Commission

I gasped for breath against the smothering pressure of the flaming room, but despite feeling like I was inhaling deeply, I realised I was hyperventilating. I couldn’t tell whether it was an effect of nerves or the oppression of the room; either would be appropriate. And the Pontifex just rocked and smiled.

My eyes rolled back in their sockets and I collapsed on the floor. It had to be the room. My body didn’t need to actually breathe. I shrivelled up like a dead bug, wheezing, when a sweet gust of fresh air entered my lungs and my consciousness was whisked away higher.

I blinked, and I was standing in a rolling field of grass under a bright blue sky. The field was otherwise featureless except for a single spindly tree, and a barefoot teenage boy in a simple shirt and pants. I realised then that my body had changed back into its chimeric form with the hooves and tail.

The boy looked a little mischievous, and remarkably like the old Pontifex.

“I’m sorry, but you’re the Pontifex?” I asked, able to breathe again.

The boy, with a foxlike grin, clapped his hands. “Don’t be sorry, you’re quick on the uptake! It’s a lot easier to talk like this, isn’t it?”

“So Y-Your Holiness, you want to talk to... me?”

“Sure. You’re pretty special to me, and you’ve had a rough time of it. Why not at least say hello to congratulate you for a job well done? Seriously, that Attaran. Can’t believe he almost got it.”

“You mean the anointing would’ve worked.”

“After a fashion. I don’t reward cheaters,” the Pontifex grinned the grin of one pleased with a secret. “When you get out of here, make sure you eat him for me, too. I want that guy burning in hell.”

“So it really does work like that! You really do want these people punished!”

“I mean, for some people, yeah! Child rapists, child killers, child beaters, aren’t they just despicable?”

“Haha, yeah...” I laughed, then paused. Discomfort coiled in my guts as the Pontifex looked on with his inscrutable, wily grin. Something in my thoughts sobered. “Am I being too casual?”

“Just go with what makes you most comfortable.”

“Then, you mean, I have to keep doing this... killing. That it’s my duty.”

The Pontifex tilted his head. “You’re free to do anything you want, Mephi. Don’t think too hard about making me happy, except knowing that I want you to be happy.”

I choked a laugh. God wanted me to be happy. “Really? But why me, of all people?”

“Well, honestly, you just piss me off. Didn’t I tell you already? Someday you’ll learn to appreciate people. It’s certain, ‘cause you’re not dying until then.”

“But there’s a time limit, right, the Judgement?”

The Pontifex’s face sobered. “Right, the Judgement...” Then he shook his head and grinned. “I’m sure you’ll have plenty of time.”

A shudder ran through my back. That answer was somehow both the best I could have received, and not reassuring at all. “I mean... I’m already kind of starting... to like people more, I guess. ‘Already’, it’s been thirty years. I mean—I mean, is that really it? This is really just about... socialising me so I’m less of a loser? You’ve invested any kind of attention into that, at all?”

“Into saving your soul? You admit that it’s already working?”

I quieted. In terms like that...

In terms like that, I really should’ve been saved by someone like Madjea.

“I don’t understand how giving me this power, or the hunger, equates to that.”

The Pontifex’s face blanked. “Hasn’t it given you more opportunities?”

“I’m barely a person. I’m sorry, I’ve been thinking recently, and I... want to get rid of it. The Hunger.”

“You want to get rid of it.” The Pontifex tilted his head. Then he smiled. “Okay.”

My mind blanked. Okay. Okay?

“Just like that?” I balked.

“Oooh, not quite falling on your face to thank me, now are you? I know what you really mean when you say things like that, and what you really mean is that you want all the benefits. The hunger hurts, doesn’t it? It really sucks, doesn’t it? But what if you could have all its benefits without any of the pain?” The Pontifex paused as if chewing. “That’s fair enough. You can earn it.”

Disappointment dropped in my gut. “You mean it’s possible. But how much more do I need to do? I—thirty years of appeasing it... I really don’t know where to start. I’ve never seen any inroad... And I... don’t think I actually can.”

“Maybe it’s time for a new chapter.” The Pontifex leaned back to seat himself on air, and clapped. A book fell from the sky, which he caught, and flipped through. He paused at a certain page. “Okay, Mephi, listen to me closely. We can do this very quickly if you follow my lead. You’re going to face some opposition—so be careful about angering the Church. It worked out this time, but it won’t always.”

“I’m sorry, but, I really have to ask this—can’t you just stop the Church again if they fight me?”

“There are many roads we can take you to get you where I want you, and I am giving you a fast one because you’ve been good and listened to me. There are more opportunities for me down paths that aren’t so great for you, in some cases. Though, I’ll never abandon you.”

Heartening. I perked up a little.

“Okay, if you can do that, things should be going well for you. Then, just when things are starting to turn out all peachy, this woman—a cultist, you attract awful cultists—will come and ruin you. This will feel very counter-intuitive, but you need kill her immediately, and do it with a knife, or strangle her, or something. And that’s it! If you can do that, you’ll be free of the Hunger in under a decade.”

I digested this astounding information. “Couldn’t I just kill her now?”

“You could, but you’d be going off track. You wouldn’t be working towards removing the Hunger.”

“Right... then could I uh, please, know her name, or what she looks like, or...?”

The Pontifex nodded and closed the book. The edges of his form, and the grass and the tree wavered, until an image arose that drowned out everything else: a young girl with very dark skin and wide, pleading, innocent eyes, underscored with heavy bags. A name cohered in my mind: Demishah. The image then dissipated.

“She’s... a little girl,” I said uncomfortably.

“She’s a shapeshifter, like you. That’s how she’ll look when she comes to destroy you.” The Pontifex bobbed his knee, unconcerned.

“Right... then,” I chanced, “could you make it so I just feel, incredible bloodlust when I see her, and...”

“Okay, Mephi, now that’s stretching the line a little. I understand where you’re coming from. But there are some things that can happen for me if you fail, so I’d like there to be a real chance that you could—just like there was a real chance you and Madjea could’ve spent the next twenty years trying to unseat Attaran. How nice that we don’t have to do that!”

“If... if you’re saying there’s a ‘chance’ that I’d fail, doesn’t that presuppose that I would?”

“There’s variance in the world that I don’t interfere with. A lot of it, actually. You’re being a bit pessimistic, after I just noted a success. You can assuredly do this.”

I fell silent, only somewhat assured. An edge of satiation came over the Pontifex’s features. We had exhausted the topic, but with the avatar of God himself before me for conversation, I didn’t want to stop talking.

“What happens to... the ones who don’t really deserve it?” I said randomly.

“Everything will be put right.” Which meant there was fallibility, that some victims of mine indeed didn’t deserve it. I already knew this, since there was Tjan. Oh, God, Tjan...

“I know you’re talking about, like, at the Judgement, but... can you save them now?”

“Do you want to keep talking first?”

I paused, not quite understanding. “Uh... o-okay, uh... what’s... my biggest mistake?”

“Hmm, probably not reporting Soft Nails when you first saw her.”

That surprised me. “But like, now?”

The Pontifex leaned forward, hugging his knees. “You’re tone deaf to authority. Again, it worked out this time with me vouching for you, but you fancy yourself a free agent while trying to incorporate into society. Eventually you’re going to have to reconcile with people whose demands are different from yours.”

A thought flashed in my head: I don’t want a society where I can’t do what I want.

The Pontifex grinned. “That thinking will isolate you.”

I don’t mind being isolated. I grit my teeth and shook my head. My reflexive thoughts were proving him right, which was to be expected, really.

“So, uh, do you want me to be more religious? Praying properly, going to church, taking devotionals, and sect orders, and... just all that kind of stuff...”

The Pontifex rested his chin in his hand. “Do you want that path, Mephi? You’re free.”

“How... do you mean that, exactly?”

He reclined in the air, crossing his arms behind his head. Then he pointed at me. “I know you. Knowing what you are, I chose you. There is nothing you will do that will disappoint me.”

The weight of this admission sank into me slowly.

“You are one of the pieces in this world that I can operate well. Whatever you are, you have your uses. I would not use a rook like a bishop, and I would not use a bishop like a pawn. But you can choose your place on the board.”

“And the optimal place, for me, is?”

“As I have said. What makes you happiest.” He smiled.

For a deity whose worship entailed significant asceticism and self-sacrifice, that was a frustratingly self-indulgent non-answer. But what made me happy? Perhaps my misgiving with his words was that I was simply not sure.

Hunting made me happy. To rake my claws through a sinner exhilarated me. But I’d already decided against that as my be-all-end-all. I needed to experiment more.

“You really care about this...”

“It’s the nature of our arrangement,” he said.

“Sorry—I’m too stupid to get it the first time, we’re kind of talking in circles.” I sighed. “I know there’s so much I could be asking you, but nothing’s coming to mind...”

The Pontifex hopped out of the air, landing dextrously on the grass. “Shall we conclude this, then?”

“There has to be something else...”

The Pontifex smiled with commiseration and held out his hand, palm out. “Brace yourself.”

Before I could question what he meant, he waved his arm up and clicked his fingers. A queer feeling of wrongness came over me, and then the sensation of dull hooks in my stomach, catching on something, and pulling. A force in me resisted the tug, and arose with rage. The Hunger.

A black and feral beast, it roared at the intrusion of the hooks—and moreso, at what they were doing. Souls! They were pulling souls out of me! MY souls, out of ME! I couldn’t control myself. I bristled and my body morphed into a lupine monster, snapping and charging at the Pontifex—

--And I was heaving, wheezing on the floor of the burning ruby room, as a shrivelled, squirming lump. My eyes rolled up to see a constellation of glowing orbs shimmering in the air between myself and the elderly Pontifex. In one great flash, they dissipated into nothing.

And I knew he had taken souls out of me that he didn’t want damned, and probably given them salvation. Still I hissed and I heaved, trying to force my body up to attack the Pontifex, but as I struggled, the wrath slowly subsided until I was simply panting on the stone, again in control of myself.

The Pontifex tapped his finger once on the rocking chair’s armrest. The fires in the room all snuffed, and everything went black, except for the light shining from the doorway behind me.

I got the message.

I crawled out of the room back to the Temple. Though most were ushering people out of the building—and the pews had emptied considerably—a small gaggle of priests were there, waiting for me.

“So, uh...” I said to them. “Can I have Attaran?”