The Hallowed Path

A road with no god at the end of it¶

The Hallowed Path is a moral code that declined to become a religion, and it has held that line for centuries against considerable pressure from both directions.

There is no god. Not a hidden one, not a departed one, not a god who will be revealed to the worthy at the end. All life is a journey toward personal perfection through discipline and virtue, the walking is the whole of the thing, and there is no destination in the sense that a pilgrim would recognise, because perfection is a direction rather than a place.

Its clergy are called Pathfinders and they do not lead congregations. They walk ahead, they report what the road is like further on, and a Pathfinder who is asked for a ruling will generally decline to give one on the grounds that it is not his road.

Why it holds where it holds¶

The Path is the creed of the Forlorn Outcasts, and the fit is not coincidental. It is the only faith on the map that gives a satisfying answer to a specific and cruel problem: what do you hold on to when every people around you has agreed that you are not owed anything.

The Path's answer is dignity, and the case it makes for dignity is that it cannot be granted and therefore cannot be confiscated. A magistrate can refuse you a licence. A crowd can refuse you a road. Neither can reach the question of whether you conducted yourself well while it happened, and that question is the only one the Path considers settled by you rather than about you.

Discipline without punishment¶

Outsiders expect asceticism and find something stranger: a code that is exacting about conduct and almost indifferent to comfort.

Pathwalkers are not required to fast, abstain, scourge, or give away their goods. They are required to keep their word, to finish what they begin, to answer plainly, and to hold their temper in the presence of someone who has earned its loss. That last is the discipline the whole thing turns on, and it is far harder than hunger.

The faith is syncretic and untroubled about it. A Pathwalker may keep another god as well, and many do, and the Pathfinders regard this as none of their business. Pilgrim's Rest and the Long Walk are the holy days. On the first nobody travels. On the second everyone does, as far as they are able, alone.

Living beside it¶

Pathwalkers are the most reliable settlers in the colonial world and the least tractable in one specific way: they will not be provoked, and they will not be moved.

A governor who leans on a Pathwalker quarter will get every obligation met exactly, every deadline honoured, every tax paid, and absolutely no compliance beyond the letter of what was agreed. They are not resisting. They have simply read the agreement, which is more than most parties to it have done, and they will hold to it long after the man who signed it has been recalled in disgrace.