To have a woman as insightful and quick-witted as Countess Hildegard “Hilda” von Mariendorf by his side would surely be to the kaiser’s benefit. Furthermore, she was beautiful. Beautiful enough to bear comparison to Reinhard himself. Did any other woman meet the conditions for empresshood as well as her?
However, as far as Mittermeier could observe, while the kaiser recognized the countess’s intellect and treated her with respect, he did not seem especially moved by her beauty. Of course, he showed no more interest in his own good looks, apparently viewing them as only what he might be expected to possess. The sources of his pride and self-confidence were wisdom, valor, and principle, not appearance. Had he been susceptible to intoxication by his own beauty, neither Mittermeier, nor his dear friend von Reuentahl, nor any of his other men would have been inclined to about entrust their fates to him, much less the future of mankind to him. Still, if he was lacking in sentiment in the common sense, that was something to consider too…
Mittermeier shook his head. He wanted to be a soldier and nothing more. He could not concern himself even with politics, let alone the kaiser’s private life, or there would be no end to his worriment.
He shifted his gaze and smiled as he pointed out to his wife their new home, standing quietly in the afternoon sun.
Summer was almost over. The death of Yang Wen-li at the beginning of the season had shocked the entire galaxy, from its most powerful men to the powerless masses. The unseen force that had seeped into their breasts at the news was finally departing, leaving behind it a sense of desolation, as if an age were coming to an end.
II
“Whether revolutionary autocrat or autocratic revolutionary, Reinhard von Lohengramm dispensed with most of the wicked practices and traditions of the Goldenbaum Dynasty, but one proved resistant to any attempts at dislodgment: the habit among assassins of targeting the emperor.”
The incident which historians would speak of in these terms took place on the evening of August 29.
It had rained until late afternoon, but the clouds then receded to the horizon, allowing every particle in the cleansed atmosphere to catch the light of the setting sun and tint the vision of the populace a limpid scarlet.
Reinhard’s final official duty for the day was his appearance at a ceremony marking the end of construction of the new cemetery for those who fell in battle. After the ceremony, Reinhard accepted the expressions of gratitude of a few families who had lost members to the war and then began his regal walk down a passage cleared for him through a formation of 30,000 soldiers.
“Sieg Kaiser! Sieg Reich!”
The cheers came in waves, fervent and rhythmic, forming walls of sound on both sides. In the days of the Goldenbaum Dynasty, the cry of Sieg Kaiser! had been nothing but a custom preserved by the nobility. Today, it was a concrete expression of the troops’ enthusiasm and loyalty.
His Majesty’s condition seems to have improved, thought Commodore Kissling, a small torch of relief flickering in his topaz eyes. The brave and loyal head of the Imperial Guard deplored his powerlessness in the face of the kaiser’s health issues, which were evidently grave. He was also infuriated by the bafflement of Reinhard’s phalanx of doctors, not selected for their ineptitude, in the face of the kaiser’s frequent fevers. Despite all their studies, despite the high salaries they drew, they had proved utterly useless.
When not in his sickbed, however, Reinhard remained the picture of youth and vitality. His vigor seemed fully intact, right down to the molecular level. There was absolutely no external indication whatsoever of weakening due to illness.
With the kaiser at this event were twenty-four officials in total, including the minister of domestic affairs, Count von Mariendorf; the minister of military affairs, Marshal von Oberstein; commissioner of military police and commander of capital defenses, Senior Admiral Kessler; fleet commander for the Phezzan region, Senior Admiral Lutz; chief advisor to Imperial Headquarters, Vice Admiral Hildegard von Mariendorf; chief aide to the kaiser Vice Admiral von Streit; secondary aide to the kaiser Lieutenant von Rücke; and Reinhard’s personal bodyguard, Emil von Selle. A careful observer would also have noted two doctors in the party. They wore military uniforms, but not without awkwardness.
Marshal Mittermeier and Senior Admirals Müller, Wittenfeld, Wahlen, and von Eisenach—the highest ranks of the military’s leadership—were away from Phezzan on a two-week reconnaissance mission, as part of the plan to protect the new imperial capital by building military bases at both ends of the Phezzan Corridor. As a result, those accompanying Reinhard at the ceremony were the most important military leaders currently on Phezzan. Those responsible for security were accordingly tense. The core officers of the kaiser’s personal guard had been forced into close acquaintance with the abdominal pain that intense psychological pressure could called. The guard’s second-in-command, Colonel Jurgens, was known as the “Iron Stomach” despite his minimal appetite simply because he had never felt this pain.
And it was the Iron Stomach himself who first noticed that something was amiss. As he explained some days later, “The others were watching the kaiser, but I was watching the ones who were staring at the kaiser.”
At a whisper from the colonel, Kissling turned his eyes to a man in the crowd. The man looked to be in his midthirties and wore a soldier’s uniform, but his actions lacked the discipline of the group. Kissling’s orders were terse and to the point.
The would-be assassin had adopted the precise opposite of the Iron Stomach’s principle of action. His eyes, full of loathing and murderous intent, were fixed solely on Reinhard, seeing nothing else around him.
He was arrested about ten feet from his target. A ceramic canister of sprayable cyanide gas and a bamboo knife painted with nicotine poison were found on his person. The drama of his arrest was completed almost disappointingly quickly, but the true performance by this attempted regicide began afterwards. As soldiers grabbed him under his arms and dragged him away, his wrists in electromagnetic handcuffs, ability to resist sapped by a voltage gun, he turned his head toward the coolly watching Reinhard and, fiercely, shouted, “Golden brat!”
Reinhard had grown accustomed to hearing this insult before his ascension to the throne. To utter it was, of course, lèse-majesté, but this was just another raindrop added to the vast pond that was attempted regicide.
Seeing that the man was about to yell again, Kissling slapped him hard enough to risk damaging the muscles in his neck. At this, even the would-be assassin flinched.
“Impertinent wretch! Are you one of those fanatics from the Church of Terra, seeking only the destruction of order?”
“I am no Terraist,” the man growled, split lips dripping blood and loathing. His gaze was so intense it was as if he sought to incinerate the handsome emperor where he stood.
“Have you forgotten Westerland? Have you already forgotten the atrocity you committed just three years ago?”
Westerland. The word flew like a formless crossbow bolt into Reinhard’s ears to run his heart through. He repeated it in a murmur, and for a moment it robbed his face of its vital gleam. The would-be assassin, conversely, had recovered his own vigor, and began a furious impeachment of his intended target.
“You are no kaiser, no wise ruler. Your authority is founded on bloodshed and deceit, as you well know. You and Duke von Braunschweig saw to it that my wife and child were burned alive!”
Kissling’s hand, raised to strike once more, suddenly hesitated. He looked at the kaiser, seeking a decision or an order, but the golden-haired conqueror only stood and stared as if in a daze.
“Come, kill me!” shouted the man. “Just like you and von Braunschweig plotted to kill two million innocent civilians! Children, infants who had never done you any harm, cremated in your thermonuclear inferno! Kill me as you killed them!”
The man’s voice rose to a shriek. Reinhard made no answer. His cheeks, so recently flushed with fever, were now so pale that it seemed the ice blue of his eyes
had spread to them. Emil stepped closer, placing one hand on the kaiser to support him.
“The living might have forgotten Westerland, blinded by your splendor,” the man continued. “But the dead will not forget. They will remember forever why they were incinerated alive!”
Just as Emil felt the faintest of trembles transmitted from the kaiser’s form, another voice was heard—a voice cold enough to freeze even the would-be assassin’s cries. Its owner was Paul von Oberstein, minister of military affairs. He stepped between Reinhard and his would-be assassin as if to shield the kaiser from the force of the tirade.
“Your hatred is founded on false premises. It was I who urged His Majesty to tacitly permit the thermonuclear attack on Westerland. I should have been your target, not the kaiser. You might even have been successful. Certainly fewer people would have interceded.”
Von Oberstein’s voice was at the minimum possible temperature, and utterly resolute.
“Villain!” the man shouted, but nothing more. His rage and enmity seemed to lose their direction and dissolve into incoherent turbulence against an invisible wall of ice.
“After the Westerland Atrocity, Duke von Braunschweig lost popular support completely,” von Oberstein continued. “With the hearts of the people turned against him, the confederated aristocratic forces crumbled from within. As a result, the rebellion was ended at least three months earlier than would have been possible otherwise.”
Even as von Oberstein’s words further chilled the frozen air, his famous cybernetic eyes gleamed calmly, illuminating the scene around him.
“Three more months of revolt would have added at least ten million to the death toll,” von Oberstein said. “Only the revelation, at the appropriate juncture, of the true nature of the duke and the aristocratic forces ensured that those ten million deaths remained in the realm of the hypothetical.”
“That’s what those with power always say! ‘To save the many, we must sacrifice the few’—this is how you justify yourselves. But has that ‘few’ ever included your parents, your brothers and sisters?” The man ground his heel into the earth. “You are a murderer, Reinhard! The golden brat’s throne floats on a sea of blood! Remember this, every second of every day! Von Braunschweig’s sins were repaid with defeat and death. You yet live, but the bill for your sins will come due one day. There are many in the galaxy whose reach extends farther than mine. There will come a time, and not very far in the future, when you will rue your misfortune at not being killed by me!”
“Take him to military police headquarters for now,” ordered Kessler. “I will interrogate him personally later.”
The seemingly inexhaustible geyser of denunciation was silenced as the would-be regicide was swarmed by enough military police to form three divisions. When they dragged him away, all that remained was the deepening evening gloom and the imperial procession. Emil felt the kaiser’s white hand rest on his head, but it did not seem to be a conscious act. Reinhard’s eyes did not register the boy at all.
“Kessler,” he asked, “how will the law judge that man for his actions?”
“Any attempt on the kaiser’s life, however unsuccessful, is punishable by death.”
“That is the law of the Goldenbaum Dynasty, is it not?”
“Yes, Your Majesty. But the laws of the Lohengramm Dynasty are not yet settled in this area, leaving us no choice but to adhere to the former code…”
Kessler detected unfamiliar particles in the young, brilliant ruler’s expression, and fell silent. Von Oberstein spoke instead, with his usual unsettling composure.
“If it is Your Majesty’s wish to salvage the man’s honor, execution is how that may be done. Have him shot at once.”
“No. I will not permit his execution.”
“If you offer to pardon him, he will only repay your mercy with another attack on your authority.
Despite Reinhard’s image as cool and collected, the look he cast Kessler then was uncertain, even pleading. But Kessler, too, gave an answer undesirable to him.
“Your Majesty, on this matter I am in agreement with the minister. It need not be execution. The captive might be granted the right to an honorable suicide.”
“No. That will not do.” Reinhard shook his head, golden hair seeming to shed a melancholy pollen instead of its usual dazzling light. “There must be no more killing for Westerland. Do you understand? He is not to be killed. When I decide his punishment, I will…”
The young ruler trailed off, the indistinctness of his speech clear testament to the indecision in his heart. He turned and began the walk back his landcar. Kessler almost gasped at the sight. The glorious kaiser’s shoulders were drooping…
III
The crimson hemisphere rose on the planet Westerland’s horizon. Swelling rapidly, it transformed into an eerie mushroom-shaped cloud, howling with a burning wind that became a firestorm searing across the planet’s surface at seventy meters per second. Two million people—men and women, adults and children—were cremated alive.
It had been three years ago—year 488 of the old Imperial Calendar. The atrocity had been ordered by Duke von Braunschweig, but Reinhard had let it happen in order to further his strategic aims. This act had left deep cracks in the psychological horizons he had long shared with Siegfried Kircheis.
Kircheis’s first reaction to learning the truth had been grief for his friend. “Lord Reinhard, the nobles have done something they never should have done, but you…you’ve failed to do something you should have. I wonder whose sin is greater.”
In his fourteenth-floor suite at Imperial Headquarters, Reinhard’s pale hand gripped a bottle of 410-vintage red wine and tilted it over a crystal glass. It appeared that not will but emotion controlled the movement of his hand, and the wine overflowed the glass and stained the white silk tablecloth an ominous red. Reinhard’s ice-blue eyes, more than half under the control of alcohol, gazed down at the sight. Even in this half-stupefied state, he was beautiful, but compared to the image of Reinhard that had spurred great armies across the sea of stars, his natural magnetism was severely curtailed.
The wine reminded him of a pool of blood. An unremarkable connection to make, but in Reinhard’s case, it opened another wound. Red hair soaked in red blood. The flame-haired youth Reinhard had begun to avoid after their difference of opinion over Westerland, but who had nevertheless given his own life to save his friend’s. Even at death’s door, he had not uttered a word of protest or discontent. Instead, he had said this:
“Take this universe for your own.”
It was an oath written in royal blood, and Reinhard had kept it. The Goldenbaum Dynasty, Phezzan, the Alliance of Free Planets—he had crushed them all and become the greatest conqueror in history. His oath had been kept, and now…and now he had been confronted once more with the sins of his past. At the end of glory, at the pinnacle of power, what had he won for himself? The fetters of a criminal, not worn in the slightest by the passage of time. The screams of children burned alive. He had thought he had forgotten. Just as the would-be assassin had declaimed, however, the dead would never forget the atrocity visited upon them.
Another presence disturbed the fog of intoxication. Reinhard’s dark eyes surveyed the room, stopping where they found a head of dark-blond hair. Its owner, Hilda, had been allowed in by Emil Selle, who stood outside the door, half in tears.
Reinhard gave a low chuckle. “Fraulein von Mariendorf.” Bereft of grandeur, his voice skimmed the frozen surface of the air. “It is just as the man said. I am a murderer, and a coward besides.”
“Your Majesty…”
“I could have stopped the duke, but I did not. Yes, he committed that evil of his own accord. But I let it happen, and accepted all the profit. I know the truth—that I am a coward. The kaiser’s throne aside, I am not worthy of the cheers my men offer me.”
Hilda was silent. Like Reinhard, she was bitterly aware of her own powerlessness. She produced a handkerchief and wiped the damp tablecloth, al
ong with Reinhard’s hand and sleeve. Reinhard closed his even lips to stem the flow of self-recrimination, but Hilda heard the wounds on his psyche creak.
She had entered the room willingly, but it would not be easy to tend the kaiser’s wounds. An appeal to proportion—“a mere two million”—would never do. That was precisely the logic of power that Rudolf von Goldenbaum had employed. Reinhard’s life had begun in opposition to such ideas. Finding a justification for his sins would be the first step on a slippery slope to self-deification and becoming a second Kaiser Rudolf.
Like Reinhard, and indeed like Yang in life, Hilda was neither omnipotent nor omniscient. She had no confidence that she could offer the right save to his wounds. But, having dried his hand, his sleeve, and the tablecloth, she had to move on to her next action. Hesitantly, she opened her mouth to speak.
“Your Majesty, if you have sinned, I believe you have already paid the price for it. I believe, too, that this experience served as the basis for sweeping reform of both politics and society. There was sin, and that sin was paid for. The results are what remain. Please, do not judge yourself too harshly. There are those to whom your reforms came as salvation.”
The price Hilda spoke of was the death of Siegfried Kircheis, as Reinhard well understood. His eyes darkened further, but the miasma of drink was abruptly dispersed. He watched as Hilda folded her handkerchief neatly, bowed, and made to leave the room. Half rising from his chair, he surprised even himself when he spoke.
“Fräulein.”
“Yes, Your Majesty?”
“I would not have you leave. Stay with me.”
Hilda did not reply at once. Doubt that she had heard correctly rose in her breast like a swelling tide, and when it rose higher than her heart she knew that she and the young emperor had taken their first step in a certain direction.
“I do not think I could bear to be alone,” Reinhard said. “Not tonight. I beg you, do not leave me alone.”
A pause.
“Yes, Your Majesty. As you wish.”
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