The Religion Read Free

turned upside down his mind clung tight to his Art. He dipped the cloth in cold water and wrapped it around the tang. And then he paused.
    From the chaos beyond the forge-house door he heard a voice-closer than the rest-shouting out to God, but not for His mercy. Calling,rather, on His vengeance and His wrath. It was the first voice Mattias had ever heard. It was his mother's.
    Mattias squeezed the sodden hilt in his hand. The tang's heat was tolerable. The dagger's final quench had not been purest dew but a murderer's blood, and if its destiny and purpose were now other than he'd planned, so too were his own. And he wondered then, as he would wonder always, if it were not his forging of this Devil's blade that had brought this fatal doom upon his loved ones. He searched for the soul with which he'd woken and found it not. He searched for a prayer, but his tongue didn't move. Something had been torn from within which he hadn't known was there until the hole it left behind howled in sorrow. Yet gone that something was, and not even God could restore it. His mother's fury pierced him. In fury-not in sorrow-had his mother chosen to die. Her fury called him to her side. He walked to the door and stooped to cover Britta with his coat. Britta at least had died whole, with a song on her lips and the joy of creation in her heart. There was an angel in the blade along with a devil. He'd take her with him. He'd take angel and devil both.
    He stepped out into the cold and steam rose from the black dagger in his fist, as if the forge contained a shaft bored up from Hell and he were a demon assassin newly ascended. The yard was empty. The heavens at the rimrock's edge were reefed in vermilion cloud. From the village pillars of smoke quavered skyward and with them cries of anguish and crackles of flame. He walked across the cobbles, sick with fear. Fear of whatever vileness afflicted his mother. Fear of shame. Of cowardice. Of the knowledge that he couldn't save her. Of the darkness that had housed itself inside his spirit. Yet the darkness spoke with a feral power that brooked neither refusal nor hesitation.
    Plunge in
, the darkness said.
    Mattias turned and looked back at the forge. For the first time in his life he saw a drab stone hut. A drab stone hut with the corpse of his sister, and the corpse of a man he had killed, inside.
    Like the blade in the quench
.
    Plunge in
.
    In the kitchen little Gerta lay tangled on the hearthstone. Her features were twisted in bewilderment and her puddled blood smoked foul among the coals. He straightened her fragile limbs and knelt and kissed her mouth. He covered her corpse with the blanket he'd slept in. He plungedon. Across the ransacked room the door hung creaking from one hinge. In the dirt outside was a melee. He stepped closer. He glimpsed the village priest, Father Giorgi, for whom he served at altar on a Sunday morning. Father Giorgi was shouting at assailants unseen, with a crucifix upraised in his fists. A squat figure hacked him in the neck and Father Giorgi fell. Mattias stepped closer. What kind of man would kill a priest? Then he stopped and wheeled away, his mind erased in an instant of all he'd seen.
    He blinked and heaved for breath and the forbidden picture returned. His mother's nude body, her pale breasts and thick dark teats. Her pale belly, the hair between her legs. Shame writhed in his gut with the urge to run. Across the yard, beyond the forge, to the woods where they'd never find him. The darkness that was now his only guide and counselor made him turn back to the door and he looked again.
    A horse, pierced with arrows, lay dying on its side, its great head flapping and its eyes rolling wide above the pink froth bubbling from its muzzle. Nearby sprawled a villager, also pierced, as if in flight, and by him Father Giorgi in a widening pool. Across the horse's carcass, as if upon a mattress obscene, lay his mother. Her copper hair tossed as she fought against the four men