Cold Copper Tears

Damn it, I'd thought about this before and I hadn't bothered to see if Jill had left something.

Sometimes you get too busy to think.

Now, with him sitting there smirking, I began to wonder if Jill hadn't set me up.

"Dean! Go upstairs and see if Jill left anything in the guest room. Maya can help you look. If you don't find anything, look wherever she could've gotten to while she was here. If you still don't find anything, look where she couldn't have gotten. There must be something."

Better late than never.

"Right. I'm sure the neighbors will agree when they try to figure out why their houses got torn up."

He understood. If he'd gotten off his mental duff back when, we might not have this mess now.

Let us not fall to bickering, Garrett. Time has been wasted. Let us waste no more.

"Check. So let's get at it. You think you know what's going on? Do you know anything about these Sons of Hammon?"

I recall them. A vicious and nihilistic cult. For them all life is sorrow and misery and punishment and shall continue to be till their Devourer has been unchained to scour the world clean. The many shall be consumed and the True Believers, the Faithful, who serve with­out cavil, who help release the Devourer and set the Devastation in motion, shall be rewarded with perpet­ual bliss. Their paradise resembles the adolescent paradise of the Shades cults. Milk and honey, streets of gold, an inexhaustible supply of suppliant virgins.

"That part doesn't sound so bad."

To you it would not.

I waited for him to tell me more.

The cult's roots reach back to the time of your prophet Terrell. It was declared heretic and a perse­cution launched against it a thousand years ago. Till then it was just one of countless Hanite cults. The her­etics fled into various nonhuman areas. A colony formed in Carathca, where its doctrines became pol­luted by dark elfish nihilism, then fell under the sway of devil-worshippers who brought it around to its pres­ent philosophical form three hundred years ago. About that time its high priests began claiming direct reve­lations from heaven, revelations the laity could feel themselves. The cult began acting politically, trying to hasten the Devastation.

They were persecuted, Garrett. First in the power games of empire and churches, then because the masters of Car­athca grew afraid of them and wanted to drive them out.

The cult faded into the human population, which supported it because humans were not well treated in Carathca. It deployed all the instruments of terror. After two generations it mastered Carathca. The dark-elfin nobility survived only as puppets. The country­side for fifty miles around fell under cult sway. Fanatic assassins went out to silence the Devastator's ene­mies. The cult became so dangerous, so vicious, that the early Karentine Kings had no choice but war or submission. They chose war, as humans always do, determined to exterminate the cult. For a time it seemed they had succeeded. King Beran declared them extinct only to be assassinated by a branch which had established itself in TunFaire under another name. His son Brian continued the fight and, it appeared, suc­ceeded in extinguishing the cult's last lights a century and a half ago. Do you follow?

"Well enough. I don't understand, but I don't have to understand to deal with them, do I?"

You need understand only that they are more dan­gerous than anyone you have ever battled, excepting perhaps vampires defending their nest. They do not just believe, they know. Their devil god has spoken to each of them directly and has given each of them a look into a paradise where they will spend eternity. They will do anything because they know there is no penalty to com­pare with their coming reward. They fear nothing. They are saved and will be born again, and concrete evi­dence has been given them for this. They need take the word of no one but their god himself.

I got a really creepy feeling. "Just wait up, Old Bones. What the hell? I don't need this. I'm a nonbeliever. You trying to tell me there's no side of the angels, that there really is a god and he's really a devil and—"

Hold! Enough!

I calmed down a little, though I was still pretty shaky. Think about stepping up face-to-face with pos­sible proof that something you find completely repel­lent is the law of the universe.

We Loghyr have never found proof of the existence of any gods. Neither have we disproved their exis­tence, although logic militates against it. They are not necessary to explain anything. Nature does not pro­vide that which is not needed.

He'd never spent half a year trying to survive in a swamp infested with five-hundred parasitic species. Were gods some sort of psychic or spiritual parasites?

However, proof or lack thereof are unnecessary to the mind that must believe. And that mind becomes doubly narrow and doubly dangerous when it is given what it perceives as proof. Then it can begin to create that in which it believes.