Assassin Read online

  “Purify our homeworlds first! Let Krevo wait! Purify the homeworlds!”

  Kahn’s agent breaks in, before the capital police club him silent and haul him off. He shouts: “The Children of Always must make room for the Children of Never!” The cheering from the mob is loud and sustained. Then they attack the police.

  The war that’s about to start with the Calmar Union will make it all so much easier, frightening billions of ordinary Grünen who understand that Krevans might be beaten quickly, although they aren’t, but that Calmari will surely fight all out as their ancestors fought: for years, maybe even for decades. Pyotr and Purity are about to mount a bengal tiger’s back. They think a hunting tiger god will be their vahana, that they’ll ride Chitan Deo off to war. But if Maximilian Kahn has his way, they’ll never manage the dismount. They’ll be consumed by their hubris. Then they’ll be eaten by his God. Then the Arahitogami can and will ascend.

  Maximilian Kahn’s is a different sort of greatness. Not a genius of thought or action but of setting and theme. He’s exactly the right man to lead the Brethren at this most critical moment in their long history. Thus, he persuades the High Council that hitched to war is an opportunity to drag the Tennō from the Jade Throne, and wreck forever the traitorous Houses of Oetkert-Shaka. In place of the old royals, they’ll erect a righteous regime of the restored One True, Black Faith, rededicated to awaiting the arrival of the true Arahitogami. A new, Holy Empire will one day conquer the Thousand Worlds under his leadership, as prophesy promises. Until then, it’s the duty of all the righteous to serve and secure “God’s Hermetic Revelation for the Universe.”

  Maximillian Kahn is one of the most dangerous men in Orion. Humble and scholarly on his best days, he discovered his talent at the Jade Court and in Novaya Uda. Underlying his destiny, he finds an inner pride he didn’t know was there. He knows that he’ll be the one to complete the messiah mission that pioneers of Deus ex Machina began, before the Sword Brothers strayed into pursuit of material and meaner things. He’ll reform their whole Order, return it to its crusading purpose to build “God’s Empire in this Universe.” Then he and his fellow Brethren will force everyone to be free. They’ll have a choice, of course. If they prefer heresy to truth, they can choose to die.

  ***

  Astonishingly, shy and unsophisticated Kahn emerges as a people’s tribune with a real talent for forensic oratory. He even goes out to speak in the Great Temples of the city. When he looks over a crowd of poor and ignorant listeners, he crosses both hands over his breast as though he’s holding two hearts with which to feel their suffering. He learns how a crowd can be changed into a mob with a turn of phrase. He sends one mob to plunder the tower of an unpopular merchant, another mob to murder an even less popular industrial baker who is accused of raising prices and withholding bread. The mobs join, and ransack the warehouses.

  Local police watch and report.

  But the police don’t intervene.

  He has protected, diplomatic status.

  Behind the scenes, Takeshi Watanabe

  is also at work, furthering even more unrest.

  Wheels inside wheels, spinning gyros faster.

  Maximilian Kahn wants insurrection against SAC and the Waldstätte. He will foment slow rebellion in Novaya Uda, largest city by far in the Imperium and the high seat of Pyotr Shaka’s and High Caste power. He’ll inspire a revolt by outcaste masses that will only set the stage for the Brethren’s far greater revolt, against the entire Old Order and Oetkert-Shaka imperial families.

  ‘When the final rising comes, insecure with the General Curia and unloved and unwanted by his peoples, Pyotr Shaka must return to the Broderbund. Turn to me, for safety and salvation.’ Then will come his moment. He’ll call out a thousand newly made Hashâshīn clones, kept in secret from the Dowager after she destroyed their mountain fortress, and marshaled in silence inside the city over the past two years. Tens of thousands of unrobed acolytes, a horde of postulants, will rush into battle at his word, at the head of mobs of outcastes and hill folk that number in the millions. They’ll kill the Order’s enemies on Kestino, all at once.

  Hashâshīn will not fail to kill Pyotr this time. They’ll strangle the fat Tennō in his chambers and roust and slaughter the Royal Canaries, while hidden regiments of dāsa troops, led by newly frocked berserker postulants, smite down SAC with God’s justice. They’ll kill and burn gray men inside their Main HQ, the heretic fortress on the shore of Lake Isis. Kahn will lead the righteous Brethren in a return to power at the Jade Court and on Kestino. They’ll ruin the arrogance of the old High Caste families, push stirring outcaste scum down into their proper places, then rule everyone from new commanderies, as God has always intended.

  God foresees all.

  God forgets nothing.

  God wants the gray men dead.

  God wants Pyotr overthrown.

  God wants cowled men in power.

  And he’s coming to lead them,

  in this time, wearing Holy Flesh.

  Will the mass bloodletting and betrayal disturb Maximilian Kahn’s conscience or his sleep? Not even if it fails. He’ll conclude that he misread the signs and try it again. His hermetic idealism is unassailable. He’s a true zealot. Neither time nor defeat nor bloodshed ever disturbs the faith or sleep of the truly devout. It’s his foremost advantage, and his greatest vulnerability.

  ***

  There’s a knock at Kahn’s door. It’s the diplomatic courier from Terra Deus with the weekly run. He looks and sounds different today. There’s something very special in the coded scrolls, he was told. Kahn unrolls a message that, when he decodes it, defaults into a language only he and others in the inner circle of high priests of the Broderbund can read. For it’s written in deva nagari, the ancient ur script of the Corpus Hermeticum, spoken and written eons ago in Nineveh, the City of the Gods. It was lost ever after to all but inner Brethren. The High Council has never used this layer of coding in all of Maximilian Kahn’s twenty years on Kestino. He trembles in amazement as he reads it.

  ‘Oh, joyous news!’

  ‘Oh, news divine!’

  ‘Is the messiah truly here?’

  ‘Can it really be true, at last?’

  ‘Has he arrived in mine own lifetime?’

  ‘I must confirm this reading. I must know.’

  ‘Only tell me, how may I serve thee, my Lord?’

  High Councilors have set a new policy. Not only must Pyotr be assassinated and dethroned as Tennō, the vacated Jade Throne must never again be fouled by any Oetkert’s buttocks. It’s to be mounted instead by the true Arahitogami. And very soon. In months or years, not centuries. After millennia of study of the Corpus Hermeticum and the Enuma Anu Enlil I & II, after a thousand lifetimes of devotion and divination, Brethren have finally traced who he is, and where!

  Chiyoko

  Kahn frets for days, lying sleepless in his commandery on a closed off island far out on Lake Isis. Each night he reaches across the bed and fills his hand with a woman’s breast, reaches down to part her clenched legs and climbs on top, with a grunting old man’s effort. For a few minutes he forgets complex plots and worries. Maximilian Kahn is no dry virgin. Yet for the first time in his life he has a woman to share his thoughts as well as fill his bed. Not one of the simpleminded dāsa slaves to whom he was accustomed on Fates. Their role was concubine, or when he grew bored, to birth his seven bonded sons.

  This is different. The woman who lies beside him and under him, who rides on top of him, is a lady. A woman of breeding and education, of blood royale and the highest genetic lines: none other than Chiyoko Shaka Oetkert, sister of Emperor Pyotr. Arrested on the night he killed her mother, on his Coronation Day she was handed as a prisoner by her laughing brother to the untender care of the misogynist Broderbund. Pyotr thought it terribly funny to confine her in their dreariest offworld convent. An awful, spartan place where Brethren park older, worn out mother-wives whose child bearing years are spent. Chiyoko was held
as a prisoner there, in with the moths for nearly fifteen years.

  She was confined to a cribbed room in a hot, sandstone convent prison in the bleak desert of Terra Deus, at the foot of Mount Meru. She was forced to scrub her own poor things, and to eat in the common kitchen along with used up old women or discarded, because childless, younger clones. She worked the dry, scrabbly gardens to grow vegetables for her supper. When the rains failed, as they did every third year or so, she hungered. Then she was spirited back to Novaya Uda five years ago, entirely unbeknownst to Pyotr. She was smuggled into Maximilian Kahn’s commandery by the High Council to keep him content, after he complained for the thousandth time that he only wanted to return to the Great Uruk Library carved into the rocks deep beneath the surface of Fates. The old bastards knew that he needed a companion of the mind more than of the body, but that Chiyoko could do that, too. She has spent the last five years locked inside his rooms, walking his compound, and servicing his bed.

  She’s more tormented than she ever was in her convent prison. For she lives in sight of Pyotr but utterly beyond his ken, gazing at the towers of Novaya Uda from a center island on Lake Isis. From the top of Kahn’s commandery fortress, ten klics from the farside lakeshore, Lady Chiyoko can see immense graphene pillars and the massive central dome of the Waldstätte. She gazes with hatred on the immense gray dome. Not only because she knows who rules from there, but because he wrecked her childhood home and built a monstrosity in its place.

  Chiyoko is an ugly woman, but more than just a little clever. She’s brilliant, a fact she never let her brother forget and that he never forgave. She despises his replacement palace’s gargantuanism just as she despises its designer and lord and master. Its pretension to unearned greatness grates against memories of her old life under tall spires, and playing in wide open gardens of the demolished palace. It was the place she was born, where she spent her happiest years, at her mother’s side. Pyotr never forgot or forgave her for that, either. Each day, she stares daggers at unseen Pyotr under his ridiculous arches and dome. Each day, she thinks on her murdered mother and her lost future. She advises Kahn to her own ends, as she knows he conspires with and against her royal brother. In the past year, she has begun not only to advise the old man but to conspire with him as well. She doesn’t intend to dwell forever on a prison island on the lake.

  She might have ruled as Empress, if Pyotr’s silent coup had not preempted her succession and ended her freedom. She wants her future back. Even more, she wants vengeance on her brother. Her hatred for the calculating killer who deposed and so cruelly exiled her, after he poisoned their mother in front of her, hurts like a twin ectopic pregnancy. She must birth the plot she conceived with Kahn and a twin scheme conceived with another, that will overthrow him, too. Otherwise, the foul gestations must burst and kill her. She doesn’t think her captor on the island to be a good man or a bad one. Just that he’s a broker of second and third hand opinions. What radical or fanatic is not? He’s a foolish champion of religious abstraction and sky chart divinations. Mother taught her realpolitik, not superstition and divine stuff and nonsense. She chafes at it all.

  ***

  Kahn rapes her nightly. And there’s nothing she can do to stop him. He is her rapist and jailor, but her best hope for vengeance on a traitor brother. ‘He violates me, an Oetkert of the blood royale, with stained paws and foul desires and worse, his cloying and intimate sayings and affections. He must pay for that, above all.’ She hates that he touches her without permission, that he fondles and fucks her whenever he wants, however he likes. Rapes her each night with ghastly, spotted, groping old man hands, and his thin, pale old man penis. ‘Me, Chiyoko Oetkert Shaka! Born a princess of the blood royale, heiress to the greatest family in all Orion. It is not for me to spread my legs like a nagas whore for a withered priest.’

  From too many dull days and duller nights spent in the convent, Chiyoko has come to smell like old menstruation. She even looks like an unused Temple nun, hoarding her private blood in cloth napkins that she later buries after dark in secret shame at her monthly barrenness. She also smells of stymied ambition and dried up, forced and cheerless sex. She hides her lack of natural musk under cascades of lubricant perfumes that Kahn is pleased to personally bathe her in, lasciviously stroking her with sponges in a steaming bath, then drying her with towels and his scratchy tongue. Until she smells of perfumed joylessness as she goes to his bed, as dry to him as ever and with a burning rage inside. Her hate is so large it almost becomes a small thing to slip into the bed of a man seventy years her senior. To fuck a wizened and fumbling old high priest with beet black teeth, because he has power to send her back to a bleak Ordensstaadt world to rot in a dank cell until she withers and dies. Or worse, he reveals her presence on Kestino then turns her over to her brother Pyotr, for his cruel amusement.

  Kahn is unused to such strong willed women. His experience in the misogynist Broderbund was with nagas concubines, bred for extreme docility and meekness and dull wits. He doesn’t consider that Chiyoko despises everything about his centagenarian body and loathes his touch and bed. He misses how intelligent she is, doesn’t know that she thinks he is a mere prattling and zealous fool. He can see that she hopes to kill him, but puts it down to her Oetkert roots not physical revulsion for him. Anyway, he knows she won’t try before she uses his plotting against Pyotr to retake the Jade Throne for herself. Already a plan is forming in her mind, fed to her by a secret ally in the Court. That’s another thing Kahn does not know. If he did, if he knew who her secret contact was, his world would stop. Or does he know, is Kahn playing along, and also playing with her contact?

  Chiyoko knows that her name means ‘Child of a Thousand Generations,’ but she has doubts. Sipping a dark Daegu coffee she considers her name’s potential deeper meaning, as she gazes out over the shimmering waters of Lake Isis. It’s an impassible, silvery moat between her past, her prison, and her future. ‘Is my name a portent, or just another of my family’s many dynastic boasts? Pah! What’s in a name? To think it’s portentous means that I’m spending too much time inside Kahn’s fake world of geomancy, adumbration, and superstition. Now, what would Mother say and do?’ Her interests are immediate and clear. ‘I want my brother dead and the crown resting on my brow, and Friedrich freed. If I must use the vile Brethren to destroy a corrupt Old Order, well, my mother and my brother both did far worse things to gain and keep the Jade Throne.’

  She’ll manipulate Kahn’s plotting, setting him up as a Judas Goat to lure all Brethren into their final destruction. ‘I shall eliminate my competition the way Suiko eliminated Nandi Shaka, to reign as the first female Tennō. A fine blade between the right ribs, and I shall rule as did Empress Suiko. I’ll finish what Mother started, cutting out the parasite that’s suckled on Oetkert vital fluids far too long. Ritter blood will again run in rivers, even in the Ordensstaadt.’

  She’ll end a millennium of misogyny with an Empress Edict proclaiming full legal equality of women with men inside the Imperium. Not because of principle or core conviction, or concern for the fellow sufferers of her shared and persecuted gender. Not for that. She’s an Oetkert. She doesn’t think beyond herself, ever. ‘I’ll be supported by women everywhere. When they stop rocking the cradle, they’ll rock the Thousand Worlds instead. In all this, Rikugun and Kaigun will be key. Will they support me against SAC? I think so, for there’s no love lost there. I’ll tell them that I’ll restore their rights. If they still fail to support my claim, I’ll tell their wives and daughters to disobey them in all ways and things!’

  She’ll do it to trample entrenched male opposition to her violent assumption of power, to enlist an army of women in her cause. She’ll purge and kill anyone who objects to womanly rule, which she’ll sanctify without intended irony in new religious law that only she’ll control. ‘It’s past time the Black Faith served the Black Eagle of the Oetkerts, not the other way around. As Empress Chiyoko, I shall kill all the priests but keep their dour faith in
my pocket, for a hundred billion daws to peck at. I’ll break the beak of any who caw in protest.’

  She’ll work with the odious Maximilian Kahn to foment social revolution. But after his Hashâshīn strangle Pyotr and behead her brother’s key allies in SAC, Chiyoko will expose all Brethren as immoral regicides. She’ll blame them for spilling her brother’s sacred blood. She’ll cry a nile of crocodile tears to veil her own key role in the royal murder, then put on a grand funeral for Pyotr’s corpse, one to pale his green lies when he entombed their mother. ‘Mary Oetkert, I do not forget you. Or forgive him.’ Chiyoko is a true Oetkert. Murder of a family member is to her in the end an instrument of statecraft, not a crime against natural or manmade law. She will kill her brother, to advance herself.

  Even if her scheme with Maximilian Kahn fails, she has a fallback plan. A secret contact in the Jade Court. She has yet to meet the poison serpent in the flesh, but already he has made her secret promises. Chiyoko puts down her empty cup. The dregs of the dark blend are still bitter in her mouth. She walks away from the transparent armor window and view of the palace, returning to Kahn’s gloomy study. ‘The sooner I help his schemes advance, the quicker I’ll bind his withered hands for daring to caress me. I’ll cut out his tongue for his presumptuous lechery, his too intimate licks. He speaks in tongues but he shall be tongueless when he dies, inside a silent scream. This I have been promised.’

  Chiyoko knows that Kahn’s treachery runs as deep as hers. The Devil’s Disciple will accept her help to subvert Pyotr, but he’ll never restore her to the throne, as he whispers to her that he surely will. Every night, as he gropes and paws and licks her in the dark. He says it too eagerly and often to persuade her of his sincerity, hardly hiding that he wants to part her legs. Even so, she always gets wet when Kahn speaks of Pyotr’s death. She guides him inside her and clenches him there like a nagas whore, not for his sake but for a brother’s murder.