The Blind Truth

Daniel moved through the alleys of the Outer Ring without saying a word.

The boy walked one step ahead, his bare feet slapping through the mud of those furtive lanes. Weak flames from a few corner lamps barely pushed back the darkness, and the smell of rotten fish and standing water clung to everything.

Daniel gripped his cane tightly, his hand cold and damp with sweat after the flight from Varo’s men. The breeze carried distant voices, footsteps, doors closing. But no one seemed willing to cross their path. Which was a blessing, considering the slave merchant’s warnings before the rescue.

Perhaps we’re already in the king’s territory. Varo won’t dare harm us here.

The child did not speak. He simply led on, as though he — and not the Deorum Tecit — were the one guiding their steps. And in truth, that seemed to be the case.

Before they reached the square where Grace had last met the monarch of the gutters, the boy stopped before an abandoned warehouse and motioned them inside. The place had once been a grain store, but the outer walls were flaking and the roof gaped with slits that let the moonlight in.

A wide gate of corroded iron stood only pushed to. The boy shoved it, drawing out a grinding squeal from the hinges that seemed to announce their arrival.

Daniel disliked the feeling.

What had once been merely a storeroom, the King of Beggars had turned into his miserable court.

It was a vast, rectangular space with a high roof supported by wooden trusses. From the beams hung frayed hemp ropes bearing torn pennons that displayed unrecognizable symbols in mockery of true aristocratic heraldry. Perhaps standards stolen from old wars, perhaps only scraps of bedsheets and curtains dyed in the district’s decaying taverns.

The wind slipping through the cracks made them sway slowly, like sails on a ghost ship.

The walls were covered in charcoal marks — circles and lines that made no immediate sense. Some were prayers scrawled by clumsy hands, others mere scribbles with no apparent meaning. There were also territory signs, respected among the dubious folk who had claimed the Outer Ring, set above rows of human skulls carefully stacked into improvised niches in the brickwork.

The King of Beggars’ throne stood at the center of the hall, made from worm-eaten wood torn from old doors and carriage remnants. The high, uneven back was shrouded in filthy cloths and an animal hide stiffened by time and grime.

In front of that wretchedly portentous seat, a low table held thick wax candles lighting clay pots filled with liquids that stank of burnt fat and sour wine.

The king’s subjects were gathered in the corners of the hall — men and women in threadbare clothes, eyes shining with expectation in empty faces half-lost to the gloom. The silence was so deep Daniel could hear rats running along the beams.

The old king sat on the throne.

He looked more fragile than before: sallow skin, sunken eyes, a body draped in a patched wool tunic that barely hid the bones beneath the slack flesh. His staff was the only thing that still seemed to have value, its coins jingling as if to remind all the man’s authority.

When the two approached, the monarch opened his arms.

“Come, boy.”

The child went to him, and the old man embraced him. Trembling hands rested on the boy’s head, almost paternal.

“Are you ready to fulfill your destiny?” the king asked in a weak voice.

The child nodded without hesitation. Daniel frowned.

“What destiny?” he asked, but no one answered.

The king closed his eyes.

Light came from his mouth. Not white, not gold, but a succession of colors Daniel could not name. They shifted too quickly, flickering through hues that did not exist. Looking at it felt wrong, as if the brain had not been made to comprehend it.

The energy crossed the space between king and child, flowing like a thick liquid. The air seemed to harden. The candles guttered. The beggars stepped back a few paces, murmuring in a terrible religious ecstasy, as if what they witnessed were too sacred for them.

Daniel clutched his cane to keep from falling. Even as his human nature recoiled from that… light? Color? That thing! — he could not look away. Like a moth drawn to flame.

The boy did not move. The light entered his mouth and spread through the small body. His eyes rolled back, showing only white. A low, steady hum filled the warehouse.

Minutes passed without time making sense.

When it ended, the old king slumped to the side, inert. The boy caught the staff before it fell and sat upon the throne.

Silence. Daniel was breathing hard.

“Who… or what… are you?”

The child opened his eyes; there was an unsettling clarity in them. When he spoke, his voice was calm and deeper than one would expect from a child.

“I am the echo of a past long buried.”

Grace took a long time to answer.

“No… that explains nothing.”

The boy ran a hand along the staff, feeling the coins fixed to it, his expression perplexed.

“Each generation, a few children are born able to contain my essence. Receptacles, if you prefer. When the body grows old, when it can no longer bear the strain, it is time to abandon it. It happens more often with me, given the life I lead and the subjects I choose.”

“You still haven’t answered my question” Daniel insisted.

The boy — the king — raised his eyes to him.

“I wonder what answer would satisfy you. Alien, perhaps? But you are not of this world either, Daniel Grace. And yet you try to fight forces beyond imagination. Perhaps the right thing would be to say I am a god, but I doubt the term pleases you.”

He paused, savoring the traveler’s stunned reaction.

“It would be more accurate to say I am unfathomable intelligence. A living complex of science and magic, with very few organic elements as you understand them. But if you truly need a name…”

The boy — or what now spoke through him — straightened on the throne.

“I am the Blind Truth.”

A chill ran down Daniel’s spine. It was one of the nine gods of Orthodoxy — the god of secrets.

“But… weren’t you only… myths?” he asked, hesitant.

“My people did not create this world, Grace. On that point, many legends serve only as allegories for the truth. But we shaped it. Until the day when…”— he made a sound with his mouth and let out a brief puff —“most of them left. My brothers and I expelled them.”

Daniel frowned.

“Expelled whom?”

“Those who came before. That time became known as the Unveiling of the Sky. For one night the stars vanished, and they were banished. Only the nine remained.”

Daniel counted on his fingers.

“Just-God. Mother of Dawn. The Blind Truth. Silent Guardian. Daughter of Ashes. Walker of the Margins. Burning Voice. Weaver of the End…”

“Names that matter little to mortals now” the boy-king remarked.

“It was their end that brought the Millennial War, wasn’t it?” Daniel drew a breath before asking, already fearing the answer.

The child nodded.

“We betrayed them, but we were also betrayed. The Burning Voice is not here in Castra Devana with us, as he should be. He wants to bring our people back, repentant for what we did ages ago. But if they return… it will be the end of Ordinem Finis.”

Daniel remembered Varo’s words. At last, he began to grasp the slave merchant’s warnings. He feared the King of Beggars not because he was a rival for power in the Outer Ring, but because he was inconceivable — a being of unimaginable potential for catastrophe.

Varo had captured the receptacle somehow. Likely planning to force the king’s essence out to wherever the rest of his kind were, once the old man’s sick body died.

Fool. And if the creature’s essence leaked into the world? There is no telling how much harm it would cause.

“So that’s what the Yellow Turbans are trying to summon? Your people?”

“Yes. Them. Senator Prebito. The witch from the north. The masked assassin. They all act on someone’s orders. But I still don’t know whose.”

The king stared into emptiness for a moment, listening to voices Daniel could not hear.

“There is a wave of murders sweeping the city, but the authorities have not noticed. Because my subjects are the targets. Obviously, to the powerful, we do not matter. But there is a pattern. Find it for me.”

Too fatalistic for a god, in my opinion. But he isn’t wrong: there were three victims in the Crypt that day, and I still don’t even know where they came from.

Daniel straightened, then nodded slowly.

“And the Warlock’s Crypt? Why there?”

“The Crypt is a monument from the past. A construction of impossible forms, with broken logic. It adapted to the present world by taking the guise of a ruined city. But in essence, it remains a temple. There is always a lingering sense that something might awaken there.”

“The Swords Party is trying to force that passage” Daniel said.

“They want a new war. But they do not know what lies on the other side.”

Grace narrowed his eyes.

“Are we sure they don’t?”

“The betrayal of one of my brothers is old” the boy-king said with a crooked smile. “When the Orthodoxy and the old royal family tried to overthrow the Empire, it was under the influence of the Burning Voice. But opening the passage requires intermediaries.”

“Prebito…” Daniel ventured.

“No.”

The boy struck the staff on the floor. Outside, the moon drifted between heavy clouds, and the wind made the torn standards in the throne room snap violently. Daniel studied the child, but his expression revealed little.

“Just as you were brought from another world to aid the Convergence, there is another. Another person who came from elsewhere…”