Colt: The Cosmic Prayer (Hidria Book 1) Read online

  Months later, however, the Duri Masters made good on their threat. The cross-shaped vessels returned to Dublokee, and once the clergy determined that the people were unrepentant and shamelessly persisted in sin and debauchery, they enlisted the army of Called soldiers at their disposal to cleanse the planet. Lacking a suitable doomsday weapon and at least realizing it was a waste to completely decimate the natural beauty on Dublokee which had no equal, the Called swept through the cities and countryside like a noxious wind. No man, woman, or child was left alive.

  Until they found Nurisarma, that is. The moment the Called warriors laid eyes on Nuri, they decided he was different from the other natives. They sensed the presence of the Divine Infinite within him. A knowing. Whether he had been raised in sin or not, they knew he was one of the Called like them. When they took him from his home and sent the rest of his family to rot with the Evil One, they called him kin. A few of the Duri Masters who were more frank than the rest routinely joked in low mutterings that he’d only been spared for his haunted, lonesome eyes which made him seem much more spiritually engaged than he truly was.

  But in the trials, that was inconsequential.

  He was one of the Called now, and passing this test meant he would not be condemned to the fate of Justice-Bearing as a failed Hidria recruit. Instead, he would be one of the Chosen. A man who knew God.

  Hidria.

  Is that what you’ve always wanted? Colt’s voice drifted to him as he followed deeper and deeper into the labyrinthine temple on the edge of eternity.

  “It doesn’t matter what I want,” Nuri recited, recalling the words of the Duri Masters and their denial of free will. “It is my calling. It’s why I was spared the corruption of my home world.”

  Colt said nothing, but that was to be expected. She was not meant to provide definitive answers. She merely forced the Called to question everything in his or her life and then left it to the subject to decide where among those myriad distractions and convoluted histories lay the true seeds of God’s calling.

  Assuming there actually was a Calling, of course. The general consensus among the Duri Masters was that if you failed the trials, you had never been truly Called in the first place. You were an impostor, a manifestation of the Evil One among men, and every bit as reviled as the Watchmen. The only true redemption from such disgrace was to serve the Duri Masters in the Called army as Failed Hidria and continue to carry out their will, just like the warriors who had taken Nuri and flown him across the galaxy in a stuffy cargo hold to the Duris’ mountaintop monastery. Failure in the trials meant a lifetime enforcing penance on wicked outer colonies. There was no graduation from recruit status.

  I’m not like them, he assured himself as Colt led him deeper into the darkness. Already, the luminescent, turquoise ripples lapping against the bottom of the walls had faded behind him. Everywhere he looked, the walls shifted with new life, yet it was still fundamental darkness. A separation from light. The wrong direction, in other words.

  Where there is light, there is God, the Duri Masters always said. They never dealt much with darkness other than to condemn it.

  “Your thoughts are human thoughts,” Colt told him. “Weak. Distracted. If you are human, you will not survive.”

  I am Hidria, he recited, and as the twists and turns of the corridor began to disorient him and he felt inexplicable panic arise in his chest, he realized he’d never felt further from being Hidria in his life.

  “That does not mean you are further from God,” Colt said.

  “You’re wrong,” Nuri countered. “The Duri profess that there is no greater distance from God than darkness. It is the utter absence of His presence. God is light, therefore, darkness is not God. Darkness is the Evil One.”

  Colt’s ethereal mist continued through hallways as they pressed tightly in around him. She maintained a dutiful silence.

  For a while, they walked the winding corridors in the same fashion, and the warrior’s anxiety grew as the walls narrowed. He could no longer see his feet as he walked. The only light in the stone building was the dim trail cast by Colt’s spirit. Every so often, he glimpsed a wooden door beside him again and even sensed movement nearby on more than one occasion, but it was clear by Colt’s unfaltering pace that he was meant to follow wherever she led, and that she had no intention of investigating the ancient doorways to other worlds. He wondered idly when they’d last been explored by humans, assuming they’d been explored at all through the millennia in which the trials had been practiced.

  At last, the corridor halted at another wooden door and Colt abruptly turned to face him.

  “Here,” she whispered. “Survive.”

  “Survival is not the supreme goal of a godly life,” Nuri regurgitated. Even his voice mimicked the subtle nuances of his Duri Master’s. It was in the monotonous glottal fry that emerged from his throat as dry as any desert on the forsaken worlds. It was the barely concealed threats that resided within any recitation of Duri doctrine.

  This is why He made us, Nuri pictured the Duri Master saying. We are all meant to suffer. We are all meant to reside in His Light. We are not meant to survive.

  Nuri wasn’t sure how or why but that particular teaching always made him shudder. It wasn’t necessarily the idea that all humans were mortal, but that mortality was a malevolent, calculated suffering which Supreme God held over the heads of each and every sentient creature. The knowledge that they would someday perish in their human bodies while He endured.

  Perish?

  “Go,” Colt told him forcefully. She had assumed full physical form and now glared at him from above. “Evil awaits.”

  This was something altogether new, as well. Colt was not supposed to warn him of dangers ahead. She wasn’t even supposed to guide him along the stone corridors. In his estimation, he wasn’t truly supposed to be alive.

  Am I special, he wondered, or a failure?

  He supposed that, in a way, the question resided in the hearts of most spiritualists. They all shared the desire to be recognized as something more than human, and yet only a dozen Hidria were Called from each generation, perhaps less. The Book told him so, though the contradictions therein frequently astounded him.

  Nuri approached the door, stepped around Colt’s dissipating form, and frowned.

  It cannot possibly be me, then, he thought. I am not holy like the others. I am not Hidria. I am human.

  “If that is what you believe, then you have already failed,” Colt told him mournfully.

  She disappeared and he was left to contemplate the door ahead of him.

  I haven’t failed yet, he thought, or she would have cut my throat. It’s too late now, either way. If I failed right in the beginning, I would have simply become a Justice-Bearer, but once the Called survives the trials as long as I have, he cannot return to an earthly existence. The mind cannot handle the transition. He either dies or lives forever as Hidria.

  But was it a literal death or another kind of death, he wondered? And where did Colt factor into that equation? All he knew of her was legend. Duri texts referred to her alternately as the Hand of God and the Executioner depending on the context. The purveyor of knowledge and discovery, and simultaneously, the oppressor who negotiated the path to Tscharia where the Evil One lived and fed on the damned. Many among the Duri also said that Colt was all things because she was part of the Living God.

  Only God Himself is all things.

  He pressed his hand softly against the door and stepped through the light onto a snow-capped mountain.

  4

  Nuri sat on the banks of a mountain river with his legs folded and his sword laid out on the grass beside him. He’d crept away from the cottage that morning as his Duri Master slept, hoping for a short respite from training before the old man sought him out. He would undoubtedly be punished for stealing away without permission and likely wind up training well into the night because of it, but in the moment, it seemed an acceptable loss. He rarely got the chance to enjo
y the mountain’s natural beauty in the daytime.

  He skipped rocks until he ran out of suitably flat specimens then pulled up blades of purple grass and watched the wind blow them from his palm. His mind was blank and that was the way he preferred it to be at the river, where other adolescent boys and girls played once they’d completed their daily chores. In place of the usual work allotted to a boy of seventeen, however, Nuri spent his days not only learning how to decapitate enemy soldiers, but also memorizing the scripture passages explaining why the Divine Infinite would not suffer a heretic to live. Never was the contrast more conspicuous than when he dipped his toes in the river and felt the overwhelming urge to forego his responsibilities for the rest of the day and simply float in the current with his peers.

  It’s all lies, he thought, frowning, as his hand reached for the hilt of his sword. It was a reflex so ingrained in him that he didn’t realize his hand had wandered at all, or that he’d instinctively grabbed for the blade because another presence had emerged along the riverbank.

  “It’s early in the day for a disciple to dirty his hands,” a girl’s voice called to him.

  Nuri’s head shot up, startled. He searched the opposite shore for the source of the sound and spotted a light-haired, fair-skinned girl standing directly in the splintered rays of the rising sun. Her complexion was so pale she appeared almost white in the glare. Nuri had to cover his eyes and squint just to get a good look at her, and even then, her form seemed indistinct, as though she’d been projected onto the riverbank rather than standing there herself. More hologram than real girl.

  “It’s never too early for silent prayer and reflection on the Divine,” he recited, though his thoughts had been occupied by anything but the Divine before she arrived. At least, not directly.

  “I hear more of your Duri Master than yourself in those words,” she said, cocking an eyebrow.

  Nuri didn’t respond. He watched her stoop in the cold shallows to draw water from a receptacle which appeared nearly modern in comparison to the rustic aesthetic the Duri had carefully crafted in the village.

  “You’re not supposed to be on that side of the river,” Nuri called to her. When she looked back at him, he nodded toward the rising slopes at her back. “That mountain is forbidden. I thought all villagers knew that.”

  She grinned and went back to emptying her pail in the hovering, black crate she evidently used to transport the water. “Who says I’m a villager?” She lowered the device into the river, waited for the ding alerting her that it was full, then glanced back at him again. “Not everyone in the universe falls under Duri jurisdiction, no matter how arrogant they become.”

  “It’s not Duri jurisdiction,” he pointed out. “It’s God’s.”

  The girl dumped her pail into the black crate again and waded into the river. “Is it?” she asked incredulously. “The Duri act more like corrupt men than servants of the Peacekeeper.”

  “Who is the Peacekeeper?” Nuri asked. He’d never heard of such a creature in his studies of scripture or any other religious text.

  “God,” the girl said. “Omega. Whatever you choose to call Him.” She dropped her pail on the riverbank and placed her hands on her hips. “He is a Peacekeeper first and foremost, therefore the aim of all religions that honor God should be peace, as well. Any act of violence against another living creature is destruction of God’s creation.”

  “By that logic,” Nuri argued, “we shouldn’t raise our hands against our enemies even for survival. Even if they attack us.”

  “The Duri definition of an attack and the true definition of an attack are two entirely different things. Verbal attacks and dissension do not necessitate a violent response.”

  Nuri felt himself being drawn into an argument against his will and was stunned by how quickly a stranger had riled him up. He pressed on anyway without knowing why. “Heresy is an attack on God. Believers must defend the Divine Infinite from such an attack.”

  “By destroying the Divine Infinite’s creation? That’s the absurdity of man. Always driven by rage and testosterone, seeking out wars for ridiculous causes where none should exist.”

  “Ridiculous causes?” Nuri clenched his fists. “How can you call the Creator of All Things a ridiculous cause?”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “The Creator is not the reason you kill the innocent. The Duri claim that is the case, but even a cursory assessment of their orders should tell you otherwise. For example, what justification did they give for the last colonial massacre by their Called soldiers?”

  Nuri jogged his memory with a furrowed brow. It had been a full two weeks since the last cleansing mission but they were still frequent enough that it was difficult to keep them straight. “The chairman of the colony had referred to God as ‘She’ in the daily prayers and refused to acknowledge that it was heresy.”

  “That what was heresy?”

  Nuri scoffed. “Calling God a woman, of course.”

  The girl raised her eyebrows. “How is that heresy?”

  If Nuri hadn’t finally adopted a measure of the composure drilled into him by his Duri Master, his jaw surely would have dropped at the sheer audacity of the question. Everyone in Duri-occupied space knew that God was a man. How could she be so foolish? Did she truly not know?

  It’s the voice of the Evil One, his conscience insisted.

  Still, he was intrigued by her apparent dismissal of the obvious heresy, which had been unanimously denounced by the Duri Masters and therefore led to the swiftest cleansing verdict in decades.

  “Everyone knows that God is a man,” he told her.

  The girl shook her head emphatically. “No. He became Man when he condescended into this primitive form,” she corrected, stretching out her arms to draw attention to her body. Nuri couldn’t help noticing the scars revealed on her biceps in the glare of the morning sun but was too outraged by her declaration to comment on them in the moment. “What makes you think the Supreme Creator of the Universe would be confined to one gender? How would one even identify God’s gender from where we stand in our mortal reality? Does God have genitals dangling between His legs? If so, for what purpose? Urination? Reproduction? Decoration?”

  Nuri fumed in silence. He didn’t know how to argue the girl’s logic because he’d never thought to ask such ridiculous questions and wasn’t prepared to debate the issue. He didn’t have any theological ammunition from the Duri Masters at his disposal to go on the offensive, and that was the only way he knew how to argue. Defense was a foreign concept to the Duri and the Called. She should have just known God was a man and that would have been the end of it. That was the way it had been written in the Old Book and the New Book, after all. That was the way it had always been.

  The girl wasn’t finished, though. “The most powerful entity in the universe, the Beginning and End, the font from which all creation flows, cannot be confined to one gender or even one species. God is All. All creatures. All places. All things. All time.”

  “Then why did He become a man on Earth?” Nuri demanded.

  She’ll have no response for that, he thought to himself, but a noxious weight continued to spread through his stomach. Will she?

  “Any fool could answer that,” she replied with a sardonic grin. “Because we have free will, and the social constructs of that time would have simply dismissed a woman, if not worse. As oppressed as the gender is now beneath Duri rule, women had even less political influence at the time and place of His coming. If He’d taken feminine form in those days, He would have been stoned as a heretical witch before He had a chance to preach no matter how many miracles He performed. The Divine knows all and therefore does not leave room for accidents. The masculine form was the most obvious and convenient choice, but it does not reflect a preference on His part. We are all His creation from the moment the soul enters the body. Do you truly believe he loves one gender more than the other? And aren’t we all a piece of Him?”

  “Creator God can do any
thing. If He truly wished to take female form, He would have done so and simply transformed the culture to accommodate His choice.”

  “Yet He allows free will, and therefore, though He could have changed an entire cultural infrastructure to prove a point, He would not have done so for they are merely human constructs. They do not have any impact on the Divine Realm. And because we have free will. To take female form, it would have been necessary to soften a considerably higher volume of stubborn hearts than was practical.” She paused and her stare narrowed. “And, still, that is an oversimplification. There was more to the decision than we can ever know as humans. Or do you believe that Man can guess the intentions of the Divine Infinite?”

  Again, he found himself biting back a poorly formed response which he knew would only weaken his position. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, the girl wasn’t finished yet.

  “Besides, you are focusing on the wrong aspect of the Divine Incarnate’s First Coming. By taking male form, you inherently assume that He preferred men to women even if you haven’t acknowledged it. That belief is the basis for the political hierarchies within millions of governments and religious institutions. Yet to whom did He entrust His development and birth? To whom did He announce His arrival? Who was the only human creature to physically contain the grace of the Divine inside her womb?” She grinned slyly and drew another step closer, gaining momentum and volume in her speech with each new idea she expressed. “If God can be said to be any gender, would it not be the one that mimics the nurturance and creation of life? Does pregnancy not represent the ultimate sacrifice of giving one’s body for the sake of another?” She glared at Nuri. “Tell me, boy, what does man do for the Divine but seek power and corporeal satisfaction? Why are there no women among the Duri clergy? Because God abhors women, or because the men empowered by the false teachings of your faith abhor women? Because they resent the weaknesses that women expose in their own commitment?”