The Will to Battle

by Ada Palmer

  I leaned and peered past Spain to see Madame, dark in a hooded traveling cloak which would have completely shrouded her skirts if not for a sea breeze which exposed the amethyst-trimmed black of her gown beneath. She was pale, her painted cheeks a waifish purple rather than her usual sensual pink, and so artful is her mask of makeup that, even though I know its falseness, the change felt real enough to awaken empathy.

  « The attack was inside the Conclave? » The king gasped.

  I was glad His Majesty could not see my face and the guilt upon it. I had witnessed the attack on his Son myself, of course, but Caesar, Conclave, Jehovah, and Utopia had all commanded that I hide the truth; a king, however kind, did not trump that.

  « Yes! Inside the very Conclave! It’s unthinkable! Cornel and Julia are hiding it from the public, but if it can happen there it can happen anywhere! He’s in such danger! Anywhere He goes they want to kill Him! Our dear, darling Child! I can’t stand it! Majesty, I think I shall collapse from fear! »

  Madame made good on her threat, collapsing in the king’s arms, which knew from practice just where at the bodice’s edge to grab and catch her as she fell.

  « Madame, you should not be here. » He rotated her body so she faced toward him, and away from us. « How did you get here? »

  It was a fair question. Over His Majesty’s shoulder I spotted servants, some in the king’s livery, some in suits, all sheepish at their failure. She should not have been here, and, as the duke shuddered beside me, I knew how completely her presence spoiled his promised sanctuary. La Almudaina would have been perfect for Ganymede, an ancient fortress-palace on the island of Majorca off the Eastern coast of Spain, long in Spain’s family, with sandy stone, arched walks, and battlemented towers overlooking palm trees and calm waves, all warmed by a vigilant but temperate sun. Here on Majorca’s shores, watched by Spain’s private guard, the fallen duke president would enjoy the same sort of dignified exile as Napoleon and the many fallen kin of ancient Caesars. Now, instead of the Mediterranean’s healing kiss, there was only the floral syrup of Madame’s perfume.

  « Oh! » she screamed, flinging herself past Spain, toward us. « My Ganymede! My poor! » English fails here to capture her wailing French. « What have those barbarians done to you! »

  The duke lacked speech still, but I saw the healthy flash of murder refresh itself in his eyes. I don’t believe this hate was for his own downfall. Madame had knowingly let Danaë’s destroyer, Merion Kraye, parade through Parliament, through Paris, even enter Ganymede’s own palace, shielded by a new face and the pseudonym Casimir Perry. Would Hector have forgiven Helen had he learned about the time the wily destroyer Odysseus—vulnerable and alone—crept into Troy to spy, and Helen recognized him but let him sneak back out again, and told no one? Odysseus’s death might have saved Troy, and Perry’s might have … no, I dare not speculate. Even with the war less than six weeks away, I dare not guess which side is Troy.

  His Majesty Isabel Carlos II caught Madame by her corseted waist before she could assail invalid Ganymede with kisses. « I told you to stay at Las Huelgas. » His stern eyes turned on his guards, who bowed apologies from the periphery.

  Madame’s smile was frantic and warm at once. « My love, how could I stay away? With our Son threatened? And my dear Ganymede barely alive thanks to this unforgivable treatment? How could I not come at once? »

  The king made her face him. « You can’t be here. The others were reluctant enough to let me take Their Grace into my care, but they were adamant I permit them no contact with others involved in the conspiracy. That includes you. »

  « Me? » Painted lashes fluttered over eyes sparkling with innocence. « Oh, that’s absurd. This is all a conspiracy against me, not one of mine, remember? I’m no more involved with O.S. than is Felix! Or Cornel! Ganymede is my ward. I raised him since infancy. I know what he needs, his favorite foods, how sensitive he is. Let me nurse him. If anyone can coax him back to health, I can. »

  Ganymede, still in my lap, breathed hard. ‘Ward’—here was a cold term. Was he an orphan, then? She merely a ‘guardian,’ this woman who had crafted him and his sister gene by gene from the ducal genome she had purchased? Who had rented the womb that carried him? Who oversaw his birth, his education, and held him a thousand times against her breast in childhood, but never once to nurse? Madame has many ‘wards,’ bred and polished in her boudoir. They have no other parent, but she has only one Son.

  The king still held her fast. « I’m sorry, Madame. If anyone found out you two even came in contact, they’d ship Ganymede straight back to the public jail again. Let me take care of things. You can send the twins’ old nurse over if you want, but you yourself can’t be here. »

  She gave a pouting frown. « Erlea says you’re talking about abdication. »

  Spain choked. « What?! »

  Hobbes: “What?!”

  Reader (laughingly): “Oh, poor dear Thomas.”

  Hobbes: “The Leviathan cut its own head off in the middle of a war! He’ll have more deaths on his conscience than any man living or dead!”

  Reader: “Yes, well, you for one are dead for the moment, friend Thomas, so the king can’t hear you, and I already agree with you, so there’s no point reiterating here.”

  Hobbes: “Without the sovereign, society turns back into a nest of beasts! All Europe will tumble into chaos! All the world!”

  Reader: “Calm, Thomas, calm. It’s not as dire as that. Leave this to Mycroft. You know he has your volume in his pocket even now, filling out the empty bulge where Apollo’s Iliad lay so long hidden. Intervening centuries may keep you and me from interfering, but Mycroft is contemporary with these events, and has the king’s ear. Our little Greek is not about to let Spain doom Europe.”

  How saintly your forgiveness, master reader, to forget my many failures and still rank my powers so high. I will try my best to dissuade the king—or rather I already did my best, since I am writing now of events three months in my past—though I do not believe I deserve any real credit for steering His Majesty off this upright but disastrous course. Madame was not about to miss her chance to be a queen.

  * * *

  The king’s hands twitched around hers. « Why have you been talking to my Prime Minister? I told you to stay at Las Huelgas. »

  « Erlea came to me. Besides, »—she planted a quick kiss upon the royal cheek—« you know I already love and honor Your Majesty, but until the wedding I’ve no obligation to obey you. Now, see sense. You can’t abdicate. »

  « We are not going to talk about this now. »

  She hung on his shoulder. « I know it’s improper for the king to take a spouse of ill repute, but the Spanish nation-strat needs your stabilizing hand right now as much as Europe does, and they don’t mind. They know you’re marrying me because you’re a responsible father who wants to do right by his Child, whatever the mother’s circumstances. They’ll understand, and love you the more for it if you stay king. »

  « We are not talking about this now. You need to go back. »

  « But— »

  « Joyce, you’re still a Blacklaw! Far more people hate you right now than hate Epicuro, and some of them could kill you without any repercussions. I can’t protect you if you won’t stay in my protection. Please go back! »

  He wrestled her, grappling her lace-trimmed elbows while her taut bust strained against him. In her excess of energy she seemed almost like a little dog, heedless of the dangers of the crowded street, which cannot understand that its master’s restraining discipline is for its own safety; I say almost, for such a dog’s eyes sparkle with confusion, not with teasing cunning.

  « Madame, if you want to remain your own free, independent person then you can run around and scheme and stage melodrama to your heart’s content, but if you intend to marry me you must act as my family, bash’, and state require us to act. You can’t do this. »

  She wiped lint from his collar. « Your Majesty likes it when I do this. »

&
nbsp; He steeled himself. « You still can’t. Mycroft, help Their Grace out of the car, and then escort Madame back to Las Huelgas and make sure they stay there. »

  « Yes, Your Majesty. »

  « Mycroft! » Madame turned her eye on me, and then her fan, blue lace over oiled ebony and heavy enough to split the skin of my eyebrow as she struck me. « Some watchdog thou art! » A second blow, a third. « Thou’rt supposed to keep Jehovah away from danger, not escort Him to where there are assassins! »

  I squinted against the blood which trickled into my left eye, but had no right to defend myself with word or hand.

  The king restrained her. « Dignity, Madame. Please step aside, and let my nurses see to the duke. »

  Three nurses had arrived, and a litter draped with silk to bear the invalid to his museum-worthy cell. Protect the duke, that was my only thought as I made myself a living wall between His Grace and faux-frantic Madame. I laid him on the silks, and helped the nurses wrap him gently, like a statuette of gold and ivory packed for transport. Madame tried to reach past me, to tuck in her darling duke with her own hands, but I blocked her. « Into the car please, Madame. » I grasped her arm and steered her toward the car, hard.

  « It’s not right! » Her eyes and lips shot hot protest at His unwavering Majesty.

  « I’ll come to Las Huelgas myself as soon as I can, » the king promised as I corralled her into the car’s black cradle, « and I’ll check on Epicuro, too. »

  « My Ganymede … »

  Isabel Carlos II nodded his royal gratitude to me as I climbed in beside his stubborn future queen. I saw Ganymede too give me a last glance, cold and dismissive, and so infinitely less disdainful than my station deserved that I could not mistake it for anything but heartfelt thanks. With my left eye still squinting against the blood, and my right distracted managing the unhappy conjunction of skirts and closing car door, I did not spot Madame’s mancatcher until its blades closed around my throat.

  « Thou’rt so hard to get a hold of these days, Mycroft. It’s unfair of Cornel so monopolizing thee. »

  As she twisted the inlaid handle, the stiff pole toppled me forward onto my knees on the car floor and pressed my face against the opposing seat. I jerked against it, but the fine blades which ring the inside of the collar are every bit as ruthless as their mistress. Practiced hands—not hers—bound my wrists behind me, and I could hear but not see the car’s far door close. Madame had an accomplice, then, someone who had approached the car from the far side, unseen while the lady’s fuss over ‘her’ Ganymede had drawn all eyes. I clenched my jaw as I felt someone try to force something between my teeth.

  Madame clucked. « Don’t be stubborn, Mycroft. We don’t want thee biting thy tongue when I short-circuit thy pacemaker. »

  That we did not, and, as I felt the car speed skyward, leaving escape behind, I parted my jaws obediently. I was glad to have a prop between my teeth as electric thunder made my frame convulse. My pulse skipped, and the remnants of the flesh part of my heart staggered like a cripple unused to tottering alone. The tracker at my ear went silent, and my lenses flashed one last white burst, then went blank.

  « Disgusting! Dog, thou’rt positively infested with Utopian vermin! » Hands brushed my shoulders, and a shower of ants and a slim snake fell on the floor around me, sparkling with luminous static as their short-circuited Griffincloth skins searched for instruction. « Do they make flea collars that work against U-beasts? If not yet, I must demand that they design one. »

  A sob rocked me, not fear but gratitude learning that such magnanimous spirits as Voltaire Seldon and Mushi Mojave, who had ten times Madame’s right to heap tortures upon me, had instead planted these precious sentinels to guard my life. The strangest surprise in all this was that Madame’s accomplice, with the bit already between my teeth, did not gag me, but pulled it out and let me speak.

  « Madame, » I choked, my words half muffled by the cushions that pressed against my face, « if you wanted me, you only had to— »

  « Hello, stray, » her accomplice growled, low.

  All at once it made sense: the deception, the restraints, the scene Madame had staged to make me so fearful for the duke that I had dropped my own defenses; the hands which now bound my ankles lest I kick for freedom were more practiced even than her own. « Brother Dominic, » I sputtered, « please— »

  « Thou’rt going to help me kill the blasphemer. »

  As a ribbon dancer uses the subtlest play of fingers to make her silks weave cyclones through the air, so, with a tiny twist of her mancatcher, Madame turned me to kneel at Dominic’s feet. I had not seen him since just after the assassination, when I flew off on my last doomed effort to save Bridger, leaving in the hospital the bandaged wreck of Dominic Seneschal, and the body bag which contained the once-living Sniper doll whose synthetic fingers had pulled the fatal trigger. I gasped as I looked up. Medicine does wonders, but Dominic’s recovery was still a wonder half worked. His hands and face were masked in a wetly wrinkled gossamer membrane, meat-scented like an amniotic sack, which fed and monitored the new muscles and skin which the doctors had grafted on to replace what had been flayed off by the friction of Dominic’s impossible ride on the outside of Sniper’s getaway car. In another week the skin and lips would set again into that cruel, conniving beauty which commands all Madame’s creations, but for now the canvas was too wet to look like anyone. Dominic still wore black like his Maître, but the elegant French tailoring was half covered by a Japanese haori jacket, an embroidered geometric pattern, black on black, with the gold-trimmed red trefoil of the Mitsubishi Executive Directorate glaring on either breast like blood.

  « Do you mean Sniper or today’s blasphemer? » I asked.

  « The Chief Blasphemer, » Dominic wheezed, as if even repeating the epithet fouled his tongue. « Today’s can pollute this Earth a few days longer; I hear she never pulled the trigger. »

  I gulped, wincing as the mancatcher’s steel prongs scraped my throat. « Sniper is our Master’s enemy, and ally to my personal enemy Tully Mardi; I’ll willingly— »

  « I did not say thou wouldst do it, » Dominic growled back. « Thou wouldst offer her a fast, dignified death. » His facial membrane stretched and crinkled as he leaned close. « The blasphemer loves thee like a bash’mate, does she not, Mycroft? »

  I hate hearing Dominic discuss Sniper in French, which lacks the ‘it’ pronoun the living doll so loves. “You know it wasn’t really Sniper who pulled the trigger. It was the doll.”

  « The doll died at my hands first, but the blasphemer was the mind and will and architect. Is Kraye guiltless of the thousand murders perpetrated by his pawns? » The harsh German of Perry’s true name rolled like a curse off Dominic’s tongue.

  I frowned. “Right now I think much of the world would say Madame is guilty of them, since Kraye was originally her pawn.”

  Madame twisted the mancatcher just enough to let me catch her smile. She was enjoying this, the world as it should be, the pedigree bloodhound she had purchased for her Son exerting fresh dominance over the stray He had led home. I will never call myself a mutt. My blood remains as Greek as Patroclus’s, but in my childhood path, which should have led me straight to service at Censor’s or Caesar’s side, I did stray.

  “But it shouldn’t be you that does this,” I pleaded, “not now, not either of you. Think of your fellow Blacklaws. With Natekari’s motion to kill Sniper under debate, if Sniper dies now everyone will accuse the Blacklaws, and it’ll be ten times worse if Blacklaws really did it. Use someone else. Use pawns. Use thugs. Brother Dominic, use your new Mitsubishi resources. Use me. Use anyone but a Blacklaw!”

  Madame straightened my hat. « Mycroft, though knowest this is too personal to leave to others. »

  « Then use me! » I begged, switching to desperate French to please them.

  « Thou canst not do it; thou art too close to the blasphemer. »

  I bristled as the old beast in my depths bristled as well. « You
doubt my ability to kill someone I’m close to? »

  Madame’s musical chuckle ricocheted across the upholstery. « Never, dear stray; we doubt thy ability to kill someone who’s been studying thy methods for thirteen years. Landing a wary fish requires novelty. »

  The old beast calmed. « Then why involve me at all? »

  « Thou art bait. »

  I half liked this plan. « You’ve told Sniper where I’ll be? »

  « I shall drop notes at the homes of some fans, coaches, teammates. Word will reach our target. »

  « But Sniper won’t come in person, » I warned. « Sniper wouldn’t risk it. »

  Dominic snorted. « Of course not. Any idiot could smell a trap, but when the blasphemer’s pawns find thee half dead, she won’t be able to resist carrying a loved one home to heal, will she? »

  « Half dead? What…? »

  « When they find thee, thou shalt be slowly bleeding to death from a rapier wound. In the thigh perhaps … just back here. » Dominic’s touch on my inner thigh was keen as flame. « Or perhaps in the back, a more commonplace target. »

  « Ἄναξ Jehovah will never forgive you if you kill me, » I warned.

  « Thou shalt not dare tell Him it was me. But thou’rt right, it must be carefully done, or else thou might indeed bleed out too fast, and die, and that would make our Maître very sad—perhaps even sad enough to come to me in tears. » With one membranous claw still on my thigh, Dominic grasped my chin with the other, tilting my head back against the blades. « Thou shalt be good and hold very still while I stab thee, yes? Or wouldst thou rather help me make notre Maître very sad? »

  Fear tinged my eyes with salt. Fear. It was strange. For all the wait and war and worry as humanity churned toward its likely end, I had not had this fear, personal, fanged with loved ones’ pain, not since [Bridger died.] (Mycroft’s draft left this sentence incomplete, but the intended end was obvious.—9A.)

  « You won’t be able to track me once I’m in Sniper’s hands. » It was my last defense. « They’re a professional, Lesley and Tully too. Whatever device you plant to trace me with, they’ll find it. »