Knowledge Web

"All right. First of all. It is not a 'godbond'. Do not call it a 'godbond'. It's heretical and inaccurate and really annoys me. It is a knowledge web.

"Second of all. My order's workings are none of your business. You wouldn't understand it anyway because you're all godless imbeciles, and I have better things to do with my time."

Basics

If Weft's contribution above hasn't answered all your questions, this is the lowdown on the Expressors of Agape with Compassion's knowledge web.

• A way to get knowledge directly into any monk's head
• Possessed by all monks
• Always 'on' at a low level
• More complete absorption is accessed through a prayer/meditation trance state
• Is used to issue instructions; an agent always knows what he is meant to be doing (thus the trademark self-assurance)
• Is used by field agents prior to a job, to assimilate all pertinent info on the place/people in question
• Knowledge gained this way is not remembered long-term except for a few bits and pieces that might get transferred to normal memory. An agent usually forgets most of the facts he absorbed after the job is completed and they are no longer useful.
• Only works with knowledge: for example, anything requiring physical training obviously can't be learned, except in theory

Religious beliefs concerning knowledge

Weft has once been observed musing on the nature of his connection to the knowledge web. (This is not official theological prose, and is of course filtered through Weft's material-mindedness.)

Oh, it wasn't omniscience, nothing like. As novices they'd all heard the cautionary tales of men who'd reached too far, tried to glimpse the full tapestry of divine knowledge. Their fates were always similar, and involved protracted looniness and messy deaths. No, mortals were meant to work with just a few threads at a time. In his case, only the relevant ones: essential knowledge, background information, the odd new skill if it was outside his sphere of expertise - anything he could anticipate needing for the current divinely appointed task.

It was reassuring in a way, having all these centuries of accumulated wisdom always there, ready to back one up with any amount of useful data. All for the asking, for anyone who'd learned to ask and to listen to the reply. Nobody could see the whole tapestry, but that was all right. It all held together, regardless of mortal thought and struggle and prayer. It all worked, impossibly, magically, divinely. He was proud, unashamedly proud, that he had been allowed the chance to contribute to the weaving in his small way.

Mechanics of the godbond

Nobody is any the wiser as to the way the godbond works, or how the order has the organisational skills to keep a minor level of contact with every agent on a job.

It is known that the godbond mechanism is not the same as telepathy of the sort found on Shade, although Suitov has hopes that the systems may turn out to be at least partly compatible. Whether he wants to use such a discovery as leverage on the order, make more surreptitious use of it or even steal the idea and set up his own network (we should add that perhaps he simply loves finding out how things work) is, as you can imagine, impossible to deduce until he should try one or more of these.