Le gasp, a story in the never ending stories forum. I will repost this with a follow up once the proper NES begins.
---
Another gust of wind snapped at the standards of the auctorial guard, the golden asp of the 22nd on the right side and the auctor’s laurel on the left. The night had been cold and clear, but a fog had risen with the dawn, and the sky wore a uniform, bleak grey. The vivid green of the valley past the flat square of the marching ground, the great river, and the hills and mountains rising beyond it were lost in the clouds that had come down from the sky to dwell among men.
The harsh sound of cloth flapping in the wind had a gentler companion, as the sacrificial doves cooed in their wicker cage between the standards, oblivious to their fate. Although this had happened to their kin before, they did not betray any anxiety, any more than normal. Which was for the best.
The auctor wore a laurel of his own, a silver wreath of receding hair stretching from temple to temple. His face was cleanshaven, with a few lines around the eyes and cheeks. He had an unremarkable nose, narrow brown eyes, and a long-faded tan that marked his ancestry as foreign to this place. He wore the black enamel, edged in auctorial gold, with a golden asp painted on the chest. He approached the cage and opened the door with a creak, considering the light brown doves, their legs tied, wings clipped. And the doves considered him in return.
He chose one of the larger ones, a pleasant pattern of white and black spots dappled on the feathers of its back. It flapped a few times as the auctor reached into the cage and gathered it into his hands, turning its head back and forth in alarm. “There, there,” he said, soothing the dove’s feathers with his thumbs as he withdrew and closed the cage with an elbow. “It is as it must be.”
Far behind the black-enameled ranks of the auctor’s seven hundred elites, in the bulk of the common legionaries, two low-ranking soldiers, friends since childhood, strained to see the ritual through the swirling fog. Judging their officers distracted, they whispered to one another while keeping their bodies straight and facing forward.
“So odd he doesn’t just leave it to the priests,” complained the shorter, blonde, barrel-chested one, feeling the morning’s damp chill already seeping into his (local, heavy) cloak and under his neckline. “And makes us attend.”
“He’s old,” equivocated the taller one, dark haired and eyed with a jawline the shorter one with his fat face envied. “Would make peace with the gods before meeting them,” stating the obvious. “And shut up,” he hissed, before their officer could detect the whispering.
The four priests of the imperial cult assigned to the legion (and to every legion) stood in a square, two holding censers of incense on long brass chains, the third holding a knife, surrounding a large copper bowl on a small table in the grass. These were fighting men first and priests second, an extra measure of beer and a small bonus their incentive. But Auctor Serapin was known for this, so whether they humored him or truly believed, all the men of the 22nd showed the required piety to the gods.
“O celestium, your ordering beyond comprehension, numbering all the gods, be not offended by our sacrifice…” An invocation of all the things the legion wished not the gods to have befall them followed from the chief priest, evoking the philosopher’s famous adage, “The greatest gift from the gods to man is to be left alone.” Flood, famine, disease, earthquake, and so on. War, notably, was the one disaster left absent from the request to the gods. It was impious for a legion to ask the gods not to send them war. War was their skill and trade.
After this litany, prayers to the favored gods of the legion were intoned, according to their status in the celestial hierarchy. The first Emperor, greatest of all, and then the unbroken line of official emperors according to the currently approved genealogy. The goddess (depicted as a dolphin, or a star, or a flaming woman) of the city where the legion had been founded, a version of a popular mystery religion in a dozen other cities, in spite of the fact that hardly a man of the 22nd had ever seen this city or been within a hundred leagues of it. The gods and goddesses of several of the major cities of the Empire who it would probably not be a good idea to offend. A few of the gods of the native Kydronians which had been absorbed into the Imperial system. Finally, the auctor’s personal gods, some obscure desert demons from his childhood, in a distant land that all but the legion’s hoariest old veterans knew only from legend.
Throughout this whole intonation the troops stood in stoic silence as the fog swirled overhead. The priests of each of the five seven hundreds (before the reforms, there had been seven) echoed the litanies of the auctor’s personal priests for each of the segmenta.
After the name and benediction of the last god (a cyclopean, eagle-winged man named K’tar) was intoned, the priests fell silent. The auctor smiled, stepped forward, and handed the dove to the chief priest for the final parts of the ritual: The reading of omens and burning of the sacrifice. The auctor, golden snake brooch pinning the black cape to his chest, then retreated from the priests to the first rank of his seven hundred, a gesture meant to show that the auctor was the same as his men before the gods.
The chief priest held the struggling dove upside down over the bowl, while the other priest prepared to sever its neck with the ceremonial knife. But then, as they did so, the dove twisted unexpectedly in the grip of the priest, falling down into the bowl with a metallic clang. As the front ranks of the elites exhaled in dismay, the situation went from bad to worse. Fluttering its wings, the dove found to its surprise, and everyone else’s, that it could fly. It fluttered a bit, and then landed on the ground next to the bowl, its legs still tied. To his credit, the chief priest dove for it immediately, at the expense of his night blue robes. To the dove’s credit, it took flight and found the air.
As he watched the dove begin its escape, Auctor Kadras Talis Serapin’s world closed in on itself. A twisting, sickening combination of nausea and vertigo seized him. To lose the sacrifice was the worst omen possible. It was worse than disaster. It was blasphemy. It was doom.
“Bow,” he rasped, breath puffing in the morning chill. “Bow!” His attendant, confused but used to following quick orders, handed him the bow just as the dove hit the ground, and the auctor shoved the man to the side, pulled an arrow from his quiver, and nocked it with a steady hand as the dove took off and flew off into the mist.
Three, agonizing seconds passed as the army held its breath. The dove was gone.
And the auctor released the arrow into the fog after it.
Nobody moved.
The auctor stumbled forward, cape rustling behind him, his boots on the wet grass and the clacking of his armor the only sound in all the stunned army. “Nobody move!” he cried, lurching past the priests, turning it into a march now in earnest, walking into the fog in the direction of the bowshot and the bird. “Nobody move,” he repeated, passing the priests. Nobody showed the slightest sign of moving, even before the order.
Not fifty paces into the fog, he found it, still alive, an imperial arrow pierced through its right wing, bleeding heavily. In its fall, it had hit one of the queer rocks, the small, squat stone statues carved into the shape of faces and left by a dead people, half worn away by time and the wind. A smear of blood across the statue’s wide, grinning mouth. The auctor took note of this with grim dismay as he broke the arrow, pulled out the shaft, and gathered the dove back into his hands with no less gentleness than he had removed it from its cage. “I’m sorry for what I did to you,” said the auctor quietly, as the blood welled under his fingers.
He walked back to the table, the army having remained stock still, exactly where he left it.
“Give me the knife,” he ordered the subordinate priest.
“Auctor, I…”
He snatched it out of his hands and quickly slit the bird’s throat. Blood pinged against the copper bottom of the bowl as the auctor felt the bird’s last struggles cease. Then he gently placed it in the basin. “Now complete the sacrifice,” he said, stepping back to his position in the line.
In spite of the cold, the bald ebony pate of the chief priest, who was also the auctor’s old friend and sekontar, shined with sweat. Taking the knife, he slit open the bird’s chest, spreading its rib cage with a crack, and pulling out the heart and the entrails. He passed the body to the subordinate priest, and dropped the entrails into the bowl. Only then did he look down to judge the pattern of their fall.
His facial expression did not change one iota when he saw that the bird’s insides had been riddled with cancer, a tumorous mass wrapped around the inner viscera. These omens were terrible. The most terrible that the priest had ever seen, or even heard of. The heart lay far apart from the intestines, which clumped around the tumor and did not sprawl, in a small puddle of its own blood. Gathering up the organs, he handed them to the other subordinate priest, with a quiet “Burn them quickly,” under his breath.
The priest, Gero Sudi Serapin (who had been a slave of the legion before being adopted into the auctor’s house) now turned and stepped forward to address the army, in the deep, commanding baritone voice which had led the auctor to advance him from a slave to a commander.
“The gods have decreed that…” gods, he thought, if these omens were true… “...that the ways of the past have failed. That strength shall be found in unexpected corners. And that...in trusting that strength, it will carry us to a new life apart from the old.”
Gero (although never an impious man) had never believed in the gods as much as he believed in them now, and he knew the message they were really trying to send. The message he had sanitized to prevent an outbreak of mass hysteria that would run counter to the auctor's plans. The first, that the Empire had become thoroughly infected with corruption. And the second...that the auctor had been chosen by the gods.
“Very good, chief priest,” said the auctor, as if nothing bad had happened that day. The priests tossed the bird’s corpse and poured the blood onto a brazier of fragrant wood, completing the day’s ritual.
“Now raise your fists and salute our Emperor!” Wherever he may be, the auctor did not add.
The salute was raised in unison, but the muttering en masse could not be quelled, even throughout it. The soldiers discussing what had just happened, repeating it to those who were too far back in the ranks to see it all.
By the end of the feast that followed the spring sacrifice, the legion had come to the same conclusion as Sekontar Gero. The auctor had truly been chosen by the gods. Though for what, was the unanswered question.
)
