The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  Ah, yes. There it was! She was wondering. That familiar sweating of her palms, the needle sensation down her neck, the unconscious edging of her body toward the door. It had been centuries. “‘Punished,’” she repeated, almost laughing, her faltering smile falling entirely when the Hierophant looked up from his writing with a stern, illegible face.

  “Of course. We can’t have you running about all over the human world without consequence. People died because of you. Don’t you see to it your officers and soldiers are well disciplined for infractions against the rules of your service?”

  She had never been so aware of the tick of a clock in her life. Trying to maintain her usual sense of confidence, she arched a brow and dryly asked, “Going to have me whipped? Partially flayed?”

  “No, no, of course not. You know as well as I do that corporal punishment is useless. It only serves to titillate those who employ and observe it, while doing nothing to prevent future infractions: far better such activities should be left as the bedroom play they are. As for flaying, well…that is rather dramatic, but somewhat more on target. I have always been in favor of long-lasting reminders—nothing obvious or socially humiliating, of course. Just a small secret between yourself and your Lord. A means by which you can forever remember to be a humble and good servant, rather than a rebellious apostate. Flaying is rather much for that purpose.” Returning his attention to whatever he wrote, he suggested, “I think one leg will suffice.”

  All efforts to keep her pulse calm buckled under the weight of a single second. A scream—her own, or maybe Cassandra’s—rose up in her head. “What?”

  “Cicero insisted I take both, but I said—”

  “No.” She felt she stood next to her own body and had to grip the bookshelf nearby. “No, I— You’re going to take my leg.”

  “Only one, my dear. A symbolic gesture. I’m sure you can understand it. Why, in the end, it will be beneficial to you! I have already ordered a replacement. Some engineers will be by to measure you for it in a few nights. You will find it a vast improvement over your original, and identical in every way.”

  Her fingers tangling through the chain of Cassandra’s diamond, Dominia glanced between the door and the Hierophant and wished she could die on the spot through some merciful intercession of Saint Valentinian’s. “But—but I came back of my own will, I—I thought you forgave me. You weren’t going to ask any questions.”

  “Have I?”

  “This isn’t forgiveness.”

  “Forgiveness is not free. It requires some effort on the part of those who are forgiven: and there are times when willful penance is not enough. I assure you, princess, I am not taking your leg out of spite. Far from it! It is because I love you, and so intensely wish to forgive you, that I am doing this. How else could I forgive all you’ve done without some gesture? Some assurance that you will put your best foot forward”—he tried so hard not to smirk that the effort strained his mouth—“and that you will always be with our Family, no matter what happens.”

  She was too numb to be angry. This was why she had never had trouble on the battlefield, why she had never feared death. Her Father was so much worse than war could ever be.

  As cautious as anyone tiptoeing over broken glass, the General wet her lips and pronounced the words, “Surely there’s an alternative. If I could say, your forgiveness seems to me”—he lowered his pen and she feared she might vomit—“sort of…conditional. I thought that God’s love was…”

  “Oh, but I am not God, of course. Though you do flatter me…I am but a man of flesh and blood like any other.” He rose from his seat and she began mentally searching the room for a weapon, trying to remember whether there had been a letter opener on his desk at the start of the conversation, regretting the lack of a poker in this particular fireplace, wondering about the density of that paperweight, having a difficult time listening to what he said, something something something “—true forgiveness is therefore, ultimately, in the hands of God. The forgiveness of men is a luxury.”

  “The forgiveness of men comes at a very high cost,” she observed, trapped without any defense as he came around the desk and stood before a woman who towered over most men, but who had to crane her neck to see the holy Father’s face. “You already took something from me because I left. You took my eye. I only got it back because of my friends.”

  “Oh, my child”—he gripped her chin with fingers so swift she relived, with post-traumatic horror, the awful feeling of her eyeball being plucked from its socket—“don’t you understand? I didn’t take your eye because you ran away! That had nothing to do with any of this.”

  Her eyes, at the visceral memory, at the epiphany, at his presence, filled with a fine gloss of tears. As calmly as she could, through the staggered breath and half smile of terror, she asked, “Then why did you do it?”

  “I took your eye because you took mine, first.”

  Of course.

  Of course.

  There was no Acetia. He was no alien. The martyr planet from which her Father heralded was Earth in her terrible future: her dark future, where things all went horribly wrong. The General’s lips parted. The Hierophant smiled at her understanding and released her chin with a paternal pat upon her shocked cheek.

  For a time, she didn’t speak. She only marveled at him, at herself, at the whole world and the insanity of reality. A whole globe of people, blinded by logic. The same man could never be two places at once. Time travel wasn’t possible. Etcetera.

  “How?” She tried asking, just once. He chuckled.

  “What fun would it be if I told you that now?” Squinting, she tried to discern a difference between his eyes—any hint of DIOX-brand artificiality—and found none. As she verified both were organic, he continued, “You understand that I must take something from you for what you have done to the Family now, as opposed to what you did to me then, during a marathon, a whole lifetime and persona ago. Yes? At any rate…don’t you feel silly, now, for flouncing off to Canada! How could I favor any child but Cicero? I used to be him. I can understand his anger. Therefore, I require your leg.”

  There was no way to argue him out of his sense of justice. No begging. No escape. Shocked as she was, the General could not move her legs; for that matter, she no longer saw the room in which she stood. What was she doing? Why had she returned? To face her guilt for—what? Had she really done anything to merit this? Maybe. The Lady must have thought so. The Lady had sent her back here because—why? Because war was inevitable? Because an inside man was necessary for the scheme to work? Because, because, because—but then she remembered she had chosen to come back, not just because of Lavinia but because of Tenchi. The swirling horror of her mind ceased long enough that, finding herself near the door and her Father back at his desk, she managed to ask, “Would you tell me one thing? Where are you keeping Tenchi?”

  “Mm? Oh!” The Hierophant glanced up from his work, pen wiggling in recognition. “Yes, yes, your sailor friend—well, it just so happens we stayed his execution and ordered his transport to the nearest consignment camp, but some funny business happened on the bus ride over…I just received an e-mail”—he turned away to awaken the desk-integrated holo-display computer with a wave of his hand and swiped past a few floating windows in that same limp-wristed motion—“something about his disappearance… I’ve not bothered to respond yet, but I don’t expect we’ll make his hunt a priority.”

  “Thank you.”

  With a tap of his pen against the temple of his forehead in a mocking salute, the Holy Father said, “Close the door on your way out, dear. So glad to see you back.”

  VII

  The Girl with Silver Hands

  By her late fifties, Cassandra could no longer stand her urgent pangs of conscience. While she continued to cook for the Governess nearly every morning, and Dominia often returned from work to any number of scrumptious porcine fragrances—her wife a permanent nightdream with that lacy pink apron—Cassandra began to refuse m
eat. Only at Mass would she consume flesh and blood, she said. That was what the services were there for: why the Lamb gave his blood and why the Churches kept it on hand to be replenished at his next stop. Other than an alleged connection with God and a nontemporal connection to the Last Supper—which was, to put it lightly, reinterpreted in the hands of martyr scholars—the purpose of the Lamb’s blood was to give martyrs an option to cannibalism. The rest of the week, well—some martyrs thought it sinful (or at least antisocial) to fast, but Cassandra knew God approved.

  Dominia, alarmed, did not approve. For weeks, she pestered her wife about drinking blood, if nothing else. To her present shame, she once went so far as to slip a bit of type A into Cassie’s wine one morning. This had only resulted in an astronomical argument and a broken glass, so she didn’t try again. She just watched in silence while her wife—a martyr in every sense of the word—fasted, week after week, suppressing superficial pangs of appetite with malnutritional salads, the occasional side of lab-grown beef, or a bowl of vegetable soup.

  Each week would begin with optimism and good spirits. Most workers loathed Noctislunae, but it was Cassandra’s best night. Each night after, her condition degraded into tremors, insomnia, and, once or twice, a Noctisfrey seizure that necessitated attendance of the Noctisaturnon service as well as the usual Noctisdomin one the following night. This was discouraged. The blood of the Lamb was a commodity, because with so many churches and fifty-two service slots in any given year, he and Cicero could only visit each church so often. So for all her trouble to follow her conscience, Cassandra would sometimes be subject to a sideways comment from the priests and priestesses of their local parish—those same who happened to be her colleagues. The shaming got to be so bad that she had to leave the Bible school business behind. That was when she started to focus on music.

  But through all the physical and mental turmoil, Cassandra was in higher spirits than ever. The General’s heart broke even now, in Kronborg, to think her wife could only be happy while starving! Dominia wished they had known the truth of Lazarus’s blood during her life. Like so many other truths, her Father had hidden that from her. Yes: her Father hid that which could have saved her wife, morally, spiritually, bodily, eternally. Oh! That bastard! How Dominia hated him. How she hated him, and hated that he now wanted to lead the martyr race on a multidimensional march of evil.

  Lazarus had explained to her once that she was responsible for ending the present state of the world for martyrs. Things had to change, and change was painful. The right change, Dominia could see, was a complete upheaval of current social values, structure, and even physical presence. There was much to be said for the idea of the martyr race migrating into the Ergosphere once enough research could be done into the subject. But before that issue could even be approached, a complete psychological rewrite of all martyrs was required. The Church, if not in need of destruction, certainly needed a new leader.

  And so long as he lived, her Father would never relinquish his position.

  Yes—she had thought before how, in the end, her goal was the death of her Father. But now she was confronted with the notion more strongly than ever before. More than that, she was confronted with the notion that it was his death or her death. The issue with her death was not so much any lingering fear of it. She fully trusted that when her body died, her spirit would remain in the Ergosphere. Even if she had to collect herself in the Void, she was prepared for it.

  No. Her concern was that if she died, she could do nothing more to stop him. A planet full of martyrs was one thing. A planet full of martyrs who didn’t need to fear the sun and who could conquer, world by world, the vast seas of the universe while bringing thoughtforms into earthly existence—now that was a tahgmahr beyond all reckoning. But perhaps it had happened elsewhere. Perhaps it had happened for her Father to find himself with such power and such long memory. When he said he came from Acetia, he meant that he came from an Earth where he was victorious and martyrs had spread their tendrils through reality.

  Dominia’s head swam as she made her ghostlike way through the halls of Kronborg, thinking through the many General di Mephitolis who’d come before her. What had been different of them? Why had they failed? Though she knew she would persist after, what was the moment of death like? Had she ever sold Lazarus, the Lady, the Kingdom for a leg?

  Maybe her standard litany of questions was the wrong thing. Perhaps the best strategy was to imagine the worst possible iteration of herself and strive to be that iteration’s exact opposite. It was with great pain that the image came upon her, the trashy cover of a proverbial pulp novel about space piracy or some such business: the one-eyed, one-legged General with the odious Memory Bride draped around her hip as she ruled a hollow world from the depressing city of Old Elsinore. Appalling. Dominia paused against a corner near the primary garden doors to rub the bridge of her nose, and when she looked up, she recognized one of the courtiers gossiping beneath the nearby marble statue of the Lamb. René Ichigawa, who recognized her the same instant and tore off like a rabbit without explanation to his companions. The poor pair looked all the more shocked when the General sprinted past in pursuit.

  “René! René, you bastard, there’s nowhere to run!”

  That wouldn’t stop him from trying. After blazing through the vast French doors and down a path more thickly lined with snow than trees this time of year, he recognized the proximity of the General’s pursuit and thought he’d get smart by taking a right turn across the pond—the pond that, while frozen this time of year—

  “René,” she cried, “don’t, you idiot!”

  Too late. He’d already stumbled though the tree line and now skidded across the ice, trying to take a shortcut in the direction of the hedges until he made his inevitable plunge through a weak spot into the frozen water.

  Then, naturally, it was a lot of, “Dominia, help,” and, “Please! I haven’t been swimming since I was ten!” Sighing, the General took the time to remove her jacket before easing her cautious way across the ice. She reached into the breach, and René, despite his splashing, still had wherewithal enough to try to use her as a ladder rather than accept her help as savior. After at least one kick in his face and a few treacherous warning snaps of the ice beneath her, she managed to extricate René and toss him, wet and shivering, onto the snowbank of the shore. Her own lips slate, Dominia turned him over to the sound of his profuse thanks only to slap him once, sharply, right in the freezing face.

  “Listen to me, you little shit. The only reason”—she slapped him again because he marveled too much at the pain of the first slap to pay attention to her words—“the only reason why you’re still alive right now is because your cousin is alive. Okay? Consider yourself lucky—very lucky.”

  “Dominia—”

  “Because if he weren’t alive, you know what I’d be doing right now?”

  “Dominia, please—”

  “I’d be yanking out your fucking leg, because that’s what the Hierophant’s going to do to me!”

  “I— Jesus Christ, what? No, Dominia, please, I’m telling you! This wasn’t my idea—what a stupid plan, I kept telling them!”

  “Telling whom?” The General hissed the words with a glance for the lights of the palace. Nosy faces pressed to the glass panels of the doors and a couple of windows down the hall. “Keep your voice down.”

  “The Lady! Lazarus! Everybody! You think I want to be here? Last time I was around these people, I lost both my eyes!”

  Mouth open in shock, she slapped him once more and demanded, “Stop lying.”

  “I’m not! I swear to you, I’m not!”

  “You mean to say that not only did the Lady and Lazarus know I’d end up here, but everybody knew I’d end up here? I mean, I’ve started to feel like the Lady put me here on purpose, but…Lazarus? You? Even Tenchi? Oh my God!” No wonder he hadn’t wanted to say anything in the Ergosphere. It had as much to do with chronology as it did with his bosses telling him to shut up in
advance. Below her series of mortified realizations, René babbled on.

  “I didn’t want to do it. Please! I’m sorry. I didn’t want any part in this. You think I wanted to hand Tenchi over to these people? He volunteered! You could ask him! You know, if they haven’t just killed him anyway. What a stupid idea all this is!”

  Dominia pulled away as the English professor’s rant continued. “It’s this—fucking cult! I can’t believe he got involved in that Lazarene stuff. He grew up with Shinto tradition! Freedom fighting, I get, but these religious ceremonies, and then agreeing to drink some old dude’s blood…I mean, it’s crazy.”

  “You literally stole my blood.”

  “Well, yes, but that was for survival. This is for religion. It’s different.”

  Seeing how he shivered and the peacock tint of his lips, the General retrieved her jacket to drape around his shoulders. “So everybody knows, huh? How many bodies is ‘every’ body?”

  “There was a meeting. Tenchi, Farhad, Gethsemane, the Lady, Lazarus, and I were all there, and a lot—a lot of soldiers, Dominia. Tons.”

  “Did you count them?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. One hundred? Two? I’m not a math professor, I’m an English professor.”

  “Your attention to detail is incredibly helpful.” She was about to give up on him when he added, “How am I supposed to keep track? There were people from all over the world, tons I’ve never seen before. I talked about it with some white guy who lent me a lighter outside the venue.”

  Lighter, huh. “Tall guy? Thin, dark hair, blue eyes, sort of a shabby red waistcoat?”

  “I thought his suit seemed pretty nice, with a jacket, but—how did you know that?”

  That good-for-nothing mutt. “We’ve met,” she said. Was it worth telling René that the guy who’d lit his cigarette was really the border collie—or had been stored in the border collie, or reflected in the border collie, or bonded with the border collie—that had journeyed with him for thousands of miles? Not when the secular professor wasn’t even willing to sit through a Lazarene ceremony. The General busied herself by rolling up the wet sleeves of her white shirt and returned the subject to her irritation. “So everybody knew, huh…”