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.