“Do the rite well, priest,” Tephe said.

Andso looked at Tephe. “Captain, this is mypart in our task,” he said. “As you bid me let you do your part, I bid you allow me do mine.” He turned away from the captain and opened the codex.

The captain said nothing to this but motioned to Ysta. The two of them stepped out of the clearing, to the edge of the assembled mass. Headman Tscha stood a small distance away, watching his son with an expression Tephe found unreadable. Tephe turned his attention away from the headman and back toward the priest, who had found the rite and was reading it silently to himself. Eventually the priest nodded to himself, looked at the headman’s son, and began to speak.

The words came in an older version of the common tongue, recognizable but inflected strangely, repetitious and lulling. The priest settled into an iambic rhythm, and over the long minutes the Captain Tephe felt his attention drift despite his own excitement in bringing these souls to His Lord, and having His Lord come to receive them.

The headman’s son screamed.

Tephe snapped out of his reverie to see the young man contorted, back arched and tendons strapping themselves out of alignment, bending the body back as if they were being cranked by a torturer. The youth’s body should have toppled over but it balanced on one twitching foot as if dangling from a string.

Tephe’s gaze turned to the priest. The codex had slipped from Andso’s hands, but the priest still mouthed the words to the rite, eyes wide at the youth before him. Neither the priest nor the captain could seem to move from their place.

The youth’s scream strangled itself as his jaw pushed unnaturally forward. The muscles that attached the boy’s jaw to his skull bunched and pulled downward, snapping the bone and sending a spray of blood into the face of priest Andso. Tephe heard the crack as the headman’s son twisted and then folded backward, as if on a hinge. A second font of blood arced up and out of his mouth. The scream that had been choked out of the boy was taken up by his father.

The body formed an arch, stomach to the sky, fingers and toes snapping like sapling branches as they drove themselves hard into the ground. The skin on the youth’s body went taut, as if being pulled hard from below. The boy’s forehead touched the ground, tendons and muscles in his neck contracting in spasms, twisting the young man’s face toward Tephe as they did so. The captain could see Tschanu’s eyes. They were terribly aware.

The air was a storm of screams and howls, Tephe’s own slipping into the gyre. No one moved. What power was folding the boy into himself pinned every soul into immobility. No one could run or turn away.

Red lines bisected every limb of Tschanu’s body; Tephe realized the boy’s skin was flaying itself. Beneath the skin red muscles uncoiled like fraying cable and then stayed themselves into the ground, pulling off impossibly stiff bone. In seconds, the arch of the headman’s son’s body was an x-shaped spine over a space tented by skin and sinew. With the small strength left to him, Tschanu forced breath past his ruined jaw, offering up a final scream.

A hand surfaced from the rope of Tschanu’s intestines, spilling them to the ground. It held for a moment, as if scenting the air around it and then grasped for body’s edge, where the tented skin met the abdominal wall. A second hand rose and made for the other side.

A creature in the shape of man pulled itself up and out of the ruined youth, its shape stained by the youth’s blood, lymph and bile. Tephe stared at the beautiful, streaked form, delicately setting its feet to avoid the visceral coils trailing on the ground.

My god,thought Tephe.

Tschanu’s body, released from its gateway spell, collapsed softly. The eyes that had been so aware stared, mercifully blank. Tephe’s god seemed not to notice the pile through which He had traveled, choosing instead to gaze with dispassion at the now silent assembly. Tephe watched His Lord grow and brighten. The stink of the boy’s body steamed off Him, until He was clean and fine and twice the height of a man.

The god blinked and looked around Him at the mute and immobile mass of people, those who would be His worshippers, head angling down as He was then three and now four times their height and size.

Tephe saw His Lord reach down, take a woman from crowd, and draw her to His chest. He crushed her into Him.

Her body dissolved into His like a spun sugar poppet dropped into water.

Without looking He reached down and picked another of His newly-faithful, and consumed him as he consumed the woman before.

Consuming their souls,Tephe thought, and despaired. His Lord never intended these souls for worship. He needed their allegiance to feed from them, and from the purity and power of their brief new faith.

His Lord reached down and picked up Tscha, headman of Cthicx.

I am a reflection of My Lord. That which he is perfectly, I am imperfectly so.

Tephe saw the headman staring at him as His Lord consumed his soul. A cry slipped from the captain.

His Lord turned, His beautiful, perfect face staring directly into Tephe, then slowly moving to the priest, the Gavril, and the head of the Bishop’s Men, each in turn struck by the terrible countenance of Their Lord.

LEAVE—said Tephe’s Lord, and splayed a hand toward Tephe as the other pressed another woman into Himself.

Tephe was on the Righteous, with ringing in his ears that was not ringing, but priest Andso screaming, high and aspirated and mad.

Chapter Nine

It took Captain Tephe a moment to realize that someone was speaking to him. He looked up from his walk. Neal Forn was pacing him, waiting for acknowledgment.

“My apologies, Neal,” Tephe said, and kept walking. He had been walking the length and breadth of the Righteoussince he and the landing party had been returned from Cthicx. “I did not hear what you said.”

“I said I spoke to the healer Garder and he tells me there is nothing he can do for the priest Andso,” Forn said. “He says there is no physical damage to heal. What has happened to him is in his mind, which is beyond the healer’s Talent.”

“Yes,” Tephe said. He ducked under a low portal.

“The priest is no longer in the healer’s care,” Forn said, ducking as well. “He has returned to his quarters and will not leave them. His acolytes say he is poring through books and speaking to himself. When they speak to him he screams and throws things at them until they leave. When they leave he screams at them and calls them back.”

Tephe grunted but otherwise did not respond. His gaze had returned to his boots, and the process of putting one in front of the other.

Forn quickly slipped in front of his captain and stood in his path, blocking his movement. Tephe pulled up with a start and looked at his executive officer, as if seeing him for the first time in their conversation.

“Captain,” Forn said. “Something must be done for the priest.”

“There is nothing to be done for the priest,” Tephe said.

“He is gone mad, sir,” Forn said.

Tephe smiled, but it was not a pleasant smile. “No, Neal,” Tephe said. “He has not lost his mind. He has lost his faith. A priest losing his faith is not a thing we can fix or heal.” He tried to move past Forn, but Forn held fast, risking his captain’s wrath.

“We need the priest, sir,” Forn said. “He leads the rites that bind the god when we travel. And travel we must. Our orders were to return to Bishop’s Call as soon as our task here was complete. If we stay here we compromise the secrecy of this planet. We have spent too much time here as it is.”

“Have one of the acolytes lead the rite,” Tephe said.