The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  “I was going to someday anyway, right?” He laughed and looked down at his shrugging arms. “Let’s say we’re even now.”

  With a reassured nod, the Lady launched her pursuit. Some bold (stupid) martyrs, crying, “Papa, Papa,” tried to fight their way through the humans to make it to the stage, but these were no ordinary mortals. The resurrected human bodies were glorified as that of the Lady, greater in speed and strength than those finest Olympic athletes and cured of worldly ills. In a contest of endurance, strength, or any other trait that could be named (including moral and mental qualities), reembodied humans were superior to martyrs in every way. The martyr cause was hopeless to break through the human defense, which was occasionally a bit more than defensive. Dominia noticed Tobias Akachi taking a little too much pleasure in giving a martyr a crack over the skull with one thick fist. She waved the polearm at him as she dashed up the balcony stairs in pursuit of her Father. “Don’t have too much fun down there!”

  “What is the point of resurrection, General, if a man cannot have a bit of fun!”

  In one great leap, Dominia lifted through the air above the remaining coil of stairs as if the law of gravity no longer applied, then settled upon the rail. The Hierophant, ever tickled by the divine, managed the word, “Wonderful,” before he made the first strike.

  The Lady had fought a great many battles as the General, but never had she fought one with an opponent so formidable—or with her own consciousness is such a hyper-powerful state, expanding through all time, all directions, as it did. It was as though she saw his motions just before they were enacted by his muscles. Each of his intended blows were met with the pristine snaps of her scythe’s blade against its inferior offender. The ease with which she parried blow after blow appeared to delight him, which annoyed her, and she sprang forward as he lashed out again. Her parry pinned the head of his weapon to the balcony floor and pushed it from his hands.

  The lesser weapon clattered through the rails and to the stage below. With a noise of displeasure, he danced away, his own form so impossibly agile that the Lady could only assume, knowing now what she knew of herself and his journey through increasingly small iterations, that he had undergone a similar glorification process in his many transferences between worlds. Had she been in better humor, perhaps she would have appreciated the artistry of his battle as much as he admired hers, but she was, suffice to say, in no mood. Particularly not when he used a suspended sandbag intended for some special effect in Act V to swing from the platform and into the audience, cackling as he landed amid a bunch of martyrs. Those who didn’t run away threw themselves down to soften his landing with pitiful cries like, “Father, oh, Papa, I have you!”

  “Will you hide amid your martyrs, coward?” She might have found some grain of humor in that if she hadn’t immediately noticed that martyr who stumbled through his row in far greater terror than his peers, knowing himself the Hierophant’s target: Theodore.

  “Theo,” Lavinia screamed. The Lady flew as quick as the speed of thought into the Hierophant’s path, eternally quicker for the purity of her ascension than he could ever hope to be in his profane acquisitions of divine power.

  “I cannot imagine why my martyrs exist, if not to serve my pleasures.” Ducking a sweep of the Lady’s polearm, the Hierophant melted fully into the Void, and Dominia bared her teeth, having no choice but to follow him.

  There he was, not feet before her, running in the direction not of Theodore but of the swirling portal that had opened with her bodily death. The next iteration—his next trap. The otherworldly window yawned like a cerulean-lined chasm in the middle of the Void, the only light in a place that stole all mortal illuminations. On the other side would be a new Void with that eight-mouthed fountain: the indicator of a fresh world. She sprinted after him, close to his heels when he made a sharp right into existence to appear in the aisle between the rows Q and R. “I always like to snap a few necks on my way out,” said the Hierophant, his words breathless with the speed of the fight but carefree as they’d ever been. “Fifty million UF dollars and a royal title for the martyr who catches and kills either one of my treasonous children—Theodore or Dominia. Who wants to be a duke?”

  The answer to that, apparently, was “everyone.” At least, everyone who wasn’t already losing a fistfight with some humans, or who hadn’t been navigating the vomitorium’s back entrance to the dressing rooms to reach a stage where they just now arrived. While the number of the resurrected continued to grow, those unoccupied martyrs, women and men alike, fine theater shoes and opera jackets be damned, began an ill-advised scramble for Theodore—mere distraction. The Hierophant had no more business with or grudge against Theodore than had an elephant for a solitary ant squashed on the way to the watering hole. His Holiness winked out of existence, and Dominia, annoyed, observed the people around her and flipped her fauchard backward to knock them out with the solid jeweled end.

  By means of this scepter, she rather humiliatingly but harmlessly dispatched those few (seven or eight) foes stupid enough to think they could fight the General even pre-glorification. As she knocked out the first two, the Hierophant appeared in the corner of her light-hungry right eye in the distance of the stage where Lavinia had been fighting to acquire the attention of a cameraman—a new experience for her, no doubt, and an effort halted by the Hierophant’s arrival. His posture, hands upon her face and body a shadow stooped over hers, was as cloying as it was intimidating, and the Lady hastily struck a young woman in a rich evergreen dress and abundant carrot wig with such force that she somersaulted backward over row DD and slammed into the encroaching Bosnian fellow so that he, too, went “ass over teakettle,” as Cassandra had sometimes said.

  Lavinia’s body language was one of helplessness as the Hierophant tried to seduce her into doing something she no longer had the will to do. Her new hands—her hands—lifted and spread and sometimes patted her Father’s shoulders in visible plea while he pressed, and pressed, and pressed, refusing to let the girl’s face stray from his, refusing to let her look off into the crowd where Theodore fought for his life amid sometimes savage and often infighting martyrs. Fine gold pocket smartwatches went flying; elaborate weaves were torn from shrieking heads; a high-heeled shoe sailed so close to the Lady’s skull that she shimmered up to the stage simply to avoid it, banking on the martyrs’ selfish wish to lay claim to the Hierophant’s promised title themselves. With their inability to work as a unit, Theodore would be fine until the humans who tried to save him had a chance to fight through to him. Fine for as long as it took Dominia to herd the Hierophant away from Lavinia and toward—what?

  What was a better target?

  “The Lamb is dead,” the Lady repeated. Lavinia’s terrified eyes landed on her speaking sister, who appeared a few paces behind her Father and only moved as much as it took to turn her polearm the right way around. “That was what sent you fleeing the first time, wasn’t it? That first time…it was the most like this last time, except for this between you and me. Your brother’s death was why you did any of this at all, finding another world. You wanted to be with him forever.”

  “We wage a war with death,” said the Hierophant, clutching Lavinia to his breast, her yelping form between himself and the disgusted Lady. “Every man does; it is life’s nature, its sordid struggle.”

  “You say you fight death, but you’ve brought it for so many. All these.” She waved to the mass of humans who by now had grown to outnumber their martyr foes, and who had begun to fill seats to make room. “And you would bring it, still, for so many more. Even Lavinia.”

  “You hear that, my girl?” He lifted his eyebrows at his youngest daughter in a mime of concern. “She would run you through to get to me. These people infected by human religion, by pagan faith—they have no value for life. Not like I do. Don’t you want to save the lives of martyrs, Lavinia?”

  “Yes,” said the girl, “but—”

  “If you do not set things into motion, martyrs wil
l never be the dominant species. We will never survive our journey to the stars, never lay a lasting print upon the universe the way mankind has and will and eternally shall. We will all die like famished seedlings, all the people you have ever known and loved—even me.”

  “But what about Theodore?”

  Lavinia’s question earned a noise of displeasure from the Holy Father. The Lady winked into the space behind him and forced him to relinquish his hold on the girl so he could flee into the Void. Dominia’s feet found earth in time to hear a foreign martyr cry out, “Why, that’s my sister,” and she could feel the conflict beginning to give way to reunion.

  “Are you all right?” The former General reached for Lavinia’s shoulder just to be subjected to the sting of her jerking away. “Did he hurt you?”

  “No. But I—” The wound was too new, and the Lady recognized that after a lifetime of lies, Lavinia needed time to heal. More time than Dominia had left to spend in the world. With a sharp breath and a bat of wet eyes, she nodded at the girl’s single request: “Please—save Theodore.”

  The Lady flitted out of existence and into the Void, where she realized that either she had exceedingly little sense of the actual physical location of the portal, or that, unobserved, it had moved. The latter instance seemed more likely. It now yawned far off in the distance, more detectable by sound than by sight, for it was the most uncannily two-dimensional thing the five-dimensional-plus mind was capable of experiencing and was not fully apparent when one was level with its surface. Not until one was practically within it: then, the portal was very much apparent, a Grand Canyon that opened to a vision of another, distant Earth and its like Ergosphere—that beautiful planet, swirling far past Mercury and Venus, that vision of the cosmos from the perspective of Sol’s beating heart.

  She could not let him escape to another iteration, nor could she let him continue to sully this one. Her uncanny haste tripled in the Ergosphere, the General sought to clutch the suit jacket of her fleeing Father only to find herself grabbed by an assortment of rotten gray arms. Malformed and hastily implemented thoughtforms sprang from the naked ground to pin her down. A gap cleft the space between them, and he called, “This place is so boring without some imagination! Then again, you never were creative in anything other than military matters. Let me show you my Ergosphere, Dominia.”

  The cleft had emerged because the very substance of the Void shaped itself into a set of gargantuan gears. As if the makings of his clockwork universe had poured out of his tar-black soul and into the Ergosphere. Though she tore herself free and leapt from cog to cog in instinctive pursuit, she knew she need not: she was the ground, the very ground that was those arms, and they withered and died even as they gripped her legs. She was those very cogs, too, that reversed and sent him hurling back toward her. Her pursuit not hampered to his liking, the Hierophant again vanished into reality and forced Dominia to beat instant retreat—not to her starting position, but to the position of poor Theodore in the midst of his own chaos.

  Del Medico had some serious problems. He’d lost his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, though one was already torn at the shoulder and he sported a swiftly swelling shiner in addition to bruises on hands raised in an unfortunate fighting style only identifiable as “fisticuffs.” With these, the former doctor failed to defend himself against those few members of the crowd who valued worldly goods in a failing society over the opportunity to reunite with their human loved ones—which an increasingly large number of martyrs seemed to be choosing. A good thing the selfish ones were so few: this small handful of assailants had evidently decided they could kill Teddy together and sort out the victor later. Having momentarily lost track of the Hierophant, Dominia set to work at the task of fighting her way to Theodore, a process that seemed slow to treacherous extent: particularly when her attention finally did fix to the distant sight of her Father disemboweling the unfortunate cameraman who had, during the Lady’s time in the Void, obeyed Lavinia’s pleas to film her.

  “My fragile girl,” he cried, “my dove, my favorite child not myself—how I tried to save you from this world!” He shook the chunks of liver from his fingers and advanced on his youngest daughter. As she cried out, Lavinia’s dart away was blocked by the on-stage martyrs. His Holiness continued his standard guilt trip—and his relentless approach across that massive stage—without missing a beat. “But you wouldn’t accept it any more than would your sister. Now look where we are! Are your arms and legs worth this? Is liberty not too highly priced?”

  After sending a fat gray-haired fellow in a bloodied tuxedo toppling with the gold staff’s slam to his groin, Dominia forced her way past a couple of loudly fighting (former) lovers—one martyr and the other resurrected, spurned and eaten—then knocked a toothy young woman off of Teddy’s arm.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, which she regretted when he began to whine. She cut him off by asking, “Can you get into the Void?”

  “I have no idea how to get in and out of that place on my own. Are you kidding? Now’s not the time for this.”

  Fighting back Dominia’s understandable annoyance, the Lady asked, “Then can you at least get to Lavinia if I clear a path for you?”

  “What do you think I’ve been trying to do,” was his shrill response. A noble one, if annoyingly phrased. Knocking with a nasty clank the teeth out of someone who needed a valuable lesson on greed, Dominia cleared the way and said, “Then watch my back.”

  “With what?”

  With another immortal Word, the Lady put into his hands a higher kind of flail that was not as harmful as it looked, and which, knowing the substance of its wielder’s soul, would never hit Teddy in the head…no matter how stupid he was with it. “That’s a good weapon for you.” She dragged him along while humans—swarming down into the orchestra pit poised before the body-blooming trench—began to clamber up to the stage, sometimes over one another. “Doesn’t require precision.”

  “What are they doing,” he cried of the souls, and she smiled.

  “The same thing as us.”

  It was religious fervor more than greed that drove the still-fighting martyrs. She would reflect on this in calmer times when she’d had occasion to process, at least partially, all the events of her last hour on that Earth. Zealot fathers forewent reunion with children they thought to be demons of the sort the tulpa had been; ignorant women scorned long-dead friends striving to embrace them due to the Hierophant’s virtuoso brainwashing. Most martyrs had the humanity left (and the common sense) to give up their fighting, but too many stayed in her path, and too many were upon the stage to shepherd fleeing Lavinia up the whirling balcony stairs to a point where she could be cornered. The Hierophant made his calm way after her once he selected another halberd. “You would overlook seventy years of love, of doting privilege, because I made the mistake of saving both you and your mother? Of giving you better lives? I should have ordered Dominia to cut your mother’s throat while she slept rather than martyring her. Perhaps I will next time. If I do it soon enough”—he glanced in the direction of the Lady, still fighting through the crowd but soon to reach the sea of humans that had grown properly onto the stage to march en masse for the Hierophant—“she will obey just like the dog she is.”

  At the General’s sneer and the approach of individuals from stage left, the Hierophant made to self-obviate again, but was halted by a hand that lay upon his arm. He turned his head, and his face was aglow with a look of such incredible shock that Dominia, satisfied to see it, only felt her own shock as she recognized from behind the honey locks of a woman whose existence slowed time. The Lady, tripped up by the General she inhabited, paused to watch Cassandra say something to the Hierophant before she punched him in the face hard enough to shatter his nose. Only the Lady knew what the gentle (sometimes crass) woman had said before striking the Holy Father, because she could feel the vibrations of the words in the substrate of reality. “This isn’t for all the horrible things you did to everyone in the
past, please understand—it’s for what you’re trying to do right now.”

  Blood pouring from his nose, the Hierophant wrenched his arm from her grip and disappeared with the saturnine expression of a man who longed more than ever for the immediate mass death of all mankind. Cassandra disappeared into the human crowd, but there was no time to fuss about it. Dominia forced her attention back upon Teddy. “Try not to kill anyone, if you can help it. There’s been enough death. Just keep using that flail— It isn’t fatal.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not real,” she explained half a second before she was once more whipping across that imaginary landscape to fly in stride with the Hierophant’s sprint. He had been right: when one interacted with the Void, the Void was also within them. Dominia could feel the Hierophant as though he were a parasite crawling about a skin whose surface she could neither see nor feel without its disruption. On entry to that space, such disruption became the sum total of experience. His presence within her provoked an itch, and she sought to cure it. She reached for him and was surprised when he caught that arm and slammed her down into the ground with force she did not expect herself capable of feeling after her ascension. She supposed, though immune from pain, little could stop thoughtbodies from having effects upon one another: and if the Hierophant had run this race even ten times, that placed him at twenty thousand years of existence, which meant he was an exceedingly dangerous opponent.

  But Dominia, a mere 333 years old, had fought a thousand battles—and the Lady, that infinite embodiment of all Dominias and more, was the very act of combat. She could not forget the limits of her capabilities, and so, though tossed aside in her own arena as she had been that night at McLintock farm, she skidded to her feet in this space and was in fast pursuit of him once more.

  When he knew she was behind him, he grew as fast as he was strong, and although she could arrive at his location at the speed of thought, this only caught her up with him for the space of a second. Then he would be beyond arm’s reach once more, too fast even for her, the hum of the portal growing ever to a roar.