Weaveworld

XIII

A FLEETING GLIMPSE

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hadwell had not slept well; but then he supposed aspirant deities seldom did. With God-hood came a great burden of responsibility. Should he be so surprised then that his slumbers were uneasy?

Yet he’d known, from the time that he’d stood in the watchtower and studied the Mantle of the Gyre, that he had nothing to fear. He could feel the power hidden behind that cloud calling him by name, inviting him to step into its embrace, and be transformed.

A little before dawn however, as he was preparing to leave the Firmament, he was brought unsettling news: Hobart’s forces in Nonesuch had been decimated by raptures that had driven most of them to lunacy. Nor was Hobart entirely free of the taint. When he arrived, an hour after the messenger, the Inspector had about him the air of a man who wasn’t certain he could trust himself any longer.

From elsewhere, the news was better. Wherever the Prophet’s forces had faced the native population in natural warfare, they had triumphed. It was only when the soldiers had failed to strike swiftly that the Seerkind had found a window through which to work their raptures, and when they had, the results were the same as they’d been in Nonesuch: men had either lost their minds, or woken from their evangelical zeal and joined the enemy.

Now that enemy was gathering at the Narrow Bright, warned either by rumour or rapture that the Prophet was intending to breach the Gyre, and prepared to defend its integrity to the death. There were several hundreds of them, but they scarcely constituted an army. They were, by all reports, an unarmed, unregimented collection of old men, women and children. The only problem they presented lay in the ethics of decimating them. But he’d decided, as his entourage left the Firmament for the Gyre, that such moral niceties were beneath him now. The greater crime by far would be to ignore the call he’d heard from beyond the Mantle.

When the moment came, as it soon would, he’d summon the by-blows, and let them devour the enemy, children and all. He would not shirk.

Godhood called, and he went, fleet-footed, to worship at his own altar.