by Kali Altsoba
He’s right. And he’s wrong. Pyotr is indeed jealous of this man of immense will and talent who serves at his whim. But Takeshi was also sent to Genève for a much smaller reason. ‘It’s the Imperium way. I’m an outcast from Fates, without family or title. Born outside the three elites of the Grün homeworlds. Only an Oetkert can be to the Palast Waldstätte born.’
Now he’s just feeling sorry for himself. In fact, a royal agent deep inside RIK HQ sent a private report to Pyotr detailing the great firestorms, one started by his idiot cousin and the other by his general’s too blunt assault on the Toruń roads, and by too eager and cocksure pilots. He needs eyes on the ground he can trust. Not just a buffoon cousin and inept, plotting generals.
‘It’s my own fault. I admit it.’
***
Knowing as no one other than Pyotr knew that invasion of the United Planets loomed, Takeshi asked to be assigned to combat duty when war came. The appeal was made during one of their private audiences sealed inside Pyotr’s inner chambers in the Waldstätte Palast, where they had planned to take Orion into war. Calculatingly, ostentatiously, he pleaded: “Tennō, send me where the action is when the time comes, so that I may serve you in your splendid little war.”
It was not just a pose. At least, not totally. Takeshi wanted to be where his rare abilities would bring him notice. He just thought that would be on the most important invasion, of Aral. It never occurred to him that Pyotr had a sense of humor, that he’d instead send him to Genève.
“I’m glad that you believe in service. Or say that you do. I shall think on this awhile.” And so he did. Takeshi served him well when he was sent to organize a team of mercs who took down Bad Camberg in a false flag op, framing Krevo so that Pyotr could violate the old borders and have his war. ‘But he needs a tug on the reins, I think, lest he take the bit in his mouth and run wild in his talent and ambition.’
Even before he helped the Tennō start the Krevan War, Takeshi’s name was whispered in the highest levels in the Sakura-kai secret society and more broadly within SAC, and also in the Jade Court. He’s marked for command. Everybody says so. Maybe even greatness, though fewer will concede their own vainglory and ambition to his.
Then here he was again before Pyotr, and yet real power was still not coming as fast as he wanted. As fast as he needed. Even though to all others at Court his rise was astonishing. No one understood the quickness of his rare intimacy with Pyotr. There were rumors, of course. Lots of those. That Takeshi Watanabe was a foil for SAC, said to secretly be running the war. That he was a bastard son of some great noble house, or even that he was Pyotr’s own bastard, born of a whore mother from the barrios of Kestino. Or that he and Pyotr made a pact in blood under the Black Faith, and that Pyotr is planning to restore the banned monks of Takeshi’s homeworld of Fates to their coveted place behind the Jade Throne. Or most commonly, that he’s the Tennō’s latest lover. That’s the most popular rumor because if it’s true it means the Emperor will discard him soon enough and others can step into a dead man’s vacuum.
Takeshi is Pyotr’s protégé, a coppery colonel in Special Action Commando but his own man first and always. Pyotr kept him at arms length after he returned to Kestino from overseeing the Bad Camberg covert op that provided the cover and excuse to launch a longed-planned war.
Fair enough. He proposed the mission in secret and carried it out in the same way. That secret needed to be kept. Pyotr needed credible deniability should Takeshi ever be exposed. So he understood keeping him distant for awhile, to avoid association with the Bad Camberg lie. ‘But I expected to be well-rewarded for my advice and service. The baubles you have given me mean nothing. I want and expect a high command in this war that we started together.’
When Pyotr finally readmitted Takeshi to his private quarters it was to say: “This war is supposed to be run at a profit, yet it will not be possible to feast if my generals and relatives burn down the worlds my armies conquer. That is what is happening on Genève.” He lamented that so much valuable and rare wood was lost to the conflagrations, making no mention of charred lives.
Takeshi despised physical weakness. He thought: ‘Your larder and your table, sire, like your thick waistline, seems well-stocked already. Surely you do not go to bed hungry at night?’ He longed to say it, for spite, but mouthed only loyal nothings instead. Albeit with a little poison sting curling in the tail of his keen observation: “There are few among your peacetime generals who see beyond their old books and tactical manuals. And none who understand your long-war plans as I do, since I helped you draft and execute them at Bad Camberg.”
“Agreed. Yet generals are much like royal relatives, not least because, and too often for the sake of my war, the two are the same thing. Still, both come and go. In time I will replace any whom the drag of war exposes as unable or unworthy. Or disloyal. After all, the Imperium is full to its brim with ambitious young men.” Pyotr’s jade eyes glinted at Takeshi as he said it.
‘Yes Tennō, I know that you know my ambition. As you know that I know your war plans, for we made them together.’ Again the fitter, younger man chose prudent silence over speech. As the Tennō’s key co-conspirator, Takeshi Watanabe has license to speak truth to Pyotr on politics and the war as no other man in the Imperium. But even for such as him there are real and strict limits. Dangerous borders he may not cross unarmed.
“Good. We understand each other. Then go to Genève. Leave immediately.”
“Genève? Why there? Why not Lwów or Aral?
“Genève is where I need you, and more important, where I want you. Find out what can be salvaged from the ineptitude of my royal cousin and the High Command there. While you are there, burnish your military credentials by taking the lead on active military suppression patrols. If you wish to advise me in this war you need to see it up close at least once.”
Takeshi bowed low, saying nothing but thinking loudly: ‘As do you, sire. A slut in every bedroom but still a virgin king when it comes to making war. Yet I don’t see you shifting your ample ass from the Jade Throne to don adamant and gird your loins with a sword. You would rather sheath the blade that hangs between your legs inside some virile young lover.’
Pyotr was pretty sure he knew what Takeshi was really thinking. He, too, said nothing, but for a far different reason. Pyotr observed no limits or borders in his speech that he did not erect himself. He simply gave Takeshi vague assurances from Main HQ that the fight would soon be over on Genève, that the fall of besieged Toruń was a matter of when and not if and that he wanted a first hand report from his most trusted adviser.
“Very good to hear and to know, Emperor. Though the news comes more slowly than we expected and hoped the last time we spoke in private.” Again a subtle reminder, using the plural pronoun, that the Emperor relied on his advice and used his plan to launch this new Orion War.
“I expect nothing but total victory from my Rikugun,” Pyotr proclaimed, ignoring the jibe while sucking on a thick slice of syrupy peach he pulled from a tall white jar beside him.
“The admirals of your Kaigun have swept nearly all before them. Given how small the Krevan navy was that was no great feat. But your generals in the Rikugun have not delivered victory, have they? Neither swift nor easy nor complete, as you rightfully demand of them. An easy run across the open plains of backward Genève, then a lurch into the forest. Costly progress on Brno, yes, but things do not go so well on Lwów or at the outer ice-moons in Aral system.’
“We shall prevail there, too. You know it. There is plenty of time before the next phase unfolds. As for the flames, I chastise my royal cousin and my generals but I understand that fire is war and war is fire. Why, making war without fire is like eating sausages without mustard.”
‘Must you phrase everything in metaphors of gluttony?’
“That is why I am sending you to Genève. There is resistance there, behind the frontlines. Suppress it. Show the Court and SAC, and me, what you can do. I authorize all your actions
. As you did on Bad Camberg, you once again have my passport to command. Take ten companies of my best SAC commandos. Clean out the rear areas and any ‘bandits’ who dare to remain active.”
‘A large and elite command. More important, it’s independent of the RIK and SAC.’
“I assume that pleases your ambition. No, don’t respond.” Pyotr sucked noisily for a moment on a second slice of honeyed peach, dripping syrup onto the blue ermine gown that he always wore when in private chambers. It was stained badly with many prior meals and with drips and dribbles of his favorite spiced black snuff. “Questions, my dear?”
‘For I have many I want to ask you, my sweet young killer. Standing there all red and copper and black, coiled to spring like a sonoran coral snake. So very pretty and so very quick and totally lethal. Yes, you are always ready to kill and feed off lesser snakes. Indeed you are. Do you understand that I am no pretty poisoner? I am a python who can crush your quickness.’
“Just one. Bandits?”
“It is what my cousin calls deserters and stragglers. A useful little term actually. Rather like my dear, late mother’s nightshirt: it covers everything. It lets us do anything to anyone.”
“I see. Yes, that’s most useful. Thank you for this opportunity to make history.” Takeshi is not yet good or practiced at the flattery, on which the Jade Court lives like other men live on air. He still fumbles it more often than not. It’s not in his natural skill set. He hasn’t the patience for it. He’s too eager for power that’s independent of all others, including one day of Pyotr.
“It is not so great a chance as that. You are to stay in the rear areas. Leave Toruń to my generals. At least for now. They, too, have a righteous role to play. They, too, must feel useful.”
“You know that I could handle that mission for you as well.”
“Perhaps, but it is too soon. You need this field experience, colonel. It will put some fiber in your bowels. More important, it will put some notches on your sword, and that could be useful to us both when it comes to dealing with my generals. Report to me in one month. Dismissed.”
***
‘It’s been three weeks. One more and I can leave this backwater for Kestino. I’ve been away from the center too long. One cannot divine the Court, or Pyotr’s thinking, from out here.’
As Takeshi turns to gaze left the bill of his cap slices into a stiff, late afternoon breeze. It carries a strong smell of burning horsehair and roasted animal flesh to his nostrils. He so slightly wrinkles his nose. Otherwise, the taisa looks content. Lost in his own sublime presence, absent in excitable thoughts about the vast sum of hate and power and opportunity that war unleashes.
As he swivels his head back to the right he catches a quizzical look from an overweight major standing four meters away. The portly shōsa frames the butt end of a line of eight, forming today’s execution party. Seven meters ahead, four frightened boys stand in a jagged row before a rustled and unkempt old tool shed. Behind them a small family cottage is burning from its roof.
Three are brothers, ages 14, 16, and 12. The oldest is trying hard to look defiant, but the youngest is crying openly. The middle child merely looks blank. A 13-year old school pal stands stiffly apart from the threesome, silently bidding to somehow disassociate from them. In another minute the modest distance he achieves won’t matter.
A plump woman and an old man, still wearing his hat, mother and grandfather of the three brothers, lie in widening crimson pools where they fell in front of the boys, trying to protect them with their own bodies. The oozing blood is still warm, dark and oily and thick. Takeshi glances down to a lump of horseshit clinging to his polished boot. He stokes it against a rise in the ground. It clings still.
‘I want to return to my karesansui. It needs my attention.’ He has tended a miniature Zen garden since boyhood. It’s all he has from his past, the only thing he took with him when he fled from the Broderbund and left his home on Fates forever. Even Takeshi is not sure why so small a thing is so important to him, only that it is. ‘I may be more Nagoyan than the monks considered.’ There are much greater rock gardens deep inside the Waldstätte Palast, the largest built in secret centuries ago by the first Nagoyan advisers to the Oetkert dynasts, to Pyotr’s forebears. He discovered these extraordinary Imperial Gardens after he was anointed one of ‘The Admitted.’
Takeshi Watanabe has no discernible scent. He’s cold, antiseptic, odorless. Except in his anger or while killing. Then he exudes a brash, red metallic smell, like nitric acid spilled on zinc. He reeks of red metal at this moment, as he looks down at the dead mother and grandfather.
“Orders, sir?” Shōsa Alfonso Gomez asks him for the order in an eerie decadence. He has big, wide, artificial yellow eyes that hardly ever blink. “Shall I carry out the execution of the saboteurs?”
Takeshi thinks it odd that he uses such formal military manners in the midst of this filth. He doesn’t reply, not right away. He’s thinking on his career. As always. He really doesn’t want to be here. Not in this stinking, fecal village. ‘What’s it called? Ahh, it doesn’t matter.’
It looks and smells no different than the last ten villages they ‘evacuated’ before today. Although this one is farther north, colder and poorer than the others on the rich flatland plains of Genève. It reminds him a little of one of the clusters of dāsa slave hovels on his homeworld of Fates, one of the original Ordensstaat worlds still ruled by the broken and exiled Broderbund.
Except there are no gelded male clones on Genève. No slaves tethered behind acoustic-levitation tractors working the rich fields. No flashing lash sinking into flesh under a dim blue sun on a grand commandery outside the sealed compound where he grew up. Nor any female dāsa like those who toiled in the monks’ barracks home of his youth. And also served their beds. There is no school of the Black Faith here. Nothing like the dull green halls where he spent his childhood, the most brilliant and recalcitrant lad the hard priests of Fates ever taught. And their greatest disappointment, for he believed in blasphemy against all their core doctrines.
Just ten, he yelled at the bent-over old Masters, whom he knew he already exceeded in both intellect and wisdom: “Blasphemy is essential to finding truth! Blasphemy is truth!” They beat him for that outburst, and many others like it over six more years. They hated his bold skepticism, and feared it. So they beat him with hard, dead scrolls. He wouldn’t recant.
At 16 years he was allowed to leave the compound on his own, on an errand. He hid his karesansui under his robes and fled the monks forever. Left behind the monochromatic life of devotions and study of the Corpus Hermeticum and all other arcane mysticism they planned for him. They wailed when they discovered he was gone, for they knew he was much greater than he knew or thought. Knew that without him all their plans to return to power on Kestino must fail.
For four years he wandered the Imperium, exploring its great cities and exciting worlds beyond those of the drear Ordensstaat core. He ended up at Pusan University on Daegu, where he first learned of the radical ideals of ‘Purity’ that challenged all orthodoxies, from the Black Faith to the Satya Yuga, to the old science and the great Peace of Orion among the star empires. He also learned about SAC’s dominant power on Kestino, over Pyotr and across the Imperium, and a far different tale about the Curia and Pyotr than the gnarled and embittered Brethren told him.
Pusan skimmed the cream off the Imperium’s intellectual life. It was thick, rich stuff. It excited young men of talent like Takeshi. Yet it was spotty with flies of mediocrity, only there because of their high caste and their rich fathers. He hated its clotted orthodoxies, as he hated the old lies and fables of the monks on Fates. That independence of mind brought him to the notice of the best professors and of SAC’s recruiters. He was cultivated, groomed. He was seduced to compromise him, only to learn that he never compromised. He was prepared in the usual ways for a career in intelligence with SAC. In time he found it politic to convert to Purity. In private, he despised its rank pseudosc
ience as much as he did the ancient superstitions of the Black Faith.
On the surface he mouths whatever phrases he must, to please Pyotr or his superiors or any useful audience. Within, he indulges an older and crueler wisdom even he must credit to the monks of Fates, reinforced by life experience. It reduces to a Vedic-Brethren meld, a syncretic verse of the Black Faith about the myth-warrior Arjuna, an ancient embodiment of murder, a godly excuser of killing, of feeding off death as the natural order of all things great and small. It returns to him in this moment, standing in muck and blood and horseshit in a ridiculous village on Genève, with a dutiful but querical shōsa waiting for his ‘kill’ order.
‘Creatures live on creatures, the stronger on the weaker. A mouse eats the wheat. A mongoose eats the mouse. A cat eats the mongoose. Dogs devour cats. Wild beasts eat the dogs. Even ascetics or hermits may live only by devouring. The hierarchy of devouring rules all things in, above, and below Orion. This is the central truth of all life, of all thousand histories of the Thousand Worlds.’