The Will to Battle

by Ada Palmer

  “Yes, very.” Chagatai’s smile made the wrinkles at the corners of her Mongol eyes turn kind. “And if the question is whether you can represent us as our agent?”

  “The age’s volatility precludes an answer. Tomorrow I may be stripped of all My other offices and left at liberty, or I may be crowned the ad hoc King of Spain, or I may have ceased to live.”

  What can one call that muted murmur when hubbub flies soundless over trackers, or typed on pocket screens by those supreme Blacklaws who choose to face life trackless like our feral ancestors?

  “Questions from the list now. Let’s see. A lot of these are about how busy you are, or are about to be. Will you be attending the court sessions when they examine the legality of condemning Sniper in absentia?”

  “Probably.”

  “Will you attend Ockham Prospero Saneer’s terra ignota?”

  “I do not yet know.”

  “How busy will those keep you if you are involved? Enough to interfere with your duties as Tribune?”

  “I do not yet know.”

  “How about the Olympic Committee? Is it taking up your time as the Games get closer?”

  I had forgotten that He held this office too, the Humanists’ best attempt to make Him partly theirs. “Some time is taken by it.”

  “Out of curiosity, do you know what they’re planning to do about Sniper in the upcoming Games? They were supposed to compete.”

  “I know not yet.”

  Chagatai frowned at her list. “Do you still consider yourself Hiveless?”

  “Hiveless I am.”

  “But do you intend to remain Hiveless? Is it important to you?” Chagatai did not add, ‘as it is to us,’ but her sash did, rustling at her thigh.

  “Hiveless I remain.”

  “Why?” The housekeeper did not hesitate to press her Master hard. “You are twenty-one already. A lot of people are wondering why you haven’t chosen a Hive yet. If you’re remaining Hiveless because it means something to you, then most of us would agree you can represent us and the Hiveless life, but it’s very different if you’ve put it off because your mother is forcing you, or the Hive leaders are pressuring you, or you’re just too busy to take your Adulthood Competency Exam. We need to know the reason.”

  I must confess, reader, that most of the preceding paragraph is my invention. I have a recording of this interview but cannot even read this section without slipping into memory’s blind daze. You’re nearly seventeen, Mycroft, and brilliant. You could’ve passed the Adulthood Competency Exam years ago. Which will it be? Friends ask … teachers ask … Will you become a Mason? A Brillist? Kids ask … foster-ba’pas ask … Our feelings won’t be hurt if you don’t pick Cousin. Sensayer asks … MASON asks … Hiveless? Utopian? The Mardis, even those who don’t ask ask: patient Aeneas, Ibis with her saccharine love-gaze, deep-seeing Mercer … You killed me with that question. All of you, you did. Seventeen years old. I had to be a blank thing when I did it, my beautiful rampage, the act of evil of a human being, not a Hiveless, not a Hive. I had no answer, no good reason to postpone the exam we all knew I could have passed. I wanted to live longer, enjoy our era’s opulence, go to a Campus, study broadly arts and sciences, touch the Moon again, continue to discover Saladin’s body as we both ceased to be boys. But you, with your curiosity deepening to suspicion, you wouldn’t let me wait. I was already seventeen. I had to act, before someone who asked why I was still waiting recognized my lie.

  “I know you always have a reason for what you do, TM,” Chagatai pressed, eyes gentle. “Why have you put the exam off so long?”

  The Great Scroll’s Addressee forms all His words with care, as if the rest of us think ourselves typists, armed with delete keys, while He alone remembers that we carve our speech in the unhealing stone called Time. “The Adulthood Competency Exam,” He repeated.

  “Yes.” Chagatai glanced at the minor’s sash still around our Master’s waist. “A lot of people have suggested that, if you took the exam and then officially chose to remain Hiveless, it would be a powerful declaration that you don’t favor any Hive. That would reassure the Hiveless, and show the world that you don’t intend to take over all the Hives, as Sniper alleges. It could ease the crisis greatly. Are you willing?”

  “Ich werde die Prüfung…”

  Chagatai cleared her throat to warn Him that His language had lapsed.

  “I will not complete the Adulthood Competency Exam,” He finished.

  A frown touched Chagatai’s cheeks. “Alright. That’s your choice. But, Sniper is wrong, right?”

  “Οὖτις…”

  “No one,” I translated, seeing Chagatai flounder.

  “… has perfect knowledge,” He finished.

  Many nodded support; these Blacklaw madmen are philosophers enough to still care about grand questions in the midst of petty ones. I might have heard, “Hear, hear!”

  “I mean about you and the Hives,” Chagatai specified. “This is another question from the list: Do you intend to take over all the Hives and merge them like Sniper says, or don’t you?”

  How many interviewers, intimates, even His many parents had not dared ask?

  “I neither desire nor plan it, but it may occur. I do not know the future.”

  “Then you think it’s possible? It might happen?”

  “I have never sought an office, but through Another’s plans I have received more offices than some ambitious people secure with a lifetime’s effort. More may follow.”

  Chagatai nodded. “So, to clarify, you don’t want to rule or merge the Hives, but you believe you may wind up doing so anyway?”

  Cameras buzzed as close about Him as their operators dared. “Yes.”

  “All the Hives?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are there any in particular—excluding the Masons, of course”—Chagatai glanced at His guards—“since we can’t talk about the Imperator Destinatus, though I do think we’re allowed to point out the precedent that no porphyrogene has ever been named Emperor—but are there any other Hives in particular that you think you might likely wind up leading?”

  He froze, the long, slow grind of many factors invisible beneath His surface, like the workings of a lifeless-seeming mine. “All are possible.”

  Again murmur.

  Chagatai smiled gently at our Master’s endearing if inhuman honesty. “I received this question repeatedly in a lot of different forms,” she pressed, “so I want to be absolutely and distinctly clear. You understand, TM, that a lot of people are upset at the prospect of one person becoming head of all the Hives, yes? People think it would mean the effective end of the freedom to choose our law.”

  Chairs creaked as many leaned forward.

  “This I understand,” the Guest confirmed.

  “If you can establish that there’s even one, even one, Hive that you think you’re definitely not going to take power in, then all the furor would end.”

  “Untrue’st. Mitsubishi no land majority inita-que populi majoritas Masonica—”

  “Slow down, TM,” Chagatai interrupted gently. “Give Mycroft time to translate.”

  Even I took a moment to parse the Japanese possessive nestled between English and Latin. “The Mitsubishi land majority and the Masonic near-majority population.”

  “Ja, these,” the Guest confirmed. “These would still be, exist, as would O.S’s crimes, and human grief, and guilt.”

  Chagatai smiled. “I meant that the danger to you would be over. No one would want to kill you over that.”

  “All material beings are in danger in a war.”

  Chagatai frowned. “I know you’d never intentionally evade a question, TM. Help us understand why it’s so hard for you to answer this one.”

  “I struggle to understand the reason for this question. All things are possible. Why must I specify que a specific thing is possible when all things are?”

  “I see.” She too paused, searching for the right words. “I think what this qu
estion really wants you to do is to differentiate between remote possibility and a realistic probability. For example, at this moment there is a remote possibility that a giraffe might suddenly wander into this room, but there is not a realistic probability of such an occurrence. So similarly there is a remote possibility that you or anyone might suddenly end up in charge of the whole world, but what we want to know is: is there, in your opinion, a realistic probability of you taking power in—and we’re still not talking about the Masons—any other Hives?”

  Long, so long, His silence. “Yes, such a probability is real. Should I endeavor not to?”

  “Should you endeavor not to take over all the Hives?” Chagatai released a long, low whistle. “Many people would say yes. Certainly it would be safer for you.” A darker silence, now. “I have to ask, TM, do you think, as Sniper does, that your death would end this crisis?”

  “It did not the first time.”

  Silence.

  “As this is not a sensayer session,” Chagatai began in that loud, forced tone one uses more for cameras than for friends, “but a very public gathering, we will not discuss that issue at present. Tribune Mason, you did not attend the Senate debate over Tribune Natekari’s motion to declare Sniper an enemy of all civilization to be killed on sight. Some of those in this room may very well personally carry out said execution if it’s approved. We’d all like to hear confirmation of your personal support for the execution of the enemy who, by attacking a Romanovan Tribune, violated the one thing which every human being in our civilization has agreed to hold inviolate.”

  Not only Chagatai but many in the room tapped eager hilts, or grips, or quivers.

  “I expect,” Jehovah began, “that this crisis will not end until either Sniper’s death or Mine, and also that, if Sniper is victor, then Earth will continue to depend on that … cowardly and addictive evil named O.S. Therefore it seems I must seek Sniper’s death. Yet I believe, in all deeds, knowledge should be as complete as possible, especially in homicide, for death is irreparable. The torture of regretting having killed is atrocissima … too cruel. Therefore I will not have any kill for Me who does not know as much Truth as it is in My power to share, nor will I have Sniper die, though Sniper is My enemy, without the dignity of understanding. I therefore command all whom I have the power to command, and request of those I do not, that no one slay Sniper until the history I am currently having prepared is done. It seeks to explain the events which led to O.S.’s exposure and Sniper’s act. When you have read it, then, those who still wish to may, if My consent conjoins with that of Romanova’s law, help Me remove O.S.”

  Chagatai smiled, a proud, parental smile, not out of place on she who, despite Jehovah’s many fathers, is the one to welcome Him home after long, strange nights.

  “Ask Me whether Sniper killed Me,” the Visitor commanded.

  A frown now. “No, TM, not if you’re going to talk about resurrection.”

  “If you ask Me, I must answer sic et non.”

  “What?”

  “Yes and no. Here virtue ethics opposes deontology.”

  Chagatai sighed. “You’re talking about deed versus intent?”

  “The Sniper who now lives bears the skill that killed Me, and the intent to have killed Me, but not the finger that sped the bullet home. Bridger was real.”

  Not only Chagatai, but all within the room froze speechless.

  Even Jehovah, though Jehovah is never truly within rooms.

  It was not His words that stunned us. His black eyes, like everybody’s, shifted their focus suddenly far from this room, far from this city, to the news which rose in His lenses. “Sanctum … conrupt’est?”

  I saw it too, in my news feed. I saw a world away, far out of reach, the first too-tiny plumes of smoke against the spotless marble.

  “Ecce, Mycroft,” this foreign God called softly to me. “All material things are mortal after all.”

  I zoomed in on the feed. A dark wound, that’s what others have said they saw, a tight incision sliced into the side of Alexandria’s great lighthouse tower, which bled irregular bursts of black smoke, clumpy like bubbles leaking from a sinking ship. I did not see a dribble, but a deluge, filth-black blood pouring from the wounded lighthouse, an endless torrent of living—no—un-living, moving black, as if this injury at last revealed the great reservoir from which are born all the specter trails and war-cancers that Tully Mardi leaks.

  “Stay still and calm, all.” Rumormonger Natekari does not have to raise her voice. “Something is happening at the Sanctum Sanctorum in Alexandria.”

  Obedient in their wisdom, the Blacklaws kept their seats, and all tuned in to witness the abomination. The Masons did not. They rushed to Him. They had planned for this, studied every millimeter of the room, of every room the Porphyrogene enters. Half manned the exit, while the others plunged in a spearhead movement down the center aisle to retrieve Him from the podium to their safe custody. The Blacklaws rose to block them, not all in one force, just a few, a stand of wardens, individual but terrible, like breakers in a storm.

  “You dishonor us, Masons,” Natekari’s tone was as black as her sash, “to think we cannot protect a guest in our own house.”

  “It is our task to move the Porphyrogene to safety during crisis.”

  Lightning her glare. “You have already failed to protect your own Sanctum Sanctorum. This sanctum”—she gestured to the hall’s aged wood—“remains inviolate.” The Blacklaw Tribune shot a glance of warning at Jehovah’s Utopian escort too, but the Delians stayed well clear, hololemurs and floating faerie lights watching in silence as the Masons faced the noble savages.

  The Masonic guards halted, though not, I think, for fear of Blacklaw weapons. These Guards of the Porphyrogene were all at least three generations in the Emperor’s service. They had not paused nor shuddered when Perry-Kraye and Ganymede fell through the window at Madame’s, nor even when Sniper’s bullet spattered their Ward’s brains across His iron father—guards know their duties to a ward dead as much as a ward living—but they had shuddered when duty’s script broke down as Bridger’s potion gave Jehovah life again, and so they shuddered now as a new transmission leaked from violated Alexandria. Two videos. Cameras from the shore still showed the lighthouse from the outside, where a second black wound had appeared, at the top, a fresh explosion cutting through the gold-leaf surface of the tower’s crowning ziggurat. The second image came from inside the ziggurat. We saw smoky air first, the doll-like figures of unconscious guards, Martin’s singed desk and mine beside it, lunch detritus smoldering, my mattress. A jiggle now as the camera is borne out of my cell and up the stairs, a guard’s room, then our Good Guest’s simple bedroom, deep in the tower, safer even than the Emperor’s palace below. A pause, another jiggle, up again, guards’ rooms, a spiral staircase, up, and up, and now we see the Sanctum vaults themselves in their grand circumference, sliced open by the violators like a marble honeycomb. Chips and cards and papers dribble from the damaged chambers: sensayers’ secrets, Censors’ secrets, Gag-genes’ secrets, the identities of past Anonymouses, truths men have killed for tumbling to the floor like dirty hail. The intruders care not. Their target is already open when we see it, the central vault, a block formed of an impenetrable glassy-black substance dreamed up by who knows what genius to guard the Empire’s archsecret. Hands, gloved and trembling, push aside the fragments of the shattered block and hold the tablet to the camera. I guessed even then the almost noble hope which drove these criminals. It might not have been Him. Imagine, reader, if it had named Martin, or better, someone further from Him, some young Familiaris from a distant trusted bash’. We could have had no war.

  IMPERATOR DESTINATUS IEHOVAH EPICURUS DONATIANUS DE AROUET MASON ESTO. SI RECUSEAT, DUM PERSUADEATUR, MYCROFTI CONFRATRIDOMITORI AGNOMINATO MARTINO VICARIO IMPERIUM MASONICUM COMMENDEM.

  —CORNEL MASON.

  NOTE: I can’t blame Mycroft for refusing to translate this, since it’s still technically against the First L
aw even to read it, but since the whole world knows by now I may as well: “Let the Destined Emperor be Jehovah Epicurus Donatien D’Arouet MASON. Should they refuse, while they are being persuaded, I leave the MASONIC IMPERIUM to Mycroft Guildbreaker, nicknamed Martin, as regent.—Cornel Mason.”—9A

  No one said anything. No one said anything for a long time.

  “I was there.” It had to be He Who Visits Who broke this silence—no child of Earth’s civilization could have. “I have been in that place, many days. They waited for this time, when I was not.”

  “Ἄναξ?” I used the Greek in public now that there was no need to hide what we were to each other. “Where’s Martin?”

  “Elsewhere,” He answered. “Safe.” Here was a small mercy, a drop of rain to give our desert life.

  Some moments more we watched, the outside view of the tower showing emergency forces swarming the soot-stained entrance. Now the inner view cut out altogether, and something bullet-slim and blue shot from the tower’s larger wound and flight-fell to the water. Only as its splash-foam thinned did I realize that what had seemed tiny at this scale must have been nearly room-sized, large enough to bear the violators to their well-planned but ill-deserved escape. A submarine?

  “TM.” Chagatai still managed to sound warm. “Everyone who’s anyone is calling me to ask why you aren’t answering your tracker. Shall I tell them to shove off?”

  “Say I am safe.”

  “Your mom wants you. Ancelet. Heloïse. Dominic. Every newspaper ever.”

  “Say I am safe.”

  “Righto.”

  “How about Cornel? Has Cornel called for Donatien yet?” The stray voice interrupting from the Members’ balcony was Felix Faust’s. Did you think the age’s sage and grand voyeur would pass up such an exquisite feast as the gestures and twitches of this Blacklaw company as they asked ‘important questions’ of his Nephew? “If Cornel hasn’t called, you should worry.”

  “Why?” In any other meeting it would have been someone in charge, Natekari perhaps, who answered Brill’s Headmaster, but in this company of sovereigns it was instead someone I did not know, a grave face in the second row, wise, to-the-mark, and, save for her sash and backpack, naked (as is a Blacklaw’s right).