Gerun, the Heretic. William Maltese

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СКАЧАТЬ and was the first of them caught. Likewise, it was obvious that Kalvin had no desire to know Gerun’s plans—what plans? The two were safer, separated. The Missionary gene bank was safer, separated.

      “Go with God!” Gerun told him.

      “Share the ritual before we part?” Kalvin asked. “Although I’ve sampled the Jursimms’s corruption which makes me less than pure.”

      “It would be my pleasure to share the ritual, grandfather,” Gerun said.

      The two dropped to their knees in the darkness, tenting their hands beneath their chins and shutting their eyes. It was a mimicking of Jon Missionary passed down from generation to generation, its meaning unknown. Except it had a magical way of calming a speeding heart, of draining apprehension, of soothing a wearied mind. When Jon Missionary had once been asked why he did it, he’d surprised by saying something almost equivalent to the Kanranian word for god. So, his descendants looked upon the ritual as a meeting of god and man on a common plain. Although a meeting with which of the many Kanran-9 gods, no one really knew. For Jon Missionary had never been that specific. In fact, if there hadn’t been a resulting feeling of “religiousness” found to emanate from the simple ritual, Jon’s utterance might long ago have been cast aside as one more haphazard word with no relevance to the original question.

      Gerun felt the immediate sense of peace the ritual brought with it, especially when shared with another who was as aware of its magic. As he’d often done in the past, he wondered which of the Kanran-9 deities—if any—had come to Jon Missionary and presented him with this particular mode of silent contact. Jursimms, The Fulfillers? No, this was too tame for the rumored rituals of the Labyrinth. Kalvin would have known if this god, in residence, was the same called upon by Jursimmic Priests. Was it Wan Wan-See, The Sick, whose shudders could shake the ground and whose pustules could squirt acid to eat the unlucky? Or Zinlac, Xisl, Persif? Or Jab, Jal, Los? Or, was it none of those? Was it a god once known to Jon Missionary and the Book, and then known to Panrun-Ru who thought to destroy the god with the pages, incinerating both? A god revealed to Warluck in the book fragment saved? Was that why the Religio-College whispered heresy in the same breath they whispered purge?

      “Yes, He has forgiven me,” Kalvin said with a sigh, his voice a mere whisper into the silence.

      “Who?” Gerun asked, young and wanting all the answers. If Kalvin didn’t have them all, it was obvious the old man had more of them than Gerun did.

      “Didn’t you feel His presence?” Kalvin asked. “Here with us. Called by the ritual.”

      “Who?” Gerun repeated. He wanted a name.

      “Who indeed!” Kalvin replied, getting to his feet and brushing gravel balls from the leatahrer swathing his knees. “Would the incinerated Book have told us? Would Panrun-Ru have told us? Could Warluck tell us even now? The god is there, whoever He might be. Someone, something, powerful enough to set the Religio-College trembling.”

      “But not nearly strong enough to save us,” Gerun said; more a statement than a question.

      “Ah, my boy!” Kalvin said, helping Gerun to his feet. “You resent the prospect of dying only because you are so young.”

      “And you don’t resent it?” Gerun challenged.

      Of course, of course,” Kalvin admitted. “But I’m closer to death by natural causes than you are, brought there not by Warluck and his machinations but by the mere passing of time. We all die. If not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then some other time. If not from fiss poisoning, then from a dew dart shot by a gimlian sprouted unaware in the darkness as we trip on it. Hundreds, thousands, millions of ways to die.

      “Yet, Warluck thrives! Protected from death by his gods, while the god of Jon Missionary deserts that man’s kin.”

      “If there is a god of Jon Missionary,” Kalvin reminded.

      “But you insinuated.…”

      Kalvin raised his hand in interruption. “We must be very careful that we don’t read into this more than there is to be read,” he warned. “What was Jon Missionary, anyway, but a man without all his faculties? Maybe he wasn’t mumbling of God but pretty sounds to entertain his tortured mind, and we—Melina-Lu, Panrun-Ru, you, me, Warluck—all misinterpret it wrongly. What then?

      “Do you believe he was nothing more or less than an imbecile?” Gerun challenged. It confused him the way Kalvin could go from Jursimmic ritual to Missionary ritual, from belief in Jon Missionary’s god, to a denial of Him.

      “It’s of little importance—except to me—what I believe is it?” Kalvin answered. “What’s important to you is what you believe. And I would suggest, at the moment, that you’re more apt to label Jon Missionary a half-wit than I am.”

      Gerun flushed with anger and embarrassment, furious that the old man had so easily accessed his mentat, while Kalvin’s mentat blocked Gerun’s entrance like a wall of grinlind against tansic barbs.

      “If He’s there, He would help us, is how you reason it,” Kalvin said, his voice offering no argument.

      “Wouldn’t He?” Gerun insisted.

      “How am I to say?” Kalvin asked with a voice sounding more and more tired. “How very little we know of Him, Gerun. If, in fact, He is even there. Our link between Him and us was a deranged one. Perhaps all we need to rally His support is the right password, the right key, the proper format for making our request. Every god in the Religio-College has its own format for conversing with humans, doesn’t it? Why not this one?

      “But this god should know his linkage to us was faulty, shouldn’t He?” Gerun persisted.

      “And maybe He knows it wasn’t faulty at all,” Kalvin argued, playing Delvin’s-Advocate. “Maybe we perceive it as faulty only because we are too stupid to follow whatever directions have been correctly given.”

      “You’re talking in circles!” Gerun accused.

      “I talk as a man who was a gyrolist in his lifetime, not a thelogan,” Kalvin reminded. “I know plants, not gods. I can only wish you better luck. There’s yet time for you to figure out the clues and unravel the puzzles. Granted, not as much time as you might have liked, but.…”

      He shrugged again, finally looking very much the very old man he was.

      “Here, sit with me a minute more,” he said, moving to a rough nature-hewn stone and leaning, rather than sitting, against it. He patted a place on the white-veined surface beside him. Gerun joined him.

      “There was a plague before you were born,” Kalvin said.

      “The Bendu Plague,” Gerun confirmed.

      “In which millions of people died,” Kalvin said. “The Religio-College soothsayers pegged the culprit right off. Sillona-Xi, angry because She’d been short-changed the year before when the drought at Kistol made for a poor harvest.”

      “I don’t worship Sillona-Xi!” Gerun snapped.

      Kalvin breathed his long sign and tried again.

      “There was a landslide in the Bytamax Province of Rhinic many terns ago. Six-thousand people dead as a result. Three-thousand injured. A mountain leveled, three valleys filled СКАЧАТЬ