Haze and the Hammer of Darkness (65 page)

The assassin bites hard on a back tooth, one designed in a special way, but before the nerve poison can take full effect he collapses under three separate stun beams, one from each overhead blister.

The remaining travelers gingerly step around the twitching body, avoid looking down, and make their declarations to the other two customs officials.

The man in black does not look back.

After a time, the assassin's body is still, and, shortly, is removed. Three disposal units roll from a recess in the tunnel wall. The body is lifted into the first. The second sterilizes the floor and surrounding area. The third does nothing.

The last of the passengers from the
Grand Duke
steps around the three metallic units and presents her declaration to the sole customs officer left. By the time the clearance light has flashed green, the tunnel is empty, and the guards in their blisters have punched the standby studs, to wait for the next arrivals.

 

xlvi

May the wind rise in dusty rooms, rooms for sex and sensuality, and let us not call either a sin, for sinning is a term implying an absolute morality, and the gods of the Empire, the gods of Aurore, accept no morality and know no absolutes.

While they know no absolutes, they know well the power of belief in absolutes, and revel in that power.

While the winds of sex and not-sinning spin in quiet circles, rise and die, rise and die in polished sheets and damp skin, in eternal light and in eternal darkness, and in the grubby universe in between, the gods of Aurore gather upon the holy peak Jsalm.

Some glitter, like Emily, and some, like the Smoke Bull, wrap misty darkness around themselves like a cloak. Each has an individual aspect and an energy presence, but what these gods that are, beings that were, do with their appearance with the light and power they draw from the field matters little.

That they have all met on the sacred peak in person is what matters, for it was in the time of the immortal Viceroy's grandfather before the Empire of Man became the Empire of Light that they last gathered. Two have often met, perhaps three, even five, but never have all met since that time.

Apollo flares and bends the light around him, and the Smoke Bull snorts and casts little rings of darkness at the feet of those who manifest them.

“Martel has left,” announces Apollo.

“Karnak,” verifies the winged siren Direne, and the gods who are close enough to their maleness bend toward the lure of her voice.

Another goddess closes her eyes, thinks of her son, and wonders how soon before she will behold a leaden shield.

“I must think,” thunders the hammer-thrower.

“Think … think while you can, old throwback to antiquity,” murmurs the Goat, his red eyes laughing at the prospect of chaos.

“Remember,” adds Apollo, “he is still the undeclared god, and the hope of the hopeless, and all that implies.”

… and all that implies
 … The thought hangs over Jsalm long after the congregation has departed, long after they have turned their thoughts to the future, all but two, whose thoughts are on the past, and what it means.

 

xlvii

Martel wanders down the long parade of Emperors, past the glittering lights of the Everlight Palaces, past the modest coolights of the Longlife Homes, past even the Mausoleums of Remembrance, as the promenade narrows to a boulevard to an avenue to a street to a lane and to less than an alley among the hulks of empty walls.

One fully intact structure still stands, but the steps to the temple are barred by a laser screen. Organized religion has been banned on Karnak since the Great Upheaval, the greatness of that catastrophe attested to by the fact that not even the Empire dares to raze the temple of the Black One, only spend gigawatts of hard-earned power to shield the black marble columns with a robe of death-light.

The teletales of the sweepers flicker, throwing amber flashes on the tumbled walls outside the laser beams.

“Do I dare to touch the strings of time … to taste the tartness of the lime … to think no thoughts in rhyme.” Martel stops. The words are in a tongue too old for even the databanks of the sweepers, and besides, the wench is not dead, but the ruler of the sweepers.

He studies the walls of fire before the temple and sighs.

“'Tis hardest to refrain, and therein lies the paradox … just a chatty old man you are, Martel, obsessed with your words, and knowing words are enough, and yet not enough.”

He stares at the temple another long moment, then ignores the bones that crunch beneath his feet as he approaches the light knives that have claimed so many over the past millennium.

“Just a gesture, for old times' sake,” he says, knowing that the banks of recorders will relay it all to the Viceroy of Karnak.

Wrapping the darkness tighter about him, he bends and picks up a jawbone, several teeth still intact, and thrusts it through the weaving net of lasers. The bone and teeth vanish in an acrid puff of smoke. Martel withdraws his untouched arm and black sleeve.

As the flashing of the teletales begins to build, the one who calls himself Martel strides into the shadows dripping from the shattered walls of the ancient dwellings that surround the Black One's temple. He is gone, gone even from the wide-angle, time-perfected spyeyes of the teletales.

 

xlviii

The Viceroy watches the scene from the third teletale disc, and although the angle differs, the picture is the same. The stocky figure in black, white bone in the left hand, thrusts through the laser screens with a puff of smoke. The bone is gone, but he withdraws his untouched hand and arm and disappears into the shadows. None of the teletales have been able to catch the man's face.

“Tell me what you saw, Forde,” commands the actual and titular ruler of Karnak, planet of long life and capital of the Western Reaches of the Empire of Light.

“I saw what you saw, Lady,” answers the man in red, who has begun to resign himself to a drastic reduction in his life expectations.

She purses her lips, then laughs.

“Forde, you please me. That is one answer which I might accept.”

Forde bows. Tall as he is, overtopping the slender figure worn by the Viceroy, he is all too aware of how appearances deceive, all too aware his continuation rests on a patience that can be as short-lived as a laugh.

“You may go.”

Forde bows again, and strides for the portal.

The Viceroy lifts her finger, then lowers it. Forde's second in command would have tried to answer the question. Better a clever schemer who knows his limits than an ambitious power-grabber who recognizes neither limits nor gods.

The man in black seemed familiar, whether she could see his face or not, and that bothers the Viceroy. The color black has unpleasant associations, reminding her of matters better left forgotten.

She represses a shudder. Perhaps she can again forget. Perhaps.

She touches the arm of the high chair that is not quite a throne.

“Query?” The well-modulated voice of the databanks forms in the empty space in front of her. She could use her screen faster than the vocal mode, but she isn't in the mood. Or she could link directly with the system, but that is not called for at the moment, she feels. Besides, she wants to be alone with her thoughts, and with the direct link she certainly does not feel alone.

“Linkage probabilities between the man in black at the temple of the Black One and the code file ‘Interest Black'?”

The Throne Room is silent.

“Linkage between the recently observed man in black and the Black One variable, depending on validity of Kyre-Brackell hypothesis and associated Auroran phenomena. Range from thirty percent to eighty percent.

“Linkage between man in black and code file ‘Interest Black' approaches unity.

“Linkage between the Black One and code file cannot be calculated.

“Further query?”

The Viceroy purses her lips once more.

Why would there be any linkage between the man in black and the Black One? But why would her sources on Aurore merely have suggested her agents assassinate the man in black? How had he managed the failure? For that alone he deserved to live, at least until she could discover if he had a certain method for beating the Guild. That she could use.

She frowns.

Why was his bearing familiar?

At last, she shakes her head. Maybe the familiarity was only an illusion, a similarity to someone else.

 

xlix

Rydal and Commoron drift across the Lake of Dreams in a swanboat, a common swanboat with second-degree time-stretching and pleasure-lifting intensifiers. They thus prolong each instant into hours, trying to grasp the feeling of eternal life and youth.

The swanboats on the Lake of Dreams are all the two will know of long life or of centuries as frequent as sunrises. Rydal and Commoron are poor, limited to extensive wardrobes, limited in travel to the grand city of Karnak, limited to one “now,” waiting for a death that will arrive long before the Viceroy has skimmed another millennium down the timetrack.

“I saw a streak of black along the far shore.”

“No one walks that shore, Commoron. That's from the ruins of death.”

“That's why I noticed it.”

“You shouldn't be noticing such things now.”

“Why doesn't the Viceroy,” persists Commoron, “just level the Black One's temple?” She finishes with the symbol of the looped cross.

“Because,” answers her lover, the poor Rydal, “the Black One remains trapped within the temple, like you're trapped within my boat.”

Rydal ignores the fact that the swanboat is not his, as youths have done in all times and in all cultures.

“No one wears black on Karnak,” Commoron muses.

“Then you didn't see a streak of black,” he responds, before kissing her hand and drawing her to him.

The swanboats, including the one containing Rydal and Commoron, circle the Lake of Dreams on their preprogrammed patterns, twining their intricate paths for poor lovers clutching a moment out of time.

And yet … do those poor lovers know something in their blindness?

They do not. It only seems so, particularly to gods who are searching for humanity in a race that has never really had it.

Martel knows about the swanboats and favors them with a glance as he walks the ruinshore side of the Lake of Dreams, the side he had never walked as a student. He inhales the too-strong scent of trilia and novamella that crosses the water from the pleasure groves on the opposite side, beyond the dreaming couples in the swanboats.

Too much of a scent, like too much power, often has the wrong effect.

He smiles at the thought, but the smile is not a pleasant one, for his eyes are cold.

The Viceroy's Palace is at the far end of the lake, where the dark water lightens into the brilliant blue bay and where the sun always shines, even when it has set.

The swanboats do not go nearly that far, milling around as they do near the end of the Avenue of Emperors, not nearly far enough from a small square and a jet-black temple that has resisted a millennium and more of the Empire's best weapons.

The temple is guarded only because it could not be destroyed, not without taking most of the city with it, and neither the Regent nor the Grand Duke had wished that, not when the Park of Summer had already been destroyed by the Dark One and the Tree of Darkness.

The Dark One has not been seen since, excepting reports that He has reappeared on Aurore and will return to His true believers. Or reports that he has appeared on Tinhorn, or Mardreis, or Sileom, or any one of a hundred worlds outside the mainstream of the Empire.

In the interim, neither age nor weapons have changed the temple, and the faithful still worship, though no litany exists, nor any true priests.

Martel knows these facts and quickens his pace. The Viceroy is waiting.

 

l

The Viceroy has a name, not that anyone has dared to use it since the Great Upheaval. She is addressed as “Lady” and other honorifics by those who must answer to her, and in other terms by those who do not.

She bites her lower lip as she gazes from her window at the morning light playing upon the blue waters of the great Lake of Dreams.

The fallen one, the man in black who is more than he seems, will arrive shortly. Of that she is certain.

Turning from the wide unglassed and open window, through which nothing but light and clean air can pass, she takes a deep breath. This day, the palace has given the air the delicate scent of sand fir.

She returns to pondering the matter of the man in black. What remains most uncertain is the purpose for which he has left Aurore and come to Karnak. His modesty also bodes ill, for the gods of Aurore, who have seldom returned to the Empire, are not known for their modesty.

The last time a god came to the people, rather than the other way around, led to the revivals that led to the Great Upheaval and the downfall of the Prince Regent. The Viceroy's edict banning organized religion still stands, although the temples, shrines, and churches are open to all—except for the one black marble temple. Anyone can worship any god, or none, but there are no priests and no services.

The precautions have worked for a thousand years.

Still … she shivers.

Why would anyone want to leave being a god to come back to risk death, or destruction, at the hands of the Empire?

She has no doubts that the full firepower of an Imperial battle cruiser will turn the strange man in black to ashes and vapor—at least away from Aurore.

So why does he court death?

Or does he?

Is that flicker of black along the far side of the lake the man-god she expects? So soon?

She speaks to the empty air.

“A man in black will arrive shortly. I will see him as soon as he arrives.”