Haze and the Hammer of Darkness

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Would it work? asks Geidren.

  Yes.

  No.

  NO! Martel lets himself become visible, half shading his face in a shadow of his own, and offers an observation.

  “The problem with relying on religion is that you give the temporal authorities the power to ban it. Banned religions are effective only in limited circumstances—like when the god involved is willing to use force on behalf of his or her followers or when the oppression of the regime approaches terrorism.”

  His last half-sentence is lost in the blaze of the lasers concentrated on the corner where Martel stands.

  He absorbs what he can, diverts the rest into his personal undertime/underspace reservoir that grows with each appearance and reduces his need to tap his own foretime reserves.

  The way things are going, Martel, you’re going to have your own fields back- and foretime, that is, if everyone keeps throwing energy at you.

  Geidren stops the waste of energy with her own mental override of the controls she had activated. Mystic and Aquinas blanch as they see Martel still stands untouched.

  “Trite, but who are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’d like to offer some observations. One: The Prince Regent will fall, but the Regency will remain, more powerful than before. Two: Despite whatever you do, and it may be a great deal, the power of the House of Kirsten will wax, not wane. Three: There is a Master Game Player. Three at least, as a matter of fact. Four: You will not even attempt any injury to Martin Martel. It might make him angry, and it will definitely make me angry.”

  Him? Master Game Player?

  Can’t be!

  Three of them?

  Martel decides to emphasize his points, and amplifies his next message to the split point.

  THERE IS A FALLEN ONE. CALL HIM THE MASTER GAME PLAYER I REPRESENT. CALL THE TWO OTHERS APOLLO AND THE SMOKE BULL, IF YOU WILL.

  Mystic and Aquinas crumple, both twitching heaps. Geidren leans heavily against the commset.

  Don’t overplay … your … hand.

  Martel smiles, points at the commset, lets the energy flow from his fingertips, and waits until the equipment is a molten heap of slag.

  At the first blast, Gerri Geidren has staggered back, staring as if to penetrate the shadow that surrounds Martel’s face.

  No esper … that power.

  “As I said,” Martel resumes conversationally, ignoring the twitches of the two on the floor, “the Brotherhood will have to live with reality.”

  What would you do?

  Oppose the Empire.

  “But,” she breaks out verbally, “you said that wouldn’t do any good!”

  “That is not what I said. I said the Regency would fall, but that Kirsten’s power would not. In opposing the Regency and what follows, the Brethren can do a great deal of good by placing some checks on tyranny. The times will demand raw power. An organization based on promoting the best development of each individual’s abilities is restricted by its very ideals from exerting the kind of power necessary. And if you give up your ideals, you lose the power you have. So … don’t.”

  Damned philosopher.

  Few would call me that.

  “Two facets work better than one,” he continues aloud. “You might call the churchly half the Church of Man, and in turn the Regency will come to regard its priests as the servants of the Fallen One, who has not really fallen yet. That should not frighten you, because the Fallen One is of and for the people, which should indeed frighten them.”

  He is distracted by the shuddering gasp of Aquinas, who stops breathing. Martel turns his attention to the man, makes a few adjustments, and lets Aquinas slip into a deep sleep. He repeats the pattern with Mystic, and makes similar changes in the metabolism and body of Geidren.

  You merely represent a Master Game Player?

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  Merely represent?

  No man is a god, no matter how powerful!

  Martel lets his thoughts check the area again, scanning the monitors that guard the control center. Still under the control of his earlier meddling, they show nothing amiss, and the guard technicians sleep peacefully.

  “The other half,” he plods on, “the Brethren, could act as the temporal government in exile, doing what it can to remind the Empire and the Regency of the human rights of their people. Remember, neither will last forever, and some organized group should be there to guide the way when they fall.”

  They? They fall? Why should we do what you suggest? They? Only one Empire …

  Martel smiles.

  “You can do whatever you want. But remember that your strength lies in your ideals.”

  Still the damned philosopher-god.

  No god, no philosopher, and a damned prophet, corrects Martel in the instant before he vanishes.

  The next step is forty years forward in time and to the palace of the aging Prince Regent.

  lix

  3. And it came to pass in those days, when the son of the King of Kings sat upon the gilded throne of Karnak and ruled, and saw naught, that upon that night that was declared the servants brought food to the great table. When it was served, the lamps flickered. Flicker did the lamps twice, and after the third flicker were they extinguished, though no man had laid hands upon them.

  4. Light! Let there be light! commanded the Prince, who was mighty and beholden in all the universe only to his Father, the King of Kings, the Emperor of Man. But the darkness remained, and the servants fell to their knees, and the courtiers were struck speechless.

  5. Let there be light! demanded the Prince, and he stamped his boots, and the echo filled the halls, but there was no light.

  6. In the midst of the darkness then appeared a light, and in that light was a demon in the likeness of a man, and he wore the black of a prophet.

  7. What mean you, miserable creature, to deny a Prince of Princes light in his own hall? So saying, the Prince cast a thunderbolt at the demon. But the demon raised his hand, and the thunderbolt returned to the Prince and struck him dumb.

  8. Mark well what I say, responded the demon, and low was his voice, yet all in the great halls of Karnak that was heard it, from the kitchens to the dungeons and even unto the towers that speared the heavens and called unto the stars.

  9. Mark what I say, for thy days are numbered, even as the hour after the opening of the seventh seal. You shall be extinguished even as I have extinguished the lights of your hall and your mightiness. And none shall mourn you. No, none shall mourn you.

  10. Before this shall come to pass, I will raise a temple, which cannot be cast down, though you and your legions will try. The mightiest tree of the world shall be uprooted, and the heavens will open, and a woman shall save thy people. And she will lead them.

  11. Your people will be saved, but not you. For none shall mourn you and your passing, not even the King of Kings. For though I am vested in dark, I will bring light, and though you claim light, you are a judgment of darkness.

  12. Dumbstruck stood the Prince of Princes until the demon had vanished and the lamps had rekindled themselves.

  13. What heard you? asked the son of the King of Kings. What heard you?

  14. But of those who heard the black demon none would look to their ruler, nor would they speak.

  lx

  Martel holds the nexus point, hangs in the gray of not-time, thoughts seeking the true timeline to the Karnak he had known as a student, to the time when he and Kryn had strolled the ways of the great Park of Summer, Park of the Regent.

  Is the true path the reedy gray line twisting into the dark that becomes black, or the pulsing red one?

  The colors he perceives are all in his mind, for the gray chaos where he waits has no color, but color is how he sees them. The solid black path, almost a road arrow of time, leads back to Aurore. That aura leaves no doubts.

  A green line is the one he wants, and Martel wills himself back against the current until the feel of the reality outside the und
ertime river matches his images. Physics says there is no flow to time, that the flow is only in the mind of man; but Martel is used to fighting his own mind, if indeed that is where the flow of time exists.

  He emerges from the undertime next to a towering red-barked tree, just outside the silver glitter fence that surrounds the giant. So high is the mutated sequoia that its noon shadow covers acres.

  Martel’s black cloak droops over him in the windless quiet.

  Cling! Cling! Cling!

  The chimes from the carillon announce the beginning of the Moments of Thankfulness. Thankfulness for the generosity of the Prince Regent. A time when all stand silent. A time when the blue-uniformed proctors ensure that silence.

  Martel throws his cloak over his shoulders, casts his senses out across the acres, knows he will do what he now knows he did, and draws an aura of blackness around himself.

  He strides across the shadowed grass with a light step—jaunty, daring the blue proctors and their blue helmets and their blue blast rifles to incinerate him.

  Fifty-one paces later—not that Martel has counted them, he knows—the first proctor has Martel in his sights. Martel pities the man, raises his hand, and points.

  The blast rifle melts.

  The proctor drops it, suffers a burn as a splash of molten metal splats on his lower forearm, eats through his gauntlet.

  Proctors travel in pairs. His companion, seeing the damage, turns, sights, and fires.

  He explodes in a column of flame as the blast bends, impossibly, and returns to him.

  Martel leaves the shadow of the mighty Tree of the Regent and casts his own acres-long shadow as he marches toward the golden towers of the palace.

  In their dark blue singleskits, a second set of proctors races toward the black interloper. They race from the blue cupola that stands at the corner of the ten-kilometer-square park closest to the palace.

  Any military authority would deem the singleskits, armed as they are with disruptors, stunners, tanglers, and full riot-control equipment, more than a match for a single black-shadowed man who marches upon the palace.

  Deeming is not sufficient.

  Martel waits to see if the bluesuits are determined to destroy him merely for moving at the time appointed as sacred to the Prince Regent.

  They are.

  First, they focus the longer-range disruptors, for they are well over a kilo from Martel. The disruptors refuse to operate. As the two proctors scream closer the shock waves bend the ornamental shrubs that line the carved stone walks, rustle the leaves of the trees the singleskits barely clear, and bowl over the few children who are in the park at noon.

  Martel gestures, and the proctors and their vehicles are gone. Not destroyed, although that would have been easier. Gone. Thrust through the tunnels in the around time and place to the Star Room of the Marshal of Proctors. The Marshal is not present, but the defense systems are always alert, and there will be enough wreckage to confound the Prince Regent and the Marshal.

  The flow of energy from another set of disruptors bouncing from his screens draws Martel from his thoughts back into the park.

  Martel admires efficiency, and the kill instinct of the bluesuits is efficient.

  Less than units in the Park of the Regent and six proctors have attempted to destroy him for being so inconsiderate as to ignore the ritual silence and stillness devoted to the Prince. The last two are squandering energy on yet another attempt.

  Martel’s cloak flaps in the energy currents swirling around him, drips bits of shadow toward the burnt grass beneath his feet as he channels the energy into the reservoir from which he draws, and walks toward the remaining two singleskits, walks through the curtain of fire, through the disruptor beams and accompanying harmonics.

  Cling! Cling! Cling!

  The carillon chimes the end to the five units of stillness devoted to the greatness and beneficence of the Prince Regent whose minions continue their efforts to annihilate the Fallen One, for who but a Fallen One would dare profane the sacred stillness?

  Freed from the bondage of immobility, heads in the park turn to view the pillar of flame, to see the growing pool of blackness around the figure of a single man, to hear the crusty sound of energy weapons.

  From the farthest corner of the great park, screeching in on another wave of wind, comes yet one more pair of singleskits, disruptors and blasters flaring.

  Martel bends the energy, forces it skyward into a grotesque parody of the Tree of the Regent, into a tree of flame casting its own shadow of dark, a flame tree visible from the towers of the palace, and from far beyond. A tree visible to the sensors of the Fleet in orbit, a tree building brightness with each instant till heads that turned toward it turn away, eyes stinging from unaccustomed tears, hands shaking.

  And still the proctors fire, pouring the reserves from their singleskits, drawing from the power beams of the city.

  Around the Old City of Karnak, most distant from the palace, lights fail. Next the lift/drop shafts in the towers fail and draw on their emergency reserves just to shut down and to put their emergency catch nets in place.

  The Pleasures Pyramid that floats over the Lake of Hopes on the outskirts of the Old City loses lift, drifting inexorably downward, its lower floors first resting on the perfumed and green water, then crumpling as more and more of the inverted structure brings its weight to bear on the smaller lower stories.

  A man, wearing nothing and one of the few who can see what is happening, dives from an upper window when the restraining fields fail. The green water is less than a meter deep.

  A woman, holding up an impossibly long skirt, decked in copper fronds and blueglass jewels belonging to some vanished history that never really happened, climbs from a terrace once protected by an energy screen and struggles through thigh-deep water. She has waited too long. Her scream is drowned in hundreds of others as the entire Pleasures Pyramid collapses outward and down, on her, on the water, on the floating body of the dead diver.

  Martel feels the deaths, feels part after part of the city die.

  The flame tree darkens, soul-sucking, energy-seeking, cold, bending light away from it. But it grows, fueled by the energy Martel funnels into it, overtopping the Regent’s Tree, overtopping the highest spires of the Prince’s palace.

  Finally, the growth halts. The black tree stands. Untouched. Silent. Silent while the singleskits pour flame at Martel, silent while the palace’s long-range disruptors and lasers add their weight to the attack. Silent while the ground beneath Martel and his tree is consumed. Silent while the innocents in the park die and the city fractures.

  Silent while Martel’s soul screams and tallies each death with a black weight in his mind.

  The tree of the black flame vanishes. So does Martel. So do the four singleskits. So does the Park of the Regent, the Park of Summer, and so does the once-mighty Tree of the Regent.

  The tree? Martel bends space and time again and sends the tree back into antiquity, back to a planet long since forgotten. And that is as it should be.

  The singleskits and bluesuits are sent journeying, too, to another place, where their spirits may mingle with those of their victims.

  Martel hovers undertime, drawing the thunderstorms, the clouds, the rain, overriding the climate satellites, fusing their circuits.

  He is done. The rains pound Old Karnak, filling the glass-lined hole that was once the Park of Summer, filling that hole that will become the Lake of Dreams, chilling the citizens who have never felt day rain, and leaving the Prince shivering in his powerless palace.

  Martel twists his place in space, fractionally, and appears in a narrow street. His cloak is wrapped around him. No one notices, for attention is focused on the coal-black clouds above, on the lack of power, on the portals that will not open, on those trapped inside and out.

  A small boy is squeezed between the iris edges of a portal door. His mother is begging passersby for help, but in this district, at this time, no one will stop.

/>   Martel gestures, and the door collapses in powder. The child falls and skins his knee, falls silently, for he can barely breathe. The mother looks sideways at Martel, then darts toward her son, scoops him up, holding him to her shoulder and brushing the sticky gray powder off him. He should be dying, squeezed between industrial doors of such power, but Martel has taken care of that as well, and the child sleeps on his mother’s shoulder.

  In the rain, the cloak droops behind Martel. He looks nearly and merely human, a black rat looking for the darkest corner of Old Karnak.

  “Mister … can’t wear black. Bluesuits burn you spot.”

  Martel smiles at the urchin, dressed in faded red and yellow, his green eyes peering from under a red thatch, with a green sandal on one foot, a red one on the other.

  “Death cannot burn, young man. And life is death,” he replies, pleased with himself for remembering the Litany at this point.

  “Maybe no. Dead you no feel.”

  “Which way to Old Center? Polony’s mansion?”

  “That wreck?”

  Martel nods, lets a little blackness seep from his soul, well out around him.

  “Trick neat. You magician, something?”

  “Something like that. Polony’s house?”

  “Turn left next alley, three streets on right, and take another left … real narrow. Watch Gert. Hangs there with viber.”

  Martel reaches out with his thoughts, checks the boy, changes a few minor metabolic matters, and ambles on toward his destination.

  Three streets on down, he turns right into a narrower way, barely broad enough for three men elbow to elbow.

  Gert is there, removing his viber from the inert form of an unwarned man.

  Time for a demonstration.

  Martel bends time, again adjusts a few metabolic details. The figure on the plastistone pavement retches, groans, and sits up.

  Gert is not impressed, kicks the man away, and advances on Martel. The stench of stale ale and of sweat on sweat precedes him, a weapon in itself.

  Gorillalike, brown hair streaming down over his shoulders, Gert grabs for Martel, who does not move, embraces the man in black with his right arm, which is as thick as a small oak, and carves with his left, viber on full power.