That black anger which bubbled closer to the surface the longer he dwelt amongst these people, these horrible, conniving humans who lied and schemed and betrayed one another every chance they got, welled into his veins and turned his blood from hot to cold. He grabbed Shahla's mother by the shoulders and lifted her up level with his face, knocking several chairs over as he flared his wings.
"One more word from you, woman, and I swear I shall draw this sword and cut out your viperous tongue!"
Her eyes grew wide with terror, seeing something in his eyes that silenced even her intemperate insults. He put her down, shame rushing through him at his abuse of a woman, but no person in that room jumped to Eshargemelet's defense, not even the black-eyed girl, who stared at him with owlish eyes. It was the memory of whispered prayers which urged him to lay the wound back beneath the dirt, to cover it over and forget about it before he did something the Cherubim had warned he must never, ever do, unleash his rage, no matter how justified it might be.
"Mikhail?" Shahla sobbed. "Mikhail?"
He did not understand why it was his name she called when it had been Dadbeh who had tried to rescue her … and been given a head injury and a broken nose for his courage. He had been too late.
Ninsianna glared at him. Whatever was wrong, he would speak to her about this chasm which had opened up between them later.
He knelt down next to her pallet, this pathetic creature still wearing the blood-soaked dress she had meant to wear to her wedding. "I am here, Shahla."
Her eyes stared past him, not focused on him, but on some daydream that he represented, a happy place where women did not have scheming parents or get beaten by lovers who did not want them or labor after babies who died.
"Did you see her?" Shahla stared into that happy world she had created within her own mind. "Did you see our baby?"
An angry hiss came from behind him, the hiss of a cat startled by a snake. Despite Shahla's self-deception, he could not hate her, for how could you loathe a creature that had been brought this low?
His eyes met Needa's, carrying the child who had not lived long enough to take its first breath, and he knew what his mother-in-law asked of him even though Ninsianna was here and she would hate him for it. Tears welled into his eyes. He took Shahla's hand.
"She is a beautiful little girl," Mikhail told her. "Too perfect for this world. She-who-is has taken her straight into the next one, where she shall wait for her mother to join her."
Shahla smiled, a weak, pathetic little grimace with tears streaming down her cheeks and trembling lips. She pointed to the bundle Needa carried.
"Will you take her there for me?" Shahla's voice was pleading. "Will you carry her into the Dreamtime so she can meet this emperor you speak of? Your god?"
Already Immanu had come in, carrying his bundle of incense, his bowl for water, his rattles and the other implements used to perform the death rituals. He tried to press a bundle of sacred cedar into Ninsianna's hand so they could perform the ceremony together, but she shoved it back at him, her golden eyes glowing with fury at Shahla's accusation, spoken as sweetly as the kiss of a lover, from her broken mind.
'-She- believes it…' That was the answer Ninsianna had given him when she said she had looked for the truth in Shahla's mind.
Mikhail's cheek twitched, faced with a choice. Give comfort to this poor girl in the hopes that because of it, eventually her poor broken mind might heal? Or give comfort to his wife who, because of this woman's lies, now doubted that he was true? He bowed his head, wishing he could remember which gods he really prayed to. In his mind, he thought of them all as village chiefs, even the goddess who tugged Ninsianna's strings like a puppet. Who had been the god of his ancestors? He could not remember to even give a prayer to them on this girl's behalf. But the choice was easy.
"I shall carry her there myself," Mikhail told her. "And lay her down to sleep in a bed lined with feathers from my own wings until you join her so she shall never be cold."
Shahla nodded, her eyes too bright, too eager as the tears streamed out of them and she lay back down upon her bed. At the rear of the room, her mother, viperous creature, glared daggers into his back. He could feel her hatred boring into him even though he had not been at fault, other than those three minutes he had been too late. He looked up at the black-eyed girl, the one who had come to him for help. If anything, this made his wife even angrier, some ancient dispute he had not been made privy to, as Shahla sought comfort in Gita's hands and not the hands of the Chosen One of She-who-is.
Mikhail stood and reached for the bundle.
"It was a normal child," Needa said softly, her hands lingering on the bundle she had not been able to save, "perhaps five months in the womb. No more than six."
Normal. In other words, despite what Shahla claimed, the child did not have wings. The child fit into the palm of his hands, still warm from its mother's body, but he knew it would not remain so for long. Shahla began to cry again. Her peculiar friend touched her hair and began to sing, the sound causing him to hesitate, as though he had heard it somewhere before, even though the song stopped and started between her sobs.
"Let's get this over with," Ninsianna's golden eyes glowed with fury even though she had to know the accusation was not true.
He cradled it to his chest and carried it outside, Immanu and Ninsianna right behind him. Siamek leaned against the wall, tears streaming from his eyes as well. Five, perhaps six months in the womb? Siamek had not been the father.
"Give it to my father." Ninsianna's words were short and crisp, her golden eyes tinged with copper as she eyed the bundle as though it were a harbinger of plague.
He looked at his wife, and he just knew that to bury this child, who had never even known the first kiss of breath, in the midst of such hatred as breathed in this village would be wrong.
"I made her a promise," Mikhail said. "And I shall keep it. Because once a vow is made, it should never be broken."
He spoke of more than his promise to Shahla. She should know better than anyone that he did not break his word.
Immanu handed him the sacred cedar and a water skin to anoint the head of the grave. The words were not spoken, but although Immanu's gift was the less powerful of the two, Ninsianna had inherited her second sight from her father. What Mikhail envisioned was so powerful that Immanu saw it and, unlike his daughter, he approved.
"Good night," he said to Ninsianna. He leaned forward to kiss her cheek, but she pulled back, her rejection feeling very much like a knife in his heart. He stood, his lip twitching with regret, and stepped back to flare his wings.
"Where do you go, winged one?" Siamek asked.
"To the highest mountaintop I can find," Mikhail said. "It is the closest to the Dreamtime I can carry this child."
So he flew to the top of the mountain they called Alfaf, and he lay the tiny bundle down amongst the rocks in a bed lined with feathers and built a cairn around it so that no creature could disturb its sleep, and then he wept, not just for the senseless tragedy of this child's death, or the three minutes he had delayed where he might have made a difference, or the poor girl laying broken in the house of her parents who hated her, nor even his estrangement with Ninsianna, but because he knew not what god to pray to and, for the first time since he'd been here, he realized he must have once had a god, a real god, even though he could feel no connection to one now.
His sadness spent, he flew home and crawled in behind his sleeping wife, glad when she murmured his name and melted against him, sad when she awoke the next morning and, upon noticing the thin spot on the underside of his wings where he had plucked his feathers, got out of bed without a word and went about her day as though he wasn't even there.
The Chief retreated into his house and did not come out. The entire village was subdued as Varshab, the Chief's man from his younger days, carried out his orders to question all of the witnesses and make sure his son did not escape from the hole in the ground until they had a chance t
o convene the tribunal. Poor Dadbeh had Firouz and Tirdard carry him to Shahla's house and was turned away by her parents who blamed him for upsetting their machinations.
And the village whispered. Oh, how it whispered accusations, although the accusations were by far not only about him, but somehow, he, too, had been implicated.
How had he ended up on trial?
Chapter 45
Galactic Standard Date: 152,323.10 AE
Newscast
“And in the news today, the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff came before an emergency Joint Session of Parliament to request they issue a Writ of Habeas Corpus compelling the Eternal Emperor to bring the Prime Minister before that body for questioning. The Eternal Emperor has refused to state what charges have been filed against the Prime Minister and will not allow Lucifer's attorneys to speak to him. The Office of the Eternal Emperor has issued an official statement of 'no comment' to all media inquiries."
"Parliament has issued the Writ and demands the Emperor produce the Prime Minister for a hearing within 24 hours or they will put to a vote a resolution the Speaker of the Commons filed today to demote the Emperor to a ceremonial god, as the Mer-Levi Federation did during the Emperor's 200 year absence, stripping him of all authority to act on the Alliance's behalf as anything other than a figurehead. The Speaker of the Commons cited as grounds the Emperor's 200 year abandonment and questionable actions since then which indicate the Emperor is no longer competent to act as our Emperor and God."
"When the resolution was put to a non-binding voice-vote, the resolution passed unanimously. We now go to reporter Merrilly Booney, who is covering the groundswell vote of no confidence in the Emperor live at a candlelight vigil outside of Parliament by angry citizens demanding the Prime Minister be released. Merrilly?"
Camera cuts to a Delphinium reporter standing in front of Parliament surrounded by tens of thousands of people carrying candles and pictures of Lucifer…
Chapter 46
Galactic Standard Date: 152,090.10
Haven-1
Young Lucifer – Age 15
225 Years Ago…
Young Lucifer
Mama said if you lurked in shadows, someday you might overhear something you wished you'd never heard. My response was always that if the information hurt, then you needed to hear it all the more. Especially when you're a 15-year-old kid and everyone assumes you're too dumb to notice something fishy is going on.
Ever since the shooting, I'd been lurking in the shadows a lot. The terrible words Mama had whispered as she'd healed my wounds under the Eternal Tree, that somebody -else- was my father, ate at me. I wanted to throw myself into Father's arms and listen to him reassure me it was all a big, fat lie, but I was big now, so instead I did whatever he asked of me, hoping he would notice and acknowledge I was his son.
His -real- son. Not this other man's son.
Papa did -not- reassure me. In fact, he'd retreated so deeply into his work that not even news of some magnificent new chess move I'd won against Emperor Shay'tan, who had no idea it was a 15-year-old boy he played against instead of Father. If I wanted to see him, then I needed to go to -him.-
"Where are you off to this morning, young prince?" Master Ubiqute asked as I approached the doorway to the wing which housed Father's genetics laboratory.
"Father sent me on an errand to fetch a feather from the ibong adarna," I held up a long, colorful tail feather. "He wants to run some tests on it." Father had asked for no such thing, but I wished to speak to him, so why chance being sent away when I could capture for him a prize?
The ibong adarna had been engineered by Father to display every color of the rainbow in the exact -opposite- color of whatever environment he was perched against, like a chameleon, only in reverse, so that no matter where you were, you would always be able to see it. It had long tail feathers, colorful wings, and a plumulaceous crest that made it one of the more beautiful birds in Father's garden. Since Father did not like to leave his creations defenseless, he had also engineered it to warble a song every bit as soporific as the Happy Bird's song was happy, often having the effect of putting anyone who was listened to it asleep.
"The ibong adarna allowed you to get close enough to pluck it again?" Master Ubiqute's mandibles widened in about as close as any non-Cherubim might ever get to seeing one of Father's guards smile.
"I -do- have wings!" I forced a laugh. "It's not difficult once you know where it makes its nest. I simply waited until it dozed off so it could not lull me to sleep, then flew up to pluck this feather."
"You are a clever boy," Master Ubiqute said. "And devious. I did not think the ibong adarna would make the same mistake twice?"
"Everybody makes the same mistake twice," I said. "And often even a third or fourth time. If you simply wait long enough, they will drop their guard and let you pluck their feathers again and again!"
Master Ubiqute stepped aside to let me pass. As lofty and empty as Father's Great Hall was, his laboratory was like a living creature, packed with cages and the pungent aroma of every life form Father dabbled with. I always found it curious that Father, who claimed he was a staunch advocate of hands-off natural evolution, liked to tinker with those creatures DNA, as if the rules which applied to everybody else in the universe did not apply to -him.-
A cacophony of growls, hisses, and other sounds gave warning of my entry, but the animals were already so agitated at the sound of Father arguing with someone that there was little perceptible increase in the volume. Any other day I would have called to him, but lately Father and Mama had not been speaking to each other, at least not since the fight they'd had the night after I'd been shot. If I asked what the problem was they told me to mind my business. I was certain it had to do with the man I had seen in the world between, but Mama refused to say another word and the one time I asked Father, he grew so angry I had thought he might smite me for my insolence.
I should have announced myself. That would have been the right thing to do when I noticed Father speaking to old Dephar, but sometimes the only way to find out what lurked in the shadows was to be a lurker yourself. Especially when you are a fifteen-year-old boy and everyone thinks you are too young to understand things. How many years had I been outwitting Shay'tan and still Father thought of me as a baby?
"You must pay attention to the problems of your own empire!" Dephar's dragon-like snout curled up in a sneer. "Your armies are dying out. You must accelerate a -new- species to replace them, not keep trying to fix the same old broken ones."
Father had a hologram of a sample of Mama's DNA displayed on his workbench, testing it to see what would happen if he spliced in an elixir to turn a particular sequence of data in her genome off or on. He had that intense look upon his face that I saw from time to time, not just determination, but some other emotion. If I didn't know he was a god, I would have sworn he looked worried.
"Shemijaza is coming for her," Father said. "Her and the boy. This is the only gift I can offer her to make her testify against him."
"What right do you have to offer immortality to win a dispute?" Dephar said. "Only SHE may choose who is favored. Every time one of you old gods forgets that edict, we run into situations like the Nephilim."
Father ran the simulation. The DNA started to reorganize itself, and then collapsed.
"Not viable," the Dardda'il-enhanced computer spoke.
Father sighed.
"I'm not -creating- life," Father said. "Only taking care of details SHE is too busy to fix so so she doesn't end up with so many evolutionary dead ends." Father queued up another hologram of DNA to spiral next to Mama's, one I recognized as my own. "My meddling has a place, or SHE would not allow it."
"These hybrids are inconsequential," Dephar said. "Why do you waste time on them? They are not even -real-."
Father pointed to the third ladder of -my- DNA, what he called TNA or the triploid strand. He'd been teaching me to interpret some of the easier sequences, such as eye color or the color of
my wings, but most of the rest of what he did still did not make sense.
"That was not there before," Father pointed to a small chain of nucleotides which had been flagged. "Whatever Asherah did to heal him, it made him -more- than he was before. I asked her how she did it and she said it wasn't her. She said it was the Song of Ki."
"The Song of Ki is nothing but a myth," Dephar said. "A fairytale the Seraphim like to tell one another to justify their separatist beliefs."
No. It wasn't. I had heard it in the land between.
"The boy was shot," Father said softly. "I was so concerned with smiting the Agent that I forgot such an injury was fatal in a mortal. If she had not healed him…"
Now he -did- look worried…
Father queued up yet another spiral of DNA, one I had never seen before. Not that sequence I had seen with the name Mama had whispered to me, then refused to speak again. No, this one had three strands just like mine. It had numerous sequences flagged, including the one Father had flagged in -my- DNA, the one he said was different, but it also had lots of broken chunks, as though somebody had taken an axe to it.
"Lucifer is so close," Father said. "If I can figure this out, so can Shemijaza, and then we'll -really- have a problem. I can't let him take them from me until I figure out how it's done."
"You do not have the right, old friend," Dephar put his hand on Father's shoulder. "Any more than he does. You know the law."
Father tried different sequences on Mama's DNA. Simulation after simulation failed to fill in that gap I could see between what I had in -my- third ladder and what he was trying to fix in hers. I considered clearing my throat and pretending I had just come into the laboratory, but, quite frankly, I found it fascinating to hear him talk to old Dephar, who knew the right questions to ask to help Father think, versus the awkward questions -I- asked which always annoyed him.
Sword of the Gods: Prince of Tyre (Sword of the Gods Saga) Page 49