by Nick Kyme
‘I’m not ashamed to say I ran. I ran, soiled and bleeding, for safety. I ran like all the daemons of legend were after me and all the time I was hearing the awful sound of people dying, the wet sound of flesh splitting open and the stench of voided bowels and opened bellies. I can’t remember anything much of my flight, just random flashes of dead bodies and screams of pain. I ran until I couldn’t run any more, and then I crawled through the mud until I lost consciousness. When I woke, which I was surprised I did at all, I saw it was dark. Pyres had been lit and the victory chants of the thunder warriors drifted over the killing field.
‘Havuleq’s army had been destroyed. Not routed or put to flight. Destroyed. In less than an hour, fifty thousand men and women had been killed. I think I knew even then that I was the only survivor. I wept beneath the moonlight and as I lay there bleeding to death in agony, I thought of how pointless my life had been. The heartbreak and ruin I’d visited upon others in my reckless pursuit of hedonism and self-interest. I wept for my family and myself and that was when I realised I wasn’t alone.’
‘Who was with you?’ asked Revelation.
‘The power of the divine,’ said Uriah. ‘I looked up and saw a golden face above me, a face of such radiance and perfection that my tears were no longer shed for pain, but for beauty. Light surrounded this figure and I averted my eyes for fear I’d be blinded. I’d been in pain, but now that pain was gone and I knew I was seeing the face of the divine. I couldn’t describe that face to you, not with all the poetic images in the world at my disposal, but it was the most exquisite thing I had ever seen.
‘I felt myself lifted up and I thought that this was the end for me. And then the face spoke to me, and I knew I was destined to live.’
‘What did this face say to you?’ asked Revelation.
Uriah smiled. ‘He said, “Why do you deny me? Accept me and you will know that I am the only truth and the only way”.’
‘Did you reply?’
‘I couldn’t,’ said Uriah. ‘To utter any words would have been base. In any case, my tongue was quite stilled by the awesome vision of god.’
‘What made you think it was god? Did you not hear what I said earlier about the brain’s ability to perceive what it wants to? You were a dying man on a battlefield, surrounded by your dead comrades and you were having an epiphany of the futility of the life you had led. Surely you can think of another explanation for this vision, Uriah, a more likely explanation that does not require the supernatural?’
‘I need no other explanation,’ said Uriah, firmly. ‘You may be wise in many things, Revelation, but you cannot know what goes on in my own mind. I heard the voice of god and saw His face. He bore me up and set me into a deep slumber, and when I awoke, my wounds were healed.’
Uriah turned his head so that Revelation could see the long scar on the back of his neck. ‘A piece of bone shrapnel had been embedded in my skull, barely a centimetre from severing my spinal cord. I was alone on the battlefield and I decided to return to the land of my birth, but when I returned I found my family home in ruins. The townsfolk told me that Scandian raiders from the north had heard of my family’s wealth and come south in search of plunder. They killed my brother then violated my mother and sister in front of my father to force him to tell them where he hid his treasures. They couldn’t know my father had a weak heart and he died before they could learn his secrets. I found my home in ruins and my family little more than bleached cadavers.’
‘I am sorry to hear of your loss,’ said Revelation. ‘If it is any consolation, the Scandians would not accept Unity and were wiped out three decades ago.’
‘I know, but I do not revel in death any more,’ said Uriah. ‘The men who killed my family will have been judged by god and that is justice enough for me.’
‘That is noble of you,’ said Revelation, real admiration in his voice.
‘I took a few keepsakes from the ruins and made my way to the nearest settlement, thinking I’d get blind drunk and then try to figure out what to do with my life. I was halfway there when I saw the Church of the Lightning Stone and knew I had found my purpose in life. I had spent my life until that point living only for myself, but when I saw the spire of the church I knew that god had a purpose for me. I should have died at Gaduare, but I was saved for a reason.’
‘And what reason was that?’
‘To serve god,’ said Uriah. ‘To bring His word to the people.’
‘And that’s what you’ve been doing here?’
Uriah nodded. ‘It’s what I’ve been trying to do, but the Emperor’s promulgators traverse the globe with his message of reason and the refutation of gods and the supernatural. I assume that is why you are here and why none of my congregation has come to the church tonight.’
‘You are correct,’ said Revelation. ‘In a manner of speaking. I have come to try and convince you of the error of your ways, to learn of you and to show you that there is no need for any divine powers to guide humanity. This is the last church on Terra and it falls to me to offer you this chance to embrace the new way willingly.’
‘Or?’
Revelation shook his head. ‘There is no “or”, Uriah. Come, let us go back out into the church as we talk, I want to instruct you of all that belief in gods has done for humanity down the ages, the bloodshed, the horror and the persecution. I will tell you of this and you will see how damaging such belief is.’
‘And then what? You’ll be on your way?’
‘We both know that’s not what’s going to happen, don’t we?’
‘Yes,’ said Uriah, draining the last of his drink. ‘We do.’
‘LET ME TELL you a story that happened many thousands of years ago,’ said Revelation.
They walked along the north transept of the church, coming to a set of spiral stairs that led to the upper cloisters. Revelation followed after Uriah, talking as he climbed. ‘It is a story of how a herd of gene-bred livestock caused the death of over nine hundred people.’
‘Did they stampede?’ asked Uriah.
‘No, it was a handful of half-starved creatures that escaped from their paddocks outside Xozer, a once-great city of the Nordafrik Conclaves.’
They reached the top of the stairs and began walking along the cloister, its confined walls dark and cold. Dust lay thick on the stone-flagged floor and a handful of thick candles that Uriah could not remember lighting guttered in iron sconces.
‘Xozer? I’ve been there,’ said Uriah. ‘At least I saw what my guide told me were its ruins.’
‘Quite possibly. Anyway, these hungry animals walked through a building holy to one of the many cults that called Xozer home. This cult, which was known as the Xozerites, believed that gene-bred meat was an affront to their god and they blamed a rival sect known as the Upashtar for the defilement. The Xozerites went on a rampage, stabbing and clubbing any Upashtar they could find. Of course, the Upashtar retaliated and rioting spread throughout the city and left close to a thousand people dead.’
‘Is there a point to that story?’ said Uriah, when Revelation did not continue.
‘Absolutely, it tells a universal tale and typifies religious behaviour that has been recurring since the beginning of human history.’
‘A slightly far-fetched example, Revelation. One freakish story cannot serve as a proof that belief in the divine is a bad thing. Such belief is the bedrock of moral order. It gives people the character they need to get through life. Without guidance from above, the world would descend into anarchy.’
‘Sadly, millions once held that view, Uriah, but that old truism just isn’t true. The record of human experience shows that where religion is strong, it causes cruelty. Intense beliefs produce intense hostility. Only when faith loses its force can a society hope to become humane.’
‘I don’t believe that,’ said Uriah, stopping by one of the arches in the cloister and looking down onto the nave. Dust swirled across the floor, blown by the storm winds chasing around the lonely church. �
�My holy book gives instruction on how to live a good life. It has lessons humanity needs.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Revelation. ‘I have read your holy book and much of it is bloody and vengeful. Would you live your life literally by its commandments, or do you view the people who populate its pages as exemplars of proper behaviour? Either way, I suspect the morals espoused would be horrifying to most people.’
Uriah shook his head. ‘You’re missing the point, Revelation. Much of the text is not meant to be taken literally, it is symbolic or allegorical.’
Revelation snapped his fingers. ‘That’s exactly my point. You pick and choose which bits of your book to take literally and which to read as symbolic, and that choosing is a matter of personal decision, not divinity. Trust me, in ages past, a frightening number of people took their holy books absolutely literally, causing untold misery and death because they truly believed the words they read. The history of religion is a horror story, Uriah, and if you doubt it, just look at what humanity has done in the name of their gods over the millennia. Thousands of years ago, a bloody theocracy that venerated a feathered-serpent god rose in the Mayan jungles. To appease this vile god, its priests drowned maidens in sacred wells and cut out the hearts of children. They believed this serpent god had an earthly counterpart and the temple builders drove the first pile through a maiden’s body to pacify this non-existent creature.’
Uriah turned to Revelation in horror and said, ‘You can’t seriously compare my religion to such heathen barbarism?’
‘Can’t I?’ countered Revelation. ‘In the name of your religion, a holy man launched a war with the battle cry of “Deus Vult”, which means “god wills it” in one of the ancient tongues of Old Earth. His warriors were charged with destroying enemies in a far-off kingdom, but first they fell upon those in their own lands who opposed the war. Thousands were dragged from their homes and hacked to death or burned alive. Then, satisfied their homeland was secure, the zealous legions plundered their way thousands of miles to the holy city they were to liberate. Upon reaching it, they killed every inhabitant to “purify” the symbolic city of taint. I remember one of their leaders saying that he rode in blood up to the knees and even to his horse’s bridle, by the just and marvellous judgement of god.’
‘That is ancient history,’ said Uriah. ‘You cannot vouchsafe the truth of events so lost in the mists of time.’
‘If it were one event, I might agree with you,’ replied Revelation, ‘but just a hundred or so years later, another holy man declared war on a sect of his own church. His warriors laid siege to the sect’s stronghold in ancient Franc, and when the city fell his generals asked their leader how they might tell the faithful from the traitor among the captives. This man, who followed your god, ordered the warriors to “Kill them all. God will know His own”. Nearly twenty thousand men, women and children were slaughtered. Worst of all, the hunt for any that had escaped the siege led to the establishment of an organisation known as the Inquisition, a dreadful, monstrous plague of hysteria that gave its agents free rein to stretch, burn, pierce and break their victims on fiendish pain machines to force them to confess to disbelief and identify fellow transgressors. Later, with most of their enemies hunted down and killed, the Inquisition shifted its focus to wychcraft, and priests tortured untold thousands of women into confessing that they engaged in unnatural acts with daemons. They were then burned or hanged for their confessions and this hysteria raged for three centuries in a dozen nations, a madness that saw whole towns exterminated and over a hundred thousand dead.’
‘You pick the most extreme examples from the past, Revelation,’ said Uriah, struggling to maintain his composure in the face of such tales of murder and bloodshed. ‘Times have moved on and humanity no longer behaves in such ways to one another.’
‘If you believe that then you have been shut away in this draughty church for far too long, Uriah,’ said Revelation. ‘You must have heard of Cardinal Tang, a mass-murdering ethnarch who practised a crude form of eugenics. His bloody pogroms and death camps saw millions dead in the Yndonesic Bloc. He died less than thirty years ago after seeking to return the world to a pre-technological age, emulating the Inquisition’s burning of scientists, mathematicians and philosophers who contradicted the church’s view on cosmology.’
Uriah could stand no more and walked towards the stairs at the far end of the cloister that led down into the narthex. ‘You fixate on the blood and death, Revelation. You forget all the good that can be achieved through faith.’
‘If you think religion is a force for good, Uriah, then you’re not seeing the superstitious savagery that pervades the history of our world,’ said Revelation. ‘It’s true that just before the descent of Old Night, religion gradually lost its power over life, but like the worst kind of poison, it lingered and fostered division amongst the people of the world that endured. Without belief in gods, divisions blur with passing ages; new generations adapt to new times, mingle, intermarry and forget ancient wounds. It is only belief in gods and divine entities that keep them alien to one another, and anything that divides people breeds inhumanity. Religion is the canker in mankind’s heart that serves such an ugly purpose.’
‘Enough!’ snapped Uriah. ‘I have heard enough. Yes, people have done terrible things to one another in the name of their gods, but they have done terrible things to one another without the recourse to their beliefs. An acceptance of gods and an afterlife is a vital part of what makes us who we are. If you take that away from humanity, what do you suggest takes its place? In my many years as a priest I have ministered to many dying people, and the emotional benefits of religion’s power to console them and those left behind cannot be underestimated.’
‘There is a flaw in your logic, Uriah,’ said Revelation. ‘Religion’s power to console gives it absolutely no more credence or validity. It might very well be a comfort to a dying man to believe that he will go to some bountiful paradise of endless joy, but even if he dies with a wonderful smile on his face, it means nothing in the grand scheme of things as far as the truth of the matter is concerned.’
‘Maybe not, but when my time comes, I will die with my god’s name on my lips.’
‘Are you afraid to die, Uriah?’ asked Revelation.
‘No.’
‘Truly?’
‘Truly,’ said Uriah. ‘I have my share of sins, but I have spent my life in the service of my god and I believe that I have served Him faithfully and well.’
‘So why is it then, when you go to these people who are dying and clinging to their beliefs that they don’t welcome the end of their life? Surely the gathered family and friends should be of good cheer and should celebrate their relative’s passing? After all, if eternal paradise awaits on the other side, why are they not filled with gleeful anticipation? Could it be that, in their heart of hearts, they don’t really believe it?’
Uriah turned away and made his way down the narthex stairs, his anger and frustration giving him force of pace that quite outweighed the stiffness in his limbs. A cold wind blew in from the outer doors and he could hear the mutter of voices and the scrape of metal on metal from outside. The narthex of the Church of the Lightning Stone was an austere place, stone walls with niches in which sat statues of various saints that had passed this way in the thousands of years the church had stood. A swaying candelabra, empty of candles, hung from the roof, but it had been many years since Uriah had been able to climb the stepladder in the store room to replace them.
He pushed open the door to the church and walked stiffly down the nave towards the altar. Four of the six candles he had lit there had gone out and the fifth guttered and died in the wind that entered with him.
The lone candle burned beside the clock and Uriah made his way towards it as he heard Revelation enter the church behind him. Uriah reached the altar and lowered himself to a kneeling position with some difficulty.
He bowed his head before the altar and clasped his hands together.
&
nbsp; ‘The Lord of Mankind is the Light and the Way, and all His actions are for the benefit of mankind, which is His people. So it is taught in the holy words of our order, and above all things, god will protect…’
‘There’s no one there to hear you,’ said Revelation from behind him.
‘I don’t care what you say any more. You have come here to do what you feel you need to do and I’ll not buttress your ego and self-righteousness by playing along any longer. So just end this charade.’
‘As you wish,’ said Revelation. ‘No more games.’
A golden light built behind Uriah and he saw his shadow thrown out onto the graven surface of the altar. The pearlescent hands of the clock shimmered in the reflected light and the ebony face gleamed.
Where once the church had been gloomy and filled with shadows, it was now a place of light.
Uriah pulled himself to his feet and turned to see a wondrous figure standing before him, towering and magnificent, clad in golden armour fashioned with love and the greatest skill, every plate embossed with thunderbolts and eagles.
Gone was Revelation, and in his place was a towering warrior of exquisite splendour, an exemplar of all that was regal and inspirational in humanity. The armour bulked his form out beyond measure and Uriah felt tears spilling from his eyes as he realised he had seen this breathtakingly, achingly perfect face once before.
On the killing fields of Gaduare.
‘You…’ breathed Uriah, stumbling back and collapsing onto his haunches. Pain shot through his hip and pelvis, but he barely felt it.
