by Posey, Jay
“This is one of the purposes for which House Eight was built. To exert the proper pressure on the smallest possible member, to correct course when all other options have been exhausted. Above nation, above race or creed. We stand apart. In the world, but not of it... It is a terrible responsibility to bear, and one we accept with trembling.”
Foe’s explanations had begun to work on Wren; already he felt his perception shifting. He’d never considered how a law wasn’t the same thing as justice before. But hadn’t he seen it for himself, firsthand? Wasn’t that just what had happened in Morningside, even when he himself sat as governor? Even so, for all of Foe’s words, there was one question the old man hadn’t answered. And maybe couldn’t.
“But how do you know you’re right?”
Foe raised his finger and then pointed at Wren, as if to say Wren had just put his finger on the very heart of the matter. “When you are young, you are clear-eyed; you are not confused about what is good and what is evil. It is only as one ages that one becomes seduced and persuaded by the illusions that convert one to the other. In the old way, we dealt primarily in information. Gathering it, disseminating it, evaluating it. Often we were the liaison between bitter enemies, without their knowledge. I do not exaggerate when I say wars were averted because of it. But when it came time to act rather than advise, we did not trust ourselves alone. Other Houses operated independently from ours. Only when consensus was reached did we move forward. But even then, we can never be absolutely certain. Absolute certainty is the province of madmen alone.
“In reality, the mathematics of death are not complicated. It is the uncertainty that stops most people, the gap in which they allow themselves the illusion that perhaps with a little more time, another solution will appear. Countless souls have been lost to such vain hope, long after it was proven baseless. But there is a necessary precision to the calculation that escapes most. When removing a cancer, taking too much is just as deadly as taking too little.
“It is important that you understand the place that assassination has in your House. It is only a sliver of the service we performed, but it is the darkest and most difficult. You are right to wrestle with the knowledge, but you must not shy away from the reality of its necessity either. For all else we provided this world, we each will go to our graves with blood on our hands. It is the burden we bear, in service to those who could not bear it themselves.”
At long last, Foe seemed to have reached the end of his philosophical discourse on a topic Wren could have gone his whole life without discussing. And yet, now that the veil had been drawn back, he knew it was his responsibility to consider all that had been said, to weigh it, and to work out what it meant for him and his life.
“Perhaps now you can understand about Three, Wren,” Haiku said. “Why there was more to him than you first imagined.”
Wren wanted to believe, but nothing Foe had said had really changed anything. Whether House Eight considered it justified or not, Three was still ultimately a man trained to kill.
“Think about Father,” Haiku continued. “The immense skill and power he possessed. And think of all those he trained, of all those he released into the world, each armed with the knowledge and the skill to destroy it.”
Haiku sat forward, lowered his head so his eyes were level with Wren’s.
“Sometimes the power was too much. The temptations too great. And those who fell away posed the greatest threat,” he said. “You must understand, Three was charged with protecting the world from his own House. From his own brothers and sisters.”
He left the rest unsaid, just allowed the weight of implication to carry over and settle on Wren. For some reason, that made the revelation more powerful. Three hadn’t just been deployed to eliminate strangers at the word of his House. He’d hunted down men and women he’d grown up with, people who’d undergone the same training, who’d sworn the same oath. And with that realization, Wren felt profoundly sorry for Three, for the burden he must have carried, and the loneliness he must have harbored always within him.
The realization had another, unexpected effect as well. Portions of an earlier conversation came suddenly to mind, one between Haiku and Foe, the day Wren first arrived. Foe had asked what guarantee there was that Wren wouldn’t cause the same havoc as Asher; Haiku had responded that he would take “the oath”, that he would be Wren’s “pledge”. Wren looked at Haiku then, chilled by the thought.
“That’s what you meant when you said you’d be my pledge?” he asked. “If I go bad, you’re the one that will come after me?”
Haiku seemed genuinely surprised that Wren had worked that out; it was the first time Wren had even seen that expression on his face before. Haiku shot a glance at Foe, who simply smiled.
“When you leave here, and you return to that world,” Foe said, nodding towards the window. “You will walk among those people as a god. Few will be able to prevent you from exerting your will. And so, out there, you will decide whether to live as a son of the dawn or as a servant of the night. The choice is yours. But if you choose to abandon your oath, then rest assured, judgment will follow.”
“You’re wrong,” Wren said, shaking his head. “I won’t be their god.”
“When the time comes, that choice won’t be yours to make. You will act. They will respond. You cannot decide what people worship.”
“But I don’t want it.”
“Good,” Foe said. “But that makes it all the more likely.”
Wren shook his head again. “... I won’t be their god.”
Foe inhaled deeply, and when he exhaled he slapped his thighs.
“Well,” he said. “Too much talk, too heavy a topic for what was to be so restful a day.” He rose swiftly to his feet. “Come with me, boy,” he said, the way it seemed he did a thousand times a day.
The abruptness of it all stunned Wren momentarily, but he quickly recovered himself and followed obediently. As usual, Foe didn’t comment on where he was taking Wren or what he should expect. Haiku had said that any training would be light, but Wren knew his definition of easy wasn’t anything like Foe’s. To Wren’s surprise, though, Foe led him up past all the usual floors and onto one he hadn’t been allowed to visit yet. Rather than opening out to a landing or a corridor, there was simply a door at the top of the stairs. This was, apparently, the top of the tower. Foe stood facing the door, and a moment later it slid open. Wren was immediately inundated by a warm and scented breeze.
Foe stepped into the room. Wren followed after and froze at the entry way. The room was massive, the largest he’d seen yet. Long and wide, sprawling. It was warmer by at least ten degrees than everywhere else he’d been, and the air was sweet and fresh. And everywhere he looked, color. Bright, vibrant oranges, and reds, and yellows, along with muted pinks and purples, amidst lush greens. Electric lights burned with an intensity Wren hadn’t seen anywhere else in the tower, almost overpowering.
“What... what is all of this?” he asked.
Foe paused in the middle of the room and turned back. “Flowers, boy.”
And so they were. Laid out in elevated beds, arranged in a grid, with narrow aisles separating each from the other.
“Come along,” Foe said, and continued down the centermost aisle. Wren hurried to catch up, his eyes roving the entire time across the explosion of life and color that surrounded him. He’d never seen such a thing, had never imagined it. He’d seen flowers before, of course, though they’d mostly been synthetic ones. But never had he seen flowers of any kind in this quantity. It was astounding and dazzling to his senses.
Foe led him to what appeared to be a tall workbench along the back wall. On it were a number of tools, as well as several bundles of various flowers, recently cut. Dozens of vases hung on a rack above it, but one small blue vase sat on the workbench to one side. Three tall stools sat in front of the bench, all pushed into a neat row along its right side.
“That,” Foe said, pointing to the vase, “is for you.”
“Thank you,” he said automatically. And then, “What do I do with it?”
“You put flowers in it,” Foe said with a chuckle. He swept his hand vaguely over the variety of flowers laid out on the workbench. “Take any from here that you like.”
The flowers on the workbench had been laid in bundles by kind, fifteen or so by quick estimate. Large blossoms of rich purple, vivid orange, fiery red. And with them, lighter, more delicate varieties; white buds like snowflakes, or threadlike stems tipped with pale pink, so thin Wren feared a too-strong exhale might melt them to nothing. Foe stood by, watching him as he looked over his options. There was a test here, Wren sensed, but he had no idea what it was.
“I like these orange ones,” he said. It was true, he did like them, but he mostly only said it to buy himself some time to figure out what he was really supposed to be doing.
“Those only?” Foe said, after a moment of silence.
“And the little white ones,” Wren said, though he made no motion towards either. Now that he was aware of Foe’s gaze, he was afraid of committing some grievous error. What was he missing? He stood there, hands at his sides, for thirty or forty seconds, weighing his choices, searching for that hidden option he hadn’t yet detected.
“Boy,” Foe said finally. “Take the flowers you like and place them in your vase in a way that suits you. There is no trap here.”
Reluctantly, Wren gathered a few of the orange-blossomed flowers along with the spidery ones with the white buds. He didn’t know the names of either of them, nor indeed of any of the others on the table. Roses he knew, and sunflowers, but that was it. He started to put the long-stemmed orange flowers in but stopped himself. Better to put the white ones in first, he thought. He tried it that way and found that the many-branched stems of the white flowers supported the orange ones and filled out the space in a way that was pleasant to him, even though he hadn’t necessarily planned it. It seemed nice enough, the orange and white. But it was incomplete. He scanned the workbench again and his eye came to rest on the few yellow flowers that lay together. There were only three of them. The stems were dark, long, and slender to the point of almost fragility, with a yellow bloom explosion on top. When he picked one up, though, he found the stem was woody; flexible but strong. Something about it reminded him of his Mama. Wren tucked the flower in amongst the others, and its blossom stood just above the rest, a yellow sunburst atop a fiery sky.
“Mm,” Foe said, his signature noise that Wren still didn’t know how to interpret.
“I thought you said there wasn’t a trap,” Wren said.
“So I did, and so I meant,” Foe replied, but he evaluated the flowers as if there was meaning hidden within. “Bright colors, that is encouraging. Good balance, if not symmetry... And who does the yellow flower represent, I wonder?” This last he said with a knowing smile as he looked at Wren out of the corner of his eye. He dragged a stool over beside Wren. “Sit.”
Wren climbed up on to the stool while Foe took down a vase from the rack above the workbench. The old man began selecting several flowers from among the variety.
“Tell me, boy,” he said. “What is your purpose?”
He asked the question casually, as if he’d asked Wren’s opinion on the weather or his meals.
“For... for what?” Wren said.
“For yourself,” Foe said. He didn’t look at Wren; he was focused on his flowers, which he was now placing into his own vase with deliberate care.
As if that clarified anything. Wren didn’t have to think about his answer for that long, though; he spent more time trying to find the words to make it sound as noble as he hoped it was.
“To protect the world from the threat that my brother poses to it,” he said.
“Mm,” Foe hummed. “And if you are successful?”
It seemed like something Wren should have had an answer to, but the question caught him off guard. He’d been focused on the confrontation, on the slender hope he had in overcoming Asher. The idea that something might come after it hadn’t yet occurred to him.
“Mm,” Foe said again, off Wren’s hesitant silence. “If you are successful, what will you do then, boy? What will define your life, when you have your revenge?”
The word struck Wren more harshly than the question.
“It’s not revenge,” he said.
“Is it not?” Foe said. Still he placed his flowers in the vase before him.
“No,” Wren said, but the fact that Foe had asked planted a seed of doubt.
“Not for your city? For the loss of your title and authority?”
“No,” Wren said again. It wasn’t just revenge, was it?
“For Three?”
Wren felt the hurt as if Foe had struck an unprotected nerve, and the intensity of the emotion surprised him. It was a question he didn’t want to answer. A question he didn’t want to let himself even consider. What Asher had done to Morningside was horrific beyond Wren’s imagining. But somehow the loss of the city was less personal, the pain less acute, than what Asher had taken away when he’d killed Three. Now, confronted with the question, Wren found himself filled with a burning anger. An anger he knew he could draw upon when the time was right. Did that make it revenge?
“Revenge will consume you, boy, and leave you an empty husk of a better man,” Foe said, and he turned away from his flowers then and looked Wren in the eye. “It is beneath this House.”
After a long moment, he turned away and slid his vase closer to Wren. Now it contained just a few flowers, beautifully arranged. The arrangement was not just of pretty colors, but was masterfully structured in a way that evoked motion, and life. Foe took down another vase, identical to his, and placed it in front of Wren. “Recreate this,” he said, motioning to the arrangement.
He sat down on a stool of his own. Wren stood, his mind swirling with thoughts of Asher and Three and revenge and purpose, and already felt defeated. There was no way he could recreate the work of art before him. He stood there, overwhelmed.
“One flower at a time,” Foe said.
Wren took a deep breath and looked more closely at the arrangement, not as a whole, but in its individual components. One at a time. He began by counting how many of each flower he would need.
“Purpose and code, boy,” Foe said. “Purpose, and code. These are the boundaries that channel a man’s intensity to useful ends.” He paused for a moment while Wren finished selecting the necessary flowers. Once Wren had the right components, he began replicating the arrangement as best as he could.
Foe continued as Wren worked.
“A code without purpose, and he becomes a slave, obeying without judgment, passion, or understanding. Purpose without code, and he will be a force of chaos, leaving a path of destruction and brokenness in his wake as he undertakes any means to achieve his ends. Without either, he is nothing more than an animal, chasing the moment’s desire, living at the mercy of his basest instincts. But a man with both, ah, now there is a power to behold.”
Wren placed his flowers as carefully as he was able, but even with only the first few in the vase he could tell something wasn’t right. Even so, there was something soothing about the process, something almost hypnotic in the recreation. Foe’s words, half attended to, somehow seemed to find their way straight into his heart.
“The oath you have sworn will serve as a code for the rest of your life, if you will embrace it and allow it to guide you,” Foe said. “But no one can tell you your purpose. And without it, you will be only a shadow of the man you are intended to be.”
Wren finished placing the last flower into the vase. He’d chosen the right flowers, and the correct number, and as far as he could tell he’d put them in the right positions, but something was lacking. His arrangement didn’t have the same
expression, the same vitality that Foe’s did.
“It’s not quite right,” Wren said, stepping back from the workbench. “But I don’t know what’s wrong.”
“Mm,” Foe said. “A fair attempt. You have the eye for detail. It is in the hand that you lack.” He placed a hand on top of Wren’s head. “Do not be discouraged. I have practiced for many decades and I too still have much to learn.
“Purpose,” Foe said a moment later. “This you will contemplate tonight, in the open.”
“Outside?” Wren asked.
“Yes, boy,” Foe replied.
Wren’s head still hadn’t cleared from all he’d been hit with throughout the day. This last shock hardly had the impact that it might have otherwise. The fear rose up, but it was muted.
“You may leave whenever you are ready,” Foe said, and then added, “It is not punishment.”
Wren nodded, though he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it.
“You may take your flowers to your room,” Foe said. Wren nodded, numbly took the blue vase from the workbench, followed Foe out of the flower room.
The rest of the day was thin with tension; Wren’s understanding of having to find a place to hide for the night overpowered by his desire to soak up every last bit of comfort he could find within the tower. He spent most of the afternoon sitting on his bed, looking at his little flower arrangement, thinking of his Mama, and of Three, and of his purpose, and of revenge. But time slipped by and towards the late afternoon, Wren asked Haiku to escort him downstairs to the front of the tower.
And so it was that as the sun sank towards the horizon, he found himself once more locked outside, alone and facing the night.
TWENTY-SIX
jCharles picked three drinks up off the bar and turned back towards his business table, in the back corner of the place. 4jack and Mr 850 were both hanging out there; 4jack, leaning back in his chair with his feet on the table, was blabbing away about something or other while Mr 850 was looking down at the table, not even bothering to pretend he was listening. It’d probably been twelve or fourteen years since they’d seen each other. It’d only taken about three minutes for them to fall right back into old patterns. jCharles weaved his way around the tables, headed towards his friends.