The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  “I love a happy ending.”

  Farhad chuckled. “That was always my problem! As a boy, I thought, ‘Why didn’t they just stay in the cave! They had to face death anyway. If they had stayed in that cave forever, they never would have died.’”

  Dominia saw where he went with this even as he cleared his throat to say, “I think—perhaps the best thing for your lieutenant is that she remain in that sacred cave. I did not recognize her by the time the magician led her from the E4.”

  That was surely so, but it did not make Gethsemane’s earthly loss any less difficult. In a way, it would have been easier if the human had lost her life in a battle. Instead, Dominia had lost Gethsemane to the magician’s machinations. What was intended for the nymph’s vessel? The General might never know. She had accepted that already, but it stung her to think such a thing when she considered she might have protested.

  All this horrible groping in the dark. She was used to depending on herself; to getting herself and her men out of anything. Lying down—upside down, to be precise—and allowing all these losses to accrue was challenging in and of itself. She couldn’t be sure, but she suspected she’d had at least one seizure while hanging, sometime after Farhad was forced to return to his cell. She had been unconscious and had only realized it when she’d faded back in with an awful headache and the taste of blood in her mouth. Food deprivation seizures didn’t usually start so early into the martyr’s starvation process, but she had a suspicion the stress position worsened it. She’d have to take drastic measures to keep track of her consciousness. The General had begun to fill the time with singing. This humiliated her, so she kept it soft. At least in Nogales she had been able to walk around her cell, or rest. She could talk to Benedict through her cell door during his shift. There was a similarity here, her jailers and friends taking shifts with one another as they were. Her Father came alone at the fourth respite of her ordeal.

  “I was quite impressed by your decision to spend all this time fasting, Dominia. Are you hoping to purify your soul in this process, as you made your last-ditch effort to save mine? Religions worldwide have a proud history of sacrificing food in exchange for higher wisdom.”

  “I want no part in leeching human spirits to feed my own. Willingly given, or no.”

  “You are going to spend the rest of your life refusing to eat when you cannot spend time in the sun? Some things never change.”

  She did not voice her suspicion that the rest of her life was worth, by that point, all of six days. That would encourage him to drop the number to five. Instead, she sternly said, “I’ve seen what it is we really eat.”

  “Sin and fear and doubt.”

  “We fill these people up with fear and doubt. Martyrs do.”

  “Had we nothing to frighten, we could not exist—and fear is not an objectively ugly thing. Fear’s only object is to end its own existence, for when we fear, we are repelled from the object that instills the feeling in us. Fear is a beast that lives only to die, and when it possesses a human being to a point said human conflates themselves with their fear, the result is the kind of fatalism that keeps martyrs well fed.”

  The Hierophant considered the sallow face resting in the crook of his arm, his own features arranged in an expression that was, for once, convincingly genuine. “You look at your life and see only my greatest cruelties. Creating you, and this exhausting sprint on which you’ve forced yourself. These two alleged crimes of mine bookend your existence as if to drain that existence of all meaning—but your life, the life I gave you, has contained much more than this. And it is a life that can go on from this point, if you let it.”

  “And then what? More of this someday, in some other form?” She laughed bitterly—a noise that in this case was more like a low, wheezed “ah-ha”—and was then overcome by a wave of convulsions. Clicking his tongue, the Hierophant cradled her to his shoulder and patted her back. Doting as any parent presented with an ill child.

  “It does not have to be like this. Nothing ever had to be like this, my girl. You chose this.”

  Her eyes shut. “Please, go fuck yourself. That must be why you spend your time with another Cicero, anyway.”

  “I know it upsets you to hear, but you must face the truth.”

  She did not respond. When he was certain she would speak no more that night without his provocation, the Hierophant patiently said, “Now more than ever, I see you are jealous of your brother. But remember: knowing all this trouble would come about, I martyred you just the same. Because I can use you, yes—but wouldn’t it have been a simpler task to martyr and slaughter you right off? I have allowed you to outlive many of your forebears. Only Cicero and the Lamb are older. All the pitiful whelps who preceded you, whose martyring I completed years before your human infancy—they were too base and unworthy in the end to meet my needs. Going on evidence from past iterations, it seems no matter what assortment I select, the results are more or less the same. I, like Goldilocks, am caught between children: this one, too vain; that one, too indolent; the next, too unpredictable. The list of flaws goes on. But you, Dominia—what a good girl you were, always were, for centuries! Your problem has only ever been, in my opinion, Cassandra. Oh, you liked to fuss with me as a small child, loved to argue and debate and scowl and stomp your foot when nothing you could do managed to infuriate me. That was why I frightened you so much, I think. Why I still frighten you now. Because I am calm. Because I know what is going to happen.”

  “How do you know? How do you remember? Did the last Hierophant tell you?”

  “Aside from the protein, and methods of Roman orators lost on a world that prizes smartphones and personal assistants, I find the best means of securing memory is by writing things down while they are fresh. When I reach a new world, the first thing I do is begin a new notebook listing my crucial points—points on which the Lamb’s predictions are, for one reason or another, obscure.”

  “But why go to a new world at all? If this keeps happening again and again, why this consistency of a Cicero moving across the boundaries each time?”

  Merrily, that hateful bastard laughed. “Why, because I have outgrown the old world. You know how tight a leash I keep on you and your sister. Imagine how carefully I confine myself!”

  XII

  La Pittura Infamante

  Oh, for a glimpse into her Father’s mind! Perhaps he had shared with Dominia some hint of that specter that pursued him world to world. If so, she struggled to divine it. To say that Cicero had left the last iteration only because he wanted his own sandbox in which to toddle, well—that was not all there was to it, surely, but good luck getting anything more. It wasn’t worth fighting through his layers of obfuscation. Her energy was better spent elsewhere.

  Things were only bound to get worse from here on out, and that was a horrible thought, because she was already having seizures. Her right foot, bound within the iron manacle in which the leg brace terminated, was now permanently discolored to the shade of cement. The limb had begun to follow suit. And, oh, how tired she was! When she included the time before the dim sum restaurant and her restless half doze upon returning to Kronborg, she had gone something like four, almost five, days without real sleep. Well—she was able to recount one period of sleep she’d grabbed, because when she awoke from it, she found her vision had spontaneously inverted itself. The dizzying effect of perceiving the world as right-side up while the body hung suspended was so overwhelming that she cried out upon perceiving it. Aside from that instance of waking, there was no way to know when she was asleep, or what night it was. She had lost track of even her own consciousness.

  And she had lost track of all time, but she did have to admit the hours, of late, felt shorter than her 333 years already made them. Sixty-minute blocks of time dilated into seconds. Perhaps she slept and was just not aware of it, but it certainly did not feel as such because, ah, how her muscles ached, how her teeth itched, how her body trembled and her stomach seemed it might rupture from its own
acids as they ate into its tissues. A few times in that third day (she tracked any semblance of space-time by chanting in a dreadful mantra the pattern of her visitors, an act that occupied an unpleasant amount of her mind and was also, at times, alarmingly hard to recall), she tried to tamper with the binds about her wrists and received a nasty, high-voltage shock. After she had recovered from that, and her body moved reasonably again, she set about suffering herself (literally, suffering herself) to tangle her bind around her sleeping ankle. By wrapping the tether, again and again, around her leg—an act that caused the dead limb terrible pain and caused Dominia to gnaw on her already bitten tongue—she could draw herself up that loathsome frame custom-built for her torture. At the top of the cross, she found the flexible tether was one solid piece that had been looped through the great metal circle and had been attached somehow inside her ankle’s metal gauntlet; in fact, as she looked, it seemed the tether had been attached at the time of welding. She’d hoped there was something to tear or unhook, or perhaps that in their haste the carpenters had not securely attached the horned cap to the top of the crucifix. Alas, their craftsmanship was sublime, for it had meant their lives. There was no easy way out of this. She was in the careful process of lowering herself back when the doors opened and the General, gritting her teeth, slipped. The nasty fall of the final four feet did not dislocate her leg, but did wrench it and leave her more physically out of sorts than she’d even been before.

  “Didn’t mean to surprise you,” said Lazarus, looking over his shoulder at the shutting doors, then the ladder he almost unconsciously retrieved. “I’d save my strength if I were you…there’s not a lot of good to be done. Not from your position, and certainly not now.”

  In spite of her pain, the endorphins released by her brain at the sight of her friend were on the level of any street drug. “It’s good to see you. And good to see you in one piece.”

  “For now, anyway.” With a wan smile, the tired old man edged the ladder beneath Dominia at a slightly sharper angle than used by the others and, cautiously, backed his way up it, informed by experience that the best way to support Dominia’s body was back to back. She saw what he was going for and urged her weakened muscles to sit up, her burden relieved when she felt the old martyr’s brace. For the first time in days, her body could relax as he continued up in a backward, crab-like fashion. The act left her in the fetal position but at least more upright than before, and like this, she could endure the hot agony of blood rushing through abused ventricles. “You look tired already,” he said.

  “I feel tired already. I’ve been here for nights, after I was busted trying to get a glimpse of the Hierophant’s script.”

  “He’ll do that…writers are so sensitive about showing their work around. You know the truth about Cicero and the Hierophant by now, right?”

  “Top contender in the category of ‘things I wish you would have told me any time over the last year.’”

  “What good would it have done if I had?” He shrugged against her back, his shoulders pushing hers and provoking a sting. “Knowledge is only so much power. Sometimes it’s a catastrophic burden. You can’t fix the past that’s happened, so you can only change the future; and you have to trust you’ll know what you need to know in order to make that change at the right time. Just like everybody else in the world—except your old man, anyway. The Hierophant’s always lived through this before, so he’s always one step ahead.”

  That would mean, in the proverbial Mandelbrot equation of reality, that the Hierophant was the variable under iteration.

  But if Dominia was not a variable, what was she?

  Her mind could not trail after the thought. Eyes closing and brow furrowing in sorrow to lose its thread, the General asked, “Then what are we supposed to do?”

  “Rely on you. Like I said a couple of seconds ago, sweetheart.” He talked to her now as he never had—a gentle grandparent—and it made her body tremble with inexpressible tears because she knew and he knew she was dying. “You’ll know what to do when the time comes.”

  “When I’m dead.”

  He said nothing. She regained her composure and exhaled, inhaled, tried to enjoy breathing while she could. Tried to learn what she could while she could still learn. “I saw Farhad. Did anyone else come with you?”

  “Other than Ted? No. They thought they had the Lady, until the men who had Her realized their terrible mistake. She’s elsewhere now.”

  “Why did they bring Farhad?”

  “He was one of the four beings that emerged from the E4 when it crashed into the Lady’s library in the middle of a very intense standoff.” This aspect matched the report René had mentioned, with the story that had started off as a UFO, then turned into a downed plane. “You can guess who the four were, I’m sure”—Farhad, Theodore, Tenchi, and Saint Valentinian—“and also guess why only two were obtainable.”

  “Because Farhad would have leapt into the fight, Teddy was meant to be caught, Tenchi has other interdimensional fish to fry, and Saint Valentinian’s never around when you need him.”

  Lazarus laughed, lowering his head so as not to bump hers. “You know well as I do that’s not true, but it does feel that way sometimes.”

  Yes, it did. But, he was right. She had needed him more while weeping in that kennel than she had in the entire year spent praying for him. More than she needed him now. Frankly, she didn’t want to see him now. Because the next time she saw him, she suspected he would be acting in that most grim capacity for which the saint was responsible.

  Funny to think of him now in that role. Funny to think she had ever regarded him as fictional. But had he ever been a man? She sensed he was more than man or fiction and probed the sage on this point. “Do you have any memory at all of the magician being your child? Even a dream?”

  “No. Either the magician has stolen those memories on purpose, or he’s lying, or the sacred protein failed to retain its own memories of the initial world because it wasn’t expecting it would have to. Do you have any inkling, any static memory, of what happened in the last iterations? It’s not written in your brain, but for me, it’s backed up in my blood, and my blood rewrites my goddamned memories every time after that first time. Christ, oh, Dominia! Do you know—something like ninety percent of martyrs return to life without anything special about them at all. Of those who do, maybe half of those powers are more impressive than basic parlor tricks. I think Cicero does have a gift—memory—but it pales beside his brother’s abilities.”

  “And they really were brothers in life?”

  “Yes! That’s my point. Their starting genetic codes were just—that close”—she could imagine him holding his fingers a hair apart—“yet the Lamb inherited all he did and Cicero got the ability to remember everybody’s birthday. If my own genetic code was just microscopically different, I always think maybe—”

  “There’d be no saving the world, or a single life. Because there would be no way for us to enter the Ergosphere.”

  Lazarus sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, I know. I guess I just look forward to someday being able to relax, and enjoy a life, or something. Or enjoy being dead! You know, I’ve never been to the Kingdom?” At the General’s shocked noise, the man said, “I’d become a citizen, for sure…but I guess I just never have time. I’m needed here. But someday, Dominia—I’m going to get a sweet slice of eternity. Maybe Trisha and I…well.” He chuckled. “I don’t know what she’d think of me now, with the beard and all, but I’d hope that in eternity I’d have a bit of youthful charm returned to me. It’s the blood, you know. Memory ages you.”

  “That’s why the Hierophant looks so much older than Cicero, but why is he so much larger?”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  “Try me.”

  “Okay. Every iteration is a little smaller than the last.” She did laugh. “It’s true. Ask the magician. He’ll explain it.”

  She might have teased him more, but then she thought about fractals, and how, to find the Ma
ndelbrot set hidden within the edge of the Mandelbrot set when viewing the function as a colored image, one had to zoom into the fractal for an unnerving eternity before finding the miniature duplicate. It only pushed to mind that trail of thought she hadn’t the wherewithal to follow before. “If the magician stole your memories of that first time, Lazarus—”

  “I don’t know that he did.”

  “But if he did, why would he do such a thing? And if it’s not true, why lie about being your son?”

  “Maybe because the weight of the actual truth is too much for us to bear. I don’t know that he’s lying, necessarily. Valentinian does look a lot like me…anyway, I’m pretty sure he’s not evil, per se, but I am pretty sure by now that it’s his fault all of this happens on repeat.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh, yeah. I don’t think the universe was always caught in a loop like this. I don’t think martyrs were always a problem, and I don’t think they will be if we can set the universe in order again.”

  “And you think it’s Valentinian’s fault?”

  “Usually, when a thing like this starts, it’s because somewhere along the line, somebody screwed up, and screwed up bad. You may be responsible for remaking the universe, but where did you get the power for remaking the universe? How do you remake the universe? I’m sure you’ve asked yourself that enough already, so I won’t. But I just mean…I think it’s a bunch of bullshit that the responsibility is on you. If anybody’s responsible, it’s the magician.”