the group. Or perhaps he said what everyone had been thinking but too afraid to admit. “We’re fat-starved,” were his words. “We won’t last long this way.”
Even with a thousand dead deer at their disposal, they would starve to death on a diet of lean meat alone.
This was the cause of Beam’s stubborn hunger that never seemed sated. It was why her hair had started to fall out, why her skin and eyes were dry, why she was inconsolably cold at all hours of the day. It was why everyone in the flock had to stop and relieve themselves over the side of the boat at all hours of the day, their only food passing right through them as water. It was degrading. Revolting. This was what their lives had become.
And it soon it would be deadly.
“Lady Beam,” Glimmer murmured. “I cannot... row any longer...” Her eyes were half-lit, in and out of sleep even as she sat up. “Please... May I rest?”
“Rest, Glimmer,” said Beam. It took effort to shift seats and take up the rowing position. Glimmer, weak as she was, collapsed into the back of the boat with a muffled thump. The water sloshed around their boat from the sudden motion.
Luster was already asleep; Glimmer had taken over for him earlier that day, insisted he get some rest. He never asked for a break, only took one when it was offered to him. He said practically nothing to anyone anymore. He had trouble even looking at Beam, ever since what happened on Urgaul.
Ever since she and the others did what needed to be done.
‘You spared the lives of your flock, Beam,’ said the Voice. It was Ah-Ren speaking from within her mind. ‘Were it not for your faith, you all would have been dead already. Your flock is still alive now because of you.’
I know this, Lord Ah-Ren, she answered Him. But at what cost?
There was no answer.
After rowing for a while in Glimmer’s stead, Beam began to lose her wakefulness, too. Her head lolled on her shoulders—when it fell, she picked her head up, opened her eyes and tried to keep them open. She bit her lip to keep herself awake. Bit it again, and tasted blood this time. Even this trick stopped working after a while. She fell in and out of sleep, rowing and then not, and she had no clue how much time had passed, be it hours or only a few moments, trapped in a cycle of dozing off and starting awake that suspended the passage of time. It could have been a day and she would have believed it. It could have been a moment or two.
In her fragments of sleep, she dreamed. She knew it was a dream this time. Even as her sleeping thoughts and her waking ones bled together like a never-ending dusk, she had enough sense this time to recognize what was real and what wasn’t.
She dreamed the cavalcade of boats was rowing through the pitch black swamp in the dead of night. The fireflies were back, hovering two by two over the dark water, and if she squinted just right, she could make them out for what they truly were—glowing yellow eyes, countless humanoid figures watching them, glowing yellow gator eyes with cold black slits for pupils.
“It’s just a dream,” she murmured. “Just a dream.”
“Is it?” one of them asked.
When she blinked, the dark remained, night truly had fallen, and all but one pair of eyes had vanished. One pair continued to watch her from between two willows, buried up to the bridge of the nose in bog water. Beam opened her mouth to say something; the figure silently retreated to the depths of the swamp. The glow dissipated. There was nothing to call her flock’s attention to even if she wanted.
But she didn’t want to frighten them any more than they already were. She kept it to herself. She swallowed it, like she’d been made to swallow the evil of this place since their arrival.
She could no longer pretend to have faith where her fear was. The fear inside her grew like a cancer, pressing up against he insides of her ribcage like it was about to burst. Where her faith had been, there was only fear.
They were thirteen in all. To call them all believers might have been a stretch of the truth.
I have not broken the faith, Ah-Ren, she said to her Lord. And I will not. If she could convince her god of it, surely she could convince herself, too.
***
More days passed. There was no end to the bog. Beam remembered the dark jokes about folk who strayed into the swamp and never returned, the Everswamp, the one that went on forever and ever. She was starting to believe the rumor now.
“Oh, Lord Ah-Ren,” Ray groaned. “Deliver us.” The old woman, like many of the other disciples, had taken to praying out in the open, somber prayers for salvation sent up through the bog’s canopy in the hopes that it would reach their Lord. All they had left was prayer. They were powerless now.
“Aurora, wake up,” said Shine. She patted the teenage girl’s face, shaking her shoulders. “Aurora... You’ve been sleeping too long.” All the girl could muster was a weak, mumbling moan. “Come now, Aurora... Sit up with me.”
Beam couldn’t bear to watch the girl’s suffering. In the back of the boat, she closed her eyes against the horror.
‘Your faith can deliver you again,’ said the Voice. ‘You have done it once before.’
Lord, I am here, Beam answered. What? What have I done?
‘You have proven yourself to Me in tests of faith numerous times since first we met. You forsook your only child, a babe, for My sake. You showed My power over death by healing your first disciple, and you showed My terrible might by killing those vermin in the house of drink. You forsook the needs of your own body to prove you had the strength to make this journey. You even took the life of an unbeliever in your midst, that his blood might be spilt and cleanse your flock of its iniquity.’
And what can I now do, Lord Ah-Ren?
‘The fourth line of the ninth tract contains your answer. My holy Word is immutable. Forget not the fruits of faith, nor the consequences of its abandonment.’
Beam wracked her starving mind to conjure up the line from the Gospel of Lucence. What was it? Ninth tract, fourth line... She knew the first half of the Gospel by heart now, but sifting through her memories for this information was like trying to read by moonlight. It was slow-going, imprecise.
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Ninth tract... fourth line... The ninth tract concerned the Lord’s means of providing for His disciples in times of hardship. ‘In the hands of the Lord Ah-Ren, one fish is as a fisherman’s haul; one fowl is as a flock; one fruit is as an orchard. His believers even partake of the leaves of trees and do not die, for the Lord can cause a man to be filled with the fullness of life. Submit to the One True God and you will be sated all your days.’
These and other lines from the ninth tract surfaced in her mind’s eye. Would that she and her flock had the sort of faith these lines described—then they would never have suffered the way they did. Doubt was in all of them now, in their very blood. It pulsed in their hearts and behind their eyes. Just under their fragile skin.
Fourth line... of the ninth tract... Then she remembered. ‘When you and the believers in your midst suffer hardship, be it famine or drought, war or pestilence, take an animal that is ritually clean to the top of a tall hill. Give the animal a clean death and gather its blood in a bowl. Touch the blood to your foreheads and cook the animal in the ritual manner, after the ways of your forefathers. Eat of the beast and the Lord Ah-Ren will grant you favor for a moon.’
They needed a ritual animal. This sort of ritual killing was modeled after the ancient Stonish ways, when the peoples of Dridon, Zan Vayonado, and Grackenwell were all one, and when they worshiped an archaic version of the Dridic god Triad. Their ceremonies involved careful, methodic, ritualized killings of certain animals deemed clean or unclean, with specific instructions on what to do with the blood and the flesh thereafter. If only Beam had thought of this tract on Urgaul, when they hunted that deer. Perhaps they would have reached dry land by now.
It didn’t matter. All they needed was to find an animal for the slaughter and some dry land to kill and cook it. The Lord Ah-Ren revealed it to her Himself—she knew this was the way out of their plight, and her faith was revitalized by the promise alone.
But she needed to be sure.
Beam opened her eyes. It took great effort to pick herself up from the cold floor of the boat, her bony arms shaking under her own weight. She fished through her bag for the Gospel of Lucence—it was so heavy she could barely lift it. It fell on the floor with a weighty thud and she cracked it open, flipping the gilded pages with her shaky hands. Ninth tract... Ninth tract...
“Lady Beam,” said Lambent. “I see... land up ahead...” She glanced up from the book, seeing a small island in the distance, framed by drooping ropes of willow and shrouded in shadow. It was tiny compared to Urgaul; there were no berry bushes or wild game in sight. It was barely enough room to tie their boats and erect their tents. “We must stop. Rest.”
“Why?” Ray shot back. Once a cheery, calming presence in the flock, starvation had made the old woman cantankerous. “We have no food. We should keep rowing. Shouldn’t we, Lady Beam?”
“We will die without rest.”
“We’ll die without food, and there’s none here! We should leave this place as quickly as we can!” Ray looked back at Beam in the rear of the cavalcade. “What would the Lord have us do? Ultimately, that is what we ought to do most of all.”
“We must stop,” Beam answered, searching the ninth tract. “Head for the island. I know what the Lord wants us to do now...” She found the line she sought. Read it to herself. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth, sobbing silently.
“Aurora,” Shine said again. “Get up. We must get up now! Aurora?”
***
“I say we do it,” said Ray. “It’s what the Lord commands of us.”
“We know that’s how you feel,” said Shine. Her eyes were dry and bloodshot from crying out what little water she had. Her voice was hoarse, cracking every time she spoke. “You don’t bother to examine your faith or how best to serve the Lord.”
“What did you just say to me, you little wench?”
“You accept the first thing that pops into your decrepit old mind!” Shine jabbed an accusatory finger at Lambent. “Him, too! He does the same!”
“I told you,” said Lambent, his mustache bristling, his voice already wavering, “I had no choice! How many times did I say that? I did what the Lord asked of me! That’s all!”
The others milled around the island, watching it all from a safe distance. They were the most quiet and obedient of all. Whatever Beam ordered, it would be done, no matter what the others decided.
“What if this is a test?” Shine asked. “A divine test of our character? What if He wants us to refuse?”
“That is blasphemy,” said Ray, sharp with contempt. “All you do is question! You second-guess the Lord Himself?”
“Never! I never said that! I want to understand the truth of His demands—”
“The truth is there in the book! It’s been spelled out for us in plain language! What more do you need?”
“This is just like Hjarsant all over again. Something about this feels wrong. I don’t think—”
“What you feel, and what you think, that’s all irrelevant now. Don’t you see that, stupid girl? We are being asked to take up the mantle of...” Out of breath, the old woman rested her hands on her knees. She waved a dismissive hand at Shine. “Oh, forget it. You’ve lost your way already. That much is clear.”
“I haven’t lost my way! I’m asking if this is a test by the Lord—He’s never commanded us to do anything like this. Not even with Hjarsant!”
“Well, what difference does it make? It’s what she would have wanted!”
“How can you possibly claim to know that?”
“Enough,” said Luster. He cut off their bickering with one word and a step between them. His eyes were dull, his mouth hanging open weakly, as if exhausted. “It doesn’t matter. What does Beam think of all this? We must do what she decides.” He looked at her for the first time in many days. Was that contempt in his eyes? Or was that just the lightless look of starvation? “Isn’t that right, Beam? That’s what we’ve all done since the beginning. I’ve been striving to repay my debt to the Lord all this time. We have no choice—what the Lord commands...” He sighed tiredly. “...let it be done.”
“Hear, hear,” Ray agreed. “What is it, Lady Beam? What is the Lord’s will? Tell us.” The old woman raised her brow expectantly, such a childlike, reverent expression for a crone her age, Beam thought.
“The word of the Lord is immutable,” said Beam feebly. She swayed in place on her unsteady legs. “He instructed us in His Gospel: ‘When you and the believers in your midst suffer hardship, be it famine or drought, war or pestilence, take a believer who is ritually clean to the top of a tall hill. Give her a clean death and gather her blood in a bowl. Touch the blood to your foreheads and cook the body in the ritual manner, after the ways of your forefathers. Eat of the believer and the Lord Ah-Ren will grant you favor for a moon.’”
“Her,” said Shine. “Her—did you hear that? Why would the Gospel say her instead of his?” She grabbed fistfuls of her thinning hair, as if holding on tight could keep her from going mad. “And I’ve read the book myself, mind you—it never said that! Never!”
Ray scoffed loudly, suddenly provoked back into the fray. “So you say the Gospel can be changed—that truth can be changed?”
“Is this truth? This is a person you speak of, not some animal! Her name is Aurora! You talk of cooking her body, eating her damn flesh! She’s just a maiden—”
“We are starving to death!” Now Ray’s voice cracked from the outburst. She almost lost her balance, but Glimmer helped her stay on her feet. “We are starving... and this poor girl, Ah-Ren rest her soul... she’s already gone. What is the harm in letting her give us strength to finish this journey? The Lord will raise her from the dead! The Lord will raise all believers from the dead when the time comes!”
“She’s not gone. I felt her breathe earlier today—”
“No, you thought you felt—”
“NO! I did! I felt her breathe!” It was Shine’s turn to hold the rapt attention of the whole flock. Even Beam felt like a spectator now, like all she could do was watch it all unfold. “I felt Aurora breathe earlier today. I know it. And whether she lives or dies, I won’t degrade this vessel that the Lord Ah-Ren has given me... by eating the flesh of a person. Of a friend.” Shine’s voice wavered, but her eyes were too dry to produce tears. “I would sooner die myself. And if this is truly the will of Ah-Ren... would you not ask yourself if this is a god worth worshiping?”
Several disciples gasped. To Beam’s surprise, Ray did not; she looked stunned silent. After a while, she looked at Beam suspensefully again and asked, “What say you, Lady Beam? Is she right? What is your wisdom? Ought we do as the Gospel of Lucence says?”
“No,” said Beam. The word shocked her flock as they hadn’t been since they learned of Hjarsant’s fate. “Shine is right. This... This couldn’t possibly be the will of Ah-Ren. This is not the god who saved me from the brothel in Claeloch!”
Now the flock had newfound energy, and the disciples gossiped among themselves as though they weren’t starving. The rush of the moment was palpable. At any moment, Beam feared she would be stricken down by the wrath of Ah-Ren for disobeying His word. Or would she? This couldn’t have been the will of Ah-Ren; perhaps it was Ah-Ren who yet protected her, and it was the evil spirit of the Everswamp that tried to trick her out of her faith.
She tried to lean on her own understanding that had grown frail with disuse, and it was like trying to stand in a drunken stupor.
“If this is not the will of Ah-Ren,” said Lambent fearfully, “then what have we been praying to this whole time?”
Beam had no answer for him. The flock went silent.
The prophetess walked away from the group and hobbled over to Aurora, who was laid out on a bedroll at the center of the small island. Her hands were folded over her sunken stomach like she was only sleeping. But her gaunt face and neck, her chapped lips, the way her flesh was loose around bones and joints, the way her skin drooped like Ray’s did even though she was but a girl—it was plain to see that Aurora would die soon, if she weren’t dead already. Beam collapsed to her knees, watched closely for the rise and fall of Aurora’s chest. She put an ear up to the girl’s lips. There were no signs of life.
It was Luster who finally broke the silence. “So we killed Hjarsant for nothing,” he said calmly. Beam was horrified to meet his gaze—it broke her heart. It was contempt she saw. Contempt for her, contempt for her faith. For everything they’d done in the name of her god. The people they’d lost. The man they killed and dumped into the swamp. The innocent maiden now at death’s door.
“I-I didn’t know,” she whimpered. “I swear it... I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know that it was wrong to kill a man?”
“He broke the faith! He might have tried to have his way with Glimmer!”
“Did he?”
“He might have! I didn’t want to, but the Lord—”
“You didn’t know that it’s wrong to eat the flesh of a dead comrade?”
“I was trying to do as I was told! I was keeping the faith! I haven’t done it yet, so why are you treating me like I have?”
Luster grimaced at her. He looked at her like she was filth, like something he scraped off the bottom of his boot onto a rock. “I don’t know you,” he said. “I never knew you.”
Beam’s eyes managed to mist over, despite her state. “No. Don’t say that. Please...”
“You’ve always been a stranger to me. I just never knew it until now.” He scoffed. “For all I know, I died at that waterfall. Perhaps the Trinitists were right. Perhaps I’m in the Hells as we speak.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way. Not anymore.” Beam scrambled to her feet, all her joints aching. “Please.” There was a lightness to her now, but not one that gave her grace or ease of movement; it was like a hollowness, like all her bones had been replaced with wood and her insides had been scooped out of her. Like her body could barely keep its shape without folding on itself. “Please, just listen. We can leave this place.”
“We’ve been here for a moon. Could be more. We’ll never leave this place. We’ll die here.”
“No! No, just listen to me. We can go back to Claeloch.” She took his hand gently and Luster let her. “The map shows a passage to the north—we’ll come out nowhere near Holcort, but it won’t matter. That doesn’t matter anymore. We’ll be on dry land, and we can hunt better food, and we’ll take our time going home. We’ll go back home to Claeloch and it can be the way it was before!”
Luster shook his head. “It can never be—”
“Yes! Aren’t you listening?! Yes, it can! I promise!” She took his hand then, squeezed it like she meant to crush it. “It can. You have to say it. You have to say that it can be like it was before.”
“You killed a man who begged for his life! How can I even look at you again?”
Beam shook her head. “No, it’s not... I... If we leave this place, we can leave it all behind us. We won’t speak of it ever again. I’ll burn the book. I’ll burn everything. We can be together, and we can be normal again! Please! Do you not hear me, Luster?”
“My name is Peadhar.” She squeezed his hand harder, but he pried it out of her grasp. “Don’t touch me! Leave me be.”
Beam collapsed again to her knees. She felt one of her joints pop painfully, but it didn’t matter. “Please... don’t do this. I beg you, Peadhar. Please.” He didn’t answer her. The rest of her disciples backed away slowly, creeping across the small island to put distance between her and themselves. “Please, Peadhar. I can make it right. I swear it. I’ll find a way. Please don’t leave me alone again!”
She caught a whiff of something then—a village on fire, the porcine smell of burning corpses. Every good thing she’d ever tasted in her life fell away from her memory. Where her hope had been, there was only despair.
“You are all alone, Beam,” said the Voice. It was loud and clear now, not reverberating in her mind, but spoken aloud into the open fog-laden air. “Even when surrounded, you are all alone, as ever. It is a shame that people make for such poor company.”
Water stirred at the edge of the small swell of land. Something rose up out of it.
“No,” Ray gasped.
“Get behind me,” Luster said, but only to some of the other disciples. He reached for the knife at his belt.
Hjarsant climbed up out of the water, two gators waddling at either side of him. His eyes were black. His neck was a grotesque wound of partly-coagulated blood that ran in red-black rivulets down his half-bared chest, his tunic torn.
“It’s Glint!” Lambent gasped.
“No,” said Ray. “Hjarsant. This evil place brought him back—a mockery of resurrection!”
“You both only guess at the truth, as you small creatures are wont to do,” said Hjarsant, but his voice was not his own. It was low, guttural, and each word had growling undertones. “Hjarsant is dead. I have made use of his body. I am the Lord Ah-Ren. Welcome, My disciples. The fruit of your faith is upon you.”