Guardian of the Dawn by Richard Zimler

Author:Richard Zimler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913640750
Publisher: Parthian Books

I refused to leave when the prisoners were summoned away. I was insane with terror and grief, and I wanted to stay where I was as a protest, but I was dragged away by my escort, who slapped my face so hard that I feared my jaw had been broken again. He and two other men took me to my cell, where I cried until I fell into the merciful darkness of sleep. At dawn, when I awoke, it all seemed a dream until I picked up my clothes from the floor and smelled the smoke of Phanishwar’s blackened flesh in them.

Two years were added to my sentence for my outburst at the Act of Faith. The Grand Inquisitor gave me this news himself after a furious lecture on my shocking behavior. Then his voice softened.

“I’ve already forgotten there ever was a Jain sorcerer in our midst, and you should, too,” he told me. “Think now only of Christ and the sacrifice He made for you.”

He handed me a document describing my religious duties over the next six years: to make confession once a month, attend Mass every Sunday, repeat the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria five times a day, and form no friendships with heretics. Once again, he ordered me to never reveal anything of what I’d seen or heard while imprisoned by the Holy Office. Disobeying him has been my only triumph in this life, I believe.

As I trudged back to my prison cell for the last time, the Inquisitor’s advice about keeping Christ’s sacrifice in my thoughts turned my mind back to the night before, and I seemed now to understand everything. It was like a bolt of lightning piercing total blackness and turning my mind the white of bone: These priests tied Phanishwar to a stake and set him ablaze because they don’t really believe that Jesus had the strength of will to let Himself be killed for His beliefs. They needed to see their Savior’s final moments enacted for them – to see that a man could bear such agony. They made us witness their spectacle because they cannot admit that anyone else might possess greater faith than they do. Christ has to be murdered anew each year to fill up their hollow souls.

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