The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  In a manner of speaking. What was Dominia to begin with? Light bouncing off a pile of flesh. Thinking flesh, thinking with light. That ultimate carrier of information! The true messenger! Fleet-footed Mercury. Dominia was that same immutable no-thing substance, this quintessence of dust like all these men who fell out of existence beneath her many hands and into the Void where she now had no shame for sending them. In this state, she had not made them. But she had triggered their existence, their exit from the Kingdom, and she would trigger their replacement within it. It was not acceptable, their deaths at her hands, but it was a fact. It was part of their duty, to die here, in this place, beneath the weapons of the eight warrior selves—yes, even that Rubenesque first avatar—who had, in alternative fashion, already laid down their lives for their duty.

  And die, they did. Quick deaths. Those who made the mistake of attacking the Ladies died by their own inflicted wounds, but those who were attacked for their refusal to flee through the open doors (as many wiser soldiers did) did not die, so much as un-exist.

  Dominia, herself, pushed aside the guns of the men around Theodore and laid a hand upon one’s helmet; his comrades watched him shut off like an unplugged computer and threw down their weapons to dash away.

  “Twelve separate teams are working to clear this building,” said Dominia to her astonished, too high, and visibly frightened brother. “All of them are looking for you. When they find you, make sure they know you’re still a part of the Family.”

  The fray dying down, the Ladies assembled themselves around their master. “But what about you?”

  “When you see me again, Theodore”—her many bodies refolded around hers to form her once more into that spirit called the Lady—don’t breathe a word of what you’ve seen.

  As the Lady disappeared to attend to the welfare of her former self, Teddy cried for her to wait. But there was no waiting: was no time. Once, in that year of Jerusalem’s plight, Lazarus had chided the Lady: “The sooner all this is over, the better. I’m tired of watching you push yourself around.”

  Well, now the end had come. Now the master and servant were one. Now, Valentinian arrived with the Lady through the dark of space-time upon the dark of the stage where once Dominia’s postmortem phantom stood, displaced from its dying body. The gasps of the audience, once stunned by the General, were deeper now to see the stranger. Toward the artificial storm clouds of the downpour induced for the Hierophant’s play, the Lady lifted her head.

  Once, the rain in California seemed so strange. But rain in Denmark’s December, Cicero? Far stranger, still. You’ve always had a penchant for the unnatural.

  XVIII

  Function Composition

  Few good things could be said of the Hierophant, especially after his death: but while he was alive, no one could accuse him of wasting time. The mocking goddess had not finished her sentence when the so-called Holy Father had turned to rip one of the (very real) halberds from the set’s wall—or that was his intent when he found himself nose to nose with Valentinian.

  “Going so soon? You can’t leave before my magic trick! It’s like sneaking out of Mass after Communion.”

  “So you’ve conned your way into a body.” The Hierophant’s tone was too dark to maintain its usual notes of condescending merriment. “Good. I’ll take great pleasure in tearing it from you.”

  “Very funny you should say that.” The magician flickered out of the path of a punch and appeared on the Hierophant’s other side, much to the dismay of the crowd. “I’ve got a little treat for you tonight—and your audience! Consider this your delayed…well, it’s not a green show, since we’re in winter and all. But it’s something! Really something. Maybe you knew the Hunters have teleportation technology, but did you know that you don’t have to go to all that trouble if you’ve got a guy like me, and enough of the organic medium to go around?”

  Above their heads, atmosphere-altering rockets burst, releasing instantaneously condensing vapors that, by virtue of convective effects and Elsinore’s frigid air, grew to a localized supercell storm intended for mere show. Once upon a time, the rockets were used for restoring the land around bombed-out Moscow, or assisting in the Martian terraformation. Now, such things were relegated to toys, and their vapors sat, unchecked, for some time before the performance. Those that were checked had been found to contain H2O, and were in perfect working order. Untampered. Normal. Yet, to the shock of the audience members (to say nothing of the technicians responsible for the rockets), when the first beads of condensed fluid dropped from the tops of the artificial clouds and upon the high-paying patrons, it was not water that dotted their cheeks, their heads, their expensive lab-grown furs.

  It was blood.

  This was another in a series of events over which historians would prefer to gloss until science could offer a less embarrassing explanation than the evidence implied. Straightlaced scholars couldn’t get any of this stuff to make sense. Eventually, the conclusion would be reached that the events of The Curse of Bathsheba were related to the mass hysteria of Lavinia’s abilities; and Lavinia, long after her disappearance at the ripe old age of 789, would someday be considered part of a group of treacherous martyrs who wished to overthrow the founding Hierophant. No one would have dared say such a thing while she walked the Earth, certainly, but that meant nearly eight hundred years of button-down society’s uncomfortable acceptance that the happenings of New Year’s Eve 4044/1999 were, in fact, true and physical occurrences that had been recorded on camera.

  And uncomfortable it was. For who in the material world could be fully comfortable with the notions of literal blood rain, levitation, divine transfigurations, and mass resurrection? The eventual explanation, long after martyrs were forgotten on Earth, would be this: the rain was traditional blood rain of the sort caused by microalgae (blame those lazy rocket technicians for letting its spores creep into the tightly sealed cylinders); and that the theater of Elisnore just happened to be the epicenter of a freak hurricane/earthquake/tsunami combination thanks to the cold winter winds, the low-hanging moon, the unnatural thunderclouds.

  Were these grasping explanations not more spurious than the simple truth?

  At the time, there was no arguing with experience. While a few martyrs in the audience tasted the ruby droplets and a murmur of astonishment rose above the storm’s initial patters, Valentinian moved his hands in time with the continuing notes of the oblivious orchestra pit. “There’s about, oh, a gallon and a half of blood in a person’s body. Doesn’t seem like all that much, but if you could organize every drop of that into a line, can you imagine how long it would be? You could make quite a circle! And any size circle of the blood of Lazarus, charged with sufficient electricity, will conduct the high frequency and produce a reality disruption.”

  The storm clouds thrashed like a coach of foaming horses, and its unnatural size grew beyond the scope of the atmospheric rockets. As the blood rain thickened, its droplets, and the clouds from which it issued, began a broad rotation above the open mouth of the Elizabethan theater. Tired of waiting for his situation to worsen, the Hierophant blinked out of existence—and back into it, close enough to the halberds for him to tear one off the set. The Lady watched while the magician went on. “Theoretically, with enough of the blood of Lazarus, you could turn the entire world into a reality disruption. A superposition of reality and unreality. But, then, I guess that’d just be the Void.”

  Lightning struck the waves of the ocean outside the theater. While the audience cried out amid the rolling of immediate thunder and the vanishing of the red waistcoated Saint of Death, the Hierophant advanced on the Lady. Another bolt struck nearer to the building.

  “Very kind of you to present yourself for the slaughter,” said the Hierophant. “The way you insist on hiding from me, I always begin to think I’ll never get the chance to see you face-to-face.”

  We have already died once tonight, Cicero: We will not die a second time.

  “If that friend of
yours wasn’t so busy with parlor tricks”—the Hierophant winked back out of existence to another symphony of stunned gasps, then appeared all of a meter before the Lady in the same instant static’s bright feelers crackled from her head—“perhaps that would be true.”

  The halberd swung; lightning struck the Lady; Lavinia cried out as light exploded across the stage and blinded the nocturnal audience members who covered their eyes as one shouting body. Three claps of thunder rocked the world during the spell of blindness; two more lightning bolts hit the stage. When the martyrs’ vision cleared, some looked up to see the cyclone of blood had expanded to the theater’s circumference, and now twisted in an uncanny ring that vibrated with electricity from the strikes.

  Most of the audience members, however, saw only that which the great tear in the fabric of reality allowed them to see. These undistracted many, upon renewal of their vision, discovered what happened when lightning discharged itself within the ground of the avatar. The body that had once belonged to Miki Soto, struck by the bolt that sparked that reality distortion, had been transfigured. The eighth Lady, Dominia di Mephitoli, stood restored before the Hierophant in a glorified body incapable of experiencing the agonies that beset the material form, her unpatched right eye a black Void that absorbed all information-bearing light it crossed. The two-dimensional tear in space-time that had emanated from Miki’s body—that same that had once expanded out of Trisha’s, and left a dog named Basil a saint named Valentinian—lapped like fire as far as shell-shocked Lavinia before it receded into Dominia’s dark socket. The General released the halberd that she had stopped with her hand, pushing it aside like a child’s toy to speak into her palm the True Word that men meant when they said “halberd.” In that vast half-real arena produced by the electrified tornado of Lazarene blood, this Word manifested upon the Earth the highest form of the Hierophant’s chosen weapon. Sharp as it was, the instrument sang to be held by Dominia.

  “Magnificent,” breathed the Holy Father, even as he backed out of range. At the same time, Lavinia lifted her hands. Her eyes, already wild, grew wilder each second. The Hierophant continued, “How I have longed to see this transformation again. O Lady! What sublime nature radiates from your true form.”

  “Cut the pedantic bullshit. I already remember; there’s never been any Hierophant but you.”

  How could there be? He was too selfish to allow himself to die in any iteration, or to allow Cicero’s potential to exceed his own. Why, what if a younger Cicero were a better Cicero than he? Couldn’t risk that. He was the evil queen and the hunter all in one, letting his old self forever suffer the pain of his brother’s death while leading him to believe that it wouldn’t happen this time. No wonder Cicero hated Dominia so much! Her whole life, the Hierophant had been whispering in his ear insidious advice: that in his time, Dominia was responsible for Elijah’s death, so they had to keep her in line. Any plan he would present to Cicero would seem foolproof.

  But El Sacerdote was too in love with himself to recognize even he couldn’t trust Cicero. Now there was a hell of a thought.

  “Pedantic or no, you cannot imagine how I have waited for this moment. How I always wait for this moment. My fairest daughter! What a wonder you are, my pride.” Barely, he ducked a swipe of the polearm, and laughed as he sprang back up. “But I think you shall find, even in your holy state, we are well matched—and your magician seems to have gone.”

  Yes: per usual, Valentinian (her good-for-nothing son, she understood, much as Lazarus’s—wow, weird thought!) skedaddled when things got hotter than room temperature. Dominia didn’t care. He’d done his job. His portal encompassed the walls of the theater and rendered everything up to the impassible doors that state of half Void, half reality that had allowed the True form of the halberd to be birthed in a physical way. The bloody mass was a great scab in the physical dimensions—everything beneath which, not fully formed, allowed glimpses of the black hole. Everything there was malleable. Perhaps this was how the magician saw reality all the time. For Dominia, the states of existence and nonexistence had become two concurrent levels of consciousness while within her avatars. For the magician, they were a perfect blend.

  And the blend was also perfect for everyone in the portal who knew not what they saw. Therefore perfect, and confusing. Perfect, and terrifying. Martyrs who had begun to crowd the doors in a futile attempt to leave found themselves facing no door at all. Instead a vast, black wall. Others spoke to their neighbors in a rising symphony of fright. Still others began to pray—but there was one martyr who was not so disturbed. While Lavinia, awestruck, removed her gloves, Dominia said to her Father, “I don’t need the magician to perform miracles, and I don’t need the magician to kick in your teeth.”

  “What’s the difference?” With a smug smile, he took another cautious step away with his halberd between them. “It will take a miracle to defeat me, my girl. And it will take a miracle to defeat all these people.”

  “I won’t have to. They’ll understand whose side they’re really on.”

  “And how will you do that, Dominia?” That smile transformed into a mocking sneer. With his polearm, he gestured to the frigid water lapping between the audience and the stage. “Multiply the fish of the ocean? I’ve already done that with science, child. So perhaps you’ll walk on water for us, instead! Go on, let’s see it: this is a show, after all.”

  “My hands,” Lavinia breathed, as somebody in the audience screamed, “We should be killing that traitor!”

  “Yeah,” shouted somebody else, while Dominia’s lost daughter, who had begun weeping, cried out, “My hands!” and yanked the petticoats of her dress so high up her thighs that the crowd murmured for a different reason: disapproval Lavinia didn’t, couldn’t register. “Oh, my legs—my legs are real! Ninny!”

  With a nod her way, Dominia said, “I’ve already produced a miracle by righting one of your foul wrongs—but if you want to see another, then, fine.”

  Her eyes never leaving those of her Father, Dominia took one step back, to the absolute edge of the stage. There, she dipped the tip of her platonic weapon into the lapping waves. Once more, part of the following occurrence could be attributed to the blood rain, but anyone who was there knew for the rest of their lives there was so much more to the story than that. The Void-tainted salt water allowed to wash in and out of the theater turned red. Had a curious martyr tasted it, he might have confirmed what his sense of smell indicated.

  “Water to wine?” The Hierophant laughed; Dominia did not.

  “Wine is nothing more than the blood—the spirits—of grapes.” The sumptuous mulberry fluid took a mahogany hue all the darker as its substance grew sticky and dense. Fermented grapes’ bitter announcement relented to the mouthwatering tang of coppery human blood. “It is the end of life for the grape, yet the existence of wine implies grapes; grapes cannot physically be derived from wine, but information about them can be. And information is all that matters here, in this half place.”

  The thick blood changed once more. Another step in a strange alchemical process that had simultaneously horrified and entranced the audience. Now, someone did try it, and said, “I know that taste—amniotic fluid.”

  The Hierophant, the notes of his laughter uncharacteristically tight, said, “My, my, all this has never happened before. How will this magic trick end?”

  “You know what happens when they saw a Lady in half. She walks back out in one piece.”

  Lightning struck the crown of Dominia’s head, and the thunder was nearly drowned by the collective scream of the audience—half for fear, and half for delight. The martyrs did not understand that a mass of consciousness had struck the Earth, and, through the Lady, was channeled down into the amniotic fluid in a flow of information-bearing photons and electrons. There, this consciousness bound with the salt enriching the formerly oceanic fluid, and a strange miracle occurred. Vision returned to the eyes of the light-blinded martyrs to reveal the General miraculously intact. Silen
ce resounded through the rows and the stunned audience observed as she shifted her weapon to her left hand, then knelt, at last removing her eyes from her Father to reach her free hand toward the water.

  Five seconds passed. With a splash loud as a gunshot, a hand burst from those waves. Dominia gripped the attached forearm to haul Kahlil, gasping and laughing, from the womb of the transfigured ocean.

  “My girl,” marveled the Hierophant. The crowd once more screamed in shared horror: all around the stage, hands leapt from the waves, seeking purchase to haul their once-deceased owners from the watery trough. “What a triumph you are.”

  “What is all this, Ninny?” Lavinia, her face aglow, began to step forward, but Dominia pointed the weapon in her direction.

  “No, Lavinia. Don’t come near him.” She jerked her head at the Hierophant. “He won’t hesitate to hurt you to get away. He’s done it many times before.”

  He clucked in distaste. “Putting such thoughts into my daughter’s head.”

  “My daughter. Cassandra’s. I am so sorry, Lavinia, for everything I let him do to you.” The General brandished the fauchard whose decorated pole resembled an elaboration of the sword of her demise. “But he’ll never have an opportunity to hurt you, or anyone, again. Cicero is dead.”

  Those few members of the audience privileged to hear this emitted piteous wails, but they were few indeed; most roared with desperation to find an exit, for they found themselves confronted with a growing number of resurrected humans who stayed by the water’s edge to help their comrades out. The Hierophant laughed and sprang for the stairs leading to the set’s balcony. “And so is the Lamb. You expect me to be heartbroken? He’s hardly the first Cicero you’ve killed, my girl. I can’t count by now how many I’ve seen you do in!”

  Before she jetted after him, she took up Kahlil’s hand. “I’m sorry I let you die, my friend.”