Assassin

by Kali Altsoba

  He will be a ruthless leader in and of the worlds, but from beyond history. He only needs a vehicle, a great star nation to lead in the last war, in order to refashion all history for all times. He will find it in the Imperium, an immaculate empire that is under attack on all sides throughout all its history. A vehicle set aside by the gods so that it might redeem them, for they know their failure and are ashamed. They, too, want Creation to be corrected by the Arahitogami.

  At this point, Broderbund doctrine and Imperium sensibility merge. Grünen have long seen themselves as a predestined nation that grew from the acorn of the original Waldstätte trio worlds, into a mighty empire. All its expansion is taught to Grün children as defensive, protecting anointed worlds from farfolk plots and wars and aggression. Imperium might is an expression of deep virtue, marking the blessing of the divine on the empire. Any faults along the way, any crimes against farfolk worlds, are always necessary reactions to the hostile envy of farfolk. Stir in Broderbund theology to the toxic stew: the old gods are evil, but the Imperium embodies virtue. The new Man God, the Arahitogami, will merge its past, present and future, blend faith and empire in waves of holy violence that shall cleanse the stars and start Creation anew. With none of God’s Error this time.

  “One can't believe such impossible things,” Alice objected. “I daresay you haven't had much practice,” the Red Queen replied. “When I was your age I always did it for half an hour each day. Why, sometimes I have believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

  No resistance to this message is acceptable because dissent from Revelation is never honest, not an error or result of human fallibility. All dissent is willfully wicked, the manufactures of a bad soul that rejects the coming Arahitogami’s inescapable and ‘One True Black Faith.’ Brethren serve this Black Faith before all persons and things. They cannot see how utterly vile it is. A bleak faith built on misogyny, misanthropy, and misery for nonadherents. A rough faith of ‘Holy Iron’ and ‘Holy Laws’ and ‘Holy Death.’ A grim faith of dim lit, hermetic belief in predestination of an Elect few, the Brethren. A cruel faith that worships a merciless deity who “predestines some to salvation, all others to destruction.”

  They wear the symbol of belief upon their sleeves: a great bird of prey with rot claws and black beak. It’s worn on arm flashes of dark green ritter weaves, on priestly robes, and burned into flesh of every sergeants’ upper arm. Brethren wear the etched Black Eagle wherever they make Holy War, a bloody predator who also adorns mystic scrolls and weapons and warships hulls, and flew above tens of millions of commanderies holding down conquered worlds. There are not so many now, or so far afield. Not since the Red Dowager whittled cowl numbers to a nub of ten million, locked in exile on Terra Deus and Fates. Yet, the will to power and fanatic belief in an anointed and inevitable destiny abides with them there.

  ***

  “The Devil’s Disciple.” That’s what they call Maximilian Kahn inside the great halls of the Waldstätte Palast and long corridors of the General Curia HQ, and the few other places on Kestino that he’s seen. Back in the Ordensstaadt he’s better thought of. There, he’s called “The Incorruptible.” Kahn imbibes soma juice before considering the yellowed, sacred scrolls he loves. He studies them in his daily devotions whenever he’s in private chambers. It has made him too thin, his eyes too small and too black, a minimal of white hovering around his pupils. His accent is coarse and thick, distinctly provincial. There’s nothing noble or heroic or inspired in his stooped and wispy bearing. His motto is: “My prayer is like a sword. My sword is like a prayer.” His favorite meal is warm, crumbled crapaudine; the special kind with carrot-like roots and darkly colored and hairy skin as rough as tree bark. Even cooked, the black flesh of the beet is just as bitter as it looks. Daily consumption has permanently stained his teeth. Otherwise, he seems almost normal, at first meeting.

  Until his hundredth year, Maximilian Kahn never left Fates and Terra Deus, the severe homeworlds of the central Ordensstaadt. He had no experience of distant Imperium affairs. He lacked fierce vitality or driven eloquence of others on the High Council. Even inside the Jade Court, he dresses as the high priest of the Black Faith he is in fact, in long sacramental robes of oily green. His are worn out with age, as is he. When at court, he wears uncomfortably the required props of priestly office. He often fumbles clumsily with the signature of his membership in the Broderbund: a short degen facsimile. It looks to others more likely that its silver blade is in danger of casually cutting him than ever creasing an enemy’s throat. He hates that he has to wear it inside his long, green robes.

  He’s not goaded by personal ambition or cruel lust for vengeance, at least not beyond the general fervor for revenge for the terrible massacre of the Sword Brothers that all Brethren want to exact against SAC and the Oetkerts. Faith alone moves Kahn. His is a sincere belief in the true revelations and divinations drawn from ancient texts, and dusty millennia of geomancy and superstition. He has a simple faith, a pure belief that lets him see alternity in a grain of sand, prophetic whole in a collage of ancient fragments he studies with wonderment of a child who for the first time sees a semblance of order in cosmic chaos.

  When Pyotr Shaka reached out in secret to the High Council on Terra Deus two decades ago, to ask for aid with “my Dowager problem,” Maximillian Kahn was summoned to the High Council and told brusquely and simply: “You are to be our envoy to Pyotr III, at the Jade Court in Novaya Uda on Kestino.”

  “Please no! I want to stay with my scrolls and studies. I’m not suited to the complexities of Court life. Only to our archives and libraries.”

  “That must all wait. You’re needed on Kestino/”

  “But I’m very close to decoding the final prophesy.”

  “Really? You are close? Sword Brothers better qualified and more scholarly than you have been looking for 6,000 years, but you say that you are close to the final revelation?”

  “I need to find one or two more pieces, but yes, I think I’m closer than ever.”

  “You might well be closer, and yet still be constellations away.”

  “If the honorable High Councilors will but give me more time.”

  “No! You leave immediately for Kestino.”

  “I’m the wrong man! I haven’t traveled. All I know is geomancy and papyri. I’m content to remain in our libraries, to serve you there as best I can. What use would I be on Kestino? How can I leave my research behind? Please don’t send me to…”

  “Silence! You will obey! You will go to Kestino.”

  “Apologies, High Counsellors. In all things, yes, I must and will obey.”

  “You accept to do your holy duty?”

  “Yes. Forgive my moment of weakness.”

  “It is forgiven for now, but it is not forgotten Brother Kahn.”

  “I understand.”

  “One more thing. We have something that you are to deliver in secret and in person. Place it directly in the hand of Pyotr. No one else must know.” He was handed a tiny box containing a single flake of the old Hashâshīn’s deadliest deadliest, most untraceable poison. They didn’t need to tell him what it was, or what it was for. He worked that out himself.

  His shuttle was waiting.

  Pyotr Shaka was waiting

  History was waiting.

  Divinations must wait.

  Now it’s twenty years later,

  and the gods are still waiting.

  ***

  Kahn is one of the Order’s best diviners. He spent a lifetime in close study of mysterious lines and tiny figures in the ancient geomantia, looking for a sign or word of the coming Messiah, the Man God, the Arahitogami. He rose to his work early each morning, and retired late every night. After twenty years at the Jade Court in Novaya Uda, he still thinks he was close back then, though he has had little to no chance to complete his fundamental studies. On the High Council’s orders, his searches take him far from his ultimate quest to instead look for prophesy on the path the Order
should take back to power in the Imperium, to regain worlds lost to mass murder under bloody Queen Mary.

  The special province of his scholarly expertise is the Corpus Hermeticum, a vast archive of ancient texts of mystic insight and prophesy that resides at the core of the Black Faith. He believes that its author, Hermes Trismegistus, also called Mercurius Maximus, was actually a composite of a hundred mystics and prophets whose coded names he painstakingly recorded, deduced or eliminated from a list of thousands in the pseudepigrapha. That great key was located by Brethren in another desert cave, near where the Corpus Hermeticum had been stored and guarded by secretive cultists. Until four Sword Brothers found and killed them. Ever after, for 6,000 years, the Broderbund has hidden and guarded the Corpus.

  Brethren took all their secret treasure, their ancient starmaps and charts and texts and celestial readings, and the pseudepigrapha, with them to Terra Deus on the pioneer ship Deus ex Machina. Text sheets of the Corpus Hermeticum are stored there in high tech vaults, refrigerated and revered as if they are some geometrically perfect monolith, divine like guide to all human destiny, pointing to a certain future out of a murky past. For the Sword Brothers actually believe that a great gift of futuristic foresight and certainty, bordering on magic, hides inside the sacred texts of the Corpus. If only they can get the detailed prophesy out. If only high priests like Kahn can decipher the last secret of long lost Ur.

  They know it is written in the script of the City of the Gods, the deva nagari. That syncretic language of hieroglyphs and ur letters and pictorial seals defied translation until Order scholars divined their meaning and recorded it in their most secret graphene scrolls, kept in the base rock vaults of their Holy Archive on Terra Deus. It’s an exclusive, sacred language, preserve of the Brethren and recorded in original Ordensstaadt laws still ruthlessly enforced. Any slave who tries to learn it by listening to his master speak the rituals is sentenced to have molten lead poured into his ears.

  A second key is thought to be the Book of the Days of the Monarchs of Sky and Wind, also called Enuma Anu Enlil II. Copied from a sequence of dozens of clay tablets found in the ruins of King Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh, the great book of omens was hidden for many centuries below the forgotten rubble of a dead civilization on the east bank of the Tigris. Until full lines of the fabled city were detected in satellite imaging and two dusty archeologists went to see if any wonder still dwelled below the sand. They found it: King Ashurbanipal’s lost Assyrian Library was intact. But before they could vid any text or announce their discovery, five whirling Hashâshīn were on top of them, stabbing and slashing while other Sword Brothers stole away the rediscovered baked clay. When reassembled, clay cuneiforms completed the original book of Assyrian omens, filled in all the gaps and added hundreds of new lines of divination that spoke of a future “Messiah of All Orion,” the Man God and God of the Suns.

  Like so many ancient texts, the first Book of the Days was also stolen by the Brethren in preparation for their flight from Old Earth to Terra Deus. This one they took during the confusion of the Ninth Iraqi War, to match with the Enuma Anu Enlil II they earlier lifted out of Nineveh’s sands. Both were stored in a subterranean cavern with all other secret treasures, until they blasted offworld with the Corpus Hermeticum, its ur keys, and the Black Stone, the venerated Hajarul Aswad that the old bastards later smelted into degen blades.

  Fanatic devotees of the deva nagari make it a language with a religion and an army wrapped around it, protected at its most secret core by the specialist killers of the Hashâshīn. Still today, it perches like a bird of ill omen and worse intent atop their pseudoscience, distorting social policy, dictating their numbing daily rituals, sanctifying clone vat breeding of dāsa slaves and mother-wives. Doctrine rides the Broderbund like a mahout rides a war elephant: wobbling and bouncing but staying in place while the half blind beast of the Black Faith moves underneath the jangling haudā, as it trumpets and tramples all in its path. It’s a quarter baked balderdash of cross cultural mysticism and bad philosophy, made far worse over six millennia by a patina of actual astronomy. It’s a lethal mix.

  ***

  That’s why the High Council rejected Kahn’s protests, denied his request to continue his vital studies of the Corpus. It sent him to Kestino precisely because he was the wrong man for the job in appearance and demeanor. Wrong men are more often trusted than those of perfect fit, and the mission was the most vital to the Broderbund in centuries. Still, he misses his scrolls and studies. Instead of a life of contented pseudo scholarship looking for the gods inside digitized papyri, searching for the key to the Holy of Holies in dead scrolls, Kahn lives in perfect misery in Kestino. For the past twenty years he engaged in a public life of action that he hated, instead of the private life of the mind he longed for. Master of a restored commandery, obedient servant of the Black Faith, he has grown into an unwanted role as the Order’s key liaison with Pyotr. He’d forgo the Jade Court to return to his one true desire, a quiet scholarly life in his old digital seminary on Fates, surrounded by young boys and male acolytes and assistants. It would be undiluted bliss to roam personally among the shelves of the mystic Holy Archive buried deep beneath Mount Meru on Terra Deus. But he’s stuck in Pyotr’s capital.

  Still, he’s very good at this other thing, this secret life he leads on Kestino. On some days, he almost enjoys it. It’s his never questioned faith that makes him so patient and successful, as he plays evermore covert roles at the Jade Court, doing things he never trained for. It’s his scholar’s eye for detail, and his belief that God guides his every action, that lets him prepare each patient move. He makes mole like progress from point-to-point, burrowing first and deepest into Pyotr’s inner confidence, only later tunneling to one side or the other in the monarch’s mind to reach a secret goal, to plant a worm of doubt that bends a weak royal will to actions that serve the Broderbund more than the dynasty. It’s so stealthy a method it makes the Devil’s Disciple seem almost trustworthy.

  ***

  The earthquake of the Red Purge unwittingly intruded lower social orders upward, into the affairs of the Imperium. Shocking calls for economic fairness are heard daily across teeming workers’ tenements, where tall shadows of richer men’s towers dim the orange-yellow light of Kestino’s F-class star, so that little filters down to the barrios of the largest megacity in Orion. Kahn sees opportunity in shaded backstreets, where most other Brethren loathe to walk. He sees more in the fetid alleys and sordid meeting halls and markets of the Old City, and its sprawling outer slums. It’s there that he finds hidden talents in himself, and starts to erode Pyotr’s support from underneath, like the tide lapping at a rotten pier.

  One cold morning, a few months after Pyotr launches the Krevan War, after a thousand prior dawns of careful preparation, one of Kahn’s secretly planted provocateurs starts to speak in a large open air market. He calls out for “spiritual and ethnic purification of Kestino and of all Grün worlds.” It’s Maximilian Kahn’s wicked instinct to seed this radical idea into the huge, uneasy market crowds, agitated by news of war yet not knowing how it affects their interests. His agents foment demands in the Old City and in other worker cities that are alien to his own doctrines, but more immediately threatening to the powers that rule Kestino and the Imperium. Working through hidden cells of sergeants and priests, Kahn sprinkles poison yeast into fermenting social unrest. A little more everyday, until the city stinks of a sour dough of discontent that mocks people’s hunger yet drives ever higher numbers into the Old City streets to protest.

  Slowly, surely, methodically, Maximilian Kahn is undermining the General Curia and the Tennō himself. And he’s doing it with the regime’s own sophistry about advancing Purity, and the cause of a “Blood Revolution” across Orion. It’s devious, it’s cynical, it’s brilliantly radical, deploying the language of genetic superiority championed by Sakura-kai to justify demands for social and caste reform on Imperium homeworlds. It’s a masterstroke by Kahn. And an ominou
s sign for Pyotr’s regime that the lower orders cheer, stamping feet and clapping. “Why should we care what happens on the Krevan worlds or on any damned Calmari world? We want real change here, we want purification on Kestino and all our homeworlds.” It’s another of Kahn’s men, egging on the crowd from a different corner. It’s the last poke they need. The rest is genuine: dissent is deep and real. The protest takes on a life of its own.

  “I believe in Purity and the Imperium. But I must feed my family first!”

  “Purity on the Krevan worlds? Let’s start in the Farfolk Quarter instead!”

  “Yes! And deport all the Adivasis, the hill people, from Novaya Uda.”

  “Deport them! Deport them!”

  “They’re all criminals and thieves!”

  “Expel all dāsa too! The filthy dog cookers!”

  “How will I be paid the wages I need so my family can eat, if we have slaves doing the best work in the great towers and manses?”

  “Down with dāsa! Down with slaves!”

  “Slavery is the enemy of working men!”

  “Down with the slaveowner classes!”

  “Why doesn’t Pyotr remove these impure scourges from our city?”

  “Kick them out! Then we’ll talk about Purity and cleansing farfolk worlds.”

  “Prices are too high!”

  “My wife and I work longer and harder now.”

  “Rikugun took both our sons.”

  “Kaigun took my eldest.”

  “Fuck the High Castes who take only our children to fight their war!”