Assassin

by Kali Altsoba

  ***

  That’s how Takeshi maneuvers at the top. At the other end of the pyramid, in his role as Interior Minister, his ordinary and secret police carry out a rolling social purge of any who might oppose him locally. He tells SAC that arrests, detentions, and public executions will more quickly imbue society with fear and respect for Purity, and that he’ll eliminate intellectual resistance in media and higher schools. He tells Maximilian Kahn the same thing, substituting ‘Black Faith’ for ‘Purity.’

  “As long as men who believe in Purity are put in place in the universities and high technical schools, to deliver proper science and the new teachings to common folk,” he’s warned by SAC’s General Curia.

  “As long as faithful Brothers who understand the Black Faith and accept your godhead take over primary schools where they will proselytize the chosen young,” says Kahn and the High Council on Terra Deus.

  Men of the General Curia are not fanatic in Purity’s cause as were the defunct, and now deceased, grays of Sakura-kai. They are true believers, nevertheless. They’re also heavily protected and barricaded in their HQ in Novaya Uda, because SAC is under attack every day and everywhere by stealthy agents carrying deadly vials of insidious Broderbund poisons. He has to get at them some other way. “Of course I have a working list,” he tells the leadership, “but please, send me more names of loyal officers, that I might get the Purity Revolution moving inside leading schools, industries and government. It’s my top priority.” So they send him lists of tens of thousands of names, future victims of Honor Courts and firing squads. It’s as if one army, before the climactic clash of a decisive war, hands over to the enemy its complete dispositions and its Order of Battle.

  Unlike misogynist Old Families and Brethren, SAC officers see themselves as progressives “on the woman issue.” Which only means they want rich sinecures for female relatives. So he makes sure that purged positions in Universities and Life Temples and on Artistic Boards are filled not just by family of leading SAC cadres, but by avaricious wives and sisters and the maiden aunts of General Curia men. He permits no male relatives to take the jobs, arguing that it’s key to enlist elite female support for the regime. In all the change, Curia generals hardly notice that the local town councils and police chieftaincies, and Directorships and Port Authorities, are being vacated by their people and refilled with far rougher men whose names come from a rolled vid scroll in Takeshi’s most secret vault.

  At the same time, he tells Kahn and the Brethren that the same street purges, hangings, and eliminations of local intellectuals will clear the way for revival of the Black Faith. He advises Kahn to ignore the “moral atrocity of SAC’s push for female equality.” Turns out, the Brothers aren’t interested in faculty positions or Life Temple seats, and disdain that he appoints women to them. They only crave total control of schools for small boys, planning to raise a new generation of true believers in male ferocity and their ascetic faith. All other posts they ignore, to their peril. Takeshi gives the universities to SAC but the junior schools and small boys to the Brethren. Each party thinks it wins the fight. SAC wives take up public positions that expose their menfolk to easier tracking and assassination by Kahn’s stealthy killers. Giddy monks slip into vacated chairs of primary teachers, those other moral deceivers of the young. More come out of hiding, exposing their real numbers and secret networks to SAC kill squads and Takeshi’s spies. The carnage increases, across more and more worlds. The fools. The blind fools!

  ***

  He boasts of it to Naujock, who is become something like his idiot confessor. The hit man is back for a day or two, to brief his master on offworld provocations and ambushes made by his very troublesome bands of roving and reeving mercs. They’re organized into full companies and even regiments now, to better handle the growing war of mice and monks wherein they play both sides from the middle. They go by names like Smashing Bars, Arms of Iron, the White Company and The Great Company. The latter has over 10,000 cruel men. When not in Takeshi’s service and pay, they roust towns in the occupied zones, committing rape and murder and acts of extortionist terror to extract farfolk portable wealth. That’s when Naujock is happiest, away from Takeshi and Kestino, back among men of his own cloth. But every week, Takeshi calls him back to report.

  “Ids go’in weal gud, boss. Lods ah dead mice ‘n monks! When yu gonna go bigga, an’ finish dem off?”

  “The trouble you are making out there keeps the Curia and Maximilian Kahn looking away from what I’m really doing at the center, here at the Jade Court and silently across Kestino. They’re too busy killing each other in the outer worlds. It’s slow, but it suffices to my purpose for now.”

  “Souns gud, boss.” He has no idea what’s really going on. So he agrees with whatever he hears from Takeshi, nods vigorously when he thinks he needs to, and takes another chaw of Sachi blue tobacco. But first he spits a great gush of blue juice into the shiny brass spittoon. Phissshh, clang!

  Takeshi looks at him in disgust. “I’m glad that you approve, gunsō. In the meantime, admirals and generals are lethargic at the decisive hour. Old Families and Guilds assume they can’t be shaken from their millennia old perches and privileges. I shall keep in constant motion. I shall be a dervish to their stillness.”

  “Hokay, boss, whadevah yu say.”

  “It’s time to make a wider move, against the Old Families and industrialists and the Guilds. Bring me Pyotr’s chief legal scribe. You’ll find him in a cell.”

  Takeshi reaches into ether and dictates a new constitution. He does it while fellow putschists are too busy quarreling over spoils and titles, and settling old scores by cutting throats. Not just of enemies, but also of men whose wives they bedded or who bedded theirs, whose estates they stole or plan to steal, whose titles they claim or want overthrown. There are lots of private murders hidden inside the wider bloodshed of his rising anarchy. Killings of rivals whose last promotion and upward career came at someone else’s expense, or whose father blocked a profitable marriage that would have raised a man into a higher caste. Or who…

  Murder has a thousand fathers.

  Death wears a thousand masks.

  Red paternity slithers silent in the dark.

  All trails lead back to a single viper’s nest.

  The new constitution sets aside the ancient Council of Elders. To give a legal basis to their illegal putsch, Takeshi persuades all four factions to approve a new body, the General Estates. In the name of the imbecile emperor, it proclaims itself embodiment of the nation and ultimate law making authority, elevated above the monarch in every way except symbolic. Legally, the regime now has authority and power that comes from more than the barrels of its masers. It claims lawful and moral authority in behalf of emergency public order across the Imperium. An ancient gambit, tried and true and now tried again by Takeshi. Most cleverly, he declines to take the office of President of the Estates for himself, an honorific office without real power. In public, he dons a cloak of service to the peoples that hides wet, red stains of tyrannicide and his multiple murder campaigns. For the same reasons, cynical nods by the other putschists toward constitutionalism hide purges each faction is hurriedly carrying out on its own, and the political violence and sheer chaos Takeshi is releasing into all the worlds. Pent up hatred is erupting out of fissures in a steaming caldera. It’s nearly ready to blow.

  But on the surface of things, it looks like order is returning to the Imperium. General Estates has two houses. The upper chamber is the hereditary Meshrano Jirga, or House of Elders. It’s confined to 1,000 heads of noble families of the three High Castes, all jealously happy to see Pyotr dead and imperial Oetkerts humbled at last. Each white haired headman accepts a seat in behalf of a powerful network of family estates held across many worlds. Each stands up and makes a proud, vigorous, utterly empty speech. Every proud old man asserts a venerable family’s part in a millennia of unchallenged High Caste power, and boasts of his titles and status and noble privileges. They have no se
nse of the mighty change that’s coming. They’re inside the eye of a hurricane and think it’s calm all around.

  Right alongside, in a competitive balance that only serves Takeshi as the secret balancer, is a House of All the Peoples. Formally, it’s called the Majlis al-Umma, or Council of the Nation. It seats 10,000 People’s Delegates from the lower castes of noncitizens, and for the first time ever, even outcastes. With so many delegates and raw agendas scrambling to be heard, the Majlis can’t be controlled by anyone or focus on anything more complex than a lunch buffet. Ragged and rowdy, its members are appointed by the Compact, though pending a promise of the first ever Imperium election to be held in six months time. Another ancient trick. It’s amazing even to Takeshi how often demagogues got away with that obvious lie and promise. Yet it’s a fact he puts to good use. Barrios and districts and outcastes joyfully accept his blatantly fraudulent ploy, which only confirms and reinforces his utter contempt for mass politics and for the masses.

  From the first hour, the two houses of the General Estates are at each other’s throats, black diamond daggers out metaphorically, and in several instances, also literally. Each proclaims and counterclaims ultimate legal authority, sole moral legitimacy, and the absolute right to distribute property and write all the laws. Few understand that it doesn’t matter who writes the laws of the Imperium when only one man, and his Interior Ministry police, is positioned to enforce them. Other plotters go along with his move because he tells them that the General Estates will gather all political enemies of their new regime in one place, and provide an outlet for pressure bubbling up from below. Inside six months Takeshi has pushed SAC and the Brethren to cull the military leadership, seduced other conspirators inside the military and the Old Families into accepting a constitution that he dictates and dominates, and set his most dangerous partners at each other’s throats in a civil war that will consume them both. Now he readies to destroy the new constitutional order he only just created. His enemies grow evermore dizzy with confusion.

  The one thing that unites them is fear of social revolution coming out of the Majlis. “We’ve never allowed anything like this before, not in over 1,500 years. Elections are poison, especially of outcastes! This is not the imperial way! Your pandering to the mob cannot be allowed. Abolish this vile thing, the Majlis!”

  He tells worried military, Old Families, the General Curia, and Maximilian Kahn the same thing about the Majlis. “Let puffed up representatives of the lower orders sit there bleating. Let them stand to shout preposterous claims and demand elections. You have them penned like sheep waiting to enter the abattoir. They will bleat and move when and where you tell them, unaware that you hold the key to the pen gates and are herding them to the slaughter.”

  Kahn and the Broderbund give him unquestioning, abject support. To the other factions he must pay obeisance. He says the same thing to them all. “I was once called the ‘Mouth of Pyotr.’ Now I am the ‘Mouth of the Compact.’ I stand outside the factions. I am a lone reed whistling in the winds of your power. I know exactly who I am,” he faux humbly adds. “I know I am lowborn, and I know my place.”

  “Be certain to consult before you act. You have no power, General Watanabe, beyond what we lend you to our ends. Don’t try to rise above your station! You will control this creature of the low you have made, or we will break it and you!”

  ‘Appear weak when you are strong, strong when you’re weak.’ Has no one else read it, a master work on strategy useful for millennia? He’s rewriting it with a quill dipped in blood. He must also hide his true master plan from Kahn, inside a different unfolding lie. “You helped wipe out top military leaders. Now help me crush the nobility in the Jirga and the Worker Guilds in the Majlis. Afterward, you and I shall finally destroy SAC and Purity and take control of the Imperium.”

  “And then, will it be the Revelation time at last?”

  “Yes, the Imperium will be the chariot of a god, the instrument through which I correct Error in Creation. When we’re done with SAC and have no rivals left, you may proclaim my godhead. I shall go before the peoples and reveal myself to them, and to all the godly in Orion. I will come out as the true Arahitogami.”

  “Then let us move quickly, and as you say! Let’s exterminate the enemies of the Black Faith one-by-one. Tell me what to do, and it shall be done. Halleluiah, Arahitogami! The great day of the prophesy is here at last!”

  ‘You mad, brilliant, irrational old monk. You star grubber mystic, with your sacred texts and hidden meanings and forecasts of heavenly motions. Is there a surer path to absolute secular power than to convince a religious following like yours that the Absolute speaks through me? I have played many tricks on many folk these past months, but this one is the oldest and surest of them all. You fool!’

  Betrayal

  Takeshi asks the General Estates to rush into law an Enabling Act. On the surface, it merely replaces Pyotr’s arbitrary men by gathering the state’s power of coercion, the hidden brute force that backs all law, into the General Estates where power will be more broadly spread. He explains it to a delegation from the Jirga.

  “It’s a narrow act, written with limited powers to permit clean up of the legal and administrative mess that Pyotr left behind.”

  “How does it affect us, the Old Families?”

  “Very little, except that it eliminates arbitrary arrest of any High Caste citizen by the military or Kempeitai.” He doesn’t say: ‘In written law alone. Meanwhile, it monopolizes all arrest power under my control, at the Interior Ministry.’

  “That is welcome. What else?”

  “It abolishes the ridiculous indignity of the kau tau. You will never again have to prostrate and ‘knock the head’ nine times before an Oetkert sitting on the Jade Throne. No more bowing to an idiot.”

  “That’s a correction long overdue, especially now that a literal idiot sits on the throne. But if this bill is merely technical, why do you want it passed so urgently?”

  “Because it shifts important hidden powers as well.”

  “You admit it! Which powers? And from where to whom?”

  “It reduces the independent role of the Imperium civil service.”

  “Do you take us for fools, to hand over more state power to a man like you?”

  “Not to me. The Act transfers all coercive authority to the Estates General, not to me at the Interior Ministry but to you Elders, gathered in the Jirga.” Not even the best of them get it. ‘In the Jirga, there are so many vain, squabbling old men you will never agree on anything. That means power to decide under this Act must fall to me. In the end, power always defaults to the focused will of one man.’

  Although one old man tries. “If the Act empowers the Estates General, some power also shifts from the bureaucracy to the lower orders in the vile second house you made, to the Majlis. That’s absolutely unacceptable!”

  “You should accept it anyway.”

  “To what end should we give vicious lowborns and outcastes real power?”

  “Whatever you do, whatever your true intentions toward the lower orders and their present demands for reform, it’s best that you do it under a veil of law. Once the Majlis votes for the Enabling Act, it will appear that they consented to wear the chains with which you’ll bind them.”

  “The veil is preferable to the whip, it’s true. But we must wield the whip!”

  “You shall hold it collectively, as you oligarchs have always done.”

  “What will you do for us,” asks a wary but also wearying Elder, just before he concedes the issue, “if we give you this Enabling Act?”

  “I shall reestablish the rightful social order this terrible coup disturbed, beyond what I ever wanted or intended. We putschists made mistakes. We must correct them. I’ll ensure that the Jirga remains atop the natural hierarchy of our politics and social life. We can’t let the lower overthrow the higher. As a lowborn, I know this. I want to be governed by my betters. We must not allow an unnatural politics to become root
ed. We must defend the Natural Order.”

  They don’t believe him.

  They don’t trust him.

  But his flattery is effective.

  And their vanity is even greater.

  They vote the Enabling Act into law.

  Headmen think that they’ll control the Estates through the Jirga. They're overconfident that they’ll always rule because of who they are, and because it’s what they’ve always done. They think the Enabling Act will help them contain caldera demands of the uppity Majlis and the surging lower orders, bubbling with expectations. They intend to break impertinent Worker Guilds who have dared push an agenda of economic and land reform in the shadow of Pyotr’s death.

  Men in the lower house are used to bowing to superiors. Lacking confidence in themselves, they look for a champion to challenge Goliaths of the Old Order. They see a David in the man who gave them the Majlis, an extraordinary departure from centuries of history of their ignored, exploited, suppressed worker classes. Leaders of the 10,000 raucous deputies ask what Takeshi wants.

  “To bring millennial justice to our worlds after 1,500 years of exploitation. To offer people who crowd into the barrios and ghettos of this city, and hundreds of cities on other homeworlds, a chance to migrate to the Lost Children and the many other new worlds we liberated in western Orion. To issue decrees forbidding Old Families from claiming all the new lands, won with the blood of your sons.”

  They don’t believe him either. But the temptation to have their own estates, to resettle their families and billions of urban poor on the conquered worlds is too great. They don’t stop to think what must happen to Krevans, Threes, Helvetics or Calmaris displaced from conquered worlds to make room. Even the lowborn are Grünen, living lives in assumed superiority to everyone in Orion. It’s the thing that lets Takeshi turn them so easily, seducing them to complicity in imperial theft.