Hammer of Darkness

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  By shifts, Forde has instructed the entire retinue, even the Generals and Marshals who have protested their undying loyalty, to depart.

  In few cases, few indeed, was force required. The reconstruction, directed from the fringes of the city by the Marshal of Strategy, the man named Reitre, is under way. Reitre has enough fear to be wise, and enough caution to deal with whoever follows the Viceroy.

  A gold-winged bluetail alights on the corner of the battlement. Useless as they are, her father had liked battlements. Not that he had really been her father. The gene patterns hadn't matched, but what else could she have called him? And how else could she have been named Viceroy out of the Times of Trouble?

  Her thoughts are broken by the sound of footsteps. “All gone, my Lady.”

  “Thank you, Forde.”

  Forde, in red trousers, tunic, and boots, stands like the obsolete column he is, ready yet to support a ruler who knows her time has passed.

  “Forde, you are the last. Reitre will need you, and you him. Serve him, and through him, my people.”

  “My Lady…”

  His protest is formal. They both know it. “… do you think… ?”

  “Yes. Shortly. And that will be between Us.” The way she says the word “Us” sends shivers down Forde's spine, and he bows. “As you wish, Lady and Viceroy.”

  “Lady will do, Forde.” She inclines her head to dismiss him. The footsteps echo as he heads for the drop shaft. The people grieve now, she knows. They grieve and dig their own from the rubble left by two gods. When their grief is buried with their dead, then they will decide why they should blame their Ruler. Who did not protect them. Who could not, she thinks.

  The gold-winged bluetail preens, spreads his wings, and leaves the battlement.

  A pair of sirens howl, and another overloaded skitter makes another emergency flight to another overcrowded health center. Shortly there will be more deaths as rejuve treatments lapse for all but the most powerful and secure, and that means those with private armies and independent power sources.

  The people do not know that the Grand Fleet has failed. Or that Karnak lies defenseless. Or that the Twenty-third Emperor of New Augusta has been poisoned by his second wife. Or that the Fuardian First Fleet is on its way to declare Karnak a protectorate. As is the Fifth Fleet of the Matriarchy of Halston.

  Occasionally, through the pall of smoke over the city, she can see a brown-robed figure surveying the defense lines of the palace. A scent of that smoke reaches her, and the bitterness waters her eyes momentarily.

  The telltale at her belt indicates that Forde is outside the screens, that he has left the defenses intact.

  Not altruism, nor loyalty, but realism is represented in that action. While an intact palace, with all its shielded weapons, should not fall into the hands of the first armed adventurer, neither should the palace, the symbol of the Viceroy, fall, or fall too easily. For then the mob will require more destruction to avenge the betrayal they will feel.

  After a millennium of protection under the hand of the Viceroy, they will feel betrayed, and there are more than enough who will use that sense of betrayal as the rein to power. “So why don't you do something?” she asks herself. Instead, she crosses the tower top slowly until she can see the Lake of Dreams.

  “I can just remember when it was the Park of Summer,” she tells the redbird that chirps from the empty jackstaff.

  She stretches forth a hand to the songster, but the bird takes flight.

  “You should have been a blackbird,” says the Viceroy. “But you couldn't be. Not here.”

  She turns back to the bench and sits, waiting, wondering if she should descend to the vacant strategy center to await the coming of the Fleets, to do her best to protect her people. Or would the few screens she could throw up now merely make the eventual situation worse? The telltale chimes.

  Forde, for some reason, is returning. Alone. Reitre would need Forde. Therefore, Reitre is no more. No ships have arrived except two medical relief freighters.

  Who? It can only be the Brotherhood, and they must have heavy weapons, for nothing less could have taken Reitre, even away from the shields of the palace. She can only wait now. Presently, Forde arrives on the parapet. “Lady, do you have some way to depart? Unknown?”

  “Is it the Brotherhood?” she asks, a faint quirk to her lips. After all, the brown-clad monks had started the whole thing, in one sense, by helping Martin to escape. Or had Martin maneuvered them into helping him? Or… she shrugged.

  For all she knows, the man she knew as Martin Martel is more than that and has been all along. If he had been, had been that experienced, why would he have been interested in a mere slip of a woman, and one without much memory of her past at that?

  Unless he knew she would be Viceroy. Unless he planned she would succeed the Prince. If he had known, had planned for those eventualities, why has he destroyed her Fleet, her capital, and left her alone in the wreckage of the Grand Millennium?

  “My Lady?” Forde's voice breaks through her reverie. “Yes, Forde. Is it the Brotherhood?”

  “So they say.” He pauses, then asks again, “Escape routes?”

  “No, Forde. No escape routes for me. Not yet. Take the courier in the west tunnel from the strategy center.”

  “But you? How will you leave?”

  “There is another, if I need it. I need to stay to see the curtain fall. To see if it will fall.” The man in red moves not.

  “Go!” Her voice lashes around him and causes the wind to halt momentarily.

  “Yes, my Lady. The Brotherhood has captured three armories and is turning the battle lasers against the palace.”

  “Let them. It will take more than that. Now go.”

  Her hands drop to her belt, and he turns, scurrying across the glowstones back toward the drop shaft. He reminds her of a lizard scuttling under a rock, but her laugh is mirthless.

  She waits until the courier winks out overhead before returning to the battlement. A faint haze has built at the palace defense lines, and her telltales show that less than ten percent of the screens' capacity has been taxed.

  A strange pair, she thinks. The blue Viceroy and the black god. Is the only thing more deadly than a woman scorned a man still in love with the woman who scorned him? Purple light flares to the east.

  A pulsed battle laser deflected by the shields. Her telltale shows that single pulse claimed, only momentarily, thirty percent of the screens' capacity. Another flare follows, then another. “The Brotherhood doesn't waste much time, does it?” His voice carries an edge she does not remember. There is a great deal you don't remember. She turns to face him, not wanting to, but realizing she has little choice.

  Martel stands no taller, no stockier, and his face is still unlined. And so is hers, she knows.

  The blackness of his eyes is darker than deep space, and she tears her glance away, blinks with the next laser flare against the palace shields.

  “You don't have to accept me, Kryn. And you don't have to accept you. That's your choice.”

  With his left hand he takes the black thunderbolt pin from his cloak, lays it in his right hand, and stretches his hand forth. The jet-blackness of the pin glitters.

  Without looking at his face, Kryn studies the pin. She has never seen it. Yet the miniature thunderbolt is familiar.

  “It is nine centuries old, Emily, and it was yours before it was mine, and if you so desire, it can be yours again.”

  She wants to shiver, though the laser blasts warm the air circulating across the top of the tower. She will not. “Emily?”

  “Emily. You are Kryn, but before Kryn you were Emily, and long before that you were called Dian. I knew you first as Kryn, then as Emily, and never as Dian. They think I am old, with my darkness and shadows, but your first youth lies long before the thousand ships fell, long before I scattered those hulls across the stars. No one but you knows how far back stretches your ageless youth. All you have to do is look.” Look!

>   Kryn feels the black wall in her mind, the one behind which who knows what is locked, splintering. “No!” Her cry is involuntary.

  He smiles, faintly, bends his head, almost as if in homage to her, but does not step forward.

  The curtain has fallen away from the darkness, and the images leap at her, one after another, falling into her lap like the ships Martel has strewn across the stars.

  She staggers. With an effort she is unaware of making, she catches her balance and sinks onto the glowstones, dark hair catching the purple highlights from the laser pulses, and shakes, the dry sobs racking her frame.

  He sits down, not cross-legged, for his muscles have always been too tight for that, across from her and waits, helping her catch each memory as it tumbles forth.

  … She stands before the four square limestone blocks that are the altar, obsidian knife in hand, and looks down at the young face. She does not hesitate, and with a clean downward stroke…

  … The hunter stands across the clearing from her, arrow nocked, his blond eyebrows invisible in the gloom, but raised in puzzlement. She draws the moonlight to her and watches as he gently lets the tension off the bow, as he slowly goes down on bended knee while the light around her pulses. Then, and only then, does she gesture. She remains the only human figure in the clearing, and the harshness of her laugh chases the blond stag into the woods. The dogs begin to bay…

  … Though the sedge has withered, and the wind's bitterness has stripped most of the leaves from the oaks, she stands on the hillside, barefoot and in a clinging shift. On her left arm rests the handle of a wicker basket as she waits for the horseman who picks his path up the hillside. His armor, though scarred, glitters in the late-afternoon light. Although his surcoat is ripped, the green and gold are still bright. Her black hair flows back over her shoulders as she waits for the knight to place her before him on his horse…

  … She stares at the two vials, finally picking the one on the right and tucking it into the hidden space in her lace cuff. The Duke will be on her left, and he will down at least three full goblets of wine…

  … She crouches next to the transmitter, waiting for the red light to blink on, eyes darting toward the berm a hundred meters away, over which she can see the top of the hangar. Inside, a young man waits for the same red light, and when it blinks will dash for his cockpit. She knows the pilot, every line of his body. The light blinks, red, and she touches the switch, does not look back as the hangar explodes in flame…

  … She slides onto the bridge, wearing only a clinging white singlesuit, not even her pilot's rings. The watch officer looks up from his console, touches the standby stud, and rises to greet her. Lips meet, and his freeze as the jolt from her wrist stunner hits his spine. She lowers the unconscious form to the plastic of the sleepship's deck and seats herself at the console. Next comes the course tape, the one that will take the sleepship beyond the Federation's borders…

  … She waits by the stone wall, idly studying the grain of the petrified walk. The one she seeks is sitting on a low stone wall, and she can sense the immense darkness of the energies he does not yet know he carries. He looks out over the water, oblivious to anything but his concerns about the troubles on Karnak. “A brooding philosopher, is that it?” He jerks his head to look at her…

  … She stands in midair, hovers above a certain snow-tipped sacred peak, across from a bull figure in carved smoke, across from a hammer-bearing barbarian, across from a sun-wreathed god in pale yellow. “Decided!” she declares…

  … The breeze darts into the courtyard, ruffles her hair. The black-haired student stares at her, his eyes widening, as her hands touch the studs on her belt.

  “I wish you hadn't, Kryn. Wish you hadn't,” he says as he walks through the stunner beam that should have dropped him in his tracks. He leaves her and her guard without looking back…

  The top of the tower is darker now, surrounded with a twilight brightened intermittently with muted purple light pulses. After a time, she lifts her eyes.

  The defenses? Yours now? The Brotherhood? Her thoughts are clear again, ring with the unheard sound of silver bells. Down. Mine for now. Yes.

  Martel stands, stretches, then extends his left hand. She takes it, though she does not need the assistance, and gets to her feet.

  With her free hand, her left, she extends a black thunderbolt pin. I meant it then. And now.

  He bends his head slightly, and she can see the wetness in the corners of his eyes.

  She takes two steps, until she is close enough to pin the thunderbolt back on his cloak. She does.

  He waits until she finishes before placing both her hands in his.

  The East Tower of the Viceroy's Palace is abruptly empty, and with that emptiness the afternoon sunlight returns, and the ravening purple glare of the Brotherhood's newly acquired battle lasers.

  Shortly the tower is gone, following the rest of the palace, and the powder-fine blue dust, gold-speckled, begins to settle on what remains of the city and the parks, and their fallen trees.

  From the depths of the ruins emerge the citizens, hurrying toward one of the few intact structures, a small black temple in the old section, where preside a handful of brown-clad Brothers. None wear black, for it is sacred.

  * * *

  LXX

  The trees are old and exude a feeling older than their height and massive trunks would indicate.

  Behind the last line of trees runs a wall of unmortared rectangular stone blocks. The barrier stretches into the distance on each side and looms half again as tall as stood the tallest of the long-defunct Imperial Marines. No gates break the expanse of stone, but thin white marble columns are embodied in the blackness at regular intervals.

  The small but hot noon sun has fatigued the traveler, and he sits on one of the white marble benches beneath the trees and wipes his damp forehead.

  His boots are dusty, but even so clash with the faded brown tunic and trousers he wears. He wipes his forehead again, replaces the cloth in his belt pouch, and pushes a strand of gray hair back over his ear. He stares at the wall. Is that all?

  A black-and-white stone wall? Even on a miracle planet? He could climb the wall. After all, it is only twice as tall as he is. Despite the aches in his joints and the years in his bones, the climb would not be difficult.

  The grass grows right up to the stone, but not into or between it. Nor do any of the vines that curl up some of the mossy trunks actually touch the stone.

  The path he has taken, the one on which he stands, parallels the wall ahead for perhaps half a kilo before winding back into the forest.

  He looks at the wall, ignoring the heavy footsteps behind him on the hard-packed earth. “I wouldn't, if I were you.”

  The voice belongs to a short and heavyset man, clad in an off-white monk's robe.

  The traveler looks up but does not otherwise acknowledge the statement.

  “It's not called the Wall of Forgetfulness for nothing, pilgrim. You touch it, and you may forget why you wanted to. You try to climb it, and you forget Martel—near everything.

  “Every couple of years, some young scientist from the Matriarchy or the Fuardian Empire shows up with a bunch of high-energy weapons to prove there's nothing unusual about it.”

  “And?” asks the man with the red boots sardonically. “The Governor, whoever it is, tries to discourage them. Shows the scientist the old cubes. Sometimes that works. Mostly, it doesn't. The last one I remember. She smuggled in one of the old Imperial battle lasers. The beam just bent back off the wall. You could see it twist into the looped cross. Just came back and destroyed the laser. Her, too.”

  The traveler turns away. Always the superstitions. On every planet where he had searched for Her.

  “Have it your way.” The monk smiles and continues his patrol.

  The older man eases himself to his feet and edges toward the wall. At the base of the stone is a clear line where the grass stops growing, knife-sharp. He stretches his hand to t
ouch the stones… and finds himself lying facedown in the grass. His nose is scraped. He sits up, realizing that the small, hot sun is lower in the blue-green sky.

  Small dark splotches stain the front of the dusty tunic, where blood has somehow found its way. “Nonsense,” he mutters.

  But he does not reach out toward the wall again as he lurches to his feet. His eyes range over the crispness of the stones, then lift to the treetops he can see above the wall. “Nonsense,” he grumbles.

  His eyes travel down the pathway toward a flicker of white that may represent the monk who had warned him.

  With a last look at the gateless wall, he turns and sets his steps back along the way he had already come. The hard-packed pathway will lead him back to the coast and to the extension of the Petrified Boardwalk north of Sybernal. His stride lengthens. The shuttleport south of the old planetary capital is more than a few units away, and he wants to make the midnight lift.

  “Can't believe anything anymore. Not anything. But I'll find Her someday, somewhere. Find Him, too. The bastard!”

  He looks back over his shoulder at the crisp lines of the black-and-white stone wall, unmortared, that has resisted lasers and time, then shakes his head. “Can't believe anything.”

  Forde's fingers stray toward the hidden shoulder holster where rests the aged but fully charged Imperial Marine blaster.

  “Somehow…” He sighs, putting one foot in front of the other. “Somehow…”

  * * *

  LXXI

  The man and the woman sit on the portico, savoring the short twilight. Down the hillside and into the trees stretch the gardens and the emerald-green lawn. Beyond the forest is a simple black-and-white stone wall, and beyond that the rest of the universe. A dorle twitters from the branches of the newest quince tree, the one the man planted a decade ago. As one, the man and woman stand and drift to the low marble railing of the portico, arms touching. Poor Forde. Her thoughts chime gently. He has what he wants. If he found you, then… he'd have nothing.