Grave Covenant

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Victor threw back his head and laughed. "All my life I've held myself to the standard you set, Father. Many is the time I've told others that I would surpass you if they would only let me do that, but they weren't holding me back. You were."

  Anger arced through Hanse's eyes. "I never held you back."

  "No, not you, but your image." Victor opened his hands in a plea to his father. "You were a good father, as good a father as I could ever have wanted, but you were also a daunting presence, and impressive, too, very impressive. I am nothing in comparison to you, but that's because mine is a different time and the challenges are different. Yet every time I get set to do something that will surpass what you have done, will eclipse what you have done, I hesitate because surpassing you will result in a diminution of your image. As I grow up, as I move away from you in time and experience, you become less and less a part of my life, and I never wanted to lose you."

  Victor turned and pointed at Takashi Kurita. "And you, you're just the same. You were an implacable foe, an unbeatable foe. You were my father's bane, yet before I could test myself against you, you died! Your death robbed me of the chance to prove I was as good as you or better. And now, knowing your son and grandson and granddaughter, in learning about your realm and your ways, I become stronger and better, but you're always there, a spectre lurking in the background. There's always a question as to whether or not you would approve of what I have done, what your child and grandchildren have done; and we can never have an answer for that."

  Takashi waved the words away contemptuously. "Your fear of losing something, your desire to know what we might have thought, this is what holds you back. The problem lies with you, not with us."

  "Oh, I agree because I know why I see you the way I do here." Victor pointed at his father. "You're the Hanse Davion of legend, the man who snapped up half the Capellan Confederation as a wedding present for your bride. And you, Takashi Kurita, you're the image on your gravestone. You're of the age you were when you took over for your assassinated father and initiated reforms to alleviate the suffering he had imposed on your people. The both of you are here as the legends you have become. And I'm on that path, too.

  "This is what I understand now, it isn't about me and who I am. I am who I am and I will remain that way until I die. Five or ten or fifteen or fifty years from now no one will really know the true me or you or, you. Who we were will be lost. What we did is what will be remembered and judged, revered, or corrected down through the years. Will the Inner Sphere be better or worse for my having lived? I would like to think it will be better, but there is more I must do to guarantee it."

  Victor balled his fists. "That's why I won't be going with either of you. I'm going back. I'm not going to die."

  Hanse chuckled. "That's fine for you to say, but you don't know the way back."

  Victor touched the pendant again. "I don't, but he does."

  Takashi laughed. "That thing won't help you."

  "Sure it will." Victor rubbed it and felt the stone warm. The jade monkey grew in size, then loosened its grip on the leather thong around Victor's neck. "You see, if this is all in my imagination, then I can imagine Sun Hou-Tzu to be my guide out of here. And if this is the realm of the supernatural and really the gateway to death, well, he tricked Yen-lo-wang and freed his people from the King of the Dead, so I win on those grounds, too."

  Takashi begrudgingly nodded toward Hanse. "He is a clever boy."

  "He'll need to be."

  Victor smiled and took the jade monkey's hand. "I cannot and will not worry about what you might have thought, or what others think about what I do. I must remain true to myself and true to what I know is right. To do anything less would be to fail myself, and that is something I absolutely refuse to do."

  * * *

  Kai Allard-Liao looked up from his place at Victor's beside. His neck felt stiff from having fallen asleep in the chair, but he'd refused more comfortable accommodations when they were offered. He didn't want to leave Victor.

  From the other side of the bed Omi looked over at him and smiled. "You heard him?"

  Kai nodded and stood. Looking down, he saw Victor's eyelids flicker, then open. "Easy, Victor, you've had quite a time."

  Omi took hold of Victor's right hand and gave it a squeeze. Tears rolled down her face, and Kai felt a rump rising in his own throat.

  Victor coughed lightly and winced, then forced a smile onto his face. His chest worked up and down two or three times, with his flesh tugging at the tape securing his bandage, then the Prince tried to speak past his oxygen mask.

  "What?" Kai shook his head and leaned closer.

  "Love. Hurts."

  Kai began to laugh. "Don't do that, Victor. You've been at death's door."

  "Beyond." Victor slowly licked cracked lips. "Back."

  "Damn right you're back." Kai looked over at Omi. "He's going to be fine."

  "Hai," she whispered softly. Reaching out with her left hand, she caressed the side of Victor's face. "The doctors have said that it won't be long before you are up and around."

  "Good." Victor's voice gained slightly in volume. "Beat death." His eyes sharpened. "Smoke Jaguars ... are next."

  29

  Palace of Serene Sanctuary, Imperial City

  Luthien

  Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine

  7 January 3059

  Dear God, grant me the strength to get through this. Victor Davion closed his eyes, then opened them and consciously corrected the swaying of his body. Forty-eight hours after his battle, he found himself again in the garden, wearing the same clothes he'd worn then, bearing the same sword. It didn't feel like deja vu to him, primarily because the fluids and painkillers they'd packed into him gave him a certain sense of detachment, but instead he felt like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime.

  Kai's voice echoed in his right ear, courtesy of a small ear piece and microphone. "Victor, are you with us?"

  The Prince opened his jaw slightly to allow him to subvocalize his reply. The microphone would pick up the sound of his voice through his own ears and the Eustachian tube, which was just as well as far as Victor was concerned because he really didn't think he could muster enough of a breath to speak above a whisper anyway. "I'm here, Kai."

  "Are you all right? Are you cold?"

  Victor couldn't answer the questions immediately. His bloodstained kimono had been draped over him so that his right arm and the right side of his chest were bared. The smallest of bandages covered his wounds, and both had been painted white so any blood would not show. The kimono hid his left elbow, which had swollen up. Magres scans had indicated a hairline fracture of his ulna. Somewhere back in the palace was the sling he was supposed to wear, but it had no part in the drama that would unfold in the garden.

  "I'm doing okay, Kai. How much longer?"

  "Sixty seconds and counting."

  "And we're still on an 'outside the Combine blackout'?"

  "The Precentor Martial is standing right here. Nothing will go out through ComStar unless you give it a green light." Kai's voice lightened slightly. "He says that by the time Word of Blake manages any covert distribution, we'll have enough holovids of you in action to label anything they come up with as a complete fraud."

  "Good." Victor coughed slightly and felt a tiny jolt of pain shoot through his body. One of his major concerns was word of his wounding getting out to the Federated Commonwealth. The Draconis March would go insane and might even begin military operations against the Combine to avenge him. A few short-sighted hotheads could destroy the best chance we have to destroy the Clans.

  He also feared what Katherine would do with the news. Any weakness on his part would provide her with an opportunity to cause trouble. He was not certain how she might capitalize on his misfortune, but it would be just one more problem for him to deal with. One more distraction to divert me from my true goal. He could not allow that, so a holovid blackout beyond the Combine's borders was the only rea
l solution to the situation. As much as he loved a free and open press, there were times when the autocratic nature of the Combine had its uses.

  Victor swallowed hard as Omi walked into the garden. To Victor's left the various lights from the holocams came on to capture her entrance. The bright lights transformed her white silk kimono from a garment into a glaring aura. They made her beauty transcendent, and Victor found himself uncomfortably reminded of the place where he had spoken with his father and her grandfather. It's as if she hovers in the doorway between this world and the hereafter.

  Omi walked past him without acknowledging his presence. Her steps failed to coax sound from the crushed stone walkway, and her kimono barely whispered as she knelt on the tatami mat at Victor's feet. On the mat in front of her sat a low lacquered table—little more than a tray really—with a sake bottle, a cup, a piece of white rice paper, and a razor-sharp tanto. The knife's hilt had been wrapped with white cord, and the pommel-cap and cross-guard were cast platinum.

  With her left hand Omi reached out and took up the sake bottle. She filled her cup with two pours, then set the bottle back down. Victor saw a single droplet of sake roll down the bottle's side like a tear and felt his guts knot up. He wanted to stop her, he wanted to kick the tray and the knife away, but he knew that was not the part he was to play.

  Omi raised the cup to her lips and drank. In two gulps she drained it, then set it back down. She rested her hands on her thighs, then looked up at the holocameras. "Komban-wa. I am Kurita Omi." She paused for a moment, drew in a deep breath, then continued. "I am speaking to you from the Palace of Serene Sanctuary. It was here, seven years ago, that I waited as my brother and my father and my grandfather battled the Smoke Jaguars, thwarting the Clan attempt to take Luthien from us."

  Kai's simultaneous translation of Omi's words provided Victor with content, but the calm urgency in her voice imparted to him the full depth of meaning. Emphasizing where she'd been when the Clans attacked was clearly a move to establish a rapport with her audience and remind them that she shared that experience with them. The tone of her voice told them that she, too, had been afraid and uncertain, yet she had conquered her fears and abided, with them, by whatever outcome fate had in store for the warriors defending the world.

  "It was here, two nights ago, as I shared the most solemn of occasions with my friend, Prince Victor Davion, that three men accomplished what the Clans could not. They stole through the silent streets of Luthien and came over the wall into my sanctuary. They came into this very garden." Omi pointed toward the holocameras, yet raised her hand so the audience would not think she was pointing at them. "They came here to murder me."

  Omi's voice dropped to a hushed whisper. "These men claimed that I had violated the precepts of Purity and Harmony. They said I was a Davion whore. They had come to kill me and they would have, for here, on that night, I was defenseless. I would have died had not Victor been here.

  Despite being grievously wounded in the fight, he slew the assassins, using the katana my father presented to him on his arrival here on Luthien."

  Victor kept his face impassive as the translation of Omi's lie reached him. He knew he had killed only two of the three assassins. Omi herself had taken up the first assassin's katana and beheaded the third man as he bent over his fallen comrade. Though the samurai tradition was full of stories about women warriors, and Omi was as skilled as any of them, her image in the Combine as Keeper of the House Honor was more genteel and refined. No one would have doubted her ability to kill one of her assailants, but that reality did not fit in with fiction being presented to her nation. For her sake and mine, this lie must become the truth.

  "As Victor was my protector that night, now he stands as my kaishaku. With the sword he used to save me from the assassins, he will now save me from dishonor." She reached down and grasped the piece of rice paper. "He will see to it that the only pain I know will be of the heart and not the body."

  Omi stared directly into the holocams. "The assassins claimed I had violated the precepts of Purity and Harmony; and this is the perception I must assume that you, also, hold in your minds. I cannot bear the dishonor of that judgment because it is not true. It hurts me more than you could know to have you believe that I think so little of you, of our nation, and our traditions, to violate them for personal reasons. My life has been lived for the Combine, and would have continued to be lived for it. I am nothing if I am not your servant.

  "I will not deny that I love Victor Davion. He has been a friend to me for years. He risked the ire of his nation to rescue, at my request, my brother Hohiro from the Clans at Teniente. At all times Victor has ever been a man honorable. What we share in our hearts and minds, we have not allowed ourselves to share with our bodies. Our love has not violated Purity, it defines Purity."

  She raised her chin to stretch her throat and let the audience see the pale flesh she would slash open with the tanto. "Neither has our love been disharmonious. I have obeyed my father's directives concerning us absolutely and completely. The price my father demanded to let me ask Victor to rescue my brother was that I cease all correspondence and contact with Victor. This I did, though with each day of the prohibition I felt another piece of my spirit die. I was willing to endure this so that the Combine would have my brother back, so the Combine would have an heir to the Dragon. This was my place and my plight and I complied.

  "It was my grandfather, Takashi-sama, who lifted this prohibition. By his action he condoned and encouraged what I felt for Victor. There is no one who can even entertain the idea that my grandfather would permit his granddaughter to dishonor herself or his nation. He knew me. He knew what I would do. He knew he could trust me never to commit any act that would bring shame upon my house. My father saw the wisdom of his father's judgment and did not reinstate the prohibition after he inherited the Dragon's Throne."

  Reaching her right hand down, Omi grasped the blade of the tanto with the rice paper. Three centimeters of the blade remained bare. Slowly, as she spoke, she raised the sharpened steel to her throat.

  "The shame I feel, the dishonor with which I cannot live, is that I somehow led you to believe I would put myself before the nation. That you can think this directly points out a flaw in my character. I cannot correct it, clearly, for why else would assassins have been sent to slay me if I could? While I have tried to always be strong and represent your hopes, dreams, desires, and honor, I failed. For this failure there is only one way to atone."

  Victor caught the faintest of tremors in Omi's hand as the blade reached her throat. As she held it poised, he slid his katana from its scabbard. He closed his left hand around the hilt and used his right arm to raise the blade over his head. His job was to strike fast, beheading her with one stroke before the pain of her slashed throat could register on her face.

  Millimeter by millimeter the tanto's point approached her flesh. Victor waited, his left arm leaden, the pain in his chest beginning to spread like cancer. The tremble in her hand as the steel pressed against her skin, indenting it slightly, mirrored itself in the palsy causing his blade to quiver.

  In an instant he saw her hand stop shaking, and he knew she was resolved to go through with her seppuku. While part of him screamed that this was madness, he, too, stilled his blade and prepared to do his duty. My duty is to show her compassion. Despite his injuries and weakness, he knew he would strike clean, fast, and strong. It would tear his heart out, but he would not fail her. "He!"

  Theodore's shout from the palace doorway brought Victor's head around. Though the Coordinator's intervention had been expected, had been scripted in, Victor had thought it would come sooner. Only as Theodore strode through the garden, his firm step crunching along the walkway with a martial cadence, did Victor realize that both he and Omi had become caught up in the drama. They had been ready to play their parts to the fullest. We went from acting out our roles to actually living them. Theodore could have interrupted us at any point, but he waited until even we cou
ld not doubt our sincerity and resolution.

  Theodore raised his left hand and lowered Victor's sword. He turned and slipped the tanto from Omi's hand, leaving her clutching the pure, white rice paper. The Coordinator examined the small knife's blade, then threw it down with disgust. The tanto stuck into the lacquered table. Its impact toppled the sake bottle and sent the cup spinning to the ground.

  "I am the Dragon and I forbid you to commit seppuku for twenty-four hours." He waved Omi to silence with his right hand. "The shame you say you bear is not yours. That shame, that willingness to think the worst of you and of Victor-sama, is a shame that must be borne only by small-minded individuals who have married themselves to a past that cannot be recaptured."

  Theodore opened his arms. "Proof of their foolishness comes with the day they chose to attack you. Who among us could have forgotten the presence of the Clans on that day? It is the day when Luthien ran with the blood of loyal sons and daughters of the Combine. It is the day that mercenaries, sent by Hanse Davion, also shed their blood to help us preserve Luthien. It is the day that marks the crest of the Clan invasion. It is the day we proved the Clans can be defeated decisively; but to mistake that for the Clans' total defeat is to live in a world of fantasy.

  "Those people would claim that I and my father and sons and daughter live in such a fantasy world, for we are placing our trust in the Davions. Let us examine this idea. Hanse Davion and I agreed that no Davion troops would enter the Combine while the Clans were a threat. Hanse Davion abided by this agreement and sent mercenaries—the only troops at his disposal that could reach Luthien without violating our agreement—to fight with us against the Clans. After that, FedCom troops did enter the Combine, but at the request of my daughter, with my permission, to save her brother from the Clans. We had no troops to devote to that effort, but, beset as his own realm was, Hanse Davion pledged his son, put his son at risk, to save my son.