Irenicon

by Aidan Harte

  “Keep them back or I promise you, when I leave Rasenna, the only thing I will leave standing is my bridge.”

  Sofia led the Bardini though the northern streets, gathering men from other towers as they marched. Reaching the river, she saw the commotion in Piazza Luna and broke into a run, crying, “Follow me!”

  The Doctor was dashing toward her, waving her back frantically. Realizing the only steps she could hear on the bridge were her own, Sofia turned. The borgata had stalled on the northside.

  “Bardini, hold!” the Doctor shouted.

  “Traitors!” Sofia screamed, “I am Contessa Scaligeri; follow me!”

  The Doctor reached Sofia. “They’re traitors if they follow you—can’t you see? Our enemies are being killed for us!”

  Giovanni came to with the general’s horse nuzzling him. He stood unsteadily and tried to take in the mayhem: Woolsmen slain, the piazza strewn with golden flags, blood running freely between the stones. He was covered in blood—somebody else’s once more . . . once more back in the pit . . .

  Was this what the Doctor had wanted all along, to clear the field of his rivals? Including the Contessa? Nothing else made sense anymore. He had been positive that he was meant to sacrifice himself for Rasenna, but somehow war had come on regardless. That didn’t matter now. To save Sofia would be enough—he could do that even if the world was intent on destroying itself.

  Luparelli was overseeing the palazzo siege, but he recognized his horse as it went by—and its rider. “A thousand soldi to whoever hits the traitor!” he bellowed.

  “Count Scaligeri ordered me to keep Rasenna safe for you,” the Doctor repeated.

  “Your only loyalty is to yourself,” Sofia said, and threw her banner down.

  “Don’t make me hurt you, Sofia.”

  “You think you’re capable?” Before the Doctor could lift his flag, Sofia attacked: a series of chest kicks doubling him over, then a knee to the chin. He used his flag to stop his fall, pushed himself up with a grunt, and charged at her, his flag elegantly masking a flurry of sudden jabs.

  Sofia sidestepped, clawing his face as he went by. She looked back at the northsiders. “Come on, you cowards!”

  “Stay!” the Doctor shouted, then touched the bloody cuts on his face. “Impressive. I didn’t teach you that.”

  “That’s nothing. Watch this!”

  The Bardini students couldn’t advance and they wouldn’t retreat, so they did what Rasenna had taught them: they waited. The fight would decide.

  The Doctor defended himself against another onslaught of Water Style, knowing he couldn’t do more and hoping it might be enough: he had to stall only long enough for the Concordians to do their work.

  Sofia jabbed his shoulder. It didn’t hurt, but his arm went dead and she snatched his banner away.

  He jumped back and risked a glance south. “Look! Palazzo Morello’s burning—we’ve won!”

  “You never understood what my grandfather meant,” Sofia said.

  Secondo arrived from the workshop and joined the borgata. “What’s going on?”

  “See for yourself,” said Mule coldly.

  “Doc, behind you!” Secondo shouted.

  “Sofia!”

  Sofia and the Doctor turned together to see Giovanni thundering toward them on horseback.

  “Giovanni, look out!” she screamed as a black swarm of arrows rained down in his wake.

  When one sank into his shoulder, he jerked left, and obediently the horse crashed through the balustrade and they tumbled together toward the river.

  “No!” Sofia screamed.

  The Doctor recognized the moment to strike. He dropped her with a neat punch to the chin. He picked her up and looked defiantly at his bandieratori. A hostile army stared back.

  “It was for her own protection,” he said calmly.

  By the time Palazzo Morello’s doors had been blown in, most of the students had abandoned their flags. The rain of debris that had knocked Gaetano unconscious now concealed him as the Concordians rushed in. Those servants too loyal or too stupid to flee were swiftly struck down on the stairs. Donna Morello, standing beside her husband, had been prepared to kill herself in classic style, but when the soldiers broke in, she entirely forgot her purpose and rushed at them, screaming a war cry.

  Quintus Morello was dragged from his comfortable deathbed to witness his wife being hurled from the balcony.

  The Reverend Mother arrived at the river and found her way blocked by a tall, surly bandieratoro.

  “We have orders, Sister.”

  “As do I, amore.” She tapped his chest lightly, and Secondo landed several braccia away, unconscious once more.

  Having dealt with the uprising’s point of origin, Luparelli ordered the Palazzo della Signoria to be burned as well and then made his way onto the bridge, gunners in tow.

  The Doctor looked at the swirling water enviously. The engineer had won himself a good death: it was best it had happened here, and quickly. In Concord they’d have made him suffer.

  Luparelli was enraged to be robbed of his revenge. “See that smoke, Bardini? When you fail to keep peace, Concord forces peace on you. Your parliament burns!”

  He bowed. “Yes, General.”

  “Don’t look so pleased. Rebellion must be punished. If the Signoria is guilty, the Families that ruled it are guilty too, and you are the Head of the Bardini.”

  As the ragged form of Quintus Morello was dragged toward them, the Doctor looked around to see the soldiers forming a line in front of his borgata. He suppressed the instinct to fight his way out—if the general was denied justice, vengeance, call it what you will, he would level Rasenna and go on his way. Dying might not have been part of the plan, but a warrior was always ready. What matter if Morello was executed too? The Contessa’s reign would be that much more secure.

  “I’ll come quietly,” he said. He handed Sofia to a soldier and submitted to be bound. He called out, “What I do now I do willingly, for the Contessa. Mule, take her to the tower. It’s hers now.”

  “Keep your place,” Luparelli said. “The Contessa is coming with us.”

  “General, I saved your life today!”

  “And your instruction has saved it many more times. I’d return the favor gladly, but you give me no option. Your own circuitous policy has led you here.”

  “I don’t care what you do to me, but spare her!”

  “That will be the Apprentices’ decision. I have already said: if you fail to keep peace, we will force it on you.”

  As Morello, barely conscious, was led to the section of shattered balustrade, the general saw his gunners backing away from the old woman implacably advancing toward them.

  “Excuse me, General?”

  “This isn’t the time for prayers, Sister.”

  “You’re quite right. I am here to hang.”

  The Doctor looked around. “Sister?”

  “The Doctor is not the eldest Bardini,” she announced. “I am.”

  “Is this true?” Luparelli said quickly, relieved to have an excuse not to execute his old master. “Very well, set him free. I repay my debts, Doctor.”

  “He’s taking Sofia!” the Doctor said as the Reverend Mother removed his noose herself.

  “You’ve earned a traitor’s death, little brother,” she said quietly, “but you must live a little longer.”

  She put the noose around her own neck, tightened it. “Until Sofia returns, Rasenna needs you. I’ve seen it.”

  Luparelli mounted up. “My God, what a sorry mess. Let’s get on with it. Take the prisoner.”

  Sofia regained consciousness as she was being slung onto a horse.

  The Doctor had to be restrained as he cried out, “You can’t do this!”

  Sofia screamed at him, “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Damn you!”

  “Sofia, I never meant for this to happen—everything I did, I did for you, everything! Bardini, flags up!”

  The northsiders stayed fro
zen. The fight had decided for them.

  As Luparelli rode over to the Doctor and knocked him out with a heavy boot to the jaw, the Reverend Mother, standing beside Quintus Morello, said softly, “Don’t be afraid, child.”

  Behind them, two solders awaited the order.

  “Sister!”

  “You only need faith,” the nun said, taking Morello’s hand.

  “No!” Sofia screamed.

  The Concordians mounted up.

  “Thus perish the enemies of Concord.” The general stopped to spit into the river. “Waste of a damn good horse.”

  Sofia watched the black flags fade as she was led through the carnage of Piazza Luna, and the Lion watched her go as impassively as it had watched the last disaster fall on Rasenna.

  PART II:

  CONCEPTION

  Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

  Saul 58:15

  CHAPTER 40

  As the Guild grew, so did the Curia’s concern at its influence. Seeing a rival church in the Guild, and in Natural Philosophy a rival faith, the Cardinals reviewed the Discourse for evidence of Heresy, composing their treacherous arguments even as the Guild’s foremost minds developed the Wave at their behest. The Wave’s remarkable success confirmed that the time had come to act. In the cold autumn of Forty-Six, Bernoulli was called before the Holy Inquisition and charged with Deifying Reason. They accused him with his own words: his impious presumption that nothing was unknowable.21

  The fashionable consensus that the Curia was the tool of an aristocracy who saw the Guild as a rival elite is not only cynical but simplistic. This philosophical clash was genuine. Before Bernoulli, most of what the Curia was pleased to call Natural Philosophy was superstition buttressed with feeble mathematics. Though Bernoulli cast much aside, there was much that he kept. For example, he found Johannes of Palermo’s Laws of Attraction correct up to a point. Difficult as it is to see from our luminous present, it was this idea of conditional truth that was truly iconoclastic, truly insidious.

  When Bernoulli’s devoted Apprentices urged him to flee, he refused, believing it was his duty as a Natural Philosopher as much as a Citizen to speak what he knew to be true. Clergy and Nobility packed the Senate, eager to see this upstart Engineer brought low. Bernoulli was harangued by a parade of Cardinals who charged that Philosophical Relativism led inexorably to Blasphemy. If Truth is not a constant, what then is Good? What is Evil? Variables too?22 Finally Bernoulli was asked to affirm Divine Authority and replied:

  The Lord is omnipotent and infinite and the Destiny He has writ is immutable. Up to a point.

  It was a trap, of course, for the Inquisition. Bernoulli knew that his trial would gather all his enemies. The coup began in an orgy of explicable but perhaps immoderate violence. While belated Noble resistance was crushed in the city, praetorians stormed the Senate.

  Senators, Necessity may be the Mother of Invention but she is also the Mother of War. I listen to her voice most intently.

  So began the last, somewhat rambling, address the Senate heard, punctuated by screams and cheers from the streets. The climax revealed a hitherto private mysticism:

  Hear me, Senators, and know History’s certainty. History has no allies. History requires no preparation, no tact, no caution. It needs none. Its will is Law, that you think it Right or Wrong matters not. None of you know what is necessary. I know it. I do it. Stand against me, you stand against a flood. Necessity and I, together we’ll drown all. I tell you I am Time’s Executor. I am History’s end. Yield to me!

  Shaking and sweating, pale and overwrought, the Senate’s new Master collapsed into fever. The Revolution was complete, the Re-Formation just beginning.23

  CHAPTER 41

  Tap, tap, tap.

  She woke, shivering on metal, into dark silence disturbed only by the ceaseless drip. It smelled like . . . nothing. In place of Rasenna’s noisome blend of spice and sweat and blood was a sterile absence: a ghost trace of iron, bitter at the throat. She began to explore the darkness but soon stopped. It was a cold world and greasy to the touch.

  She couldn’t much remember recent events except one, and that one was impossible, a poisoned whisper from a bad dream: he could not be dead. She could not have been here long: her jaw still ached where the Doc had punched it, and there was another, fresher, pain at the back of her head. She was still too weak to stand, so she lay back and listened to the drip as the journey from Rasenna came back in fragments . . .

  . . . of rocks fallen into the sea, knocked loose by the carriage wheels. She watched their escape with envy through a small vent in her mobile creaking cage.

  After the Twelfth left Rasenna, Sofia was sent north in a small convoy—either General Luparelli found prisoners burdensome or this particular prisoner was wanted in the capital. Most of the journey was by narrow winding roads along the coast, avoiding Rasenna and other towns. It was late autumn, and the rolling Etrurian landscape was frozen into austerity. They traveled north until they came to a place with leafless trees covered in thick dust, the land stripped of life by something more permanent than winter. Sickened by it, Sofia concentrated on keeping warm inside.

  It was snowing when she caught her first glimpse of Concord. It was really two cities, the new built on the corpse of the old. Sandstone walls and the towers on the periphery were all that remained of the city defeated by Rasenna at Montaperti, and they were left behind as the carriage crossed an immense bridge lined with flags and torches. It was recognizably from the same architectural school as Giovanni’s, but where his had elegant human proportions, this had been built for titans. They approached a wall of steel-blue plates overlapping like fish scales; they rippled open with the crunching chime of a phalanx, an echo of the many legions that had marched through it over the decades.

  They were woodsmen once, so Giovanni had told her, and she could see how they had replaced forests with soaring columns capped with steel branching into coiled limbs. Narrow, endless stairs connected the old city of earth and wood to the dark white city of steel and marble. She counted scores of aqueducts, wide as rivers, all flowing from the same source: the mountain that dominated the city center like a decapitated giant, looming black and baleful. Looking irrelevant amid its jagged peaks were the networked towers of the Engineers’ Guild, minute parasites on an indifferent behemoth. From the mountain’s summit there rose up an awful black cathedral, a fell idol looking down on its wretched worshippers without love, without pity, as if it were not the interloper, as if it had always been here and Man himself was the aberration. She had never seen anything like it—but like any Etrurian, she knew its name, for it could only be that tower, more ambitious even than Nimrod’s: this was the Beast itself, the Molè Bernoulliana.

  Only the mountain on which it stood rivaled the Molè’s spiraling height. Its smoky-green triple dome was capped by a savagely tapering needle stabbing the sky. Its array of buttresses was festooned with entangled wires: the web of an army of blind spiders toiling away for mad centuries . . .

  . . . and here memory became confused as the carriage door opened and a hood was thrown at her. She had been transported somewhere else, this time by boat, then she was led up steps and into a large open space—she could tell that by the way her footsteps sounded. The only voices were hushed—guards conferring, she supposed. Though her hands had been bound together, they were otherwise free, and she’d begun to lift the hood when the blow came from behind.

  Then darkness. Then silence . . .

  Tap, tap, tap, tap.

  And now she was here, wherever here was. She could feel no seams in the rough stone walls, so either the individual bricks were huge or the whole cell had been carved from rock. As her eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, she thought she discerned light coming weakly from one wall. Crawling closer, she found a large metal door with a window that might have been large enough to squeeze through but for the thick iron bar
bisecting it. She grabbed the bar and pulled herself up. As she looked out, she sneezed, and it echoed in the space above and below. She cursed the unaccustomed length of her hair—it would never dry in this place. Already it had taken moisture from the air till it could absorb no more, and now it straggled lankly around her neck and down her back.

  She thudded her head on the bar.

  “Guess not,” she whispered to herself.

  Before she could inspect the exterior, her legs gave out. The ground was damp, but she was too exhausted to care. She fell again into darkness . . .

  . . . and was woken by an agonized groan of metal. The only machines she had ever heard were those Giovanni had used on the bridge, but they had sounded nothing like this, mountains of rust scraping together like animals in pain, too tired to scream. She lifted herself to the window again, stooping because of the low roof, and peered into the darkness.

  Outside, above and below, there was nothing, but in the center of this empty space was a glass column, thick as an old oak, and beyond that an endless curved wall dotted with other cells like hers, hundreds of them, all set in a great spiral in an inverted conical pit. As her eyes grew used to the twilight gloom, she could see the pit was not bottomless, as it had first appeared. It ended about thirty rows below in a dark lake.

  She studied the wall across the void, and after a while she realized that the rows of cells were moving—very slowly—and that was most likely the cause of the groaning. That mystery solved, Sofia started to wonder if she was alone, but that question was answered quickly enough when the groaning stopped and the screaming started. Peering across the void, she caught a glimpse of a bearded, skeletal figure dancing around his cell. There were other people too, and they were all running to their cell windows, thrusting out bony arms as if to grasp something. Listening closely, she could make out a variety of dialects, some prayers, some blasphemies, but mostly gibberish.