Assassin Read online

  Yet an emasculated Order survives. Its rule is over, but not its desperate faith in the ancient prophesies. And it still has Fates and Terra Deus, and the immense clone farms buried there under mountains and deserts, in racks of tanks tens of klics long and stacked a hundred or more stories deep. Higher cowls burrow into the old scrolls and divinations in the deepest vaults, looking for fresh signs of the coming of the Arahitogami, the Divine Human who will save the Black Faith and Restore God’s Justice to All the Worlds. Meanwhile, another dark influence now stands in their place at the Jade Court, in deepening shadows behind the throne.

  The Special Action Commando is elevated to primacy at the Jade Court by its central role in the mass murder of cowls. It has no rival. Dowager Mary used SAC to sate her rage. She sent the gray commandos as her Beowulf to slay Grendel for her, only to discover that his monster mother may be a less immediate but greater threat. Or is Mary Oetkert the true wretch, the monster mother? Is it her and not Grendel’s mother who is the descendant of Cain? Or is it all of us together?

  Regent

  Queen Mary quickly settles into her role as the Dowager Regent, ruling in Pyotr’s name and stead. For a year she wears widow’s black, draping a black lace shawl over her head and face. Under the delicate silk threads, from between tiny lattice work squares she watches the doings of the Jade Court, assesses its many plotters, knaves and fools. Waits for them to make their move but always moves more sharply and before they do, preempting a dozen treasons and poison plots.

  On the anniversary of the assassination she reemerges in royal green, a brace of emeralds hung around her neck, a jade tiara perched on perfect raven hair. She’s still young, and still stunning. High Caste men of ambition flock to her ballroom and seek entry to her bedroom. She spurns every would be lover and every offer of marriage, over a hundred made within the first year of her new availability after the official mourning period ends. One thrice removed Oetkert cousin leeringly points to her dead husband’s empty bed and promises to fill it, and her, “better than Karl Joseph ever could or did.” She has him whipped and ejected from the Jade Court, banned from Novaya Uda and kicked off Kestino.

  She knows that to her deeply misogynist people any marriage will rob her of real power, as everyone looks to her new husband as the more natural ruler. She won’t give any man a crown to rule over her, instead of beside her. Finally, she tells her chief adviser: “Enough fool’s errand talk of marriage! There’s too much work to be done. I haven’t the interest or the time for such nonsense. Make it stop. Make the suitors for my hand and seekers of my bed all leave!”

  “With respect, majesty. Another royal cousin is waiting for an audience. In fact, he’s asking to see you in private chambers.”

  “I am done with cousins! He’s not to be admitted to my bedchamber. Tell him that I will only receive him in the Throne Room, along with all the other fops who come to pet and prance or petition.”

  “He shall be told.”

  “I won’t have it! Make these damned fools stop coming to me. If they wish to bend the knee before me, let them do it to my regency and not to what the gossips say is my drying womanhood! Yes, I have heard the ugly whispers.”

  “But your majesty ...”

  “No, Lord Simon. Tell everyone who applies that from now on my bed is for sleeping and the doors to my chambers are closed to all and any suitors.”

  “It will be done.”

  “Be certain that it is. And let it be known as well that the next presumptuous fool who touches me will lose the offending hand.” When she said these kinds of things as Queen people understood it was almost playful, royal exaggeration. But as Dowager Regent, after the Red Purge, no one cares to take a chance.

  “How else may I assist you, Dowager?”

  “Bring me the Orders of the Day.”

  “Immediately, majesty.”

  “And my generals and admirals, too. Call the Great General Staff to order. I want to hear an up-to-date report on conditions on all our border worlds, and the state of our frontier security.”

  “They shall be summoned.”

  She won’t put at risk her own power and freedom, so she sets aside all talk of marriage. She won’t jeopardize her son’s succession, so she abjures sex and childbirth. She will carry the family forward as Dowager, then lay the burden of the future and the dynasty on Pyotr, when he matures and comes of age at 35. She’ll step into Brother Luther’s sandals in the meantime, to train her weak son to be a proper monarch. She’ll tutor him in the ways of power and survival.

  “Have the prince properly dressed for Court each day. And take away that ridiculous blue ermine bear he clings to, like it’s the swollen breast of his wet nurse! I expect him to attend and learn the arts of governance, and to be seen in the Jade Court for what he is: the rightful and future Tennō of this empire.”

  “I will attend to it, majesty.”

  “See also to his studies, Lord Simon. You will teach him basic things, the tales of history and science that he needs to know to understand the worlds. Leave the rest to me. I will guide him in the higher arts, of power and ruling.”

  “And his siblings?”

  “Chiyoko I will teach as well, but not together with Pyotr. Those two are oil and water. Leave simpleminded Friedrich to his toys and pets.”

  ***

  She makes mistakes, too. She never intended to elevate Purity or the Sakura-kai and Special Action Commandos by reducing the Broderbund. Yet the gray men enjoy newfound power at Court and on many worlds from which Brethren are banished. Officers move into ancient commanderies stolen from dead cowls they hunted down and killed, and into the beds of their younger clone mother-wives. On Fates and Terra Deus, the last brooding cowls keep watch from afar. They’re making long lists of officer names, plotting vengeance on the hated gray clad men. Their patience for revenge is infinite. They know the Dowager and SAC are mortal, but time and the gods are on their side. Always and forever.

  For two decades after Karl Joseph’s assassination the Broderbund is quiet. It trains initiates in the Ordensstaadt and grows mother-wives and dāsa in its clone vats buried deep inside the mountains, far more than anyone at the Jade Court or in the Kempeitai secret police realize. But the Order can’t break free of bonds Dowager Regent Mary makes to constrict its rights, activity and ambition. At the Jade Court, cowled religious fanatics who served her family for 1,500 years, but also controlled it, are displaced by men in gray. Secular thugs, truth be told. Lord Simon is right: the worlds are moving out of balance. The new men are in a far greater hurry for radical change than Mary wants, or can afford to tolerate.

  She regrets shifting hidden power to sleek gray men. Her husband tolerated that SAC drifted from its origins as Rikugun special forces, until it separated from its parent force to strike out on its own as an elite military service. It even set up its own Main HQ across from the Waldstätte, in an expropriated merchant house. Mary worries more than Karl Joseph about its growing dalliance with ‘New Geneticism,’ and rising militarism of its emerging biopolitics doctrine. She grows evermore concerned as she hears rumors that younger officers are devoted to Purity, that some have joined a secret society she at first thought was a merely cultural dalliance: the conspiratorial Sakura-kai, or Cherry Blossoms.

  “How many of these secessions are we to tolerate, Lord Simon? First my departed husband foolishly allowed SAC to secede from Rikugun, and now it has its own secret schismatics who plot against more senior leaders?”

  “Schism is a grotto siren’s song for the young, majesty.”

  “Even in a grotto, a ship can hit the rocks. Are you watching these fanatics?”

  “They are watched, majesty. That is why I have come to you about them.”

  “What do they really want?”

  “I don’t think even they know, majesty. They’re young, so of course they search for a higher ideal to serve than themselves or the old Imperium.”

  “Have they found it in this ‘Purity’ doctrine t
hat my foolish husband played at? Do they take it seriously, as I doubt he ever did?

  “Yes, majesty. They think they find purpose in ever thinner slices of truth.”

  So it is that ideological infiltration of the High Curia of SAC by the younger officers of Sakura-kai comes to worry Pyotr’s mother, the Dowager, as much as the Broderbund did. For the gray men grow stronger than she intends, become too independent of the throne and her own control, drive Imperium culture and military policies where she doesn’t wish them to go. As the Curia becomes more warlike in its ideals and genetist ideology, she regrets more each day the terrible rashness of her Red Purge of the Brethren. ‘That was done in too much anger. It was not the Oetkert way. Now who do I ask to encourage our best traditions, to wade in red if need be to counterbalance these overeager futurists?’

  She almost longs for the cynical old cult dwelling inside the Black Faith. Although it killed many an Oetkert-Shaka, it also sustained her family in power for more than a millennium. She knows it as an ancient, fool’s doctrine of godly personhood that waits arrival of the ‘True Tennō,’ the Arahitogami or ‘Divine Human.’ It’s an old lie, of course, that no Oetkert believes and only a minority even of the Black Faithful have heard or accept. Perhaps not even all top leaders of the Broderbund? Their true, secret doctrine has never been revealed outside the inner circles of the cult who reside in the Ordensstaadt. A far simpler version is cleaved to by ordinary Brethren, happily loyal to discipline of the flesh, daily devotions and superstitions.

  Mary fears SAC’s newer and more hasty ideology could drag the Imperium into war. War with Krevo or another small, Neutral neighbor is one thing. But a Fourth Orion War? ‘A little war might be managed, though I see less to be gained than there is to be lost. A new Orion War against Calmaris or the Hermit Empire, or gods forbid, against both at once? Disaster! ‘Lost Children’ of the Imperium. Phat! What nonsense. The only children that matter are mine!’

  She appreciates that the Imperium benefits from the balance of power that sustains the Peace of Orion, as it has done for nearly 300 years. She disagrees with those chauvinists who insist that Grünen and the Imperium are unfairly hemmed in by terms of the treaty, “denied our rightful place under the Thousand Suns, cribbed and confined by farfolk envy, conspiracy and machinations.” Those are charges SAC’s Curia makes, leaching them into the memex and thence into the culture’s bloodstream, like a virus. It’s giving vent to farfolk hate. It’s stirring the cauldron of chaos, increasing the chance for an unintended stumble. Maybe even a headlong dive into war. As Pyotr approaches the age of maturity and his ascent to the Jade Throne, she complains to her most trusted courtiers. “Those nasty men in steel gray usurp my prerogative! They are a threat to stability, with their subversive fool’s ideas about biopolitics! What trash!”

  “They’re ambitious, majesty. Of that there is no doubt.”

  “How ambitious?”

  “They’re discontent with your stewardship.”

  “Of the ship of state?”

  “Yes, majesty.”

  “And? What else?”

  “Of your tutelage of Prince Pyotr.”

  “They dare say it?”

  “They do, inside the Sakura-kai.”

  “You have failed me in this matter, Lord Simon. I do not know what I must know about this threat, so that I may protect Pyotr and the Jade Throne. I must know more about this subversive sect. Cherry Blossoms, you say?”

  “They claim to be like the cherry blossom that falls from the tree while still in perfect bloom: they vow to die eternally young, if doing so advances the cause.”

  “Don’t they know that can be easily arranged, by me?”

  “They’re true believers, majesty. As much as the last of the Brethren are.”

  “We have too much faith loose in the worlds these days. It billows the sails of internal conflict, maybe even one day soon, of war. Tell me more.”

  “One sect believes in revelations of biopolitics it reads in strands of DNA. The other dwells on what it thinks are revealed prophesies of long dead gods, that only the elite of the Brethren can read in secret ur languages they conserve, but which are lost to history and all the rest of us.”

  “Yes, yes. And how convenient that no one but they can read the Word of the Gods in long dead scrolls. But leave the mad cowls aside for now. Set out for me instead the false beliefs of SAC. What do its officers and the secret Sakura-kai really want? Why did they separate from Rikugun?”

  “They want to recover the original genome.”

  “I have no opinion and even less interest in that. What else?”

  “They want the ‘Lost Children’ worlds reunited to the Imperium.

  “So do we all, and so say we all.”

  “All of them, majesty. Not just those the Neutrals hold.”

  “That can’t be done.”

  “Because the old treaties forbid it?”

  “Because realism denies it. Too many ‘lost worlds’ lie across the Calmari border. Some even orbit Jahandar’s madness on Nalchik. The last war did not end tidily. It was a compromise all around. We lost worlds, but we hold more Calmari and Dauran worlds. Half the Neutrals of Central Orion no longer exist.”

  “The young see only the worlds we gave up, not the ones we gained.”

  “We must ensure that our people forget ‘Lost Children’ surrendered in the Golden Peace. A soft longing taught to children is one thing, but this cause must not be activated in our politics. It is the one thing that could arouse most Grünen to the old ways of farfolk war. It is the most dangerous idea in all Orion.”

  “They want them, nonetheless.”

  “What else, beyond this pipe dream? Tell me something specific.”

  “Above all things, they want to control Amasia.”

  “What?”

  “It’s the key to their genetist vision, a future vista of Purity unfolding into the future of all the Thousand Worlds.”

  “That’s not politics, that’s insanity! Beyond even monkish madness!”

  “As I said, they’re not so very different in spirit. Both exude the fanaticism of religious certitude. Sakura-kai are more hurried, and hence more dangerous. But in essence, the gray men and the cowled men are the same: both claim certitude, one based in pseudoscience and the other in pseudofaith. Both are fanatic killers.”

  “If they want to annex Amasia they want a new Great War! Amasia was and is Calmari. It is not one of our ‘Lost Children!’ We have no claim to it.”

  “They say that Purity gives them the absolute right.”

  “How can that be?”

  “They say that Calmari despoil Amasia, that by refusing to adopt Purity and secure the Lemurian genome banks they deny its key role in future history.”

  “Fanatics! So, they do want all out war in Orion?”

  “Yes, majesty. Our best embedded spies report that Sakura-kai and even most officers in SAC want a Great War. They despise your ideas about balance and hate the Golden Peace, which they feel shackles us. They think that war allows progressive genetic advance. They say war must decide who is fit to survive.”

  “Why such hurry, in all they do?”

  “They’re impatient to rearm.”

  “We are armed well enough. GGS tells me that there’s no pressing threat on any of our borders.”

  “They would not arm for defense. They would arm us differently, more fully, and to make aggressive war.”

  “I will stop them.”

  “That is why they want you gone.”

  “Enough! This is a side dream of a cult. We watch, but do not fear them.”

  “With respect. That is wrong, majesty. You should fear Purity and SAC.”

  “What is it, Lord Simon? I hear an unspoken thing hanging in the air that lies between us, some degen of the mind?”

  “I hesitate to say…”

  “You want to add something about my son? About my dead husband’s heir? I know his flaws! You will not shock me by speaking to
them. I know that he flirts with Purity. Say it now, aloud and without fear. Go on. Speak!”

  “Pyotr is young, and the young are always in a hurry. He may want to … They tempt him, majesty.”

  “He is slave to his many lusts and temptations, for he is young. How is this different?”

  “They want him to be a crusader king. They want a holy warrior for Purity mounted on the Jade Throne, not a Dowager Regent who believes in balance in all things and will do all things she can to block them.”

  “They overreach if they expect so much from him, my weak and rakish son. It will never happen! Anyway, not as long as I breathe.”

  “We must keep you breathing then.”

  “It’s as bad as that? They’re as reckless as that?”

  “Yes, majesty. Too many Sakura-kai, and some others, want you gone.”

  “I leave the Regency in three years. Is it so long to wait?”

  “It is for some. As I said, they are hasty men.”

  “And Pyotr? Is he as hasty as the others?”

  “It’s not clear, majesty.”

  “What else? I see it in your eyes, Lord Simon. Speak it!”

  “Very well, majesty. They’ve tried to convert Pyotr to biopolitical faith.”

  “He is many things, my son, but he is not an idiot. He’ll never believe that pseudoscience rubbish!”

  “He’s young, majesty, as you say and I agree.”

  “Your meaning?”

  “All youth are rushed, discontent with elders. He may not believe in Purity, but he could still ally with their movement for other reasons. His own reasons.”

  “I know he chafes under my tutelage and authority, but that is the nature of relations between a dowager and a waiting prince. It can be no other way.”

  “It does abrade his views. He does chafe. More every day.”

  “Then he’ll need to apply balm, until he mounts the throne! The coronation is only three years away, on his 35th birthday. He nears the age of majority and a heavy inheritance. Patience in this matter may yet teach him virtue.”