by D. P. Prior
Rhiannon’s head started to pound, and a burning sensation crept over her scalp. She wanted to retort, wanted to strike back, but he’d touched a nerve; a nerve that paralyzed. With surgical precision, he’d cut to the heart of her shame, her losses, her emptiness.
“We both face the same foe, Rhiannon. We all do. Deception has been there from the beginning, prompting, pulling, promising. It does not belong to the natural order of the cosmos. It is… other. Alien, you might say. Even Gandaw knew that, in his own way, which is one of the reasons he tried to create all things anew. Makes you wonder, though, if he realized at the last, he was the most deceived all along.
“It’s the same for everyone: choices are heaped upon choices. With some, we sink deeper into the mire, yet with others we soar free and get a bird’s-eye view of the enemy.
“I’ve made my decisions with great care and exactitude, and I’ll stick with them. But what about you? Since our… coupling, you’ve been quite the changed woman. One minute the virginal Nousian, the next a bellicose Fencible with more heat than a nest of fire ants. That’s some transformation, though I don’t doubt I am partly to blame: a whispered word here and there, all those sparring sessions. I’d initially thought you could replace Shader if he failed, and maybe you could have, if there hadn’t been other forces at play. You see how easy it is for the best of intentions to turn out badly. But never mind. Every cloud has a silver lining, as they used to say. In this case, it’s Saphra. The Templum had its Saphra Society, its last line of defense against Gandaw, and now I have my secret weapon against the Father of Lies.”
Rhiannon’s eyelid twitched, and white-hot irons stabbed at her brain. She raked fingers through her hair till they caught in the knots. “She’s mine,” she mouthed. Then, in barely a whisper, “She’s mine.”
“I don’t think so,” Aristodeus said. “Not the way you’ve been neglecting her, and more than that, neglecting our arrangement. What was it?” The philosopher was relentless. “Couldn’t quite find the mothering archetype? Disillusioned by love?” He touched his hands to his heart and gave her a wounded look. “Or was it the fall of Aeterna, and with it the unmasking of the lie that Ain takes special care of Nousians? All that history, all that power, shown for what it really is by a tinpot emperor with no ambition beyond his own survival. The great Zaneish dynasty! Hagalle can’t even wipe his arse without checking the paper for poison.”
“No.” It was a weak contradiction, but she had to say something. She couldn’t let him roll right over her without putting up some resistance, even if it wasn’t herself she was defending. “Hagalle’s more than that. We saw, atop the Homestead. Whatever else he is, he’s no coward.”
“Fear turned to rage is still fear,” Aristodeus said. “And don’t presume to tell me about Hagalle. I’ve known him a damned sight longer than you have; tutored him since he was a child.”
“What?” Who hadn’t the philosopher influenced? Who wasn’t marching to his tune?
“Difficult times call for difficult choices, and an enormous amount of preparation.”
“So,” Rhiannon said, “you wanted Hagalle to conquer the world, destroy the Templum?”
“Not at all. He’s still his own man, you know. I just had to make sure he was where and when he was needed. I don’t mind telling you, it was no sure thing getting him to the stage where he could take the field without pissing his pants.”
“And this is where it’s led, where all your preparation has taken him? You made a shogging tyrant, Aristodeus. Tell me how that’s not playing into the enemy’s hands.” Hot tears spilled down her cheeks. She was fuming, wasn’t she? So why was she crying?
“Oh, please!” Aristodeus said. “Power corrupts? Is that your thesis? Do try to come up with something original.”
Rhiannon wiped her eyes and stood, hands on hips, daring him to make one more comment. “Just take me to my daughter.”
Aristodeus’s shoulders slumped. He looked genuinely sad for a moment, but it didn’t last. He assumed a condescending frown and rolled his eyes theatrically. “As you wish. But she stays here with me. Understood?”
***
She was seated on a low stool the other side of a wall of glass: Saphra.
My Saphra.
Even thinking it sounded wrong. Saying it would have been fraudulent. And yet Rhiannon had said as much to Aristodeus, staked her claim on the girl she’d never wanted; the girl who’d clung to her like a shadow, despite the lame apologies, the excuses that kept her at arm’s length—or in the care of a minder whenever possible.
Saphra. Always such a sullen child, except when there was company, and then she was a tangle of joy and attitude that would have sat better with a teenager.
Mephesch stood before her, reading from a book—not the kind of kid’s book Rhiannon would’ve read to her, if she’d had the time; it was a thick tome, big as the Liber, and probably just as dense. Gray cloth and boards with a burgundy spine, like the ones in Aristodeus’s study.
Saphra. Restless, needy, frenetic; and yet here she was sitting primly, head slightly inclined, taking it all in, nodding, mouthing questions Rhiannon couldn’t hear.
Another homunculus was combing through the girl’s wet hair—hair that had started turning darker this last year, shifting almost imperceptibly from tow to auburn, just as Rhiannon’s had done before finally settling on black.
She should have been the one combing it. Not that it had bothered her before. But now, with a barrier between them, and strangers more intimate with her daughter than she’d ever been, the want, the need, the compulsion built within her like the urge to cut.
Acid or ice formed in her stomach. Perhaps it was both. She could hear the hollow thump of her heart. Her mind struggled to make sense of what she was feeling, to give it some sort of name. She glanced at Mephesch, who’d paused in his reading to answer a question—her daughter’s question that she was not party to—and she remembered Gaston, remembered Aristodeus’s champagne, remembered the goading thrill of the black sword, what it made her do to herself. All three coalesced around her self-loathing, and she looked unblinkingly at the girl on the stool, Mephesch filling her head with Ain-knows what, the other homunculus combing out her hair…
Aristodeus pressed his face up against the glass beside her, breath misting on the surface. She glanced at him watching with approval; looked back at Saphra, and then she had her word:
Violation.
As if she could hear her mother’s thoughts, as if she could sense her through the glass, Saphra’s head jerked round, and she caught Rhiannon’s eye. A frown swept her forehead, tightened her lips, but then she smiled and waved.
“What’s this?” Rhiannon said through clenched teeth.
“Schooling. Nurture. The sort of thing you’d expect a mother to provide.” Aristodeus waggled his fingers at Saphra, and she beamed in reply. “Oh, I don’t blame you. Not entirely. You had other things on your mind. Other priorities.”
The look he gave her said, “Like cock, booze, sweating it out at the gym.”
He turned straight back to the scene on the other side of the glass. “Time lost can easily be made up, when you know how.”
Mephesch raised an enquiring eyebrow at Aristodeus, who nodded that he should continue.
“No better teachers than the homunculi. They have a knack for making knowledge stick. That, coupled with the better part of her genetics, our girl will make up lost ground in a matter of days.”
“Days?” Rhiannon pressed both palms to the glass and touched her forehead to it. Weakness entered her limbs, and even her eyelids slumped shut.
“With a little augmentation.”
“What?” It was like a scorpion’s sting, rousing her from her stupor. The implication of what he’d said was a creeping venom.
“Nothing you need worry about. Sektis Gandaw wasn’t all bad. Deluded, yes, but not wrong on every account. Did you know the homunculi taught him most everything he knew about science? Yes, of cours
e you did: the bard and his tales. What was his name again?”
He knew. He always knew. Always knew everything.
Sensing her reluctance to play, Aristodeus said, “Elias. Yes, that’s it. Elias Wolf. Surprisingly accurate, his historical verse, but then it would be, wouldn’t it? Seeing as he lived through the Reckoning.”
Rhiannon’s shoulders bunched up about her ears. When she let out of rush of breath, she expected a torrent of tears, but none came. She was done crying; all dried up.
“Not a lot of people know,” Aristodeus continued, as if she weren’t already beyond breaking; as if she were somehow more than an empty sack of skin, “that the homunculi were visiting Earth in their plane ships long before the Reckoning. Long before Sektis Gandaw and his Global Technocracy, too. If not for them, humanity would still be skulking about in caves, grunting over who gets the last banana.”
Rhiannon swiveled to face him, but still she dropped her chin to her chest, kept her eyes shut. Each word she spoke came out like the grate of tortured metal. “What… are… you… doing… to… my… daughter?”
“Saving her,” Aristodeus said with as much finality as a door slamming shut. “From you. From squalor. From alcoholism, random fornication, temper tantrums. From a life of abject misery, purposeless, banal, and devoid of all meaning.”
Rhiannon’s gasps as he drove each condemnation home were no more than shudders localized in her throat. With each, she sagged a little. With each, the ground dragged her toward it, until she slumped to her knees in desperate need of sobbing, but no longer sure how.
Saphra’s head pivoted her way, but there was no reaction on her face. Within a second, she was listening to Mephesch’s reading once more.
“But not just saving her,” Aristodeus continued. “Maybe more.”
He went quiet for a moment, and Rhiannon lifted her head. “You mean you, don’t you? You’re using her to save yourself.” Extricate himself from the trap he’d fallen into.
To her surprise, he dropped into a crouch before her, cupped her chin in his hand so that he could look right into her with those gray-blue eyes. “Me, yes, but maybe you also. Maybe everyone. You see, this war with the Demiurgos doesn’t end with me winning a skirmish. For each move, there’s a counter. He gets ahead, I leapfrog over him. He thinks he has me, and yet I slip under the radar, so to speak, popping up here, there, and everywhere.”
Rhiannon had never figured that out. Neither had Shader. “You fell. Sektis Gandaw said as much. You fell into the Abyss.”
Aristodeus clenched his teeth; grimaced with what looked like exasperation. “And I found a way out. Simple.”
“How? How did you get out?” And even if he had, that didn’t explain why he’d taken her there. “Sektis Gandaw thought you were in two places at once, remember? Is that it? Are you here and in the Abyss at the same time?”
His face tightened in refusal to answer. He may not have known the answer.
“And what’s with the tower? Your base behind enemy lines?”
“It is a defense. My defense. It insulates me from the brunt of his malice. You, too, if you remember. Hence the prohibition on opening the door.”
“So, why’d you need it? If you’re free, why’d you need the tower?”
Aristodeus’s chest filled like a bellows as he drew in a long, slow breath. His eyelids flickered, and he pinched the bridge of his nose.
“It is a limited freedom I’ve won. I can go so far, do so much, and then I’m whipped back. It’s like the recoil from a rubber band that’s been stretched taut. You have rubber bands? I forget. It’s so difficult to keep up. The important thing is, I have room to maneuver, and he’s none the wiser.”
“Unless he wants you to think that.”
Aristodeus wagged his finger and opened his mouth to shoot that idea down, but then his eyes took on that inward focus, like he hadn’t considered the possibility. He swallowed and gave the barest of shrugs. “Perhaps. But I don’t think so.”
“And why’s that?” Where’s the evidence? the philosopher might have said.
“We cannot keep second-guessing ourselves. That way lies an infinite loop of self-doubt and mistrust. That’s the sort of paralysis that cripples the dwarves of Arx Gravis.”
“But it could be true.”
“Yes, it could. It could equally be false. I have no way of knowing, but I take on board what you have raised and will meditate upon it.”
Well, that was a first. What struck Rhiannon, though, was how obvious the idea seemed to her, and yet the great philosopher hadn’t even considered it. Had the Demiurgos blindsided him, or was it simply his own egotism getting in the way?
“Not just meditate, mind,” Aristodeus said, as if he’d shelved that particular dilemma and found a way to press ahead. “We must never be afraid to act. It is deeds rather than thoughts that will win the war. And we must not simply react, either. Sometimes, we need to spring surprises of our own, do things he will not expect.”
“And if you get it wrong? Take the wrong action?”
Aristodeus turned his palms up. “It’s a high-level game. Two tacticians head to head, thinking outside the box, subverting each other’s wishes. It is taxing, but no more than for a virtuoso musician, one who steps aside and allows his instrument to perform in and through him. My mind, my intellect, is my instrument. At times, I must simply let it soar. When it comes back to earth, when its purple patches are spent, then I must strategize, meditate, mobilize my pieces.”
“So, you’re a genius.” Twat. “You really think you’re smarter than the Demiurgos?”
“Not at all,” Aristodeus said. “I’m sure he’d like me to think so. He is the sower of chaos, of lies, of destruction. Hubris is often the door he enters by. Why do you think Gandaw acted the way he did? Did he really believe he could create ex nihilo and still exist himself? He was just a vessel, a conduit for the Demiurgos’s will; the will to disperse, to separate, and ultimately to destroy.”
“OK, so now we’ve got that straight,” Rhiannon said in a tone dripping with sarcasm, “what’s it all got to do with my daughter?”
“My daughter,” Aristodeus said. “Ours. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything. The Deceiver’s wiles have seeped into our cosmos since the fall of the Aeonic Triad. The Archon’s presence here limits him. Neither can act directly without ceding ground to the other. It’s sobering, don’t you think? Two Supernal beings locked in an impasse, first warring over their poor benighted sister, and now competing over us: our world; our cosmos. Makes you wonder why they fell in the first place. Makes you wonder if they were pushed. Because that’s what I’d do, if I had the means: send them both back where they came. Eingana, too, if I could find her, but I suspect she’s already made that journey of her own accord.”
“That tells me nothing,” Rhiannon said. She pushed down on her thigh, lunged into a standing position. She threw a look at Saphra beyond the glass, then glared at Aristodeus. “She’s a girl. A little girl, not some weapon in your cosmic drama.”
“I assure you,” Aristodeus said, “it’s not just my drama. It’s not just my war. Look at what Gandaw did on Earth. And before him, Blightey. How do you think the Liche Lord came to be what he is? Voices from the Abyss, is what. The whisperings of the Dweller—and that monstrosity is little more than the Demiurgos’s lapdog. And let’s not forget about the dwarves of Arx Gravis, what Nameless did to them under the sway of the black axe. No one is safe, Rhiannon. Nowhere. There is an army arrayed against us. Against all the living. Someone”—he stood now, and tugged his toga straight—“needs to organize the defense, lead the counterattack.”
Rhiannon fought back a sneer. “Who elected you? I didn’t vote for you.”
“It’s not a matter of democracy.” Aristodeus looked up at the ceiling, as if he were imploring its support. “It’s a matter of vision. Who else has seen the patterns? Who else has come so close to the chancre they can almost touch it?”
In her mind, she was back
in the tower of ivory, heat radiating from the door.
“You mean, who else got suckered into the Abyss?” she said. “Who else is trapped there, with nothing but some imaginary tower between him and the flames?”
“What?” As if in response, sweat beaded on his forehead.
And she’d dreamed of fire. And coercion. And Callixus.
“No.” She felt a surge of confidence and certainty now, and it restored her lagging resolve. “I’m not buying this cosmic shit. Well, I am, for what it’s worth.” For what difference it makes. “But this is all about you. You screwed up. You bit off more than you could chew. Admit it: you thought you could take Sektis Gandaw down that first time, didn’t you? You, and only you, could stop the Unweaving. Well, listen up, baldy, because I’ve got news for you. You messed up. You messed up big time, and now you want my kid to get you out of shit creek. Am I right?”
She expected to see anger in his eyes, a confusion of emotions writhing across his face, but instead, he just laughed. Not the maniacal laugh of a bullshitter who’d been found out, but the self-assured mirth of someone who was always right, and knew it.
“But I did prevent the Unweaving, ultimately,” Aristodeus said. “I admit, it was a close-run thing, especially with the setback first time round. But as any good general will tell you, adversity can be turned to advantage, if you’re willing to take risks.”
“It wasn’t you,” Rhiannon sniped back at him. “It was Shader.” And her, and Nameless. But she knew giving credit to Shader would hurt Aristodeus most: the pupil outshining the master. After all, Aristodeus had boasted he’d made Shader, hadn’t he? Taught him all he knew, prepared him for the end of all things.
There was a gleam in Aristodeus’s eyes that hit her with a barb of doubt. Quick as it had come, her sense of triumph evaporated like mist.