The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  Somehow, the diamond around Gethsemane’s neck made it seem like that moment of reunion was still a possibility. Her human friend even went so far as to accept the burden here, in this place where it added to the shifting of her body (and, no doubt) the shifting of her mind. As that loyal friend called her back to the present with a gently chided, “You have fallen silent, General—take care not to be lost in thought, as you tell me,” the martyr stopped her.

  “I think it’s too much, asking you to carry my wife for me here. I know your strength, but you’re dealing with enough with the nymph—I don’t know, leaking into you—”

  “Revealing herself in me.”

  “Sure,” said the General, trying to chuckle and coming up short. Instead, frowning, she took the Bearer’s hands. “Did the Lady tell you something, anything, that we—you—can expect on this journey? Did She send you here to die with me, or for me?”

  The human’s eyes lowered from Dominia’s to study the ground as illuminated by the torches. Ocean waves, frozen in time, felt flat beneath their feet though they visibly rippled across the illuminated portions of the path. “After all that you have seen, do you really still believe in death?”

  That old surge of panic, of loss to discover her tears washed Cassandra’s blood from her hands—wasted upon the carpet like her brain matter. “If death isn’t real,” said the one-eyed General, “it does a good job of pretending it is.”

  “Yes, it does. But you have met him, yes? Death. So have I.” As Dominia gathered her meaning, Gethsemane confessed, “In the escape tunnels of the Lady’s temple, when we fled with Her—”

  Son of a bitch. That was where he’d gone! Of course Akachi would have a handful of of men waiting for the women. Even if he felt the odds weren’t in his favor, it would have been worth a shot. Mentioning it to Dominia would have been humiliating for him when his plan fell through, but as Gethsemane described how the half-baked Hunter assault on the escaping women had been foiled by the appearance of the magician, all the martyr could think to ask was, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because, I—” Now the woman looked supremely uncomfortable and seemed to struggle for an explanation; it was the most discomforted Dominia had ever seen the stoic human appear. “He turned their guns to birds that pecked and chased them back to the tunnel’s exit, and I watched and laughed with everyone, but then—something happened. He did not ask me to keep it to myself, but I…I am a woman of faith, General, and know my spirit is bonded to a fae, a nymph beyond all space and time, but I have no firsthand experience of a thing like this.”

  Time stopped, she said. The birds in the distance froze midair around the heads of the men they harassed; the women froze midlaughter, midapplause. Even the Lady was still. Only Gethsemane and the magician had remained mobile, and he had turned around and spoken strange things to her. “You are the daughter of the Word,” he’d said. “All Bearers are daughters of the Word, and you above all its daughters are cherished, Gethsemane, for it is you most cherished by Dominia. Many times you have died—it is the duty of all Bearers to live many lives and die in miniature as the universe dies in grand, unseeable scale. But no more will you perish, and just as it seems the eve of your death has come, there I will be for you, instead, with one more task for you to commit upon your father’s behalf.”

  When time restarted, it did not simply restart: rather, Gethsemane came to in the Lady’s safe house, many miles away, with no memory of what had occurred in between. None of her sisters remembered even the Hunter assault in the tunnels; and the Lady, while not denying the event had happened, had Herself encouraged Gethsemane to keep the event quiet. Your sisters are not so advanced as you in ways of the spirit—they would be jealous to hear such a thing, not understanding what it means, that you are favored by your father.

  “I have seen the magician in dreams before that time,” the woman explained, “but that night was the first and only time I have seen him in person. This past year I grew convinced it was a dream, but…”

  “But now you think your time has come.”

  “It is not time as you mean it. Not death as you know it.”

  Trying to contain her bitter anger at the forces around her and their penchant for giving friends just to strip them away, Dominia instead tried to focus on practical aspects. “If he says he’ll take care of you…I guess that’s all I can ask.”

  “I believe him, General. But I am…reluctant to leave this behind.”

  “From what I can tell, the other side is just more of the same. But better.” With a squeeze of her hands, Dominia released her. The human bowed her head to remove Cassandra’s diamond. As the little gem lowered into her palm, it was with the relief of an anxiety the General had not known she’d felt. There was the feeling in her face again. She lifted the gem to her lips to kiss its cold facets, and only on lowering her hand noticed the shocked gaze of Gethsemane trained somewhere behind her. The General turned, and against the distant dark, illuminated without need for her Father’s profane torches, stood the Lady.

  There is no difference between death and life. Death is an external illusion, as Our Bearer has tried to communicate to you. Walk with me, General.

  As the goddess turned away, the martyr hesitated until her human companion cried, “You must go!” and physically pushed her off the path. Dominia, laughing slightly, turned to chide her, but was stunned. Empty space stood before her, the path back to the airship—and her friend upon it—vanished.

  Wisdom keeps you from arguing too long with Gethsemane, for you know she has a duty. You know despite your trepidation that you take the right course of action. Irritation bubbled up in the General, who, after putting on Cassandra’s diamond, stalked to the Lady’s side. In liberating him from the Front, you will do Theodore—and others—a great kindness, and receive information in exchange. And information is the truly fundamental element of this universe.

  “Where are we going?” As the deity continued apace, each step was accompanied by the eerie rattle of an invisible suzu bell, and Dominia felt faint anxiety to see the Lady walk, real event or no. That many-womaned entity smiled but a hair, Her lips unmoving even in the Void.

  Have you not yet learned the futility of questions? We are here to show you something.

  “But my friends—”

  You will meet them again. This is not for their eyes.

  A light grew in the distance toward which they marched, far greater than the lights pouring from the women. It seemed at first as though a true sunrise grew over the horizon of the world, but as she remembered they walked through the Ergosphere of a black hole that was little more than the encoded version of the planet Earth, she recognized by sound a black-and-silver block of sea that, animated unlike water for miles around in that frozen camera obscura of a half-world, foamed wildly within its confines.

  “Is this some kind of dream?

  All things are dream here: especially at night, when all the landscape is submerged in the darkness of Our waters. Even the Earth’s waters are no match for them, and Earth’s waters are a hungry, violent force. The Lady lifted a hand rendered invisible by the trailing sleeve of Her robe to gesture toward that ungenerous sea. From this distance—if distance could be said to exist in a place where waters roiled in the light of an invisible moon—the wrath with which that ocean thrashed was evident, its waves leaping high and collapsing upon their siblings like overexcited dogs presented with dinner. The closer she drew, the more its color changed—or gained, as its black waters bloomed crimson. The Lady, unhesitating, made her way to its very edge to watch the waves lap Her feet.

  What do you do when you have done all you can, General?

  Following the Lady’s suit, Dominia gazed into the waters and saw, reflected like a broken mirror by its foaming surface, a face that she first mistook as hers. She was just trying to discern what was wrong with it, this face that sat where she should have seen nothing or her own—until, as his hand burst forth to grab her ankle, she rec
ognized Kahlil.

  “You put me here,” proclaimed a voice that she did not hear so much as feel. As though it reverberated not through air but through the hand that was joined by another to pull her into the reddened waves. “I wasn’t prepared to die, but you let me die. You knew what he would do. You could have saved me. But you didn’t even move.”

  Though she drew her gun to extricate herself from the grip, the General was awash with shame. “He would have killed you if I moved.”

  “You’re the expert on killing.”

  Dominia pulled back the hammer of the gun.

  “I guess so.”

  She had hoped the effect would be something akin to what one saw in old zombie movies—the two-dimensional sort she favored as a little girl, before the reality of being a monster wore away the charm of fiction. In all those stories, there would be moments where something happened like a half-rotted arm was blown to bits by a single, dramatic shot. This was not that. The bullet made contact with the arm that gripped her. At the second of impact, she was back in the Lady’s temple, burying sheets of lead in the waves of men who came, body after body, to throw themselves at her like wheat begging to be threshed. All these bodies with families, these spirits with mothers and fathers and no souls, no hope—where had Dominia sent them? Where had they gone when they died?

  Her mind flew back to the present conflict. She could not fire again. Could do no more than look helplessly over her shoulder. She hoped to find help from the Lady and instead discovered, in one piece, Tobias.

  “Will you kill me again, General?”

  As Dominia’s mouth gaped in shock, the revenant forced her into the waves.

  Time—if time could be said to exist in that place—halted the instant the General broke the strangling surface of the garnet waters. These were not like those waters that had transported her, miraculously, to the Kingdom. A raging tsunami of angry atoms comprised this ocean, a sea whose depth knew no more limit than did the vast collection of beleaguered souls assembling it. As Dominia drowned among them, she sensed their numbers to be very nearly limitless, and marveled: Had she killed so many in her life?

  “Yes,” was the resounding cry that seemed to come from her own mouth, forced open by the terrible pressure of the waters and filled with their bitterness. “Yes, you have done this to us.”

  A thousand battles, the Bitch of Europa. She had stopped reading about monsters because she had been one—yes, been worse, more pitiful, more contemptible, than one of the Lamb’s dogs. Dogs had no sense of morality or consciousness, and dogs loved and cared for not just other dogs but other animals. But Dominia had turned off her ability to love. To care. She had rendered herself as deeply unconscious as possible so there could never be any question of what she did. Never any hard thinking. Any possibility of failure.

  But, oh, on the other side of that! How love and caring had rushed into her at the proper time, like the horrors of reality on waking from a happy dream. Cassandra had been the medicant for her ills. A chance to be kind and gentle. An excuse to be a Governess, and stay her killing hand. Yet, she had kept that gun. A badge of who she had been. Of who she would, deep down inside, always be. The General.

  “You’ve already ended the world for thousands of people,” accused Akachi’s death-paled voice, rattling her brain as her insides screamed for help. “Why shouldn’t you flee to your Father’s side and end it for the rest of them?”

  She wished to have the voice to defend herself: to tell them she only did as she’d been ordered and that now—now, too, she was only doing the Lady’s will. But there was no way for her to speak, to fight the current that dragged her ever deeper to the abyss.

  “Just full of excuses,” was Kahlil’s response to her struggling thoughts. “You’re a user of people as bad or worse than Iblis, himself. You didn’t care enough about Miki to save her. She was just a tool to you.”

  Dominia couldn’t bear it. She hadn’t used anyone—hadn’t wanted to, hadn’t meant to. But hadn’t she done it anyway?

  “You have,” answered a waver of a voice, softer and more tragic than any she had heard. Horror filled her to recognize Tenchi, of all good people, in that mass of unwashed spirits and corrupted souls. Hadn’t he just been by the ship, and before (or after) that, in the Kingdom? It was impossible for him to be here, wasn’t it?

  “If you proceed along this path, I will never make it to the Kingdom.”

  But he wasn’t more than a mile away, off fixing their airship!

  “If you proceed along this path, I will never make it to the Kingdom.”

  The voice could only echo its one statement over and over, and the General’s mind so burned she could only think in patterns—the words “Lady” and “help” over and over until the clamor of accusing, dead voices were hushed by the choir of the goddess.

  We have brought you here for a reason. All of this happens for a reason. These spirits that assail you, these waters—what are they?

  Her crimes? Her guilt? Her sorrow?

  They are the same as anything else. Information.

  At last, Dominia’s sinking halted, and the waters burst around her. As they cleared to leave her floating in the Ergosphere without even ground, she discovered not only the Lady but, far as the eye could see, characters of various alphabets. It was as if she still possessed that DIOX-I that collected every passing Halcyon account and cluttered her vision with augmented features—but now, the world to be augmented had melted away, and she only saw its data.

  “What is this?” The General marveled across this new sea of names, statistics, numbers, and letters arranged in no order or pattern she could discern except most of them were stuck in a single failed process, and many seemed to be nouns that were verbing in one way or another. Akachi swinging (she assumed his arm, up to defend his face from the tulpa), Kahlil springing (away from Akachi), Tenchi (tragically) begging for his life. Hundreds, thousands, more she did not recognize, names and functions she did not understand. Most were frozen in permanent stutter.

  The conductive nature of salt water permits the transmission of subtle radio frequencies over short distances; it is a carrier for information, and the oceans here in the Void are overfull. As the Lady spoke, the General found her eye could stay on one fact no longer than a second before leaping to the next. That same dark water of Our ocean is found everywhere in this place. Once a dreamer has been submerged in its substance, the encoded information of reality is everywhere one could look. This brand of perception is where the magician does his grandest work to intercede with the normal functions of reality. This is where you shall do yours.

  “Mine?” asked the General, seeing Tenchi’s name again. “But what about him? Tenchi, he’s here with us. I just saw him. What is this ocean? How can he be in it and without it?”

  Because the Tenchi you see is the Tenchi you have already saved in the future.

  The Lady turned to brush a fingertip across some piece of data floating past. A screen could not have been said to appear, though that was how Dominia perceived it, in a way: first one news broadcast, then another, until a great symphony floated across the back of her mind while the Lady activated data point on data point.

  “—national tragedy as Governor Theodore del Medico—”

  “—kidnapping at the hands of the terrorist organization now controlled by Dominia di—”

  “—suspect in custody, thanks to an anonymous tip. Terrorist Tenchi Ichigawa—”

  “—detained at the airport—”

  “—no word yet on the location of the Governor—”

  “—though the stolen jet crashed, no bodies were discovered—”

  “—execution to be broadcast live—”

  “—suspected to have escaped by boat, leaving Ichigawa behind.”

  Dominia, on the verge of tears, demanded, “But that’s not true! We didn’t leave him behind— René was—” Paled, the General looked into the face of the Lady. “René. He betrayed us again?”

>   René is a martyr now, and not one of your sort. He is not a man with a vision of a higher order, or a better world. He sees only this one, and sees his future in this one as being short-lived if he does not make good use of his new genetics.

  “But what about Tenchi?”

  If you were to proceed to Jerusalem with Theodore, Ichigawa would not make it to the Kingdom, for he has not yet consumed the blood of Lazarus on Earth from where you stand. He is a religious man, but has been too frightened to gain full initiation into the faith. Perhaps—the Lady’s lip twitched—you would do well to save all souls by tricking them, as you did Theodore. It is the easier way.

  The easier way, to be certain. It was always easier to trick somebody into something, rather than preparing them for what they’d actually have to do. That was why she found herself here.

  You cannot prevent Tenchi’s capture. By the time of your E4’s crash, it has already occurred, and your Father has solidified your presence in this place. But there is time enough for you to reach the location of Tenchi’s execution.