Once again beginning to overheat, Daisy conjured water. By now, she was practiced enough to just wet her clothing, but evidently the sorcery caught someone’s attention, because she heard what were halfway-decipherable words in Jovian. Daisy caught herself looking around for the shouting voice before she had even made the God-Star or chosen an appropriate Power to thank for Providence. She supposed her relief and the sense of urgency would speak for themselves to the Lord.
The source of the talking was quickly apparent, for the man was a good foot taller than anyone else on the streets, and being given a wide berth at that. But no, he was standing on a crate. His clothes were dirty and ragged, but his dark brown hair and beard were neatly trimmed. His skin was subtly different in color than that of the other Marzians, more of an olive hue than tanned, and it lacked the weathering of the populace. It seemed she was not the only one to have traversed the space between planets.
“Come, come!” the man called to her. It was a little late to not trust in the One God, so Daisy strode over to the man. He stepped down from his box with a flutter of his light brown robe, and asked, “Please to be telling m-m-me, y-y-you from Ort-t-th come?” Daisy’s brow furrowed. His accent was thick, and she wasn’t sure after all if he was speaking the same language she’d learned as a child. To further complicate interpretation, he stammered over the consonants in pronouns.
“Orth? Beyond Marz? No. I come from Jupitre. How is it you speak Jovian, if you haven’t been? You’re clearly not native.” Daisy wondered if this entire trip had been a fool’s errand and she had strayed from the One God’s will entirely. Perhaps she would be happier handing over her mind to the Repositorium of Knowledge and submitting to the will of those who ran the Kingdom of Air.
The man clearly found her own speech as confused as her own, for he was some modest time before losing his befuddled expression. Then he shook his head. “I-I speak Draconic, not Jovian.” This made a surprising amount of sense to Daisy. The Kingdom of Air was a draconic empire through and through, and so the native tongue would have to be some corruption of their own tongue. The man was not the one with the impenetrable accent, her own speech suffered from linguistic drift. She asked if the Marzians spoke Draconic, and he shook his head after a few moments. “A dialect of Lider I speak. It’s the lingua franca. Though the conversations go much like ou-ou-ours.” With the passage of time, she found it easier to understand his accent, compensate for her own, what have you. And the stutter was hardly worth noting, though she admired the bravery of a man with a speech impediment standing on a crate and addressing a people.
She said as much, and he shook his head. “Th-th-they not listen. I-I do not speak Marzeilles, and my Lider is Loon, so I am as a raving madman to them. It is m-m-my curse. I-I was to witness for the One G-God and nobody listens.” He seemed a very gentle soul, but when she said as much he cocked his head and shrugged. “Gentle? What has that to do with m-my Calling?”
Daisy let out a breath with such force that he looked at her suddenly, and then launched into a brief explanation of the nature of divine inspiration. “The Supreme Creator, of the Trinity, grants two forms of divine inspiration, and both are necessary for success. He grants prophecy, as you are blessed with, and wrath, which perhaps you are not. It is a central teaching that prophecy without wrath is unheard. Well, prophecy even with wrath might go unheard, but at that point the problem is the listeners.” She realized she was discussing theology with a perfect stranger. “I’m Daisy, what is your name?”
“I-I am R-R-Ruler.” The geometer’s toy, or was he destined to be king? He shrugged and laughed weakly. “I-I am much more a geometer, but m-my m-m-mother thought I would rule fey nephilim.”
Daisy remembered, this time, to make the sign of the God-Star and thank the One God for His mercy, then square looked at Ruler. “I would be willing to teach you the inspiration of wrath, if you would not mind being my guide. You speak a dialect of a lingua franca while I do not have even that much.”
Ruler appeared to consider her words, or, perhaps, his own. Already they were developing a pidgin between their two dialects. “I-I am gifted with telepathy. With y-y-your permission, I-I would use it to give y-you the meaning of others’ words, and give y-you the words to say.”
Daisy recoiled. Telepathy was a gift of dragon kind, and her experiences with dragons had been those of power-grabbing, covetous, conniving sorts. Their only virtue was their longevity, that their touch upon the lives of those they influenced was often so light as to leave their pawns unharmed in their lifetime. She wondered how she could have been so wrong, as to judge a dragon servant trustworthy. Ruler clearly traced the thoughts going through her head, though she had not felt a psionic touch, for his hands were open, palm up, and he was shaking his head.
“M-my dragon, sh-sh-she believes in coexistence. She was the first recipient of my L-Lord’s Word, His divine message. There is a terrible war to come. Dragons must learn to coexist, if the-e-ey want to survive.”
Daisy’s thought was that this was laudable, if it were true. Still, she would not trust the words of a human, without taking into account Heaven’s eyes. She conjured a small sphere of water, and reached out magically towards Ruler. It wouldn’t tell her if the dragon had misled him, but it would tell her whether he himself believed what he was saying. To her partial relief, the orb of water shone with an inner light, brighter even than the light she could summon plumbing the depths of her own soul. Not only was he a Godly man, there was every possibility his prophecy was divinely inspired, for she had never seen so bright a soul outside the pastors of the Unchained. She weighed her options, before finally letting down her emotional walls and encouraging Ruler to make contact with her mind.
Communion was immediate, and swift. There was no need for the intermediary of speech, though many concepts were tied to Draconic-Jovian words where there was only a small difference in sound. “I don’t prefer to communicate like this, as it requires focus and it robs me of my stutter.” The word stutter was similar in their languages, but his carried a connotation she didn’t recognize. When she asked, he elaborated, “Since my many-times-great grandfather, the von Mind lineage has taken pride in our boldness by leading adventuring companies despite our stutter. We are confident. We are proud. What we are not, evidently, is wrathful. I was a diplomat for a team working under my dragon when the One God gave me my mission.” He switched back to speech. “I-I can use m-m-my telepathy to give y-you the meaning of others’ speech, and the words you need. If y-you trust me.”
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Daisy measured the weight of his words, unfamiliar with telepathy but inclined towards trust in the sincerity of his mental touch. His soul, after all, had glowed with the light of the One God, brighter even than her own. “Very well. I will teach you wrath, if you will intercede on my behalf with these Marzians.”
Ruler barked a laugh. “They call the-emselves, so I-I-I gather, the Ranks of the Damned. This is the Kingdom of Hell.”
“This is Marz. The fire planet, but hardly Hell.” Ruler shrugged his indifference. What he’d said was true. There was, however, one remaining issue before him, before he could accept her offer of assistance. What was her faith, and how strong was she in her faith?
Daisy let out a woof of air. That was not a light question, nor was it unreasonable from her own origins in the Kingdom of Air. Then again, this was the Kingdom of Hell, evidently. How many planets in Heaven’s orbit considered themselves damned? But Ruler’s question. Daisy was, she said simply, a Witness. Ruler gestured for her to elaborate, and she cast about for a way to summarize the teachings of her faith.
It called itself the Order of the Broken Chain, or simply the Unchained. They had been founded as a response to draconic autocracy in the Wholist Church, and so aside from their belief in a direct relationship to the One God, common to every Witness sect she had encountered, they were anti-imperialist, anti-isolationist, and generally inclined to question authority. Ruler laughed and shook his head, but refused to elaborate until she had said her peace.
The tools of oppression were violence and fear, and with faith in a benevolent God and a peaceful afterlife, they broke those chains by spreading the Good Word. Then too, since the sacrificial death of the Savior by suffocation in the vacuum of space, it was no longer necessary to be slaves to sin. Those, too, were chains they believed were broken. Or were to be broken.
Ruler was smiling warmly. Daisy wondered how much he understood from what she had said, but linguistic barriers were rapidly disintegrating, and she realized a light psionic touch was smoothing what wrinkles remained. But what of his faith? Obviously, if it was contingent to their relationship that he knew the tenets of her faith, and given his divine mission, he was a deeply religious man. But what did he believe?
He had, he replied, had kept his mother’s faith. As a geometer, rather like Daisy, she had been enchanted by numbers and the consistent physical laws of the universe which enabled the celestial orbs to remain in their orbits around Heaven. So it was that she came to be of the Clockmakers, likening the One God to a precision craftsman who had created the Heavens and Orth. Ruler smiled and chuckled. His mother would not have approved of Daisy’s sorcerous light.
While he was not an Orthodox Clockmaker, those who believed that candles were against the will of the One God, for if He had intended for humanity to toil in the dark, He would have given them the eyes of cats. Similarly, and a custom which he had kept out of long habit from his childhood and apprenticeship, they took a nap at noon for one hour, give or take, sleeping away lunch and the midday fog.
Beyond that, there were other intricacies of their faith, of course. This or that rite, devotional clockwork; a great many of the Clockmakers were craftswomen. But Ruler could tell that Daisy’s interest was like his own: did they have compatible beliefs in One just God. Further, he could tell his answer didn’t satisfy in that regard. He had explained the mechanics of his faith, some of the customs, but not his fundamental relationship to the Lord.
Clockmakers believed the One God had set the world in motion, and believed in absolute free will. Once started and wound, Creation went along its course in ways defined by the rules that ordered reality. Of course—Ruler tapped his head—that didn’t mean He wasn’t speaking. There would be a war on dragonkind for their heresy, and the One God had chosen Ruler to warn humanity of the incoming upheaval. So while there was free will, his faith made room for the benevolent intercession of the Lord.
Daisy nodded. Her own faith emphasized freedom from oppression and sin, his own the fundamental orderliness of the universe, but both held the beneficence of the One God. Did Orth believe in the Savior’s sacrifice? Ruler nodded vigorously. On Orth, the Savior had come—the Savior had come to Orth? Did He pass through each of the planets before dying on Jupitre?—Ruler had been getting to that. The Savior had sacrificed Himself to the cross on Orth, dying for their sins, in the small nation of Icehold. What followed was mutual incredulity. The Savior had died on both Orth and Jupitre, neither of them doubted the other, did that mean he had come to every planet? How could the Savior die more than once? Had He not risen to Heaven after his resurrection? Ultimately, they agreed on a passage of the Gospels, “With the One God all things are possible.”
It was around then that Daisy noticed the sheen of sweat on her face, and that Ruler as well looked overheated. With his consent, she doused them both with water, and asked how people survived this Hellish—she laughed at her own choice of words—climate. Ruler replied, “Wa-Wa-Watergate takes shipments of water from a dragon and distributes them throughout the Kingdom of Hell.”
So Ruler had been charged with a divine mission to warn of a war to come with dragonkind. What did that say of the dragon who had given him his psionic gifts? Ruler shook his head. Presumably, she would remain above it. Or, and his visage abruptly grew grimmer, she would die in the ensuing war. But he was charged with his divine mission, and he would carry it out. He had no desire to be devoured by a giant fish; or either by a very small fish. Daisy cocked her head in a question. Ruler pulled taught his robe, and his abdomen was lumpen in a manner Daisy would have attributed to a hernia. He explained that it was his thorn, a gift from the One God to keep him humble. A gutfish, which was a kind of abomination eel.
Once again Daisy found herself recoiling from this holy man. Abominations, after nephilim, were a favored tool of the Powers that Were. They bred horrific monsters as a final recourse when lies proved insufficient. She herself had encountered them only once, but they gleefully publicized the successes of these monsters putting down insurrections. Ruler waited patiently for her to get over her squeamishness, only to proceed and inquire more.
His gutfish was capable of telepathy at a reasonable distance, being a venerable member of its species, and had cold, draconic thought processes. It kept him from entangling his own motives with those of the Lord. It also allowed him to utilize his electrical runes without his arm going numb, drained of the energy to relay impulses. Evidently the creator of the eels had intended their capacitor cells to be used punitively, but they were immensely useful in this age of elemental brands.
He showed her his hand, and she saw the scars of electrical brands. Then, too, he showed her the revolver he carried, a novelty to her. On Jupitre, like her dragon staff, guns were breech loading but single shot only. Ruler, however, was enchanted with a different aspect of his gun. There were contacts on either side, designed to spark when he applied current. Proudly, he told her it was truly a gun which couldn’t fire both ways. It had no mechanism by which to do so.
Daisy nodded, though she had her doubts. Her own hand bore a fire brand which enabled her to fire her gun without use of flint, and she wondered if it would allow her to fire Ruler’s gun. Still, with his radiant soul and their compatible faiths, hopefully it would never come up.
