Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 179: Conversion Ritual

To become the next Pope, it was necessary to understand the conversion ceremony completely.

A year ago, when O’Brien had declared his succession, he had placed the relevant books in Mayne’s hands personally — the accumulated records of centuries, the procedure refined through tens of thousands of attempts until failure and success could each be predicted by the signs the body gave before the outcome was certain. Mayne had memorized them. The contents of those books were now as familiar as the architecture of his own rooms.

The principle was simple. Its simplicity was the most disturbing thing about it.

To create a new soldier for the God’s Punishment Army required the death of a witch. Her blood, drawn while she lived and mixed with God’s Stone of Retaliation in a crystal basin, underwent a change during the mixing — the stone dissolved into the blood, its suppressive property transforming the blood’s enhancing property into something that could be tolerated by a human body, barely, if that human’s will was sufficient. Without the stone, the blood killed instantly. Without the blood, the stone swallowed whole killed the same way. Together, they killed only sometimes. That was the victory centuries of refinement had arrived at: sometimes.

He had read this and understood, in a way he had not fully understood before, why the Church collected young women by the thousands. There was no outward mark to distinguish a witch from any other girl. The change came only when the magic awakened, and afterward — after the body had been altered, the organs and blood remade by the witch’s power — the blood became usable. So the only way to maintain a supply was to maintain a population. Cast the net wide. Keep them in monasteries, in the Old Holy City, waiting for the change to come. And when it came, redirect them.

He had known this, in the abstract. He understood it differently now.

He also understood why the higher ranks of the Church moved through the world the way they did — with a certain quality of removal, a distance from ordinary moral calculation that was not callousness but something more considered. Everything they had done was, by any measurement that did not account for the alternative, evil. Their hands were soaked in blood. They had killed more witches than any executioner in the kingdoms below, and would kill more, and had already decided this was necessary, and had kept deciding it for generations.

Only the victorious would be qualified to receive God’s judgment. Only the living would be present to be judged. That was the arithmetic they were working with.

He set the thought aside and turned to the first two Judges on the conversion tables.

He knew both of them.

Dylan was from the First Battalion — he had the particular look of someone who had survived a thing they weren’t sure they deserved to survive, which the First Battalion had in abundance after last year’s defense of Hermes. The demonic beast assault had taken half his unit. He’d watched his comrades die under claws that ordinary weapons could not stop and ordinary strength could not resist, and he’d decided that if there existed a form of the fight where that imbalance was reversed, he wanted to be on that side of it.

Tucker Thor was a Presiding Judge, a Holy City guard who had watched the beasts breach the outer wall and been stopped from the interior only by the God’s Punishment Army’s intervention. He wanted to be a shield. He said it simply, in the way of people who had found a sentence that contained everything they felt without remainder.

Mayne moved between the tables, speaking to each man in turn — the names he knew, the units, the small specific details that the ancient records described as the most effective preparation: not encouragement in the abstract, but recognition in the particular. He had read about this technique. Performing it was different. Dylan’s face, when Mayne said his name and named his captain, went through a change that was almost painful to witness — the sheer surprised gladness of being known by someone whose knowing meant something.

That’s a firm belief, he told Dylan.

Excellent, he told Tucker.

You are both the pride of the Church.

When he judged their faith was as strong as it was going to be, he signaled the guards.

The blindfolds went on. The iron rings closed around their wrists and ankles, fixed to the table — not for cruelty, the ancient records noted, but because what was coming would produce reflexive thrashing that could disrupt the procedure at a critical moment, and a disruption at a critical moment wasted half the witch’s blood, which was the resource they could afford to waste least.

The witch was brought in on a third table, placed between the two men.

She was eighteen years old. One of the Church’s own — raised in the monastery of the Old Holy City, given over to the institution before she had a concept of what she was being given over to, having spent her entire conscious life in that preparation. The day before the ceremony, she had been given dream water: sleeping fern and winter flower boiled together, a dose sufficient to keep her insensible regardless of what the body reported during the process.

Mayne had read this detail in the records without fully thinking about it. Standing here, looking at her face — young, slack with the drug, whatever she might have been in the absence of all of this entirely inaccessible — he thought about it.

He called for the procedure to begin.

The silver syringe went in. The blood — reddish-brown, with the peculiar density of witch’s blood — ran through the tube and collected in the crystal basin over the layer of pale blue God’s Stone of Retaliation at its bottom.

The stone changed first.

Through the crystal walls of the basin you could watch it: the stone darkening as the blood covered it, and then — over the following half-hour — the stone beginning to dissolve, its edges softening, its color migrating into the blood until the basin held neither stone nor blood as such but something between: the reddish-brown clearing to transparency, then shifting toward the blue of a clear-sky afternoon.

It was, objectively, one of the more remarkable things Mayne had ever watched. The ancient records noted that it had taken tens of thousands of attempts to arrive at this reliable form — the right age of witch, the right volume, the right needle placement, the right quality and quantity of God’s Stone of Retaliation, the right timing. Each variable represented a century’s worth of failures. Each failure had been documented, analyzed, and incorporated into the next attempt.

The blue fluid was introduced.

Dylan broke first.

His body arched against the iron rings almost immediately, the table creaking under the force of it. His hands opened and closed in rapid alternation, and a sound came out of him that was somewhere between shouting and weeping — first wordless, then resolving into fragments of speech that weren’t quite words, more like the pressure of language against a mind that could no longer organize it. His skin went wet. The veins at his throat and arms stood out in sharp relief.

Tucker was worse in a different way — he convulsed in silence, which was harder to watch than the sounds, foam and blood at the corners of his mouth, the body working against itself with a thoroughness that suggested something fundamental was being contested inside.

The fluid in the basin dropped. The level fell steadily, minute by minute, toward the bottom.

Then: Dylan’s skin began to smoke.

It started at his extremities and moved inward — a thin white vapor lifting from the surface, as if something beneath was burning off. The records were specific about this sign. Mayne hesitated.

A hand settled on his shoulder from behind. O’Brien’s.

“That’s enough,” the Pope said quietly. “Let him go.”

One of the personal guards stepped forward, drew a dagger, and administered the mercy with the efficiency of long practice. The sound Dylan had been making stopped.

Tucker’s convulsions subsided slowly, over a painfully extended interval, until his breathing found something like a rhythm. His former color had gone — the warm-pink of the living replaced by a blue-gray that the records described as the characteristic sign of successful conversion. It was not a healthy color. It was the color of something permanently altered.

He had survived.

One success from two. Half the witch’s blood, spent. Sixty applicants still waiting.

Mayne looked at Tucker’s chest rising and falling and said nothing. Then he signaled the next pair forward.

By the time the last ceremony concluded, he could barely stand.

He found the wall and put his back to it and sat down on the floor with the boneless immediacy of someone whose legs had made a decision without consulting the rest. The hall smelled of blood and tallow and the particular mineral quality of the cave’s air, and all of it together was a smell he would not be able to forget regardless of how many years passed.

O’Brien came to stand before him. The old man looked down at him with an expression that was something warmer than simple approval.

“I’ll tell you something,” the Pope said. “The first time I presided over this ceremony, I was forty-five years old, and the smell of the blood made me sick directly onto the conversion table. I very nearly wasted an entire basin. The Pope at that time gave me a thorough beating — and then ordered me straight back to my place to continue.” A pause. “You did considerably better.”

Mayne opened his mouth. Found he had nothing to say.

“Go and rest,” O’Brien said. “You’ve earned it today.”

He started to rise. Got one knee off the floor and stopped as the detail reasserted itself. “Wait. You called me down here specifically. I hadn’t yet asked—”

“Ah.” O’Brien smiled, and there was genuine self-mockery in it. “My memory. Yes.” He produced a small sealed container from within his vestments. “The core area has developed something new. A poison — discovered, they tell me, entirely by accident. It activates in contact with decaying bodies and persists in the surrounding area for an extended period, acting on the population without requiring direct ingestion. There is an antidote, but they have not made it widely known.” He held the container out. “Master Crow’s Eye can explain the particulars. But when I heard the description, I thought of Broken Castle. And of Graycastle.”

Mayne took the container carefully. He thought of the white substance burning off the God’s Punishment Army soldiers at Broken Castle. He thought of Garcia Wimbledon and her letter and the fishes. He thought of Timothy moving through the north, of the timeline that had not resolved the way he’d intended.

He suppressed the brightness that came into his chest when he thought of possible applications, because it was not appropriate to feel bright in this hall, standing over conversion tables still bearing the signs of what had just been done here.

“I will speak with Crow’s Eye,” he said.

He bowed, and went.

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