9. Hemoclysm

Then the time of bloodshed came, the Hemoclysm, when the configurations, nations, and factions attempted utterly to exterminate all rival DNA molecular compositions. First one worldwide war and then many burned the eternal forest, and in the times between the wars came the gene-cleansings and genocides and mass starvations.

Because of the wars, Asvid and I were growing allergic to each other. Our immune defenses, as they grew more complex, were harder to harmonize chemically. When we could no longer stand each other, he declared me his apprentice no longer, but a journeyman.

Not long after I departed from him, and founded for myself a stronghold at the mouth of the Avon, a summons arrived that midnight by long-range night-swallow. I ate the bird to ingest the chemical codes, which only mechanisms from my DNA could unlock and read.

It was a summons, not from Asvid, but from his master. After so many years of surviving the deadly world-wood and the deadlier children of his kindred, Asvid was being called by the one man with the right to call him: his patron and maker and master, Pastor, from whom all Phastorlings take their name.

And, in calling Asvid, he called all the Asvidlings, who were a very great number, more than I had imagined.

Pastor had called a Phastormoot, a gathering of those loyal to him, and we were summoned to Millennium Island on the opposite side of the globe.

I met with Asvid on the day the great migration was set to depart. Such a gathering of such hosts had never been seen, for he was eldest, and there were many indeed beholden to him. Rank after rank of the Asvidlings, names out of legend, rumors from history, Hormagaunts as vicious and deadly and cunning as anything our race had ever produced paraded before us and descended into the moaning vessels of the sea, a forest of horns and crests, a cacophony of screams and trumpets, a thunder of claws and hooves, until only we two, Asvid and I, remained.

I remember it well. We stood upon at the river mouth on a bluff overlooking the sea, and the land behind us, as far as eyes could reach, was dark with ash, and there were many trunks, hundreds of feet high, cracked and burnt and dead, huge like half-fallen towers, with no canopy overhead to hide the agoraphobic sky. Upon the battle plain, I saw blackened skulls piled in pyramids or rolling in the ash, and corpses of dogs and crows foolish enough to eat the slain, and so be poisoned by what slew them. Across this roofless world of smoldering death the river currents ran black with cinders and bark. The world-forest was dying.

Even I, who lived and rejoiced in death and murder, was appalled, for the chemical codes inspiring filial piety in me had weakened my nature. I asked of my master why all these dread events were necessary? What was wrong with the world?

He told me all history is nothing but a play of marionettes, and all events were played out by the puppeteer who pulled the secret strings, the Red Hermeticist Father Reyes y Pastor.

These were his words: “All our lives and all the lives of our ancestors have been bound up in a web of mathematical codes and conclusions, a march of numbers like an army of deadly ants, as invisible as bacteria, and history has never escaped from the meshes of the web. Father Reyes, through us, his scholars and scions and servants, establishes the contours, and history follows when we let the webwork out, or pull it back in. No matter where the individual fish may dart, the school is where the net defines. Pastor is one of the Enlightened, an Illuminatus—many times I have killed or caused disasters, founded schools or spread rumors, to thrust the forces of history one way or another, according to his commands.”

I told him that the Witches thought the motions of stars and planets defined destiny; that Chimerae said blood and genetic mechanisms defined it; that Nymphs taught that destiny was a figment of brain elements which could be altered by a vapor or a wine. Had not he himself taught me of all these dead ages?

Even behind the scales and bristles and fangs of his battle modifications, I saw then for the first time his human eyes, and human sorrow. “I will impart the greatest of secrets to you. Not stars, not blood, not brains define the destiny of men. My master does. It is given to him, the Red Hermeticist, to determine the fate of lesser men. The enlightened guide the benighted; the sighted lead the blind.” He spoke as one who speaks and believes, but hates, a hard truth.

He continued, “It is said there were other Hermeticists who defined and ruled the history of other ages. Our age is his. He is the Master of the Fate of the Hormagaunts.”

I saw then that I was a fish in a bucket, who, leaping out of the wooden wall, found myself still confined in a well, hemmed by a wall of stone. I had escaped the close slavery of Artabria only to find the larger slavery of the Red Hermeticist. “Are these wars his doing? For his pleasure, hell rules earth, and many fine things pass away, never again to be seen? It there none who can oppose and overthrow the ruler of this age and its present darkness?”

Asvid spoke with wry and weary humor. “The Nymphs, long ago, believed that there was a Judge of Ages, who would arise from sleep in the roots of his mountain, and condemn any age which offended his law. But what that law is, I never paused to inquire, and now the Nymphs are extinct, as dead as their belief.”

“You do not hold such a person exists?”

Asvid said, “Rather, I hope for his sake he does not. For were there a Judge to which the suffering multitudes and slaves and slain children could appeal, he would have heard their cry, and condemned this age long since. If he were real, and so indifferent to his duty, surely I would slay him.”

We departed separately, for in our present forms, we could neither embrace, not so much as a handshake, and dared not exchange the kiss of peace, lest the allergic reactions sicken us. He spread vast wings of membrane and took to the air, and I bowed my head and dived into the black and rushing water, the river tumbling to the sea.

I knew we would never meet again. The Phastormoot was the summons of the loyal. And Asvid was no longer numbered among them. Nor, truth be told, was I. The Wintermind technique allowed me to resist the homing instinct implanted in me. I fled in the opposite direction, from Thule to Vinland and south again to New England, Columbia, Virginia.

Therefore I know Reyes y Pastor exists, because he summoned me. I know the Judge of Ages does not exist, because if he did, Reyes y Pastor would have been judged, and slain.

You have been patient to hear the whole of my life, for the whole of my life was needed to tell what I knew of Pastor. My life was hell. Pastor is the maker and master of hell, the chief tormentor. That is what I know of him.

I assumed Asvid would be alive when I was thawed. Legend said nothing could kill the Old Man, the First of the Phastorlings: and the longer I lived with him, the more I thought the legend true.

He is not here, is he?

10. Wintermind

After Soorm was done speaking, Illiance said in High Iatric to Menelaus, “You have heard the testament of the relict Hormagaunt. Did his words happen to open to you a more complete understanding of the causes of the decline of Hormagaunt civilization, or yours?”

Menelaus said, “I’ll say. Do you two gentlemen have any reason to doubt his tale?”

Illiance said cautiously, “No obvious element contradicts a known fact preserved in our historical records. On that level, it seems not to be a complete fiction.”

Ull gestured toward the dog thing hunched over the table of readouts. “We have some cause, in the absence of contrary evidence, to suspect that there is no deliberate deceit being practiced.”