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Slouching Towards An-Teng

"The sacred Heptet looks down upon us, glorious and munificious, resplendent and joyful. They are the blessings of Our Lady, the all-knowing and all-giving souls which she has been and birthed that we might know her, vast beyond her understanding. And so we make seven sacrifices, seven sacrifices that embody her souls, seven sacrifices which will found the cornerstones of our sacristy, that will be the foundation of our prayer." The speaker spoke from the shadows of his hooded cloak, a deep red of dried blood. It was the blood of an ox that he had daubed his cloak with; someone had told him that such a garment, bathed in life's essence, would make rituals more effective, and he hadn't had any human blood on hand.

"Look upon our sacrifice, so noble and pure, that we offer unto you, Our Lady and Our Blessed Lords." The man held an ordinary kitchen knife in slightly shaking hand over the altar, on which reclined a bound and gagged man. The man had long and matted hair, smelled of mud and salt, and had legions of lice he had obtained in his years on the street. His eyes were wide with fear, but he seemed barely aware of what was going on; his wrinkles, aligned perfectly with the shape of his wide eyes and wide-spread mouth, seemed to show that he had worn that look for years.
"Our Lady, accept this sacrifice to show our to you our love and service, to you. Our lady!" His incantation done, the cloaked man looked out over his audience.

Just over a dozen people were packed into the room, a small pantry smelling of fish and pickles, looking on with various amounts of zeal. Seven were the cult leader's employees, mostly there in the interests of keeping their jobs at his store; the makeshift cathedral was in the basement of his house. Two more were students at the local university, both men who had failed to exalt, both rebellious youths raging at the strictures of the immaculates, both looking for ways to kill time that would keep them entertained. Four more cult members were homeless and impoverished, eager for the free meals that the leader provided and hopeful that there might be some whisper of truth, that there might be divinities who cared for them. And the last two were the wife and son of the leader, the wife looking on with uncontained boredom, sighing at her husband, thinking that it was getting too late to make dinner and there wasn't a thing in the house ready. In her arms, their child, a four year old of unremarkable nature, looking on at his father, beaming loving smiles at him. His father raised his knife to strike, and no gasp rose from the crowd; his hands paused, quaked, froze a foot above his target, the bound man's heart. His eyes met his son's beatific gaze, and he smiled back, and brought his knife down hard.

There was a crack as the tip of his knife struck a rib, skidded to the side, and pinged off of the stone of the altar; the wife let out a sigh at the ruin of her sharpest knife. The cult leader's hood fallen back as he struck revealed a head balding early, a day's worth of stubble and an utterly unthreatening visage thick with baby fat. He started back as the bound man screamed into his gag and started thrashing, before striking again at the man's heart in a panic. The knife sunk deep, but the man kept thrashing; as the leader pulled it free, it was followed by the red mist of a punctured lung. He looked in momentary awe as fine sheets of blood floated in the air, the light from a high window slicing through and illuminating the brume, the rose motes dancing in the sunlight. They bloomed in time with the laboured breathing, the whistling gurgle that emerged from the man's chest wound. A muffled scream from the sacrifice broke the spell, and the leader struck again and again, until the deed was, to his satisfaction, complete, the man's chest shredded. He hastily pulled his hood back over his head; it slanted over to the right, and he slipped it back into place. He began again, and as he spoke, almost unconsciously kept wiping the dripping blood from his nose with his smeared sleeve.

"My friends, we have done the will of Our Lady, followed the rituals that are her blessing. Now we must scatter the sacrifice across the city, that it is consecrated in blood to her name." One of the students gave an amused snort, and the leader glared and carried on. "The body will be sectioned into seven, and placed about the city. You all have your assignments, and then we will hear from our god." He began to chop apart the body with his six inch kitchen knife, attempting to slice through the dead man's shoulder. His knife caught, repeatedly, too short to cut through cleanly; a moment of hacking, and he managed at last to reach the bone; he sweat profusely, nervous and gasping. Try his hardest, the knife simply was not sharp enough to cleave the tendons and the ligaments tensed by death; the shoulder remained secure, merely flain. "Honey, do you have any bigger knives around?" The leader asked, apology written on his voice.
"Yes, but you're just going to get them all bloody and dull them."
"Please dear?"
"Fine," the long suffering wife said, "but you're getting me a better tomorrow."
"Yes dear." The man sighed, and his wife put the child down, handed him a ball, and went upstairs, returning moments later with a cleaver. The man began to hack away again, and managed to seperate apart both shoulders. He moved down to begin to hack away at the man's hip, and on the second stroke, the blade slipped and cut a two inch slash into his leg. He dropped the cleaver with a clank onto the altar, and slapped his hands over the wound. "Ow gods damnit. Dear, could you get a bandage and an icepack?"
"As if I hadn't told you you should have let somebody else do the cutting. I'll not cover for you now."
"Dear, if I go and get them, I'll have to cross your rug, and I am bleeding."
"Fine. But that's it. You're too excited and in no state to be sacrificing. You can finish in the morning." He sighed, lifted his fingers, and pushed them back down as his blood flowed freely.
"Yes dear. Alright, we've got two sections done, so Steven and Allinea, you take the left arm to its spot, Delle and Sanis, you take the other. I'll let you know when the next meeting is after Our Lady contacts me." Two of the man's employees took one arm and left, the two students the other and followed. The others listlessly wandered out, leaving only the man and his boy.

"Did you see that, Annie? Did you see? We did it. We really did it. My pa always said to me, 'you're going to do great things.' And we actually pulled it off. Soon, the Lady will come, and the world will be happy again. She'll kick out those realm thugs, and she'll rain us with gold and pleasant dreams." He picked up his son, placed him on his lap, and started to coo a gentle song.
"The Lady Hegra's up in the sky, the Lady Hegra's up in the sky. She knows all of our dreams, everything and how it seems, our Lady Hegra's in the sky. Our Lady Hegra's in the sky, Our lady Hegra's in the sky, She hears all of our prayers, she takes away despair, our Blessed Lady Hegra's in the sky." He sang his son the lullaby, and the boy happily drifted to sleep.

Outside, the students walked away from the merchant's basement, an arm in their bag.
"Man, that was so incredibly weak."
"I know. I figured this would be all cool, but no. I mean, I could cut through an arm better than that weak shit."
"Seriously. You think this Yozi's going to come tomorrow?"
"Hell no. I doubt that guy even knows what he's praying to. Lets dump the arm and go get a drink, eh?"
"Good plan." The student hauled the severed limb out of his bag, grabbing it as if giving a handshake. "It's been nice to meet you, sir. Unfortunately, we must be on our way." He hurled it down an alley, watched it bounce off of a wall. "Ten points! Anyways, lets find a pub around this shit-boring part of town."

The cult leader had taken his son off to bed, and wandered back downstairs to look at his work. The body was already, after but a few hours, starting to smell, and bugs lay on it. The man sighed, got out an oilskin tarp, and rolled the body into it; straining, he dragged it under a shelf and put a sack of fish in front of it. He got out a bucket of water and a stiff brush, and began to scrub at the altar, trying to remove the blood. It had already sunk into the rough cut limestone blocks he had stolen from a construction site up the road, and his scrubbing just turned the deep red blood comically pink.
"Honey," he yelled up the stairs, "do we have any soap?"
"It's under the sacks of potatoes in the back," she bellowed in return. He scrubbed for minutes, his leg aching, the blood on his cloak now cold and sodden.

Giving up, he trudged upstairs. He found his wife at the dining room table, eating the leftovers of yesterday's fish.
"Dear, I couldn't get the stains out of the altar."
"Oh, is that what you needed? I thought you were trying to clean your cloak. You'd need vinegar for the stone. Achh. I'll just do it."
She grabbed a jar and climbed back downstairs with him, pouring it over the altar and scrubbing powerfully, the blood scraping out slowly and flakes of the low-quality limestone cracking from the acid. "Walli, where did you put the body?"
"It's behind the fish." She stared at him for a moment.
"Wait. You put, and let me get this straight, your sacrificial corpse, which is a dead, bloody, diseased hobo, with our food for tomorrow."
"Well, yes. It's a nice cool part of the pantry." He smiled a smile intended to calm, pretending not to notice her seething anger.
"You just don't get it, do you? You dumb fool. You actually think I want a corpse on our food? I liked this cult idea because it was going to keep you away from drinking. But this is just ridiculous. Tomorrow morning you call up your friends and you tell them that their little club is being disbanded, and you go right out to the river and get rid of that body, and this is final." She marched up the stairs and slammed the door, before opening it a crack and yelling down "And you're sleeping in the living room tonight!"
"Yes, dear." He muttered under his breath.

At seven thirty in the morning, the man was woken by a knock on the door. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, yawned, and wandered over, opening it and seeing in front of him a tall man in red jade full plate with a grand daiklave strapped to his back.
"Citizen. I am Magistrate Sesus Etli. Your name?"
"Uh, Dennit Walli," he replied, shocked at the presence of a prince of the earth, remembering at last to bow.
"Mr. Dennit, you are under arrest for murder."
"What? On what grounds?"
"Well, let's see. What clues did you leave for my goddamn masterful - and I assure you, it is masterful - sense of deduction to follow? For one thing, you were seen by at least six people clubbing a vagrant yesterday. Then you left his arm out in the alley." The dragonblood swept past him into the house, grabbing the cult leader's head and dragging it with him. "Then, you left a trail of blood from that alley the ten yards back to your house. Then, even if you hadn't, one could smell the stink of blood and vinegar from fifty paces." The dragonblood dragged the man downstairs by the ear into the basement from which the smell so powerfully wafted. "Then, you failed to clean off your really, really shitty altar - that is some terrible craftsmanship, I must say. You should be ashamed. Then, you dragged the body no more than five feet, leaving another blood trail. And finally, the last clue that tipped me off, was that when you answered the door, your face was still covered in dried blood. I mean, if you're going to do a cult killing, at least have some goddamn hygeine, you dumb bastard. Who's this shrine to, anyways?"
"The great lady from before time."
"Well damnit. Another She Who Lives in her Name cult? Have some goddamn creativity."
"No, not her."
"Then who?"
"Our Lady Hegra. You know, 'The Lady Hegra's up in the sky, the Lady Hegra's up in the sky...'" The terrestrial stared at him dumbfounded.
"You built a cult out of an evil lullaby? A lullaby about Hegra? Why in gods name would you worship her?"
"Because she will bring happiness and joy, won't she?" The cult leader looked genuinely concerned.
"She's a hideous deathstorm of nightmare and horror whose touch is a rain of acid that contaminates the soul, you douchebag. If she ever - ever - heard a whisper of your prayers, the only thing she could do to a creature so piteously insignificant is to crush your soul into a tiny fragment which understood only pain and fear, except for the little bit she kept intact to understand what had happened. You dumbass. This is why we in the realm insist on demon summoner certifications." The magistrate hauled the man back to the living room, meeting the wife at the top of the flight of stairs. "You know what's downstairs?"
The wife paused, a deer transfixed. "... No. I have no idea what is downstairs. Dear... what did you, uh, do with my vinegar?" The magistrate looked at her blankly for a moment.
"You know your husband is running a demon cult, and you have the temerity to lie to me so poorly? Come on, then." He grabbed her ear, and dragged them body outside, yelping, where they met a half dozen of the city guard. He produced a pad of paper and a pen from a pocket under his armor. "All right, men, this is them. Dennit Walli and - " he pointed to the wife with his pen.
"Dennit Allia." She quietly said.
"Right. Dennit Walli and Dennit Allia. Arrested on charges of - was this your first sacrifice?"
"Yes sir." she said.
"Right. One charge each of first degree murder, corrupting the youth, blasphemy, and betraying creation." He scribled this down on his pad as he spoke. "Dennit. One n or two? Two? Thanks. On all counts, guilty as charged. The sentence is death." He drew his daiklave, and with a single motion, slashed through both of their necks before they were even aware he had moved, heads staying put for a moment as they both took on a look not of surprise but of true, heartfelt annoyance. "Better luck next life," he said, as he walked away. "Guards, bury the bodies properly; I'd rather not deal with them again. Also, there's a child inside. Get him a home without yozi. I've got real problems to deal with. I hear there's a proper cult around here somewhere."