The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

“I…no. I’m sorry, Lavinia.” Eyes filling with tears, Dominia lifted her hand to wipe her cheeks and then her mouth and sob, “I’m so—oh, sweet Lamb, I’m so sorry.”

  “What on earth for?” asked Lavinia while her sister bolted up and slipped past her, through the doorway. “Ninny, wait—”

  “I can’t stay here right now, Lavinia, please. I have to think.”

  “But, Ninny, don’t you see? I’m trying to show you it’s a nice thing.”

  There was simply no way for the General to respond. Still nauseous, and now with the taste of bile burning her throat, Dominia stumbled back in the direction of the gardens. The only place for her now was the most clamorous room the entire castle had to offer, and one of its best attended: the kennels.

  It was no secret that the Lamb loved his dogs, and the love of dogs—indeed, all animals—had become one of the most popular pastimes of martyr life, right behind alcohol abuse and sadomasochistic sex. Dominia, during peacetimes, spent as many seconds as possible in the presence of the animals, because they did not care what or whom she ate so long as she shared some with them. Nor did they care if she did not eat anything at all. The Hierophant frequently had when she was a little girl named Morgan who, like Cassandra twenty years before her death, could not be persuaded to eat flesh without a great amount of doing. She had been criticized by everybody, and even the Lamb had tried to persuade her to eat normally rather than going by his blood alone. The dogs didn’t try to pressure her about anything, though.

  This particular group of dogs didn’t even care that they hadn’t met her before, not once in their entire lives: they simply bounded forth en masse to dance with big dog grins around her feet and spring up, paws bracing against her hips and stomach as they tried to bowl her over in impressive demand for affection. Normally, she would have responded to this behavior with laughter. Given the circumstances, and, seeing that she was completely alone with them, the General di Mephitoli allowed herself to dissolve into nearly hysterical tears.

  Being alone with animals had a way of releasing emotion. Even with Cassandra, she restrained herself, forced herself to be the strong one for a woman who needed more support than the Governess. But certainly as a troubled little girl and a supremely surly teen, Dominia had found the company of dogs provided her with unconditional permission to feel. Then, as now, she could let go, crouched in the corner like a real sad sack while a few particularly enthusiastic mutts attempted to love-bomb her out of a sadness whose expression was universal.

  “Oh, God.” She hugged one at random and covered her eyes with her free hand. “What am I going to do? What have I done? You can’t imagine—of course you can’t”—she almost laughed—“but, oh, God, I never…I never stopped to ask myself what I was doing. I’m such a horrible person. I—I just wanted Cassandra. I didn’t know how to handle her baby. I didn’t think…I didn’t want this.

  “What am I doing? How did I expect this to end? I can’t lose my leg, but my friends— Lavinia—oh, my heart. I only ever wanted Cassandra.”

  It was so hard to cry. Humiliating, even alone, as if she betrayed her own self-definition by experiencing an emotion unrelated to a calculated expression of violence. How often she had wept along this journey! This idiotic series of battles like none she’d ever fought. Yet, never had she wept like this. On the floor, every last ignored burden crashed back to her. How she’d changed! How she’d changed and how she’d suffered, and for what? She asked herself what she was getting out of a certain action, not about the nature or consequence of the action. She had wanted Cassandra out of all this mess, but the lengths to which she was willing to go for her wife now seemed foolhardy. She had tossed her life away for a woman who’d killed herself. A woman who could not return to this life, despite all the General had been told. A woman who could only return in the flesh when the universe was born again, and Dominia herself was born again. Would she have no memory of everything she’d suffered to attain? Would she be better off without those memories?

  Even if Cassandra could come back, what reason would she have to forgive the General?

  With another self-pitying sob, Dominia opened her eyes, about to reach for another dog, and froze in an astonishment that caused her to second-guess her own sanity. The animal before her, which of all its peers listened most astutely to her lamentations (and with none of the concerned supplications of its cohorts), was a most recognizable border collie. Through wet hiccups and soft gasps to stabilize her breath, the General wiped her face to better see.

  “Basil?”

  Head low, the still, gentle dog leaned forward to sniff her hand and give one affectionate lick. Then, all business, Basil turned on his heels and trotted away, past the lesser animals and around the corner to the next row of kennels. Holding her breath, the General clambered to her feet and straightened out her clothes, then stumbled forward with a cadre of dogs at her heels. As they rounded the corner, Dominia’s breath released, and more than half her followers bounded to greet, with barking delight, Valentinian. The Saint of Death stooped to pet the wise-looking border collie before him, a grin already on his stubbled face.

  “Aren’t dogs the best,” the magician said, his sigh one of sheer admiration. “They always know just what to say.”

  VIII

  Dimethyltryptamine

  Had anyone ever been so angry at the answer of their prayers? And not “answer” in a monkey’s-paw, vengeful-djinni way, but a real, true answer—was it normal to feel, amid the kaleidoscope of relief and surety and sanity and hope, that iron-brand singe of rage? The General could not say. Certainly not in that moment when her anguish transmuted into fury for the magician before her, whose expression, down to the very angle of his eyebrows, remained smug as ever. “Looking a little red there, buddy.”

  “I am…surprised,” she managed to calmly articulate, realizing her left hand was bound in a trembling fist. She forced it open to pat the nearest mutt. “Just…surprised to…find you…here.”

  “And I am proud to see you are working on your anger management,” said the insufferable man, but in such a tone that the General couldn’t help but crack the tiniest smirk. With one of his own, he waded through the dogs to offer Dominia his right hand. She shook it while trying to decide how humiliated she needed to be for all he’d overheard, then studied that most patient border collie.

  “I thought—”

  “What, that Basil would just disappear forever when I replaced him? No, no. I just got a body. He’s as much a Void-walking, soul-having good boy as any sapient being I’ve ever known. Isn’t he? Isn’t he!” With a few well-placed words and a bend of the magician to ruffle his coat, the noble animal’s stoic demeanor melted into playful puppitude that, inspiring like in its playmates, sent the whole crowd rollicking around the rows of kennels like a great canine sand devil. “He belongs in this world, has always had a body here. That can’t be taken away by the Ergosphere, although time makes it seem so.”

  “What happened to your first body?”

  “Well, we have an error in reality. Imagine what the first Cicero did when he crossed the boundaries between universes the first time.”

  “Hence, your deletion?”

  “But now I’ve been given a new body—thank you,” he added, pressing his hands together in a gracious aside that surprised her. “It means so much to me, I can’t tell you. With this, I’m able to alter the closed system. There also happens to be a lot of traffic in the Ergosphere right now, anyway, which can provoke minor reality fluxes. Like with an electric current running through copper wire—electrostatic force pops one valence electron from a copper atom, and that liberated electron finds another atom, in which case the electron’s negative charge boots out another electron. These days—ever since the time of my liberation, in fact—people have been a lot more in touch with the Ergosphere. That’s our current. People coming, people going; and there’s one electron I don’t need to worry about. Guess who popped out of existence?” Valentinian drew a
circle with his index fingers and Dominia smiled in relief.

  “Tenchi!”

  “Yeah, buddy, you did good work.”

  “What about Gethsemane?”

  To her annoyance, he smiled and said, “We’re talking about Tenchi right now—anyway, he was right to be nervous about taking the blood of Lazarus. Tenchi’s the kind of guy who, once he stumbles into the Kingdom, well…good luck getting him back out. He’s not dead—I see that look on your face. He’s just moved. A living refugee.”

  “If he intended to leave and come back,” Dominia added, “he would have looked a lot older, right?”

  “Generally speaking, but not necessarily. Most people have an inner vision of themselves that isn’t aligned with their external presentation, and that frequently includes age, whether they picture themselves younger, or older…anyway, normally, if both I and Captain Good Boy over there are present at the but creatures without strong inner representation and an excess of emotional desires—an animal, or a primeval or traumatized individual—can be subject to this form of possession. Consider it more like spiritual radio. Of course, try it with somebody who can talk, and they freak out.”

  “So you intercede through animals—unless the goal is to provoke madness.” She needed not think on her Father now. “Is Basil in danger here?”

  “He’ll feel it if he is, and react accordingly. He’s his own man now, for the first time maybe ever. I’ve always been inside of him, dormant, waiting for you. More…sitting with his data in the Ergosphere and watching it, manipulating it. But it’s all the same in the end. Now, after being separated from me and exposed to the Ergosphere on his own, he’s a genius dog, in touch with the ebb and flow of information, and knows when he needs to make himself scarce—and when his favorite person needs some comforting.”

  The General lowered her misting eyes to blink them clear. When at last she could bear the magician’s face, she found it strange to see in physical reality. She had waited for his arrival with great impatience over the past year yet been so busy that she had practically forgotten his appearance, if she could be said to have seen it at all in that in that dreamlike Void. For some unnerving reason, she found as much resemblance to her own blue-eyed, black-haired features as those of Lazarus’s. “I suppose you won’t stay long?” she asked, her tone cool.

  “Yes and no. I mean, again, I’m a busy man. But I can’t leave you hanging when you’re suffering so much, Dominia.”

  She turned away to study the romping dogs. Valentinian went on, “I want to help you.”

  “Do I deserve help, after what I’ve done? What I’ve caused? God—what I’ve done.” She remembered Lavinia’s stump with a shudder and covered her eyes as if to banish the memory from their sight, where it would nonetheless endlessly cycle until its horror was reduced to mere fact. Such a process could take weeks, months, maybe years for something so heavy. Certainly a gross amount of tahgmahrs. A shallow gasp wheezed from Dominia’s lungs. “Don’t I deserve to lose my leg, too? I was responsible for—”

  “Not for that,” said the magician, his tone more gentle than she’d ever heard. “You did some bad things, Dominia, it’s true. So has everybody. But you’re not beyond help; and you’re not beyond change, or goodness. You’re not responsible for what your Father chose to do to Lavinia, or what Cassandra chose to do to herself.”

  “Cassandra—”

  “Was a very troubled woman, no matter what you think you did. Hey.” He leaned into her watering field of vision. She forced herself to look at him, forced her expression to remain as stoic as possible. “Listen to me, okay? Everything you’ve done, everything that’s happened— you can make it right.”

  “And you’ll help me?”

  “Of course. That’s why I’m here. I know you feel lost and lonely and probably more afraid than you ever have in your life, and I’m sorry. Nobody’s telling you anything, and when we do tell you something, it’s almost always bad news. But I’ve got some good news for you. Something to show you.”

  “Everybody’s got something to show me tonight.”

  “But this is a good thing. A really good thing. I’m going to show you why humanity is worth protecting, why staying on the right side of this thing is worth it in the end.”

  “Why I need to lose my leg.”

  “Why it’s all going to work out okay.”

  Lips tight, the General glanced to the window and the bright night outside, which lit Kronborg’s garden via reflection from the bejeweled blanket of snow. “Trust you, huh…well, I don’t know how you expect us to be able to get out of here unnoticed. Can you navigate the Void at night? Even you have to stop and rest.”

  “Well, sure, because it’s creepy as shit. But we don’t need to go through the Void. That’s the wonderful thing about the Kingdom—fairy-land rules.” Dominia was awash with mild surprise as the grinning saint elaborated: “When you’ve eaten food from the Kingdom, you can forever reach the Kingdom directly.”

  “What? How?”

  “Oh, you can reach it any way! It’s not dissimilar to the blood of Lazarus. The truth is that a sufficiently practiced person could enter the Kingdom by contemplating a bottle of water.” From the breast pocket of that new velvet jacket, the magician withdrew his cigarettes (in a snazzy gold case, no less). “I’ve noticed you’ve been returning to Earth using the Word, for instance.”

  “I can’t enter the Ergosphere with it, though. The only reliable method I’ve found for night travel is artificial light, BLP. I can travel by some music, but not much. I think my Father might go by paintings—his dream study’s floor reminds me of Vermeer—but I can’t figure out the method and I don’t have time.”

  “Ah, he knows about forty different ways. That’s the benefit of fooling around for two thousand years! I’d have to write a guidebook to describe them all…everybody’s got their favorite. And you’re right, the Word can only be pronounced by an earthly tongue at a time like the Lady’s transference, which means it’s no bueno for getting to the Void from reality. Anything a mind bound to the three-dimensional brain manages to ‘remember’ is a lesser approximation. That’s why I favor this.” The smiling fellow offered her a cigarette, which she accepted reluctantly.

  “Why do I get the feeling this isn’t even a normal cannabis cigarette?”

  “Oh, buddy.” The magician laughed so that he might have rubbed his hands together, were they not full. “You remember those little cobalt flowers from the Kingdom?” At her visible surprise to find he was able to get them through, he wiggled his eyebrows. “Just because flowers don’t have mouths doesn’t mean they aren’t as much an individual as you, or Cassandra’s diamond. Ableist,” he teased, which got him a much-deserved elbow in the gut.

  “Fella can’t make a joke…anyway, those flowers grow around the Kingdom’s water sources, but they prefer salt water, and tend to die just as soon as you bring them into the real world. Even dead, they know where they came from—it’s stored in the dried cells of their petals. Moreover, they are symbolic here. Another way of thinking of the lost souls of the Void.”

  There was Gethsemane’s ethereal nymph, declaring blandly how many of their pond’s visitors were drowned. So the dead were poured into these flowers; they would be traveling to eternity by the contributions of the lost deceased. Better than traditional cannibalism, she supposed. The magician summed up, “When that energy is released with a little bit of fire or a spark of electricity and inhaled by a Lazarene with the substance of the Kingdom in his body, it points out the nearest door to the Kingdom.”

  “No kidding. And what happens when a non-Lazarene smokes it?”

  Inhaling amid the crackling of the cigarette, which he’d tipped his head to light, the magician laughed. “They get good and fucked up!”

  While Dominia allowed him to light her cigarette, she glanced at Basil. “What about him?”

  “Oh, like I tried to say, animals come and go as they please. I have no idea how it works with them if
I’m not pulling them in or out. I’ve never asked. I assume they’re one with the Ergosphere already anyway, and contact with it—such as when a spirit like myself bonds with them—slips them free of time. What am I, an encyclopedia?”

  “Sort of.”

  The taste of the cigarette was a far cry from the standard sourness of nicotine, though some tobacco had been sprinkled in to cut the offensive flavor of the flower. Its smoke, too, burned like nothing she’d inhaled, and she choked as Valentinian said, “You want to try to hold it in as long as possible…won’t take much.”

  On and on she puffed, feeling anxious as a high schooler toking behind the bleachers. She glanced once, twice, in the direction of the door, and all around for cameras, holo or otherwise. Thank the Lamb, there was no one imminently coming for her. No one who would arrive, anyway, before Valentinian’s attention was drawn toward one of the kennels. “Oh! There it is.”

  Yes, like a magic-eye puzzle. She saw nothing at first, but after one long drag, and after he put his hand into it, she saw that not just one but two kennels became from her perception a door into that marble hotel lobby. Reality around her warped, and she leaned forward into an intense gravity that twisted even the colors of the world, yet her vision’s position remained upright. As if her senses had separated from her physical body. Within the door, the new front desk clerk of the City’s hotel typed at her invisible keyboard with the receiver of a perfectly visible rotary phone jammed between her cheek and shoulder. Dear Miki Soto!

  Dominia was so excited to see her friend, and so altered by the cigarette she’d smoked, that she didn’t even remember running through the doorway. But, ah, what colors! It all seemed brighter on the other side, with the moment of transition on the threshold the brightest of all—even if she only held it in her memory secondhand. As if the explosion of light and vibrancy had been too much for her immediate observation. Behind her, the doorway had vanished as it came, but the General paid it no mind. The bored clerk looked up, did a double take, and promptly dropped her phone.