The Will to Battle

by Ada Palmer

  Faust liked the interruption. “It is my not-inexpert opinion that my Nephew is the only living being capable of calming Cornel MASON down enough to stop them declaring war on the whole world instantly over this theft.”

  “Theft? You mean exposure.”

  “I mean theft.”

  A pause. “You think they also robbed the vaults?”

  The Headmaster nodded. “I think few creatures on this Earth could crack the Sanctum Sanctorum and not succumb to curiosity.”

  I felt the blood drain from my face. “The Oath of Office. The MASONIC Oath of Office is in the same block in the vault! No one but an Emperor has seen the Oath since thousands of ages of however-long-you think-the-Empire-is-old ago!”

  Faust applauded the wounds my fear inflicted upon grammar.

  “Caesar angry.” I slumped onto the nearest something. I often feel in my mind the vice of Caesar’s black-sleeved hand upon my throat, but now I seemed to see it on everyone else’s.

  Still soft, Jehovah’s words. “This demonstrates that My many offices do indeed conflict with My Tribunary duty.” I was not quite sure to whom He addressed this. Possibly Himself. “My apologies, colleague Natekari. I believe My uncle is correct. I should go ad patrem.”

  She nodded. “Okay, people, get Jagmohan to somewhere safe and private. Now.”

  The prospect of a task woke the attendant Masons from shock’s stupor. “We wi—”

  “No, let them act now.” Jehovah’s pointing finger chose a Delian, shrouded in a cityscape of brass and moths’ wings. “Masons should follow us, and mourn.” To His colleague. “Acceptable?”

  Natekari smiled at His perfect courtesy. “Go, and good luck.”

  A flash sea of flare-bright floating spirits stunned the crowd as Utopia snatched the Visitor to the safety of away. They snatched me, too, hands which, even without Griffincloth, were invisible through the tear blur which turned the newsfeed in my lenses to prismatic glitter. They slung me over something dark and furred and warm that vibrated with life or electricity. Griffincloth fell across me, a coat shared by a Delian, whose tender darkness me kept me still, like a horse’s blinders, as we rushed down paths of patchy brightness and loud footsteps.

  They set me down in Camelot. Or something very like it, a semicircular courtyard of stone, ancient in style but new and clean, hung with pennants of azure, gold, and scarlet. In the distance to one side I saw the thatched-roof denseness of a city, rich in market stalls and horses. On the other side, a road led out of the still-closing castle gates, lined with other edifices. What did I glimpse along that street? First a waterfall of mirrored mercury, then a palace of ancient Egypt, cliffs of amber, a misty graveyard, Mars—a city block of worlds pressed side by side as books stand side by side on shelves. But the gates sealed quickly, and once the cockatrice finished its scan, they let me climb down. My steed turned out to be a black lion, which sat down behind me so I could slump against its soft side rather than falling upon the stone. Or rather, upon the Griffincloth, for there was no stone here, nor mercury, nor thatch, nor amber, not really. It felt like a kind dream, and it was kindness, kind Delians and kind Fate, which let me enter Hobbestown’s Utopian district. It is one of the largest Utopian districts on Earth, block on block of Griffincloth edifices crowding their otherworlds tight side by side, for Utopia—the tiniest Leviathan, a dolphin half forgotten by the great whales—is happy to show its trust by schooling with the even smaller race of Blacklaws.

  I spotted my Master easily, a patch of black cloth starker than our medieval setting should have had. Chagatai too stood out, incongruous, but the Delians around them were all knights in armor now, or rather some were, while others became long-robed sorcerers, a Viking youth, an elf king, a flame-bright autumnal dryad, whatever persona each had programmed their coat to generate when they stepped into this genre.

  “Shall I call Alexandria for you?” one offered.

  The Visitor was not looking at anyone. “Do I make the human race worse?” He asked. “I make you violate the inviolable, a Tribune’s person, the MASONS’ Sanctum, Hobbestown; I even make mankind a Deicide.”

  “TM,” Chagatai coaxed, “MASON’s ready to take your call, if you’re ready.”

  One last pause. “Ready.”

  The Griffincloth castle became at once a different castle, MASON’s, Alexandria, the ceiling of lapis and gold and candle-stars, the floor of channeled marble. The Emperor was on his throne this time, blood-purple porphyry framing his square-cut Mason’s suit. A new suit, reader. It was black, all black, death black, save only for the right sleeve whose gray cloth promised some faint possibility of mercy. I curled against the lion’s inky mane and wept.

  “I want you tracking their escape,” Caesar began. “Every sea monster, and dendan, and hippocampus, and seahound, and panoctopus, and plasma-ray, and kraken…”

  “You have them,” Utopia pledged.

  “You should not declare war today, pater.” Jehovah managed English.

  MASON shook his head. “Fili, these laws are older than the word ‘law.’ The wheels are moving. The Empire defends itself. My enemies, all my enemies, all who in their selfish, fleeting factions sharpened the blade which has wounded my IMPERIUM, all will be destroyed. If Romanova tries to stop me, Romanova is a young and toothless power, and will hardly be a bump in my path.”

  “Not today. The day after tomorrow.”

  MASON squinted at his Son. “Why wait two days?”

  “Because war will disrupt travel and keep all Powers occupied, including Su Majestad el Rey de España, so, in a thousand years, it will still be said that Cornel MASON declared war the day before his lover would have gone to Rome to seek permission to marry another and exclude him. I would not have that personal side effect make posterity forever doubt the justness of your choice.”

  Long and black the Emperor’s silence, marred only by my sobs.

  “There is precedent,” MASON pronounced at last, “for granting enemies the option of surrender. I give them three days. If those who breeched my Sanctum all surrender to me, and return unread the Oath they stole”—here the Delians winced at confirmation of the deeper blow which fired MASON’s rage—“then their executions will be … unprotracted.” He locked his gaze on Jehovah, doing the best a human can to hold His eyes. “This same mercy I offer to Sniper, Tully Mardi, and to those who shelter them. Three days.”

  “This is wise patience, pater.” Jehovah’s voice felt like hope, not that His tone changed, but even His lifeless voice felt light beside the Emperor’s. “Three days may buy many.”

  Three days may, in fact, buy one hundred and twenty-eight.

  CHAPTER THE TWELFTH

  The Temple of Janus

  Written August 8–9, 2454

  Events of May 2

  Hobbestown, Burgos, Rome, Romanova

  “I am glad we go to the Vatican today, Mycroft. Never before have I desired so acutely to speak with My Peer, nor about so specific an aspect of His Plan.”

  These were the only Words spoken by He Who Visits in our flight the next morning from Hobbestown to the convent, where we were to join His mother, thence to fly together to the reservation. I had not slept that night, for, when my eyes closed, I could see nothing but black-clad MASON on his bloody throne, and when they opened, the cornucopia of Utopia’s wonders proved irresistible. Braced by an anti-sleeping dose, I wandered that night through Eldorado, through asteroid mines, through a giant’s house, through Thebes, through a dusky Venice whose seas were inky purple and whose sky was sliced by vast Saturn-like rings, and through strange trees whose hollows merged into a black hallway where only shadows stirred. I was not alone. All night the Delian’s black lion padded, soft and solid, at my side. The great beast’s somber gaze reassured all bystanders that the cannibal did not range their lands unchecked. The lion condescended too to catch me with its furred and muscled softness, whenever the beauties made me faint. Most beautiful were the superhuman denizens these halls made of their
populace, the nymphs and ancients, wraiths and aliens, that watched me with inhuman vizored eyes. The nowheres changed unpredictably, a shopping district on a plum-red moon transforming into eighteenth-century Kyōto as the computer’s timer switched the Griffincloth from following one Utopian’s program to another. Blacklaws stirred here too, human monsters mixing comfortably with folklore monsters in a collegial, commercial chaos under the real night sky. A child gave me an orange in return for a recaptured ball, to the quiet approval of its accompanying ba’pas, one Blacklaw and one flame-clad Utopian. Fate even gifted me a glimpse of one of the great prides of our age: the Lóngsphinx, a body which fuses feline with undulating Asian dragon lined by luminous translucent wings, which holds within an A.I. so advanced that, like those chimps and dolphins that we rear among us, this U-beast wears a minor’s sash as proof that Romanova recognizes in it a sentience as precious as a human child. We made life, reader; we made a thinking thing. All this Utopia let me enjoy, as if they sensed that I would need a special kind of strength to face tomorrow. For hours at a time, I did not think of Bridger.

  “I must have My sensayer.”

  That was the first weight upon me as we flew toward Spain. Though younger, less church-scarred Hives are not so strict, a European Member who would visit a reservation to discuss theology must bring their sensayer as chaperone, and, though Ἄναξ Jehovah remains a Minor, when in Rome He does as His Spanish father does. When we reached Las Huelgas, the whole nunnery was aflutter with preparation for the expedition, for Madame must have her ladies, and her ladies must have their escorts, and all must have their sensayers, so the visit multiplied like ivy from what had seemed a single chute. The young Master required no such complex entourage, but He did require His sensayer, and thus sent me to fetch him.

  Good reader, how much I would have given to not step into that room. How much I would give to not remember now. But when such a Lord hands down commands, a man submits, even if it costs him scars. I did step into that room in Las Huelgas, and I saw there Carlyle Foster-Kraye de La Trémoïlle.

  When we were ready to go, Dominic followed me out into the hall and—

  When thou wert ready? Thou canst not leave it there, Mycroft. What happened? What didst thou see? How fares our Carlyle?

  Oh, reader, do not ask, I pray you. It has not been easy shielding you thus far from Carlyle’s state. Better that you remember the first Carlyle you saw, arising daily full of strength, a welcome friend in Bridger’s wild garden, smiling.

  I do not like to repeat myself, Mycroft. At my command thou servest. What didst thou see?

  As you command, reader. To your judgment, however little I may understand it, I subject my flawed and failing own.

  It was Dominic’s cell, his books and stark necessities transplanted from Madame’s so faithfully that the order of the papers, the icon of Jehovah on the wall, even the smell seemed just the same. The bed was his same stiff wood-framed palette with the thumb-thin mattress still upon it, and upon that mattress lay Carlyle Foster-Kraye, tied down with wrists and ankles lashed fast to the bed frame. Carlyle’s Cousin’s wrap and long sensayer’s scarf were nowhere, but a habit lay discarded on the floor beside the bed, Dominican black and white. Sweat made Carlyle’s bare chest sticky, while dried spit crusted the gag that stifled what I doubt were even words. Tear-crusted eyes twitched with the inhuman wildness of one transported beyond the here and now, while Dominic, as fired with zeal as I had ever seen him, sat on a stool at the far corner of the room, reading aloud from the Pensées of Blaise Pascal:

  “The greatness of a man is that he can know he is wretched. A tree does not know it is wretched. True wretchedness is knowing that one is wretched, but it is greatness too knowing that one is wretched. This wretchedness itself proves human greatness, for it is the wretchedness of a great lord, or a deposed king…”

  I vomited, there on the threshold. Beautiful and terrible Pascal, the darkest author I have ever read, darker than Calvin, Kafka, the black friar Savonarola, darker even than you, Master Thomas, for all your warring brutes. You never tried to intentionally make your reader wretched, nor pried his eyelids back and forced him to gaze into the Great Dark. Some acts are too cruel, reader, even for philosophers. If William of Ockham’s art we dub a razor, and if Nietzsche subtitled his Twilight of the Idols “How to Philosophize with a Hammer,” then Pascal’s is surely a flaying knife, petal-thin and cruel, that peels the victim’s skin back inch by inch, leaving no shield between the tender soul and the infinite dark mirror. And he does more, Pascal, he bares our race’s flaws as well, civilization’s cowardly underbelly. Pascal’s French is unsurpassed in elegance, his logic flawless, his message likely true, and his goal nothing less than the perfection and salvation of his reader, but—remember who it is that says this, reader—he is too cruel. Yes, I have read him. I learned from him that all the activities of my life, all my duty, my penitence, my love, all these are mere diversions to distract me from thinking about the only certainty: someday I will die. We all will. All human achievement, our empires, good deeds, art, the Great Project itself, all are distractions, invented by a race so weak we cannot sit still in a chair for five minutes and face our finitude. What is Caesar but a man so rich in power that he can afford to be distracted every instant of every day? A king in office is fortunate in his distraction, but a deposed king has nothing to distract him from the lesson that even kingship is one more game invented by a race that will never grow out of fearing the dark. Yes, when I read Pascal, I fled. I admit it. I am a coward, and I do indeed use duty to hide from my fear, my guilt, my wretched human state. And now, before my eyes, our fragile, straining Carlyle, a prisoner with no means of escape, endures the lashing of philosophy’s cruelest words … surely, reader, no philosopher in history has ever had a truer apprentice than had the Marquis de Sade in Dominic Seneschal.

  Dominic inhaled the salt perfume of sweat and acid, my vomit the first to christen his new cell.

  “See, Sister Carlyle? Our Mycroft, like thee, has been blessed with plenty of that ‘greatness’ named wretchedness, offered to the human beast by its unkind Creator.”

  The title ‘Sister’ warmed me, made me think of the bright young Cousin when I first met her, lively in her trailing wrap. Madame keeps trying to force us to use male pronouns for Carlyle, to remind everyone that the Carlyle Foster-Kraye she has ensnared here is indeed the Prince-héréditaire de La Trémoïlle, a future duke. But this broken offspring of broken politics is also still the kind Carlyle I met and wished I could call friend. Even Dominic is not so heartless as to call this diamond a spade. Let some unfeeling censor change our words, if when this chronicle is finally released Madame still has power enough to censor. We who truly care about Carlyle—even if it is Dominic’s dark caring—shall respect her choices and say ‘she.’

  Dominic placed his finger between the pages of Pascal to keep his place, a motion no more reassuring than if he had taken a red-hot poker off my flesh to reheat it in the fire. « Well? » he invited. « What news? »

  I gazed down at my vomit on the floor. It was a small splash, just a trace of citrus and goo, which worked its viscous way toward the brushlike soles of my Ahimsa shoes. These shoes, with their many bristles, used to be soft enough to let me step on an insect without harming it, but they were so worn down now that I suspected the nubs would prove deadly to passing ants. I need new shoes. Just as well. In war I will need better traction, and it was hard to think of ants when even Utopians were casualties. Besides, we now know that, even if ants are Gods, then, like Jehovah, Their deaths would not destroy Their universes, merely their Earthly form. See, reader, how even now my mind dodges and ducks away from thinking of that cell? And dread Pascal?

  « Spit it out, errant, » Dominic commanded, addressing me by my domestic title as ‘stray dog.’ « What news from notre Maître? »

  I couldn’t look at Carlyle. I feared a mirror, feared seeing in Carlyle those same tormented eyes that I had had when I first saw
Madame’s, and learned that it might have been for nothing that I slew Apollo. The sensayer’s vocation had been Carlyle’s Apollo, a thing so noble that its very presence on this Earth proves Earth worth saving. Carlyle had sacrificed it, prostituted it, for Julia first, luring in powerful parishioners, pretending she believed it was for their good. Carlyle prostituted it again for Thisbe, and for me, concealing Bridger while pretending to her other parishioners that she did not hold in her hands the Proof that all hearts crave. She lied to them, to her parishioners. And then, when Dominic had tortured from her her confession of Deist hypocrisy, no sooner had Carlyle purged her conscience through that contrition, but she had prostituted her priesthood once again to Papadelias, betraying Julia, betraying Thisbe, lashing out in the same rash spite which now leads Cousins everywhere to perpetrate, in pacifism’s name, atrocities. These are not my accusations, reader, they are Carlyle’s, the many spines of the iron maiden of self-hate that she erects about herself in her despair. Dominic does not ply his art here without consent. And this was not the worst. The worst, the evil that made Carlyle think even Pascal’s tortures were too light for her, was the revelation that her very birth had turned Merion Kraye into Casimir Perry, Madame’s homemade Horseman of Apocalypse. And now I came to announce more damage done:

  “Have you heard about the Sanctum Sanctorum, Brother?”

  “I heard something had happened.” Dominic followed me into English. “An attack.”

  “Persons unknown have breached the inner vaults, and publicly exposed our Master as Imperator Destinatus. They also stole the MASONIC Oath of Office, and Caesar has sworn his inviolate oath that he will make war to get it back, and…” I bit my lip.

  Dominic’s brows narrowed, but his forehead could not wrinkle—his freshly regrown skin was too elastic, virgin, like a child’s. “And what?”