The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  Dominia, smiling to hear how Cassandra’s emotional mannerisms seemed to infect the normally stoic Gethsemane, relaxed the cue beneath the Hierophant’s nose and tucked the wooden shard into his breast pocket with a pat. “Here I was, upset to see you, when it turns out you’re able to handle Teddy’s deprogramming yourself.”

  “Is that so,” said the Hierophant, behind the glittering of those just-crinkled black eyes. “Silly me.”

  “So.” She whirled toward Valentinian, who loped to collect the abandoned half of the cue and, by his touch and an unheard word, restore it whole—or, more aptly, grow a second half for it, as the original other half still sat in the Hierophant’s pocket. “What in the hell are you doing here, with him? Do you mean to tell me that all this time, if I had followed his lights, I would have found you here, too?”

  “Not necessarily,” said the magician, bending to line up his shot of the blazing three ball. “I do have a life.”

  “Yeah.” The General laughed in a way so sharp that Valentinian scratched and swore to see the lightly bounced cue whirl off, nudge the three, and promptly pocket itself. “Doing what? Because it’s not helping me.”

  “Excuse me,” said meek Theodore, “I’ve had kind of a shock? Can we talk for a minute about—”

  “Shut up, Teddy,” demanded the General in time with the magician, who then went on to drop his voice and say, “But can I talk to you a little while?”

  “About what? How disappointing you are? Or do you want to try to convince me to make another mistake?”

  With a look somewhere between irritation and mild hurt, Valentinian extended the repaired cue to the Hierophant, who traded it for the shard in his pocket. As the magician rendered the cue a panther-headed walking stick—strictly ornamental, she suspected, as he was once a martyr, and wore the face of a late thirtysomething man despite his hyper-advanced age—he fell into stride for the western of the four doors Dominia had only now noticed. Too caught up in fury for Valentinian and concern for Theodore’s condition to take in the many new details of the room. This concern became more of a regret as the whiny Governor, over the sound of a knock on the ornate door opposite the one opened by the magician, demanded, “Why won’t anyone tell me anything? My Lamb, I’ve been kidnapped! Drugged and forced onto an airplane! An extra-dimensional airplane! Not only that, but a helicopter, one without doors or anything! And threatened! A man was shot in front of me! My soul, condemned unjustly! And now I’m being kept in ignorance!”

  The Hierophant, who had hastened to respond to the knock, cracked open the door and made a sound of delight. He threw the portal wide as, in increasing pitch, Theodore carried on, “After all that I’ve been through, the least—the very least you ‘people’ could do for me is tell me what is going on!”

  “We can’t,” answered the guest, who Dominia recognized with a surreal lurch to be herself, exactly as she was, studying her with a kind of calm that indicated she would be prepared for this moment when it next arrived. “We don’t understand it all, ourselves.”

  Pleased as punch, as he himself would put it, the Hierophant looked between his duplicate daughters, then considered the cue in his hand. “Care to close out our dear friend’s game, my girl?”

  “With pleasure,” said that other Dominia, that future Dominia, that impossible-to-explain shadow (or more real) self of herself, who watched the Hierophant turn back to study the best position to place the white ball. Theodore looked the way Dominia felt: confused and nauseous. Though no doubt he couldn’t comprehend the awful feedback loop of making unbroken eye contact with oneself. That feeling of being a camera filming a screen of its own output until—

  “Are you coming?” Valentinian’s words snapped her back to the present and out of the single-eyed gaze of her inscrutable other self. The magician stood at the start of a new path that blazed with healthy red torches, and she hurried to his side.

  “She wasn’t kidding,” muttered Dominia at last, shaking her head. “I don’t understand this place.”

  “You understand it more than you’re willing to admit. Hell of a lot of implications to the truth, after all.”

  The farther they walked from that strange centrifuge of the Hierophant’s study, the less dizzy she felt. “What implications are those?”

  “I don’t know. Religious ones? You tell me.”

  The General crossed her arms and found she had to consciously slow her step lest she overtake the magician, who was inclined to stroll with leisure rather than hustle as far as possible from her Father. “I’m starting to sympathize with Theodore, scary as that is. I think everybody around here just gets off on denying information, and nobody wants to say what side they’re on. I’ve spent the past year trying to convince myself you didn’t use me to get a body.”

  “Look,” said the magician with a belabored sigh, “I can see that you’re pissed.”

  “You left me when I needed your help. We were captured!”

  “And? You worked it out. Now you run an army.”

  “For somebody else.”

  “So? That’s what you did before, for the Hierophant. Why’s it stuck in your craw now?”

  “Because—because I was done with this! I was done with the military life, remember? I was the Governess before—”

  “Before Cassandra killed herself.” The magician studied the General’s hard face. “Before you decided her life was worth more than anything in yours.”

  “And what happened? Everybody made me believe it would be worth it to pick you over her. When will I see her? When will I—when will I be anything but alone?”

  Her hand lifted to hide her straining mouth. As the magician said, “Oh, kiddo,” she snapped, “Don’t patronize me! This fucking place, it makes me so emotional.”

  “You’re always emotional, Dominia. You just can’t hide it here.”

  “Please shut up.” Her fingers pinched a triangle over the bridge of her nose. “I could have used your help so many times this year. I’ve prayed for your help, every night, every morning, like some…stupid girl.”

  She laughed sharply as he said, “Yeah, I know, and I appreciate it.”

  “So, why didn’t you help me!”

  “Because you did a fine job helping yourself! You haven’t needed my help at all. Look how far you’ve come in this past year! Do you know how much most people accomplish in the average twelve-month cycle? Practically nothing. If they’re lucky, they get a raise at work, maybe they lose some weight, maybe they have a kid, maybe, maybe…but at most, the average person gets one or two big things. You, kiddo, are having a red-letter year. Obtaining an army, instantly doubling its size by working with the Red Market and establishing further ties with the Lady—you run a city, for Christ’s sake, a whole state from the district of Tel Aviv and east for miles, with satellites in Tunisia, South America, and even a couple in the UF. You keep looking at these things as burdens, but ultimately you have more control than ever. You’ve got a bright, bright future, and you haven’t needed me to ensure that. Yet.”

  “When I do, will you be there?”

  “Haven’t I always been since we met?”

  The whines of the dog that had led the General to rescue Miki Soto from traitorous René, the defiant sapphire eyes of Basil while he stopped the train. Her eye teared up but she couldn’t relent. “You disappeared during the nastiest battle I’ve had in a long time, and haven’t been around since.”

  “But I’m here now. Not for too long—things to do—but I want to be here for you, morally.”

  “You just don’t want me to be alone with the Hierophant,” she said, sniffing. He laughed as he offered her a handkerchief.

  “True.”

  “Thanks for that. I don’t think I have it in me to listen to him drone about…Lamb, I don’t know, dreams or history or something.”

  “He’s a walking sleeping pill sometimes, for sure.” Chuckling, the magician resumed guiding Dominia west. “Will you trust me, kiddo? I know you’re
pissed: you go to all that trouble of replacing my dog-body, and both the dog and my body vanish…but I promise it’s for a good reason. There’s a lot of catching up to do after all that time wasted on four legs.”

  “Can’t you at least tell me why you’ve spent so much time away?”

  “I can tell you that it concerns a lot of people you love, including your little sister.” That gave Dominia’s attention new vibrancy.

  “What about Lavinia? Can you tell me what I want to know?”

  “All things in their time. Theodore knows more about her…and you know what Theo doesn’t.” The magician met Dominia’s eye in a way so significant it pushed her heart down to regions neglected, to thoughts abandoned and cut out from the rest of her being. Thankfully, she could not linger there, for in the distance she saw what she first took as a statue of black and silver. Its shape, however, she knew with all the mixed thrill and sorrow of an estranged child for their parent. There, in the distance, stood the Lamb with his silver ram’s horns—so still that if she had not known him for his patience, she might have thought him frozen in time. His black cloak did not even stir at his breath.

  At her wonder, Valentinian reminded her, “The Lamb is always here. Even when he’s on Earth. Always in two places at once. You can’t imagine the stress. He can’t get very far from his body, but he was able to come far enough tonight to visit you.”

  Lazarus had discussed this with her once, she recalled. This was what made him so effective when it came to altering probability and sometimes delivering external information in the form of epiphanies. While his body was on Earth, here stood his soul, contemplative as a man staring into a pool of water, his horns reflecting a muted echo of Valentinian’s red flames back at the torches that cast them. Surely it was simple for a spirit who saw so much to arrange things—or nudge things—on Earth, much as Valentinian created things from the Ergosphere with the ease of speech.

  “The last time we met, it didn’t go so well.” The General was hesitant to approach her preferred parent when she realized Valentinian would proceed no farther down the path. Gently, the magician smiled.

  “Maybe from your perspective. He doesn’t care what happened before. There’s something he needs to show you. You need to understand that what you’re doing really is the right thing, and you need to— Well. Just see.”

  “And you? When will I see you again?”

  “When you need me,” said the magician, a twinkle in his eye. The General shook her head.

  “You know”—she glanced at Lamb, then back up to the magician—“you people love to talk—

  “In useless riddles,” she told the open air where once the magician stood. Allegedly stood, at any rate. She could never be completely sure of anything anymore. The General turned back to find with a start that the Lamb now stood a hair’s breadth from her face.

  “Dominia.” He extended his hand. “We haven’t much time. Things here move quickly. My body was far from here when my spirit departed to come to you, and it still is, but I will be drawn back when it is forced to move.”

  There were so many things she wanted to ask. To say. She wanted to reject the hand he offered and argue with him about why he’d felt the need to alter probability so her Father lived on to ruin the world. Why he didn’t alter it to stop the blast in Kabul that had killed all those human runners. If the Lamb could inspire feelings, why couldn’t he inspire compassion in his followers—in the Hierophant—instead of this intense hatred? The hatred buzzed alive in her ear when at last, saying nothing, she took his hand and saw through the eyes of his body to experience what a head-splitting, soul-wrenching hurricane it was to be the Lamb—especially the Lamb standing at the head of a church, with all the people begging:

  Please God

  Please, please God

  Please! Please please-please! Please God, please o God please God won’t you HEAR me GOD why aren’t you LISTENING to me God PLEASE LISTEN TO ME no not HIM ME BECAUSE PLEASE GOD I NEED YOU MORE THAN ANYONE IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW, RIGHT NOW, RIGHT NOW, I BEG YOU, GOD.

  The Lamb was not God. But the Hierophant had done a very good job of making martyrs think he might be God, or part of God. Just like the Hierophant, himself. The Lamb. The Son of God. Christ’s message was all children were children of God, but who would listen to the message in a world like this? Who had listened to Christ, and who would listen now to this sad fellow with the ram’s horns—implants that, meant to filter out some of the bombardment of radio-wave thoughts broadcast through the semi-constant low-frequency chatter of infinite minds praying all the time, only served as a funnel for those beggars front and center? In exchange for the loss of fidelity of those wild parishioners on the sidelines of the gathering, the implants amplified those early-to-arrive worshippers whose thoughts were ceaseless prayers for miracles without understanding a miracle’s cost—without understanding that the smaller the probability of the thing they asked, the harder it was to enact. Not for the Lamb but for reality, which was always for the Lamb a strange word to describe the trembling of atoms in his fingers. No—this trembling of atoms. There were no fingers. There was the illusion of fingers reaching out to grasp the pulpit, and that illusion made the wood real by way of touch. Merciful touch! It was all the Lamb had to remember where he was.

  Swaying behind Cicero, he reflected that it would mean nothing were he to collapse then and there. His brother would carry on using him. Strictly speaking, the Lamb always felt this fluish way because of excessive amounts of both dopamine and serotonin, and altered forms of dopamine and serotonin—created, of course, by the protein, which took an almost-sentient pleasure in warping his psychic abilities beyond the point of any recorded living martyr’s. Not considered a problem, then, these spells of weakness, and they never prevented Cicero from hauling him country to country, plastered to his obsessive side as if the Lamb were a child given to wandering off in shopping malls. Mustn’t let him wander off. Must parade him around in front of these desperate, empty, sad people who just wanted to meet God, to know their doings were permissible and that their lives were worth something. They just wanted to be terrible people while still deserving love.

  Of course they deserved love, even these—but that was not the Lamb’s responsibility. It never had been, but, oh! They had certainly striven to make it that way! Somehow they had convinced themselves that it was all God’s fault—not anything in particular, mind, but “it,” “everything,” “anything.” To a martyr, the Lamb was God on Earth: the winked and nodded Second Coming of Christ. They could not understand what the real Second Coming was meant to be, could not fathom that it was not a paltry and sorrowful man of flesh and pained spirit who watched the worshipers leap like dogs at Cicero’s command: Sit! Stand! Kneel! Sit! Kneel! Kneel! Kneel! He would have told them to crawl if there were enough space between the pews, and they would have eaten it up. Cicero would have, too, for that was the kind of man he was. Mad with power and somehow bitter that he had not even more—just as he was still bitter that the General had torn out his eye. So bitter, in fact, that El Sacerdote had made it his mission to make everyone he met see what she had done. He wanted to make everyone uncomfortable with that big, black, neon-pupiled eye that roved at random, filling up Cicero’s brain with useless Halcyon information as though it might see Dominia out there, praying, in the audience of his vulgar show.

  “In the Churches of Europa,” sneering Cicero admonished the crowd, “they are silent when I speak, and allow the Spirit of the Lord to wash over their hearts. Is it so important that your neighbors know how spiritual you are, you who bark and yelp your prayers in response to mine? Shut your mouths.”

  This was typical for a United Front church and typical for how Cicero dealt with it, for there were always so many new churches each time they swept through the nation that each needed to be taught El Sacerdote expected a certain degree of passivity among his parishioners. People of the Front were often much louder and more boisterous—happy—than their Europe
an counterparts, in part because the martyr population was smaller and they were not forced to live with the reality of their situation as much as the Europeans in capital cities who walked down a street and saw through the windows of any local butcher’s shop the slaughter and dismemberment of humans. That was how the Hierophant had willed it. He had seen fit to render the human a base animal. To strip all dignity from the race rather than repressing the protein and covering up its existence as Elijah begged of Cicero that fateful night the Hierophant knocked on the brothers’ door. He brought with him the false protein they themselves were so close to developing with Lazarus, whose name in those days was no more “Lazarus” than was Elijah’s “Elijah” or Cicero’s “Cicero.” Elijah hadn’t believed it a just gift—or just a gift—and was far more frightened to see a man, so towering, appear as his brother’s perfect, though slightly aged, duplicate. But Cicero!

  Elijah had never seen Cicero so excited as the moment he threw open the apartment door to find himself in the hall. The reformed geneticist turned scornful priest had been so keen to explore his Hierophant-given abilities that he hadn’t anticipated the horrors of the martyr appetite—hadn’t anticipated that appetite’s effect on society, nor that all efforts to cultivate an artificial meat would fail.

  Or maybe he had anticipated all that. The Lamb had. He had seen it clear as day and could still see it now, without even turning his head (though that was what it felt like, looking into various probabilities: turning a head that didn’t exist). When his beloved brother held him down so the Hierophant could force the change upon him, Elijah awoke from his first death and found he could see all dimensions, everywhere, extending in all directions. Impossible directions. He could see with overwhelming terror that this was the future, this was the future, this was the future—and the future could only lead back to the past until all this could be undone like a knot tangled in the fabric of time. He had seen in that same instant what it was the martyrs truly devoured when they devoured the flesh and blood of man, because it was not a simple matter of the demands of misfolded proteins, or overexcited molecules that craved union with the sun. The protein part of the meat they ate, after all, was easy enough to solve with a bit of stuff from a petri dish! It worked for humans. Why didn’t it work for martyrs? What was it that martyrs truly devoured? What was that awful truth in the background of hunts, meals, Noctisdomin Mass?