Page 23

Spiritual Guidance

Y ao had expected many possibilities. That the self-styled hero of justice would come to her of his own volition, alone, and unannounced, was not among them. She had assumed Blackhand would either figure out that the eye talisman she had given to her had a communication theurgy on the back, or that she would find the one hidden inside the scroll’s spindle. She sent out a flesh-puppet to greet and ask him to wait before disarming her defences to let him in.

“I’ve come to claim what you owe,” he said to her.

“Sounds to me like you’re sick with a heart devil, after all,” the woman smirked.

Casus wanted to argue, but she silenced him with a mere glance as she turned and gestured for him to follow. She brought him upstairs and examined him, carrying out various strange rites, some of which tangentially reminded him of Zaveshian and Igarian practices. Others, though, were completely unorthodox. It all involved a great number of talismans and needles that he barely felt. Moreover, with each round of tests Yao’s confidence in her prognosis waned and her confusion grew.

“As it appears, it truly is not a heart devil. There’s no corruption, no psychosis, no astral instability… How strange. The only alternative is the opposite, then. You’ve gleaned a piece of enlightenment recently but haven’t fully processed it. Perhaps it runs counter to your pre-existing beliefs, and you have yet to reconcile the dissonance. How troublesome. I have many ways of dealing with heart devils, but nothing for this. I am afraid that I cannot help you with such a thing. However, I am not so callous as to pretend this cursory examination makes us even.”

Nearly every part of Casus wanted to reject that, but he knew it was true. He had just hoped for the infinitesimal possibility that the issue was something easier to fix, such as internal bodily damage.

In the end, Casus left the woman and found himself wandering the city without any particular aim. He fell into a strange stupor and only came to his senses when he found himself in a particularly nasty part of town, tangling with random nameless scum from the gutter. Trash on legs, making a bid for Hashem’s bounty. Two baneworms in Saurian bodies and four humans. There were six of them, and three brought out belts—two Dregsteamers and some homemade piece of shit with a motorbike throttle and a cracked, cloudy Locust Stone catalyst. This was a point where he would usually transform, but he simply couldn’t. It wasn’t that the Silberblut Coupler wouldn’t respond; he couldn’t even flip the mental switch that would initiate the transformation.

So, he fought as Casus Aristedes. He came out at the other end with several new bruises both to his body and his ego. A fight like this ought to have been trivial, but had it not been for his arm, he wasn’t sure he would have walked out of that back alley. Even the bounty money for the baneworms had a bitter taste somehow.

For lack of direction, he turned to faith. Not directly asking Zavesh or Igaria for an answer—that just wasn’t how things worked. No, he went to a man who had guided him on his path to taming the Silberblut Coupler to begin with. A man who spent much of his time within the city’s central temple, volunteering as one of the gymnasium trainers between his excursions, all in pursuit of cultivating a perfect body and mind. His hair was white, and the centuries showed on his face the way a few decades past 20 showed on any other man, but his gaze burned like fire, and he held in one finger more strength than Casus held in his entire right arm.

Ambrosius, the Saint Ungrafted.

The saint lived in a small house about half an hour’s walk from the central temple. It was downright ascetic compared to a church safehouse; the only luxury to be found was in the exercise equipment, books, and war games that filled much of the dwelling. Ambrosius was, as always, busy training when Casus found him, and as always, he found time to speak without uttering a word of complaint.

Ambrosius simply led Casus into the basement, where a miniature urban landscape of astonishing detail stretched across a table. In the span of a few minutes, he brought out boxes of miniatures and re-set the battle state as it was nearly a year ago when they had last spoken like this. The saint didn’t say a word, simply playing his turn. Two of his thaumaturge units got a lucky strike in and cut down Casus’ graft-beast.

So it went for around three hours, finishing that battle and beginning another before Casus managed to order his thoughts enough to put some of them into words. “I have lived my life with the unwavering belief that I was to be the next Silberblut. If that is not my role, then why… What…”

Three turns, about half an hour, passed before Ambrosius answered.

“Tell me, young one. Is a man no more than a flesh-automaton? Is a son no more than the sum of his parents? Is a Fullgraft no more than the sum of the saints from whose parts their body was crafted?”

“No,” Casus answered without hesitation.

“And what, pray tell, is the reason? What differentiates you from your unthinking brethren, who tirelessly maintain the Wheel?”

“The indomitable spirit of divinity which burns within all mankind.”

“Straight from the scriptures,” said the saint, smiling.

They continued to play in silence for some time, and spoke for far longer than that, into the night and unto dawn. Eventually, Casus reached a conclusion. “I believe I shall be able to move past this, but I will require time in the Chamber of Reflection.”

“Are you certain? You know the risks,” Ambrosius cautioned, but didn’t try to dissuade him.

“I know them better than most. I believe a day will be enough.”

“Very well. Besides Favonia, Firminus, and Fidelia, is there anyone who should be informed regarding your status should complications occur?”

“Yeah.” Casus nodded.

Several hours later, he was floating in a tank of fluid deep beneath the central temple, in a chamber whose walls held two dozen such tanks. It was not a dreamless, peaceful slumber, but a journey into his own psyche induced through elixirs and absolute sensory deprivation. He’d done this before, once. It wasn’t fun then. It wasn’t fun now. The risks were many; mental damage, delusions, and even permanent catatonia. The fluid was, in fact, a vast colony of engineered omniphage that at once drew out bodily waste and supplied the body with nutrients. To call this particular strain ‘omniphage’ was a stretch, but it was the correct term.

Nonetheless, he found at least part of the answer he had been searching for.

***

Krahe, as much as she disliked it, understood why Casus decided to send that message back to the safehouse. If she was not mistaken, he was taking a significant risk, comparable to her own choice to dive into the Astral Gulf not long ago.

He returned seemingly no better or worse off, but there was something different about him.

When he started asking about how she saw the matters of legacy and inheritance, she knew he’d chanced upon something in that glorified sensory deprivation tank. She gave it some thought, and, at first, she decided to just parrot the words of someone who had given this matter far more thought than she.

“A great philosopher from my world’s ancient past once said that tradition is the preservation of fire, not the worship of ashes. But that’s not what you need to hear. What you need to hear is that you will never be the Silberblut of legend. The only thing you’ll achieve by mirroring your predecessor is to become a distorted echo of him in our era.”

“Then how would you see it if someone did for you as I have been doing for Silberblut?”

“Honestly?”

“Lady Blackhand, my convictions are not so fragile as to break this easily,” said the Banisher, not entirely certain of his own words. “I have come to learn that you are more honest than most when it comes to giving your unfiltered thoughts. Of course I want your honesty.”

“If I learned of someone trying to embody the idea of me five centuries after my death, let alone five millennia, I would be confused at best. Most likely, I would be a bit disturbed. It would be an imitator, not a successor. But if someone were to, let’s say, discover some of my old grafts, use them to unearth a conspiracy and bring down the masterminds in their own time, I might consider such a person a worthwhile successor. I don’t know what Silberblut was like when he still lived, but if I were him, I would prefer for a would-be successor to use my coupler for his own ideals, not for slavish imitation of mine.”

Krahe took a long swig of ekarone juice as she watched Casus absorb her words.

She then added, “That being said, I think I prefer your idealism to Silberblut’s cold judgment. I mean, ‘guilt repaid with cold blood, each and every guilty man?’ A bit harsh. Even I wouldn’t chop off a petty thief’s hands.”

“I admit that some of my predecessor’s recorded judgments gave me pause as well. It is why I worked so hard to ensure I had full control of myself before using the belt…” Casus trailed off, his gaze shifting across the table to the Silberblut Coupler’s vacant eye. His features hardened, and newfound determination crept into the banisher’s voice. “I suppose now it is time to take full control of the belt itself. Tell me another, Lady Blackhand, before I go.”

“Another what?”

“Another quote from one of your world’s saints.”

“Hmm, I never did study ancient history much. I usually read these whenever one extremist or another used them on a poster.” Krahe shrugged, but nonetheless furrowed her brow as she went rooting around in her memory. “I think I recall that Saint Augustine once said… What was it he said? Barzai, help me here. The one about anger and courage.”

She held out her arm, splitting it open lengthwise to let the eidolon manifest itself. Barzai popped out and took up a perch on her open palm, tilting his head back and forth before locking his gaze on Krahe.

“Beef,” the raven demanded in a large black man’s voice.

“I’ll give you some if you give me that quote.”

“Beef, twelve ounces,” he reiterated.

“We have tortoise. You liked it better than beef.”

The whole time, Casus observed, his stoic visage admirably masking his mild bewilderment at the scene. That thing really wasn’t a normal eidolon; not only did it eat, it even made demands of its master.

Nonetheless, the offer of tortoise steak convinced the crow. It opened and closed its beak a few times, snippets of various sounds and voices coming out as if it was scrolling through radio stations. After a solid two minutes, Barzai opened his beak one final time. A scratchy voice came out, like that of a man who yelled a lot, made even grainier by the hiss of a low-quality speaker.

“ Hope has two equally glorious and terrible daughters, for they drive men to action like none other; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the world’s wrongs, and Courage to see that these wrongs might be righted. Or something like that, I’m kinda stupid … ”

At that point, Krahe recalled the raven.

“Alright, that’s enough. You’ll get your meat in a bit.”

She couldn’t help but notice that Casus had a profound look on his face as he left, but she didn’t give it much thought. After all, it felt like the Banisher had a profound expression more often than not.

***