by Wren, M. K.
Rich had a year to prepare his followers for his apotheosis; they expected it and understood it as his Testing. Still, violence had almost erupted in the wake of his death, and there weren’t three thousand Bonds in the Plaza that day. Today there were twenty times three thousand, and they hadn’t been prepared for this Testing. They were told Galinin’s assassin would die here today, and came to find the Brother. It wouldn’t be conceivable to them that the two could be one and the same.
Alexand reached the center of the stand, and the SSB escort retired, leaving him to the Directorate guard captain and two sargents. They wore no face-screens to hide the stark fear in their faces.
The sargents came up on either side of him, but the moment they touched him, the sound that seemed at absolute maximum peaked to an even higher volume, the line of guards in front of the stand sagged and strained to hold. The two sargents seemed paralyzed, staring out at that clamoring mass as they might at an approaching tidal wave.
Alexand felt his lips draw back, felt a cold elation within him that might have been laughter.
No help for me out there? I have an army, tens of thousands ready to die for me, convinced that would buy them a piece of sainthood in the Beyond. With a gesture, I could unleash that savage tide to sweep onto this flimsy box and smash it, to surge up the tiers of steps and batter down the great doors of the Hall, sweep on, pounding through the marble corridors until it reached the Directorate Chamber itself.
He saw the blue lightning of lasers as the guards fought off an assault on the steps, heard screams, not of anger, but of agony. And the smell—
“No—oh, God, no! No!”
He swayed, felt his knees on the verge of giving way. Izak, I’m not a saint; my visions are imperfect.
But this one was becoming acidly clear.
He might unleash this pent, ravening tide, and it would overwhelm the execution stand. It might even take him with it, carried along in a protective eddy, and the MT fixes were probably still in his boots. There was a chance—
But the tide would never reach the Hall.
Before that, the orders would be given. The lines of guards at the doors and along the promenades would close ranks and open fire. The X4 canon squads on the roofs would turn their guns down into the Plaza and open fire. The ’car squads overhead would converge and open fire.
This vision was perfect and so horrifying, he began to weep when he realized it hadn’t yet transpired. There were skirmishes along the barricades, but they still held.
And he understood now the how and why of this.
Izak, and probably other Shepherds, had been told that Alex Ransom was the Brother for the sole purpose of making this hideous vision come to pass.
Selasis. Ussher knew about the Brother. Selasis meant to create an Armageddon here that the Concord would never forget. The Bonds might hold the Lords responsible, but they would blame the Phoenix. They would never forget and never forgive.
Alexand sought Izak and found him only because he was so close; the black barrier had been forced back against the stand.
“Izak! Stop! You can’t let this—IZAK!”
But Izak didn’t hear; he wouldn’t stop shouting.
Hands clamped on Alexand’s arms; faces pale and rigid with terror under golden helmets loomed only centimeters away.
“An ampmike! Get me—let me talk to them!”
The guardsmen didn’t hear; they were too frightened. They were pulling him toward the executioner.
“No! Let me—not yet! Don’t you understand?”
They didn’t understand; they didn’t hear.
Yet if they let the executioner carry out his duty now, there was no way to stop the tide. The vision would come to pass, the tide would become a horror of carnage.
He channeled every vestige of strength left him to pull himself free of the hands that would drag them all to death. He couldn’t hear his own cry of pain and despair.
Free. Only for seconds. Alive and free. Seconds.
He stumbled to the edge of the stand, swayed there, shouting into that raging, booming tide, crying out in the Name of the Lamb for peace.
They didn’t hear him; his voice was drowned in the howling roar. Too late. Too late. . . .
Rich! Help me! Oh, my brother, my sainted brother—
Now he could be sure.
Bruno Hawkwood looked into the face of Adrien Eliseer Woolf, the Prime Sign, and his elation took the form of a sensation of vibration, as if he were a bell struck in a vacuum.
He said in a near whisper, “Forgive me, my lady, for laying hands on you so roughly. I didn’t expect you here.”
But wasn’t it right that she was here? If he were a true Reader, he’d have expected her.
Her chill gaze didn’t waver, yet she was so pale, she seemed near fainting, except the fierce will possessing her eyes wouldn’t tolerate that. A Berserker’s rage was confined in those black orbs, and her gun was still aimed at his heart.
“My lady, you’d be justified in killing me, but I beg of you, don’t kill me now. I’m a condemned man by my own choice. You’d only be hastening an event already Written, and I have a path I must follow to its end before I die.”
Still, she didn’t move; her voice was as soft as his.
“I have a path to follow, too, Master Hawkwood.”
“Death is at the end of your path, my lady.”
“Yes.”
“I mean your death.”
“But I won’t die alone.”
He closed his eyes, warned by a fleeting dizziness that he couldn’t delay too long. A dull rumble reached his ears; something in it quickened his already erratic heartbeat. Some unfathomable terror was taking shape outside, and he knew by Insight that if he didn’t pursue his Written path, the very fabric of past, present, and future would be torn.
“There’s a purpose to our meeting here and now, my lady. You’re here as a signpost to me on my path, as I’m a signpost on your path.”
“I don’t know your purpose here, but I do know mine.”
“They’re one and the same, but this is my path.”
Her deadly intent gaze seemed to probe into his soul, and perhaps she believed him, but she didn’t understand yet.
“If we’re on the same . . . path, Master Hawkwood, you won’t try to stop me from reaching the end of it.”
He shook his head. How could he make her understand that he must stop her? Their purpose was the same, but not their paths. He couldn’t let her die, and she would if she tried to walk this path; his path.
A True Path can only be walked alone.
Rich! Help me! Oh, my brother, my sainted brother—
Falling. All his strength gone. What was left?
The Brother sank to his knees in the path of the apocalyptic tide that wouldn’t hear him. He lifted his chained hands and crossed his arms, forcing the right arm with the left, hands reaching for his shoulders.
The Lamb died praying, and the Brother knelt for prayer, but sought nothing behind his closed eyes except the dark silence he found there.
Rich, there’s nothing left. Forgive me. . . .
Perhaps he was close to shock; he didn’t know, didn’t care. Perhaps his senses were too numbed to continue submitting signals to his mind, or perhaps his mind had stopped the input of signals it could no longer sort into coherent order.
He didn’t know, didn’t care.
He didn’t know his few seconds of freedom were becoming many seconds. He didn’t know that something was happening outside his senseless husk self that every non-Bond witnessing it would call a miracle.
The Brother knelt in the path of the tide, and the men in black uniforms surrounding him, charged with his death, made no move to touch him; no move at all. The Brother had stopped time on thi
s black stand. He held it, unknowing, while he communed with darkness and a dead saint.
He heard the drum roll.
His senses roused to submit that signal, and his mind succeeded in translating it into a question: How can I hear it now?
And an answer: The crowd-tide had receded, quieted enough to let that sound become audible.
He opened his eyes.
The tapestry had changed, a new texture imposed on the double-hued masses. Arms crossed, forming repetitious zigzags, faces tilted up to the light of the helions as if it were sunshine. And a new texture in depth. They were kneeling. He heard the murmuring of a new kind of wind; it moved out from him like a summer wind bending grasses in its invisible passage. When the wind reached them, the Bonds knelt, one by one, rank on rank, thousands upon thousands. Their voices, their anger, stilled, they knelt to pray with the Brother in answer to his unasked prayer.
But the Brother didn’t call it a miracle.
These people had been left nothing of their own but their religion. From childhood, they had accepted the guidance of the Shepherds, the embodiment and arbiters of all that was holy, in every aspect of their lives and particularly in the ceremonies of worship. When the Shepherds knelt for prayer, they knelt. The response was reflexive. It was inconceivable that they could see that physical signal given by a man they called holy, the brother of a saint, without responding by imitation.
The response was inevitable.
The miracle was that he had given them the one signal that would be comprehensible in spite of the mass rage that had shaped them into a tide of disaster, that would quell the rage with the reminder that it was not righteous, it was a sin against all they held sacred.
Perhaps that came of communion with a saint.
The drum roll thrummed. His body trembled with it; fear and pain together reclaimed their holdings.
A muttering undercurrent of sound entered his awareness. The tide had been stopped, but the tide was Bond. On the borders of this crowd, fifty deep under the promenades, looking out from every window, the Fesh waited. And at hundreds of millions of vidicom screens in every city, every human habitation on every planet and satellite in the Two Systems, the Fesh waited.
The man declared guilty of attempting the assassination of the Lord Galinin still lived; that outrage was unavenged.
The Brother meant no more to them than Alex Ransom did to the Bonds.
The Concord waited to mete out justice, and the one man who knew the injustice of it because he knew his own guilt, would remain silent while the Concord slaughtered its scapegoat in faith that it would thus be cleansed of fear and delivered from disaster.
It would be, must be, done. The Concord had no choice.
A True Path can only be walked alone.
And his time was growing short. Bruno Hawkwood knew he might render the Lady Adrien unconscious without harming her, yet he hesitated at that; it would mean leaving her here, helpless and vulnerable.
“My lady, I can’t let you walk with me on this path. I can’t let you . . . die. . . .” He stopped; he was forgetting to keep his voice down. Or was it—no, he only heard his own voice more clearly now because of the silence.
Lady Adrien started to speak, but he said sharply, “Listen!”
“To what?”
To nothing; to the silence. That ominous, fearful murmur was gone. Something had happened out in the Plaza, the unforeseen turn of Destiny—
Abruptly, the new silence was broken with a sound so unexpected, both of them froze into taut stillness.
The doors of the Directorate Chamber had opened. Hawkwood couldn’t see them from behind the column, but he didn’t move. A better vantage point would also expose him.
Voices in an impassioned exchange came from the Chamber, echoed in the white recesses of the hall. He recognized one. His Lord. Orin Selasis in a vituperative rage, bellowing, “Traitor! Do this, and you show yourself the traitor you are to all the Concord! By the God, a traitor will never hold this chair as long as I live!”
And another voice, nearer, probably at the Chamber door.
“A traitor will hold it as long as you live!”
Hawkwood recognized that voice, too, but above all, he recognized the free ring of defiance in it.
Now he could be doubly sure.
Lady Adrien also recognized the voice, and she reacted so swiftly, Hawkwood didn’t have time to think out his own reaction. He caught her wrist, twisted it to turn the gun upward, his right hand closed over her mouth as he forced her back against the column with the weight of his body.
“Wait! Wait, my lady!” A frenzied whisper that stopped her struggles.
Perhaps she was simply surprised to find herself so suddenly immobilized. She stared up at him, then at the sound of hurrying footsteps, the focus of her gaze shifted inward, the Berserker’s rage flashed from the black depths of her eyes. The footsteps echoed like hammer blows, quickening as they approached. There was a point at which Hawkwood knew he might be seen, and his one hope was immobility. He couldn’t relax his hold on Lady Adrien, only pressing harder against her when she renewed her struggles.
He whispered into her ear, “I can put you out without making a sound, my lady. Don’t force me to that.”
She stopped fighting him, but he could still feel her tense readiness. The pounding footfalls passed; Hawkwood turned his head to see the Lord Phillip Woolf, cloak whipping behind him, break into a run as he neared the lifts. He plunged into the first one and sank out of sight.
The hall was silent again; the Chamber doors had closed.
“My lady, we are not on the same path if Lord Woolf is your target.”
Hawkwood knew she’d have killed him then if she could, but the moment passed, and when he released her, she sagged limply, face contorted as if she were struck with pain.
“Not just Woolf! But he let Selasis—oh, Holy God, why? Why did you stop me?”
“Didn’t you hear what he said to Lord Selasis?”
Her features lost their agonized tension. “What he . . . said?”
She’d heard nothing but the sound of Woolf’s voice, the identity of it. Hawkwood understood that; he understood every nuance of grief. He was only grateful their paths had crossed so he might turn her from her False Path and save the life he had once, in mortal error, tried to take.
“My lady, follow him and you’ll know why I stopped you. Your lord husband lives as long as you live.”
That didn’t make sense to her, not even the fact that she was free of any restraint. He took the gun from her; she seemed to have forgotten it was still in her hand.
He said, “Your path leads to life, my lady, mine to death. Go now.”
She stared at him, still dazed, then broke away and started to run toward the lifts. But after a few steps, she stopped and looked back at him, and he saw her lips silently form a word, a name, in sudden comprehension.
Margreta.
He didn’t wonder how she knew; he was only sure she did know. He saw tears in her dark eyes.
Her last words were spoken aloud.
“Lord bless, Bruno Hawkwood.”
Then she turned, running, leaving a renewed silence in the marble solitude when she stepped into the lift.
Hawkwood turned in the opposite direction, feeling the soundless resonance vibrating within him.
Now he could be three times sure.
A True Path.
It would be, must be, done. The Concord had no choice.
No choice.
And I shall die with that, when all I asked in the beginning was my birthright of choice.
Words blurted from the ampspeakers. The formal charges. To the Fesh, they were affirmations of the rationale, part of the ceremony for just murder. To the Bonds, they were only meaningless sound
s. The Concord was full of meaningless sounds.
Alexand searched the faces below him and found Izak’s, but until the words ended, only looked down at him, and the Shepherd looked back, tears finding their way down the furrows of his cheeks.
The rattle of words stopped; the drum roll resumed. Alexand heard movements behind him, brusque orders.
“Izak . . . can you hear me?”
The Shepherd’s hands together reached out to him.
“Oh, my lord, I hear you.”
To make the words audible over that shivering staccato demanded an effort of will Alexand wasn’t sure he could sustain.
“Izak, were you witness to my brother’s Testing?”
“I was, my lord, I was.”
“This is my Testing. Don’t betray it with violence; don’t betray me. Remember…” A ringing sound in his ears; his voice faded against it.
Rich, hold on to me. So little time. . . .
“Izak, remember me as you . . . remember my brother. Remember my words as you remember his.”
“We will remember, my lord. We will remember.”
Booted footsteps behind him. He ached with every one.
“A sanna . . . my friend, a sanna for my passing.”
He couldn’t hear. The ringing in his head pulsed with the pounding of his heart and the endless drum roll.
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want . . .”
There, at last. Izak’s frail voice joined by tens more, then hundreds, and, finally, thousands. A melody as poignantly beautiful as this evening sky. The new moon had found a clearing in the violet cloud, amethyst upon sapphire, and a single star to accompany it.
“. . . He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters . . .’’
The sky faded into a lapis blur; his eyes were failing, but he could hear his sanna, the voices tens of thousands strong, echoing among the white facades.
“. . . He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake . . .”
