In the meanwhile, discordant shouts bubbled up from amid the crowd as he spoke, always along the lines of, “Hail to the Divine Emperor!”
“Hail to our God Tyrus! Everything we have is yours!”
“Have my life, Divine Emperor! Have everything I own!” rang one particularly booming voice.
Tyrus’s image swiveled its head toward that voice, and a reptile-cold smile crossed his lips. “Are you certain you wish to speak such words? Let him come forward. Let him make public his testament of faith!”
With a flourish, a short, balding man emerged from the crowd, which eagerly shuffled him forward. He was lovingly clutching a stone bust of Tyrus, like a cherished icon.
“Everything I have is yours, Most Ascendant Divine Emperor! My family, my love, even my life! For you, I give anything!” And with that, he threw himself down to his stomach.
The crowd swelled with applause for this noble man, and a broad grin blazed over Tyrus’s lips. His holographic held out its arms in welcome.
“Oh, do stand. Such bravery! Such conviction! What is your name, you glorious soul?”
“I am Tavistock Strafe, Your Divine Supremacy.”
“A good, solid name. I hail you, Tavistock! Everyone show Tavistock the reverence you would show me! Your God commands it of you.”
The audience did. They reached for him, hailing him. Tavistock visibly teared up, drinking in the praise and acclaim of the crowd that broke into shouts of his name.
My eyes remained locked on Tyrus’s face, on that grin that only grew wider.
“Now, Tavistock, follow through on your pledge,” Tyrus said softly. “One mustn’t scorn vows made to a god.”
I knew those words. I knew where this was leading. I knew it.
Tavistock did not. The balding fellow blinked up at Tyrus, thrown by an expectation he was eager to fulfill, but did not yet understand.
Tyrus gestured with a magnanimous smile to the matter incinerator.
“Sacrifice yourself to me.”
12
FOR A MOMENT, the man, Tavistock, stood there with his face oddly slack and expressionless, like he could not quite understand what was being asked of him.
“How brave you are, Tavistock,” proclaimed Tyrus. To the audience: “Give him your adulation for this noble act!”
There’d been a dimming in the voices of the onlookers, just for a brief time, as though they, too, could not believe what their Divine Emperor required of one of his followers. Yet some of them immediately raised their voices in wild cheering—the true believers. Some of them had to truly believe the mass delusion they all shared, that their Emperor was indeed a god. Some were not bribed or threatened into obedience, but internalized what the people around them only pretended to believe.
They would celebrate anything their Divine Emperor asked of them, wouldn’t they? Even something so terrible as this.
Once the true believers gave voice to their cheers, the others followed suit. How could they do otherwise? They had no choice, in their minds, but to obey the group lest it turn on them. They would forfeit all the riches and acclaim they’d earned from subscribing to the delusion of Tyrus’s godhood. Even that lone soul who’d placed my image at the foot of the statue had done so in stealth. There were no heroes to be found here.
And the hapless Tavistock, standing in the same public place where he’d so proudly drunk in their praise just moments before, had gone waxen with realization.
A wicked sort of malevolence filled me at the sight, for he was not so gleeful now.
“M-may I…,” he stuttered, as his Divine Emperor, looming above him, raised his vast granite palms to beckon for silence so Tavistock’s voice might be heard. “Might I not serve my Divine Emperor in… in some other manner?”
The reaction was immediate, a firestorm of boos erupting from the crowd, but Tyrus silenced these as well.
“You have pledged me devotion in any form I deem fit, Tavistock, and this is what I now require of you. Do not jeer at him for seeking to please me in another way. He is in his rights to wish for some other way to please me, but Tavistock—there is no other way. This is what your Divine Emperor demands. Sacrifice yourself to me.”
Tavistock was visibly shaking now, his gaze crawling to the matter incinerator, and the encouraging cries of the crowd seemed to electrify the air around him.
Go ahead, show the substance of your faith, I raged at the fool of a man, waiting for him to turn tail and run. Perhaps when he fled this demand, he would awaken some of the others.
Yet the man did not turn to flee.
Instead he lurched forward one step, two, then paused to send a dismayed, almost childlike look about at the crowd cheering him on, applauding him for his obedience to something that was certain to destroy him.
Is he mad? I thought disbelievingly. What was this power Tyrus had seized, to compel his faithful to act against their very survival instincts?
I had assumed his control over the Excess stemmed solely from his combination of bribes and threats, and yet this was something more. This was a human instinct: conformity. All the pressure of the humans around Tavistock forced his steps forward.
The thunderous roars of approval from the crowd felt like an energy on the air, and Tavistock kept looking about as though to imbibe sips of public approval. His resolve visibly strengthened with each moment of adulation, even as my own thoughts thundered at him, You FOOL. They are lauding you for self-destruction!
With a sudden courage, his jerky steps drew him to the incinerator, his doom.
That was the moment I glimpsed it: the slight gap between the funnels of storms walling me off from the audience. Perhaps in his preoccupation with the spectacle he’d created, Tyrus was unaware that there was enough space through the gauntlet of swirling, raging winds and security fields for me to penetrate if I wished.
I looked at Tavistock once more. This man was entirely unworthy of my intervention. I saw Anguish in my mind again and my heart gave a hideous twist of pain, because I knew what this would lead to with him, with the last Diabolic. The only brother I would ever have…
Yet the alternative was to support this debacle: a human being killing himself for a false deity, all for Tyrus’s gratification. I had always been a monster, but I was not this sort of monster. My evils had been thrust on me, engineered into me, but this was the sort of wrong that one chose for oneself, that one thirsted for. Power and influence were the intoxicants the Domitrian monsters of Tyrus’s family craved.
If this was a scene I would witness again and again in my future, I could not accept it. The falsehood and cruelty of it would choke me.
I could not tolerate this bargain. I could not endure it.
So I would not.
I dashed forward and sprinted through the gap in the storm columns, the roaring of the storms thundering about me.…
And then I had broken through to the floor of the arena proper, with the stands expanding up and on all sides of me, thousands upon thousands of watching faces gazing down, and a hush fell as a new person appeared in the arena.…
I did not think. I did not have to.
“Tavistock!” I bellowed at that pathetic man, now clutching the lip of the matter incinerator, trying to work up the courage to fling himself inside it.…
The pathetic wretch turned, and his eyes widened in dumb shock as he registered just who I was. The crowd reacted with a similar swell of shocked cries, for there was no mistaking me. Everyone knew precisely who I was.
I stalked over to Tavistock and seized the bust of Tyrus right from his arms. Then I whipped around and hurled the bust right at the “granite statue” with all my might, sending the rock careening directly into the holographic projector. The massive granite illusion of animated stone vanished in a snap as sparks surged from the unit, and in the thick silence, my voice was thunderously loud:
“Don’t you see. It’s but a hologram? HE IS NO GOD!”
13
FOR A MOMENT, al
l I could see was the total amazement washing over the sea of faces at the sight of me, and I knew it would be but a moment before Tyrus reasserted control over this situation somehow. It astonished me that he hadn’t already reappeared in some form or other, but I took advantage of my captive audience to spread my arms and turn about so all could see me, could see the Interdict’s mark over my chest, and those facial features Tyrus had healed and restored down to the crooked nose, to the state they’d been the day I first vanished.
“It is me,” I told them. “I am Nemesis. I am the Nemesis. I am alive.”
And then a bloom of another holographic projector, and Tyrus reappeared in standard human size just at the end of the arena, laughter lurking on his lips. “Come now, can it be another Partisan imposter? At this gathering of the devoted?”
He’d given his cue to his devout, and those most slavishly obedient to him among the crowd rose from their seats, screaming,
“Partisan!”
“It’s an imposter!”
But I was the real thing. I was reality. Let the gullible among them deny the evidence of their eyes all they wanted—I would show them something undeniable about me.
So I forged across the distance to Tavistock, still hovering uncertainly by the incinerator. I seized the machine, ripping it from the floor with the brute strength no ordinary human being could ever hope to match.
“You want a sacrifice, Tyrus? Take mine!”
Then I hurled it with all my strength toward the metal plates containing the wall of storms. The incinerator clanged to the floor with its gaping mouth suctioning, and the storm generators began to crinkle with a piercing shrieking noise, before being funneled down into their destruction.
The containment field vanished, and the boiling dark clouds surged outward in a ferocious howl of gases, upending the containment plates of the others, unleashing the angry multihued clouds within the closed atmosphere of the arena.
Like that, I had unleashed Tyrus’s storms.
Screams arose as the bright torrents of storm lashed outward, the gases intermingling into explosive bolts of bright lightning. The sudden onslaught of new vapors destabilized the atmosphere in the chamber, triggering a hideous suction noise. Even Tyrus’s holographic image registered a flicker of genuine alarm.
As the winds began to swirl and tear around me, I gave a mad laugh. I was free, free of Tyrus’s choke hold over me. There was no going back, no undoing this.
“Prove you’re a god!” I jeered. “End your own storms!”
The winds knocked me off my feet, but I clawed my way back up, intoxicated by my liberation. All around, faithful followers surged for the exits. Their exalted Divine Emperor shouted for calm, but his voice was lost amid the thunder of the storm.
Nearer to me, the fearful cried out for Tyrus, some dropping to their knees to pray for salvation. Those fleeing trampled those on the ground. As this human tide reached me, some hurled themselves at my feet to beg for aid. But the crush of the crowd did not spare them or me. I was pushed and carried toward the doors, and even I could not combat the combined force of so many panicked bodies.
I was forced straight out of the arena into the entryway. The storms did not follow, but panic still reigned. I found myself wedged between frantic, shoving masses. At first I fought to free myself, but there were too many people in too little space. The press was too powerful. I wheezed for air, and spots began to cloud my vision, the sea of heads fading as darkness overwhelmed me.…
Instinct took over.
My fists clamped onto the body in front of mine. I launched myself forward, vaulting up from over his shoulders. Hands reached up, clawing at me—trying to seize on my momentum or to halt it, I knew not. I leaped from one set of shoulders to the next, aiming for the door, where the bodies had jammed into an impassable barrier. With one great, final, bounding leap, I kicked through the wedge of bodies that clogged the entryway.
As soon as I broke into the next chamber, I dragged a great gasping lungful of air. A clamor of people immediately swarmed in behind me, and for a moment I was overwhelmed by the memory of the fire in the Great Heliosphere, the bodies blue from lack of oxygen that Tyrus and I had hauled out of the jammed entrance.…
But there was no fire this time. The storms had remained confined to the arena. I had the time and chance to help. I clasped the hands scrabbling for mine, pulling people free of the dangerous pile. “Help me,” I cried to each person I liberated. “Help me save the others!”
But few listened. Some, still powered by panic, ran from me. Others stumbled away like drunkards, then fell to their knees even now to loudly acclaim their Divine Emperor. When I finally freed enough people to clear the doorway entirely, the liberated crowd trampled one another without remorse, ignoring my shouted instructions:
“Walk, don’t run!”
“For Helios’s sake, be patient! I will free you all!”
The mob knew no reason. They tore forward like wild animals, heedless of who suffered. I found myself backing away, my heart jerking wildly in my chest. Human terror was cruel and careless. And those who had not lost their wits, who had recovered their breath and then moved stalwartly onward, ignoring my pleas to help…
They were the worst. For they did not seek to allay the panic, or to aid their fellow humans. Instead some made a show of loudly praising their Divine Emperor for their survival, and others…
Others saw me and called for my blood.
“Imposter! Imposter!” screamed one crazed young woman. Her raving drew the notice of others, who swarmed about me as the young woman yelled, “She did this! This was her fault!”
And they descended upon me in their rage.
I had fought multiple opponents before, but never so many. Even so, I might have leaped clear and evaded them—had something solid and heavy not crashed into the back of my head.
I reeled as my own blood splattered the floor. At the sight of that blood the mob howled, like a pack of hunting dogs loosed on prey. They had discovered that I was mortal. That I, too, could bleed.
A man armed with a stone bust hurled himself at me. I didn’t see his face, just the granite block that flew into my vision. I swung up my arm to divert the blow, drove my foot into the man’s torso. I tore his arm out of its socket—and a heavy blow smashed me from behind.
A man had tackled me—his weight heavy, cumbersome. I stumbled forward, and my heart lurched in terror. If I fell now, I would die. I would be ripped apart, limb from limb.
I found enough footing to push myself into a flip. The man clinging to my back took the brunt of our shared impact. I drove my elbows into his ribs and heard the gratifying crack of his bones. His strangled shout fed some new fire within me—bright, hot, dangerous.
They wanted to fight? Very well.
As I rose, so too did the nature I had long restrained—for a Diabolic was bred to fight and knew no fear in it. Others surged toward me, thinking they were safe in their superior numbers. I laughed. Crouching to duck a blow, I caught an assailant’s fist and twisted it into splinters, then drove my fist into his jaw. His neck snapped like a twig. I clutched his body and turned so the corpse could absorb the bright slash of a blade that flashed my way. Then I hurled the body into the crowd before me.
Arms grabbed both of mine. I wrenched back and drove the two grapplers together, their heads knocking into each other’s. Another rushed at me, and I propelled my boot into his head, felt his skull yield and shatter.
My heart was pounding now as though from a drug, some glorious elixir. This was what I was built to do. A blade flashed.… I dodged and delivered it back into the gut of its holder. A throat bared itself before me: my arms were occupied, so I sank my teeth into the cartilage and ripped. The iron taste of blood bloomed between my lips. I spat it out as I straightened and wrenched free of the entanglement of bodies. Another blade presented itself, stabbing toward my eyes: in thanks, I took it and drew it across its wielder’s throat.
Now armed, I
slashed through everything that neared me, cutting a swath through the hostility, ignoring the panicked shrieking all about me. At last I found myself standing in a clearing over the mass of fallen. A short distance away, Tyrus’s faithful huddled tearfully, shrinking into themselves as I looked them over.
The horror in their faces awakened something rational and human in me. I grew aware of the blood cooling on my hands, my clothes. Of the corpses littered about me.
“They attacked me.” My voice was hoarse, breathless. Why did they look at me so, as if I were the monster? “They attacked ME. I was defending myself!”
A small group leaped to their feet and raced away. I recognized two of them as women I had saved from the crush. Yet they were running—from me.
For a brief, awful second I felt betrayed. Wounded and scorned.
And then those feelings twisted into anger. Would I be judged for defending myself when attacked? What of my attackers? Was their violence not to be reviled? Was it only I who was expected to lie down and submit myself like a lamb to slaughter?
I had protected myself. I had been able to protect myself. And this made me monstrous to them.
My gaze sharpened as it swept over this collection of people, a sampling of the most repugnant of the Empire. The enforcers of false decrees; those corrupt or deluded enough to show themselves willing to police the virtues of their fellow Excess.
These people deserve him.
The thought scorched through my mind, hot and poisonous. The whole lot of these enforcers of Tyrus’s delusions were pathetic and revolting followers—and such people deserved a god like Tyrus.
So let them have their Divine Emperor.
I whipped around to leave them to their chosen fate.
None dared step forward to stop me.
I passed out of the room, stalking onward along the causeway. Right and left, groups huddled, bedraggled escapees from the arena, entertainers, and vendors scouring the area for news—all fell silent at the sight of me. Many of the Excess fell to their knees, either in fear or disbelief. My hair was askew, my leather finery splashed with blood. None dared address me. For a short while, it seemed I might walk all the way back to the Retribution with no interference.
The Nemesis Page 10
