Idurism

The verdict¶

Most faiths begin with a question. Idurism begins with an answer, and the answer was delivered rather than reasoned out.

It holds that gods are lies. Not absent, note. Not indifferent. Lies, in the active sense: things that present themselves as worthy of worship in order to get something, the way a snare presents itself as a gap in the hedge. An Idurist is not troubled by evidence of the divine. He expects it. Something has to be doing the lying.

From that the rest follows quickly and without much comfort. If the powers above are liars then the order they claim to keep is a story, and if the order is a story then life carries no meaning issued from outside itself, and if there is no meaning issued from outside then all that is genuinely happening is that everything alive is on its way to being dead. The faith does not flinch at this. It settles into it. What is left when you take the lie away is the dying, and the dying is real, and a real thing can be done well or badly.

The art¶

So they do it well. That is the whole of Idurist practice and it is the part outsiders never see coming, because they arrive braced for nihilists and meet craftsmen.

The clergy are called morticians and the title is exact. They wash and set and dress the dead, they know what a body does in the fourth hour and in the fourth week, and they will correct you on it. An Idurist funeral is the most careful ceremony in Valdrin, conducted with total attention and no consolation whatsoever. There is no promise that the dead have gone somewhere. There is only the work, done properly, on the one thing nobody was lying about.

Blood and bone mark the path they tread without concern. That line is quoted at them constantly, usually by people who take it to mean they enjoy killing. It means they have stopped pretending the path is made of anything else.

Who ends up here¶

The faith is at its oldest and hardest among the orcs, for reasons written into their flesh, and the great orcish power of the Laeroth keeps it as a state creed. But Idurism is not an orcish possession and never has been.

Everywhere it collects the same kind of person: the one who asked something of a god in earnest and watched what happened next. Widows of two wars. Physicians out of a plague town. Soldiers who prayed on a field and were answered by the field. They arrive in ones and twos, they are not preached at, and they are never asked to explain themselves, which is most of the appeal.

Living beside it¶

Idurists make superb neighbours and impossible converts. They do not proselytise, because there is nothing to sell. They keep their two holy days, the Remembrance of the Dead and the Ancestors' Wake, and on both of them they will not work, and they will not be argued into it.

What unsettles a governor is not hostility. It is that an Idurist quarter is entirely unmoved by every instrument a colony uses to hold people in line. It cannot be promised anything. It cannot be threatened with anything it has not already concluded is coming. A magistrate who has spent a career leaning on hope and fear will find, in that quarter, nothing whatsoever to lean on.