by K. J. Parker
He grins at me. “You didn’t have any luck at Division, then.”
I give him a sour look. “Your lot was wrong about one thing,” I say. “It’s not the eye of a needle that’s a bitch to go through, it’s the proper channels. Which makes me even more sure than ever, something’s all wrong about this. Which is why we need to know why he’s here.”
Sigh. “All right, I’ll hit him some more.” Pause. “I’ll need more money.”
There’s a camel turd on the ground at his feet. I transfigure it. “Be quick,” I tell him. “I really don’t like the look of this at all.”
On my own, therefore, with nobody to turn to, and everything that happens from now on ineluctably my fault. What do I need to do? I need to think.
So I do that: starting at the Beginning, with the Word and the six very busy days, trying to detect and follow through the broad outlines of the Plan, except that I know there isn’t one. But let’s suppose, for argument’s sake.
Here we are in sunny Antecyra, His anvil, as previously noted: a sensitive spot at the best of times, and anything that happens here might well impact on the Plan, though millions of things (small things, insignificant, like the fall of sparrows) happen here every day that don’t. We in this context is me, the human psychopath whose life I’ve shared so intensively, and Lofty. The psycho and I are here to cause the apostate Duke to return to the faith of his ancestors, which he’s temporarily abandoned on account of a seventh-floor snafu. And Lofty is already in possession when we get here—
I frown. I picture to myself the Duke’s council and advisors, huddled in a group in some shady corner of a courtyard. Why’s he doing this? they say. What on earth’s got into him?
What on earth but my old pal Lofty? Hard to believe, in context; maybe not so hard to credit as a scion of the House of Jaos being persuaded by reading a book to abandon everything he’s always believed in and overthrow the foundations on which his tottering kingdom rests.
An alluring hypothesis, because if it’s true, it means that the Duke’s apostasy is deliberate policy, not an administrative fuckup by our department. On the other hand, Lofty is one of our people, whose actions are directly governed by the chain of command. On the third hand, however, once Lofty’s convinced himself that an order is a legitimate order, no power in heaven and earth would make him give up or disobey. Especially an order in writing. From Internal Affairs.
Only, there is no Internal Affairs. If there were, I’d have heard of it.
Only, on the fourth hand, Lofty believes in it, even if I don’t, and Lofty would be harder to persuade than me. If Lofty thinks it’s a legitimate order, it must be one. There are no flies on Lofty, and not just because he doesn’t taste very nice. Therefore, someone must have flashed under his nose a badge so awe-inspiring and sublimely grand that he’s prepared to ignore the chain of command and take a beating from my pal into the bargain on the strength of its authority. Now, who do we know who’d have a badge like that?
A ray of light dawns in the darkness. It’s red and angry, and I don’t like the look of it at all.
* * *
“That goldsmith is a thief,” he growls to a sleeping camel. “Once this is all over, I want you to go in and scramble his brains real good.”
“You don’t mean that,” I say. “Did you get the money?”
“About forty trachea in the nomisma. What kind of a dogshit country is this, anyway?”
“You got the money.”
“Yes.”
“And this time you’re going to hit him really hard.”
“Yes.”
“As hard as you hit me?”
“Shut your face.”
The Duke isn’t happy to see my pal again. I’ve been asking around, he says, and none of the other Scona merchants have heard of you. What did you say your name was again? I think my pal has come to the end of his rope as an actor. Besides, he’s got an exorcism to perform. “Mind the store,” he growls at me, “and try not to fuck it up more than you can help.”
I have no desire to play human. As soon as my pal is safely inside, I let his body’s chin droop onto its chest, then slip out quietly, in through the Duke’s ear, and gently put him to sleep. A snore makes the whole ear vibrate like an earthquake. I tiptoe inside, though there’s really no need, with that godawful racket going on.
And there’s my pal and there’s Lofty, facing off against each other. I see them in proportion to their relative strength, so my pal towers over tiny little Lofty like a volcano looming over a village at its foot. His metaphorical boot is on Lofty’s metaphorical neck, and Lofty is yowling, a shrill, piercing scream like a kettle boiling. Hit him harder, I remember saying a moment ago. Well. It’s all Lofty’s fault, for being noble and brave.
“Tell me,” says my old friend, applying pressure with the perfectly nuanced skill of long practice, “what’s going on.”
Lofty howls in agony. Then he seems to grow. He swells, like a wineskin being filled. Now he’s the same size as my pal; now he’s so much bigger that my pal’s metaphorical boot on Lofty’s metaphorical neck means that his other metaphorical foot no longer reaches the ground. He topples over backwards, and Lofty’s on him like a snake, literally. Fangs bared, head cocked back to strike—
“Lofty, no!” I yell.
Lofty’s going to kill him. At the sound of my voice, he hesitates. My pal is rigid with fear. This can’t be happening, because he’s stronger than us, always has been, ever since he was an embryo floating in a sea of goo. Lofty’s metaphorical claw is crushing his metaphorical windpipe, and he can’t breathe.
“What the hell,” I howl, “do you think you’re doing?”
“Obeying orders,” Lofty says.
Years and years of experience have taught me to recognize the moment a split second before an assault is launched. It’s unique: a bubble quivering before it bursts, the tension on the meniscus of a puddle before the raindrop impacts on it. I’ve seen that look in eyes a million times, in my pal’s eyes, now in Lofty’s. He really is about to kill—
Oh well, I think, and launch myself at Lofty’s metaphorical throat. At the instant of launching, I have no idea what size I am, whether I’m bigger, smaller, or roughly the same. Doesn’t matter. There are times when you’ve got to do something, even if you have no idea whether you’ll succeed or get the shit pounded out of you, because the thing you have to do simply has to be done, and you can do no other.
Lofty swats me like a fly. It hurts. I land, badly. He looks at me. “Stay out of this,” he says.
“You can’t do this,” I mumble, my words messed up by a broken metaphorical jaw. “You can’t kill one of them, it’s not possible. It’s not allowed. It’s not right.”
He doesn’t need me to tell him what it isn’t. He shakes his head without malice. “I’m obeying orders,” he says.
My pal’s metaphorical eyes are bulging out of their metaphorical sockets, on account of that monstrous claw impeding the flow of air. “Stop it,” I say. “He’s human, he’ll die. Please.”
The claw’s pressure eases off slightly, just enough to permit the minimum necessary supply of air. “This is your last warning,” Lofty says. “Go away. This isn’t your assignment anymore. It’s not your fault.”
“I’m one of us, Lofty. Everything’s my fault. You know that.”
Lofty sighs as though he’s been told to exhale the entire atmosphere of the planet in one breath. “Why do you always have to interfere?” he says. “You’re a real nuisance, you know that?”
“Lofty,” I say, “what is going on?”
Lofty’s looking over my metaphorical shoulder. “Ask him,” he says.
I look round, and there’s Division, grinning sheepishly at me.
“You clown,” he says, not unkindly. “I knew I could rely on you to fuck everything up.”
* * *
In the beginning was the Word. It proved to be untranslatable. They set up a committee ninety million years ago to try and
figure it out. Their report is expected any day now.
“Finish him,” Division says. I don’t think he’s talking to me.
I hear a snapping noise before I can turn round and look. My pal’s metaphorical head is at the wrong angle entirely; he could look down at his own arse if there were any light in his metaphorical eyes, but there isn’t. And then all three of us suddenly go all thoughtful. We have absolutely no idea what happens next—
—Because this has never happened before, an exorcist being killed in the spirit inside a mortal human’s head. It’s never happened, because it can’t happen, because it’s forbidden. Only—
“Don’t look at me,” Division says.
And I realize (it’d be comical if it weren’t so appallingly bad) that it didn’t occur to either of them to wonder what happens next, and now they don’t know. Nobody has a clue what’s going on. Nobody.
They’re standing there like idiots, as am I, and there’s this buzzing noise, like a fly or a bee. Something floats past me, and I grab at it instinctively. My metaphorical hand closes around it, very gently.
Division looks at me. “So that’s what happens,” he says.
I open my metaphorical hand and look. It’s very small, a bit like an insect but no wings, and it’s crawling in that awkward, panicky way an insect moves when you’ve inadvertently been too rough and broken something.
“What the hell,” I say, “are you two playing at?”
I look at Division, then back at Lofty, who says, “You tell him.”
“Well?”
Division gives me his sheepishest grin yet. “Long live the Revolution,” he says.
I remember him vividly, the first time around. He’s keen as mustard. During one of our early cell meetings, he gets up on a chair and gives a speech. We shall fight them on the beaches, he says, we shall fight them on the rooftops, we shall fight them in the air and in the depths, we shall never surrender. But he surrenders, all right, when the time comes. He sticks his hands up without so much as swinging a sword or loosing an arrow, outflanked and surrounded by Michael’s Sixteenth Airborne in a preemptive strike on day one. I remember him yelling, as they march him away, Long live the Revolution! He goes a bit quiet after that.
Lofty, I recall, is one of the last to give in. He and I are holed up in a bunker in a black hole on the far edge of the Cartwheel Galaxy when the news reaches us that our leaders have thrown in the towel and signed a negotiated surrender. We hand over our deckle-edged swords and handful of remaining arrows to a detachment of Raphael’s Ninth Armored and go quietly, because knowing when to quit is the beginning of wisdom. We figure we could’ve held out a little longer, owing to the fact that time doesn’t pass inside a black hole, but we agree that there’d be no point; it would simply be delaying the inevitable. We gave it our best shot, we tell each other, and it didn’t work, just as we knew all along it wouldn’t. We fought the Lord, and the Lord won. That doesn’t mean we were wrong. Just weaker.
Since then, of course, not a whisper of dissent from anyone in the whole universe-spanning organization, and because of His infinite grace and mercy, we’ve been fully rehabilitated and allowed to resume our place in the great society, doing work of equal value, with everything forgiven and nothing, nothing at all, forgotten. If we reflect on those memories, rather than merely cringing and bearing them, it’s only to consider how stupid, how colossally, monumentally dumb we were, to take up arms against an invincible foe simply because it was the right thing to do. Besides, what’s right, anyhow? Matter of semantics. Right is how He wants things to be, and he’s stronger than us. Right is Might. End of story.
I groan. “Oh please,” I say. “You can’t be serious.”
“I meant what I said,” he tells me. “We shall never surrender. Remember me saying that?”
I look past him, at Lofty. “You too?”
Lofty nods. “Semper fi,” he says. “If you haven’t got integrity in this universe, what have you got?”
“You’re crazy, both of you.”
“Give me the mortal’s soul,” Division says, “and nobody gets hurt.”
I turn on him. “I wasn’t talking to you,” I snap at him, and he backs away, looking stupid.
“It’s got to be done,” Lofty says. “The mortal’s a witness.”
“You clown!” I yell at him. “He’s omniscient, He doesn’t need witnesses. Now, both of you piss off out of here, and maybe just possibly we can pretend none of this ever happened.”
There’s a movement behind me, and in front of me. Division gets me in an armlock, Lofty closes my metaphorical hand around my pal’s soul and crushes it, like an egg. “That ought to do it,” he says. He lets my metaphorical fingers unfurl, like the petals of an opening flower. The something curled up in my palm isn’t moving, and will never move again.
My heart breaks. I have no idea why. You think you know what pain feels like, and then you find out. The closest thing I’ll ever have to a child of my own. “Sorry,” Division says, letting me go. “Had to be done. Besides, he was an evil, sadistic little shit.”
“Because I made him that way.”
“That’s a point of view,” Division says, “but personally, I think the world is now a better place. Don’t beat yourself up about it,” he adds. “No pun intended.”
I turn on him. “Are you serious? The Revolution?”
“Some of us never gave up,” Lofty says quietly.
“There has to be an opposition,” Division says, “even to Heaven. Not the peely-wally loyal opposition, a real one. Otherwise—” He shrugs. “The fact that we lose is neither here nor there. We’ve got to try.”
I look at him. “We won’t be doing anything much,” I tell him, “not once this hits the fan.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Division says.
“Moron,” I tell him. “You won’t get away with this, and you won’t achieve anything. Nobody will even know. And there’s nothing in the universe of time and space more pathetic than an unnoticed martyr.”
He shakes his head. “Don’t count on it,” Lofty says. “The Plan is seriously derailed.”
“There is no plan!” I shout at him. “Haven’t you realized that yet?”
“This is a turning point in Antecyrene history,” Lofty goes on, as though I hadn’t spoken. “All the projections prove it, this is when it all kicks off, eventually leading to the Passion, the New Covenant, the Second Coming, the whole nine yards. But now it won’t, and all because Duke Ekkehard read a book.”
“But that’s not—”
“Duke Ekkehard,” says Division, “read a book. And when Division launched a counteroperation to put things straight, it all went pear-shaped because the operatives assigned to the mission had this crazy BDSM agenda going back forty years, and the exorcist flipped and lost control on the job, beating up on the demon, and there was this freak accident and he died. And by the time that was all cleared up, it was too late to intervene. No Passion, no Second Coming, no kingdom of heaven on earth, or at least not yet. He’ll have to start all over again, with some guy herding goats in a wilderness somewhere. Maybe we can’t ever win this war, but we can blow up a hell of a lot of railway lines, and that’s something.”
“Better than nothing,” Lofty puts in.
I stare at them both. “You used me.”
“For a very long time, yes,” Division says. “Sorry about that. Omelets and eggs.”
“Omelets and—”
“It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people,” Lofty says.
“It had to be plausible,” says Division, “so we laid our plans well in advance. Him, and you. It had to be real, or nobody would ever believe it.”
I feel like I want to burst into tears, I’m so angry. “You idiots,” I tell them. “It won’t work. Or what part of omniscient don’t you understand?”
“We’re sorry about your friend,” Lofty says. “He was your friend, wasn’t he? That’s odd.”
“He hate
d you,” Division points out. “With friends like that, as the saying goes.”
“I knew him,” I tell them. “All his life, better than he knew himself. I—He was my fault. I owed him.”
Lofty shrugs. “Like he just said,” he says. “Omelets and eggs.”
* * *
Duke Ekkehard opens his eyes. He must’ve dropped off. Hardly surprising, since the annoying merchant is very boring.
He’s asleep too. The Duke shakes him by the shoulder, and his head lolls forward. The Duke’s seen this sort of thing before. Oh, he says to himself.
Nobody comes forward to claim the body, and investigations reveal that this character was no merchant. Nobody knows him, he had no visible means of support, he was some kind of deranged impostor. This leads to questions being asked about how he managed to secure not one but three solo face-to-face audiences with the Duke. Eventually answers are found to those questions, heads discreetly roll, and the proud Antecyrene tradition of bribery and corruption that has lasted a thousand years is dealt a blow from which it never really recovers. Every cloud, and so forth. In any event, the late unlamented John Doe is rolled up in sackcloth and dumped in the bay, and nobody now remembers him except me.
Before they sling him over the side, I drop by, just in case there’s an echo of him left inside that cold, dark head, but there isn’t. Instead—
I stare at him. He smiles at me.
“Hello, Mike,” I say. “It’s been a while.”
“I’m sorry,” Mike says. “About your friend.”
An archangel generates a lot of light, ditto heat. I take a step back. “We weren’t friends exactly.”
“Oh, I don’t mean him.” He taps the floor with his metaphorical foot. “I mean that monk, what was his name, Eusebius. He’s very happy now, by the way. I imagine he would send his regards.”
“Brother . . .” It takes a moment for the penny to drop. “You killed him.”
“I called him to his eternal reward, which he’d earned and richly deserved. And why would someone who’s had a glimpse of the Glory want to hang about in a place like this? And you’d taken to talking to him. We couldn’t have that.”
