I can.
Caine ignites his wolf-grin. "Then I think I've got an Emperor for you."
And that's where I come into the story once again.
8
I confess to watching my resurrection many times. I find it fascinating, and not only for the impressive ceremony, which took place at the Cathedral of the Assumption a few weeks later. It involved the great brass icon of Ma'elKoth in the midst of the temple statues of every god in Ankhana, a Great Choir of elKothan priests, all the nobility and most of the gentry of the Empire, a tremendous amount of chanting and singing and incense and fireworks, and every possible kind of symbolic pinch of this and trace of that: sand from the Teranese Delta, a cup of Tinnaran brandy, an apple from a Kaarnan orchard, et cetera ad infinitum. It was the culmination of a weeklong festival throughout the Empire and was, in Caine's words, "the biggest fucking dog-and-pony show in the history of the human race."
Part of what I find fascinating is the way my body seems to assemble itself from the mound of symbolic bric-a-brac, and how when it's done, it's me.
It's me the way I always thought of myself, when my body allowed me to forget the approach of middle age: young, smooth of face, a corona of platinum hair around golden night-hunter eyes.
A primal mage.
I'm sure this came as rather a rude surprise to many of the nobility's more hardened bigots. But even they can't object too loudly: the whole capital garrison of the Imperial Army heard Toa-Sytell proclaim all the Folk as citizens of the Empire, with the full complement of rights and duties. And for now, anyway, even the bigots carry the certainty of God Himself within their hearts: that this slim ageless fey is their new Emperor.
I say again: That would be me.
Someday, perhaps, if I say this often enough, it will no longer sound so strange, or so awful.
And so I watch it happen again and again: I watch God Himself, through His faithful priests, carve me out of a mound of dead things and breathe life into my nostrils, and it still seems entirely wonderful, and entirely terrifying.
That is not the only portion of the recording within the Caine Mirror that I watch again and again; I further confess that I spend much of my time reviewing Caine's talks with me, and our first meeting in the Pit, and every other time he and I were together.
What a gift he has given me
For this is the one seeing my flash can never offer: to see myself through another's eyes. It is altogether humbling, and exalting, and to precisely the same degree.
Not too dissimilar, in that respect, to being Emperor.
9
I lay upon the bed where one ruler of Ankhana had died, and one had awakened from death, and stared numbly at the man responsible for both.
"I don't understand," I said. "Why me? It doesn't make any sense."
He replied through half a smile. "You just haven't had time to think about it yet."
He came back from the window and pulled the high-backed laquered chair from the vanity table. He reversed and straddled it, reminding me for one instant so strongly of Tommie that sudden tears stung my eyes.
"The new Empire can't just be for humans, not anymore," he said. "Everybody's gonna have to work together. You're already the Mithondionne. The Folk will follow you. But you were born human, so the nobility can accept you—reluctantly, sure, but remember, God's on your side. Their god. And you'll need him: the Blind God's still out there, and we both know it can't give up."
He leaned forward as though sharing a confidence. "The task of the Empire will be the defense of Overworld. You were born on Earth. You know what we're up against. Part of what makes a great Emperor is the ability to choose people who are responsible, capable, and honest enough to administrate the business of the realm. Who better than you? Who better than you to mediate disputes and disagreements between provincial Barons? Who better than you to negotiate alliances? Who's gonna work harder? Who's gonna care more? Shit, Kris—who better than you for anything?"
"But, Hari—" I brought fingertips to my eyes to hold back tears. "But everything I do, it turns out wrong."
He shrugged this off as irrelevant—and perhaps he was right. "Sure, shit doesn't turn out how you expect—or how you hope-but wrong?" He grinned at me. "You'll have to take that one up with t'Passe."
"T'Passe ..." I murmured. "How is she?"
"She's alive. Took a bullet and an assload of shrapnel out on Gods' Way, but she made it. That's a tough broad, no mistake. But this whole thing has flipped her lid a little—I guess she's decided I am some kind of god after all, and she's my prophet. She's been running around trying to start up a church for me. Every time I tell her to cut it out, she just shrugs and tells me she respects my wishes," he said sardonically, "but she is not compelled to comply."
"T'Passe liked to say that people are either sheep or wolves," I said wistfully, watching a cloud billow past the window. "Which am I, Hari?"
"Well, you know what I always say: There's two kinds of people in the world: the kind who say things like `There's two kinds of people in the world; and the kind who know that the first kind are full of shit."
He waits while I parse this, and I give him a smile to let him know I've gotten the joke.
"But that's serious, too," he said. "Two-valued systems break down in contact with the real world. True or false, right or wrong, good or evil: those are for mathematicians and philosophers. Theologians. Out here in the real world? Sure, there are sheep, and there are wolves—and there are also shepherds."
"Shepherds," I echoed.
Hari nodded. "Yeah. Maybe your real job is to protect people like them—" A jerk of his head indicated the world beyond the bedchamber's window. "—from people like me."
I thought about that for a long time, and I have to admit I liked the sound of it.
I am always mildly astonished when such things come out of his mouth; it's so easy to forget that he was raised by a former university professor—by the author of Tales of the First Folk, no less. And that is, itself; a reminder of how shallow and caste-biased I remain, even after all these years: my need to explain his gifts according to his bloodline. Perhaps, immortal, I can someday outgrow myself; for this I maintain some hope.
"But what about the other way around?" I asked. "Who will protect the people like you?"
"Wolves don't need protecting," he said. "All we need is some open country—without too many fences, or too much concrete—and we can take care of ourselves."
"Sheep, and wolves, and shepherds," I murmured. I sat up in bed, and Caine handed me a robe of such silken liquid softness it was barely even there. I wrapped it about my shoulders and wandered to the window, marveling at my straight, strong, painless legs.
I looked out over the city, watching the people slowly bring it back up from the ashes. "And so there must also be ants and eagles, trees and flowers and fish. Each to its own nature—and the more there are, the more beauty in the world."
"Butchers and bakers and candlestick makers," Caine snorted. "It's just a fucking metaphor. Don't beat it to death, huh?"
I nodded. "And Emperors. Do you really think I can do this, Hari?" I turned to face him. "Do you?"
He squinted at me against the light from the setting sun. "In my whole life, there are only three people I've ever really trusted," he said. "One of them was my father. The other two are you."
This burns me every time I watch this scene in the Caine Mirror; it wounds me with a pity I can never share with him. I can never tell him how sorry I am that he could not include his wife in that small company. I know too well how deeply it wounds him.
Through his eyes I watch myself say, "All right. I can try. I just . . . need time to get used to the idea."
"Not too much time," he tells me. "Your fucking coronation's in less than an hour. Come on. Let's get you ready."
"Yes," I see myself tell him. "Let's."
10
My coronation was very grand, in a disconnected, slightly nightmarish way. I lack suff
icient interest in pageantry to spend much ink upon the details. In the vast stark shell of the Great Hall of the Colhari Palace, I accepted personal fealty from hundreds of nobles and from the lords of the Folk. I sat upon the venom-stained bulk of the Oaken Throne and watched myself receive the diadem in that dreamlike dissociative state where I was and was not myself: an experience both terrifyingly immediate and as familiarly comforting as the hundredth hearing of a favorite bedtime story.
I still could not make myself believe it was happening.
It finally became real when Querrisynne Massall approached through the assembled ranks and climbed the steps to the dais, to kneel and offer me the mithondion that had been borne by the Twilight King. I took it from his hand, and received his embrace, and neither shrieked my pain nor collapsed upon the throne.
The Massall is father to Finnall: brave, lovely Finnall, my comrade, whom I stabbed on the precipice above the mines of Transdeia. Father to Quelliar: the murdered chief of the legates to Thorncleft. That the Massall was here told me all I could bear to know of the fate of my family, and my people.
Yet I took the symbol of my House from his hand with no feeling other than a grave respect for what was offered and for what I then accepted. This was how it first became real to me: At that moment, I understood how different I am from what I had thought to become.
Caine had tried to make me understand, while he helped me layer myself with ceremonial dress.
"The real problem with monarchy as a system of government," he'd said, "is that virtue is not hereditary. So I guess the Big Guy decided he had a better plan."
I have been improved.
I am immortal.
Immune to illness, to age, to every infirmity that afflicts mortal kind. It may be possible to kill me, though Caine tells me that if I should, by some fluke, be destroyed, the power that I call T'nnalldion—Home—can create me again as I am at this moment.
I don't think it's changed me too much; to alter my essential nature would defeat the purpose of having a living ruler at all. One might as well cede authority to a book of bloodless law; one might as well have a robot for a judge, dispensing justice according to its programming, unable to mitigate, unable to abrogate—which of course is not justice at all.
Justice is just only when it is specific.
It seems I am myself, saving only a subterranean connection to the pulse of Home: a constant wellspring of strength. It is strength I cannot live without. Only by touching that living world within myself can I bear the pain of all the lives that come before me. Without it, their pain would overwhelm me; I have no doubt I would go mad, banish the sorrowful from my presence, and end up a Fool King in a court of happy idiots. Provided a court full of such folk could be found.
There are so few happy people in the world.
11
Many came before me in my Audience the next day; I will mention only those who are part of this story. Nor will I make any attempt to preserve the order of their coming; I find I cannot even recall who was first, and who came after.
Kierendal came to plead the case of the former Duke Toa-M'Jest in absentia; the former Duke himself had not been seen since he left the Courthouse on the night before the battle. I had confirmed the decision of the late Patriarch to strip him of his title, though I rescinded the order for his arrest and execution, and sentenced him only to banishment. As Tommie had said, the only reason to kill a man is for something he's going to do. His threat to the Empire is mostly symbolic: the resentment of the Folk he had persecuted in the name of the Church, and the vendettas of victim's families. The Empire cannot be perceived to condone his actions.
"But this is the only home he has ever known," Kierendal pleaded, kneeling on the steps below the Oaken Throne. She wore the white of Ankhanan mourning, and her face was smeared with black ash. "Banishment might as well be a sentence of death. He is not a bad man—"
"Bad or good is irrelevant," I said gently. "And this sentence is kinder than he deserves."
"But the amnesty—"
"Does not apply." I'd decreed a general amnesty for crimes committed during the height of the outbreak; it would have been impossible to sort out who was responsible for what, when so few could be considered responsible at all. "The crimes for which Jest is banished occurred before the disease took hold."
"He is a friend to Caine—he helped Caine, freed him from his cell—" Her voice dropped to a bare whisper.
"And it is Caine who spares him execution. Caine has done what Jest himself refused: argued for the life of his friend. That is why the sentence is banishment, not death."
She lowered her head and flooded my chest with her pain. I understood her too well. She pleaded for him not because he deserved such sup-port, but because he was familiar. Jest was the only remnant of her former life that she could still hope to salvage; she hoped for a rock to anchor her in the empty ocean of her life, even if it was itself the rock that had battered her to pieces.
I have never been able to decide if it might be kinder to allow such false hopes to survive.
"And what of my punishment?" she said.
Without my flash to show me her heart, I might have been confused by this, for—far from punishing her—I had declared her a Friend to the Throne; she is one of the few true heroes of this story, pure-hearted and strong, and fierce in her defense of her people. I knew what she wanted, and I knew what she needed, and I knew that these two things only loosely resembled each other.
"Kierendal, this is the punishment I -decree for you: to live without those whom you could not save. I further sentence you to bear this punishment with dignity, and never to disgrace their memories by claiming guilt which is not yours. Let it be so."
She wept as a steward led her away.
Acting Ambassador Damon came before me, to make the traditional refusal of the honor I had, in respect to that same tradition, offered: a title and lands on the borders of the Empire. He desired only to stay within the Monasteries. He had already resigned his post, though his resignation had not yet been officially accepted by the Council of Brothers. Despite the amnesty, despite all arguments to the contrary, he held himself responsible for the destruction of the embassy. He put it thus: "This happened on my watch. There is no possible mitigation."
I suppose it is a function of conscience, to insist upon our fair share of guilt.
T'Passe as well came before me. To her, I offered the only reward she would accept: a proclamation rescinding Toa-Sytell's criminalization of the Disciples of Caine.
"The Disciples of Caine, as a group, are under no obligation to you for this," she reminded me stiffly.
"I thought the Disciples of Caine, as a group, don't believe in groups." This sparked a tiny smile. "I personally, however," she said, "am in your debt"
"If you would repay that debt, visit me on occasion," I told her. "I value your insight, and would welcome your conversation."
This seemed to both startle and please her greatly, and she promised to comply.
And I remember Faith Michaelson, brought before me by Businessman Shanks. I remember how pale and serious she looked, how her eyes had retreated into black hollows, and I remember the slight tremble of her hand as she reached for the hem of her dress to perform a curtsy. Her voice was thin, fluting like a rabbit's whimper. "Your Imperial Majesty ..." she said.
"I am so very pleased to meet you, Faith," I told her. "I hope that we may someday become friends."
"Mm-hm," she hummed faintly. Avery Shanks squeezed her hand and murmured, "Yes, sir."
Faith repeated, "Yes, sir."
"And I hope," I said to her there, "that someday you will feel free to call me Uncle Kris."
Her expression did not change. "Yes, sir."
This child was so profoundly wounded by the unspeakable crime she had suffered
More: she had been ripped entirely from the world she knew.
The best I could offer was some stability, and the hope of comfort. For her services to th
e Empire and the world, I created her Marchioness of Harrakha, giving her title to Imperial lands where the Transdeian railway comes down from the God's Teeth, and to the river town nearby.
Avery Shanks regarded me with eyes that glittered like a falcon's. "I'm told you're Gunnar Hansen's youngest son," she said, speaking the English that was her sole tongue.
"I was," I admitted.
"I know your father." Her gaze judged my robes and my diadem, the mithondion in my hand and the vertical pupils of my eyes. She said coldly, "I can just imagine what he would think if he saw you now."
"Then your imagination far outstrips my own," I replied.
"I don't suppose a man like you truly understands the importance of family—"
"And you may perhaps be correct."
"—but I am the only real family this child has. You must not take me from her."
"I had no intention of doing so."
At this she looked startled. "But Michaelson—"
"I know no one by that name."
She shut her mouth so abruptly that her teeth clicked together.
A formidable woman: even more so than she had been on Earth. The new world had been transformative for her, as well. In that instant when the world had become new, and the Social Police officers who had restrained her had fled in terror, she had found herself alone with the creature that had been Arturo Kollberg. Mad with rage and loss, it had leaped upon her, knocking her down, kicking her, clawing at her, and the totality of her universe underwent an instant skew-flip.
She had suddenly, instantly, passionately comprehended that despite being fifteen years her junior, and male, and the aspect of some unimaginable creature of nearly limitless power, physically he was a small, frail, malnourished little man
Who had hurt her granddaughter.
For the creature that had been Arturo Kollberg, I can only imagine that the new world was equally transformative. It must have found itself entirely astonished to be pummeled and clawed and kneed and kicked by Avery Shanks. How could it have possibly guessed that such a beaten, broken old woman could have become so instantly fierce? It couldn't have guessed how much hand and arm and leg strength Avery Shanks had, even at seventy, from her five weekly sets of tennis. It could never have anticipated that this woman had spent thousands of hours reviewing the recorded Adventures of not only her son, but also of Caine, her dearest enemy. While her body might not have the entrained reflexes of a warrior, she had gleaned considerable theoretical knowledge of personal combat, and she had long ago overcome the sort of squeamishness that stops ordinary folk short of savage murder.
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