1644 Underkeep Massacre
Give Me a Slice of that Old Time Religion
There was not much that could bring together the fanatical Babkhi Zurvanists and the devoutly pious Cedrists, but the opportunity to eradicate enemies of their respective faiths had to be one of them. Neither group exactly held out much hope for receiving the lavished attention from this new Kaiser Aurangzeb that his predecessor the late Kaiser Dominus had doled out so generously. Although born into the ancestral faith of the Babkhi race the 'learned Doctor' Tokaray al-Osman had been instrumental in the establishment of the atheistic Coordinated State in Elwynn, and the revival of Cedrism was a policy favoured by that same Thorgils in whose disappearance and purported demise the new Kaiser was so heavily implicated. However, what they did have was mutual enemies. For the Babkhi the Liches and Deep-Singers of the city were an abomination, noxious creatures of the lie and the spawn of Ahriman, while for the Cedrists they represented a manifestation of Minarborialism, a heretical perversion and repudiation of the hallowed faith – and the Kaiser had declared war upon them as his first act. For those who had ever felt cheated or slighted, marginalised or merely repulsed by the inhuman creatures living in their midst, the day for a glorious reckoning had finally arrived.
The Babkhi of the city, influenced by the Mobads and the agents of the Dark Orchid Society, rose in a spirit of cruelty against the Liches and the Deep-Singers, who were scattered throughout the city in many of the tenements and backstreet slums. A massacre began at dawn on Market Street, within the sight of the ziggurat-like Esagila of Raynor and the appropriately named Retribution Park. The liches were dragged from their homes and one by one decapitated until an officer of the City Guard drove by and reminded the Babkhi that if the body of a Lich is destroyed they will regenerate at the next Lichmas. After this the Liches were instead blinded and had their hands and feet cut off and burnt in the vacant sight of their gouged out eye-sockets.
When the Deep-Singers saw this cruelty, about two hundred started to flee towards the bridge to Lichkeep, but the Babkhi and the City Guard discovered them and, having trapped the Deep-Singers against the segment of the bridge which had been removed as a security precaution by the Lichbrook Dragoons during the night, began a great slaughter, which would not have left any of them alive had not a party of the Landsraad Guard, on a free-roving hunt for the City Guard, chanced upon the scene of the massacre and opened fire.
Others fled to the Underkeep, the mysterious subterranean structures beneath the Brrapa Lu Eraro Grand Central Station and the beating heart of the Deep-Singer colony in the city. Here too they found the descendants of the Incarnates in a state of considerable alarm. A sudden raid by surface dwellers had the abduction of one of the young from a broodchamber. Each man and woman of the community, unless already blessed with quill or stinger or poison sac, armed themselves with their weapons in the station building, and there marched onto the surface to do battle with the riotous humans who had assailed them. They fought bravely and well, and slaughtered a great many, but the enemy by numbers alone overpowered them and forced their way onto the station concourse. There the battle ended for the moment for the humans dreaded to go below the ground which had been all but ceded to the Deep-Singers, who in turn knew now that they would be exterminated if they attempted to come back to the surface. A stalemate would have ensued only the rumours of a detachment of loyalist Scholae legionaries advancing on Raynor Park caused the rioters to retire westwards and to devote themselves more profitably to looting and ransacking abandoned commercial premises.
The daily ritual of Cedrism, conducted at the Temple of Mors in the north of the city, began on this day with a novel and subtle innovation that was the cause of much rejoicing. The ritual began, as it always did, with the entrance of a purified priest into the sanctuary. He made his typical prostrations and mumbled prayers before rising to light a censer of burning incense, with which he processed about the temple cleansing the darkest, most sacred recesses. Next, he approached the shrine holding the cult statue of Mors and broke the seals upon that shrine, drawing the bolts and opening outwards the doors and in so doing unveiling the dreaded god of death to the world.
“It is done. Blessed be the Lord of Death and Truth.” the priest cried out in the darkness. This solitary call was met by a great shout and acclamation from without. The noise born of the cheers and cries of a vast multitude. The Children of Mors, the professed devotees of that dark god's cult, had wasted no time in assembling their acolytes and devotees for the day's great celebration. The Thrones had decreed that the passing of their benefactor, the Kaiser Dominus, should not be met with sadness but rather with joy, for truly the wise lord was now in the company of the gods. Moreover, there would be no more pleasing way of celebrating the apotheosis of Dominus but with a cultic sacrifice in his honour.
The night-time raid on the Underkeep had been a harrowing affair, carried out in the darkness but aided by the disordered withdrawal of the Kampioens. It was the first of many such actions, and while the smallest of the incursions it brought back the token of great symbolism. A specimen of daemonic spawn – a child, if that was the word, Deep-Singer – to fulfil its part in the ritual.
At the ebbing of the cheers, a blast of trumpets echoed and the vast bronze and ebony doors of the temple were swung open. Entering into the temple were two figures, dressed in the crimson hooded robes of executioners from the House of Betrayal, whose speciality was murder in the service of the divine, together dragging in their wake a smaller, much smaller, sobbing and naked creature. The sacrifice was brought into the temple.
The child, was broadly humanoid in form, ostensibly female, and almost human in its tearful and heart-rending sobs of distress. Only its crown of tendrils in lieu of hair, unblinking eyes and protruding neck bile sacs announced for all the world its inhumanity – not a human child after all but a cursed abomination, a perversion of science and a crime against nature. It's fate then was not to be pitied but to be revelled in. The gods willed it, indeed they demanded, that it be the first of many. Or at least that is what the crowd would have so.
The creature was dragged before the Shrine of Mors and hauled off her feet, sprawling onto the floor, by a sharp vicious heave on the rope by the two executioners. As she struggled to regain her footing and stand, one of the executioners stepped in and delivered two vicious downward punches in swift succession that knocked her prostrate to the ground, her body shuddering between sobs of pain and terror.
The priest carrying the censer, wearing the faded purple of the House of Tears, continued the ritual as though nothing were amiss. The priest prostrated himself before the god, kissing the ground before the statue. After raising himself, he chanted greetings and praises to the god, while offering precious spices and oils to the statue. This being done he turned to the two men dressed in crimson and nodded.
Using the ropes that formed a halter around the creatures neck, the executioners hung the young Deep-Singer from one of the cedar beams buttressing the temple ceiling. As the rope slowly strangled her, the girl's face turning an asphyxiated shade of purple that almost matched the colour of the officiants robes, the two executioners drew their obsidian blades and stabbed her repeatedly in the abdomen, sending blood gushing to the floor until one of the hooded figures had the presence of mind to step across and take up the tin bucket that had been provided for the purpose and held it underneath the creature to collect the spilt offerings.
The bleeding out did not happen quickly but once the life had flowed from the sacrifice, the two executioners butchered her like a sheep.
The purple robed priest meanwhile set aside his censer and removed the figure of Mors from the shrine, cleaning and purifying the image before ornamenting it in fresh linen, oils and cosmetics. After being purified a second time, the statue was returned to the shrine. The priest then invited the Mors to inhabit his statue.
The executioners had during this time unslung the lifeless carcass and set it down upon the butchering table. The liver and entrails were cut out first, using those same obsidian knives. One of the executioners had the task of shaking the dung out of the spooling reams of steaming guts into a waste bucket held, reluctantly, by the other. The executioners then gathered up the liver and entrails which they placed onto a silver tray which they carried, along with the bucket carrying the cooling blood spilt from the sacrifice, to the shrine, before which they laid the offerings on the ground with low bows and reverent prayers.
The officiant priest now offered to the statue of Mors the liver, entrails and blood of the sacrifice for sustenance. After chanting additional hymns, the priest closed the doors of the shrine, resealed it, and removed the offal presented to the god. The offal would be saved for the meal of the senior Paines and Thrones of the Cult of Mors. By consuming a meal of flesh and blood dedicated to Mors they would imbue sanctity and mana.
The executioners meanwhile returned to their work of butchery. They quartered the carcass, cutting off the dainty feet at the ankle joint, and slung a severed limb over each shoulder before walking out into the temple courtyard. They were met with acclamations and shouts of joy amongst the laypersons who had assembled there to witness the first sacrifice of a Deep-Singer in the recorded history of Cedrism.
A lottery was held to select those who would participate in the feast, it was felt that the invisible hand of Mors would chose the most worthy of his followers to join the priests around the cooking fire. The head and hands were thrown into the fire, and when they were roasted, they chewed off the palms and sucked the flesh from the finger bones. One old crone, a lady of the House of Despair possessed of ancient memory, declared the flesh of a deep-singer to be quite the most succulent meat she had tasted since back when Safir was still on the menu. A priest had then used a silver-tipped mallet to crack open the skull to allow his fellows to greedily scoop out with their fingers the baked grey curdled mess contained within. In jest one of the celebrants remarked that the char-roasted tendrils actually tasted like calamari. That earned a rueful chuckle amongst those waiting, with salivating hunger, for the haunches of meat to be sliced, cooked and passed to them on a tin plate.
The meal had ended with a sermon by one of the Paines in which she had called for a holy war to be waged until there was no more Underkeep and no more Lichkeep, only Shirekeep. That had earned thunderous applause, and the chants of Deii Volt! - the gods will it.
Finally, the purple-robed priest finished washing away the blood and gore, had cleansed the sacred instruments and even swept away his own footprints. With those chores done, he extinguished the candles and torches, snuffed out the brazier and censer and exited the sanctuary.
