by M F Sullivan
She would never let that happen again. No matter what it took.
More uncountable hours passed, lurching ever closer to that fatal one. The ceremony of her alleged penitence might have been smaller than the hieros gamos of Miki’s ascendance, but it still managed to be, in every way, infinitely more pretentious. That was the way the Hierophant’s ceremonies were. Some people found martyr religious ceremonies to be of exceeding beauty, as much as any Catholic Mass from which they derived nine tenths of their symbolism and habits. Dominia, however, never found them anything but stuffy. If God was anywhere, it was as far away from this bunch of pricks as possible.
Although, in all fairness, the General was so desperate for a change of state that her heart was consumed by joy when Cicero and his priests, accompanied by the silent Lamb, entered the chapel in such flurry of movement that the doors seemed to have burst. The gaggle of godly men spoke loudly about their preparations, as if she were just another decoration.
“Let’s have a dry run, if you all will indulge me.” El Sacerdote strode past Dominia without sparing her so much as a glance. He deposited his sacramentary upon the altar and called, “Positions, lads, our imaginary Introitus is ending.”
Struggling as she was to see through her own eyes, the General had to squint and do some creative reconstruction of the scene to recognize the objects held by the priests. They were not merely censers and books: one was a small dagger made of, or plated with, gold, and one was a bastard sword whose hilt had been encrusted with jewels.
“Now, after our Introitus, I intend for us to open with the Confiteor; then, Deacon Greholda, if you would read from the Gospel of the Lamb…”
But she, thinking of these weapons—in particular that largest weapon, which consumed her attention now as it would later her leg—she could not focus on Cicero’s words. Not until the priest holding the sword got out of her way and allowed her to make eye contact with the Lamb; not until she was able to make out, amid all the underwater audio effects of her near-bursting eardrums, the word “Lazarus.”
At that, the Lamb stepped up to accept the dagger from the priest. There was Cicero in her vision again, miming the space on the floor before the Lamb as if Lazarus knelt for the slaughter. Cicero, still senselessly, ceaselessly talking, strode to take the sword from his compatriot, then turned to demonstrate (in slow motion, with no physical contact) how he would hack off the General’s leg, right there, above (below) her knee. There were distant words to the effect that it would take several blows, so, in the case of excessive thrashing, her bindings would need to remain until the ceremony was over—but it would be in poor taste if the penitent was also electrocuted as consequence of her natural struggles, not to mention of no small consequence to the sword’s bearer. Therefore, the electrical component of her bindings would be deactivated before the ceremony.
“I hope you will not let us down, dear sister,” said Cicero, at last condescending to address her.
She did not condescend to respond. She just made hard eye contact with the Lamb, and chose to pray to him by means of his favorite form of prayer: not thinking at all. Instead, she took it on faith that he was as supportive of her as he had pretended to be all these years.
The Lamb did not look away, nor did he make any move to comfort her, nor give any indication she should expect comfort. All the same, she took strange comfort in his gaze, and allowed this comfort to carry her through to the start of the ceremony. The priests returned in their vestments to open the doors and welcome those few lucky, noble parishioners given the honor of seeing firsthand Dominia’s act of penance. Anywhere from one to five at a time, martyrs made their slow ways in, openly gawking at the nine-day-rank and tortured General. After they averted their eyes from the inevitable glance at her face, they’d cross themselves and genuflect before their entrance into a pew from which they strove to stare at the victim without further eye contact.
Let them look. She didn’t want them to be completely disappointed. Not after all the good money they paid and time they’d wasted and asses they’d kissed to get them to this moment, invited here. At least they would have the pleasure of seeing her strung up, if they weren’t going to witness an amputation.
Hopefully. Hopefully. God, willing. Magician, kind. It was already an encouraging development to hear that her bindings would be grounded. She nursed that sign the way she nursed images of Cassandra. When it was time for the long, drawn-out ceremony to begin, and perfumes of frankincense announced the procession of priests and prisoners—Lazarus, Farhad, and, amusingly, Basil—she was emboldened to see them. Shackles and doom be damned. Her friends were there with her, before these insufferable bastards. Alongside them, she was invulnerable.
And then, to bolster that hope—here came René, looking as shifty as he ever had. Late—disrespectfully and embarrassingly late—wearing Dominia’s jacket, scurrying in after the procession. The doors closed as he snatched a seat in the back with a genuflection so half-assed that the laughter of the General interrupted the Introitus and led to a lot of uncomfortable coughing and shuffling among the parishioners. This was visibly echoed by the aggravated thrash of Cicero’s black eye on his otherwise stoic march to the altar. The cyborgan whipped to Dominia, then to the back of its owner’s head in search of the disruption’s source, before El Sacerdote got it under control.
She wasn’t sure what her alleged brother had expected from her. True penitence? Perhaps the prior Dominia had shown such, and the Hierophant had assured Cicero that this would be the case—but this Dominia was through with every bit of the sorry institution that was the Holy Martyr Church. How annoying that the final hour of her life should involve her in a religious ceremony!
Annoyed as she was at the tail of the pompous introduction, the General felt her teeth might snap in her skull at the force of her grimace. In the hands of one of the priests was not the aspergillum usually used to contain holy water but the globus flask used by Lazarus to collect and transport the waters of the Ergosphere. This, they wasted in sprinkling upon perfectly healthy martyrs, taking it up and down the aisles as was generally done during Easter Mass with so-called holy water. You could get that shit out of wells so long as you had a priest around. To get the Lady’s water, you had to go to a specific well—or a geyser, she supposed it was now—and bring the stuff back to Earth. Pouring it on these tools! It made her chest hurt even with the deity’s blessed pain removal.
Cicero, meanwhile, opened with that rambling confessional prayer he had threatened to use for the occasion, delivered while standing before Dominia so as to stare at her while he rattled off the long list of sins called by name in the longer and more Hierophant-favored variant of the Latin prayer. The worst, most tedious one, in which parishioners agreed with the priest that thrice, through their faults, they had “peccavi per superbiam in multa mea mala iniqua et pessima cogitatione, locutione, pollutione, sugestione, delectatione, consensu, verbo et opere, in periurio, in adulterio, in sacrilegio, omicidio, furtu, falso testimonio, peccavi visu, auditu, gustu, odoratu et tactu, et moribus, vitiis meis malis.”
Blahdiam blahdione blahdoio blahdavis. Modern Mephitolian was identical to Latin in many respects save for a lot of German roots and loanwords, yet in this context the stuff was somehow still dry enough to put her to sleep.
“Sin rots the relationship between the soul and the Lord,” Cicero surmised, the prayer having been completed once the priest carrying the stolen waters halted outside the General’s periphery. “One need look no further than my eye—the eye of your own humble servant of God—to see its effects upon the world. Its effects upon the self, and the selves of one’s fellow man! Dominia’s sin was what took my eye from me, children: but the Lord, in seeing her penance and my suffering, saw fit to provide us with the circumstances for a miracle.”
Now she understood why the Holy Father’s DIOX-I, from his time as Cicero, was undetectable. It was because he had no DIOX-I. Both his eyes were perfectly real. She understood so well—
and was, for her part, so fatigued by horrible tortures and emotional revelations—that she was not the least bit shocked or surprised (as were those many screaming parishioners) when the black DIOX-I of the priest faded into a deactivated state and was, by his own hand, yanked out of its cavern with a scream of victorious agony. After hurling away the bloodied cyborgan, the half-blind priest wrenched the waters from the hands of his lesser assistant. Before the worshipers, Cicero tilted back his head to waste the remainder of the Lady’s water on the restoration of his own eye, rather than the healing of the lame or the curing of disease.
What a surprise. Even less surprising was how, after demonstrating his new, healthy eye to the roaring martyrs who abandoned horror and shouted their praise for the Lord, he resumed his pedantic sermon on the subject of sin as if he had not just committed the most egregious one Dominia could name.
She had sinned against no one this past year, save those people she had been forced to kill in righting her Father’s wrongs. Her sinning—her conscious, intentional sinning, at least—had ended with Cassandra’s death. Though Cicero and her Father loved to pretend they were arbiters of sin, Dominia had learned only she could tell herself what was a sin and what was not. A sin was a crime one committed, ultimately, against oneself. It was not one’s neighbor one truly hurt. Not the families of the murdered or the victims of rape. Not even God was hurt by one’s sin. Rather—each sin, no matter how ignoble the soul, piled against the spirit of the sinner until it boiled out of the body and took the form of physical recompense. Because that was what it took for the truly depraved sinners to cease their sin. It took arrest, or execution, or, in Dominia’s case, the loss of the one thing that ever gave them any scrap of joy.
René’s face appeared intermittently as he leaned from time to time around the oversize hat of the woman before him. Dominia thought of his summation that happiness was a field—and then, she was forced to wonder whether Cassandra had ever really given her any joy. Was joy but a chemical reaction? A state temporary as any other? Was the entropic world too cruel a place to sustain the feeling long-term?
She didn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe it. Happiness was possible. Cassandra was possible. The end to all of this was possible. Across Elsinore, Lavinia recited lines that drew them ever-closer to the boring play’s surreptitiously deadly climax—yet such a thought arose with relief in the General. The end to all this lingered so close as to be surreal. Once more, she fell out of the body that she had not felt since the Lady’s visit one day prior. Once more, she observed herself from outside. She stood just within the shut chapel doors while, across the room, the chanting priests arranged their prisoners. Here was Cicero, accepting the sword. There was Lazarus, forced to kneel before the Lamb as El Sacerdote called to his worshipers, “This moment is the moment for which all our ceremonies have been mere preparation. The blood of the Lamb, mere metaphor for the forgiveness of the Lord, is the means by which we wash away the sins of this world—but with the Holy Father’s guidance, the blood of Lazarus is the way we higher men will open ourselves to the next.” Here was the Lamb, being handed the knife. That was Cicero, brandishing the sword. The bite of its metal edge should have chilled Dominia’s physical thigh.
“Sin is a dead limb that weighs us down,” summarized the maggot to her Father’s botfly.
Unwilling to wait a second longer, cagey René Ichigawa stumbled up from his aisle seat with Dominia’s gun in his hand. How funny. Poet, professor, political dissident: ultimately, history would mark René as an assassin. Too soon for anyone to notice and too far from anyone who could stop him, he tripped to the exact spot where stood the General’s phantom and clumsily fired her old weapon at the second Cicero said, “Luckily for you, my sister: belief is a sword.”
In their analysis of what happened that night in Kronborg’s chapel, those brooding historians would be forced to come to one conclusion: the murder of the Lamb and the freeing of the General Dominia di Mephitoli (therefore all the events of the night that led to her permanent disappearance, the death of the Hierophant, and the final destruction of the Holy Family’s vile institution), was initiated by one highly improbable bullet trajectory, and one very coincidental power outage. The rest was a mess of conspiracy, paranoia, and implications that were downright magical.
Certain basic facts were agreed upon. The Lamb, who had noted sway over probabilistic outcomes, saw the shot being fired—and, more importantly, had seen it was fired at Cicero. He, along with two other priests, moved to cover his brother; only he was fast enough to get between El Sacerdote and the would-be assassin. Not that he needed to, or should have. René’s bullet—the single bullet remaining in the gun returned to the General by means the textbooks could not comprehend—ricocheted off one of the metal horns of the Lamb, snapped the tether hanging the General from her crucifix, then ricocheted once more—this time, off the metal cap of the crucifix, which altered the trajectory enough to allow the projectile to bury itself in the Lamb’s brain.
It was also a fact—mere coincidence, most impressed—that Kronborg Castle’s power died along with the Lamb. Elsewhere in those frigid walls, security PCs lost their connection to the prisoner’s cuffs, and the remote-controlled devices, already grounded, sagged open around the wrists of the prisoner, Dominia di Mepitholi.
The speed with which all those events occurred could not be communicated by any historian, no matter their effort. Women screamed; the General fell; Cicero uttered for the first time in two thousand years a noise that Dominia’s spirit interpreted as a cry of horror the instant before impact with the cold tile floor returned her to her flesh.
“My brother,” El Sacerdote screamed as worshipers poured through the doors. “My brother, oh, Elijah! No, no, oh—that lying bastard!”
Her leg was beyond saving; though, perhaps thanks to the Lady’s water across the floor, or her first chance to be upright in over a week, the General felt better than she had in days—even if her heart ached to see the death of a Family member who had treated her with a decency not found in any iteration of Cicero.
There was no time to mourn. The rattle of chains muted the sounds of chaos as Lazarus bent over her, hastily seeking to keep her awake and slip her hands from the parted cuffs.
“You’ll be okay,” swore the mystic, not able to move his hands within a particularly wide range, but able to touch her face well enough. “You’ve got it from here, kiddo.”
There was no time to ask. Not even time to cry out. Her friend’s face changed; his body slumped. Cicero withdrew the sword he’d plunged into Lazarus’s back and fluid streamed after it. Not blood. Not that good, sacred blood that saved so many souls, human and martyr alike. No: in a strange miracle she could not then explain, her friend’s fatal wound wept water.
Without giving in to amazement or redemption or the urge to make some gloating speech, Cicero nudged the mystic aside. The priest plunged the blade between Dominia’s ribs.
Steel pierced her heart.
XIV
Anamnesis
For several seconds, the General could not place the nature of the silence where she stood. It was not the silence of the Ergosphere, nor of any other thing she recognized. Why, she could not even well remember where she had just been. She only knew that, like a sleepwalker on waking, she found herself upright, on two good legs, with darkness all around—except a disembodied row of ghostly faces that floated before her.
She could not recognize the silence until a white moth flitted past her eye. With its help, she pieced together where her spirit stood: visible in this moment of her death in what was, truly, a miracle. Upon the Elizabethan stage, the manifestation of Dominia turned to see Lavinia. Too astonished to pretend she gave a fig for the show she was in, the princess stumbled forward a step.
“Ninny,” she whispered, while the Hierophant pressed, “Say your line.”
As quickly as she had appeared in the spotlight, the General disappeared into the more familiar silence of the Void and
left in her place the seventh avatar of the Lady, who raked Her steely gaze across the crowd. This information did not come to Dominia by any brand of firsthand sensory experience, for she was not there to see the Lady’s body flicker into her empty place. Rather, she felt the abstract knowledge as if by some organ she could not place. She could hardly place herself! Again, again, again, she was consumed by the piecing of the sword through her flesh and against the muscle of her heart. Again, again, again. As if that was all she’d ever been: pain, burning pain. And failure. The darkness around her replayed it with detail so cruel that the nothing that was once Dominia was forced to remember that moment again, the way memory cycled through the tail end of a terrifying tahgmahr even when one was clearly awake, safe, in bed. Lazarus’s face, then Cicero’s. Then, the point of the blade. As bad a dream as any.
Dominia had suffered many tahgmahrs as a girl, waking often to the sound of her own screams. While she remained a child, on the instances the Lamb was home for these terrors he would arrive to comfort her almost before she was awake—but as a teenager, or during his many transcontinental trips with Cicero, she had been forced to learn how to rationalize, on waking in a cold sweat, why the images that caused her to shake were false, and now absent. Then, as now, she felt deeply alone; but then, as now, that feeling resolved itself into her own sense of space and bodily security. Dreams of being kidnapped from her parents and murdered by the Hierophant resolved into the truer, parallel reality; dreams of her own failure and murder by Cicero resolved into much the same. To have died, she needed to have been alive. And to observe her own death after the fact, she had to have some basis from which to do it. Therefore, she could not be dead in an eternal sense. Therefore, even after death, her soul was swiftly derived from the darkness of the Void and the trembling of her trauma.
There was now a certain comfort in the Ergosphere’s dark night. The absence that it marked was not the absence of Dominia. Thanks to experience during her life using the blood of Lazarus, any postmortem confusion about her Self had been brief as she’d been promised. She perceived her thoughtbody as she always had—and, though she stood in the dark with no so-called black sun of Earth’s stolen light hanging above to illuminate her path, she did not feel at any more risk of disappearance than she might have in reality. Yet there were still risks. Still traps. And the simplest trap of all was walking anywhere.
