A young Rhinosaracin, a pugnacious species of mammalian hominid with a large horn erupting out of its snout, breached the line and came at her with his shoe.
"Lucifer … Lucifer … Lucifer …"
One of her men shot him as he cocked his arm back to throw it at her. The shoe dropped harmlessly to the ground moments before the Rhinosaracin fell, merely unconscious, but instead of cowering, the mob which had swelled to over a million people grew bolder in their anger.
"Hold your fire!" Jophiel shouted. The last thing she needed was to have her own men prove the theory which had been circulating in the media. That the Eternal Emperor sought to strip the people of their elected power and return things to the weaker status-quo which had existed before he had disappeared.
An allegation she now knew to be true…
"Lucifer … Lucifer … Lucifer …"
The mob undulated like a living creature, shoving against the fragile line of soldiers who'd been assigned to ring Parliament and prevent them from climbing its walls. Another rock flew her direction and hit one of her Mantoid crewmen off the shoulder, and then another.
"Hold your fire!" Jophiel shouted again. Her men huddled around her, shielding her with their bodies, and took the brunt of objects ranging from discarded bits of lunches, shoes, rocks, and whatever else people could fish out of the trash cans to lob at her. She. The prime defender of the Eternal Emperor.
"Clear the way!" Klikrrr shouted, his words lost in the chanting of Lucifer's name. From the fearful eyes of the crewmen, words were not necessary to convey that order. The people were many, and they were few.
"We need to get inside," Jophiel said.
It had been a mistake. She had told him arresting Lucifer without bringing formal criminal charges in the civilian courts would ignite a powder keg. Fault lines had been erupting ever since the Eternal Emperor had returned from the ascended realms and begun wresting power back from his citizens by appointing her to be the supreme commander of his military. The citizens had grown bold in their tenure as a godless people. They would no longer pray for deliverance when, for 200 years, Lucifer had taught them to roll up their sleeves and fix their own problems instead of looking to a distant god.
"I don't see why the air traffic controllers didn't just let us land at the VIP landing strip," one of the Mantoid soldiers said
"They have a point to prove," Jophiel's expression was grim. "Parliament wishes to demonstrate they are not defenseless. They have the power of the people behind them"
Yes. Parliament wished to prove the Alliance had grown strong and prospered in spite of what the Emperor did and not because of it.
"Lucifer … Lucifer … Lucifer …"
More rocks flew their way, lobbed from far back in the crowd. Millions pushed against the fragile line of Angelics, those men and women who would defend her … or would they? Favoritism. She had been given something they had been denied, and in doing so, the Emperor had separated her from those of her species who did not have such privileges. In their eyes, that put her in the camp of the Emperor, a camp they had not yet decided whether or not they wished to support.
A Malotov cocktail flew over the line of soldiers and landed on the pavement, nowhere close, but it made her men huddle against her even closer, as if Sata'anic lizards came at her with pulse rifles instead of the people they were supposed to defend.
Her men slipped the safeties off their pulse rifles, ready to fire.
"Let's get you inside, Sir," Colonel Klikrrr said.
It was fitting the showdown would happen here. That massive structure Lucifer had built to surround the smaller, symbolic Great Hall of Parliament which had been all that had existed until the Emperor had disappeared. The newer building was round, so that no member of the Alliance would sit any further away from the Great Hall than any other species, and as defendable as a fortress. This had been the vision of equality she had been born into. This had been the vision of equality she had grown up with. This had been the vision of equality she had thought she'd seen emanating from the Emperor and god she adored.
She now knew it was all a lie…
The glass doors closed with an audible sigh, shutting out the cacophony of the mob. Her peace was short-lived. Reporters thronged their beleaguered group instead, shoving microphones in her face and asking for statements like angry bees. Unlike outside, where there had been a line to keep the mob away from her, in here she had no such protection. The role of the press was to voice the truth. The people's truth … not the Emperor's. That voice was inviolate, and not even the Eternal Emperor was exempt from their scrutinization, a lesson he had forgotten at his peril.
"What is the nature of the charges that were brought against the Prime Minister?"
"That's classified." She schooled her face into a neutral mask.
"Will the Prime Minister be brought before the emergency joint session today?"
"No comment." She did not dare tell them she did not know.
"Have you seen him? Is he still alive?
Jophiel's mouth opened and shut. She would not tell them she had not seen him since the day he'd had the knock-down drag-out with the Emperor in front of Ba'al Zebub and that the Emperor had refused to let anybody see him.
"No comment." It was the only thing she could say that was not a lie.
The throng parted, allowing a well-dressed Electrophori aide pass, helped along by the fact their species emitted an uncomfortable electric charge when they were agitated. Jophiel could not remember her name, but she was the Speaker of the Common's legislative assistant.
"Is it true you defied a direct order from the Eternal Emperor to come here today?" a reporter asked.
She opened her mouth and the placations would not come out. Jophiel had never been prone to fits of anger, but her eyes met the cool green eyes of the Electrophori delegate and noted her smug satisfaction at the chess move Parliament had made to outmaneuver the Eternal Emperor.
"They seized my offspring!" she hissed at the reporters.
Cameras flashed. Video cameras were shoved into her face. All around her, the mob waited for her to spill her guts and tell them more.
She bowed her head in shame. Uriel was safe because he'd been with her, but the ones still young enough to be in the youth training academies had been seized. Why, oh why, had she given them up, to be used as pawns in this clash between the will of the people and the will of the Eternal Emperor?
Her head came up, forever proud. She would not tell the mob how she had pounded on the door to the Emperor's laboratory, barred entry as he worked to save Kunopegos foal, and pleaded until her knuckles were bloody for him to come out and discuss what his hubris was doing to his empire. She would not tell them that she was here in violation of a direct order because she knew the Emperor was wrong.
"We did no such thing," the Electrophori's mouth moved into a dissatisfied moue. "You saw the mob outside the door? When we heard protestors were gathering outside the youth training academy on Haven-2 demanding your kids be taken as hostages, we took them into protective custody."
Jophiel glared at her. Had the roles been reversed, she would have done the exact same thing, but she wouldn't kid herself that 'protection' had anything to do with it. It was a chess move, pure and simple. The Speaker of the Commons had caught wind that with the near-death of her twelfth child, the wall of impartiality she had built between her heart and her offspring had crumbled. He had rolled the dice on a bet that if she cared about one offspring in a personal manner, she would care about the other ones, too. And he had won.
The Emperor had refused to see her. She had finally thrown herself at Master Yoritomo's feet and told him, weeping, that if the Emperor didn't give her permission, she would go anyways, and then turn herself in afterwards for court martial. She was here to offer herself as a sacrificial offering to sate the people's anger because the Emperor had made it clear he viewed the will of the people as little more than a pesky gnat. Perhaps if they tore her apart, the
y would not tear the Alliance apart in their eagerness to show the Emperor they did not need him dictating their lives to them anymore.
"Come," the Electrophori said. "Parliament waits. You are already twenty minutes late."
Jophiel and her men trailed after her, dogged by reporters and their cameras the entire way, even after they got past the security checkpoints, although once they entered the Great Hall of Parliament itself the reporters were herded over to a media area where they could view the goings-on without disturbing it. The Speaker of the Commons was already on the pedestal, warming up his choir of the people's voices.
A second commotion, even bigger than the ruckus she had created as she had made her way inside, erupted amongst the delegates as she looked up at the lofty ceiling and saw, through the stained glass skylight, the shadow of a battle cruiser block out the light. A Cherubim battle cruiser. Had the Emperor decided to end this little experiment in democracy while all the rabble-rousers were gathered in once place by exterminating them the way it was rumored he had done with Lucifer's biological father? The room grew deathly quiet.
The ship moved aside and landed in the courtyard between the newer outer circle and the older inner one, the landing strip only Lucifer's shuttle or the Eternal Emperor's was allowed to land. An audible sigh of relief rippled through Parliament. Their first impression had been the same as hers, but then the whispers started. How dare he try to intimidate us like this? Why send a Cherubim battle cruiser when a shuttle would have sufficed? It is proof the Emperor has grown drunk with power.
An aide came running in from outside the great rotunda and whispered something to the Speaker of the Commons. His snout thinned in an angry line, but his back was straight, his expression determined. He would not let the Emperor cower him.
“Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye,” the Speaker of the Commons shouted over the clamor. “This joint emergency session of Parliament to investigate the circumstances and facts surrounding the arrest of our Prime Minister. I have just received word the Emperor answered our Writ of Habeas Corpus."
Jophiel cringed. Here it was … the foal, so to speak, was about to be let out of the bag.
“Bring the accused before the general court,” the Speaker said.
They came then, the Emperor's Cherubim guard, not the defenders of a god these people loved, but the oppressors of someone they loved even more, the man who had ruled in his father's stead for 200 years while the Emperor had been off to points unknown. They came two-by-two-by-two, surrounding him so he had no hope of escape, and dumped him down on his knees at the foot of the raised dais as though he were refuse before stepping back to ring the perimeter.
She thought at first it was a joke. The wretched creature the Cherubim had dumped onto the podium couldn't possibly be Lucifer. Could it? A charred pile of black feathers, only the trembling of its nearly featherless stubs, indicated they were looking at an Angelic. The scent of brimstone wafted through the room.
Parliament gasped. Jophiel found herself gasping along with them. Hashem had decided to let Lucifer have his little day in court, to make an example of him, to mock Parliament and remind the people what happened when citizens rebelled and committed treason against their Emperor and god.
It was a warning … to Parliament itself.
It was a mistake…
She thought at first he might be dead, a victim of his father's temper, but those once-magnificent wings trembled, drawing strength from the people themselves, as he pushed himself up on first his hands, and then his knees, panting to remain conscious as he fought back whatever other injuries the Emperor had inflicted upon him.
Charred black shafts, devoid of the vanes which gave her species flight, heaved with every breath, a darkened porcupine straightening its quills, not the graceful wings of an Angelic. Jophiel heard a sob and realized it came from her own lips. What had he done? What had he done to the man he had raised to be his son?
Her hand rose to cover her mouth. Parliament was so silent you could have heard a pin-feather drop, the shuddering breath which heaved from beneath those charred wings audible even in the upper balconies. And yet he moved. Undaunted in his righteous indignation. Those wing-nubs flailed, unable to catch the wind to give him balance, so he crawled. He moved first one arm, and then the other, still shackled, as were his legs, and crawled up those steps to reach the raised dais where he had once made rousing speeches. And then he collapsed.
The delegates in the front rows began to cry as they saw the once-snowy feathers now charred and thin where the Emperor had pulled down the powers of the heavens and tried to kill him … and somehow failed.
The whispers grew louder. Anger. How dare the Emperor do this to the people's representative? Who did he think he was? This petty tyrant who had stepped out of the pages of some old testamentary religious text, an old god who had no place in a modern Alliance?
The Speaker's aide rushed forward, to help him up. He waved her off, defiant even in this moment of greatest shame. Jophiel stood in horrified fascination. How had Lucifer survived?
The voices grew louder. No longer whispers. These were a godless people who had banded together to take on Shay'tan in the Emperor's absence … and won. They would not be cowed by the Emperor's demonstration of displeasure. Loud voices turned to shouting. Shouting against the Emperor. Their defiance grew, these people who did not depend upon the gods to run their daily affairs, and who had gotten along just fine until the Emperor had returned 25 years ago and started playing one faction against the other in an attempt to regain control.
"Take those shackles off of him right this minute!" the Speaker of the Commons bellowed at the Cherubim guard.
The Cherubim stood, stone-faced, and did not move.
Parliament began to riot.
The Speaker of the Commons moved to stand in front of Master Yoritomo, the leader of the Cherubim guard, dwarfed by his height and fierce armor, but not afraid.
"You may be strong," the Speaker of the Commons hissed up at the thirteen-foot tall defenders of the Emperor. "But you are only one thousand, while we are many."
He gestured up at the hundreds of delegates who bent over the balconies like raptors about to swoop down for a kill. He then gestured towards the door they had all come in.
"Beyond that door lay the unwashed masses you and your master hold in such disdain," the Speaker said. "They are eager to teach you what it means to be subject to the will of the people! You are powerful, but you have aroused our ire, and we have discovered our strength. So either you take off those shackles, or I shall order the guards to open those doors, and the outer doors that lead to the streets where the masses you passed through on the way in here number in the millions, and then we shall see what happens when you are forced to slaughter civilians in front of the cameras."
Outside, the shouting grew louder. Parliament had had the foresight to station video monitors and radios so the mob could see what was going on inside the building. A new chant erupted from the mob.
Kill … them! Kill … them! Kill … them! Kill … them!
The Cherubim did not budge.
"We are done with you and yours," the Speaker of the Commons said. He looked up the slanted floor that led down to the theatre. "Bailiff … open the doors."
"Wait!!!" Jophiel leaped onto the floor. "Master Yoritomo! Please! This is not in the Emperor's best interests! It is intemperate and unwise!"
For a moment she feared the Cherubim Master-of-Arms would not move, but then beneath that stone-faced expression she saw a hint of emotion, that they, too, recognized the Emperor acted foolishly, so eager to sate his sate his anger by publicly disgracing his son that he had stepped into a trap. Master Yoritomo stepped forward and removed the shackles, leaving Lucifer where he kneeled.
The smell of burnt feathers nearly made her gag. Every instinct she possessed screamed at her to fall to her knees and take Lucifer into her arms, to kiss his eyelids and weep tears into his wounds and tell him she was sorry for not s
peaking up on his behalf. But she had not done so, and because she had not, her last chance to earn the trust of the man she now realized was not the fop she had always thought him to be had been lost forever.
"L-l-lucifer," she suppressed a sob.
He still wore the suit he had worn the day he'd been arrested, but it was so singed and black it seemed the clothing a workman, the uniform of the people, making him one of them. He did not look up when his shackles were removed, but kept his hands together as though in prayer. It was in slow motion that once-beautiful head rose, those chiseled features, that sensual mouth, those silver eyes that bored into hers with hatred and betrayal.
The image danced into her head. It was not a Happy Bird he projected now, a happy memory he had shared with her in a moment of intimacy because, after that last time they'd attempted to conceive a child together, she had felt so connected to him they had both had wept. No, the images that danced through her brain now were horrible, images of what it had felt like as the Emperor had burned off his wings, the way the electricity had jolted through his nerve endings and made him writhe in pain, the betrayal, and he knew it made her squeamish. He toyed with that squeamishness, punishing her for being weak.
"Stop," she whispered to him. "Please stop."
Those eerie silver eyes bored into hers like twin swords of hatred. He rose to his feet and nearly stumbled, but refused to take the Speaker's hand, unbowed even though the Emperor had tried to break him. He never took his eyes off of her, the accusation in those twin silver orbs, and then turned to face those who had summoned him here today. The people. His people.
The people cheered. Their champion had risen.
“Prime Minister Lucifer," the Speaker of the Commons said. "Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you gods?”
Sword of the Gods: Prince of Tyre (Sword of the Gods Saga) Page 53