Eyes of the Calculor

by Sean McMullen

  Vorion watched the fighting from the roof of Libris, then returned to the Highliber's study and stepped through the leadlight window. He picked up a note written by Dramoren and began reading.

  I, Franzas Dramoren, Highliber of Libris, do offer my death and the deaths of the heretical heads of state to the Deity so that Prophet Jemli may be free to lead the righteous of the Rochestrian Commonwealth into the light of salvation. Death to all heretics, death to aviad abominations, a curse upon Mirrorsun and all fueled engines.

  Vorion crumpled the poorpaper and dropped it into the fire. "No, my Highliber, that will never do," he said as he sat down to compose his own note.

  I, Vorion Poros, lackey to the Highliber Dramoren, do affirm that I have betrayed my Highliber, the Dragon Librarian Service, the Overmayor, and the Rochestrian Commonwealth in the name of the Deity and for the greater glory of the Word, and with the help of the blessed faithful of the Woomeran Confederation. My only regret is that some demon or abomination drove the mayors from the balcony before my bomb exploded, and that the great beamflash tower did not fall to

  the cannons of the righteous. All power and glory to the Word, long life to Jemli the Prophet.

  Vorion signed his name, dripped wax beside the signature, and pressed his seal into it. His hands were shaking almost beyond control as he drew his small, ceremonial flintlock. He pressed the barrel hard against his temple to make sure that he could not miss.

  You know there is no other way, I must do this to clear the Highliber's name, he prayed as he squeezed his eyes shut. God forgive me, God forgive me —

  With all the shooting that was going on outside, nobody paid any heed to yet one more muffled shot.

  WILD OF THE MIRROR

  Peterborough, the Woomeran Confederation

  Jemli was conducting her afternoon's meditation when she noticed that a girl had entered her chambers, a girl with the coldest expression that she had ever seen. She stood with her arms folded and stared unblinking at Jemli, who was seated on a huge, embroidered cushion. There was something familiar about her, something about her manner, attitude, bearing, expression, and even the smirk on her lips.

  Unfolding her arms, the intruder now walked across to a wall, her boots making no sound at all on the flagstones. She pressed a panel without taking her eyes from Jemli. The panel clicked softly. The intruder slid it aside, reached into the recess behind it, drew out a Morelac, then closed the panel.

  "Mine, I believe," said the intruder in educated Austaric that retained a slight Rutherglen accent.

  The words had the impact of a snakebite upon Jemli.

  "Guards!" she called, and immediately the doors at the end of her meditation chamber were flung open. Two guards entered, their muskets held ready.

  "Guards, take her away from me," Jemli called fearfully.

  One of the guards crossed the room and stood beside the intruder.

  "Come, you are in trouble beyond telling," said the guard, reaching out to seize her.

  His hand passed right through her arm. The guard cried out, recoiling back and firing his flintlock. The ball passed through the intruder, ricocheting from a stone column and lodging in a panel. The intruder held up the Morelac twin barrel.

  "I shall go," said the intruder to the guard, then she turned back to Jemli. "For now."

  She walked silently across to a stone wall and stepped straight through. Both guards exchanged glances with Jemli.

  "It is a vision, sent by a demon to shake our faith," she said quickly. "Go, go. My solitude is my strength."

  When the guards were gone again Jemli locked the double doors behind them and made straight for the secret panel where the Morelac that had once belonged to Lemorel Milderellen was concealed. She pressed the panel. It clicked. She slid the panel aside. The space behind it contained a pistol rack, but no pistol. Jemli reached in and picked up the rack, she held it up to the light, turned it before her eyes. Suddenly she screamed, dropping the rack as she fainted. This time the doors had to be smashed open by the guards. They found Jemli lying on the ground, an open panel in the wall and the gunrack beside her. A stretcher, medician, and nurses were sent for at once and Jemli was carried out, surrounded by a dozen men and women.

  Only when the room was empty did Velesti step from behind a screen, wearing a guard's uniform and holding the missing Morelac in her hand. She slipped it into her belt and buttoned her coat over it. An image of a guard with Zarvora's face materialized in the air before her, floating a foot above the floor.

  "Thank you for your help, Frelle Mirrorsun," said Velesti. "Now, would you escort me through the palace, or must I fight my way along?"

  "That would spoil the illusion, Frelle Disore. And after all my hard work with those illusions, too."

  "And mine."

  Jemli lay resting in her bed, now surrounded by eight guards, two medicians, three Reformed Gentheist priests, and five of her personal maids.

  "I had a vision, the Invincible Lemorel appeared to me," she was telling the priests. "She held up her favorite pistol, the one our beloved papa gave to her. She said that she had returned to be sure that I was making no mistakes. I did not recognize her at first, it has been so long since her death. I called the guards, and it was only when one put his hand through her that I realized who was before me. She said she would go, I think she was satisfied."

  Jemli realized that nobody was watching her anymore, they were looking at a woman who was standing to the right of the bed with her arms folded . . . and halfway through the wall. Jemli screamed and sat up.

  "I have been talking to Glasken, we dead have a lot of time to chat," said the image. "He was wondering if it was you who arranged Mayor Bouros's murder. He was not dead then, so he could not watch you as closely."

  Jemli's mouth hung open and her jaw was trembling, but she did not reply.

  "I see, I hear," said the guard on her right, gesturing to the wall and phantom. "I cannot stand it."

  He began to back toward the door. Most of the others began to follow.

  "No! Don't leave me!" shrieked Jemli.

  They stopped, but did not return to where they had been.

  "We do know it was you who denounced Glasken and sent the militia into the underground University," continued the image of Lemorel softly.

  "Stop it!" shouted Jemli. "Lies!"

  "Denkar said he died there, with all the other engineers. Strange, I only knew Denkar as FUNCTION 9 while he was alive. He was a component in the original Calculor."

  Jemli looked from the image to her guards and other staff.

  "A demon, here to baffle and confuse us with lies," she assured them. "We must face it together. None of it is true."

  "Oh, but your last husband, the Overmayor, told us. He was rather cross that you killed him, by the way. Cross with himself, that is, for not bothering to have you removed earlier."

  "In the name of the Deity, begone!" shouted Jemli, standing up on the bed and gesturing at the image with the heel of her hand.

  It was an imposing sight. With the extra height of the bed her head was eight feet from the ground. The image of Lemorel was not moved, and did not move.

  "The Deity is at my right shoulder!" shrieked Jemli. "The Deity will cast you back into hell!"

  The image unfolded its arms and spread its hands, looking around.

  "Here I am, waiting to be cast," it said, then folded its arms again and glared at Jemli. "The dead are watching you, Jemli Mild-erellen. Fart in your bedchamber and we hear it. Preach abominations, death, and hellfire to a hundred thousand of your faithful, and we hear it. Bomb the Rochestrian Overmayor's palace balcony during the ANZAC parade in Rochester and we hear it all the way from here."

  "Get out!" Jemli now snapped at her staff and guards. "It's trying to divide us by lies laced with truth. I must face it alone."

  Laced with truthl thought everyone else in the room.

  The image watched the others hurry out. The duty captain of the guards pulled the do
or shut behind him and looked around. All the others had already hurried off, including his fellow guards. Only a single guard remained at her post, by the double doors at the end of the corridor. She saluted as Jemli's duty captain approached.

  "Watch that door, but do not approach it," he ordered. "If the Enlightened One calls out or screams, send for her priests."

  Velesti nodded. The captain opened the left door, then stopped again.

  "She is battling a demon," he whispered. "I saw it."

  Velesti nodded again, but did not allow herself a smile until the

  door had clicked shut behind him. The duty captain thought for a moment how similar to Lemorel's image the guard's face had been, but did not hold the thought. He no longer had much faith in what his eyes told him.

  Back in Jemli's room the image of Lemorel sauntered clear of the wall. Jemli watched, still standing on the bed.

  "The bombing of the palace was about a minute ago, by the way, and congratulations, your agents managed to kill Highliber Franzas Dramoren and shoot down one Avianese kitewing. Unfortunately all the other leaders survived, and are very, very angry. The great beamflash tower of Libris survived as well, and is currently transmitting a declaration of war on Woomera to the border forts and garrisons."

  Only now did the image fade. Jemli collapsed down onto her huge bed, desperate to have peace, to sleep, to rest, to just lie still with a blank mind, yet aware that the image had told no lies at all. At least nothing that she knew to be lies, at any rate. The Dragon Librarian Service was to be crippled, the Commonwealth left lead-erless, the Southmoors blamed. They were the only neighboring power not to have a representative on the palace balcony, she had even sent the unsuspecting Overmayor of Woomera to die there. It could not fail, she had decided. The presence of her own Overmayor was to be her proof of innocence.

  Hours later reports began to arrive by the Gentheist-controlled beamflash system that reached to the border with the Commonwealth. The paraline and road bridges had been blown up on the river border, and trenches were being dug across the roads on the Commonwealth side. Woomeran barges and river galleys were being seized in Commonwealth river ports, and others had been shelled and sunk by shore-based bombards. Another report spoke of a battle raging between two squadrons of river galleys directly outside the river harbor at Morgan. The two forces were evenly matched and were flaying each other to matchwood. The same agent in the beam-flash tower of Morgan reported mobs shooting Gentheists regardless of whether or not they had affiliations with Jemli, and every Gen-theist shrine in the port was burning. Soon after that message the

  beamflash transmissions ceased, after an announcement that war had been declared and the border was closed.

  Jemli now had a dilemma. Her army of lancers, officials, priests, and newly trained beamflash operators was ready to rush into the Commonwealth and save it from anarchy. It was not an army of invasion, however, and was not intended to deal with coordinated, determined, and sustained opposition. Worse, from Morgan onward, the beamflash towers were all on the Commonwealth side of the river border.

  In a strategically canny move, Jemli sent a message to the Burra tower to dispatch three riders to Wentworth, a Woomeran town on the junction of the Southmoor Emirates, the Commonwealth, and her own lands. The thousand lancers there were to make a dash into Southmoor lands, then cross a nearby bridge into the Commonwealth. The riders covered the distance in a single day, and the thousand Ghan lancers were on Southmoor land by midnight and in the Commonwealth by morning.

  One of the lancers swam back across the river and staggered into Wentworth five days later. The brigade had been annihilated.

  Burra, the Woomeran Confederation

  I he report of the surviving Ghan lancer was given to a dispatch rider at once, but it was a further day before he reached Burra, which was now the eastern terminus of the Woomeran beamflash network. The priest in charge of the tower read the report in disbelief before giving it to the transmitter.

  / WENTWORTH LANCERS WIPED OUT / ALL COMMONWEALTH TOWNS AT SIEGE STATUS AVIANESE KITEWINGS DIRECTING COMMONWEALTH AND SOUTHMOOR LANCER BRIGADES FROM THE AIR / THREE CAVALRY BATTLES AGAINST SUPERIOR ODDS/

  "Why is this happening?" asked the transmitter. "Peterborough

  said that it was the Southmoors who bombed the palace in Rochester."

  "The leaders of the Commonwealth and Southmoors think differently," replied the priest, "but faith and the Deity will defeat them. Besides, our people are born and raised as warriors, we learned from the mistakes of the Milderellen Invasion. . . ."

  His voice trailed away. The sound that had caught his attention was like the drone of a large bee, but this bee was drawing shouts of amazement from the gallery on the other side of the beamflash tower's gallery. Hurrying across, the priest was confronted with something like a kite approaching from the southeast at much the same altitude as the tower's gallery.

  "Abominations in abominations," declared the priest. "They think to spy on our territory as they spied on our lancers."

  It was then that the reaction gun aboard the kitewing opened fire on the beamflash tower, with the firepower of a hundred musketeers. In two passes it shattered every mirror, telescope, and lens in the gallery, then turned north. His face flayed by flying glass, the priest staggered back across the beamflash gallery to the northern balcony.

  "Warn the capital, that thing might attack their central tower!" he cried, but the man working as transmitter had been killed in the attack.

  The priest knew enough code to send basic, unencrypted messages, but the mirrors, telescopes, and even semaphore switchboxes were riddled with half-inch holes. He picked the dead transmitter's binoculars up off the floor and looked for the kitewing. It was barely visible already, flying low and straight for Peterborough. It was fast, it would take no more than twenty minutes to reach the capital.

  Thinking quickly, the priest opened the flare locker and ignited a smoke flare, then he selected the largest fragment of mirror in the gallery, took a sighting on the sun and began flashing his warning to Peterborough.

  / ALERT / AIR GALLEY ATTACK IN THIRTY MINUTES / TOWER DISABLED / NINE DEAD / MIRRORS DESTROYED /

  Peterborough, the Woomeran Confederation

  In the central tower in Peterborough the faint twinkle of the priest's message was noticed a few minutes after the first smoke flare had been sighted. The supervising priest was called, and he ordered that a request for clarification be transmitted. None was returned, but the desperate warning continued. The interval being flashed in the warning now was five minutes.

  "There is nothing at all on the paraline," reported the shift's observer.

  "He must mean a galley engine has attacked," the priest decided. "He is not a trained transmitter."

  "A galley engine would take an hour to cross from Burra. Anyway, the line is clear."

  "Transmitter, alert the paraline guardhouses," ordered the priest. "Receiver, is his message the same?"

  The receiver peered into his telescope again. "Yes, and a second flare—"

  The image of a huge and ungainly kite rose up into the receiver's field of view with its reaction gun already sparkling. Bullets tore through the tower, tearing through flesh and shattering equipment. A lamp was hit, and the olive oil spilled and ignited. In this tower the priest was one of the first to die, and most of the operators who were still alive scrambled for cover. As the kitewing made a second pass the guards on the ground opened fire on it, but they had no way of estimating its true size and speed, neither were they trained to aim slightly in front of a fast-moving target. On its third pass the kitewing was confronted by a lone, brave operator who fired two shots from his flintlock pistols, but to no effect. The flames had taken hold of the tower's gallery by the fourth pass and the operators were already escaping down the stairs.

  Jemli herself saw the kitewing empty its reaction gun into the gallery in its last strafing run, then assume a course southeast and slowly gain height. All across Pete
rborough the tower and church bells were ringing their futile alarms. It was hours before musketeers

  ceased shooting at anything that dared to take to the air above the Woomeran capital, by which time five military messenger pigeons had fallen to friendly fire. That evening a galley engine arrived with the news that the Southmoors had formally joined the war and had taken Wentworth in a single battle.

  Jemli called a meeting of her Assembly of Priests, then vanished with them behind closed doors until the ninth hour. When they did emerge the criers were roused to go through the city, proclaiming a mighty rally for midnight of the following day.

  In the main marketplace of Peterborough two figures walked together as evening faded from the sky. One was a woman wearing a uniform of the palace guards, the other was dressed only in a kilt and cloak, and was assumed to be a visiting hermit.

  "You are in great danger, there are now priests following you and listening to everything you preach," cautioned Velesti.

  "Oh, good, I might convert them," replied Ilyire.

  "You are also unique. How else can we communicate with the cetezoids except through you?"

  "I have trained some of my best students, they are already able to carry on in my absence. I am not important."

  "What can be achieved by dying?"

  "Nothing in particular, but do not worry. I am not planning to become a martyr."

  Highland Bartolica, North America

  lor Samondel, the problem was that her enemies happened to be the most highly skilled at making what she wanted. The guildmasters who remained loyal to her had begun to reduce the weight of her sailwing by removing its reaction guns and armor and replacing its skin with a much lighter silk, but a difficulty remained. It had been built very much in the traditional style, long before the war with Yarron. It was aerodynamically stable, and reliability had been built into every aspect of its construction, but it was still heavy compared