Hugh Cook - The Worshippers and the Way

I'll pass it on."

"But not to Dog," said Hatch. "Give it to his mother. Tell her I'm worried about her son. He's – I think he's in some kind of trouble."

"I'll talk to him, then," said Shona. "If I can find him.

He's often sleeping away from home these days, though I've no idea where."

With that, Shona again set off down Scuffling Road, which led north from the lockway, passing through the commercial center of Actus Dorum and finishing at Jara Marg, the square in which the Grand Arena stood. Shona did not dare the full length of the road, but instead took the first turn to the right and headed east along Zambuk Street.

Hatch watched her till she took that turn, and a long watch it was, but he found himself unready to be moving. He wished the moment could be perpetuated to forever – wished that the harshness of the future could be indefinitely deferred and he left in peace with the beggars. Whom he envied.

Then he sighed.

Shona was gone from sight: and it was time to be going.

"So you'll be on your way now," said Grim, catching that sigh and divining its import.

"It'd take good gold in payment to keep me here," said Hatch, who was not yet through with his appointments, for he was scheduled to meet with Sesno Felvus, the ethnarch of the Frangoni of Dalar ken Halvar.

"Gold I have not," said Grim. "But I do have a question."

"Speak," said Hatch.

"Is it true – "

"True!" said Master Zoplin. "What's he wanting with truth? A good lie is half the price and three times as worthy."

"Is it true," said Lord X'dex, "that stars become iron in their burning? As much I have said, and I think it a truth."

"That much is true," agreed Hatch, who had entirely shed his earlier impatience now that he was in possession of opium, and who still found himself in no great hurry to go to the temple and confront the continuation of his own crisis. "Iron, sand, dust and bone, the matter of each was made in a star. Grim – your question."

"Is it true," said Grim, "that the Way speaks of brotherhood."

"The Way?" said Hatch, enjoying the luxury of these moments of folly, these moments of uncommitted idleness stolen out of the day of his commitments. "I know of no Way."

"He knows only the Wheel," said Zoplin. "Food to be turd then turd to be food, and man born of each and to each returned in turn."

"Hush down, maggot-bane," said Grim, scowling at Zoplin, who caught the sense of the scowl in the words and scowled back in blind response.

"The eater be eaten, the banquet his benefit," said X'dex. "A dog at it! Where's my forking stick?"

Bursting to a scream, Lord X'dex punched himself, then bit his knuckles and sucked on the bright red blood which started forth from the ruptured skin.

"I'm sorry," said Hatch, fearing that X'dex was going to throw one of his fits, "but I must be gone. I have an appointment at the temple."

But Grim moved, a very snake in his speed, and was over the dust in a slither, striking to clutch, clutching his grime to the purple of Hatch's robes, pulling so hard on the fabric that Hatch was afraid it would tear at the shoulder.

"Temples, yes," said Grim, starting to babble, venting saliva in a frenzy free from all his customary humor. "Temples and teachings. Teachings the Way. Beggars be men, men be no beggars.

Beds, holes, whores and a butchering."

"What are you on about?" said Hatch roughly.

Despite himself, Hatch was frightened by Grim's garbled desperation, by the violent agony of his clutching, his questioning, his hope.

Hope!

In a beggar, that hope was terrifying.

Yet certainly Grim hoped for something, though Hatch had not yet worked out what it was. Grim hoped for it, lusted for it, and was speaking of it still, though his Pang had grown incoherent in its rupturing, and Hatch could not follow the pacing of it.

"Grim," said Hatch.

The curtness of the address silenced the beggar's babbling.

But only for a moment. Then Grim said, his words a blurting spasm, a token of torture:

"So but. So well. Is it true? Truth? Is it true, Hatch? Are we true? Are we Real?"

"Grim," said Hatch, trying to be patient, trying to resist the urge to kick the beggar heartily and boot him away, "Grim, I must be gone, so you must unhand me."

"It's a nonsense, as I said it was," said Zoplin.

But Grim was not done.

"The Nu," he said. "The chala. The chala. Was it? Wasn't it?

Well? Is it true, or isn't it?"

"He knows you now," said Zoplin. "I see it in his face."

The Eye glittered in Zoplin's left-hand eye socket, and Hatch realized that Zoplin had got the thing back off Grim while Hatch had been selling his chocolate to Shona.

"He knows us," said X'dex, dipping a finger in the blood of his knuckles and smearing that blood round his own eye sockets.

"He knows us, knows it, but won't tell the truth. It's hidden knowledge, that's what it is, just as the man said."

"What man?" said Hatch.

"You see!" said X'dex. "He knows!"

"What man?" said Hatch, suddenly angry. "I charge you to tell me! What man?"

"You tell us of god," said X'dex. "You tell us of god, and we'll tell you the man."

"Yes," said Zoplin, waving a piece of his baked yam at Hatch.

"The god is the truth of it, isn't it? All men to be brothers, that was and that will be. Not some to eat dust and some to eat chocolate."

"I don't eat chocolate," said Hatch, stung by the accusation.

"Ho!" said Zoplin. "But you eat what we don't eat when god would eat otherwise."

"Nu-chala!" said Grim, using the word as a weapon, and thus revealing the import of this dialog. "The Nu, the Nu-chalanuth!"

"You speak of a religion some many years dead," said Hatch, trying to control his shock, trying to convince himself that his shock was mere surprise and not fear. "It's dead, a dead faith, a faith some – some twenty millennia dead."

"Ho!" said Zoplin. "So. So you speak for the death of gods, do you?"

"An undertaker in his spare time," said X'dex. "Laid out the chala god then gutted his entrails for dogmeat"

"Gutting!" said Grim. "Come burning we'll gut, we'll be gutting."

"Come burning?" said Hatch, his worst suspicions by now aroused.

"He talks nonsense," said X'dex, suddenly suave in his graces, as if his earlier knuckle-biting and blood-smearing had been but a play-act. "Accept my word, as one master of men to another. He is but a poor beggar, a thing made Unreal, so what helps him his nonsense?"

Hatch knew that by rights he should stay and shake Grim till the truth fell out of him. Someone had been talking to these beggars of the Nu-chala-nuth, of the Way of Worship. And Nu-chalanuth – why, Nu-chala-nuth was a Nexus religion which had left billions dead in the Spasm Wars. It was a fanatical Religion Militant which had burnt planets, shattered stars and wrecked the peace of the greatest transcosmic civilization known to human history.

Nu-chala-nuth!

That was strong stuff to be feeding anyone, and no stuff to be feeding the beggars of Dalar ken Halvar. Best that such doctrines sleep inside the mountain, inside the Combat College, deep in the depths of Cap Foz Para Lash. What fool had brought them to the daylight?

Hatch should have asked, should have pressed for an answer.

Hot tongs and torture. But he just then had too many problems of his own to be investing his energies in the explication of a halfhinted threat, even though there was a possibility that the threat was made against the state itself.

"Our Beggar Grim should talk nonsense less, for he still has a nose," said Hatch.

Then, in the makeshift contentment of that threat, Hatch set off for Temple Isherzan, the holy of holies which stood atop Cap Uba. He had meant to go first to House Jodorunda, but there was no time for that now. If he went to see Penelope then he would be late for his appointment with the High Priest, and that was something which could never be allowed.