The Trials of Empire, page 32
Claver joined a Jadran monastery. He foreswore his father’s inheritance in favour of poverty, even though the Jadran Order did not require such. His mother, who took her own life upon the news of her eldest son’s death, would die penniless.
The deaths of the members of Claver’s immediate family over the course of several years accelerated his piety. It was clear that the Jadrans were not severe enough for him. They observed too many saints’ days with lavish feasts; they were not celibate; they did not self-flagellate, though Claver did. He would make long, arduous pilgrimages through the beautiful pine forests of Guelich, and then in silence and solitude ferociously whip his own back with a length of leather cord. I watched as on one occasion the obenpatria, as well as several nuns and a physician, tended to a number of deep incisions across Claver’s shoulders.
He would spend days and sometimes weeks fasting. He shut himself away in his room, poring over the Neman Creed. He examined the books of Creus, the Histories, the parables of Vangrid. He would inspect old Draedist texts and write lengthy treatises rebutting their tenets, excoriating them, ridiculing them as heresy. He would expend a great deal of time and energy in proselytising to his fellow monks and nuns, expounding his theories, explaining why they were wrong to tolerate the heresies of Lorn.
One morning, his obenpatria, both concerned for Claver’s welfare and probably slightly frightened of him, tasked him with taking alms to the local poor. So it was that Claver returned to Imastadt, attended by several junior members of the Order and leading two mules.
There, in the centre of the town, he stopped. Ground had been broken on the construction of a new Sovan courthouse, and he regarded the builders as they moved about the scaffolding with abject contempt. He turned to those accompanying him, agitated. He gesticulated angrily to the building. A scuffle broke out. Baskets of vegetables were overturned into the mud. Claver slapped one of the monks, and the man collapsed to his knees, sobbing. The nuns reprimanded Claver sharply, but he took no notice of them. Eventually, several constables appeared and took him away.
The Jadrans had finally had their fill of Claver. He was expelled. It should have been the end of him. There and then. He should have been reduced to a hermit, a wandering madman left to rant at the squirrels in the forest until his back wounds became enpoxed. But the obenpatria of the Jadran Kloster in Imastadt was a kind and patient man. And besides, he too was not blind to the encroaching secularisation of the Empire. He was not impervious to the many generations of grievance inherited from the Neman Church. He could find a use for men like Claver; devout men, pious men – violent men. Claver was a tool in the right hands. It was just that his hands were not the right ones.
Letters were sent. I watched the trail of this correspondence make its way along the roads of the Empire like blood through an artery. And, a few weeks later – weeks in which Claver had spent fasting, self-harming, and studying the Creed – the response from the Church came back.
Claver was sent to Sova. But it was not an official of the Neman Church who greeted him. Instead, Claver had been invited to attend dinner with a pontificate from a fringe group of Nemans called the “Sons of Sova”. They met in an establishment known to host such groups, in the centre of the capital. Amongst the attendees was a woman I recognised as Ellanher Boda, one of the Cyrillians who had been killed during Vonvalt’s purge of the Magistratum. The pontificate, an obese middle-aged man, saw great potential in Claver. He encouraged the young priest’s ravings despite being obviously alarmed by their intensity. It was like watching someone carefully nurture a tiny, sputtering flame into a conflagration.
Claver was introduced to the pontificate’s private chapel within the Temple of Savare, and several other places, including an establishment where Cyrillian Justices and members of the Sons of Sova could meet and exchange ideas. These places were hotbeds of sedition. But like many rebellious organisations, all they did was talk. They spoke for hours, morning and night. They pestered Mlyanar senators. They preached on street corners until they were moved along or arrested by city watchmen. They printed and copied pamphlets and distributed them. I watched as one day Nathaniel Kadlec snatched one such pamphlet from an associate of Claver’s without thinking. He would read the tract that evening and plant the seed of his own treachery.
As he had in the Jadran Order, so Claver grew frustrated with the Sons of Sova. They urged talk, debate. He urged action. He had heard, as had most of Sova, about the emergence of blackpowder and its use in Kòvosk. How a fist-sized pot of the stuff could blow a knight’s leg off; how a barrel of it could obliterate an armoured company. One sultry summer’s evening in the capital, several goblets of wine deep and het up after an afternoon in the Arena, Claver had urged his fellow Sons to obtain some blackpowder and use it to sabotage the Grand Lodge.
The Cyrillians baulked. Even the pontificate was concerned. Once again I saw the opportunity for disavowal raise its head. But instead of expelling Claver, they sought to tame him. His following was too great, for his activities had not been limited to these silly meetings between pseudo-intellectuals. He had been preaching, proselytising, boring all and sundry with his parochial, nostalgic, orthodox brand of Nemanism – the kind of Nemanism which had never existed except in the minds of the old, the bigoted, and the curmudgeonly. He took his evangelism seriously, and in turn had been noticed by the mainstream Neman Church.
The Neman Church was at this time already struggling with its reputation. It lacked serious men. As it swelled to absorb new nations, it was being diluted, and the answer to its dilution – syncretism – had been a strategic misstep. The Church had decided to answer this problem by fixating on the Frontier and the Templars and to make themselves indispensable as a pseudo-Legionary force; and it needed people to recruit Templars.
Who better than an angry, righteous, zealous young man?
They quietly invested Claver in a private ceremony which by any measure was a snub, for it was clear that the man frightened and embarrassed them. But, like the Sons of Sova, the Church thought they could use him.
Like the Church, Claver saw great potential in the Frontier. It was an area of the map no one was paying any attention to. The pilgrim path had fallen into disrepair, and bands of Saekas roamed freely on their ancestral lands, picking off Imperial settlements like someone peeling away the fingers of a man gripping the lip of a cliff. Südenburg and Keraq and Zetland received the bare minimum of conscripts and Imperial funds. The Legions were focused on the Kova Confederation – and the Emperor with them. Long angered by the paganism that was running rampant in the north of the Empire, Claver, with the blessing of the Church, decided to remedy the situation.
I watched as he trudged across the provinces of the Empire. At nights, he read from a small, battered copy of the Neman Creed. By day, he walked relentlessly and preached. There was no denying his skills as an orator. There was something about his imploring nature, his pleading sincerity, the way he was able to weep on command, that moved people. Moreover, he was able to induce people to believe in a version of the Empire that, as far as I was aware, had never existed. He took parables and stories from the Book of Creus and other holy works and mythologised real historical figures from the Empire of the Wolf. The commonfolk especially enjoyed this nonsense, the idea that they as Sovans were superior – had always been superior. That their superiority was ingrained in them. That the pagans of the Frontier were no match for them. He evangelised their prejudices, weaponised them. At every step of the way he was pushing on an open door. In those early years, Claver as a young man had turned out more Templar recruits than in the previous twenty.
One night, I saw him sitting next to a small cookfire in a forest in Jägeland. His back was freshly whipped and his clothes were wet with blood. In his hands was a copy of the Neman Creed, and he whispered the words quietly to himself whilst he read.
Then he looked at me, for the first time since I had begun this journey. He fixed me with a look of incredible fear and sadness.
“Ramayah,” he said through a mouthful of blood, and then something unfurled from the darkness behind him and leapt forward and grabbed him by the head and—
I was back in the cave. August was standing next to me.
“What did you see?” she asked.
“H-his life,” I said. And it had felt like a lifetime, too. I was dizzy and disorientated. It was like waking up from a coma. Twenty years had flashed by in an instant. “His whole life.”
“Hm. What little there is worth observing. Come, then.”
We moved away from Claver’s form, immobile, ghastly, a vessel overstuffed with black ectoplasm, and made our way back to the Broken Path. In the distance, the Halls of Hell, that distressing palace of insanity, sat on the horizon. It exuded malign energies. Even from our distant vantage point, I felt frightened, as though the eyes of the afterlife were on me.
“I’d like to go now,” I said.
August nodded, but her gaze was fixed on the distant palace. A curious expression had overcome her. I followed the line of her gaze, to see that something was happening. The palace was shifting, moving, reconfiguring. Great groaning and creaking sounds emerged from within its walls.
“As would I,” she murmured. “Hold still. This will be unpleasant.”
XXIII
The Slow Evil
“Ramayah the Progenitor is the patron of many evils. His coming is known to be heralded by the decay of grass, the whispers of demons, and the sound of dripping blood.”
FROM THE BOOK OF HISTORIES
I awoke in a place of quiet ostentation; a well-appointed chamber which, with its various mason jars of herbs and poultices and other concoctions lining shelves, immediately announced itself as that of a physician. I have woken up in physicians’ wards more times in those years I spent in Vonvalt’s service than all the years before and after combined.
A woman slept quietly in a plush chair in the corner of the room. I recognised her to be the Royal Physician.
Judging by the light, it was just before dawn, and a warm, cloudy summer’s morning. I examined myself, body and mind, though nothing seemed the matter. Indeed, for a good few minutes I couldn’t think of why I was there at all.
And then, the memories returned.
It was always the way. The afterlife, the astral plane, was deeply unnatural; it was as though the brain did not know how to properly categorise the experience. Like trying to grip an oiled eel. The experiences defied comprehension, and the mind was eager to forget.
But I could not forget the feeling of possession.
I sat quietly for a long time, breathing deeply, waiting for the feelings to pass. I clutched at the bedclothes as agonising fear gripped me. As soon as I felt as though I had achieved some semblance of calm, it would strike again: a sudden, vertiginous dread, like falling off a tower. It came in waves, panic washing through me so profoundly that I would go for great spells of breathless, tense excruciation, my whole body rigid, every muscle clenched.
I endured this backwash of fear for a long time. I had no interest in rousing the physician; she would simply attempt to sedate me in some way, and I did not want to sleep. I never wanted to sleep again. I hated it all, the afterlife, travelling there, this whole mess, I detested it. I genuinely considered killing myself in those moments. It was absolutely unendurable. The only thing that was stopping me was knowing that there was a fate worse than death – and I was well acquainted with it.
Eventually, as the sun’s light began to filter through the low ceiling of cloud, I quietly pressed myself out of the bed and made for the door. I opened it as quietly and carefully as I could, and exited the chamber. Beyond was another chamber I recognised, for I had been in it before. It smelt pleasantly of herbs, and less pleasantly of vinegar where various pickled specimens sat in ranks on shelves. I took a moment to examine huge, expensive astrological charts that adorned the walls, and thumbed idly through thick mathematical tomes which would be consulted in conjunction with those same charts to determine all manner of ailments and the appropriate treatment.
I had no desire to reacquaint myself with whatever ills had befallen us that day, no desire at all to discover how I had escaped – or rather, had been rescued. I also had no desire to think about the afterlife and the cosmic terrors which waited there. In those quiet moments I had no desire to do anything at all.
And so I lingered in the silent Imperial Palace, willing the silence to linger with me. I wished with all my heart that there was some other place, some other plane of existence where I could go, my mind disconnected from any conscious and rational thought, and simply… fade into nothingness.
And then I heard something. A curious noise, definitely made by a human or animal. It had a… wetness about it.
My heart raced, my nerves suffused with lightning. The noise had emanated from another one of the chambers which branched off that main room. The door to it was slightly ajar, though I could see that it was strapped with iron and had several sturdy bolts on it. I approached slowly and quietly, my breath trembling in my throat.
I peered through the gap. It was another private ward with only one bed in it. Atop the bed was a man – or the ruin of a man. He had been smashed to pieces. His face had been ripped away, leaving a bony rictus underneath. Limbs were twisted and broken, and stripped of flesh. I could see blackened blood and yellow fat where someone had hastily sealed wounds with red hot irons. A dozen other oozing welts spoke of an incredible and deliberate torture, yet perplexingly many of these were covered in salves. I saw, too, that the man’s arms and legs had been bound above the elbows and knees with strips of fabric, strips pulled and knotted so tightly that the limbs beneath had already begun to decay for want of blood.
The sheets underneath the man were brown and red with both old and fresh blood. An incredible stink rose off him.
And then the sound again.
I gasped. It was the rattling intake of breath. It was impossible. The man should have been dead. In any other circumstances a person in such a state would have been dispatched, not had their life prolonged with medicines. This was cruelty.
I should have left in that moment – a great deal of heartache would have been avoided if I had. But I felt compelled to approach. A few moments later, I had crossed the floor and was standing next to the bed. A gory skull looked up at me, eyeless. I saw that the man’s face was in fact still attached at the left side; it had simply been peeled away on the others. There was a mark, I saw, carved into his forehead like a mason with a chisel – a mark which I recognised as one of the summoning ideograms which the prognosticators had been busy scrawling on the walls ahead of my possession. But it had not been done with care and precision; just scratched on, like a child drawing in wet concrete.
My heart lurched as another rattling, sucking breath entered the man’s lungs. Blood frothed out of his mouth and from a hole in his neck. He could not see me, but I could tell that he sensed I was there. The exposed musculature and tissues of his mouth and jaw worked to expel a single word. He was parched, so it was barely a whisper, but I was able to make it out:
“Sorry.”
I frowned, and then a thought took root in my mind. I reached out with trembling hands, pinching the man’s face between my two forefingers and thumbs and, as though I were folding a piece of laundry, slowly lifted the flap up and over his glistening, cracked skull.
It was Senator Jansen.
My screaming woke the physician, who rushed in.
“You are not supposed to be in here!” she shouted at me. But, for all her anger, I could see that she was ashamed of this appalling spectacle and her role in it. “Get out, now!”
I did. Sick of it all, of this brutality, of this horror and death, I exited the chamber and then the physician’s residence entirely, bursting out into the hallway and emitting a great, heaving sob.
Sir Radomir, who had been dozing in a chair outside the door, yelled out as he was startled awake, instinctively pulling his short sword halfway out its scabbard.
“Helena!” he shouted, rubbing the sleep away from his eyes. He gripped me by my upper arms. “You are safe! You are safe now!”
I could not be calmed. It all came pouring out of me like wine from an uncorked bottle. I collapsed into his arms and sobbed, hysterical. Everybody was wrong about me; I was not strong enough. Everybody kept saying that I was forged from steel, that I had a brilliant mind and an iron comportment, that my upbringing and tutelage had all conspired to make me mentally strong. But I was not. Who could endure these things? No human being was designed to deal with such constant horror and insanity. I was not becoming inured to it; it was destroying me from the inside out.
The physician rushed out, this time with a tankard of something in her hand.
“Here, give her this,” she said.
Sir Radomir took the proffered tankard, but I smacked it out of his hand. “No!” I shouted. “I don’t want your fucking potions. I don’t want to go back to sleep! Don’t make me go back to sleep, please!”
“She must—!” the physician started, but Sir Radomir cut her off.
“Just— Creus, shut up a minute,” he snapped at her as he tried to wrestle me still. “Helena, for Nema’s sake get a grip on yourself.”
I thrashed against his hold, but I was weak and in shock and I could feel my strength ebbing.
“Helena!” Sir Radomir shouted, finally losing patience. He dealt me a stinging slap across the cheek, and I collapsed to the floor, my histrionics cut short. “I am sorry, Helena,” he said, squatting down next to me. I felt his hand pressed between my shoulder blades, and he rubbed my back gently. “I am… not very good at dealing with crying maids.”
