Lord of Order by Brett Riley (the reading list book TXT) 📕

tube shot skyward. It was bigger than the others, faster, and it did not arc over a city. It traveled far above Earth, into the darkness of space, and there it fired its payload, an energy wave that rippled through the nothingness and saturated the planet. The continents grew dark as all the ancients’ mighty machines, all their sources of power, failed. Troy’s teachers called this force the Godwave, and though none of them understood what it was or how it worked, every Crusader knew the result—the permanent crippling of technology, humanity’s greatest affront to God’s will. Flying carriages fell from the sky and burned, taking whole swaths of cities with them. In New Orleans, some struck the highest buildings and razed them, while others gouged enormous holes in the street, crushing people and animals and structures, burning and burning and burning. Strange smaller vehicles died on the roads. Ships on the oceans drifted until they capsized and disappeared or struck land.

The dead lay where they fell—families collapsed around their last meal, lone pedestrians sprawled on sidewalks—and rotted, their skin bloating and bursting or desiccating in the sun and collapsing, organs and blood spilling out or turning to dust. A motivated builder could have cobbled together great edifices from their bleached bones. The vermin came and feasted, the insects, the carrion creatures, bringing their own diseases to the scattered and desperate survivors who fought them tooth and claw, scrabbling out a life among the ruins.

But in their lairs, Strickland and his first Crusaders thrived, using their stores and whatever they wanted from the still and silent world they had made. They celebrated and sang and worshipped, so rapturous they lost track of the months and years, so even now, no one could have said when the Purge occurred or exactly how much time had passed since then.

Next came the emissaries, whom Strickland sent forth to preach the gospel of the Lord and the will of the Bright Crusade. They traveled to every city, every hamlet on the continent. They braved the wide and rolling oceans, bringing answers and certainty and the promise of order. The peoples of Earth flocked to them. Those who did not—those who saw Strickland as the architect of their misery or the prophet of a faith they would not, could not share—crept away to wring their subsistence from the land or conglomerated in hidden places, striking at the Crusaders with every available weapon. In Troy’s dreams, they had always been faceless, but tonight they converged and collapsed into one body, a woman with stringy black hair and a smile born not of humor or happiness but sardonic hatred. Against this threat rose a tall and sturdy figure, androgynous, faceless, and shifting in hue and shape, wearing holstered guns and riding at the head of a small cadre. A lord of order, his deputies.

Here, as always, the dream faded. Troy lived the rest of the story every day. How the Crusade sliced the globe into principalities, each under a lord of order’s rule. How each principality’s rule of law functioned—the lords, their deputies, their chiefs who oversaw some vital profession, those chiefs’ lieutenants, all the way down to the lowliest apprentice. How Strickland, upon his death, named a new supreme Crusader, and how that person followed suit. And so it went, all the way down to Matthew Rook.

Troy did not dream this progression. Instead, his sleeping mind turned to Sister Sarah Gonzales. Together, they sat on the Riverwalk, watching the water and talking of things he could not remember.

Troy awoke more enervated than if he had not slept at all. He lay in bed longer than he should have and thought about his office—how, by rights, he should still be Ernie Tetweiller’s deputy, how the bitter cup Matthew Rook might be serving New Orleans should have passed to the old man with both more experience and more wisdom. But in his last days on duty, Tetweiller had grown disillusioned with the Crusade, with his job, with how nothing ever ended and no one ever won. Tetweiller had used his increasingly stiff leg as his reason for resigning. I ain’t in no shape to ride every day, much less jump outta the saddle and fight hand to hand, he had said when he broke the news to Troy. Only the old man himself knew how much of that was truth and how much convenience. But it mattered little. New Orleans and its outlying areas fell to Troy now. So whatever came belonged to him too.

He sighed and got out of bed. The coming day would not dissipate just because he had no wish to face it.

That Sunday, Troy sat in the first row of the Temple’s right-hand pews, listening to Jerold Babb preach. To Troy’s right, Jack Hobbes flipped through his Bible to find the correct passages. Beside him sat Gordon Boudreaux, Santonio Ford, and LaShanda Long. No one occupied the pew across the aisle to their left; it was reserved for Babb himself, in the event of guest speakers, and outlander Crusader officials, none of whom were present in the city. Every other pew was jammed full of honored Temple workers and their families, along with high-ranking workers in the trades sitting with their kin and apprentices. They had sung and prayed together, and now they sat, mesmerized or half asleep, as Babb spoke in his old man’s quaver, his text 1 Peter 3:12–17.

Wonder what all my folks would think if they were privy to the title Peter held when he wrote it, Troy thought. Or that a high minister of the world’s only sanctioned religion is preachin about persecution, like we’re the ones confined to one building or a swamp.

Still, the passages were beautiful, poetic, and, if you ignored the context, eerily prescient. For the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, Babb intoned, and his ears are open unto their prayers: but the face of the Lord is against them