Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

Chapter 15

“Oh yes, simple.” Nicci descended the steps one at a time in a slow, measured manner as she spoke. “Both boys and girls in the Old World are taught the same things by the Fellowship of Order, and in the same basic manner.”

She came to a halt not far from Richard and loosely folded her arms as she sighed—not out of weariness, but rather with a weary cynicism. “Except that with them it’s started not all that long after they’re born. It begins with simple lessons, of course, but those lessons are expanded and reinforced over their entire lifetime. It’s not unusual to see pious old people sitting through the lectures given by brothers of the Fellowship of Order.

“Most all people are drawn toward ordered social structure and they yearn to know how they fit into the larger scheme of the universe. The Fellowship of Order provides them with a comprehensive and authoritative sense of structure—in other words, tells them the right way to think as well as a proper way to live their lives. But it’s most effective when started with the young. If a young mind is molded to the Order’s dogma then it usually becomes inflexible and fixed for life. As a result, any other way of thinking—the very ability to reason—generally withers and dies at a young age and is lost for life. When such a person is aged, they will still sit through the same basic lessons, still hang on every word.”

“Simple?” Jebra asked. “You said the premise is pretty simple?”

Nicci nodded. “The Order teaches that this world, the world of life, is finite. Life is fleeting. We are born, we live for a time, and we die. The afterlife, by contrast, is eternal. After all, we all know that people die but no one ever comes back from the dead; dead is forever. Therefore, it is the afterlife which is important.

“Around this core tenet, the Fellowship of Order ceaselessly drums into people the belief that one must earn their eternity in the glory of the Creator’s light. This life is the means to earn that eternity—a test, in a way.”

Jebra blinked in disbelief. “But still, life is . . . I don’t know, it’s life. How can anything be more important than your own life?” She softened her skepticism with a smile. “Surely that isn’t going to convince people to the Order’s brutal ways, convince them to turn away from life.”

“Life?” With sudden menace in her glare, Nicci leaned down a little toward Jebra. “Don’t you care about your soul? Don’t you think that what happens to your very own soul for all eternity might be of serious and earnest concern to you?”

“Well, of course I, I . . .” Jebra fell mute.

As she straightened, Nicci shrugged with a mocking, dismissive gesture. “This life is finite, transitory, so, in the scheme of things, in contrast to an eternal afterlife, how important can a fleeting life in this miserable world be? What true purpose could this brief existence possibly have, other than to serve as a trial of the soul?”

Jebra looked uncomfortably dubious yet unwilling to challenge Nicci when she framed it in such a way.

“For that reason,” Nicci said, “sacrifice to any suffering, any want, any need of your fellow man is a humble recognition that this life is meaningless, a demonstration that you acknowledge eternity with the Creator in the next world to be the consequential concern. Yes? By sacrificing you are avowing that you do not value man’s realm over eternity, the Creator’s realm. Therefore, sacrifice is the price, the small price, the pittance, that you pay for your soul’s eternal glory. It’s your proof to the Creator that you are worthy of that eternity with Him.”

Richard was amazed to see how easily such a rationale—delivered by Nicci with confidence, command, and authority—intimidated Jebra into silence. While listening as Nicci towered over her, Jebra had occasionally glanced to the others, to Zedd, to Cara, to Shota, even to Ann and Nathan, but seeing none of them offering any objection or counterarguments, her shoulders began to hunch as if she wished she could disappear into a crack in the marble floor.

“If you confine your concerns to being happy in this life”—Nicci casually swept an arm out, indicating the world around her as she glided regally back and forth before them—“if you dare to revel in the senseless trivialities of this wretched world, this meaningless, brief existence, that is a rejection of your all-important eternal next life, and thus a rejection of the Creator’s perfect plan for your soul.

“Who are you to question the Creator of all the universe? How dare you put your petty wishes for your insignificant, pathetic little life ahead of His grand purpose of preparing you for all of eternity?”

Nicci paused, folding her arms with a kind of deliberate care that implied a challenge. A lifetime of indoctrination gave her the ability to express the Order’s carefully crafted tenets with devastating precision. Seeing her standing there in her pink nightdress somehow only seemed to underscore her derision of the triviality of life. Richard remembered all too well Nicci delivering that very same message to him, only at the time she had been deadly serious. Jebra avoided Nicci’s piercing gaze, instead fixing her stare on her hands nested in her lap.

“To bring the ways of the Order to other people, Galea for example,” Nicci said as she resumed her pacing lecture, “many of the Order’s soldiers had to die.” She shrugged. “But that is the ultimate sacrifice—one’s life—in an effort to bring enlightenment to those who do not yet know how to follow the only right and true path to glory in the next world. If a person sacrifices their life in the struggle on behalf of the Order to bring salvation to backward, ignorant, and unimportant people, then they earn eternity with Him in the next world.”

Nicci lifted an arm, sheathed in the satiny, pink material of the nightdress, as if to reveal something magnificent but invisible standing right there before them. “Death is merely the doorway to that glorious eternity.”

She let the arm drop. “Because an individual life is unimportant in the scheme of things that really matter, it’s obvious that by torturing and killing individuals who resist, you are only helping to sway the masses of the unenlightened over to enlightenment—so you are bringing those masses salvation, serving a moral cause, bringing the Creator’s children home to His kingdom.”

Nicci’s expression turned as grim as her pretense had been. “People who are taught this from birth come to believe it with such blind zeal that they see anyone living in any manner other than according to the Order’s teachings—in other words failing to pay the rightful price of sacrifice in return for eternal salvation—as deserving of an eternity of unimaginable agony in the dark cold depths of the Keeper’s realm of the underworld, which is exactly what awaits them unless they change their ways.

“Very few people who grow up under this indoctrination have enough of their reasoning ability still intact to be able to think their way out of this bewitching circular trap—nor do they want to. To them, to rejoice in life, to live for themselves, is trading eternity for a brief and sinful frolic before a looming doom-without-end.

“Since they must forgo the enjoyment of this life, they are going to be only too quick to notice anyone who fails to sacrifice as they should, fails to live by the canons of the Fellowship of Order. Besides, recognition of sinfulness in others is deemed a virtue because it helps to direct those who neglect their moral duty to turn back to the path of salvation.”

Nicci leaned down toward Jebra and lowered her voice to a sinister hiss. “Much the same as killing nonbelievers is a virtue. Yes?”

Nicci straightened. “Followers of the Order develop an intense hatred for those who do not believe as they do. After all, the Order teaches that wicked sinners who refuse to repent are no less than Keeper’s disciples. Death is no more than such enemies of the righteous deserve.”

Nicci spread her arms in a forbidding gesture. “There can be no doubt about any of this since the Order’s teachings are, after all, merely the wishes of the Creator Himself, and thus divinely elicited truth.”

Jebra was now clearly too cowed to offer an argument.

Cara, on the other had, was clearly not cowed. “Oh, really?” she said in an even, but contrary, tone. “I’m afraid that there’s one fly in the ointment. How do they know all this? I mean, how do they know that the afterlife is really anything at all like they portray it?”

She clasped her hands behind her back as she shrugged. “As far as I know, they haven’t visited the world of the dead and then returned. How would they know what it’s like beyond the veil?

“Our world is the world of life, so life is what’s important in this world. How dare they demean it by making our only life the price for something unknowable? How can they begin to claim that they know anything at all about the nature of other worlds? I mean, for all anyone really knows, the spirit world could be a mere transitory state as we slip into the nonexistence of death.

“For that matter, how would the Fellowship of Order know that these are the Creator’s wishes—or that He has any wishes at all?” Cara’s brow drew down. “How do they even know that Creation was brought about by a conscious mind in the form of some divine breed of king?”

Jebra looked relieved that someone else had finally objected.

Nicci smiled in a curious manner and raised an eyebrow. “There’s the trick of it.”

Without looking over, she lifted her arm back toward Ann, standing across the room in the shadows. “It’s the same method by which the Prelate and her Sisters of the Light know their version of the same gruel to be true. Prophecy, or the high priests, or some humble but deeply devout person has heard the intimate whispers of the divine, or has seen into a sacred vision He has sent them, or has been visited in dreams. There are even ancient texts that profess to have infallible knowledge of what is beyond the veil. Such lore is mostly a collection of the same kind of whispers and visions and dreams that in the distant past were set down as fact and have become ‘irrefutable’ simply because it is old.

“And how are we to verify the veracity of this testimony?” Nicci swept her arm out in a grand gesture. “Why, to question such things is the greatest sin of all: lack of faith!

“The very fact that the unknowable is unknowable is what they claim gives faith its virtue and makes it sacrosanct. After all, what would be the virtue in faith if that in which we have faith could be known? A person who can maintain absolute faith without any proof whatsoever must possess profound virtue. As a consequence, only those who take the leap of faith off the bedrock of the tangible into the emptiness of the imperceptible are righteous and worthy of an eternal reward.

“It’s as if you are told to leap from a cliff and have faith that you can fly, but you must not flap your arms because that would only betray a fundamental lack of faith and any lack of faith would infallibly insure that you would plummet to the ground, thus proving that a failure of faith is a personal flaw, and fatal.”

Nicci ran her fingers back into her blond hair, lifting it off her shoulders, and then, with a sigh, she let her arms drop. “The more difficult the teachings are to believe, the greater the required level of faith. Along with the commitment to a higher level of unquestioning faith comes a tighter bond to those who share that same faith, a greater sense of inclusion in the special group of the enlightened. Believers, because their beliefs are so manifestly mystic, become ever more estranged from the ‘unenlightened,’ from those who are suspect because they will not embrace faith. The term ‘nonbeliever’ becomes a commonly accepted form of condemnation, demonizing anyone who chooses”—Nicci tapped a finger to her temple—“to stick to the use of reason.

“Faith itself, you see, is the key—the magic wand that they wave over the bubbling brew they have concocted to render it ‘self-evident.’ ”

Ann, despite the glare of contempt for a Sister of the Light-turned-traitor-to-the-cause, offered no argument. Richard thought it a rare choice on her part, and one that at that moment was particularly wise.

“There,” Nicci said, shaking a finger as she paced, barefoot, “there is the crack in the Order’s imposing tower of teachings. There is the fatal flaw at the center of all convictions contrived in the imagination of men. Such things in the end, even though they may be sincere, are nothing more solid than the elaborate product of whimsy and self-deception. In the end, without the rock of reality, an insane person who hears voices in their head is equally sincere and equally credible.

“That is why the Order vaunts the sanctity of faith and teaches that you must dismiss the wicked impulse to use your head, that you must instead abandon yourself to your feelings. Once you surrender your life to blind faith in their account of the afterlife, they claim that then, and only then, the doorway to eternity will magically open for you and you will know all.

“In other words, knowledge is to be gained only through rejection of everything that actually comprises knowledge.

“This is why the Order equates faith with holiness, and why its absence is deemed to be sinful. This is why even questioning faith is heretical.

“Without faith, you see, everything they teach unravels.

“And since faith is the indispensable glue that binds together their teetering tower of beliefs, faith eventually gives birth to brutality. Without brutality to enforce it, faith ends up being nothing more than a fanciful daydream, or a queen’s empty belief that no one will attack her throne, that no enemy will breach the borders, that no force can overthrow her defenders, if she merely forbids it.

“After all, I don’t need to threaten you to get you to see that the water in that fountain is wet or that the walls of this room are constructed from stone, but the Order must threaten people to make them believe that an eternity of being dead will be an eternal delight, but only if they do as they’re told in this life.”

As she glared into the still waters of the fountain, Richard thought that Nicci’s blue eyes might turn that water to ice. The cold rage in those eyes was born of things she had seen in her life that he could not begin to imagine. On the dark and quiet evenings alone with her, the things she had been willing to confide in him were terrible enough.

“It’s a lot easier to convince people to die for your cause if you first make them eager to die,” Nicci said in a bitter voice. “It’s a lot easier to get boys to bare their breasts to arrows and swords if they have faith that doing so is a selfless act that will make the Creator smile and welcome them into the eternal glory in the afterworld.

“Once the Order teaches people to be true believers, what they have really done is to forge monsters who will not only die for the cause, but kill for it as well. True believers are consumed by an implacable hatred for those who don’t believe. There is no more dangerous, no more vicious, no more brutal an individual than one who has been blinded by the Order’s beliefs. Such a believer is not shaped by reason so he is not bound by it. As a consequence, there is no mechanism of restraint on his hatred. These are killers who will only too happily kill for the cause, absolutely secure in the knowledge they are doing the right and the moral thing.”

Nicci’s knuckles stood out white and bloodless as her fists tightened. Though the room seemed to ring with the sudden, terrible silence, the power of her words still echoed through Richard’s mind. He thought that the strength of the aura crackling around her might provoke a sudden lightning storm within the anteroom.

“As I said, the premise is pretty simple.” Nicci shook her head in bitter resignation, the emotion draining from her bleak pronouncement. “For most of the people of the Old World, and now the people of the New World, there is no choice but to follow the Order’s teachings. If their faith wavers they are sternly reminded of the eternity of unimaginable suffering that awaits the faithless. If that fails to work, then faith will be driven into them by the point of a sword.”

“But there must be some way to redeem these people,” Jebra said at last. “Isn’t there a way to bring them to their senses and get them to cast off the teachings of the Order?”

Nicci looked away from Jebra to stare off into the distance. “I was brought up from birth under the Order’s teachings and I came to my senses.”

Still staring off into a dark storm of memories, she fell silent for a moment, as if she were reliving her seemingly endless struggle to grasp at life, to escape the haunting clutches of the Order.

“But you cannot imagine how profoundly difficult it was for me to emerge from that realm of dark beliefs. I doubt that anyone who has not been lost in the suffocating world of the Order’s teachings can begin to grasp what it’s like to believe that your life is worthless and of no value, or grasp the shadow of terror that falls over you every time you try to turn away from what you have been taught is your only means of salvation.”

Her watery gaze hesitantly drifted to Richard. He knew. He had been there. He knew what it was like.

“I was redeemed,” she whispered in a broken voice, “but it was far from easy.”

Jebra looked encouraged by what Richard knew was no real encouragement. “But it worked for you,” she said, “so maybe it will work for others.”

“She is different from most of those under the spell of the Order,” Richard said as he gazed into Nicci’s blue eyes, eyes that betrayed the naked emotion of how much he meant to her. “She was driven by a need to understand, to know, if what she had been taught to believe was true or if there was more to life, if there was something worth living for.

“Most of those taught by the Order have no such doubts. They block out those kinds of questions and instead tenaciously cling to their beliefs.”

“But what makes you think that they won’t change?” Jebra didn’t look ready to abandon the thread of hope. “If Nicci changed, then why can’t others?”

Still gazing into Nicci’s eyes, Richard said, “I think they’re able to block out any doubt in what they believe because they’ve internalized their indoctrination, no longer viewing it as specific ideas that have been drilled into them. They begin to experience the ideas they’ve been taught as feelings, which evolve into powerful emotional conviction. I think that’s the trick to the process. They are convinced within their own minds that they are experiencing original thought rather than those discrete ideas that have been taught to them as they grew up.”

Nicci cleared her throat as she looked away from Richard’s gaze and turned her attention once more to Jebra.

“I think Richard is right. I was aware of that very thing within my own thinking, aware of that inner conviction that was actually born of a carefully crafted manner of instruction.

“Some people who secretly value their lives will join in a revolt if they can see that there is a realistic chance to win—that’s what happened in Altur’Rang—but if there isn’t that chance then they know that they must repeat the words that the followers of the Order want to hear or risk losing their most valuable possession: life. Under the Order’s rule, you believe as they teach you, or you die. It’s as simple as that.

“There are people in the Old World working to join together those who will revolt, working to set the fires of freedom for those who want to seize an opportunity to control their own destiny. So there are those who truly want a chance at freedom and will act to gain it. Jagang, too, knows of such efforts and has sent troops to crush those revolts. But I also know only too well that most of the people of the Old World would never willingly cast off their beliefs; they see doing so as sinful. They will work to ruthlessly crush any uprising. If need be, they will cling to their faith right into their graves. The ones—”

Shota irritably lifted a hand, cutting Nicci off. “Yes, yes, some will, some won’t. Many wiffle-waffle. It doesn’t matter. Hoping for a revolt is pointless. It’s just idle wishing for salvation to arrive out of the blue.

“The legions of soldiers from the Old World are here, now, in the New World, so it’s the New World that we must worry about, not the Old World and what the mood for revolt might or might not be. The Old World, for the most part, believes in the Order, supports the Order, and encourages the Order to conquer the rest of the world.”

Shota glided forward, directing a meaningful look at Richard. “The only way for civilization to survive is to send the invading soldiers of the Order through that doorway to their longed-for eternity in the world of the dead. There is no redeeming those whose minds are lost to beliefs they are eager to die for. The only way to stop the Order and their teachings is to kill enough of them that they can’t continue.”

“Pain does have a way of changing people’s minds,” Cara said.

Shota gave the Mord-Sith a nod of approval. “If they come to truly understand without any doubt that they will not win, that their efforts will lead to certain death, then perhaps some will abandon their belief and cause. It very well could be that despite their faith in the teachings of the Order, few of them actually, deep down inside, really want to die to test it.

“But what of it? Does that really matter to us? What we do know is that a great many really are so fanatical that they welcome death. Hundreds of thousands have already died, proving that they really are willing to make that sacrifice. The rest of these men must be killed or they will kill us all and doom the rest of the world to a long, grinding descent into savagery.

“That is what we face. That is the reality of it.”