Do you see now why I will aid the Judge of Ages, and why I did not tell the Blue lordlings of my moot with Pastor? No man, unless he were a Hormagaunt in truth, could hear of such enormities and not vow eternal war against the Master of the World, or whichever of his Hermetic vassals presently wears in his name his iron crown.

5. Madness

I know the fate of Master of Fate: in the Year of his Lord 7466, Reyes y Pastor went mad.

Still in his household, I served, and I saw it all. Reyes began talking about a king in outer space who has a child but no wife, and Father Reyes was urging but not ordering his servitors and slaves to serve this king.

Reyes then enacted a strange make-believe type of glandular donation, but using bread instead of real glands from real children, wine instead of real blood. But he insisted that these are the proper mechanisms for producing the biochemical change into a new organism, which he called a glorified body.

Within the next few years, some of the other Hormagaunts were given an office as “Shepherds”—even though there were no sheep—and were called “Father” as Father Reyes was—even though they sired no sons.

The Fathers not only spread this imaginary biochemical change, but some also wandered the newly treeless lands, telling Iatrocrats that to kill and consume children was forbidden, telling the Clades to welcome the stranger and the sojourner, telling Donors to obey their masters in all things, but to disobey when ordered to cease to serve the imaginary space king, and to rejoice in the death that this disobedience would provoke.

The Old True Way was openly defied, and this new way, this thing for which we had no name, spread from the Pacific Islands through Indonesia to Indochina through Angkor to Tabrobane. It sounded like the Nymph-talk, but it was a nonsexual form of sex, a nonhomosexual nonincestuous form of brother-love: indeed, in its name, some of the Clades forswore reproduction altogether and became eremites, living in isolation and begging the king in outer space to forgive the crimes of the world.

Others of the Clade-folk took one and only one mate, freeing their harems and studs, and they claimed their flesh was one, but they did not consume each other or make the flesh to be one. Nor did they mate only in the mating times and seasons, but for lifelong. Bowers of blooming flowers they grew to solemnize and celebrate this wonder, even though it was nothing but reproduction using sexual organs to exchange fluid, rather than the more dignified and hygienic pods and matrices. They used the old instruments of long-vanished Witches to compose songs about this, called Epithalamia, and the songs were very fair to the ear, so that even Hormagaunts would weep to hear. It was insanity, and did not serve the progress of the race toward posthumanity, but it was a beautiful insanity.

Reyes y Pastor called himself the Master of the World, and Lord of History. Who could have stopped him and his madness? But one did. The real Master of the World sent another down from the darkness of heaven, from the morning star, your ship.

Sudden war and horror came, so swift and so complete that no mortal could have compassed it, only a posthuman. First, the foe raised a storm. How you posthumans can command the weather, I do not understand, but I saw it.

During this typhoon, Medusae dropped down suddenly from the night sky in many vessels as silver as fish and swifter than hawks. From these vessels, tendrils like the arms of Scylla reached down and plucked up and tore asunder all the Hormagaunts, Donors, and Clades found in the open.

All who served the make-believe king of space were slain by the real space lord, the Master of the World. Up from the sea, their approach hidden by the tidal wave, came Hormagaunts from Annam, offended at those who spoke against the One True Way. And there were diverse earthquakes in many places, wherever a rainbow of light reached down from outer space and touched the bottom of the sea.

Then one descended from the vehicle of the Medusae dressed as an Hermeticist, in the black silks of a starfarer. He had two tendrils made of biometallic gold issuing from his skull above his eyes. I did not know what it was I saw, but the coming years revealed what it was: This was the first of the Locusts. The time of the Red Hermeticist was done; the time of the Locust Hermeticist was come.

The cathedrals and nunneries and other buildings were inflicted with rabies, so that the doors all closed and those inside were digested and slain. No innocent life was spared, and those who did not resist were not killed cleanly but by slow torture, cut with knives so that strings of his own flesh could tie the victim between two fires to which wood was added one stick at a time. They were infected, so that when other prisoners were released from cages made of the bones of their loved ones, the infections afflicted sight and reasoning centers, so that these would-be saviors merely lit themselves aflame or brought more harm on the victim, much to the amusement of the Annam Hormagaunts.

I saw the coffin of the Red Hermeticist being loaded aboard the airskiff of the Medusa, but whether this was a slumbering coffin or a death coffin, I could not say.

History has heard nothing more of Reyes y Pastor.

And I? You know how I escaped. I fled to your Tombs for protection, Judge of Ages, knowing this the one place the Hermeticists could not come. That is how I came to be your prisoner.

What? No. No tales I told the Blue Men were truth, though perhaps some parts were closer to true than others. What right have they to ask anything of me?

8

The Testament of Oenoe the Nymph

1. The Tale of a Bride of a Dead World

After noon mess, a pack of eight dog things escorted Menelaus past the gate to the large sky blue nautilus shell.

There was a warm and steady headwind from the doorless opening as he entered, which stayed in his face as he climbed. The air pressure was slightly higher inside than out. Menelaus decided that the Simplifiers either had a religious prohibition on doors and chimneys and windows, or a deliberate preference for pretty but uncomfortable impracticalities. Not to mention lots of fuel to waste.

He was brought around one more half turn of the corridor, reaching a higher but smaller chamber than before. Here, a different architecture suddenly appeared. The floor was coated with living grass, surrounding a depression in the center of the floor where a green pool thronged with floating lotus blossoms shimmered. As the dogs escorted him in, a screen of leaves and lianas closed over the opening, moving just slowly enough to be unnoticeable. This living screen of leafy vines was the first curtain he had seen inside the nautilus shell; and the only barrier to the wind. The air within was humid and warm.

On the grass lay draped the beautiful curvaceous form of a She-Nymph, her midnight hair like a waterfall of ink, shining, falling in drapes and cascades adown her swanlike neck and slender shoulders. Generations of gene-modification had exaggerated her various sexual characteristics to a point just shy of absurdity. Her eyes were slanted and lustrous, so large as to seem a child’s eyes. Her eyes were underlined by an epicanthic fold, and shaded by eyelashes like two raven’s wings. Her face was round and high-cheeked, her lips so full and red, they seemed to burst with blood. The chin beneath was small and firm, coming to a dainty point. Her breasts were like those of a pregnant woman, while her waist was that of an untouched maiden, and the muscles of her belly formed a parenthesis around a perfect navel. Her designers graced her with wide hips sweetly rounded, long legs that were a symphony of curving length, firm thighs and pointed toes, all muscled like a slumbering lioness.