God Rising: The Cult of Ainz
Written by: AtheistBasementDragon
Edited by: The Usual Gang of Drunken Perverted Idiots
Chapter 199: Blood Oath
...Kami Miyako...
Dominic rushed through the city as fast as he could without appearing suspicious, a part of him was smugly self satisfied. 'Walking openly with this bald head of mine in peasant clothes was a damn good idea, even by my standards. People notice the bald head and the rest of my face doesn't 'fit' that, so they won't recognize me at all. Still, caution is needed.' He thought as he focused on taking the back alleyways that wound throughout the city and ventured into the open streets only when he had to.
"You." A voice said as he was about to exit an alley.
Dominic turned toward the gruff voice, a half a dozen men were leaning against the walls.
"Me?" Dominic pointed to himself, altering his voice with a higher pitch for an additional layer of deception.
"Yeah, who else, baldy?" The biggest asked. Dominic looked closer as he scowled and made a fist. True or not, he didn't like it. He snarled angrily. They were well fed, relatively speaking, though their clothes had many patches and their cloaks were almost threadbare from overuse. Their clothing was mostly red, except for their brown leather boots.
"Where you from?" The biggest one asked, orangish hair hung down the length of his neck and a thick ginger beard of the same shade covered most of his face.
"Say what?" Dominic asked with a frown.
"What, you don't know words, baldy? I asked where you from? You from here? You from Crossroads, Ikari? Wheaton, somewhere else?"
A sensation tickled in Dominic's brain, a clue about why he was being asked, he thought of the reports of factional fighting between refugee groups. "Here." Dominic answered calmly.
"I see, well, then you've got a toll to pay or I'm afraid we can't let you pass." The big one said calmly as he drew out a short knife The other refugees drew short knives as well.
"What kind of toll? I don't have time for this." Dominic said with contempt.
"Your ration card." The thug replied.
"Oh, so that's how you've been staying fed." Dominic said aloud as the curious state of their bodies was explained. "Well, I can't help you. I don't have a ration card."
"Then we'll take your clothes and those boots." The thug answered and began to approach, two more in red emerged from around the corner in the open.
"Neither of those things is going to happen. Now get out of my way, I've got somewhere to be. Be grateful I don't want to take the time to kill you, at least not now." Dominic growled harshly.
The little gang paused at his seeming fearlessness. Dominic tapped the sword at his side.
"It's just one, and there are eight of us." The thug answered as he came up to Dominic, towering over him by a full head and a half. He smiled arrogantly.
[Penetrating Blow] Dominic said, and thrust his hand forward with the palm flat and horizontal with the ground, thrusting as if he were thrusting a knife, his hand pierced the stomach of the thug, who grunted and stared down, incomprehensibly at the hole that appeared in his stomach. Dominic growled again, grabbed the intestines, and yanked his hand back out, bringing the insides of the thug, outside. The large thug fell to his knees and grasped at his innards as Dominic released the hold, then kicked him hard in his chest, sending him tumbling head over heels backwards a half a dozen feet until he hit a stack of crates, shattering them and crumpling into a heap, blood stained the snow and the walls, and the thugs shrieked with horror.
"That was one. I don't have time for you trash, run away." Dominic snarled again, and the remaining thugs ran for their lives.
"I shouldn't have done that... now my hand is all filthy with... filth." He said out loud and approached the dying man that had been left behind, he was shaking in pain and fear as he lay in the debris his collision had created.
He was struggling to drag his innards back to his body and put them into place, Dominic stood over him for an instant, then raised a foot, and terrified eyes looked up in a silent plea for mercy. Mercy that would never come. The Cardinal of Wind brought his foot over the thug's neck, then brought it down, crushing it completely and the once towering figure was reduced to death twitches, then eternal stillness.
Dominic crouched and wiped his hand and arm on the shirt of the corpse to clean himself up hastily. He then flipped the body over onto its stomach and yanked the red cloak from off its back, and put the threadbare cloak on over himself. "That'll do." He said to himself and hurried to the main street.
'I wonder how many people that has cost us, I wonder how many died of hunger because of gangs like these stealing ration cards or clothing. After I've finished off Yvon, I'm going to have to do something about these. Maybe I can use them against the Undead's armies as fodder, the Slane Theocracy doesn't need trash like that after the war, maybe he's done us a favor by showing us who we need to get rid of?' He thought with bitter frustration, and his mind drifted over to the other human kingdoms that stood against the Theocracy.
'Damn it! If we'd only just worked together... all the while, we could have finished that monster... it'll take decades to recover from this, even after the gods return to destroy him for us.' Dominic thought with a groan.
He was still contemplating all that when he finally reached Raymonds home and pounded on the door. A buxom blonde maid came to the door. "I'm here to see Raymond, it's urgent." He said breathlessly.
"Urgent or not, the Cardinal isn't here. He will be back soon." The maid said calmly.
"I'll wait for him, it's that important!" Dominic said urgently.
Solution thought it over as she looked at the bald man in the peasant clothing. She very nearly followed her first impulse, to shut the door in his face and send him away.
His eyes caught hers though, and in them she saw the urgency he had put into his voice, and more, she smelled the scent of blood wafting off of him as if he'd bathed in it. "You can wait but... not inside, nobody from outside the house, is allowed inside the house when the master isn't here." She said formally.
Dominic growled, "I need to..." He reached out to push past, and when he hit the door, he found he couldn't shove it even the tiniest hair.
"If you try to force your way in, your guts will be forced 'out' of their resting place." Solution said sharply. "I guard the master's house, and I guard it well." She held the door fast, and he looked at her more closely.
'Former scripture trainee? Got to be... but if she failed, what the hell passed his regimen?' Dominic wondered with a frustrated sense of awe, but he took his hand away from the door.
"I need to hide, until he can see me." He whispered, "There has to be somewhere?" He asked insistently.
Solution looked away in thought, "Come, you can hide in the bath house, he'll be back soon I think, and then if he'll see you, well, then he will see you. If he won't, then that is neither his problem nor mine, make it a problem at your peril." She uttered starkly.
"Understood." Dominic said through gritted teeth as she led him to a medium sized, round building around the side of the manor, opened it up, pointed crudely inside, and then shut the door behind him as soon as he was inside.
He looked around, there was a small bench around a pool of warm water, "Oh, you lucky bastard! You had a natural hot spring on your little plot of land? You built the bath around it... I swear... some Cardinals have all the luck." He said enviously, and he lay down on the bench and drifted into a much needed sleep.
...Ruins of Wenmark...
As Raymond, Nua, Enri, and Boabdil quietly did as Neia said, she smoothed her hands over the table at which she sat, ashes from bodies had made a thin coat that gave the table a gray top, which she swept to the floor, a little cloud of particles hovered and slowly fell to the floor while footsteps echoed in the hollow room of the once great city.
A savage impulse came over her, and she quietly sang a little piece of a tune during their ascent, putting her voice to work, haunting and subtle. "...Everyone's screaming... ...when the lights go out... ...the plan we have is all wrong... ...are we still here or are we gone..."
Raymond felt sweat springing to his flesh, and despite the light flooding the room from above, he felt himself encased in darkness, all the way up until the moment he shoved a corpse to the floor and its bones broke apart and scattered, and took its chair for himself.
Nua felt her skin tingle, her fingers twitching as she put distance between herself and the Black Paladin her owners had called a demon. She darted a glance over her shoulder as Neia swept the ashes away dismissively and folded her hands together, resting them patiently on the table in front of her. 'Demon.' She thought of the word, it had been uttered more than once on the streets, that the demoness in the west was rising against humanity. Long had she dismissed it as mere stories told to frighten people into compliance. She thought of her last meeting, when the woman had almost attacked Raymond. She swallowed hard, 'She feels like... like Lady Solution, kind of. Like malice wrapped in flesh. Nua... no, tell me you're not going to do what you think you're going to do? Come on, you want them dead, you want them all dead, you've wanted it for well over a hundred years, you can't be seriously thinking of mercy?' She argued, raged in her own mind as her body quietly moved to the seats, she looked at one with a corpse, and one without, and with a shudder, moved to seat herself in the empty one.
Boabdil felt the glare at his back, 'I must be the most unlucky man to ever exist... I seriously have to talk that 'thing' down? Come on man! Think! Think!' You've always found a way out before!' He pulled the chair back, to be seated, and the skeleton tumbled out of his way as he did so, scattering bones about.
Enri moved to the nearest seat, she shoved the skeleton out of the way contemptuously, and noticed as Neia's eyes turned sharply to her, and a very tiny nod of approval came to the herald of the Sorcerer King, so small she herself might not have noticed it. 'I know. I know the stories of this place, I envy you the chance to have done so much for those so helpless... but I do not envy what it has made you. But damn it! You will listen, you will listen to me too, and I will bring you down, even if just this once, before my army becomes yours.' She thought with gritty determination as she imitated Neia's posture in her own seat.
"Alright, we're all here, we're all seated. Now before we begin, I will point out that I owe a debt that I must repay. I will spare ten thousand lives from Wheaton all the way to and including Kami Miyako. That will include some resisting villages, but... tell me... how many people are trapped 'outside' the city right now, Cardinal Raymond?" Neia asked calmly.
"Ten thousand? Why...?" Boabdil asked suspiciously, "Is this some kind of trick?" He asked, narrowing his eyes and glaring down at her.
He felt ice stab his soul as her eyes met his. "I will not be using any tricks, not this time, I swear it on my god, my wife's life, and my life, and on the peaceful rest of Illyana in her grave. I am not tricking you. I did something terrible to someone, and the price of their forgiveness is ten thousand of your people get to live. You can kiss her feet later in gratitude. She deserves it." Neia ground every word out like a stone grinding flower.
"I see." Boabdil answered, somewhat subdued. "I will never forget my debt to them."
Neia grunted indifferently and looked over to Raymond for an answer to her question.
He felt himself slump mentally even as he held his body straight, "Nobody really knows. They've been streaming in for awhile, and the city has been so closed off that nobody has gone out to take a census. Plus there are the ones who have taken control over the forest, a few did get allowed in, and the stories they tell... even inside the walls it isn't that bad."
"Oh?" Neia asked with a cockeyed look.
"People need fire, so some have become bandits, taking over the woods and extorting from others in exchange for access to wood. Most of the outside is even hungrier than we are inside, guards atop the walls report that they saw... well remember the red flood you sent our way?" He said sadly.
"Of course." Neia answered promptly.
"Some of the guards saw body parts being fished out of the water, but not for burial..." He shut his mouth tight.
"Like the consumption of my people inside the walls..." Nua whimpered.
Neia's feral growl was inhuman. "I learned of that last night, and I promise you, Nua, I will fucking kill them all. I will cut off their hands! Rip out their tongues! Tear open their bellies to free the flesh of your people from their vile stomachs! I will divert the river to wash away any sign that Kami Miyako ever existed!" Shadows wreathed her as she her empty eyes held the room spellbound.
"No!" Nua snapped out with a force that surprised herself.
Neia shut up and looked at the elf girl as if she hadn't understood the word.
"What?" Neia asked, "What did you say?"
"I said, 'No!' Pope Neia." Nua answered firmly. "Nobody hates that city more than I do! Nobody in this room has a right to hate it more than I! But there 'are' good people there!"
Neia's wrath slowly dissipated, as if being shed by the shaking of her body that had just begun.
Raymond spoke up sharply, "A servant of Yvon, a human, helped an elf to escape slaughter to warn, of all people, Dominic, of what Yvon was planning, what he was doing. And I have butlers and maids who are humans, and they have helped me protect the elves and half elves I've sheltered. There are humans who are part of Enlaith's network of underground resistance and information that have been filtering information back to you. Are you going to kill them too?!"
Neia was quiet at the question.
Enri stood slowly, she met the black shadow of Neia's eyes with her own cold, stony glare, and pointed down at Neia like an angel from on high, "Will you who are the herald of the Divine Lord Ainz, who you call the source of justice... do justly yourself?!"
"It is a city of evil. The source of the suffering of my country, the source of the BLIGHT of the six that has torn apart so many innocents. Destroying it is justice." Neia argued vigorously. She stood and folded her arms behind her back, clasping one hand in the other and fixed her eyes on Enri.
'I will not flinch from her, I will not turn away.' Enri thought stoically as she remembered how easily the Black Paladin showed that she could break the body of the peasant General, and held the look between them, like a rope so tense it might snap with but a little more pull.
"My Queen... my former Queen, Calca, tried to save everyone, she wanted a world in which everyone was happy. There was no higher justice to her than not having to sacrifice anyone. That is... I admit, a laudable goal, but that is not this world! We live in a world where not everybody gets to have life! Or happiness! Or safety! Where some have to die so that others can live, where some have to suffer horribly, destroy themselves and destroy others in order to stop something worse! Look around you! Do you think every single person who died in this city, truly deserved to die! Even I, the Scourge of God, know better than that! Yet this city showed me it could not be allowed to continue! Every night I slept in the Golden Roan... I could hear the false pleasures of well trained slaves, I could hear their little cries when they thought they were alone, and were, but for my senses as a scout. I could smell the sex and the fear and taste their pain on my tongue as if I were licking the fear born sweat from their very skin... and everything in this city was structured around dominance and exploitation like that. Were there good people here? Probably so, who looked at elf or human in chains and felt pity, but who did nothing or at least, nothing that stopped anything. To stop this place from its evil it had to be destroyed root and branch! So it is with Kami Miyako!" Neia exclaimed.
"Kami Miyako is not Wenmark!" Enri shouted and stamped her foot, she balled up her fists and shook with frustration.
"There are people there who really 'are' trying to stop everything! Look to the right of me! Cardinal Raymond is a leader of that country and he's put his life on the line to stop it all! His loyal human servants are helping him and have been since the start! You have a 'chance' here Neia! A real chance!"
"A chance for what?" Neia asked coldly, her body still as granite on unmoving earth.
"A chance to do what you couldn't before! A chance to save the ones who should be saved, while also destroying the ones who earn your wrath! I'm not saying we can save everyone! But that doesn't mean we kill everyone either!" Enri shouted and her body started to shake as if caught in a blinding freezing rain.
Neia looked over to Boabdil after a moment's thought. "What happened to the slaves of Crossroads? Did you kill them?"
"No. I wouldn't do that, even if I could have. I sent..." He went pale.
"You sent them to Kami Miyako, didn't you." Neia said, it was not a question, and her voice was very quiet, seemingly devoid of rage.
"But... they should be safe there, the conditions aren't luxurious, but the ones I sent South were registered to powerful houses." He answered.
"Name the houses." Neia said coldly.
He quickly rattled off a list of a dozen or so wealthy and noble names. "That isn't all of them, but those are the majority." He said promptly.
Neia turned her attention to Raymond, "How many of those are now dead?" She asked.
"Two fled with their property and... Solution killed them." He answered grimly as he began to understand where Neia was going. Nua reached out and took his hand, her body visibly shaking and clearly on the verge of tears.
Neia swapped her gaze seamlessly back to Enri. "How many of those died in the rebellion in your territory?" She asked, "Do you recognize any names?"
Enri swallowed hard, "Most of them, I think only two survived."
Dark caverns faced Boabdil yet again, "What do you think Yvon will do with the ones holed up in those places you ordered them kept?"
Raymond interjected in the slow rationality of an experienced statesman, standing up as Boabdil lost himself in disgusted introspection, "If he succeeds in his coup, he will first send soldiers out to our safe zones, the 'work camps' to harvest those publicly owned. They will be gone, I have already asked His Majesty to evacuate them, and I have every confidence that he will do so. Yvon will then likely suspect my involvement, and I will have to go into hiding, unless Dominic resists effectively, which he probably will, but if he wins against Dominic, he will then seek food elsewhere to keep his promise. He will remember the slaves of Crossroads who no longer have masters or mistresses, and he will confiscate them to feed the army as you approach."
Silent stares were locked on him, but Raymond saw none, before his eyes passed the events as he foresaw them in the worst case scenario, "If those are insufficient, he will begin executing anyone who does not turn over their household slaves, and the city will fall to infighting."
"Infighting? Over what?" Neia asked with genuine curiosity and doubt in equal measure permeating her tone.
"Because, among the great houses of Kami Miyako, many have grown up with the same slaves as part of their life, elves live long, and are often passed down from parent to child, like family heirlooms. Some of them grow up nursing from elven breasts, or raised by elven slaves, taught by elven tutors, as much as by their own parents. I won't deny what my country has done, I will not pretend a lack of hypocrisy in what I am about to say..." Raymond choked up, his voice caught in his throat and tears ran down his face... "but even though we're taught that..." he squeezed Nua's hand, "this is an animal, that she... isn't a person like us, what we say and what we feel in the quietness of our souls are not always the same thing. There are those who love their slaves and whose hearts rebel against a lifetime of the teachings of the divine... I won't excuse them but, they know no other way than this. If the ways they know change, and Yvon demands the lives of those who helped to raise them? I believe, I truly believe, they will fight."
"I don't expect you to believe me, but I swear on my life it is true, kill me here and now if you're going to say I lie!" Raymond exclaimed and released Nua's hand, he opened his arms as if to embrace death, "I stake my life on this truth! Many will fight against Yvon, they will fight to protect the elven woman who nursed them, or the elven man who taught them how to ride a horse or tucked them in at night, who taught them to read or fed them or do for their children as was done for them in turn! We are a lost people! But there is still time, still hope for some of us!" He shouted with his eyes shut, and his voice echoed off the blackened walls until it died like the city it echoed in.
Neia looked to Nua, who thrust herself hard against Raymond as if wanting to protect him. "You, Nua, do you believe him?" Neia asked in a voice that was surprisingly gentle.
Nua's heart pounded in her breast, the gentle voice was putting Raymond's life in her hands, putting the city's life in her hands, she could feel it, the eyes of night fixated on her own, and demanded that she speak the truth. 'Lie to me, and I will know.' Nua felt that meaning in the stare.
'Do I believe him? Is he telling her the truth?' She wondered, her eyes darted around as if seeking answers from the walls and dried up bones of the chilly room. Finally, she answered, "I had... one good owner, he loved me, I can... admit that now, even though he did some terrible things I can't ever really forgive, I understand now, being around men like Raymond, that terrible deeds sometimes come from terrible, impossible choices, and he did what he did because he saw no other option. I don't know how often it happens... but if I was truly loved by a human, and if humans in Kami Miyako can truly bring themselves to take risks for my kind, as some of them have... then it must happen behind many closed doors where I can't see it. Yes. I believe Raymond is telling the truth." Nua answered in a tender voice as her body trembled against that of the Cardinal.
Neia sought her face, looking for any hint of a lie, and finding none, she lowered her face to look at the ground in front of her.
Boabdil leaned over toward Enri's ear, she turned, and met his eyes, between the two enemies passed a silent argument waged purely by expression and eye contact, until a nod of agreement passed between them.
"A compromise." Enri said, drawing Neia's attention back from whatever her private contemplations were.
"What?" Neia asked doubtfully.
"General Boabdil will reveal the locations where the elves from Crossroads are kept, so that they can be rescued." Enri suggested, struggling to keep her voice even under the withering look of the Scourge of God.
"I do not make negotiations using hostages." Neia answered through gritted teeth. "You should all know that."
'Demon.' Enri thought again but with a swelling sense of pity, and forced the thought aside, "That isn't what I suggest, I say he will reveal them all, asking nothing in return for that knowledge so that they can be rescued as well."
"I sense a 'but' there." Neia said sardonically, her body's tension heightening as she waited for the shoe to drop.
"But we let the city seal its own fate. We all know that Yvon's coup will begin, he will do exactly what Cardinal Raymond predicts, but there will be no public slaves to be had, this will force Yvon to turn to the private houses. If he's right, the city will fall to fighting and riots in the streets, let Raymond and Boabdil, and those like them, gather their supporters together in a place where they can 'hold out'."
"The Artisan district." Raymond said sharply, "I can extract a promise of it as a 'safe zone' from Dominic easily enough."
"If Yvon wins, then you destroy every surviving human life and rescue the elves. If Dominic wins, well you destroy whatever doesn't surrender, and if they kill each other, you let Raymond peacefully surrender the city, then you can do all the trials you need to in order to purge the guilty. No matter what happens, you will have poured out your bowl of wrath over Kami Miyako. The only difference is, the city itself will have decided who drowns in the flood." Enri suggested with a cold, calculated reasoning that at once horrified her conscience and gratified it immensely.
'Is this really me, speaking now? Did I just say all that? Father... mother, Sun... Your Majesty... I think you'd be more proud of me now than at anything else I've ever done.' Enri thought with awe and gratitude.
Neia remained quiet for an instant. Then her deadly eyes held Enri like a snake did a wounded bird, and the black vanished as if it never were, and sky blue reigned supreme in the whites of her eyes. "Very well. You have 'won' this time, General Enri. That will be our compromise. The city itself will decide on what soul it has for itself, and that will decide whether two stones stand atop one another, or are washed away to the sea never to be joined together again."
Neia drew out a knife, held out her hand, and sliced her palm open, and then squeezed it tight so that she made a fist that shook from the tension, and blood dripped down from the palm, and stained the dust, ashes, and stone of the floor of the dead city's central government building.
The Black Pope then wiped the knife clean on the edge of the table and put it away, then reached into her pack and drew a small cloth, with which she wrapped her wound. "Before this wound heals clean on its own, I will stand in the center of Kami Miyako. What that will mean for your city, will be determined by what that city does next. I swear that on my own blood."
The tension in the bodies of those who stood or sat above the scene of the pope blooding her own flesh, began to fade. "I'm going to call for a gate, I don't want to be here anymore, Enri. I'll see you again at the gates of Kami Miyako. Cardinal Raymond, General Boabdil, Nua, I'll see you inside the city when I get there. On your truth, its future hangs. Act fast, I will not wait long."
She bowed politely and after a moment of messaged silence, the [Gate] opened and Neia departed, leaving the rest behind to shed their fears through shaking flesh as the rush of urgency died in their hearts as they had their 'victory' over the wrath of the Scourge of God.