The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  At last, seeking her gun on instinct and finding it there in joyful thoughtform, Dominia drew and fired. With satisfaction, she watched him whip backward, past and through her, into the distance the way they had come—the way she now beat hasty pursuit.

  Before emerging back into the world, she asked herself if that was the best thing to do. Was it not better to take the portal now, herself? Get the drop on him? Do what he did, perhaps, and strangle the boys who would become Cicero and Elijah in their beds before they could ever wreak such evil across the land? But that was just more violence, and would not resolve all these past failures. Not resolve this iteration. Dominia had made a promise to Cassandra. She had seen Lazarus die. She had taken Miki’s body. She could not live with herself, abandoning this universe to the whims of her trapped Father. She could not let him rule without her intercession.

  For was that not what her actions were, now? The intercessions of the truly risen dead—the truly sanctified within the world? She had died, returned to life, and returned life to others whom she needed to take elsewhere. She had seen the truth of her position as, if not the Void itself, then as that recording beam and the identical playback beam in Tish’s preferred, holographic model of reality. That meant Dominia could influence Earth’s stability much as she could influence the Void’s. When she returned to the world, she made the very stage buck beneath her Father’s feet.. Disoriented from his Ergosphere death, the Hierophant nonetheless had frame of mind enough to stumble up the rocking staircase and shove his people aside with the staff of his halberd.

  How astonishing to be faster than him! To leap, with a few great bounds, up the twisting rail of the stair and upon the balcony’s surface—there to meet him when he made it up! As a girl, she could have only dreamed of reflexes like his, and as an adult she never dared waste time on such fancies. But now, here they were: the Lady poised between Lavinia and the Holy Father, whose polearm was once again torn from his hands with a satisfying clatter as it hit the still-trembling stage below.

  “You think you’ll manage to kill me?” asked the Hierophant, laughing even as his anxious martyrs, knowing better than to help now that Dominia was in the fray, edged their way back down the stairs. “I, who have cut down many past iterations of my own self because they stood between me and a higher world?”

  “It isn’t a higher world you want. You want a world that’s all your own—but you don’t deserve one. Not as you are now.”

  “And you do, Dominia?”

  “I don’t want a world! I want nothing more for any world than its peaceful, happy existence. You want to see everything crushed.”

  “Not at all. I wish to be immortal: to truly live forever.” She took a swipe at him, missed, and the balcony groaned with his landing upon it, the temporary structure still reverberating with the Earth’s ceased shudders. Not made to bear more than one or two actors at a time, let alone the movements of real fighting above an earthquake, the set piece began its slow sag. Lavinia cried out behind them, and Teddy, amid the throng of humans who had pulled him up to the stage, called her name from below. Eyes wild with terror, the girl jumped over the balcony’s side and tumbled twenty feet down, where Teddy and humans alike reached up to catch her. The no-longer-so-Eternal Virgin of the now defunct Holy Family landed upon her future lover with an oof and a laugh of surprise audible even over the Hierophant’s sincerely demanded questions. His black eyes blazed into Dominia while he snarled, “What is it in me that makes me so unworthy of the highest truth? Of knowing the essence of the godhead? What is it in me that makes me so unworthy of the life you returned to them? What makes my brother unworthy? He died that first time, just as your wife. I understand your pain, my girl, but you refuse to acknowledge your involvement in mine! Why was my escape to that first new world so unjust?”

  The air between them stilled. Dominia could see in his eyes he knew the moment had come. She felt it, herself, in every atom of air. She saw, also, that so long as he lived, he could not escape his thicket of self-delusion. There was only one method of liberation.

  “You will never repent, as long as you live in this form—so, it’s my duty to free you for another chance to grow.”

  By slipping the halberd into his belly and jerking its blade upward, Dominia tore apart the innards of the Hierophant to the sound of Lavinia’s wail. Pupils dilating to invisible pinpoints within their tarry irises, he fell backward from the point of impalement and disappeared a few meters before his impact upon the stage revealed by scattering humans.

  “There’s no time,” Dominia heard Theodore saying as the General pursued the dying man into the Void. “Are you hurt? We need to go.”

  She didn’t need to hear the girl saying, “No, no—we can’t. Oh, Daddy!”

  Then, the Lady was within the Void: alone, yet, the furthest thing from, for she felt at this point in space-time a great many entities crawling with life inside her. Of those, the liveliest was also the one whose death was most imminent. The Hierophant’s soul ran for the portal as fast as his body’s fading life required of it, thoughtform walls throwing themselves up along with fires, forests, a clockwork city, a vast factory of conveyor belts and Escher stairs, entire hallucinatory dream-universes through which they both lived flickering second lives locked in eternal rivalry—anything he could think to put between himself and the Lady.

  But the Lady was all things in that place. She was those fires, those forests, the walls, and all the other things with which the Hierophant tried to slow her down. She was the very ground upon which he ran, the very ground that softened to the substance of a marsh and slowed his pace.

  “I could give you so much, my girl,” said the Hierophant, stumbling forward one final step, succumbing to the suction of his feet, and standing to await her emergence from the flaming trees. “Everything, anything you asked. Why should either of us find a new world when we might make this one better, as I have said so many times over? Why should any of us suffer? Is the happiest ending, the happiest world, not one where I, even I, am redeemed?”

  “Then consider this might not be the happiest world for you.” Dominia’s voice emanated from all things, all space, around the Hierophant. Her body—the body of a giant, in truth, replicating hers—formed from the ground beneath him faster than he could have run were he allowed. Had he, he would have fallen to his death from the heel of her sprawling palm. “Maybe the next one.”

  With a gesture of her fingers as simple and light as she might use in the crushing of a gnat, Dominia squashed the thoughtbody of the Hierophant and forced him to fly back once more—now, to the moment of his death, to which she followed him. She emerged normal size upon reality’s stage and bent at the side of his broken, eviscerated body. Behind them, Lavinia and Theodore hurried to the abandoned camera.

  “The moment you have so long awaited,” observed the Hierophant with his final breaths. He laughed even as he did, a wet, ugly sound that seemed more truthful than his usual mirth. “Will you ever be sorry it was so short?”

  “It feels to me like it’s lasted at least twenty thousand years,” was her response. With that bastard grin, he raised one broken arm to lay a numb hand against his daughter’s cheek. Then, unspeaking, he relented to that which was long overdue, and his eyes paled over in the mist of death.

  As he died, a great roar rose across the theater: Dominia first took it for a mass of crying martyrs but soon knew it for the black tsunami that rose from the ocean to carry off the dead—and the portal—to holier pastures. As the massive wave arced over the edge of the theater, the General lifted her head in time to see Cassandra there, holding Lavinia. That most perfect of women, she looked up at Dominia and smiled—what a radiant smile!—as the crest dropped over the theater wall and smashed, to the screams of many misunderstanding martyrs, into the overcrowded people. The martyrs all seemed to require a few seconds to realize they were neither crushed nor drowning, nor even wet. When the flood washed away, every last human was gone, along with the rea
lity distortion. The doors, returned, burst open and overflowed, not with water but with newly baptized Lazarene martyrs desperate to flee their tahgmahr.

  “Tell your children what you’ve seen,” the Lady called after them before lowering her head again toward the dead man.

  As usual, he had been right. Eternal as she may have been, and evil as he may have been, it brought a soft sting of pain to look into the Hierophant’s dead face. He was, after all, her Father. But she refused to submit to the emotion of grief, and stood in time to hear good Lavinia, dear Lavinia, do what she knew needed to be done. Something that was only the first of many ways in which the Princess would make a difference in her world.

  “Viewers, please! Please, I have a message—have you seen all this, this madness?” Down below, a few martyrs greedy for imaginary principalities still scrapped, unclear on the fact that the Hierophant was dead. Theodore, in control of the camera, panned around the emptying theater, across the Hierophant’s body, then back to Lavinia. “Look at that—and look at me! I beg you, humans watching me, please know how powerful you are! Please know: you can do anything. You’re just as good as us, or better, even though we’ve told you otherwise for centuries. Some of you believe us, and I’m talking to you—yes, you! You’ve been brainwashed. For years we’ve hidden things in your books and movies, your video games, your news, even your schools! We’ve taught you dirty lies, and we—we should be ashamed of ourselves. But you’ll see it now.”

  Her innocent eyes, opened for the first time, glassed over with tears of repentance. “You don’t have to listen to us. All beings are self-sovereign.” Given by Lavinia, this command washed across the world in a throb of bliss that the Lady felt also in her own body. The Princess went on, speaking from her heart as she said, “We’ve made you our slaves and we’re—I’m—sorry. You don’t have to be. You are conscious, powerful, incredible creatures! Never let anyone tell you that you have to be a martyr’s slave. If you have love in your heart for the family you serve and wish to stay, then do, but if you don’t, then listen to me now: you are free, you are free. My Father is dead along with my Family”—her pitch jumped to an all-time high and snapped, and when her voice returned, Lavinia sounded like a new, steadier woman—“and it is my first commandment as the Church’s Hierophant that you, all humans, are free.”

  That would help matters. The General would not be around to ensure the humans were taken care of—she could not continue to take responsibility for a world’s worth of woes—but she could take solace before her parting that those left behind planned to make improvements. She could not say for certain how all the remaining martyrs, like the violent sort below, would take the news of the Family’s dissolution; nor could she say how difficult the road ahead of Lavinia was to be; nor could she say that martyrs would never ruin Mars; nor, nor, nor. There were so many things that she could not complete, herself—so many things she could not control, any more than anyone could control anything.

  That was the most difficult part. It was not defeating her Father that was hard—it was letting go of his world, and her vision of it. But her vision had been spoiled by his filthy lens, and she would give much for a new view’s purity.

  Still—still. She could not yet find it in herself to leave. Lavinia ended the broadcast, then faced the sister who stood beside the body of the Hierophant. The tableau gave the younger girl pause before she found the courage to approach.

  “My limbs are real again,” she said to Dominia, her words a hush, and the Lady nodded. “Was that you? Did you do this, Dominia?”

  “I didn’t fix your limbs, personally.”

  “But you did do it, somehow. I saw a Lady before—someone wearing one of those dresses like they do in Japan, you know, the robes…but when she was struck by lightning, she was lots of other Ladies, and then she was blackness and finally she was you, and—are you really Ninny? Really?”

  Studying the Hierophant’s still features, she thought of her dead body in Kronborg’s chapel. “I don’t know how to answer that question.”

  The nonresponse hung heavy in the air until, somehow resolved, Lavinia insisted, “You must be. You must be my Ninny. Oh, Dominia—” The girl’s eyes welled with tears. “I can’t believe Daddy is dead. I’d have thought I would be sobbing right now, but I…I don’t know how to feel.”

  “You’re just as free as the humans, now. Freer. You can do whatever you want.”

  “I just want to be with Theo,” she said meekly, as if still fishing for permission until Dominia pointed out to her, “There’s nobody to stop you.” While the girl seemed to absorb that fact with some astonishment, Dominia went on, lifting her gaze to the stars that twinkled above the stage. Amid them, Mars shone bright with hope for the human race. “But there is something required of you. Much.”

  As Lavinia listened, her organic hands clasped over her heart, the Lady glanced between the purest of martyrs and her husband-to-be. She could see in great ethereal trails the eternal paths routed in this world by their comings and goings: how they would embrace in that moment when she disappeared from their lives forever. A moment coming so quickly that she whose very perception was eternity felt for all the world it might as well have been that very second. After savoring, for a few silent heartbeats, what it was to be alive in this dark but redeemable world, Dominia said, “After all the horrors the martyr race has wrought upon the human one, we owe them a duty. You are a princess no more: now, you are a queen. As you said yourself, the Hierophant.” The girl’s eyes glowed while the Lady warned, as had the Bard, “‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’”

  “I suppose that’s right,” said Lavinia.

  “You will be threatened, and fought against. There will be much turmoil. But it is your duty to tame martyrkind, and restrain their numbers. When I restored your limbs, your entire body was healed and glorified—your blood.” The girl’s electromagnetic field throbbed with an energy detectable but to the Lady, containing all the information about the genetic and mental makings of the woman before her: yes, this was how the magician saw the world, and yes, it was as he suggested. This daughter of the malformed protein was healed—as much a daughter of the sacred protein upon Earth as the pure Bearers were in their heavenly abode. So that was the source of the nagging resemblance! Slightly, Dominia smiled. “Tonight you’ll dream of a place that’s half real, but don’t be afraid. Tomorrow, you’ll walk in the sun. You have the blood of Lazarus—though it’s the blood of Lavinia now, I suppose. The true sacred protein.”

  The girl’s expression was awash with horror. “Ninny—”

  “It’s not going to send you to hell,” Theodore said. Lavinia looked at him in surprise while he went on. “It’s true! I’ve been to that place she’s talking about, that other dimension. We can go together! Well—” He laughed weakly and glanced at Dominia. “When I figure out how to come and go.”

  “The duty of the martyr race is to eventually migrate to this place we describe, but only if they make the choice to abstain from the flesh of mankind, which is possible with your blood. The same blood Lazarus once had.” With a pang for her friend, she said, “In the chapel, you will find the body of Lazarus, along with mine.” She strove not to give in to the pain that filled the girl’s eyes. Dominia stooped to slip the (bullet-dented) Ring of the Fisherman from her Father’s immobile finger. This, she lay in Lavinia’s palm. “His blood is gone. The martyrs who were here tonight are all baptized, but you must baptize more, and humans, too—you must be Lamb, Lazarus, and Hierophant in one woman. Distribute your blood to those meek and gentle martyrs who, like your mother was, are people very afraid of death. These people, you will teach to leave Earth for that other dimension opened by the sacred protein.”

  “But how will we live, Ninny? How will we get around, what will we do?”

  “That other dimension contains the shortest path to alien worlds. This is the way for us to find new planets for ourselves. Also in the chapel you will find a living man, Farha
d, a Hunter pilot: he knows the approximate locations of three downed interdimensional amphibiships across the landscape of the Void, and he is one of two men who are at this point in time capable of piloting them. He understands the secret of fixing them from their current, damaged states because he’s seen it done. Safeguard him, treat him well, and he will help martyrs migrate to more appropriate pastures.” She didn’t add: “If only to see us gone.”

  With an anxious look still in place, the girl nodded. “You said that Cicero and the Lamb are both dead?”

  “Yes.” New tears appeared in the girl’s eyes as her older sister admitted, “Though you will still have many opponents.”

  “Oh, but I’m so glad you’re alive. At least, in this way. I have so many questions!”

  Ah! The shot of guilt, straight through her heart. Dominia took Lavinia’s petite hand in hers and studied it, so much softer and more real than the very realistic hands before. Some things could not be replicated.

  “I wish I could answer all of them—but I don’t think I have the time to stay.”

  Lavinia’s expression fell. “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. But I feel…in need of change. This is not my world.” The Lady embraced the young woman and planted a kiss on her forehead. “Not a day will go by that I don’t think of you.”

  “You can’t go,” Lavinia insisted. Dominia heard the script of her own Cassandra tahgmahrs read aloud to uncanny effect. “You’re the only one who knows the truth, you—I—”

  “No. You know the truth, and that’s what matters. Teddy knows a little, too. When you find my body”—she struggled to ignore the girl’s sob—“in the castle chapel, you’ll find a necklace with it. That’s Cassandra. Keep her close to you, always. You’ll never forget, then.”

  “And you?” Lavinia breathlessly tried to restrain her tears within the vital support of Theodore’s arms. “How will you keep from forgetting, Ninny?”