Assassin Read online

  It was war for all or nothing.

  It was make a mass conversion,

  or accept a mass extinction.

  All conquered worlds converted.

  An empire spanned South Orion.

  To balance, another formed in the North,

  and a third sprawled across the Western stars.

  The grand bargain next sent Imperium warships and dāsa armies of the Black Faith out to wage the First Orion War. The first all out, no-holds-barred clash of three still forming empires. Elite, green robed ritter left Rudkhan Castle on covert missions, with short black degen tucked into their belts and secret poisons in hand. Special targets died quickly in the dark. Assassination became as common as rain, aiding new conquests by the armies or paying back defeats. Brethren added fire of fanaticism to the forges of Oetkert industry, and the Imperium spread like a swift plague over the austral stars of Orion. Everywhere they went, Brethren and Oetkert-Shakas melded religiously sanctioned slavery and eugenics theory with military might of the Waldstätte. They were met by hard resistance everywhere, from ruthless if backward Daurans in the north to coalitions of advanced Neutrals and the disguised empire called the Calmar Union, in the south and west.

  Before Agni’s holy fire was spent, and Brethren settled down as partner rulers and masters over a vastly expanded realm, the bastard descendants of Deus ex Machina helped the Oetkert-Shaka dynasty overrun nearly a third of the Thousand Worlds. So the wars got even bigger. The other empires formed what is today called the ‘Auld Alliance, and struck back. The First Orion War was followed by a Second, then by the Third and greatest. The ‘Auld Alliance of Dauran and Calmari, along with most Neutrals of central and southern Orion, stopped five centuries of aggressive war and expansion. A stalemate ensued, a cold balance of power and resistance that compelled the Broderbund and Imperium to accept the bitter cup of poison farfolk called the Golden Peace of Orion.

  Well, that’s the nice way to say what happened just under 300 years ago. It’s the way the scholars and other propagandists say it in the Historia Humana volumes and official histories. In fact, it was a diktat masquerading as a peace, as a negotiated settlement. It was forced on the Imperium by Alliance ‘nudger’ genocides on Setubal and Lugo, and a threat to next target the new capital of Kestino as well as all Ordensstaadt and Waldstätte worlds. When the Imperium counter threatened an all out nudger war, a soft truce was agreed. The balance of terror lasted for nearly 300 years, an absence of war we only called peace.

  ***

  Oetkerts won an empire but paid a weighty internal price. After centuries of war and hundreds of conquered and annexed worlds, the Broderbund der Ritter was elevated to the secret power behind the Jade Throne of the Imperium. From the end of the First Orion War, only its High Council decided which Oetkert wore the Jade Crown and for how long, and when it was time for a different sanctified head to loll and wobble above tautening silk strangulation cords. The Imperial Family birthed Tennōs, yet Oetkert-Shakas did the Brethren’s bidding. No Tennō was safe or secure on the throne. Not when the Order looked to secret texts to find “the true Arahitogami,” a mystic creature only its innermost circle of priests could divine, but who is destined to rule over all Orion.

  Or so says the High Council. Power to legitimize with religious sanction was the ultimate source of its hold over the Jade Court and Imperial Family, which in true Oetkert fashion felt no gratitude whatever for service by ritter or dāsa troops. It was usually enough for the Brethren to suggest a course of action or change in policy to have it done by royal decree. There was always the option of poison or the silk cords or a degen if the current ruler resisted, and always another vain and ambitious Oetkert-Shaka willing to mount the Jade Throne in place of a murdered father or uncle. The system worked well for 1,500 years. Until it didn’t. Until a failed attempt to kill Pyotr in his child’s bedroom, and Chiyoko in hers. Until the stillborn rage of the Dowager Regent birthed the Red Purge. Until banishment and exile and replacement by men in gray. Until doubt crept in over the old prophesies, and new cowls like Maximilian Kahn stepped up to find hidden revelations in the crypts that might return the Brethren to power.

  Brethren slept through unrest fermenting inside Grün society after the long wars of empire ended. They had lost the outlet of displacing dissatisfaction into external aggression, and lost the ability to share out spoils from conquered worlds. Like all slaveowner classes, the High Council couldn’t conceive how something bubbling from below could alter settled affairs at the top. Never foresaw that the lower might rise up to overthrow the higher, that the secular could displace the divine, or heresy could triumph at the heart of God’s Empire. They missed the real danger of a mass, ideological challenge from Purity’s ‘biopolitics.’ They thought it was secular nonsense that could never compete with the power of revelation enshrined in the Black Faith. Couldn’t see that the ideas spewing from Pusan were no more or less crackpot than their own. Deluded with overconfidence, with the gods on its side the High Council chose to wait out the storm. And so the canker of Purity grew inside the body politic, until it laced through root and branch of all classes and castes in society.

  The High Council awakened to mortal danger only when Pyotr’s father, Karl Joseph Shaka XIV, showed signs of favoring Sakura-kai, a cabal of radical SAC officers devoted to ending the stranglehold on power of the atrophied Broderbund; and to ending the Long Peace the cowls had signed onto and accepted ever since. An assassination of the ruling Tennō was debated inside the High Council, but set aside when he warranted 50,000 commanderies for their avaricious sergeants and postulants ready to ascend in rank and property. They thought Karl was playing the old Oetkert game. They thought he was only trying to counterbalance them by secretly promoting SAC and Sakura-kai, and that his new fortress offer was a renewed kowtow to their continued power once he was discovered.

  Finally, Tennō Karl made his move. He promoted three SAC marshals and hence their radical Purity ideas to his Council of State. Then he let SAC build a prominent HQ across from the Waldstätte Palast, converting an old mercantile house. Heresy sat in pride of place along the shore of Lake Isis. Tolerating the Oetkert illusion of balancing was one thing, open defiance was quite another. High Councilors gave the order: “Kill the Tennō, for his disobedience to God.” The order arrived at Rudkhan Castle in the Alborz Mountains of Terra Deus, and two teams of five Hashâshīn each embarked on covert ships for Kestino.

  High Council spies knew it was Karl’s hidden pleasure to dress in common mufti, to disguise himself as an ordinary worker and prowl the Old City barrios and the Farfolk Quarter of Novaya Uda, moving among the cathouses with just four guards also dressed in mufti. As if he was some ordinary High Caste noble out to drink and whore his fill. So they set him up, not just for murder but also humiliation for his debauchery. Five holy assassins, with all white-on-white eyes, elevated by lethal doses of blessed robusto, were sent to strangle him. But first, they used his lecherous habits against him, sending green silk cords ahead on the person of an exotic lady of the evening known to permit the Tennō to tie her up. He was lured by her sultry promises and a glimpse of full breasts, along with a teasing flash revelation of her dark yet close shaved muff. They killed his guards then knifed her, too, before strangling Pyotr’s father on a greasy bed in a filthy cathouse backroom.

  Queen Mary bent over with pain and with child, giving birth to a dead son. She named him Karl Joseph Shaka XV, after a freshly murdered husband. The tiny premature thing had died trying to escape her, choked by his own umbilical. From a bloody birthing bed, a young widow and grief stricken mother screamed vengeance, throwing the Broderbund envoy to his death from a high window. She knew that if she had delivered a live child in her convulsive grief instead of a dead one, the ambassador must have ordered its cord cut from her and the baby killed. Just before she, too, died, she must have watched a Hashâshīn strangling her tiny son with his birth cord in lieu of holy silk. She could not let it stand. Out the window the
ambassador flew, cracking dead on the flagstones far below.

  ***

  The ‘Defenestration of the Envoy’ was the critical act that launched a slow motion Grün Revolution. For it was the moment the Imperium started down the path toward genocide and imbalance, and let Purity displace the Black Faith. With Queen Mary’s sanction, commanderies were attacked by Purity mobs, egged on by ambitious men in steel gray. Brethren were slaughtered, hunkering down against a firestorm of Oetkert and SAC violence simply called the Red Purge.

  Never before had Brethren erred so badly, misread prophesies so woefully, suffered so much destruction of plans and power and far flung property. Some despaired. They lost the Black Faith, then killed themselves. Relying on mystic assurances, the Order had utterly misjudged the enraged Dowager Regent. They never thought that she or any Oetkert-Shaka could turn against them, pillar of the dynasty and caste system, cofounders of the Imperium. Driven back to the last two worlds of the Ordensstaadt, banished to exile on Fates and Terra Deus, survivors and even the High Council asked: “Why God, have you forsaken us?”

  He answered, heard clearly through frantic divinations: “You have lost your way. You are tied to the Oetkert-Shaka dynastic lines, not the true Arahitogami. Return to your origin mission. Serve the Coming of the Man-God.” They sent postulants down into their deepest archives, searching for any way back to true righteousness. Many doubted, but more stayed confident that a future revelation must restore God’s Will, and with it their own rightful powers and privileges. Forty years later, they still dream wet theological dreams of the future day the worlds are run by their divine nobility, in a universal society where their ascetic devotions and holy leadership will bring Humanity to Heaven on All the Earths.

  ***

  Dowager Mary went too far in the Red Purge, moved by a rage she could not relent. It fell to Pyotr to restore the balance of murder, essential to stable rule. To do as his mother advised him on the day he decided to kill her, to partly bring back the Broderbund to balance out the Sakura-kai and General Curia. Or at least he tries. He can’t ever seem to manage it. It’s not his nature. Only once in 20 years did Pyotr show the Broderbund that, like any Oetkert, he couldn’t be trusted and maybe he should be feared. The occasion was a revolt on the forest world of Huertgen, where local High Castes were joined by local Brethren who had High Council support. Pyotr had the revolt crushed. Takeshi joined lustily, willing executioner of his erstwhile mentors and the hard masters of a boyhood spent on Fates. He ran down, captured, then delivered bound Brethren to torture cells to scream out their last prayers as they were flayed alive by the cruelest of the Curia’s gray clad men. Brethren on Huertgen were wiped out to a man.

  Takeshi knew from contacts in the General Curia and Sakura-kai that this second, smaller blood purge was ordered by Pyotr, made the nominal head of the Cherry Blossoms after he cut a deal with Purity. Coldblooded murder elevated Takeshi in Pyotr’s estimation, too. It brought them together, as brothers in blood so to speak. Pyotr did it because he needed funds from confiscated commanderies for his fast expanding military. Yet, even as Sakura-kai hunted down Brethren on Huertgen the Tennō sent coded messages to the High Council on Terra Deus that he would maintain his secret alliance with the cowls.

  ‘Inside the voids, Mother, the best murders can be done.’

  ‘Yes, my son. It has always been true. Yet beware the voids.’

  ‘Why? In their darkness new alliances can be made.’

  ‘There are others in there with you, watching you, plotting against you.’

  ‘Always, Mother. It is the nature of the lives we lead. Oh wait! The life I lead as Imperator. But not you, not anymore. I killed you.’

  Brethren had no choice. They accepted Pyotr’s blood pruning rather than lose everything in an outright purge, a second blood purge they might not survive. For once, even Takeshi was impressed by Pyotr Shaka’s secretive tactics and sheer ruthlessness. ‘Mass murder to hide mass theft. I didn’t think he had it in him.’

  ***

  Today, the Broderbund is much diminished, a wounded and thus dangerous animal, full of plots and poisons, assassins nests and secret assignations. One of those Takeshi knows nothing about. He has no idea that Maximilian Kahn and the High Council have taken a special interest in their old pupil, who in his youth declared himself apostate from the Black Faith and fled from them and Fates.

  He thinks he’s done with them.

  He despises Kahn and his old teachers.

  He doesn’t know, they’re not done with him.

  He has no idea who they think he could be.

  Will he want it when they reveal it to him?

  On the surface, it looks like the Oetkert-Broderbund alliance is reforming. Brethren cells and sympathizers are worming back into the central Imperium, emerging from exile with Pyotr’s help and protection. Soon, his armies will strike into Neutral and Calmari space. In this greatly expanded war, the High Council sees fresh opportunity for its own politics. It reaches out to its man in Novaya Uda, its direct link to the Tennō ever since Pyotr committed matricide to claim the throne with secret Broderbund poison. Maximilian Kahn is sent a godly plan encoded with unbreakable mysteries, and more, a revelation recently discovered in ancient scripture. If he can confirm the readings, corroborate the starcharts, the divine plan they shall reveal will shake Kestino and all Orion.

  Kahn

  The Imperium is ripe for a return of the Broderbund to power and influence because it only resembles a law governed realm, rather than is one. The idea of law is not the main principle of government, and never was: arbitrary autocracy is. Instead of suffering guilt for centuries of raw injustice and brutal slavery, its ruling kleptocrats think that core inequality is both natural and a sign of moral innocence compared to the rest of Orion. They don’t think ordinary folk are creatures of reason. All elites agree that the central task of politics is to shift the commoner demand for reform at home, the anarchy that arises from below from time to time, into export of their civilization’s inherent virtue to farfolk worlds.

  Even the best, most radical elitists are only passive reformers who adhere to a watered down version of the Black Faith. They think of history not as unfolding secular processes that should involve them morally, but as the slow penetration of God’s Will and Spirit ever deeper into the Thousand Worlds. Each age transcends the one before, bringing fresh crisis that leads to the next advance. The mass of plain folk are beastly, but they can be driven like herd animals to upland moral pastures and cared for there. In this mystical view, there’s no need to establish a rule of law. Just wait for the Spirit of the Age to advance, to penetrate history. The difference between what High Castes believe, those who think about politics at all, and the Broderbund, is that Brethren are not so passive. They think they can read God’s Will in the twinkle of stars and wrinkles of papyri, and using his map and foretelling, force the pace of destiny. They think they are God’s Cure.

  Wait, why does he need one? Because right when the Broderbund started up in secret, in an Egyptian oasis 6,000 years ago, a problem showed up. Even after contact was established with the divine, ordinary history still flowed to the future, as constant and as changing as the Nile that washed the feet of the pharaohs. They needed to figure out the rules of history. They didn’t want to stop devastation by unintended or periodic river floods, but to break apart all the artificial dams that civilization throws in the river’s path. They want floods, they want the river’s nourishing waters go where God wants. Not where fallible men divert them.

  If God needs healing, Brethren are his Cure.

  If God is the Nile, Brethren are the Flood.

  If God has a plan, Brethren alone can read it.

  If the future has a past, only they know its secrets.

  If the past has a future, they know how to get there.

  But there’s another problem nagging at them right from the start, and it only grows deeper as Humanity moves off the origin world out to a thousand
stars. It’s evermore troublesome the more high priests of the Order read the Word of God in more distant stars and old scrolls, and in the very Structure of Creation.

  Why are there so many ruined worlds?

  Why is there so much sin, everywhere?

  Was it Man or God who created sin?

  What is the true, original sin in Orion?

  Pride surely. But who was the original sinner?

  Was it Man or Woman who first sinned?

  No! It was God! All sin belongs to God.

  The ultimate, secret teachings of the Order on this question are allowed only to the innermost circle of high priests. Even postulants are not trusted: they may balk at the doctrine, so harsh is the revelation of Black Truth. For the problem of evil, inner circle readings say, is not that woman tempted man from the true path of devotion, as most misogynist Brethren are taught and believe. The problem isn’t Shakti at all, not a divine female energy let loose to ruin Creation.

  The problem is God.

  The problem is Creation.

  That was the first sin:

  release of the imperfect.

  There’s no saving it.

  There can be no progress.

  There is no basic good,

  in any human society.

  Or in science or nature.

  All of Creation is Error.

  God is not the Cure.

  God is the Disease.

  That’s the past: unredeemable. But the future? To have one, the Brethren are tasked with creating history anew. In purged exile, the High Council returns to ideas of how to redeem their lost and failed god. They will seek the Arahitogami, the Divine Human who will surpass the old gods, leading a grand transformation to Divine Totality across the Cosmos. Only he can correct the Imperfection in Creation, in all of Nature. Violence for him is the final form that love will take. Violence on the way to him is the road of brotherly love. A spirit of lawlessness must replace the idea of law. A spirit of murder must displace the ideal of mercy. The final messiah is near. But this is no gentle savior with lambs and children adoring at his feet. The hidden and last imam is a god of violence, the Light of the Cosmos will go supernova, which means Creation and Destruction All in One.