The Will to Battle--Book 3 of Terra Ignota

by Ada Palmer

  “You don’t need this war,” I screamed back at all of them, Sniper, Apollo, Tully. “I know we can’t avoid war, but it doesn’t have to start like this. No one’s ready. Put it off! Put it off until Kosala has time to stock the hospitals. Put it off until someone has a plan!”

  My Enemy’s eyes grew colder than his ghosts’. “You think we don’t have a plan?”

  How cold were mine, I wonder? “One you’re prepared to implement? Tell me, Tully, look me in the eye and tell me you don’t want three more weeks to move your pieces into place. Tell me you don’t want three more days to teach a few more kids how to survive for five minutes out there! This isn’t an opening volley, it’s a world brawl. Stop it.”

  “The next start might be worse.”

  “How could it be? There will be more food! More medicine! Stop! Stop it! Please!”

  I am lying to you, reader. I just realized. Reading back these last few paragraphs I recognize my fantasy, not memory, taking control. It should have been me who served my masters well and talked these rebel leaders into prolonging peace. I failed. I lay there sobbing, useless. It was my Enemy who made these arguments. It was Tully Mardi who saved the world.

  “Stop blubbering, Mycroft!” He backhanded me, a strange blow, ill-aimed but strong, the semipracticed strike of one who has trained long on punching bags but never flesh. “Get me a direct line to Papadelias! Now! Mycroft, can you hear me?”

  I didn’t recognize the lump between my fingers as a tracker microphone until that moment. “Pa-papa?” I stammered.

  “Yes, Commissioner General Papadelias. Call them. Now. They’ll answer you. We can still stop this!”

  I made the call, uncomprehending, and Tully snatched back the microphone the instant “Mycroft?” sounded urgent through its drum.

  “Commissioner, this is Tully Mardi Mojave. Sniper and I want to help calm the chaos. We think we can talk our supporters down if you can get Ancelet and the other Hive leaders to calm theirs down. We’ll piggyback a video on this signal, but we need your pledge, with witnesses, that we get temporary immunity, that you won’t trace this call to track us down, and that you won’t send anyone after us for, say, forty-eight hours after we get things calm. We want to save lives as much as you do, but we won’t sacrifice our cause or our freedom to achieve it. Do we have a deal?”

  Silence. “This plan will subtract evil. I can secure cooperation’s pledge from every force on Earth whose pledge means anything. Amnesty is yours forty-eight hours beyond those hours we spend together on this good. Will you reciprocate?”

  “I … who is this?”

  “I Am Jehovah Mason.”

  I blushed at my mistake, but panic and autopilot had overridden Tully’s instruction of which Master I should call.

  Now the silence was Tully’s, panic, not a rabbit’s frozen panic but Reason itself in crisis, as when tedious arithmetic reveals slowly to Galileo a different Plan and Maker than the ancients knew, or when fragile Carlyle Foster sees a dying soldier turn to plastic. Tully Mardi was with us on the Rostra, remember? Jehovah’s bloody brains spattered his clothes too. The public, with their static-blurred video, could doubt the miracle—not he. Coward. Coward you are, my Enemy, and always will be. Coward who had over the phone the undivided attention of a God, and knew he did, and stood there, dumb.

  “Yes!” Sniper snatched the microphone. “We’ll reciprocate: no attempts on your life by me or any of my agents for forty-eight hours after things calm down. You have my word, and if it was true what Mycroft says that you’re offering a truce for a month while they finish writing their history, I’m open to that too once we get this calmed down.”

  Again the silence before He Who Visits speaks. “Dominic’s pledge does not mean anything.”

  O.S.: “What?”

  The Addressee: “Other powers’ pledges I can secure, but Dominic’s pledge does not mean anything. You harmed Me. Whether measured in hours, weeks, or seconds, My Dominic will not pause his hunt.”

  I: “Where is Dominic?” I shrieked it loudly enough for the microphone to hear me.

  The Addressee: “Yahari Mecum. Pericul’est. Continuitas tua Me solatur, Mycroft. (With Me, of course. There is danger. I’m glad you’re alive, Mycroft.)”

  I: “Tecum … (With You.)” The tongue of white-hot panic in me faded. Dominic was not coming. Dominic would happily watch the world burn if he could defile the blasphemer’s corpse amid the coals, but he would not leave our Master’s side in time of danger. No one may harm his God; no one but him.

  The Addressee: “Will you return My Mycroft?”

  O.S.: “Possi—”

  My Enemy: “Never!” Tully tried to snatch the microphone, but Sniper danced back.

  O.S.: “We’ll discuss it later.”

  My Enemy: “Are you insane? We’re talking about Mycroft Canner!”

  O.S.: “We have worse enemies.”

  My Enemy: “You have worse enemies.”

  O.S.: “Other issues later, crowd-control first.”

  My Enemy: “Do you like dental torture? Mycroft does.”

  O.S.: “Later! The world’s on fire. We can spat after we’ve put it out. Well, J.E.D.D. Mason, do we have a deal?”

  The Addressee: “Why do you not call Me Jehovah?”

  O.S.: “What?”

  The Addressee: “You exposed that name to all your species. You have the strength to use it; others may learn that strength of you, if you show it.”

  A new light kindled in Sniper’s eyes, comingled curiosity, intrigue, aggression, pain, as when a child, used to crossing wooden swords with a younger ba’sib, suffers his first seriously bruising blow, and awakens to the fact that he faces no toddler now, but an opponent. “Jehovah. Do we have a deal?”

  “We have.”

  Their efforts took many hours, and equipment which apparently the next room had, leaving me alone with my wounds. Sleep, with less death in it than before, visited me in spurts, but it is no use to you hearing how the mobswell looked to me in fever’s dreams. You want reality. Their efforts worked; this possible version of war died unborn, but not quickly. Censor Jung Su-Hyeon dispatched predictions to Romanova’s forces with electric speed. Papadelias made hard, brave choices of where to send his few, brave men. Two thousand, three hundred and thirteen people, by our last count, died that night. Hundreds of buildings burned. Millions of tons of food and kitchen fertilizer disappeared from shops and warehouses. All capitals became police states. The transit network closed all flights, except those away from danger areas and toward hospitals, shelters, or home. Authorities dismissed rumors that organized packs of servicers had separated crowds in Athens, defended set-set bash’houses in Los Angeles and Mexico City, and put out a flaming barge that threatened Chongqing harbor. Utopia hid. Kosala pleaded for calm, Spain for dignity, Ancelet for patience, Jehovah for humanity. MASON told the world to go to its room. Sniper pleaded for, of all things, strategy: “This situation needs a single bullet to the head, not a flamethrower into the crowd. These riots are unworthy of Humanists.” Tully made public his predictions of the real consequences of what the mobs were doing, and once he made his numbers public, Censor Su-Hyeon released his own, not quite identical. The world went to its room.

  It was Martin Guildbreaker who came for me in the end: Martin, the world’s most trusted man. He is trusted of Caesar, of Papadelias, of our dear Master, of the Senate, of the Senate’s grandmother his own grandparent Charlemagne Guildbreaker Senior, trusted of Ancelet and Faust who read men well, and of Andō and Spain who watched this young Mason grow up at their Son’s side. In my delirium, Martin later told me, I started listing aloud his many trusts and merits, as if drafting in my head some brief biography which might have made it into my first history had sleep not claimed the memory. Caesar had sent Martin for me, with Cannergel cuffs and the order that he manacle my wrist to his to prevent escape as he escorted me back to Imperial custody in Alexandria. Seeing me bandaged and barely able to stand, Martin cuffed me
all the same. Only as he helped me to my feet did I realize a goodbye kiss from Sniper had likely not been a dream.

  “Tell me as much of what happened to you as you’re willing to,” Martin ordered, “but don’t fill in the gaps with lies, not tonight.”

  I slumped against his shoulder, comfortable like sun-warmed stone. “Someone tried to kill me. Stabbed me. Someone who had the means to spy on Sniper’s followers, who must have heard them talking about my capture and got to me faster than Sniper could. And whoever it was wanted to make it look like my original kidnapper was responsible for my death, so stabbed me again in the same spot.”

  “Your original kidnapper?”

  I would not answer. Do you find my silence strange, reader? Dominic does not have to remind me aloud of the power he has to harm many I care about. Think of Voltaire and noble Aldrin ever in his power, reader. Think of Saladin. “How did you get Sniper to give me back?” I asked.

  Martin told me what he believed was my true ransom: the three terms confirmed between Sniper and our Master. Term one: my history would be completed as planned, but each fresh chapter would be sent to Sniper’s faction as soon as I completed it, so Sniper, Lesley, and Enemy Tully could veto or edit my words. Term two: Sniper would write a chapter of its own, to explain its disappearance on March twenty-seventh, and was free in that chapter to exhort my readers to join its deadly cause. Term three: Dominic and I would be watched carefully over the next weeks, and the Enemy notified if either of us made a move against him before the truce was done. I rejoiced at heart: these were fair terms, reader, happy terms that would make my history better in the end. But Martin was deceived: these were not the true price exacted by Providence for my release. The price was that they spoke.

  The Addressee: “I will help you speak with your captured bash’mates without revealing your location. Live transmissions are easily traced, but Papadelias will facilitate exchange of text or recorded messages. They will be monitored, but neither censored nor admissible as evidence.”

  O.S.: “Tempting.”

  The Addressee: “I will also aid you in communicating with your supporters. Back channels breed doppelgangers.”

  O.S.: “What?”

  The Addressee: “There are now as many lies circulating under the names of Ojiro Sniper and Tully Mardi as there were under the name Voltaire when all Paris knew there was no greater draw for readers than the title of their banished Patriarch. Fugitives cannot control which words carry your names.”

  Hobbes: “I had that problem too from time to time! Upstart nobodies circulating underground pamphlets with my name on them when I was forbidden to publish. Infuriating!”

  Reader: “Yes, I have seen the phenomenon from the other end. It is maddening slogging through tome after tome of false Seneca or Canner to find the real works.”

  The Addressee: “One supposed Ojiro Sniper wrote today que My Emperor father must join Me in death to end this, and another that it was not Perry but young Censor Jung Ancelet Kosala who masterminded all. I want to help you help the public weed out such doppelgangers. I will let you share the system the Anonymous uses to let the public sort author from impostor. That web of checks and riddles has stood two centuries impregnable.”

  O.S.: “Clearer channels would be very useful. And in return I release Mycroft?”

  The Addressee: “I would be happy if you released Mycroft.”

  O.S.: “I thought that’s what you were bidding for.”

  The Addressee: “Bidding?”

  O.S.: “Why else would you offer me so much?”

  The Addressee: “To decrease evil.”

  O.S.: “What?”

  The Addressee: “Separation and confusion cause pain, a form of evil, and prevent the joy and creativity which are the fruits of human contact. I do not wish you pain, nor to decrease the sum of human happiness and achievement.”

  O.S.: “Wait, you…” Now it was Sniper who needed silence to collect thoughts. “You’re offering me all this just to keep us from being lonely?”

  The Addressee: “It is My small apology for My Peer’s cruelty in creating separation. Political and filial obligations prevent Me from releasing your bash’mates, but I will allow as much contact as possible.”

  O.S.: “And communications with my followers? Why give me that?”

  The Addressee: “Lies too are evil.”

  O.S.: “Are they?”

  The Addressee: “Ὄντος … pardon … existence is truth; lies unmake truth and so unmake existence; that is evil.”

  O.S.: “That’s really why you’re doing this?”

  The Addressee: “Of course.”

  O.S.: “Philosophy aside, you realize this strengthens my side, right? If I’m struggling against impostors, it slows my plans. Give me a clear line to the people and you make it easier for me to get what I want—and what I want is to kill you.”

  The Addressee: “You are principled, self-examined, recta, destacada, driven by worthy causes, and loved by one I Love. I can respect a universe where it is you who kills Me, but not one where I am murdered by a lie.”

  O.S.: A pause. A sigh. “You’re one of these impossibly good people, aren’t you? So the longer I talk to you the more I’m going to regret having to kill you?”

  The Addressee: “I am thus far omnibenevolent.”

  O.S.: Again a pause. “You understand it’s hard to believe anyone really thinks like that, not just in this day and age, but any day and age.”

  The Addressee: Again that deeper pause, as thoughts unfathomably vast, beyond both space and time, contort themselves into mere syllables. “I wish to restore to you that familiar company which understands your thoughts and language as no other can, and so reaches through the darkness of miscommunication which isolates every human soul; your shortest name for this concept is bash’. I wish too to give you Truth, and the means to share what Truth you have with Earth now and Posterity beyond. These things I freely give. It proves again your Author’s love of symmetry that you have the means to give the same to Me.”

  O.S.: “You mean … Mycroft?”

  The Addressee: “My translator and historian. I do not need Mycroft to kill you and Tully Mardi Mojave; many could do that. I need Mycroft for Myself.”

  O.S.: “Bad luck it’s you that has to die.”

  The Addressee: “Luck?”

  O.S.: “Bad luck it’s you they picked to make tyrant of the world. It should’ve been a selfish dick like Andō or Perry, or someone horrible like Dominic, so no one would regret seeing their head blown off. Even President Ganymede chose to play the game, so it’s fair they’ve gone down in flames. You didn’t choose this. You should be in the Sensayers’ Conclave writing weird philosophy, not in the Senate, and not in my gun sights. It’s stupid luck it’s you that has to die.”

  The Addressee: “There is no luck, nor Fortune, only Providence.”

  O.S.: “You think you were chosen for the greater good?”

  The Addressee: “There is a Purpose; that is not the same as Good.”

  O.S.: “What purpose?”

  The Addressee: “It seems I have not given enough attention to that question. I thank you, My adversary, for reminding Me. You are wise. I grieve that you too will so likely die in this.”

  Thus, while had I slept and the world cooled, these two had met mind to mind, and poisoned the clean title of adversary with the taint of affection. I got the transcript later from Martin, who watches our Master more closely than ever now, not spying secretly, but watching with the full consent of He Who is watched. But for that night, as Martin helped me from the recovery bed, I still believed my ransom had been painless.

  “Shall we walk a bit, Mycroft?” Martin invited gently.

  “Thank you, Nepos.”

  A little exercise was welcome at this stage in the science-hastened re-knitting of my tissues. While the Imperial guards carried a stretcher ready, Martin let me lean on him and walk up from the now-abandoned basement to face the smoky sky. We were
somewhere in India, a festive downtown: clubs, galleries, spice bars, and walkways lined with windows packed with desire. The sun had not quite set, but smoke’s interference gave an early wake-up call to what few evening lights survived. The musk of snuffed fires wafted from all sides, and to our left a sea of shattered glass sparkled like faerie fire around a freshly gutted improv club. My tears began when I saw the composition kiosk of the club’s Amadeus set-set gutted in the street, its strings and cables draped across the ruins in triumphant garlands, like the intestines of a defeated giant. Graffiti covered the walls with slogans, opposing slogans, sloppy Hive sigils, and bull’s-eyes. One bull’s-eye had a crosshairs, and letters scrawled at its center to be the target: JEDDM. The silent shops had a sense of violated shock to them, as if affronted that we should catch them empty, like a theater set glimpsed in its naked frailty after the show. Looting had been everywhere. I can hear our Master Hobbes whispering over your shoulder, reader, saying this proves again that we are selfish, wicked beasts, but I think goods left unguarded breed forethought, not greed, a hunter-gatherer’s rational defensive fear of future chaos: If law and trade break down, will my fight for survival need this loaf? This coat? This spoon? We walked three slow blocks, passing an ironwork sculpture ripped into makeshift weapons, and a brawl preserved in spilled paint, footprints bright as wildflower chaos. The arched gate of a Utopian district loomed on our left, with four sentinels beneath, luminous in coats of tide marshes, 1450, 1950, and space-view sunset, watched in turn by three stern unicorns, a giant spider, and a whirlwind of silver-sleek winged snakes that thrashed like flying mercury. Apollo’s sun sigil did not show upon these coats, but I knew the Delians for what they were. In the square outside the gate someone had been burnt in effigy; it almost didn’t matter who.

  Martin paused our walk now, judging my tears enough. “Tully Mardi wants more of this, Mycroft.” His voice was soft. “And Sniper wants to kill Dominum nostrum, kill them again so they stay dead. Both threats would’ve been eliminated today if you’d called Caesar, or Dominic, or me, or anyone who would’ve followed through and killed our enemies. I know today’s secret truce may prove a good thing in terms of raw casualties, but it puts Dominum in greater danger, and that endangers the new age they will bring to the Empire and the world. You know that’s not an acceptable price, not just to postpone a thousand deaths. Promise me, Mycroft, once this truce is over, that you’ll never again give up a chance to destroy our enemies. Promise me.”