He knows you, thankless children! He has heard the lies you tell each other, the lies you tell yourselves. He has seen the things you keep hidden, the things bound deep, around your heart and your spine, the things which you do not yourself know are false. But He knows! He knows!
Obey His servants with light hearts and smiling faces. Obey the High Chapel, the blessed Patriarch, and his hierophants. Pray that they be merciless in rooting out the apostates and the blasphemers among us, whether they reside in the Enclosure or the towers of Silver Terrace, in our homes or in our very beds!
This week of all weeks, let His companions serve you as examples! Remember Laqip, clever and bold, who turned his talents to the Rising and the new God. Remember Amata, who was kind to all things which deserved it, who loved our lord with a faith noble and true. Remember Kiri most of all, Kiri who overthrew the Anathema, Kiri who became Ba‘l Melqart.
Instead you dance and you frolic, you boast and you brag, you gossip and you blaspheme! In the evenings the clubs and the music houses and the alleys of the Scarlet Way are full, but in the mornings the pews of the High Chapel sit empty. You make a god of your pleasure, you see no good beyond your loins. You strain and you kick against the laws He has put before you. You do not see that His dictates are for you own ease, are for your good, would bring you joy, and above joy, peace. If only you would see, if only you would see!
But you will not see. You will not see until it is too late!
(4): Seluku
5:20 PM
He’s very good, is he not, Amanuensis? One of the best drummers we have ever had at the Fourth Perfection. No, no trick, I assure you, or at least no more than the usual artifice of the blind. Gaszi is very good, and there are many who come here and find their feet tapping along to his happy rhythm. But they do so imperfectly, they do so gracelessly—they can’t replicate his syncopations, they lack his feel for the pocket. I think there are only six or eight other drummers in the city who could perform such a task, and I know all of them. When they come in, they yell, “Seluku, bring me a drink” and “Seluku, let me hold a few mina till payday.” Drummers are the most profligate members of a reprobate species—not a scientific fact, only a judgment born of long observation.
Thank you. It is all that’s left to me these days, to appreciate if not to create. It is enough. We accept what we cannot change. I was known to tap the snare on occasion, though my specialty was the long harp. I was thought to have had some talent in my youth, not that I imagine my meager abilities would have been anything against your own. Speaking of which, perhaps you might be interested in sitting in on the next set? It would be a great honor for the Fourth Perfection to host one who has actually perfected that skill.
In that case; what can I do for one so high in Ba‘l Melqart’s service?
I haven’t thought of Nutesh in years. No doubt you found him buried in tarnished metal and faded drapery? A mother hen atop an antique egg? You have done an old man a kindness in making him feel important enough to warrant a conversation. Did he tell you of his days as a revolutionary, hand in hand with blessed Amata? He knew her, that much is true. Everyone who attended the Academy in those days knew her, and a great many others as well. She was—perhaps famous is not quite the right word. The city is vast, and I do not imagine any but a small proportion ever heard her name in the years before the Ascent. But anyone involved in the movement knew her.
The question is, did she know him? And there, I am afraid, the answer is a bit muddled. No doubt she smiled at him at some point, and perhaps even shared a laugh, or offered him a sweet word. She was very kind; more than anything, she was kind. But beyond that?
Well, who can say? I am aware that unerring recollection is the final perfection mastered on the White Isle, but for the rest of us memory is a slippery thing. What I ate for breakfast yesterday is more a matter of conjecture than of fact—and as to the distant events of my youth? A story, altered and added to with every telling, the rough edges evened out. Who is to say that mine is any more accurate than your would-be historian’s? He meant well, at least.
No, I will not say anything else ill of him. This was before the Ascent anyway, and the God King’s amnesty certainly covers his crimes. If Nutesh yelled louder than he fought, if he never found himself at the front, facing the servants of the Anathema . . . as I said, there is no glory in condemning the pretensions of an old man.
Besides, not everyone can have an injury to boast of. I received mine before the Sanguinary March, when we still had some hope that the crimes and iniquities of the regime were the result of the Anathema’s ignorance and the corruption of her minions. We were . . . we were still very naive. Our meetings were illegal, but then, everything was illegal in those days; you hardly paid attention. The only organizations sanctioned by the Academy were study and prayer groups, and even those were ribbed through with informers. It was a running joke that there were two in every class; you could tell because they were the ones taking notes.
Amata and Laqip started it, a few of us meeting at cheap coffee shops before curfew, talking with that mad passion of youth, certain that the problems of the day were as simple to diagnose as to cure, and that we were destined to play surgeon. Forgive me, that was an old man speaking, and old men have no more love of youth than a starveling for a glutton. I suppose every generation wishes to upend the works of those that came before, to put their own distinct mark upon the earth. The young see things in such stark divisions and imagine—cannot help but imagine—that their own time is uniquely terrible, that they are but a step or two from apocalypse.
But that does not mean that they are always wrong. The city had grown to rot. Here along the strip, where the cafés now extend out forever, and pretty boys and handsome girls strut hand in hand, there were nothing but boarded-up houses and long lines of begging veterans, flesh burnt and tumescent. In the Trace, where smoke parlors and boutiques now bleed into the Grand Bazaar, a shantytown stretched for miles, tents and scraps of cloth for the lucky ones, the dust or mud for most. When I was a student I took a room in a house not far from there; I lasted two weeks, and then I moved in with Laqip, a mat slung on the ground for twice the price but I was happy to pay it. You will find there is none of us can look very long at the depth of human despair. Not that this is much concern for me any longer.
That was a bitter joke. Apologies again.
In time our conversations became meetings, and these meetings outgrew our tiny apartments. We began to gather students outside of our cohort, and people who were not students at all but just come to listen to Amata and Laqip, to dream some of this shared dream. We took to holding our discussions at the house of one of our wealthier members. That was what we called them, discussions, as if doing so would hide the fact that we were discussing the rot that had infected the city, and how to clean it. At first it was a game as much as anything else; I can admit that, I who paid for playing. We thought ourselves very clever, stealthy as mice and brave as eagles! When we had a meeting we always made sure to have two exits, and we demanded the most terrible oaths of secrecy from everyone who would attend.
A man may swear to a thing and not mean it. And a woman also, though I think less often. Regardless. I am not sure who it was that betrayed us that night. We never found out, or it was decided best not to tell me. Our meeting was stilled by the rap on the door downstairs. We knew that sound, even young and foolish as we were, knew to fear it, the sound and what would come afterward.