His eyes were dark wells as he regarded me.
“Yes, Finch?” he said.
His voice rumbled in my thoughts. I knew he was even now searching for the reason for my unexpected arrival to the Aviary in the folds of my brain. I retreated to my father’s fortress, my box, as I lowered my eyes and addressed him.
“I have found Duke Kolvino’s murderer.”
“Excellent,” he said, with obvious amusement.
“You,” I said, managing to raise my eyes to meet his alien gaze. In that instant I knew with every cell in my body that I was about to die.
There had seemed to me to be no intervening travel from where he had been to where he was now. He smelled faintly of the damp earth.
“Pray tell,” he said.
“You forced Perin to kill his master, his lover. Kolvino was plotting to win Her Dark Majesty’s favor and gain back the position of the Justice Minister for his ally, the Duke of Hounds,” I said. “That was why Knoris and Galia were sniffing about. They knew a plot was afoot, they just didn’t know the details of it.
“You had no intention of allowing Kolvino to tip the balance back to his side, so you had a few of your newly recruited attendants visit Perin’s family in the Basement Quarter weeks ago. They were seen there again last deep.
“I spoke with his sister, now quite old, and his two nieces. They said nothing just as Perin and your attendants instructed them to do. An old woman and two children, all frightened that you will come in the darkness and gobble them up. How does that make you feel, my Lord? Remind you of the good old days?”
“My feelings are irrelevant,” he said, oblivious to my tone.
All the anger, all the bewilderment that I had felt countless times for junkies and alleyway murderers who ruined lives without comprehension bubbled up inside me. It was pathetic enough for human beings to do this to each other, but the Beloved…with eons of existence…I buried my rage; it would only serve the Duke in this.
“Your men threatened to kill his family if he did not help you destroy Kolvino and turn over the secret he had learned, the secret that he was going to give Kolvino.
“Yes, Kolvino used him too, I suspect. Turned his love into a tool to gain him some petty upper hand in your political wars. Or maybe, just maybe, he did it all for Kolvino’s love, unbidden. A gift to make up for the damage Perin had done to his lover’s status. But once he discovered the secret, he knew. He knew that he and Kolvino must both die to protect it.
“He was told that his sister’s Red Lottery number would pop up quite a few times if he did not cooperate. At her age, she wouldn’t survive that for long.”
“As well you know,” the Duke whispered, “from…personal experience.”
I swallowed hard. My eyes burned. Calm…control.
“Tell me, where is Perin now?” the Duke asked.
“He’s dead. I found his body in a sewer pipe not far from where Kolvino was slain. His secret died with him”
“You have surprised me yet again, my friend,” he said.
He was close to me. There was a cloying stench of the grave carried with each word, decaying syllables bubbling up from a rotted soul.
“With time you learn to measure a man, Finch, and my measure of you was that you would never be able to go on as such a reliable agent if I confided in you in this skirmish in the game. So I relied on lesser agents that could easily be removed without questions or inconvenience. Regrettable that I could not trust you in this, but it is simply the price I had to pay for all of your other assets. After all, you are only human.”
“Yes,” I said.
“But that will change.” He expected me to fall into step beside him, so I did.
“With Kolvino’s domain vacant, One of the high attendants will be given Exalted Communion by Her Dark Majesty and join our ranks. My allies and I will assure it is you, Finch.
“What explanation do you want me to give?” I said, lowering my head to examine the worn stone path, the thick grass.
“Kolvino went too far, in High Sacrament with Perin,” the Duke said as if he were staging of a play. “Having slain his beloved consort, wracked with grief, he destroyed himself in the rays of the dawn. Very romantic, don’t you think?”
“Yes, touching.”
“Is there any evidence to contradict such an account?” he asked as we neared the great doors at the end of the path.
“No,” I said honestly, having collected all of Bandril’s findings and samples and having disposed of Perin’s body myself. I had given his sister coin and told her to lose herself among the masses of the Basement Quarter. Even I had no idea where she and the girls were now.
“Then it would seem that this has all worked out to our satisfaction,” the Duke said as we paused at the doors. “You have shown me you are ready to wield real power. You possess the experience, and now I know you possess the discretion as well. You will honor my household as one of the Beloved, Finch.”
“No, milord, I will not,” I said. “Before coming here to give you my report as your Prefect, I was bound by the duty of that office to notify the Prime Minister of your suspected involvement in the matter of Kolvino’s demise,”
I felt the heat draining away from my body, the Duke’s form growing larger, broader, and less human before my eyes.
“I have been commanded to appear before Her Dark Majesty and the entire Court to present my findings,” I said.
The force of the slap would shatter my skull like cheap pottery. It stopped inches from my face, defying all the laws man understood about velocity and energy, but the Beloved answered to older, darker laws.
“Your findings…” the Duke rasped. He was a gaunt, tattered scarecrow now, all jagged shadows and flashing yellow teeth. Snap, snap.
“I will be required to disclose the admissions you have made during this audience, my Lord.” Every human instinct screamed in me to flee. “Unless you command me as your high attendant to remain silent.”
“You would stand mute before Her?” the Duke said incredulously. “She, who is mother to us all? She who defied the Goddess and who all Beloved fear as your kind fears us? You would defy her at my command?”
“Yes,” I said. “For while the Prefect is required to report the suspicion of any Beloved involvement in a high crime to Her Majesty, there is nothing in the Codex that requires an attendant to betray the confidence of his master to anyone.”
“Surely there will be disagreement upon such an argument, if anyone even has the gall to posit it,” the Duke said. Ever the consummate politician, he was already turning the jewel of the problem over and over, looking at each facet. He nodded after a moment.
“My faction will have to raise the argument,” he said, coming to the conclusion I had hoped he would. “If not, then the Queen will rip the facts of this from you and…” he let his thoughts trail off as the implications settled in.
“And you and your co-conspirators will be joining me on the Rock of Suffering,” I said.
“It will not come to that,” the Duke said. “Others will not want to give her the authority to question our attendants in such a manner. Everyone has too much to lose.
“This will bring down much disgrace on my house. I will appear to have had Kolvino dispatched in the court of public opinion, even without an ounce of proof and will now look to be covering up the matter. You have cost me, Finch, and you have cost yourself a chance to be free from the shackles of mortality.”
“The order, My Lord?”
“I swear this; you will never become one of us, Finch. Never.”
The Duke spun, giving me his back as I opened the great doors.
“The order, Lord?” I began to walk through the doors, my back to him as well.
The cold was like that of deep space; his anger was a star of heat in my mind.
“Say nothing,” he said.
“As you command, my Duke.”
The doors closed upon the aviary. As I walked down the hallway to the lift, the screams of
dying birds mingled with the howl of a wind made out of rage.
#
On the southern stairs of the Temple of the Servant I reclined, looking out over the mountains of concrete and glass lit by a hundred thousand electric fires.
“How did it go?” Kestrel asked as she sat down on the step above me.
“It was a stalemate. The Queen didn’t want to pry too deeply into the affairs of the others for fear of unifying them against Her, and no one wanted their dirty secrets getting out to the entire court.”
“The entire court,” Kestrel said. “What was it like, seeing Her Dark Majesty?”
The images leered at me in my mind. I remembered a room full of hungry, shrill ghosts, cold and crowded. I remembered chanting, a great crystal case, and a hand emerging from within as it slowly opened. The rest of it was denied me by my mind out of mercy.
“I don’t remember much of it,” I said. “I don’t want to go back.”
“What happened to Perin?” she asked, changing the subject.
“He was a plant, sent by his lover and master to infiltrate your group,” I said.
“I don’t believe that,” she said defiantly.
“Believe what you want,” I continued, “He was torn between his master and lover, his family and the secret of your group.
“Kolvino refused to allow Perin to bring his sister and her family into his household. He was jealous of Perin’s last human bond and wanted the old woman to die, so he would be the only thing in Perin’s world. That’s what Perin’s sister said, anyway.”
“Perrin understood what would happen if word of the underground got out. He took the way out that destroyed the least lives. He killed Kolvino by taking the drug and then having his lover drink from him. He left him for the sun to do the rest.
“The drug killed him, Kestrel, horribly. He curled up in that sewer pipe and hoped the rats would find him before there was any trace of the drug left. He saved us all, you and your revolution, the rest of the attendants, and his family. Maybe the entire human race, as well.”
“He will be remembered as a hero of the revolution,” she said.”
It took too much effort to laugh. I shook my head and took a drag on my cigarette.
“What will keep the Duke from exacting revenge on you now that he’s off the hook?”
“He’s far from that. His reputation is very shaky now in the court. I am his saving grace. I was the one he named as Prefect and I’ve delivered the goods. The whole court knows that now. They may hate me for opening this can of worms but they all know I’m not just his lapdog. Besides, I got the better of him in this. He’ll try to beat me, break me, but not kill me. There is no gloating in that.”
A group of acolytes, headed for dinner in the grand hall, passed and greeted Kestrel. She nodded to them. We were silent until they had passed.
“Plus he thinks I learned the secret Kolvino learned, and he wants to get it out of me, so he’ll keep me close.”
“That secret is us,” Kestrel said. I nodded.
“Your people had best behave too,” I said, smiling over my shoulder.
The darkness above us concealed the true roof of the world, but we both knew it was there. Like some Gnostic model of the universe, a fake sky beneath a false heaven. Beyond it all lay cool night and glittering testimony to long dead stars.
“You’ll have to choose a side someday, Aaron,” she said as she walked slowly back up the stairs to the temple.
The teeming, breathing chaos of the Hive was below me. My father’s kin, my kin, lived in ashes, lived in slavery, but at least they lived. And from ashes, new life could arise, or so the old stories said; freedom as brilliant and burning as the source of all life and light.
“I have,” I said, looking across the Hive, basking in the invisible sun.
Centuries of Kings
Marie Brennan
I HAVE KILLED KINGS, lured emperors to their doom; destroyed courts, brought countries to war; for thousands of years I have brought chaos with me wherever I go, death not enough to stop me, and I regret none of it.
And now the hunters pursue me through the wood.
#
Tamamo-no-Mae. Pao Sze. Dakki. These are but a few of the names I have answered to in my life. Wife, concubine, whore. I have answered to these as well. Two thousand years is a long time – more than one name can bear.
They blur together in my mind, the kings I have killed. Few last for more than a year, and then I move on. Not all have been kings. But men of power, yes; the poor or unimportant do not interest me. I go from land to land – China, India, Japan – where I am does not matter to me so much as who I find there. Toba is the most recent, but it began with Zhou.
I remember the days in Zhou’s court as if they were yesterday, though they lie centuries distant. The court of the last Emperor of the Shang Dynasty, the man said to be more dissolute than any other in China. I could tell such tales of that court – tell of the day he demanded that seventy-two ladies of the highest blood strip to their skin and dance, in public, for his entertainment. When they refused, he had a ditch dug before his palace, and he filled it with snakes and lizards and biting insects; when it was full his guards threw the women into the ditch, and their screams filled the air. And he laughed and asked if I did not find it amusing.
I found my amusement elsewhere. A few words in the right ears, and trouble was seeded; you cannot murder seventy-two ladies of the highest blood and not expect rebellion in response. Zhou expected it, but his arrogance had robbed him of allies. His enemies stormed the palace compound late one night, and he died in his favorite pavilion, perishing amid the flames.
The fire did not begin outside, with the invaders. It began inside, from a tipped lamp.
I died in that fire with him, but by then it did not matter; I was finished with Zhou.
#
This much I will say for the hunters: they are noble men. Many have chased me in their time, but few have been as distinguished as Miura-no-Suke Yoshiaki and Kazusa-no-Suke Hirotsune. Retired Emperor Toba set them on my heels, and they are determined, more determined than many who have gone before them. This is the third time they have pursued me. The first time, I gave them the slip, and the second, their horses faltered before I did. Again they return, though, and now we flit through the hills and woods of Shimotsuke-no-Kuni, across the Nasu Plain, our feet as swift as leaves driven by the wind.
They may catch me; they may kill me. It does not matter. However many times I die, I will always find my way back.
#
I returned to China years later, during the dynasty called Zhou. Not the same name, but it echoed nonetheless with memories of snakes and screams. The Emperor then was Yu, twelfth of his line, who cast aside another woman for me. He wanted to make me smile: a harmless enough goal. But flowers and jewels brought no light to my face; the antics of monkeys and dogs were to me as indifferent as the changing of the moon.
Could he have succeeded, had he known how to pursue his goal? Years had passed since my time in Zhou’s court, true, but not so many – not nearly so many as have passed now. Perhaps I could have smiled, then, for some cause other than bitterness or vengeful amusement. Perhaps.
But that was centuries ago, and who can say now what might have been?
A court functionary suggested it to him. Yu lit the signal-fires, meant to summon soldiers to him in case of need. The soldiers rushed to the courtyard, all in haste, and when I saw them there…
I laughed.
Yu misunderstood. He heard in that laugh nothing of harm. But I saw the soldiers milling over the paving-stones, and I heard the angry mutters of the lords, and I saw that Yu was a fool, and that his foolishness would bring him down. It was for that I laughed.
He saw me laugh, and was pleased; and, as I had known he would, he lit the signal-fires again and again, all for my sake, and every time I laughed louder.
I laughed the loudest of all when the father of the woman Yu had cast aside re
turned with an army, and he lit the signal fires one final time.
I laughed, not because the soldiers came, but because they did not. And Yu perished alone.
#
I do not know where the two noble hunters found their horses; these are not the ones they rode before. They pursue me without pausing, thundering across the plain toward the peaks of the Nasu Mountains, and although I am swift, I cannot outrun them.
Fools. This chase is for nothing. Toba will perish. And so may I, it is true; but that will accomplish nothing save to make these noble warriors feel proud. They will congratulate each other, and return home, and be given the feast of heroes – but they cannot stop the cycle, nor turn it back.
They cannot undo the past. No one can.
Zhou set this in motion two thousand years ago. Let them blame him, if they will.
#
Some kings I bring down through war or rebellion; others waste away. So it was with the Retired Emperor Toba. I was a mere servant-girl when he first cast his eye upon me, but such considerations did not stop him; my beauty was unsurpassed, my hair a shining river of blackness, my skin as perfect and pale as the moon, and the scent of my body was never marred by sweat or dirt. In darkness, I glowed with my own light.
That much was obvious to see. The rest, he discovered with time. We listened to music, and I amazed him with my knowledge of it. We viewed the moon, and my poems were gems, more precious than any the others could compose. He questioned me on Buddhist teachings, and found my answers wise beyond even his comprehension.
Two thousand years is a long time. I have learned much, and forgotten nothing.
Toba sickened before long. But someone in his cloistered court had more sense than most; someone dispatched a messenger to summon the great diviner Abe no Yasuchika to the Sendo Palace. Many of that kind are frauds, but Yasuchika had eyes that saw much, and when he turned those eyes upon the emperor’s sickness he saw what I had done.
Oh, indeed, he saw much. But not all.
He saw the life draining from the emperor, draining from him to me. He saw my pointed ears, my golden fur, my nine tails. He saw the centuries of slaughter stretching behind me.
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