Chapter 13 #4
A Hesperian soldier stood in the corner, arquebus slung over his shoulder. His eyes tracked Rin every time she moved. She made a face at him. He didn’t react.
“You may call me Sister Petra,” said the woman. “Why don’t you come over here?”
She spoke truly excellent Nikara. Rin would have been impressed, but something felt off.
Petra’s sentences were perfectly smooth and fluent, perhaps more grammatically perfect than those of most native speakers, but her words came out sounding all wrong.
The tones were just the slightest bit off, and she inflected everything with the same flat clip that made her sound utterly inhuman.
Petra picked a cup off the edge of the table and offered it to her. “Laudanum?”
Rin recoiled, surprised. “For what?”
“It might calm you down. I’ve been told you react badly to lab environments.” Petra pursed her lips. “I know opiates dampen the phenomena you manifest, but for a first observation that won’t matter. Today I’m interested only in baseline measurements.”
Rin eyed the cup, considering. The last thing she wanted was to be off her guard for a full hour with the Hesperians.
But she knew she had no choice but to comply with whatever Petra asked of her.
She could reasonably expect that they wouldn’t kill her.
She had no control over the rest. The only thing she could control was her own discomfort.
She took the cup and emptied it.
“Excellent.” Petra gestured to the bed. “Up there, please.
Rin took a deep breath and sat down at the edge.
One hour. That was it. All she had to do was survive the next sixty minutes.
Petra began by taking an endless series of measurements.
With a notched string she recorded Rin’s height, wingspan, and the length of her feet.
She measured the circumference around Rin’s waist, wrists, ankles, and thighs.
Then with a smaller string she took a series of smaller measurements that seemed utterly pointless.
The width of Rin’s eyes. Their distance from her nose.
The length of each one of her fingernails.
This went on forever. Rin managed not to flinch too hard from Petra’s touch. The laudanum was working well; a lead weight had settled comfortably in her bloodstream and kept her numb, torpid, and docile.
Petra wrapped the string around the base of Rin’s thumb. “Tell me about the first time you communed with, ah, this entity you claim to be your god. How would you describe the experience?”
Rin said nothing. She had to present her body for examination. That didn’t mean she had to entertain small talk.
Petra repeated her question. Again Rin kept silent.
“You should know,” Petra said as she put the tape measure away, “that verbal cooperation is a condition of our agreement.”
Rin gave her a wary look. “What do you want from me?”
“Only your honest responses. I am not solely interested in the stock of your body. I’m curious about the possibilities for the redemption of your soul.”
If Rin’s mind had been working any faster she would have managed some clever retort. Instead she rolled her eyes.
“You seem confident our religion is false,” Petra said.
“I know it’s false.” The laudanum had loosened Rin’s tongue, and she found herself spilling the first thoughts that came to her mind. “I’ve seen evidence of my gods.”
“Have you?”
“Yes, and I know that the universe is not the doing of a single man.”
“A single man? Is that what you think we believe?” Petra tilted her head. “What do you know about our theology?”
“That it’s stupid,” Rin said, which was the extent of what she’d ever been taught.
They’d studied Hesperian religion—Makerism, they called it—briefly at Sinegard, back when none of them thought the Hesperians would return to the Empire’s shores during their lifetime.
None of them had taken their studies of Hesperian culture seriously, not even the instructors.
Makerism was only ever a footnote. A joke. Those foolish westerners.
Rin remembered idyllic walks down the mountainside with Jiang during the first year of her apprenticeship, when he’d made her research differences between eastern and western religions and hypothesize the reasons they existed.
She remembered sinking hours into this question at the library.
She’d discovered that the vast and varied religions of the Empire tended to be polytheistic, disordered, and irregular, lacking consistency even across villages.
But the Hesperians liked to invest their worship in a single entity, typically represented as a man.
“Why do you think that is?” Rin had asked Jiang.
“Hubris,” he’d said. “They already like to think they are lords of the world. They’d like to think something in their own image created the universe.”
The question that Rin had never entertained, of course, was how the Hesperians had become so vastly technologically advanced if their approach to religion was so laughably wrong. Until now, it had never been relevant.
Petra plucked a round metal device about the size of her palm off the table and held it in front of Rin. She clicked a button at the side, and its lid popped off. “Do you know what this is?”
It was a clock of some sort. She recognized Hesperian numbers, twelve in a circle, with two needles moving slowly in rotation. But Nikara clocks, powered by dripping water, were installations that took up entire corners of rooms. This thing was so small it could have fit in her pocket.
“Is it a timepiece?”
“Very good,” Petra said. “Appreciate this design. See the intricate gears, perfectly shaped to form, that keep it ticking on its own. Now imagine that you found this on the ground. You don’t know what it is.
You don’t know who put it there. What is your conclusion?
Does it have a designer, or is it an accident of nature, like a rock? ”
Rin’s mind moved sluggishly around Petra’s questions, but she knew the conclusion Petra wanted her to reach.
“There exists a creator,” she said after a pause.
“Very good,” Petra said again. “Now imagine the world as a clock.
Consider the sea, the clouds, the skies, the stars, all working in perfect harmony to keep our world turning and breathing as it does.
Think of the life cycles of forests and the animals that live in them.
This is no accident. This could not have been forged through primordial chaos, as your theology tends to argue.
This was deliberate creation by a greater entity, perfectly benevolent and rational.
“We call him our Divine Architect, or the Maker, as you know him. He seeks to create order and beauty. This isn’t mad reasoning. It is the simplest possible explanation for the beauty and intricacy of the natural world.”
Rin sat quietly, running those thoughts through her tired mind.
It did sound terribly attractive. She liked the thought that the natural world was fundamentally knowable and reducible to a set of objective principles imposed by a benevolent and rational deity.
That was much neater and cleaner than what she knew of the sixty-four gods—chaotic creatures dreaming up an endless whirlpool of forces that created the subjective universe, where everything was constantly in flux and nothing was ever written.
Easier to think that the natural world was a neat, objective, and static gift wrapped and delivered by an all-powerful architect.
There was only one gaping oversight.
“So why do things go badly?” Rin asked. “If this Maker set everything in motion, then—”
“Then why couldn’t the Maker prevent death?” Petra supplied. “Why do things go wrong if they were designed according to plan?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
Petra gave her a small smile. “Don’t look so surprised. That is the most common question of every new convert. Your answer is Chaos.”
“Chaos,” Rin repeated slowly. She’d heard Petra use this word at the council earlier. It was a Hesperian term; it had no Nikara equivalent. Despite herself, she asked, “What is Chaos?”
“It is the root of evil,” Petra said. “Our Divine Architect is not omnipotent. He is powerful, yes, but he leads a constant struggle to fashion order out of a universe tending inevitably toward a state of dissolution and disorder. We call that force Chaos. Chaos is the antithesis of order, the cruel force trying constantly to undo the Architect’s creations.
Chaos is old age, disease, death, and war.
Chaos manifests in the worst of mankind—evil, jealousy, greed, and treachery. It is our task to keep it at bay.”
Petra closed the timepiece and placed it back on the table. Her fingers hovered over the instruments, deliberating, and then selected a device with what looked like two earpieces and a flat circle attached to a metal cord.
“We don’t know how or when Chaos manifests,” she said. “But it tends to pop up more often in places like yours—undeveloped, uncivilized, and barbaric. And cases like yours are the worst outbreaks of individual Chaos that the Company has ever seen.”
“You mean shamanism,” Rin said.
Petra turned back to face her. “You understand why the Gray Company must investigate. Creatures like you pose a terrible threat to earthly order.”
She raised the flat circle up under Rin’s shirt to her chest. It was icy cold. Rin couldn’t help but flinch.
“Don’t be scared,” Petra said. “Don’t you realize I’m trying to help you?”
“I don’t understand,” Rin murmured, “why you would even keep me alive.”
“Fair question. Some think it would be easier simply to kill you. But then we would come no closer to understanding Chaos’s evil.
And it would only find another avatar to wreak its destruction.
So against the Gray Company’s better judgment, I am keeping you alive so that at last we may learn to fix it. ”
“Fix it,” Rin repeated. “You think you can fix me.”
“I know I can fix you.”
There was a fanatic intensity to Petra’s expression that made Rin deeply uncomfortable.
Her gray eyes gleamed a metallic silver when she spoke.
“I’m the smartest scholar of the Gray Company in generations.
I’ve been lobbying to come study the Nikara for decades.
I’m going to figure out what is plaguing your country. ”
She pressed the metal disc hard between Rin’s breasts. “And then I’m going to drive it out of you.”
At last the hour was over. Petra put her instruments back on the table and dismissed Rin from the examination room.
The last of the laudanum wore off just as Rin returned to the barracks. Every feeling that the drug had kept at bay—discomfort, anxiety, disgust, and utter terror—came flooding back to her all at once, a sickening rush so abrupt that it wrenched her to her knees.
She tried to get to the lavatory. She didn’t make it two steps before she lurched over and vomited.
She couldn’t help it. She hunched over the puddle of her sick and sobbed.
Petra’s touch, which had seemed so light, so noninvasive under the effect of laudanum, now felt like a dark stain, like insects burrowing their way under Rin’s skin no matter how hard she tried to claw them out.
Her memories mixed together; confusing, indistinguishable.
Petra’s hands became Shiro’s hands. Petra’s room became Shiro’s laboratory.
Worst of all was the violation, the fucking violation, and the sheer helplessness of knowing that her body was not hers and she had to sit still and take it, this time not because of any restraints, but due to the simple fact that she’d chosen to be there.
That was the only thing that kept her from packing her belongings and immediately leaving Arlong.
She needed to do this because she deserved this. This was, in some horrible way that made complete sense, atonement. She knew she was monstrous. She couldn’t keep denying that. This was self-flagellation for what she’d become.
It should have been you, Altan had said.
She should have been the one who died.
This came close.
After she had cried so hard that the pain in her chest had faded to a dull ebb, she pulled herself to her feet and wiped the tears and mucus off her face. She stood in front of a mirror in the lavatory and waited to come out until the redness had faded from her eyes.
When the others asked her what had happened, she said nothing at all.