The Priest Read online

  • • •

  Though the marble corridor offered no hiding places, the shadow, creeping in the dark, was nearly invisible. Still, Phaeax saw it.

  He stopped and called from behind, “This is a breach of professional etiquette, don’t you think?”

  The shadow stopped, too, turned.

  “One can only assume that your intentions are less than charitable.” Phaeax cracked his knuckles, rolled his head upon his shoulders to loosen the tension in his neck.

  “Do you think you can stop me?” the shadow said.

  “I do.”

  The shadow began moving towards Phaeax. “Just because of Kesh?”

  “Oh?” Phaeax said. “Do you have any doubt that Kesh was the rule and not the exception?”

  “You exceed your station, priest.”

  Phaeax pursed his lips, looked around to acknowledge where they were, finally locked eyes with the the figure that now stood before him. He shook his head.

  “I made you come to me,” he said, “and I’ll make you bow.”

  Ahurimanda laughed. “Do you think that you scare me?”

  Phaeax smirked, causing Ahurimanda to recoil in spite of himself.

  “Be Damned, then!” Ahurimanda cried, attempting to cleave Phaeax in two from head to toe with the edge of his right hand.

  Phaeax snatched Ahurimanda’s wrist with his left hand, stopping the god’s momentum instantly. At the same time, he drove his right fist deep into Ahurimanda’s midsection, exactly as he had with Kesh.

  Ahurimanda bent double and coughed wetly against the inside of the malevolent face he wore.

  Phaeax couldn’t suppress his laughter. Still holding Ahurimanda’s upraised wrist, Phaeax twisted it outward and drove his boot into the side of Ahurimanda’s head, sending the god sliding upon the smooth marble floor.

  “Perhaps you should have joined your priests on some of their proselytizing missions. Don’t come into this house and presume to be its master.”

  Phaeax walked a half-circle around Ahurimanda so that he now blocked the way to Nox.

  Ahurimanda propped himself up with one arm, rose, gained his feet.

  Phaeax launched forward, his fists hard against every yielding target. Each blow was like a tug on marionette strings as Ahurimanda was impelled by the onslaught, slip-sliding with erratic prompts upon the polished floor until he tripped over his own feet and was prone once more.

  Phaeax, hand on hip, stood over him, staring with raw contempt.

  “Do the Last Times justify this?” he said.

  Ahurimanda rose to his feet once more. “Don’t they?”

  The alarm bell at the gate sounded then.

  “Don’t you have any pride?” Phaeax said, shaking his head. “Resorting to trickery? To murdering one of your kindred in her sleep to prove your own Truth? Pathetic.”

  Far down the corridor, and from their various cells, the Grays stirred, rallying to the alarm bell’s call.

  “In days gone by,” Ahurimanda said, “murder was a thriving business. Then we entered the Last Times, and people stopped caring. Death comes for everyone, that’s not new, but moment-by-moment reminders of the end of all things have a way of quelling even the fiercest of passions. Mankind struggled throughout their existence to eradicate murder only to have murder abandon them when the end was in sight. Tonight is special, though. We are on the cusp, on the threshold of that imminent end. I have prayed to Lord Murder, who cannot have left us entirely, and I will not be denied his favor.”

  Phaeax clicked his tongue, made a move towards Ahurimanda to begin the beating anew.

  “Wait! I can offer you Paradise in place of Damnation. Every man has his balance sheet, but I am judge. Paradise can be yours.”

  Phaeax shook his head. “You offer nothing that I want, nothing that will last beyond daybreak. I’m going to forcibly convert you, and with you every last one of your adherents. All that will be left in this city—in the world—will be madness and the True Death.”

  Ahurimanda stared at Phaeax for a moment with his unmoving, demonic cameo eyes and finally started to nod. “You’d do it, wouldn’t you. You’d sentence everyone who’s ever lived, who believed in something more than your—her—damnable nihilism to oblivion, to an eternity of nothingness.”

  Phaeax was unfazed. “Yes. That sums it up nicely.”

  “Have you not witnessed wonders? Does the very existence of your own goddess not speak to you of something more than mere emptiness at the end of it all?”

  “We’ve all lived the wonder,” Phaeax said. “We’ve all played our parts. The one thing that every living thing has in common, is that they die. Even gods, as we have seen. The world has wound down. No one knows what will happen when it ends, but if you still believe in second chances, all I can tell you is that you should have tried harder and paid more attention the first time around. Our time is done.”

  “Only if you get your way.”

  Phaeax snorted. “My way . . . That’s the second time you’ve made that mistake. I serve Nox. It’s her way. Now her servant, who exceeds his station, is going to end you.”

  Phaeax took a step forward and Ahurimanda seemed to lose his mind. He cried out, swinging his arms with wild abandon, his hands threatening to split Phaeax from any angle at any moment. Phaeax hopped back nimbly, avoiding the first two swipes. As the third swipe came, Phaeax caught Ahurimanda’s wrist again, twisted the arm to turn the hyperextended elbow towards him, and struck it so that the arm bent opposite its design. Ahurimanda reared, screeched, and succumbed to a kick that sent him once more skidding to the floor.

  Echoing footfalls preceded Tenes, running as fast as he could up the corridor. He saw Phaeax first and realized that Ahurimanda was the mass coming to a stop at his feet as he arrived.

  “Is he . . . Is he—”

  Before Tenes could finish, Ahurimanda rose up, spinning, one arm lifeless and broken, the other a swift sword, drawing a neat line through him. Immediately, flames rose up from beneath Tenes, and he began to sink through the floor into them.

  “Tenes!” Phaeax cried.

  Despite their close proximity, Tenes was already a world away. The cut, though bleeding, left him intact. The flames however, began to char and consume him instantly. He cried out, but his voice made no sound over the roaring flames that claimed him.

  Phaeax took a deep breath, composed himself, walked to Ahurimanda, who was laughing, laughing, laughing. Phaeax took Ahurimanda’s good arm and broke it before shoving the god bodily into the wall, which silenced him.

  The flames did not dissipate.

  “I don’t know if you can hear me, old friend, but know that your torment will be short-lived. You were right about me, but you needn’t have worried. Nox is Truth. I will see to it myself that Ahurimanda’s Truth is subsumed by her own.”

  Phaeax thought he saw a faint smile on Tenes’s face, but the flames ate the rest of him then and vanished as quickly as they appeared. There was nothing left of Tenes, no ashes, no blood.

  Ahurimanda’s blood, however, was everywhere. The god himself was a wet heap against the wall. His laughter had quieted, but hadn’t stopped. It was like a motor in his stomach that sputtered and jigged, but just wouldn’t quit. When Phaeax reached down, grabbed his robes with one hand and struck him in the face with the other, the god laughed harder, regaining his volume by degrees.

  Phaeax stared down at him, sighed. The cameo mask was lined with cracks and a piece forming the lower left jaw had fallen away.

  “Hmmm, Kesh was sturdier than you, but maybe you’re just too contrary to die. I’ve got just the thing.”

  Through his laughter, Ahurimanda managed to say, “How is it that you can lay your hands so easily on gods?”

  Phaeax placed his hands together as if in prayer. When he pulled them apart, a glowing wire was suspended between them, fastened to the middle finger of each hand. There was enough slack to enable him to double wrap it around Ahurimanda’s neck, but loosely.


  “What are you . . . What are you doing?”

  Phaeax knelt down close and squeezed between Ahurimanda and the wall, so that their shoulders and then backs were touching, all the while keeping both hands over his right shoulder and gently tightening the loops around the god’s neck. The black aura erupted from Phaeax, curling and shimmering and stealing all the color Ahurimanda had spilled throughout the corridor.

  “Was the answer to your prayers unclear?”

  Phaeax waited a moment to let the meaning of his words sink in, but didn’t allow Ahurimanda to voice an answer. He stood straight suddenly, pulling the Ghost Wire taut. There were two thumps and the corridor was filled with Divine Accountants.

  STRAUSS

  THE LUNATIC GOD

  Nox sat in the middle of her round bed, holding the white sheet to cover herself.

  “You should have roused me sooner,” she said.

  “My apologies,” Phaeax said. “While I have no doubt that you can defend yourself, I didn’t want Ahurimanda coming near you.”

  She looked at him slyly for a moment, said nothing, then her expression sobered. “Are the Divine Accountants finished?”

  “Not yet.”

  She shrugged, shook her head. “The Accounting doesn’t matter. You know what this means, though?”

  “Yes. The chains can no longer hold him.”

  “If by some strange quirk he is able to take my life, this world, what’s left of it, will become a breeding ground for endless chaos and perversion.”

  “Not the best way to punctuate mankind’s passing.”

  “No,” she said. She frowned. “You have done so much already, but I must ask one last favor of you.”

  “No need to ask. I know what must be done.”

  She stared at him in silence for what seemed an infinite moment. “You are, and always will be, my favorite, Phaeax.”

  Phaeax smiled, bowed. “At your service. Till the end of time.”

  “Soon,” she said. Despite her victory, almost total now, she could not manage a smile.

  • • •

  Phaeax descended the steps of the temple. Grays and Ahurimanda’s priests lay dead everywhere. Farther out, some Grays remained. In place of Ahurimanda’s priests, they fought madmen, not to claim them, but to defend their own lives. Besides the Grays, madmen were all that was left of humanity.

  To be driven insane, now by mere proximity to the end, was to worship Strauss, the Lunatic God. With each new adherent, Strauss had grown stronger. Phaeax cocked his head, listened for the chains, was reassured only partially by the distant sound of them. There were fewer than usual that rattled, fewer that needed to be challenged. He quickened his pace.

  Nox had described perfectly what he now saw in the streets: endless chaos and perversion. Some of the madmen ignored him, some sought to engage him. Anyone who drew too close was felled by a single blow to the head. There was no time for sport.

  The poor, poor Grays. They defended their faith admirably, but their going would be ugly. Phaeax would make sure that end was clean and didn’t linger like a suppurating sore.

  • • •

  Phaeax crested the hill at dawn. Standing at the middle of a great stone disk, etched with elaborate symbols and flush with the dusty ground, was Strauss, the Lunatic God. The ancient canvas strips used to bind his arms to his torso lay in a pile at his bare feet. His arms, despite their eternity of imprisonment, were thick with muscle and lined with scars that suggested a script long-forgotten. His hair was blond, thick and bushy, like a lion’s mane. He snapped the final chain connecting the collar around his neck to one of the thirteen anchor points spaced evenly around the edge of the stone disk, then turned slowly, rubbing his left arm with his right hand, to acknowledge Phaeax’s arrival.

  “Do you know who I am,” Phaeax said.

  “I do,” Strauss said, in a deep voice, clear and steady.

  Phaeax flinched. “For the Lunatic God, you seem quite sane.”

  Strauss snorted. “I am the cup from which all men drink. I am empty, but in so being, I am replete.”

  Phaeax cocked his head. “What does that mean exactly?”

  “It means,” Strauss said, shaking his head, “that you cannot beat me.”

  “Many have made that claim, but none have been able to support it.”

  “I’ll be the first,” Strauss said. “And the last.”

  “We shall see,” Phaeax said, grinning.

  • • •

  The fight lasted twelve hours, ending finally when Phaeax broke Strauss’s sinewy neck. At that moment, with the sun sunk halfway into the horizon, the city, the hill, the barren land for as far as the eye could see, were racked with the onset of recurring quakes.

  Phaeax limped down the hill, back into the city, where he had to navigate smoldering fires, collapsing buildings, and great, hungry cracks yawning through the desolate streets. Everyone was dead now. Only he and Nox remained.

  THE END

  Nox started, turned, saw Phaeax standing behind the curtain at her chamber’s entrance. She stood exactly where she had the morning before, when he’d brought news of Karm’s abdication, but he’d been through quite a lot since then.

  His black cassock was dusty and torn in several places. Blood had formed a dark glaze around his left knee. A cut had nearly closed his left eye.

  “You are, and always will, be my favorite, Phaeax,” she said with a shaky voice, “but before I give you leave to enter, you must tell me the truth.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, saying nothing. She wore her customary black gown which contrasted so well with her perfectly white skin. She never looked more beautiful to him than she did just then.

  His staring brought a flush to her cheeks. She pursed her lips, but remained patient for an answer.

  “Did Tenes tell you?” he said from behind the curtain.

  “No. He was loyal to us both, and I shall miss him.”

  Phaeax nodded.

  “Though I appreciate every convert you’ve brought me, you are too good at what you do,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “You know who I am, or you wouldn’t be asking.”

  “I want you to say it.”

  Phaeax sighed.

  “My name, one of them, anyway, is Murder, Adjunct God of Death.”

  She nodded nervously and waved a hand, bidding him to enter. He did.

  “You have fucked me in effigy hundreds of times. And every time you were tender.”

  “Did Vice tell you that?”

  “Yes. Does that bother you?”

  Almost imperceptibly, he shook his head.

  “Good. It was news well-received. I have never been with a man or a god. To be intimate with me is to die the True Death and I don’t like things half-done. But you are Lord Murder . . . What am I to think?”

  “You are right to be leery. I confess: in part or in total, Tenes had guessed the truth. As a boy, he witnessed my fight with Tai Sun Sen, the Immortal. You may recall that, as he died, Tai Sun Sen embraced your Truth, something that affected both Tenes and me in a similar way. It brought Tenes immediately to your door, but sparked in me the ambition to meet the biggest challenge conceivable. Like Tenes, from that moment, I was a firm believer in your Truth. But what if I could murder death?”

  “Just for the challenge of it?”

  “For the challenge of it and the statement it would make. But I realized, if I moved overtly and succeeded, I would just be supporting your enemies, which would not do.”

  “So you assumed the identity of Phaeax and entered my priesthood.”

  “Yes, but before I could do that, Lord Murder had to disappear and be forgotten. In that time, Tenes grew old and gained his black cassock. The Last Times had begun without anyone realizing, and, since I felt a certain kinship with Tenes, I decided to enter your priesthood while he was still chief. I have been loyal to my vows, and to you, for the last fifteen years, maybe especially so these last five.”

  Sh
e swallowed hard, clutched at the folds of the gown covering her breast. “And now?”

  He shrugged. “I walked that tenuous line for ten years, sure of my ultimate purpose, but my black cassock changed things, brought me into direct contact with you every day.” He shook his head. “Or maybe I’m lying to myself. Maybe I lost sight of that purpose as soon as I entered these temple walls. Even before I took my vows, I worshiped you. More than that, I—”

  “Shhhh,” she said, putting a finger to his lips and silencing him.

  She unfastened the shoulder strap of her gown, let the garment fall like a splash of ink to the white marble floor, and stood naked before him.

  His eyes widened, his heart pounded. He stood still as she reached for him, unbuttoned his cassock, and let it fall as her gown had, leaving him naked from the waist up. She studied him with her eyes, before gently exploring his bruised and broken skin with her fingers.

  Their eyes locked.

  “We both want this,” she said. “Have wanted this for a long time. To gods, years are nothing, unless even one is spent pining for something you can’t have.”

  He nodded with increasing fervor.

  “Take off your trousers,” she said, “and hold me.”

  He kicked off his boots and complied.

  Her skin was cool, but like a balm in treacherous summer heat, not the cold of death itself.

  She directed his hands to her breasts and had to bite her lip when nearly overwhelmed by the impulse to kiss him. He held his breath as he slipped inside her, since neither of them knew for sure how far they could go before their intimacy proved fatal. She gasped and blinked and bit down again on her lower lip.

  Still standing, they settled into a rhythm, their rough, synchronized breathing the only sound. She pulled his right hand to her throat, manipulated his fingers around it.

  “I don’t . . . want . . . to be . . . alone,” she whispered between breaths, pleading with her eyes.

  He tightened his grip slowly, gently, while drawing her to him, and kissed her on the lips. Consummation struck with finality, like a hammer that smashes suns, bringing about the end of all things, which was the birth of all things.