LIGHTNOVELONLINE 158 – Razem Revealed
The receptionist folded and sealed the letter with a large, rectangular stamp that burned a complex sigil onto the paper, holding it shut without wax or any other physical glue. She silently nodded, took the letter, and went on her way.
It almost seemed like Razem was waiting for her. In fact, the front end of the Igarian temple was conspicuously deserted; not entirely, but the number of people was significantly lower than she would have expected.
He stood at the precipice between the chapel and the temple's halls, and simply met her gaze with a nod.
"I did not expect to see you so soon. Certainly not in these circumstances. You look well, he said, gesturing for her to follow as he turned to walk down the hall. He led her deeper and deeper, eventually into the earth, but only perhaps two floors underground. As they walked, he explained: "The letter you hold in your hand - it's little more than an identifying token, I already know what it says."
He brought out a second letter, identical to the first, but not sealed. When the two letters touched, they merged together and burned up into nothing. The room he was leading her to was a reliquary, but the security was not nearly as stringent. There were the giant doors with the complex opening sequence, sure, but that was it. Within was a large room with walls of reflective black stone. Razem snapped his fingers. A pulse of Thauma radiated out of him, blanketing the whole room, and several sections of the wall became transparent, revealing artifacts previously concealed within. All of them shared various design elements with Sorayah's lantern, and some of them, Krahe recognized based on having read their descriptions.
"Hoh? I thought you would be more impressed," the ex-inquisitor remarked. "New church contractors always like the polarized quartz trick."
Seeing her apprehensive glance at those words, Razem acquiesced: "You said you had a matter related to these relics to report, yes?"
With those words, he held his hand out to another section of the wall, causing it to recede and slide to the side, revealing a far less impressive, but far more practical room. A small archive of texts and scrolls, with a few tables against the walls, but otherwise blank. He led her into that other room and seamlessly conjured several items onto the table. This conjuring manifested as reams of paper unwinding from inside his robe's sleeve to wrap around a nonexistent item. Once finished, the layer of paper burned away to reveal the item inside, now very real and present. In the span of a few seconds, he summoned a typewriter, a memslate recorder/player deck that looked far too much like his hands to not be custom, and, weirdly, a full pitcher of azure-coloured liquid, plus two tall glasses.
Krahe had no reason to be taken aback, it was a perfectly sensible application of Kenoma storage.
And yet, she was - just a little.
"This may take a short while, but I am sure you already knew that. Please, give your full and unabridged account of your findings."
And so, Krahe did. Mostly, anyway. The fairly amount of information she withheld didn't factor into Sorayah's case specifically, and she simply didn't drink any of the azure liquid on the off-chance it was perhaps a truth serum of some kind.
Razem, however, didn't express doubt as to her words. He did ask her to restate a few things while holding a band of seals that he conjured, and Krahe did feel like she physically couldn't lie while holding it. Deception, however, didn't necessitate lies, and she didn't need to do a great deal of deception to begin with.
Eventually, she brought out the lantern, and Razem, openly displaying his interest in the thing, took several similar artifacts from their displays to compare. He told her some things she already knew, and others she didn't.
“We did a great deal in the effort to wipe these out, but, as you can see, the knowledge of their creation yet persists.+ The problem with these devices, besides the manner of their creation, is the occult corruption their use inflicts on the user and the fact they demand “human charcoal” to operate. Some versions of the device even demand that the fuel comes from someone who trusted the user. It will be a challenge to discern how many based on the residue inside the mechanism, but if I were to guess… Seventeen, or perhaps eighteen people must have been turned into charcoal to power this thing over the years. How many of them can be blamed on Sorayah, I cannot guess."
He looked up from the lantern, adding: “That’s a small number, to be clear. You caught her early. Most of the specimens in our collection have burned through volumes of human charcoal equivalent to several hundred people. At their heights, the Human Charcoal Cults were powerful enough to make an entire town disappear overnight...”
They spoke on the matter of the Human Charcoal Cults and their occult practices for about another hour, and Krahe came to the conclusion that Razem seemed almost like Casus. A genuinely, truly good person. But he wasn't. Not entirely. The difference hit her quite quickly: Effort. Casus didn't try to be what he was. He just was. Razem was trying terribly, terribly hard, at all times. He didn't come across like he was faking it, but Krahe sensed that he had to try to be like this.
So, she took a risk.
"You don't have to put on appearances in front of me, you know. I can tell."
He didn't suddenly transform or completely change his demeanor, but he did let out a breath and sink into his chair. It wasn't his personality that fell away. It was the faintly regal, detached aura that he had been giving off until now. Suddenly, that vanished. He was just an old man with a fire in his eyes and an aura that felt like the surface of a vast ocean, tranquil yet prepared to churn into a storm at a moment's notice. A former killer who had become a man of the law, and then a priest. A walking, talking narrative stereotype.
"Ah, you've detected my dark secret! Razem, High Priest of the Seven Spokes Audunpoint Branch Central Temple, is just an unenlightened old coot," he said with a faintly mischievous smirk. He reached out and a band of paper whipped towards one of the glasses. He downed half of it in one swig. "It's not truth serum, if that's what you thought. The glassware doesn't have anti-appraisal enchantments either."
He knew. Not exactly, but he guessed basically what she had been thinking. She hesitantly took the other glass and sipped from it. It smelled great, a soft herbal scent. It tasted atrocious. Bitter and sour. And yet, once it went down, it felt like she'd just shot up a cocktail of nootropics; her thoughts ran a hundred miles an hour and her mind felt clearer than ever.
"The taste, however... Is an acquired one," the priest added after the fact, sipping from his glass with a mischievous grin.
