Read 5: The Holy Road for Free Online Page B

his journey back to Rathal’pesha. Now he lay behind canvas panels, wrapped in warm blankets on an infirmary bed. He could hear Hann’yu grinding medicines. A bell rang out the hour of praise. John listened as Hann’yu set his pestle aside and went to join in the prayers.
    John could have risen and followed Hann’yu. The wounds across his arms and chest were healed. The deep cuts in his palms were only scabs now. But he wasn’t ready.
    He wasn’t prepared to meet the faces of his fellow priests. He didn’t know how he would react when they told him that Ushman Dayyid had been murdered. What would he say when they described their battle against the Fai’daum demoness, Ji Shir’korud?
    Already, John had overheard ushiri’im talking about it to Hann’yu. The demoness’ ability to break the God’s Razor confused them. She had never done it before. They came into the infirmary with minor scratches and asked in lowered voices how Ji Shir’korud had unleashed so much power. What would they do if she returned to take the city? Had the Issusha’im Oracles known this would happen? Had it been Parfir’s will?
    John clearly remembered Ashan’ahma’s cultured southern voice inquiring how it could have possibly been Parfir’s will that Ushman Dayyid deserved to die?
    They asked questions that Hann’yu couldn’t possibly answer. Hann’yu responded in his usual gentle manner. He admitted uncertainty and ignorance. The ushiri’im seemed to leave more disturbed than they had been when they arrived. John realized that they weren’t really looking for information so much as they needed reassurance.
    Dayyid’s murder had left a gaping hole in their society. Whether he had been a tyrant to them or not, his presence had been the certainty of their lives. From morning to night he’d been there training, punishing, and shaping them. He had told them what to do and how to do it. If they had a question, Dayyid had the answer. He had spoken with the assurance of a prophet. His cause had been their cause; his values had been their values. For many of them, he had been the embodiment of Parfir’s will. His faith had pervaded Rathal’pesha.
    And now they had lost all of that.
    John wanted to feel some sympathy for their confusion but he couldn’t. He had been down there on the grounds of the blood market. He had seen exactly where Dayyid’s regime of unquestioning faith led. Dayyid had taught the ushiri’im arrogant cruelty. He had made them unconcerned murderers, because for all the questions they asked Hann’yu, not one had wondered if using the God’s Razor against common bystanders had been wrong.
    John recognized his own hypocrisy. He had become a murderer himself that very day. And yet he wasn’t sorry for it now.
    The ushiri’im needed to have Dayyid torn from them. They needed to feel fear and vulnerability because those things were reminders of their humanity. They needed some incomprehensible force to rend their lives apart so that they might have some sympathy for the common people they so easily destroyed.
    John sighed and glared into the white folds of canvas surrounding his bed. Or perhaps he just needed to feel that the greater crime of the ushiri’im justified his own actions. He wanted to reclaim that effortless sense that he was a just man—a good man.
    In Nayeshi it had been so simple to think so. Decent was the default of an easy modern society. Atrocities occurred more often in the realm of fiction than in everyday life. Mass murderers were the monsters of the week on crime shows; they weren’t his friends.
    But John’s clear distinction between a decent person and a vicious persecutor certainly hadn’t existed among the crowds who had gathered in the blood market. They had been victims, but they had been no more innocent than the ushiri’im. Most had been there to taunt a condemned man. Most would have cheered and laughed while watching Saimura writhe and scream as he burned on the pyre.
    At