The sensation didn't last long. There was all the tedious business of disposing of the body, then rooting through his belongings to get what I needed, then turning my back on my birthplace and setting off into the great dust - I couldn't stay in a place where he and I were both known. I never once regretted it. I walked out under the southern gate with the stars rising and the heat of the day ebbing, wearing a dead man's robes and with a dead man's script inked neatly on my own shaven head.
Ah, there you go. There is the irony. The marks on my flesh, the ones that mark me out as me, were never really mine. I wore them after that to ensure my stolen name and persona were never questioned. In time, I half forgot their origins, and I began to care more about what I was writing. By the time I reached for the tattooist's needle, the words had changed and the act was more than one of disguise. Originally, though, it was all just lies.
So what was my original name? Just like the name of the place where I was born, that genuinely doesn't matter. I have become like a daemon, nurturing a secret moniker that only the empyrean echoes. I certainly will not tell you. Some things even the gods don't know.
I was lucky, or fated maybe, to be learning my craft at such a time I was just a boy, as all the seminary acolytes were. My stolen papers and my lies soon found me ensconced at another institution. I studied as little of the genuine theology as I could, but was assiduous in observing the more worldly paths of power. I saw how the priests maintained discipline within the great cathedrals. I saw how fear and ecstasy could cow an entire population. I saw how a whispered word was more powerful than a shouted oration, at least a lot of the time.
These were the last days of the old faith. Already there were panicked rumours of an army sweeping across the desert, one commanded by a golden prophet who would upturn everything and bustle the Powers out of their assumed heaven. The hierarchs of the Covenant began to get scared. The sacrifices became more frequent, protestations of faith and penance for sins were made more heartily. I knew it wouldn't save them. The well was running dry, and in any case, they had already drawn too much water. I began to speculate on who this prophet was, and wondered if I could somehow align my cause to his. I was growing tired of my withered instructors, and wished to be in the shadow of something with a proper sting.
And then the strangest thing of all happened. I'd spent so much time with all those books, and all that chanting, and all those homilies on the old patterns of pain and redemption, that I somehow neglected to be cynical about them. I found myself saying things, and meaning them. I found myself studying, not to evade the instructor's scourge, but out of fascination. It was as if I'd been dipped into one of the inscribers' inkwells and come out stained. There was never an epiphany. I never moved from being an unbeliever to a believer, but I began to appreciate, gradually, how much I was aligned to a certain way of being. I was, you might say, a natural. I had been made for this.
I remember being in the vaults of that old mud-brick temple, tending to the tapers and tasting the aroma of hot blood on my lips. I remember looking into the tarnished glass of the altar-mirrors, and seeing not one reflection, but a fractured four. I felt a shiver run through me, despite the ever-present heat. I was a petty thief, a minor speck within the iris of eternity, but I knew I could do things for these presences. I felt they had always been there, hanging in my shadow, lingering over my minor cruelties. The Covenant was their plaything. Perhaps other institutions could be used in a similar way.
So when the prophet eventually made it to our city, and I saw his impeccable profile shine out across a weeping and grateful nation of newly enlightened slaves, I was neither elated nor despondent. All I had to do was wait.
I was still a child, then. I would not be one forever.
* * *
And of course I met my prophet in the end, up close. I saw him pass through the gates with his army of swivel-eyed faithful and recognised what it meant for me at once. He was a bigger scorpion, and I needed to get closer.
He was with Kor Phaeron. That raddled old sack of skin and esoteric drugs, he hung around like the stench of cut meat rotting in the sun. I remember that our eyes met, briefly, as the two of them made their triumphal procession through the taken city, although I suppose he won't recall it now. Back then, I was nothing, and he was everything. I was the grub in the dirt and he was the master of a world's zealous armies, standing at the side of the anointed and sucking up his sloughed-off incense.
It is commonly supposed that I must hate Kor Phaeron. We have become rivals, that's true, and within this grand coalition of blackguards and renegades that generally engenders bad blood, but he really doesn't make me angry. I find him amusing. He's worked so hard to
