'Look at him, there!' The old priestess now jabbed a finger at her grandson, though only half seriously, causing her host Belias to flinch. 'Drunk on wine and full to bursting and still he complains that he is bored. Would you believe he has seen an entire empire pass beneath his heels these last twelve moons, sights that only a privileged few will ever be fated to witness? No, he merely whines for more, like the spoiled child he is.'
Kirkus belched loudly at that.
There is no lord but thy own self, Belias silently recited, as though suddenly he was indeed a true devotee of Mann, while he covertly took in the intoxicated condition of the young priest sprawled in his chair. Could this truly be the next leader of both an empire and a faith that spanned two continents, and at least forty different races?
Unlike many of his fellow countrymen who would rather fight until independence or death if they could, Belias was by his own reckoning a realist. It was a trait he judged far superior to any other in his life, and which he found miserably lacking in his fellow Nathalese. Save, perhaps, for the merchant classes, who knew a good business opportunity when it came crashing through their doors boot-first.
All those years ago, when the imperial army had first rolled up to the Nathalese borders, and broken through almost without pause, he had recognized the future imperial occupation for what it truly was – an inevitability. And so, after the final stand of Queen Hano and her forces right here in this ill-fated city, which he had been fortunate enough to escape, through being far away with his wife and child on his family estate, and being the ambitious young politician that he was, Belias had switched sides accordingly. He became, of all things, a priest of Mann, seeing this as the only way to advance politically within the new order. It had been a simple enough business. All he needed to do was study for three years at the newly opened temple complex in Serat, where all manner of provincials were studying likewise to take on the robes of the order, and then to brave his way through the Cull, that mysterious ritual which would also signify his final initiation into the creed of Mann.
It had worked well, his change of allegiance – and Belias liked to remind himself of this, and of the subsequent success of that decision, during those darker nights when his conscience plagued him. He was now, after all, the governor of his very own city.
But, despite all such pragmatism, or perhaps because of it, Belias understood his less sophisticated countrymen only too well. An episode like today, a public press-ganging throughout his city, might well be enough to trigger a revolt, despite the threat of total retaliation that would be anticipated by all. If that uprising happened, High Priest Belias was undoubtedly a dead man. He would be the first to be strung up by the populace, seen as the traitorous figurehead that he was. And even if he somehow avoided such a lynching, the priesthood itself would finish him off for allowing such a revolt to occur in the first place. They would denounce him as weak, and no true priest of Mann at all, and he would be disrobed by their favoured method of disrobing one of the order – by sticking him on top of a burning pyre.
And all of this because of these fanatics from Q'os, sitting here at his dinner table, in his own home, in his city, gorging themselves on his food, while their stinking slaves cluttered up his driveway. It would be their fault if the citizens revolted, and their necks might even join his own in the noose. But that would not provide much by way of compensation. Dead was dead, after all.
Mann, the high priest reflected sourly. The divine flesh. Belias had made a point of learning everything he could about this all-consuming religion he had bought into. And he believed he understood it for what it truly was.
The Holy Order of Mann had not always been so holy. Once, it had been nothing more than a dark urban cult, a rumour whispered among the city states of the Lanstrada, where it was used as a threat by mothers to frighten their children into obedience. But that was before the same furtive cult had risen to dominance in the rich city state of Q'os – a populace gripped by fear and superstition induced by years of disease and failing crops – where the cult had seized power in a coup known as the Longest Night.
Driven by their victory and ambitions to consolidate their power as quickly as possible, the cult invested the vast reserves of wealth now under its control into reforming the city's army into a machine fit for conquest; their dream, to spread the Mannian philosophy throughout the known world. At first, their military endeavours did not go so well. But, eventually, armed with a new design of cannon – more accurate, less prone to exploding unexpectedly and requiring a smaller quantity of blackpowder – their fortunes on the battlefield finally turned. This led to an era of invasion and dominance that saw the brutal forging of an empire in little less than fifty years and, in the process, changed the very nature of warfare.
During those five decades in power, the cult had purposely wrapped itself in divinity. Over a relatively short period of time it had grown into a state religion, with many of its earliest customs hardening into tradition. The Cull was one such example. For the neophyte priests it was a ritual of initiation, in which they would lose the tips of their little fingers then proceed to murder an innocent with his bare hands, such a breaking of taboo being intended to hone the primal self into a point unstoppable.
Or so the faith went, though Belias thought it all so much fluff at the end of the day. He had merely felt sickened by his own long night of initiation. While more devout priests repeated the ceremony of the Cull many times during the course of their lives, supposedly honing the divine flesh further still, Belias had never repeated the experience, and tried hard never to dwell on that one and only time. Not once had he ever told his family what he had done to attain these white robes of his station.
Before now it had never seemed to matter that Belias did not believe in any of Mann's more fundamental nonsense. He was an ambitious turncoat priest in a religion that did not concern itself with selflessness or sacrifice, but only with power and self-divinity, and therefore Belias, a man of supreme self-worship in his younger years, had rarely ever felt himself a fake.
It was curious however, sitting at his own dinner table with these obvious fanatics from Q'os – real priests in every sense of the word, with their carefully shaven scalps and their abundance of facial piercings – that Belias was finally feeling himself to be the charlatan he really was. And it was this thought that lay at the forefront of his mind as he sat observing the scene before him, his sense of foreboding growing by the moment. He wondered just what they would do to him if they ever suspected.
*
Kirkus was feeling irritated. The wine was passable, the food at least filling, but it felt as though he had passed the last hour dining with corpses, so stiff and formal were the minor conversations conducted around the table. Not for the first time in the last six months, he wished he was back at the Temple of Whispers, along with his peers.
A sharp cry from outside broke his disgruntled train of thought. Likely, one of their newly acquired slaves was being coaxed into silence by the lashings of a whip.
'About time,' he commented, fumbling to refill his glass yet again. Such arrogance was partly for show, however, for Kirkus was not in every way the spoiled lout that he pretended to be: it simply entertained him to appear so at times such as now.
No one responded to his remark. The tinkle of cutlery and the crunching of food continued around the table.
Kirkus straightened the cutlery before him until each piece was again perfectly in its place. His teeth ground together. If he did not do something soon to relieve his boredom he would go mad.