Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

"There," Nicci said, shaking a finger as she paced, barefoot, "there is the crack in the Order's imposing tower of teachings. There is the fatal flaw at the center of all convictions contrived in the imagination of men. Such things in the end, even though they may be sincere, are nothing more solid than the elaborate product of whimsy and self-deception. In the end, without the rock of reality, an insane person who hears voices in their head is equally sincere and equally credible.

"That is why the Order vaunts the sanctity of faith and teaches that you must dismiss the wicked impulse to use your head, that you must instead abandon yourself to your feelings. Once you surrender your life to blind faith in their account of the afterlife, they claim that then, and only then, the doorway to eternity will magically open for you and you will know all.

"In other words, knowledge is to be gained only through rejection of everything that actually comprises knowledge.

"This is why the Order equates faith with holiness, and why its absence is deemed to be sinful. This is why even questioning faith is heretical.

"Without faith, you see, everything they teach unravels.

"And since faith is the indispensable glue that binds together their teetering tower of beliefs, faith eventually gives birth to brutality. Without brutality to enforce it, faith ends up being nothing more than a fanciful daydream, or a queen's empty belief that no one will attack her throne, that no enemy will breach the borders, that no force can overthrow her defenders, if she merely forbids it.

"After all, I don't need to threaten you to get you to see that the water in that fountain is wet or that the walls of this room are constructed from stone, but the Order must threaten people to make them believe that an eternity of being dead will be an eternal delight, but only if they do as they're told in this life."

As she glared into the still waters of the fountain, Richard thought that Nicci's blue eyes might turn that water to ice. The cold rage in those eyes was born of things she had seen in her life that he could not begin to imagine. On the dark and quiet evenings alone with her, the things she had been willing to confide in him were terrible enough.

"It's a lot easier to convince people to die for your cause if you first make them eager to die," Nicci said in a bitter voice. "It's a lot easier to get boys to bare their breasts to arrows and swords if they have faith that doing so is a selfless act that will make the Creator smile and welcome them into the eternal glory in the afterworld.

"Once the Order teaches people to be true believers, what they have really done is to forge monsters who will not only die for the cause, but kill for it as well. True believers are consumed by an implacable hatred for those who don't believe. There is no more dangerous, no more vicious, no more brutal an individual than one who has been blinded by the Order's beliefs. Such a believer is not shaped by reason so he is not bound by it. As a consequence, there is no mechanism of restraint on his hatred. These are killers who will only too happily kill for the cause, absolutely secure in the knowledge they are doing the right and the moral thing."

Nicci's knuckles stood out white and bloodless as her fists tightened. Though the room seemed to ring with the sudden, terrible silence, the power of her words still echoed through Richard's mind. He thought that the strength of the aura crackling around her might provoke a sudden lightning storm within the anteroom.

"As I said, the premise is pretty simple." Nicci shook her head in bitter resignation, the emotion draining from her bleak pronouncement. "For most of the people of the Old World, and now the people of the New World, there is no choice but to follow the Order's teachings. If their faith wavers they are sternly reminded of the eternity of unimaginable suffering that awaits the faithless. If that fails to work, then' faith will be driven into them by the point of a sword."

"But there must be some way to redeem these people," Jebra said at last. "Isn't there a way to bring them to their senses and get them to cast off the teachings of the Order?"

Nicci looked away from Jebra to stare off into the distance. "I was brought up from birth under the Order's teachings and I came to my senses."

Still staring off into a dark storm of memories, she fell silent for a moment, as if she were reliving her seemingly endless struggle to grasp at life, to escape the haunting clutches of the Order.

"But you cannot imagine how profoundly difficult it was for me to emerge from that realm of dark beliefs. I doubt that anyone who has not been lost in the suffocating world of the Order's teachings can begin to grasp what it's like to believe that your life is worthless and of no value, or grasp the shadow of terror that falls over you every time you try to turn away from what you have been taught is your only means of salvation."