“Hush isn’t
a
god,” said Purity. “She’s
the
god. She’s the great unifier, the secret truth beneath all of creation. She is eternal silence and eternal peace. It’s my sacred duty to usher in her final reign.”
“The ogres worship Hush as a goddess as well,” said Infidel. “I was friends with the priestess you stole the Jagged Heart from. If you both worship the same god, why couldn’t you just have asked politely to use the harpoon?”
“The ogres are unworthy, impure beings,” said Purity, wrinkling her nose. “I tolerate them merely as pawns. They know nothing of Hush’s true peace.”
Gale shook her head. “If you value peace, why attack my ship unprovoked?”
“If you’d turned Ivory Blade over to us, no one would have been harmed.”
“You do see the underlying flaw in that argument?” asked Infidel.
“I have only your word that Blade’s dead,” said Purity. “Assuming it’s true, I would also assume that
you
are now my most likely lead to reclaiming the Jagged Heart.”
Gale and Sorrow remained poker-faced. Infidel looked like she was about to say something, then didn’t. She frowned slightly. If we’d been playing cards, this would be the moment I went all in.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one good at reading her expressions.
“It’s here?” Purity asked, as passion returned to her voice. She sat fully upright in the chair. “The Jagged Heart is aboard this ship?”
“No,” said Infidel. “I don’t know where it is. Blade was already dead when I took his armor.”
“You’re a terrible liar,” said Purity.
“And you’re tied to a chair while your followers are confined by manacles,” said Gale. “Infidel isn’t the one being questioned here. You are.”
“Ask what you wish,” said Purity. “Only the guilty have anything to hide.”
“First, who are you really?” asked Sorrow. “Why does everyone call you Purity? Purity was an ancient witch, but I found her grave. She died ages ago.”
“Ancient?” Purity chuckled. “Do I look ancient to you?”
Sorrow shook her head. “No. You’re what? Thirty-five? Forty? And, if you were the real Purity, you wouldn’t have needed the sword to do your ice magic. You’d have the power embedded in your skull. But I’ve felt your scalp. There’s not a single nail in it.”
The bound woman laughed.
“What so funny?” asked Sorrow.
“You and your ridiculous scalp, studded with nails. You truly believe these to be the source of your power?”
“I’ve empirical evidence that they work, yes.”
“You know nothing of true magic,” said Purity.
“Enlighten me,” said Sorrow.
“True magic is passion. True magic is hatred and anger and the thirst for revenge. This is the power that binds me to this world two centuries after my first death.”
Perhaps it was my imagination, but I thought Sorrow held her head a little higher upon hearing this definition of true magic.
Gale, on the other hand, looked exasperated. “Make up your mind. Are you after revenge or peace? You can’t have both.”
“Don’t be foolish,” said Purity. “Revenge fits peace like a hand fits a glove.”
“If you’ve nothing to hide,” said Sorrow, “tell us everything. If you don’t use nails to gain your power, what is the source?”
“I’ve told you,” said Purity. “Hatred binds me. When I was thirteen, Skellings attacked my village. I watched them disembowel my father while my mother was raped. My youth and beauty spared me from the worst of their violence. I was taken as a prize to be presented to the Skelling overlord. His name was Gorg. He weighed three hundred pounds and smelled of rotten teeth. I was given to him on the eve of the winter solstice; it was considered good fortune for a Skelling warlord to deflower an innocent on that night.
“He was not gentle.” Purity shook her head slowly, as if trying to fight back the memory.
“I’m sorry this fate befell you,” said Sorrow. “I know all too well the cruelty of men. I intend to create a world where such things happen no more.”
Purity’s haunted expression changed to one of amusement. She chuckled softly. “You shall fail, little witch. Are you as blind as I was? Sheltered and protected, ignorant of the truth of the world?”
“My life has been anything but sheltered.”
“Then release your dreams of a just world to the winds. They are of no more value than dust. The core of life is pain and violence. You can no more strip cruelty from the heart of man than you can peel thunder from lightning. I learned this truth well on the night Gorg tore my flesh with his violent lusts. A weaker woman would have withered when faced with such a horrifying truth, to know that nothing compels the strong to have mercy upon the weak. I, on the other hand, embraced the truth. The world belongs to those strong enough to take it. I killed Gorg with his own dagger. I gouged his eyes from his fat face, then ran into the night, losing myself in the wild, frozen wastes of the Isle of Grass.”
“I’ve experienced those wastes,” said Sorrow. “You’re lucky to have survived, especially during the winter solstice.”
“But I didn’t survive,” said Purity. “I ran until I could no longer move my legs, then fell numb and senseless in the snow. My soul slipped loose of my body and I found myself alone, all alone, on an endless plain of ice. The sky above was bright with crisp stars. There was no wind. Never had I listened to such silence. I could see my lifeless body at my feet, the skin a pale blue-white. I was draped in nothing but a bearskin blanket. My naked feet and hands had turned black. Frozen blood crusted my face, though I cannot say whether this was my blood or Gorg’s.
“I turned from my body and began to walk. That weak slab of meat and bone no longer felt important to me. I journeyed for a very long time. My feet left no trace upon the snow. The quiet absorbed my every thought. All the pain of life slowly faded from memory. Not just the abuse I’d suffered, but the tiny pains, the small day-to-day agonies that accompany a body, the pangs of hunger or thirst, the needle pricks of heat and cold. I was free. Truly free, in a world where all was black and white, where peace was the final solution. The one heartache I felt, the one pain, was to think that all the living world was denied such a heaven.”
“No offense, but your afterlife sounds kind of boring,” said Infidel. “I’ve been to a couple of dead lands counting the one we’re in. Both had dragons, and definitely weren’t dull.”
“Ah,” said Sorrow. “But my afterlife had a dragon as well. Whether I had walked for hours or years, I cannot guess, but as I journeyed a shape rose on the horizon. As I grew closer I found a giant mountain of ice carved into the shape of a dragon. I entered through the mouth. Within this mountain were tunnels. I explored them, drawn by a force I did not yet understand. In the center of the mountain, where a true dragon’s heart would have been, I found an altar. Upon this altar was the Ice-Moon Blade. When I lifted it, my soul was pulled inside. Hush whispered to me. Then I woke.
“I was in a new body. It was springtime on the Isle of Grass, and the fields were covered in yellow flowers. In the placid meltwater of a nearby pool I saw that I was now a woman in her fifties. She was half lame and blind in her right eye as a result of beatings. I had only the faintest echo of her memories. She’d found the Ice-Moon Blade in a streambed where it had washed down from the glaciers. My spirit now filled a body whose original soul had withered long ago.
“I murdered her husband and his brothers, even her sons who treated her as no more than a slave. Eventually I was caught and killed. My soul once more retreated into the sword. What happened in the intervening gap I don’t know, but a dozen years later the blade was touched by a young woman, merely fourteen, who’d suffered a miscarriage after being kicked in the belly by her father. I rode her for a long time, and killed many men as I mastered the true power of the Ice-Moon Blade. Eventually, that body fell. To this day, the Skellings call her grave my grave. Since then, nine different women have carried my soul.”
“This one shall be your last,” said Mako.
“Truly? Kill this body if you wish. Drag it in the Sea of Wine for all I care. My soul will always fly free and return to the blade.”
Sorrow looked at me. “Looks like you aren’t the only bodiless soul aboard. Maybe Rott wasn’t after you. A two-hundred-year-old soul is probably a much tastier meal.”
Purity shook her head. “Do you seek to intimidate me with talk of the dragon of decay? I’m the prophet of Hush. Her power is greater than that of entropy. She is timeless. She existed before all, and will endure beyond all. From eternal cold, dark and silent, the world has flickered. Now it sputters; soon it fades. The hush of an unending winter night is the only true eternity.”
“The other primal dragons would argue with that,” said Gale. “Certainly the sea is eternal; Abyss is more powerful than Hush.”
Purity shook her head. “The sea shall freeze, go silent, and find peace. The oceans are merely restless ice; one day they will slumber.”
“I wouldn’t be so cavalier about Rott. Death is forever,” I said, aware of the irony that I should make such an argument.
“In the cold, even death loses power. Decay ceases; entropy grinds to a halt.”
“For a little while,” said Infidel, raising the Gloryhammer. “But sooner or later, the sun will rise again.”
“The sun?” growled Purity. “Glorious, the dragon of the sun, shall be the first to die when the Jagged Heart is in my grasp.”
“What?” asked Mako, sounding amused. “You’re going to go jab the sun with a harpoon?”
“Killing it forever, yes,” said Purity.
Mako no longer looked amused. His brow furrowed as he looked at his mother. “That, uh, can’t happen, can it?”
Infidel cleared her throat, “When I was in Greatshadow’s realm, he told me that the Jagged Heart was created when Hush fell in love with Glorious and had her advances rebuffed. The bad blood goes back a long way.”
“This is stupid,” said Mako. “How does one harpoon the sun?”
“You can’t,” said Sorrow. “Not in the material world. But in the abstract realms?”
I buzzed in with my paper tongue. “Aurora told me the Jagged Heart had the power to open the door to an abstract realm. Something called the Great Sea Above. It’s like heaven for ice-ogres.”
“I say it can’t happen,” said Mako, crossing his arms.
“I dunno,” said Infidel. “Greatshadow said the harpoon could have killed him. The abstract realms follow the same rules as dreams. Anything’s possible.”
“No,” said Sorrow. “Not anything. It’s not dreams that lie beneath the abstract realms; it’s myth. Myths are symbolic, resonant truth. Dreams don’t have to make sense. Myths must make more sense than actual reality.”
“I get that dreams are kind of random,” said Infidel. “But I hardly would call the myths I learned as a child sensible. I remember one where a wolf disguised himself as an old woman. Not exactly plausible.”
“It’s not the details that matter,” said Sorrow. “It’s the message. Myths are the vessels of great truths. They teach us about justice and love and courage. They help define who we are. Every culture I know of has a myth explaining the creation of the world, and foretelling its destruction. The notion that, before there was heat and light, there was cold and darkness, is a pretty common belief. Simple symmetry predicts that if cold was the beginning, it shall also be the end. Myths follow grand cycles. Everything that is created must one day be destroyed.”
Mako threw up his hands, utterly frustrated. “So you’re telling me it makes sense that someone can stab the sun with a long, pointy stick and kill it? You and I live in very different realities.”
Sorrow nodded. “The thing about myths is they tend to overpower reality. The great truths they carry they have the power to push aside the more mundane truths of the material world.”
“That’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard anyone say,” said Mako.
“I agree,” Sorrow said, with a shrug. “That doesn’t make it false. I’m a materialist. My powers come from seeing through the illusions that limit most people when they interact with the material world. Even though my mind is superbly attuned to recognize reality, I live my life in daily pursuit of things that are not real. I search for justice. I follow a code of honor. I pursue fairness and equality. But justice, honor, fairness, equality... these aren’t real. They don’t exist as measurable objects. If there were a scale, and on one plate there were a single grain of sand, I could not place a single crumb of honor upon the counter plate to tip it. Yet I value these things more than food, shelter, or any comfort. I’ve pledged my life to advance these causes. Just because something isn’t real doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
“Truth is stark,” said Purity, staring at Sorrow. “Truth is hard. And truth is all that matters.”
I scratched my coconut skull. I’d heard these words before, from Father Ver. Was it pure coincidence that I’d hear them again? Or was it just evidence that when you stripped away the quibbling details of the various faiths, all fanatics essentially thought alike?
There were three loud bangs on the boards above us that caused everyone to jump.
“Ma!” Jetsam shouted, sounding as if he were kneeling on the deck directly above.
“What?” Gale shouted back.