Infernal by Mark de Jager

Author:Mark de Jager [Jager, Mark de]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, General
ISBN: 9781473529366
Google: eGOsCwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B01CHNXBRQ
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2015-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

Faith is a strange thing. I do not think that I have ever had any myself, at least not the sort that humans do with all their churches and temples and incomprehensible rules given to them by their gods. No, I had never had that sort of faith, although I had encountered it. But the heart of faith, the truth of it, was that no matter what guise it took, in the end it amounted to believing in something that you have no reason to believe is real. Which made it a bit like sorcery in many ways, and adds to the irony that while a natural-born human sorcerer is extremely rare, men were able to create their own sorcery in churches. Like St Tomas.

I had no idea who Saint Tomas was or what he was famous for other than being dead, or perhaps for having died in some spectacular way, but the countless thousands of men and women who had come to kneel in the church and pour their emotions and intent into the stones had a different view.

It was no mystery that the oldest and grandest of man’s churches were built either upon or close to places in the natural world where the veil was thin enough that the Songlines were nearly audible. I could easily imagine some long-dead shaman discovering that if he did his little ritual in one particular place he had better results, and so passed that secret on to his successors. And so on and so on for all those centuries until they finally stacked stone upon stone and named the building, an empowering act in itself.

With the church lying so near to a Songline, the focused devotion from all those hundreds of years of emotional rituals, sermons and prayers would have combined with the inherent magical radiation to thoroughly saturate the stone. In effect, by praying to a god who most likely did not exist, the humans’ prayers had gradually willed it into being; it was the ghostly residue of their forefathers’ prayers that offered the worshippers comfort, as theirs would one day do for as yet unborn generations.

I was thinking this as I lay naked upon the stone floor of my room, my limbs stretched out so that as much of me as possible was in contact with them. It had been hard going to sense the spirit of this place at first as it had no specific signature, nothing that resembled a single name or nature like a man’s magic would. It was the product of thousands of different wills and personas, a choir of broken notes that time had fused into a new whole. I didn’t chase after it, nor did I call to it. I waited and listened, until all that I could hear was the song of St Tomas.

I knew that I could never hope to replicate it, not all of it. But like with any pack or swarm, there were some within it who stood out.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.