The Hierophant's Daughter

by M F Sullivan

  “Right. I’ll ask how you plan to keep me alive through that when we get there.”

  “Yeah, and focus instead on how you’re going to keep me alive right now.” René lifted his head toward other tanques, which, under the control of their proper owners and equipped with gunners, fired down the street of the shopping district. The guns did more to tear up the pavement than penetrate the armor of a machine: most models of tanques were designed to survive this scenario under the reasoning that any misappropriated vehicles were better waylaid than destroyed. After all, drivers had to emerge at some point. So did passengers, which was a worrying detail when she considered René. Studying the chaos of the crowd nearby, and how racks of courtesy bicycles offered by the city were emptied in droves, the General careened in that direction. “Grab a bike and get lost in the crowd as fast as you can.”

  “Ride away,” he cried, “with my bags? But we’re not even to the station yet!”

  “It’s five blocks! You can get there from bike paths faster than I can from this mess of a street. Ride away like these people are doing, like you’re terrified of me, and do whatever you have to do to get in on the tail of the passenger line.”

  “What if they’re already closed?”

  “It would be inhumane of them to turn passengers away from safety with someone like me on the loose. Tell them that.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I’ll drive into the station, as near to the train as possible.”

  “And what happens when I get hit with a bullet? Or when I’m seen and recognized?”

  “Then you keep running, or I leave you behind and find Lazarus without you.”

  “You couldn’t manage that on your own!”

  “If my only option is to try, then that’s what I’ll do. I’ll draw the gunfire away from you as much as I can, but ultimately”—she shifted the vehicle into its highest gear and allowed it to grind over the sea of vacated cars lining a street that had become decorated by faces pressed against every pane of glass in the flanking buildings—“it’s up to you to keep yourself from getting killed.”

  Scoffing, René pulled his bag into the front seat and threw open his door as Dominia broke to a screeching halt before the packed crowd still fighting for bikes. “You don’t have many friends, do you.”

  “I don’t think I have even one,” she admitted, but it was with none of the sorrow or pain that had come with the notion when first it arrived in her life. Ichigawa decided to feel that pain for her and shook his head while clambering out. Above the din, he shouted, “That’s very sad! If you make it out of this and start treating me decently, I’ll be your friend.”

  “I’ll have to think about it.”

  The door slammed shut; he bolted into the crowd. Sure enough, one or two people winced out of his way for having noticed his association. This gave an advantage, and he was soon on a bike. Meanwhile, in the distant station, passengers crammed their way into the doors. According to history books, Kyoto’s Light Rail had been a global wonder when it was opened in 1564. Martyrs across Europa requested special travel visas so they could risk their lives to experience a piece of technology the Hierophant had deemed “a vain and useless show of technical capabilities, though impressive,” which was the most cumbersome way to pronounce, “those grapes are sour,” Dominia had ever heard.

  His sourness arose from the fact that the Light Rail was the finest work of technological art mankind had ever devised, and the world’s greatest art collector could never add it to his many claimed museums. Linking Japan, China, India, and the Middle States, the Light Rail’s establishment was a process that outlived its initial developers but which would have made them proud. Using the trails upon which far earlier humans had traded silk, tea, and philosophy, tireless engineers had made it possible to get from Kyoto to Istanbul in fourteen hours, with stops in between and quite a few subsidiary lines going far south as Cairo. Istanbul, being as it was one of the most contested cities in the globe and given to a heavy martyr presence, was not a popular destination despite being the end of the line for the primary Light Rail, nor was it Dominia’s destination.

  Today, they were headed to the center of the Middle States. In its heart awaited the primary cells of the cabal known as the Hunters: René and Tenchi’s masters, and the organization behind not only the evacuation of refugees from the UF, but the funding and outfitting of human soldiers in South America, the Middle States, and South Africa. The Hunters had certain standards designed to prevent a martyr from reaching them, and they were not often willing to make exceptions, even for the price of information. Dominia would have no help without René. She had to gamble he’d get on that train.

  Kyoto Station, the grandest of the stations and a neighborhood unto itself, was designed for ultra-wealthy humans to make a comfortable life among high-rise town houses. Said town houses were situated overtop a sprawling mall that opened, after many a brick road lain for its quaint European feel, to the station, proper. The Light Rail Station was always closed without a ticket, and in the event of an emergency like this, it was on lockdown. As she and Basil barreled around a corner where the city of technology ended in favor of the city of wealth, Dominia discovered a barred security gate had been pulled across the street to render the glittering wall impassible. Lucky for her, the T1-63 Reticulated was designed for just this situation.

  While, elsewhere, René bullied his way onto the train, Dominia pounded the electric. The vehicle slammed into the gate in one, two, three, belligerent attempts to ram it down; after the great machine’s onboard computer realized it wasn’t going anywhere, it adjusted itself like an enraged predator fixing its posture to fight its way against, through, and over the fence that held it. The vehicle lifted itself from its wheels and, with audible metallic strain, jumped, its front tires used like limbs to drag its bulk over the fence in a series of sharp undulations. In the untrained, this provoked a nasty combo sea- and carsickness. Dominia had long since gotten used to the experience of being shaken around in a tanque and neither blinked nor winced as it landed within the station and resumed its forward motion, then brought itself back to speed to tear through the palatial ghost town. Its citizens had managed to move their expensive cars off the road and their expensive selves into their businesses, apartments, and train cars long before Dominia’s arrival. This was good: this meant that it was mere seconds and a few blocks until she skidded to a halt before the ticket booth.

  The other side of the actual station was, to Dominia’s relief, sheer madness, the economy section of the train a lower priority and thus still being filled: here a mother with screaming children, there a few harried businessmen shouting and trying to squeeze on, here the peaked-cap conductors demanding order along with tickets. Their eyes fell on her vehicle, and the shouts began in earnest, all pretense of tickets-taking dropped. Dominia checked her gun, her bullets, then programmed the vehicle to auto-defend the area against assailants, which the other tanques had made of themselves in a constant hail of gunfire. Unsure if René had made it, Dominia hoped that he did, told the dog, “Sorry,” and scrambled from the vehicle while it wheeled itself around to face its pursuers. A twinge of guilt crossed her mind as she watched it go, and yet—no dog sat in the window, now. Basil should have stood, paws against the glass, pathetic. Perhaps it was a mercy she could not see: she assumed the beast cowered beneath a seat in much the way the passengers, visible in the golden train’s temporarily translucent windows, ducked their heads from Dominia’s view. As she hopped a turnstile, the conductors cried in panic, and the one within shut the car before his comrades joined him. No doubt they were relieved when she passed them without a second glance, not stupid enough to force her way onto the train through a passenger car. Better to make for the back of the train, where passenger cars disappeared and were replaced with shipping cars. After all, along that ancient path, the Light Rail was as much a mode of commerce as of transportation.

  Four, five, six, long cars down, with gunf
ire rattling behind her, the train began moving and was already entering the tunnel which would propel it faster. Gritting her teeth, the General allowed two cars to roll past before she came to one that, windowless, seemed good a choice as any—and with the massive train picking up speed, no wheels to hamper it and reduced air resistance thanks to its bullet design, the choice slipped further from her hands every nanosecond. Desperate to get out of the sun that burned her forehead, Dominia caught the handle of the great door along the side of a shipping car and forced herself to hang on. She had seconds until the train hit the tunnel: as ever, it was good she was not human, but better that, by some miracle, some oversight (or, she would wonder later, some conspiracy), that great door from which she flapped in the breeze was unlocked. Her foot, braced against the body of the car, pushed the massive thing open with a terrible grind. A second before the shipping cars were in the tunnel, she yanked her leg inside, down upon the floor with her, then forced the groaning door shut.

  Miraculous. But she’d expected to be alone. A female porter, her hand upon the door that led to the enclosed gangway from the shipping to the passenger cars, emitted a cry of surprise. The General silenced it with a firm hand upon her mouth. With a warning look, she put away her gun. Then, it was a matter of trying to retrieve Japanese lessons from three hundred years ago.

  “Watashi wa Dominia—uh, watashi wa tom—no, uh…anata no tomodachi. Okay? Uh… Iie himei, okay?”

  The porter, having overcome her surprise, assessed Dominia through a tight pair of dark, cold eyes. The General had to wonder if either were a DIOX-I, now that she was equipped with one of her own. She took for granted the assumption that most people opted to keep their organic eyes. The daring and Internet addicted would immediately see the benefit of replacing their organic models with new ones. She’d begun to, herself. The DIOX-I explained that this girl’s name was Romanized as “Miki Soto,” which she repeated out loud.

  “Yeah,” said Miki, in a tone so flat that Dominia flushed, “that’s me. What of it?”

  “You could have told me you spoke English while I fumbled around.”

  “Well, I’m telling you now. And?”

  “And—and I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Congratulations.”

  The girl moved quick—not as quick as a martyr, but quick all the same, and Dominia reached for her gun until the second plump lips contacted hers. Having foregone any flirting since Cassandra, let alone a kiss, Dominia’s brain flicked at rapid-fire pace through available options before accepting the touch, the breath, that soft, wet tongue. Sweet distraction! A kiss every bit as lewd as Cassandra’s were sweet and chaste. She was so startled that she didn’t feel the electrical baton poised against her ribs: not until the kiss ended and Miki giggled. “But I’m still going to hurt you.”

  How many times was Dominia going to lose consciousness on the way to Afghanistan? She’d have asked herself that if unconsciousness hadn’t come over her like a pop in the back of her skull: a hiccup that left her, on awakening, without Cassandra’s diamond.

  VII

  The Light Rail

  Cassandra’s absence was not her first discovery. That was her (officially) broken watch, whose blank face reflected her own bleary one. Then came the porter’s uniform, folded beside her unconscious body with such tight creases it looked as if it had been ironed: it smelled like the lavender of the woman who had pinned her against the cool metal of the train car to multiply the current’s kick. That, plus the ache in her stiff muscles, meant the woman was no hallucination. Dominia had escaped Japan, and now had a whole new level of problems. Who was she? Miki Soto. A card sat atop the uniform, its front embossed with a black-petaled, red-outlined lotus. Familiar symbol, but one she couldn’t place in her post-electric haze. She sat up to rub her head and neck with a pained sigh that turned into suffocation as her hand found the necklace gone from her throat.

  Her palms were wet with sweat beneath her gloves. She stripped them off to feel around on her chest, then cried out to confirm Cassandra gone. Up the General sprang, then back down on hands and knees in search of her beloved’s remains. No trace.

  Dominia knew where she was: with that same woman who had left the uniform. A disguise for the train, in exchange for her wife’s body. Cassandra! Oh, poor Cassandra, forever dying in Dominia’s mind, much as she forever stood in her flowing black dress, whose lace she smoothed while they waited outside the throne room of the Hierophant. Telling her, “You look beautiful, don’t worry; you’re so smart and funny, everyone will love you.”

  She had been emboldened by that, all the way into the absurdly long and courtier-filled throne room of Kronborg. The Hierophant, from his great gilded throne modeled after the seats of ancient, greedy Popes, sat forward. “So this is Cassandra!”

  “Yes,” Dominia had said, “this is Cassandra.”

  He descended the stairs two at a time to circle like a shark. Dominia, on edge, made panicked eye contact with the Lamb, who stood silent by the empty seat. In truth, she’d been every bit as frightened as she had urged Cassandra not to be.

  “You do move fast,” he said. Though Dominia had the urge to reply, the comment was for Cassandra, who blushed.

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “‘Sir.’” He chuckled warmly and shared a glance with the courtiers as for a precocious child. “Please, dear: ‘Your Grace’ will do.” Before Cassandra became embarrassed, he carried on. “I mean to say that you, my girl, have courted our fair General for all of…” At his question, Dominia surrendered the (yes, humiliating) number, “Five weeks.” This elicited a few tuts from the audience. The Hierophant made no comment; he lifted his eyebrows at Cassandra.

  “A menstrual cycle’s worth of romance—plus a few nights—and you would shed your human life to spend eternity with this woman? You know how many she has killed.”

  Embarrassed (or, in retrospect, threatened) to have it put that way, the human said with an evasive glance at Dominia’s shoes, “I love her, Your Grace.”

  “Oh, and I am quite sure she loves you. Every now and then I find someone I love quite a lot, myself; however, do you see any of them with me now?”

  Glancing around a room empty but for sycophants, Cassandra said, “You have the Lamb and Cicero, sir. Your Grace.” Dominia sensed that slip was intentional, and strained her ribs trying not to smile. The Hierophant never bothered preventing his.

  “Yes. Two thousand years. We are Family, that is why. Do you see these paintings, my dear? Here, here.” After taking her arm with a look for Dominia’s permission (or to gauge her reaction), the Holy Father guided Cassandra toward a crowd of martyrs who hustled out of the way in an awkward clamor of strange gauzy dresses and the plunging-neckline, techno-chic suits that would, to the General’s relief, go out of fashion around the time Lavinia awoke. On their redistribution, they revealed a painting against the obscured wall: “The Martyring of Regulus,” depicting the third-generation Family child in question, naked and screaming beside the red waistcoat and merry disposition of the fictional executioner about to toss him into the maw of a great, spiked centrifuge.

  “If I wish to avoid tragedy, perhaps I should stop naming my children after tragic figures. But I suppose I cannot help that I see their substance when I martyr them; the Lamb’s eternal eye always confirms it. Dear Regulus, he was not as noble a general as his namesake. Instead, he began to think himself a holy man. Of course, he was part of the Holy Family, responsible for blessings, and so forth, but he thought himself holy as me. Holy as the Lamb. And so, he needed putting down, and received a fate appropriate in light of his name. Of course”—he winked—“we did better than a barrel. Here’s a fun fact for you: in reality, it was Cicero who did the tossing. The painting was commissioned many years after the event, when we acquired Kronborg in…oh, 1472, I recall…”

  As he began to ramble about the castle’s history for the forty thousandth time in Dominia’s life, the General had relaxed. Hundreds of years and h
undreds of girlfriends, short- and long-term, and she had never dared bring anybody home. She had never wanted his opinion about her love life; but for Cassandra, even had she been a martyr from the start, it seemed somehow important that the Holy Father agree Dominia’s choice was splendid. This moment, therefore, broke over two hundred years of vague anxiety. He was almost like a real father giving approval to his daughter’s girlfriend and taking her on a tour of the house. Oh, sure, there was always a degree of threat implicit in speaking with him. That was the way he was. He didn’t do anything violent without telegraphing it in ways increasingly unsubtle until it was too late to turn back; the Regulus thing was boilerplate intimidation for anybody interested in becoming a martyr as an adult. Had his intention been refusal, Dominia would have sensed it right off. There would be one last, standard question, which came as he explained the fire in 416 BL, from which nothing but the chapel was saved. After lulling her into a state of intense boredom, he asked Cassandra, “Have you ever been a Lazarene, my girl?”

  Cassandra, who had assessed the painting—which featured a crowd of figures and the Hierophant watching over the proceedings, with him in that silly golden miter he dusted off for holy nights and religious (never political) decrees—lifted her eyes and laughed in that harsh way that the General loved. “Hell no, I’ve never wanted part of that horseshit. Sir. Your Grace.”

  In a miraculous turn of events, this proved a rare moment when the courtiers had laughed before the Holy Father. While they tittered, he patted the girl’s hand. “No wonder she loves our dear General—they have so much in common. Your friends,” he pressed beneath the room’s recovery. “Family members?”

  “No,” she said, firmly.

  “Good. Because, when you are transformed, it will become apparent if you are a Lazarene.”

  “I’m not.” Irritation brewed beneath her words. “What happens if a Lazarene is martyred?”