Chapter 2

I suppose this is where I ought to ask whether they want power, but everything is far too tangled right now, and my head aches.

This body is strangely rigid. Surely it isn't rigor mortis?

If this is a Sacrifice summoning, I really wish they'd settled the whole thing with a card. Or, failing that, at least prepared a body that was still in one piece.

Something clinks. I look to see what's caught, and iron chains are locked around both wrists and both ankles. Beneath them the skin is bruised a deep, ugly blue. The marks of a struggle.

If you're going to be a Sacrifice, you might at least offer the body of your own accord. Then again, they tore the heart out, so perhaps damage to the flesh simply fell outside the scope of consideration. And naked, too. How perverted. No — once a murder has taken place, perversion isn't the issue. This is a crime. Of course, if they happen to possess a culture like the Aztecs', it might not be a crime at all. Or they might be rich enough to smooth a killing over.

That aside, the flesh is remarkably solid. I don't mean that it's been trained, or that it's stiff because it's a corpse. I mean it feels different from every light I have ever touched.

The viewpoint isn't the floor this time. It's a person's body, so I can't be sure it will work — but can it hold me?

It creeps. A dark violet mist rises off the body. Putting the sensation into words is difficult; it feels as if I have been watching from behind myself, and now I am zooming in. Nothing like the old feeling of reaching out a hand and hauling myself upward. And the further I go, the sharper every sense becomes.

My eyes see far more clearly. There is the touch of the stone beneath me, the slosh of blood soaking my chest, my stomach, and everything below, the thick reek of it, the sound of people breathing all around. Pain is there as well, but it doesn't register as pain so much as some part that has nothing to do with me — like watching an HP bar tick down from the far side of a monitor. This won't be what kills me, will it.

"Lord Ksaxisibal. I am your servant. It is an honor to meet you."

The large man before me addresses me with great care. He is heavily muscled, his face shaggy with brown hair and half of it filled in with tattoos. What sets him apart is his eyes: cloudy ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠pupils without a single point of light in them. The eyes of someone who has despaired without end. I see eyes like those often, through the mirror, when I lick the light and peer into memories.

Setting aside a name that sounds like a curse, I have to wonder in what form they know me at all. If I turn over the sentence he just used to introduce himself, I can roughly guess the route by which they worked it out — and yet the lights I look up at have never all been living in the same world. One place was a primitive age. Another, a Western Middle Ages. Another, an Eastern one. Quite a few had built cultures wholly alien to any of those, and there were even people who seemed more advanced than the modern era. Back then, warmth was enough, so I never paid it any mind. Thinking of it now, they were all different worlds. Which is to say the odds of anyone here knowing about me converge on something very near zero, don't they?

Once I'm outside, I ought to look up this name they call Ksaxisibal. Assuming I can get outside.

Only dark violet mist keeps streaming from the body. Nothing else changes. Is this some special effect that appears when I'm inside? Ah. The hair is purple. Purple looks good.

The world is full of wonders, but first I should try to speak.

A problem. The words won't come. Right — you move the diaphragm, contract the lungs, drive the air out, and when that wind passes the vocal cords it resonates, and together with the tongue you can form speech. The diaphragm seems to be alive, but there's a hole through the lung, so no sound is going to come of it.

Can't I close the hole in the chest? So long as this power that is me exists, there ought to be something. Ah. A mistake. Blood surged from the opening in a sudden gush.

If that were someone's taste, they'd be delighted, but I don't see anyone of the sort. I did wonder — a crowd that believes in a heresy like this can hardly be expected to hold ordinary ideas — and fortunately, no one appears to have a hobby of liking corpses. The air is trembling, oddly. The man in front of me suspects me.

Suspicion is only natural. I was never the one he called. The thread that reached me from that light may well have been a line meant for someone else. I only snatched it.

How frustrating. Dying this way or that comes to the same thing. If I die, then dying will be entertaining in its own right, but if there's a chance, I ought to test it. This body is very solid. I'll try putting a little more of myself inside.

An underground chamber into which not a single point of light entered.

Candle-stands stood at even intervals in a ring, faintly pushing back the dark. Along the inside of that circle, minute script had been written beside pictures explaining to what end the place was built.

Pictures steeped in hatred, each one wishing ruin upon another, covered every surface in a different form. Around them stood a multitude of people, faces hidden behind masks.

There were three great circles, built so the floor dropped from outer to inner, high to low. Masks and garments were much the same in color, yet the clothing differed subtly from circle to circle, and the patterns worked into the robes of those within were far more painstaking than anything worn by those outside. Every one of them stood facing the center.

Where their gazes gathered, an altar rose in the shape of a stepped pyramid. One face of it bore a stair, and before that stair stood four people of differing builds. To either side of the ascending way, corpses torn to shreds had been laid upon every tier. On the step just below the highest stood a large man. At the very top was a chair of stone, and upon it a naked girl, her four limbs bound in iron chain.

Naked or not, the scene was wretched. Where the girl's heart should have been, a great hole gaped, and the blood that had poured from it ran down her body and down the pyramid. That she might still be alive was impossible.

This was a ritual. In some worlds, a rite that offers as Sacrifice the one they would call a shaman, in order to call down their god.

One cult — by fraud, extortion, threats, pyramid schemes, the exploitation of human beings, and every other means besides — had gathered vast funds and labor and raised an enormous temple. And by putting all of that evil to use, they had obtained what they desired.

As someone had said:

There were mages, too, who claimed it was no such thing: that the hearts of the despairing had punched a hole in the world, and that what burst through was not absence but the void which is the opposite of being, annihilating in pairs against reality and thereby causing the blast. Not one of these accounts was a proper fact. This much, at least, was certain. Someone was there. There was someone who did something for the person who had fallen to the bottom of life.

Upon that fact, a cult spread. A god who promised that even the lowest could land a single blow was unbearably sweet to the weak. Until then there had been only the road of being beaten, of living, of dying; now, before death, there was the possibility of revenge. Belief breeds hope, and so — setting aside the fact that they could never meet the one they actually wanted — it was an excellent god. Even if that hope was a false one, born of despair and resignation.

To those on high, it was a thorn in the eye. It meant a human at the bottom might lay hands on the power to kill them. And so this world suppressed the faith. The more it was suppressed, the more it spread like a wildfire, for by nature there are always more people being exploited than people doing the exploiting.

Then, very intermittently, the prayers came true. An unknown explosion vaporized an entire city. Investigation established that it was an unknown power which could not exist in this world, and beyond that there was nothing to be done. Worse, once word got around that the investigation itself had named it an unknown power, the cult only swelled. And so it had no trouble raising an altar as vast as this.

A cult begging someone for salvation. Even if the name was wrong, there was nothing strange in it reaching the protagonist who was its cause. And so, in the end, their god descended upon the Sacrifice.

A ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠girl without a heart moving at all was already strange enough. Stranger still that a girl who had been blonde should die, wake, and find her hair dyed purple. Something had certainly come inside. Verification was required. For the moment, it might be nothing more than a dead body being moved. This was a world with magic, and magic for stirring corpses was not unknown, so suspicion rose among the people gathered around her.

The one among them testing the truth most coldly was the leader who had presided over the rite. His name was Yasle. Once the spiritual leader of a theocracy, he had lost that country to an invading nation — and with it his family, his friends, and his neighbors. Resenting a god who did nothing, he turned his back on the faith he had held, and became the leader of the present cult, whose following was growing but which, for want of a proper head, had been unsteady.

Unlike a god that never answers, this one did. Having become a leader of the faith, Yasle knew that much for certain: this god truly answered. A god that gave the lowest the power of revenge. Sufficient for his purposes, even if, as a matter of belief, his aim pointed a little elsewhere.

So he had drawn on every heretical art he could find, blending the method of summoning an evil god from outside with the method by which the cult called the one it worshiped, and made the attempt. The result was before his eyes. Something that had simply woken, looked around with vacant eyes, and examined its own body.

When their gazes first met, he was disappointed, wondering whether he had failed. It had looked at him with the face of someone who knew nothing and had only been dragged here. That thought did not last. From the wound in the body, an endlessly ominous, cold, dark-violet energy began to spill. The wound disgorged a grotesque polyhedron, as if countless afterimages had overlapped and were shivering against one another, and then, little by little, it closed. No — closed was the wrong word. It looked like a phenomenon that could not be understood. The result might be called healing, but every step between had been grotesque.

The wound in the chest sealed, and a heartbeat sounded once, loud. After that there was no heartbeat. In its place came the sound of something rotating. A heart is meant to beat; what he heard instead was rotation. Yasle began to analyze the grotesque phenomenon unfolding in the girl's body, and then he stopped. It had lifted its gaze and was looking straight at him. In that moment he understood that he had succeeded in calling something.

Eyes that did not belong on a girl's face — stained with ravenous greed and a craving for warmth — stared directly at him, spilling an eerie violet light from somewhere behind them. An eyeball is an organ for receiving light. The something wearing the girl before him was giving light off. Not the figurative gleam of eyes called the windows of the soul, but a physical radiance. An alien mark that sickened the stomach merely to behold.

Without realizing it, Yasle bowed his head.