The Madness of Kings

by Gene Doucette

  There were a lot of reasons this was probably not true, with one being that the Wivvolian language was so incomprehensible in its own right that it was unlikely to have produced the perfectly easy-to-pronounce name Botzis. Makk liked the story anyway.

  Kev continued. “Despite my…distaste for the Botzos, since I am still Dunn’s most famous expatriate I was invited. I wouldn’t have attended except I happened to have business in northern Botzis at around the same time, so I was already nearby.”

  “Did you give them anything?” Elicasta asked.

  She was huddled in the chair next to Makk, seemingly lost without her headgear on, sipping rye she probably wasn’t enjoying. That she spoke at all was a surprise.

  “I did,” he said. “But not credits. I donated a rare map that’s worth much to the right buyer. I assume the charity resold it, but I hope they did as I suggested, which was to show it to the Botzo tribes so that they understood that they were in the middle of a desert on an island, positively surrounded by better living conditions.”

  “The man you met,” Makk said, to bring the story back to the point.

  “Yes. He said his name was Orno Linus. A professor of astrophysics, ostensibly. I already knew the name. Actually, his name—or rather his family name—was initially the only reason I listened to him at all. He was there as a visiting scholar on leave from the Velon chapter, performing a comparative study of the various Outcast legends by delving into the originative texts of as many Septal vaults as would have him. I thought at first that he was about to entreat me to help him gain access to the great temple on Unak—which I couldn’t have done—but for the first of many times, he surprised me.”

  Ba-Ugna paused then, to take a drink and to appreciate a good dramatic pause when the opportunity for one presented itself.

  “He said, ‘I may have stumbled upon something important,’” Kev said. “’And if I’m right, I will need your help.’ Now, knowing as I already did that the professor had been in the Septal vaults, my thoughts explored the same conspiratorial landscape as the next man’s. I asked him, ‘what are they hiding down there?’ He laughed, and said, ‘I don’t think they know. I don’t think anyone knows.’”

  He looked closely at Makk.

  “You never met Orno when he was alive, did you?” he asked.

  “I didn’t,” Makk said.

  “But you’ve met Calcut.”

  “A few times. Didn’t care for him.”

  “A popular sentiment. Orno had this…passion when he spoke of greatly important matters. It was a kind of fervor that was almost alarming. He could speak about something as benign as orbital periods, or ceremonial variants of the Tribulations of the Five, with a ferocity that left one feeling at risk, personally. Calcut shares the same quality; I’m sure you’ve seen it. What I mean to explain was that our first conversation was less important for what he said than for how he said it. I came away believing that regardless of what he found, if he said it was significant it absolutely was, and that my assistance really was critical. What form that assistance might take was, in the moment, irrelevant.”

  “But what did he say?” Makk asked. “Or was that really all?”

  “That’s my point, detective,” Kev said. “He didn’t need to say more. I’d heard enough to provide him the means to make future contact, and to promise to help him as best I could.”

  “He didn’t say anything?” Elicasta asked, also clearly frustrated.

  “Orno was in a difficult position,” Kev said. “Taking from the vaults—items or information—is so strictly forbidden that even discussing it with someone who hadn’t spoken the vows must have been antithetical to his entire being. But you’re right, Ms. Sangristy; he said more than that. I’m holding back. He didn’t just say that he needed my help. He said, ‘I need your help to save the world.’”

  “From the Cull?” Makk asked. “That was how your daughter described it. Is that what we’re talking about?”

  “If that’s how you’d prefer to think of it, then yes,” Kev said. “I’d rather stick to the non-mythical if that’s all right.”

  Makk laughed. “I don’t see how you can. You called Professor Linus an astrophysicist, but that was only one half of his deal. The other half was about the Outcast, and the return of the Outcast is called the Cull, and now here we are, talking about saving the world from it.”

  Kev sighed. “We’ll discuss my daughter’s many indiscretions presently,” he said. “And yes, this is about the Outcast, but you’re getting ahead of the story.”

  “Why you?” Elicasta asked. “If he needed money and influence…he was a Linus. He didn’t need to involve you. Especially considering your bad blood with Calcut.”

  “I think he did go to Calcut at first, and his brother didn’t believe him. It’s been a number of years since Calcut and I were in the same room, but my recollection is…the word venal comes to mind. I suspect saving the world wasn’t something that interested him, not unless he saw a profit in it. But the ‘bad blood’, as you put it, didn’t exist two years ago. I was already at work on the C-Coin trace by then, but that wasn’t public knowledge. However, as time went on and Orno and I began communicating with greater regularity, Calcut did become aware of his brother’s—in Calcut’s mind—indiscretions.”

  He turned to Makk.

  “Calcut murdered Orno,” he said. “I understand your proof hinges on the absence of evidence?”

  “That and a thumbprint,” Makk said. “But yeah, a key piece is tech that renders the user invisible to a drone. Know anything about it?”

  “It’s not an invention of mine, but it’s very interesting.”

  “We think it came out of the House. Why is it interesting?”

  “Technologically speaking, there’s only one way something like that can actually work, and that’s for the user to establish an uplink with the drone.”

  “Crap, yeah,” Elicasta said. She practically jumped out of her chair. “You’re right. He’s right, Makk.”

  “I don’t understand what that means,” Makk said. She was looking at her own eyepatch optical like she was ready to pop it open.

  “Uplink’s a two-way convo,” she said. “Duqo Plaint’s toy is resonating with a worm.”

  “Sorry,” Makk said, “I still don’t understand. Can one of you explain it without tech-speak or Stream-speak? I only know Endish.”

  “For it to work, there has to be a piece of tech embedded in the drone—the worm Ms. Sangristy spoke of—that isn’t supposed to be there,” Kev said. “When activated, it knows to swap what’s being recorded with an augmented reality version of it. One that doesn’t include the user.”

  “But that’s nuts,” Makk said. “They can’t possibly know ahead of time which drones to put the worm into.”

  “That’s precisely right,” Kev said. “It would have to be included in all of them.”

  “I wanna crack this right now,” Elicasta said, “and dig it out. We have time?”

  Ba-Ugna seemed amused by Elicasta’s sudden enthusiasm to break her own rig. “If they’re smart, it’s in a critical component. Your optical may not function without it.” To Makk he said, “I may be able to locate the add-in with some time. Perhaps the county attorney will find this useful to Calcut’s prosecution.”

  “Yeah, he might,” Makk said. “But he’s not about to trade it for you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “It wasn’t. We all benefit from having Calcut Linus in a jail cell, detective. He may have bashed in his own brother’s head, but from the correspondences I’ve since received, it’s clear he blames me and Viselle for Orno’s death, rather than himself.”

  He got up and refilled his glass, then stepped away and whispered something to Jig. The butler returned a minute later with a box of cigars.

  “I hardly ever smoke,” Ba-Ugna said. “But seeing as how I’m going to be spending tomorrow in a jail cell, I thought: why not? Detective? They’re from the Pnh-Hyp Province of Wivvol. V
ery rare.”

  “Illegal?” Makk asked.

  “Not, I’m told, when they were acquired. But what does it matter? The Wivvolian united isn’t here.”

  Wivvol strictly controlled its export goods. Tobacco was one of their biggest crops, but its use was restricted to bacco sticks. The leaves they used for cigar production came from a different strain, and for reasons nobody was quite clear on, for the past fifty years the Wivvol high council had forbidden either the raw product or the finished cigars from leaving the country. Consequently, the only way to get them was on the Black Market, and probably 99% of what was sold there was counterfeit.

  Kev lit up his cigar. Makk shrugged, took one, and touched it to the same flame. Elicasta just wrinkled her nose at both of them. Jig scurried in, dropped an ashtray on the table, and left again.

  “Orno reached out a second time fourteen months later,” Kev said between puffs. “He was agitated, having just returned from another of his vault expeditions, this time to the Unak temple I mistakenly assumed he needed my help to access. He’d begun to put together the pieces of his theory by then, and while he still declined to fill me in on precisely what he’d worked out, he did provide two more fragments. One was a book, which he said he discovered in Unak. Most of the vault archives, as I’m sure you know, are duplicates, with the variation existing in the margins. This book, he said, was an original; he’d seen nothing like it elsewhere. That being so…he decided to keep it.”

  “Did he show it to you?” Makk asked. “Can you describe it?”

  “You mean, ‘is it the book you and my daughter discovered hidden under Orno’s bed?’ I think it is. But to answer your question, he neither showed nor described it to me; our meeting was over a secure voicer. Not in person. But what he said was that the book proved he was right about the Outcast. He also said a pupil of his was well on his way to proving the same thing, only they didn’t know it.”

  “Dorn Jimbal,” Makk said.

  “The same.”

  “Are they here too? Because I have a lot of questions for them.”

  Ba-Ugna smiled. “I’m not going to answer that,” he said. “Is the book safe?”

  “Safe as it can be.”

  It was still in Leemie Witt’s possession. Leemie alternated between being frustrated that he couldn’t work out what the book said and terrified that in any second he was going to be murdered for having it. His average was about a word a week, which was to say that they only knew four more of the words since Calcut’s arrest.

  “By the end of this conversation I hope to convince you to give it to me,” Kev said.

  “You’re going to be in jail by the end of this conversation,” Makk said. Ba-Ugna smiled again.

  “We asked Dorn what they were working on,” Makk added. “They said they proved Dib’s orbit around the Dancers was unstable, and that the planet was going to fly away eventually. But he was talking about something that wouldn’t happen for hundreds of thousands of years. If that’s what we’re calling the Cull of the Outcast, I think it’s less than an emergency.”

  Kev shrugged. “I’m telling you what he told me,” he said. “Oh, and there was one more thing he let slip before disconnecting. He said, ‘Archeo worked it out.’”

  “Archeo Demara?” Elicasta asked.

  “I think that’s who he was talking about, yes. Which was how I ended up here. Do you know what life was like on Lys at the beginning? It’s been described as a vacation getaway, but that’s not at all accurate. I went through the archives here, with the family’s permission. I discovered that it used to be very unpleasant. Yet the Demaras came up routinely. And that’s not all. There were plans to store supplies. These estates are only livable because of the cargo ships that come up from the surface, but Archeo’s original vision was one of self-sustenance. They were going grow their own food.”

  “In the dark?” Makk asked.

  “Sun lamps.”

  “He could have just put the station on the other side of the planet. Or in a fixed orbit over one of the oceans, and come around on the Dancers once a day like the rest of us.”

  “I’m not saying it made sense,” Kev said. “I’m saying, he came up here for a reason, and recreation appears not have been that reason. He was putting his family out of reach.”

  “Of what?”

  “The Outcast,” Elicasta said. “Sure. If the source of all evil is about to Cull the whole of Dib-kind, the best way to survive it is to not be there when it happens.”

  “But that’s insane,” Makk said. “Archeo Demara was a scientific genius; he wouldn’t have bought into that. And I think we can all agree the Outcast is a myth. You said the same thing yourself a minute ago, Ba-Ugna.”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to tolerate a little non-literal religious mythologizing for this conversation, detective. I’m sorry if that makes you uncomfortable. I agree with you, but the sanest man I ever met said otherwise. I don’t understand it the way he did, but do know who to place my trust in.”

  “All right,” Makk said. “How’d he know Archeo worked it out? Did he tell you that much?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “There are a lot of explanations for why Archeo Demara built Lys, Ba-Ugna. The Stream has about fifty of them, and only half are as ridiculous as that. Demara wasn’t even a Septal.”

  “Makk, it makes a lot of sense,” Elicasta said.

  “It fits some evidence, but not other evidence,” he said. “I know my way around building an argument, and that’s not good enough. But somehow it is good enough for the smartest man on the planet and his daughter, and I don’t get it.”

  In truth, the entire myth of the Outcast was something of a sore spot for Makk.

  He often described his life in the orphanage as being decent, and fine, and not as bad as you’ve heard, and so on, and all of that was basically true. But if there was one dark patch in that upbringing, it was the myth of the Outcast, and specifically the Cull.

  The thing about life in an orphanage was that the kids you grew up with—the ones that didn’t get adopted early, and therefore not at all (nobody adopted anyone after about age four, for some reason)—were as much brothers and sisters as they were classmates. So when they learned all about how the Outcast would return one day and kill almost everyone (a tiny percentage was supposed to be spared), seemingly the entire orphanage decided this was Makk’s fault, specifically. Even the kids he considered his brothers and sisters turned on him, triggering what would be a life filled with trust issues.

  Basically, he was beaten up a lot, for about a year.

  The beatings only stopped once he learned to defend himself against the larger kids, and then things were fine again. Kind of. One of the reasons he was able to keep the peace between himself and the other kids was that he realized they were afraid of him, and he took advantage of that fact. It was a much lonelier way to get through life, but significantly less painful.

  The most infuriating thing about all of it was that the Sister who taught them about the Outcast stressed, repeatedly, that it wasn’t a literal thing. The Outcast represented an internal temptation toward evil, not an external pressure. That was what Septal House canon, and knowing that was how he made it to adulthood with the Cholem brand still on his wrist: it wasn’t literal, and the people who thought otherwise were wrong.

  So he didn’t care that the world’s smartest man, his ex-partner, and possibly his girlfriend, had all decided it might be real after all. He wouldn’t be going there with them.

  “Let’s set the Cull aside for the moment,” Kev said. “Your opinion has no bearing on it, and I need to get to where it all went wrong.”

  “Sure,” Makk said. “Love to.”

  “The third time Orno and I communicated, he made a number of things clear. First, he had worked out a solution to the end of the world. Second, he didn’t trust me enough to share this information either over a voicer or in person; he would require a commitment first. A personal sacr
ifice, if you will. I needed to assume some risk. I don’t know what changed between the second and third interactions, but the interim period did include the revelation that I was working on the C-Coin trace, so it’s very possible his brother was talking in his other ear.”

  “When was this?” Makk asked.

  “About a month before he was killed. The third thing was that he’d removed something from the Velon chapter Septal vault. He declined to describe it, but said four other such objects would have to be obtained as well, and this was why I was needed.”

  “Obtained how?” Makk asked. “Bribe a bunch of High Hats?”

  “I have considerable influence, unparalleled access to technology, and enough credits to, yes, bribe whoever needs bribing. None of that was likely sufficient to acquire things the House did not want to have acquired. But I wouldn’t be acting entirely alone. He claimed to have been in contact with at least one other chapter about the possibility of extricating the necessary artifact.”

  “Which chapter was that?”

  “Wivvol! I know, I was surprised too. I didn’t realize the House had an active chapter there. Perhaps they don’t, and this is the reason such an extraction was possible. But for the other three, the best he could offer was that he’d floated inquiries through his extensive contact channels, and would have to wait to see what surfaced. Just locating all of them was a challenge, clearly. There was the one he had in his possession, the one in Wivvol, and a third one he said he knew the location of. But he had no idea where the other two were, and as I’m sure you appreciate, there are a lot of Septal chapters.”

  “All right,” Makk said. “I want to get this straight. Orno Linus reached out to you for a worldwide scavenger hunt, so he could get his hands on five identical rare objects hidden in the most secure places on the planet, so he could use them to…what? Wish away the Outcast?”