What would it do to her to see me as a Tributary Statue beside Tyrus’s, proclaimed as a false goddess, playing the same cruel joke as he? What would it cost her to see a woman she had considered a friend turned into the face of her own oppression?
The years of her life seemed to rush before my eyes.
I could see her growing up walking past Harvester Row, growing into a teenager who was too accustomed to the horrors of that place to be properly afraid of them. They paid a premium for the blood of the young. Perhaps the prospect of credits would tempt her to donate her blood or body. Her father would surely warn her off, but what if she did not listen to him? What if she grew up amid those stone confines, gazing up at the vast and glowing image of that Divine Emperor and Empress she was compelled to revere, and knew at so young an age that no one could be trusted, that the foundation of everything was a lie.…
Would she begin to notice how narrow her world was, how little hope there was to travel beyond it? In such a mind-set, all the unwholesome opportunities of Devil’s Shade could appear like the only chance she had.
Stop, I commanded myself. Stop thinking of this! But I could not shut out the thought of her, the image of Atmas strapped into the Harvester’s chair as I glowed above her, the false goddess in the skies.…
“Do take comfort,” crooned Tyrus, eyes fixed on my face, reading my turmoil. “Don’t you see what this means? My love, you needn’t bother shutting your ears to the despair of the Excess after tomorrow. Those voices screaming, ‘Nemesis lives’ will at last go silent forevermore.”
10
THE RETRIBUTION slid into the docks of the Halcyon without drawing notice. The Halcyon was a massive cityship, an artificial structure in space that could not propel itself or make anything but small changes to its position, yet served as a habitat for hundreds of thousands of people. I would reappear amid the Imperial Triumph.
Anguish had been released into my keeping on the Retribution, and he followed me to the disembarkation deck. Tyrus had crewed the ship for me—stationing several armed Inquisitors onboard. They tailed our every step now, but by tacit agreement, we ignored them.
“You need not do this,” Anguish said, not for the first time.
I was growing tired of this argument. “Do you want to live? Then, yes. I must do this.”
He caught my arm as I tried to push past him. “There must be other ways.” Leaning close, he spoke into my ear. “We can find a medical bot somewhere, steal one.…”
I shook off his grip. “I will not risk your life on stupid gambles.”
“Nemesis. Surely that is my choice. And I say—”
“Enough.” Whatever cost I had to pay, it would be well worth his survival. “I will be back as soon as I can. Be ready for me—I don’t want to stay a moment longer than I must.”
Then I arranged the sweeping liquisilk hood over my head to conceal my face and stepped into the boarding artery that connected my vessel to the cityship. The masses had already gathered for the celebration, and as I strode down the featureless passageway, I could hear the growing din that awaited me.
In normal times, the cityship Halcyon was a vast floating museum. It contained artworks and antiquities, including those of Ancient Earth, too valuable to risk storing in planetary atmospheres. The curators took vows before entering service: they would never leave the ship again, never marry or have children. Their sole calling was to protect and maintain the collections. Until recently, no others but the Emperor and a very few Grandiloquy had ever visited the Halcyon.
As I stepped onto the ship proper, I saw that times had changed.
Tyrus had not told me many details of the planned celebrations, but he’d mentioned that every soul on the Halcyon today had earned their invitation by dint of their eager and impassioned belief in their Emperor’s sacred nature.
What he had not mentioned was that he had invited thousands.
Tributary Statues lined the corridor as well as giant busts of Tyrus’s proud face, before which everyone made a great show of bowing as they passed.
I continued toward the arena where the celebration was due to take place; the sheer number of people made me feel nauseated. I knew that assembling this congregation had entailed an Empire-wide search. Only the most ardently outspoken believers had been summoned—those Grandiloquy and Excess who had publicly proven their zeal in the new faith, either by informing on skeptics who questioned Tyrus’s divinity, or by actively rooting out the older faiths and punishing the practitioners.
But there were so many!
Tyrus’s new sigil was everywhere. Six stars being devoured by a black hole. People displayed the sigil on armbands and necklaces, on embroidered silk sashes. Some had even tattooed it on their cheeks and hands. Others had adopted Tyrus’s facial features or hair color—an unnerving effect, as though Tyrus were everywhere around me.
I picked my way around a pile of flowers mounded beneath a portrait of the new God. The faithful here were competitive. As one man knelt before this portrait, the next man fell to his belly. A woman had started to sing the praises of the Divine Emperor, and another, joining her, shouted her praise, drowning out the singer.
Right and left, the stilted praise spoken solely so others could overhear it:
“How lucky we are, to be led by a living god!”
“What times these are, when a Divine Emperor can command the stars!”
“He has no more devoted subject than me!”
I passed next through a chamber lined with tanks some thirty meters tall. Within these tanks, dancers wearing artificial gills twisted sinuously amid fluid-rendered holographics that depicted the glories of Tyrus von Domitrian’s reign. Some dancers reenacted these scenes; others mimed acts of worship and prostration. In the domed cupola above, performers in antigravity boots flipped and dived, messages flashing from their robes when the light struck them:
Hail to our Divine Emperor!
Hail to the Domitrians!
Sidonia had always wanted to come visit the archives here, but she’d never had the chance. Tyrus, too, had entertained grand plans for the ship. He’d meant to open access to the Excess, to share the heritage of Earth with those who had been robbed of knowledge of it.
How wonderingly he had spoken of it. Artwork is the very expression of the human soul. That is the power of it, Nemesis. That’s the reason every petty tyrant seeks to censor, control, shame, or dictate to artists. If you can control them, you can control ideas of the human soul.
As I stepped into the main exhibition corridor, I saw that he’d learned that lesson well.
For the vessel had been desecrated.
A bronze plaque spoke of a rare series of stone columns from a human civilization called Greece. What stood in the artifact’s place was a marble statue of the Emperor Melchoir von Domitrian, gazing down upon all who passed. The plaque denoting a line of terra-cotta statues also stood above something decidedly altered—statues of other Domitrians.
An empty, aching sorrow filled my heart. There was something of a curse in dreams that came true in the wrong form, long after their meaning had been extinguished. Tyrus should have had a chance to be the idealist he’d once been. He would have treasured the artwork that belonged in this place. He should have had a chance to exhibit them across the Empire. He would have done something magnificent here, had he been given the chance before his corruption.
Even this place meant nothing to Tyrus now.
The walkway took me directly toward the gaming arena, where yet another of Tyrus’s statues loomed outside the entrance, its arms spread wide. From some other person, that posture would look like a warm invitation, an embrace. But Tyrus opened his arms only to destruction. Thus had he posed on the day he’d unleashed malignant space above the skies of Corcyra.
I gazed up at the statue, feeling ill. And then something beneath it caught my eye.
A tinier image stood at the feet of Tyrus’s statue. Someone had placed an active holographic disc there�
�� of me.
The hairs rose at the nape of my neck. This was not Tyrus’s doing. He would never have chosen that image—the Nemesis I’d seen on the alley walls on Devil’s Shade, crowned by a halo of white fire. This was the Nemesis I was supposed to destroy today—the threat I would defuse by disavowing all who invoked her.
Whoever had placed that holographic disc had done so not in praise, but in challenge.
The Excess who passed pretended not to see the holographic. They trained their gazes steadfastly on the bronze Emperor’s feet, which they rubbed for good luck.
As I watched, one brave devotee of Tyrus’s decided to take action. He smashed the holographic, and a brief, restive murmur passed over the crowd. But the general cheerful hubbub soon resumed.
I took a deep breath, and for the first time in hours, my lungs felt clear and full. Somewhere amid these deluded masses, some lonely, defiant soul had risked everything to place that holographic. Here, in the den of Tyrus’s most loyal—even here, some brave human refused to bend to that which was unworthy of reverence. They chose not to conform.
Somewhere nearby was a fine example of true humanity.
And now I turned into the arena—to betray them.
11
THE ENTRYWAY to the arena was a pathway of thunder. Actual thunder—raw and furious, vibrating the floor underfoot. I froze in place as bodies shoved past me. Six great columns led the way forward, floor-to-ceiling security fields containing the swirling, churning atmospheres planted there for aesthetics.
The thunder, I realized, was the sound of “gods”—the gods being the six heads of Tyrus projected in flashes overhead, appearing and disappearing from within six bright gaseous clouds. Had I known nothing of science, I might well have imagined this the threshold to the divine. Or to hell.
The first time I had stepped into the sky dome of the Chrysanthemum, I had felt just so: overawed and disconcerted by the great expanse of atmosphere overhead—blue and cloud-strewn.
I had imagined then that I would never again see its like. But then I’d visited Lumina and had learned that illusions, no matter how magnificent, could not compare to a true planetary atmosphere.
A mournful ache spread through me. I wanted to be back roving in a wilderness with Anguish, breathing natural air, feeling marvelously and perfectly suited to the demands of my surroundings.
Nature, true nature, was raw and fierce, created by no man. What it required was strength and quickness and wary respect. This place, with its false thunder and phony gods, wanted only awe—gaping, vapid, unthinking.
This was a show designed for the Excess. Tyrus had invited primarily the planet-bound to this event to better spread his propaganda to the street level of the Empire. Now I felt a softening within me. The average Excess had never seen such technology, so how could I expect them to see through it? They had been trapped inside a net they were not even aware existed.
At last the arena proper yawned wide about me. The stands rose upward so high that their uppermost walls faded into the thickness of the chamber’s atmosphere. In the lowermost stands, a current of bodies flowed toward what a holographic placard proclaimed a Tributary Fount. It appeared to be a standard matter incinerator with a gaping maw. Into that wide metallic mouth, they cast gifts of varying value as tributes to their Divine Emperor.
One enthusiastic young girl shouted, “For the Divine Emperor!” and slashed away her impressive braid of scarlet hair.
Not to be outdone, the woman behind her—whose hair was short—hastily tossed in the holographics she’d brought, then took a knife to her hand to contribute her own blood.
“For the Divine Emp… Emp…” She had sliced deeper than intended in her enthusiasm, for when she beheld her gushing hand, she paled and swayed. Someone caught her and shoved her aside, to make room for the next supplicant.
Looming above it all stood the largest statue of Tyrus yet, its palms extended toward the center of the arena as though he were offering some great gift to his subjects.
“You will follow me.”
The woman’s voice broke through my concentration, but I was not startled. I’d expected Tyrus to send handlers to instruct me. Of the two figures that materialized by my side, I recognized only one: the Inquisitor Synestia, who’d found me on Devil’s Shade. She wore plain civilian garb today.
Without the Dark Star garb, she appeared but an unremarkable figure who would blend in with any crowd. She sported a Domitrian armband, and her gaze dropped to my bare arm—where I had refused to don the one that had been waiting with this hooded disguise.
I held her gaze defiantly.
The crowd began screaming. The dancers had cleared away, and a large low-gravity plate had been slid into the center of the arena. There, a pair of massive scorpions had been unleashed for a face-off.
The two graceful predators circled each other, and for a moment, as their poisonous tails wavered in the air, dripping venom, it seemed as if they would not strike, as though they might come to some accord.
Then one lanced forward and they became a tangle of gleaming red-and-black limbs, contorting about, tails driving forward in desperate jabs to penetrate each other’s armor. One drove its venom through a crack in the other’s shell, and its tail turned into a stabbing, vicious prong, injecting its toxin again and again.
“You will be cooperative, will you not?” Synestia said as we threaded through the crowd.
“I will cooperate. I have told Tyrus as much.”
“The Divine Emperor,” she corrected me.
I narrowed my eyes, then spoke the words that seemed to choke me: “The Divine…” I could not finish it. My gaze had become riveted beyond her to the scorpions, where the victor stalked forward for the kill.
At that moment, the poisoned one surged forward and I glimpsed a flash of sharp teeth that had been engineered into the creature. A moment later, the teeth sank into the skull of the other, ripping it away in a gush of fluids. The screaming of the crowd filled the air as the victor gave an unearthly shriek.
“The Divine Emperor,” I forced out.
The scorpion’s legs folded beneath it as the poison tore through its veins. Just like that, it was all over. And both scorpions were dead.
Even as I followed the Inquisitor Synestia, I hated every step, every heartbeat. I hated that I was reduced to this. Better to have never been found; to have lived out life on Devil’s Shade.
No.
No.
Better to have let Tyrus die that day on the Tigris. Better to have mourned him—the one I loved more than myself—than grow to hate the ruination of him that I knew now.
In a sumptuous, velvet-walled antechamber in the interior of the arena, Inquisitor Synestia put the beauty bots to work. When at last they retreated, I looked into the mirror and beheld a ghost.
The ghost wore the sign of divine blessing: her black leather suit parted in a deep V over her chest to expose the Interdict’s concentric sun sigil. It was the mark of blessing the Interdict had given me to mark my humanity, my personhood, to proclaim me more than a mere Diabolic. The girl’s hair was long and a gleaming white-blond.
Thus had I looked, the day the Hera had struck the Tigris. The last day I had truly loved my husband. The day I had refused to let him die, when I had forced him back into Pasus’s captivity.
Something felt stuck in my throat. I could not swallow it down. If I could go back in time to warn this girl… to do everything over…
“So everything that has taken place since,” I said dully, “the wedding, my execution, Corcyra—”
“Never happened,” said Synestia. “You have been dead. Those appearances were made by imposters. Today, the Divine Emperor summons you back to life.”
My laugh felt rusty. “Did you ever truly believe in your faith? Or was it always just a path to power, even before he decided to play God?”
Synestia did not answer me.
Outside, the roaring of the crowd mounted into a new crescendo. My
gut tightened.
The Inquisitor gestured me onto a steel platform. The platform jolted and began to carry me upward. Overhead, a square patch of ceiling retracted, and the crowd’s shouts redoubled.
I braced myself and emerged onto the floor of the arena to find myself circled by the six columns of storm clouds. They’d been moved to this spot, and now they twisted and roiled with lightning, shielding me from the arena’s view.
Then the source of the new cheers reached my ears over the pounding roar of the storms.
“My subjects. Behold! I have animated stone to be among you! How glorious I find your tribute to me.…”
Through the gale of flashing lightning, I saw that the massive statue of Tyrus no longer extended its hands. Instead it spoke, and Tyrus’s words issued from its mouth.
It had also been a hologram. Of course. What fools he took these onlookers for, to suggest this was true stone and he was animating it! Weariness seeped through me, for he was entirely a falsehood now, it seemed. Falsehoods upon falsehoods, and how foolish of me to still hope for something of substance beneath the illusions.
“… I commend you for the fine example you set for the entirety of this galaxy this day,” Tyrus’s voice carried on. “You were summoned because you have proven yourselves prepared to give all to our holy crusade! You have sacrificed to me, sometimes neighbors, friends, even family—all to please your God and spread our truth! You have been rewarded for it, I trust, and today you will be rewarded further still!”
The crowd was reaching forward, palms extended to him as though to grab at his distant image and draw some of his divinity unto themselves.
The Inquisitor was right. Tyrant, God, what matter? The crowd would worship him regardless. And now, suddenly, I realized the full extent of what it would mean to stand beside him.
Would they shout such things to me? Would they reach for me as they did him?
Would I learn to enjoy it?
Would I come to relish it?
Would I even learn to endure it?
My heart roared my answer: NO.
The Nemesis Page 9
