CHAPTER 32
CHILDREN OF THE EARTH AND SUN
The light of Forum’s nigh-never-ending day streamed through the oculus at the apex of the mighty dome of the Great Sanctum of Mother Earth, Jewel of Heaven. I watched the incense coil through its beam, studied the frescoed images of man’s conquest of the machines nearly five hundred feet above our heads. The pillars that supported the dome were twice as wide as the height of a man, surfaced in porphyry chased with gold, and gold were the sconces and the nine caryatids that supported the canopied ciborium that hung over the central altar where the statue of the God Emperor stood crushing the pyramid that represented all of machine-kind.
Ten thousand candles, all of white tallow and differing heights, ringed that central altar, their drippings fallen down its sides to pool in the trench built at the altar’s base. Still more candles burned in the niches at the base of each of the great pillars, and along the exterior wall. Lesser altars to the icona. To Justice and Fortitude, to Ever-Fleeting Time and Bloody-Handed Evolution. To Kratos, strength, and Zelos, zeal. There were statues to Mercy, to Victory, and Love. Prasada offerings lay on trays before the statues. Fruits and cakes and little parcels. The worshippers had sacrificed them to the icona, and the priests would dole them out when the litany was said and the practice done. What had been given to the lesser gods would be returned, as was tradition.
“In the name of Holy Mother Earth and in the light of Her Sun we pray!” intoned the new Synarch of the Holy Terran Chantry, a hollow-cheeked old palatine called Heraklonas. He raised the censer, waving it as he processed about the altar, two attendants in white minding the fringe of their master’s blue-and-green silk robe.
Cassandra stood beside me.
I had not wanted her to accompany me, but years of near imprisonment in the Arx Caelestis had chafed at her, and she had begged to come.
I had not wanted to go myself, but Aurelian had left me no choice.
Not listening to recitations of old Heraklonas, I glanced sidelong at the dignitaries gathered about and below us. We had been seated in the rear of the royal box, an elevated and well-shielded riser that took up nearly a third of the sanctum’s circumference, above the central altar and below the choir loft. A sea of red- and white-haired heads sat beneath us. The Emperor’s children and few surviving siblings. Among them were seated those dignitaries newly arrived from offworld.
“That’s the director general of the Wong-Hopper Consortium,” I whispered to her, indicating a man in a tall, cylindrical miter of indigo and slate, surrounded by men in the flared skullcaps commonly worn by the Mandari elite. “Wong Xu.”
“Why are they in masks?” she asked. “Is it like on Jadd? Only their women are masked, too.”
“Those aren’t masks,” I said, marking the jeweled and enameled white cheeks. “They’re rebreathers. They’re scrupulous about contagion at the best of times, and these . . . ”
“ . . . are not the best of times.”
“Quite,” I said, and gesturing to a dark-skinned man in black and cloth of gold, continued, “that is one of the Triumvirs of the Uhran Republic. I forget his name . . . and beside him is King Paeon of Tarú.”
“The . . . green man?”
“He’s a dryad,” I said. “That’s chlorophyll in his skin.”
“Where’s Tarú?” Cassandra leaned close to me.
“It’s one of the Small Kingdoms,” I said. “Just the two star systems, I think.”
“Only two?” Cassandra asked.
“You heard Selene,” I said. “Everyone is here. Or will be.”
There were still more yet to come. The Tenno, the Nipponese Emperor Yushuhito, had not yet arrived, nor had any of the Extrasolarians. The Jaddian emissary had just landed the day before. There were others—so many others—contingents of the great houses, the Princes Bourbon and Hapsburg, Bernadotte and Hohenzollern and the rest. A sea of colors and finery—and of security details packed cheek by jowl between.
“O Mother Earth!” intoned the Synarch Heraklonas, “Who bore us and blessed us and whom we betrayed! Have mercy on us, your children! We who wander in eternal dark, lost forever until we are returned to you . . . ”
“Are the Tavrosi here?” Cassandra asked, craning her neck while trying to appear as one not craning her neck. In the loft above us, the choir began to sing, chanting the first litany, describing man’s peregrinations, the worlds settled by mankind after the end of the Foundation War.
“They wouldn’t come in if they were,” I said. “The Tavrosi are godless.”
Despite the polyphony filling the sanctum, I swore I could hear her blink at me. “Qesta non tuo tashdaqa, Abba.”
You do not believe.
“Non,” I agreed, “E non. But they’re not here yet.” I could understand her eagerness. She had never met one of her mother’s people.
“Who do you think Prince Aldia will send?” she asked.
“No one you know,” I said, knowing she hoped to see Hydarnes or another of her teachers again. “And not Prince Kaim, either. It will be some admiral or other, you’ll see . . . ”
Soon the first litany would be done, and one of Heraklonas’s anagnosts would read from the Cantos, after which—for this was a High Day—the sacrifice would be brought in and burned, its smoke rising through the oculus to Earth-of-Old. The sacrifices left before the icona, the prasada, were by tradition vegetable, but the burnt offering would be animal: horse or ox or ram.
It was a white bull that was led in from the gate of sacrifice and chained to the altar. Cassandra gripped my arm as Heraklonas drew the knife and slit the poor beast’s throat. Memories of the altar at Akterumu flickered in my mind, of myself chained there, of my people given over to the Cielcin horde. The Chantry’s faith was hollow, a confection of cynical politicking crafted ten thousand years before I was born, a confection given substance by those millennia as rotting bone might fossilize and give way to stone.
It was a reenactment without meaning, a costume we wore in that falsely sacred place, a memory of man’s savage past from a time before the Mericanii Dominion, a time when man was beast—and king of beasts in the forests and jungles of Earth. To what dark gods had the fathers of men made offerings, and gashed their flesh with flints, or inhaled the fumes of pharmacons and poisons without name? For what devils’ sake had fathers lashed their daughters to pyres and kindled flame, or despoiled virgins in rituals black with sin?
They were the same, our sacrifices and theirs.
I stood sharply, ignoring Cassandra’s concerned gaze. I felt almost giddy with delight to see His children still bent toward us, remembering what we had taught them when they were young. For we had been among them. I saw that plain. Just as we had been among the many-legged ones and the pale ones and ones that dwelt in the seas. We would bend these creatures, too, turn them to worship us in time.
We would be victorious.
“Abba?”
I smiled down at Cassandra, though whether it was to reassure her that I was all right or from deep, inhuman joy I could not say. I could not untangle my thoughts from those thoughts which were not mine, those thoughts that had been given me—forced on me.
I turned and mounted the steps without a word. None stopped me, nor said a word when I halted before a statue of Three-Faced Fate. Three-Faced Fate, six-armed, six-breasted, passing the thread of beaten gold that represented all that was and would be from one hand to the next, thrusting her needle into the air.
She looked like a Watcher, looked as Ushara had looked, graven of an alabaster so translucent it seemed to glow with a light of its own. She looked like Brethren—with all those hands. I looked to the others: to Time, with its two faces; to Death, cold and naked with her skull and scythe. Almost I felt I was standing in the entrance of the Dhar-Iagon, looking up at the graven forms of the Watchers carved by Cielcin hands.
I have survived the pits and the torments of Dharan-Tun, and the solitude of my cavern cell and of the black journey after—and so I know the taste of madness, its texture and smell. It has never left me, and so I know that it was not madness that moved me then.
The magi believe that mathematics are the ultimate law. All reality is mere matter in motion, they say, is granted motion by energy, and all relations between said matter and energy may be described by the equations that are the incantations of their art, equations written in the very foam of space by no hand at all, as the universe is—according to them—without artist.
This is not so.
The incantations of the magi—which can indeed conjure wonders as extraordinary as star drives and as commonplace as soup spoons—are not written on the black page between the stars. They are contrivances, tools fashioned by human hands and minds that those minds might apprehend that darkness, symbols in the way all our words are symbols.
And yet their powers are real.
No man who has taken ship or turned on a light can deny them.
But it is not the magi who possess power. No man can sail between the stars at will, though he possesses the knowledge to build a ship and engines. He possesses knowledge only, and knowledge is not power. The power lies in the ship itself, in the laws of nature harnessed by its engines.
That power would be without ship or engines.
Would be without us.
Might it not be, then, that there are higher laws and deeper principles beyond our paltry means to annotate and describe? Laws of nature stranger than physics? How else could the image of the Watchers assert itself in that alabaster stone? In the twisted flesh of the daimons man fashioned with his own hands? Men have worshipped gods since men were beasts. Old Earth had been filled with them almost to bursting. The Watchers had been among them, I saw that plain—twisting man from the path, and though their names and influence had been forgotten, their shape had emerged again in new guise, reconstructed as the liar-priests of the Chantry forged their false religion from the pilfered pieces of countless dead faiths.
There were only so many ways to build a ship, and so one endeavoring to do so might—seemingly by pure chance—reproduce the shape of a vessel long vanished from the sky. It seemed to me then that the sacrifice of flesh in the sanctums—which was a part common to all worship of the Watchers—had tended toward a faith that carved that image of the Fates, the whole growing from the part as a seed.
In time, that false religion would turn fully to evil, to the worship of the Watchers, the powers of this world. Unless it was destroyed, torn up by the roots . . .
“Lord Marlowe?” I looked away from Three-Faced Fate and found Princess Selene walking toward me, accompanied by one of her sisters and a quartet of Martians in full plate, their faces lost behind visors of featureless red enamel. The sacrifice was ended, and the dignitaries were beginning to filter out of the inner sanctum. I saw King Paeon of the dryads emerge with his retinue, and stop to speak with one of the masked members of the Consortium.
I bowed, coming down from my thoughts but hesitantly. “Your Highness.”
She dismissed my reverence with a gesture. “Are you unwell? Your departure was marked.”
“Did they think I was trying to run?” I asked.
She shook her head. “You left your daughter.”
“The smoke,” I said, and did my best to smile. “The incense . . . disagrees with me.”
Selene allowed this with the barest of nods. She wore her hair up in a Grecian pile secured by fine gold netting, ringlets like coils of copper fire. A high choker of yellow gold set with laser-etched carnelians accentuated her long neck, and her gown was of a red color-matched to her hair, decorated with white petals like the snowy down of cherry blossoms blown in the wind.
“You recall my sister, Titania?”
I remembered a willowy girl, painfully shy and full of a secret enthusiasm. The woman who accompanied Selene was slim still, but aged. She wore a veil of white lace, and no jewelry. Her gown was ashen gray, and I picked out threads of white in the red hair she wore pulled tightly back from a high, fair brow. There were lines set deeply at the corners of Titania’s mouth, so that where before I was certain she had been the younger sister, I was as certain now she was the elder.
I took the other princess by the hand. “Enchanted,” I said.
Titania withdrew her fingers sharply.
“You must forgive my sister,” Selene said, “she does not often leave the Peronine Palace—only for sacrifice. She has consecrated herself to Mother Earth, as you see.”
“You joined the Sisters Cinerea,” I said. The Cinerea were mourners for Old Earth, women—virgins—consecrated to the Holy Mother, called to tend the fires of the sanctums that burned on every world.
Titania bowed her head. “I serve in my way.”
“The machine of Empire has little use for us spare heirs,” Selene said, peering up at the statue of Three-Faced Fate with her golden thread. “Our father’s time will come—may Mother Earth and God Emperor forbid it—and when it does, our brother will have little use for his siblings. We afterlings must find our own way, each for ourselves.”
“Your brother?” I said. “Prince Alexander?”
“That is the high probability,” said Titania.
Selene put a hand on my arm to soften Titania’s sharpness. “Alex is yet on campaign with His Radiance. It is said that he will succeed in his time.”
I accepted this with a slow nod, looked back up at Fate—and the Watcher-shape of her on her plinth. “But it is not confirmed?”
“Our father yet lives!” Titania snapped, “Sister, this line of discussion is most improper.”
“Of course, dear sister,” Selene said. “What of you, Lord Marlowe? I have barely seen you these four years! Aurelian has kept you under lock and key.”
“Aurelian has kept me busy,” I corrected. I had spent many long weeks in the War Office, helping to translate intercepted Cielcin communiques, deciphering battle plans, providing intelligence to support the fleets in the fractured provinces. The loss of Nessus had crippled the telegraph network in the Centaurine Arm. Some forty percent of all Centaurine telegraph relays had been routed through Nessus. With those telegraphs lost, communication across much of the volume was limited to the fastest courier ships.
“Yes, I heard about all that,” she said. “Still, I’ve not seen you since that dinner at the palace.” That had been six months previously.
“That may change now the Council is at hand,” I said. I had no illusions that I would be kept in the Arx under the watchful eye of the Martians, but I had at least some small hope of an end to my plush imprisonment. “I understand the War Office has developed a new praxis that will allow the Emperor to attend remotely.”
“So it is said,” said the dour Princess Titania.
“Parallelized entanglement, I think they call it,” Selene said. “It’s not new technology. It’s really just several thousand telegraphs yoked together, enough to allow for real-time video transmission.”
All about us, the sanctum was emptying, worshippers processing from the inner doors to the massive bronze gates that opened on the Campus Raphael. I watched Director-General Wong Xu walk past, surrounded by a block of functionaries in painted white-porcelain masks. The Triumvir of Uhra drew aside one gray-haired Imperial prince, the two men speaking intently.
“There you are!” Cassandra appeared as if from nowhere, emerging from a block of Legion officers. She wore her red-and-gold mandyas over a black gown. The family colors. “Non ti es buon?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I said.
“How do you find the city, Cassandra?” asked Princess Selene.
Cassandra turned, and seeming to notice the princess for the first time, sank into a curtsy. “Beautiful, Your Highness. I only wish I could see more of it.”
“That . . . may be permissible before long. I would be delighted to show you about the city myself. I may be able to persuade my brother to permit an exception. Do you ride?”
Cassandra brightened. “Horses?”
“Yes!” Selene matched Cassandra’s smile. “We keep a fine stable. Darusans, mostly. I’m certain you could join me—that much should cause no threat to Imperial security.”
I studied the princess’s royal profile, struck again by how much she had come to resemble her mother—her mother, who had tried to kill me. The Empress Maria Agrippina had retired to Caliburn House on Avalon, fearing the plague. I glanced to the aging Titania, back to Selene. Selene had spent centuries in fugue—that much was plain—but for what reason?
“Perhaps your lord father will join us?” Selene touched my arm again, smiling. “Assuming Aurelian can spare him, of course.”
I bent my gaze to examine the floor. “I don’t imagine your brother will spare me, though you are welcome to try.”
* * *
“Were you friends?” Cassandra asked when we returned to our apartments. “You . . . and the princess?”
I stopped halfway through the action of removing my coat. “No,” I said at last. “No. I was . . . nearly betrothed to her.”
Cassandra’s silence was deafening. I turned and found her standing, mouth half-open. “Betrothed?”
“Never officially,” I said.
“You . . . and her?”
“We never—!” Memories of old visions flashed across my mind. Selene seen in countless aspects: her face illumined by guttering candles, her naked back where she perched on the edge of our bed, her flower-crowned head where she sat on the dais at the foot of throne carved from a single piece of stellar iron taken from the heart of a dead star.
But Cassandra was grinning.
“What is so amusing, girl?”
“She likes you, Abba. Anyone can see.”
“Enough of this!”
“There’s no need to be so dour!” she said. “It is nice, seeing this side of you.”
“There is no side, girl.”
“You always call me girl when you’re angry,” she said.
“Cassandra.” I hung my coat on its hook in the little closet by the door. “This is not a game we play.” The red light of a camera blinked in one corner of the ceiling, the tip of the iceberg of surveillance equipment that was on us at all times.
Her smile faltered, and I pressed toward her, laid hands upon her shoulders. “This is not the Fire School. We are not home. We are not safe. I have enemies here.”
“Who?”
I shook my head. It was wisest not to say. Anyone might be listening. “This Council will begin meeting within the week,” I said. “This place is a den of vipers at the best of times, and with the others coming . . . you must be on your guard, my daughter.”
Cassandra’s smile withered. “I am not a child,” she said.
“I know that,” I said, perhaps too quickly. “But I would not have brought you here if I had any other choice.”
She accepted this, and half turned away. “What are you afraid of?”
“They tried to kill me when I was here last,” I said.
“You think they’ll try again?” she asked. “Whoever they are?”
“They nearly killed your mother,” I said. Indeed, Lieutenant Casdon’s knife-missile had found Valka precisely when I’d been in the Royal Wood with Selene, acquainting myself against my will with the woman Caesar had wished for me to wed.
The girl’s mouth formed a silent oh.
“Be on your guard,” I said again. “These people are not our friends. Not even Selene—though perhaps she’d like to be.”
“She’d like to be more than that, I think.”
“Silence!” I said, unable to mask my exasperation. In the unsteady quiet that followed, I said, “With any luck, we will not be here much longer. Aurelian tells me his father has arrived at . . . wherever he is now. I will speak to the Emperor soon.”