Dancer stares down at the dust of the reverie. “I believed I was dirt once,” he says slowly. “For these.” He tilts up his sigils. “And this.” He traces shapes through the dust and his voice loses the learned words and the sharpened consonants as he sinks back into the mines. “Was my own clan that did me wrong.” His heavy eyes flick up. “Didn’t know that, did ya? They burnt off me what makes a man a man. Ares found me bleeding to death in a tunnel.
“He knew what they’d done. He fixed me, in more ways than one. But he did one better. He taught me it was Gold that broke us. Taught me Red could matter. Taught me I mattered. Ten years, I never saw his face.” He looks up at Sevro. “When he took that helmet off to you, to me, and I saw Gold, I wept worse than when they gelded me. First man who said I wasn’t broken was the master. The slaver.
“Hit me good. Right here.” He thumps his chest with a flat hand. “And I saw it hit him. I wasn’t his best. I wasn’t his favorite. But I was the only one who believed like he did. Was me that chose Darrow. Was me that had the keys to Tinos.” He swallows. “Boy…that father of yours never judged me ’cept by what I’d done. Began to understand I owed him the same.
&nbs
p; “Made a choice, then. I’d stand before him. Him that freed me. Him that made me different, made me a force. And I’d tell him what he told me long before: a man is his actions, not his blood.” He looks back at the remains of the datadrop in sorrow that even now he still hides his truth. “The Jackal came before I got that chance. That is the greatest regret of my life. Your pa was my hero then and he is my hero now. I knew I’d never see his like again. I was wrong.”
Dancer blows the reverie dust from the table and stands to look up at me. Ares dreamed of individual freedom, because of his son and his Red wife. Darrow dreamed of a world without monsters. Dancer’s private dream was more delicate. He believed it was Gold who made his people wicked. And without Gold, they could be good. Bit by bit, he’s seen reality wither that dream on the vine. But now that he knows it was still a Golden hand poisoning the soil, making him indict the very object of his faith, doubt the mission of his life, inside that stalwart chest awakens his holy wrath.
There is the warrior.
“Got a lot of hate in me,” he says in a low growl. “Got a lot of fear that you won’t ever understand. But none of it’s for you, Virginia. We’ll disagree again soon, I’m damn sure of that. But if our enemies think we’ll devour each other…Nah. Today my Sovereign is the Lionheart, and tomorrow she will have my votes. We will rescue the Free Legions.”
“?’Bout bloodydamn time,” Sevro says.
TO SEE THEM FROM ABOVE: the roving herds of beasts, the rivers carving stone, the rituals of man in all their varied panoply, to see the clouds roil over the patchwork latifundia of Asian plains, to see the mines of our home, is to remember the patterns of the world, and the majesty and complication and impermeable obscurity of distant lands. It is to remember how few people you know. How many do not know you. How many will soon forget you. How many praise you today to offer contempt tomorrow. Permanence of fame, power, dominion of the individual, are illusions. All that will be measured, all that will last, is your mastery of yourself.
This is what my father told me. It was his warning about power, though he sought it to his end. I’ve never understood how a man so wise could be so undone by himself. Perhaps I never will, and that is what has always frightened me. Not that I cannot control my own fate—that is impossible—but that I cannot control myself.
Now I stand without him, wondering if he should be my compass when he could not even follow his own needle—and the roar of the distant ocean fills my ears. I watch the Earth turn from the Ocular Sphere, a glass chamber suspended atop the highest pinnacle of the Citadel of Light. Created by the Master Maker Glirastes, like too many other wonders, it floats like a teardrop escaping upward to heaven from the tip of a bronzed sword. Octavia would often come here for her meditation and solitude. Of course, as an outsider I could not insinuate myself upon her here when she would wrap herself in that psycho-mystic credo she taught lonely Lysander—the Mind’s Eye. I would wait for her, thumbing through intelligence reports in the library below, or discoursing with Moira, or entertaining Atalantia with the newest gossip I’d plucked for her ravenous appetite.
But Octavia is gone, and Lysander swallowed by the great expanse with Cassius. Though my opinions of Cassius are weighted and complex, and not understood completely even by myself, I hope they found happiness out there. There was so little of it for them here.
The Sphere is mine now, as are so many of Octavia’s trophies. It is a hollow oddity, that possession. While she lived, these talismans and icons of hers—her Dawn Scepter, Silene Manor, the Sphere, the Pandemonium Chair, the Sovereigncy itself—were wrapped in mystery and portent. As if they held some great secret of life that I was too young, too foolish, to possess. I craved them so much—maybe as much as my father craved for whatever his desire actually was. But now, in possessing them, I see them for what they are; and they all feel lesser for that possession, as does indeed the world itself. The scepter is a hunk of iron. Silene Manor a house. The Sphere a clever device. The Chair a dangerous tool. Cities are measured by cold statistics of consumption and output. Planets by their loyalty and strategic importance.
All that matters is my son, my husband, and those I love and know, and who know me back.
Of all the people that lived in these last seven hundred years, none know the minds of the gens Lune as I do now. None know the weight, the fear, the anger, the ambivalence, the pride, the love, the disgust, the disappointment, the hope, and the utter frustration of ruling over billions of souls.
Octavia lost her husband and daughter. If I lost my son and husband, could I go on?
Or would I grow to be the villain of someone else’s story?
Waving my hand at the curved glass wall of the Sphere, I watch the Earth grow until it consumes the entire pane. I fly amongst the peaks of mountains, along the cool fingers of Eurasian rivers running toward the sea. I rotate my hand and find the great mechanical prison, Deepgrave, trundling along beneath the surf. And with a flick of a finger, my sight races to Mercury. Much is white and black, to signify old images. Many telescopes have been destroyed in the war. But through the swirling clouds of the hypercane, I glimpse a Society bastion—a mobile operations command city—upon the desert sands. A jamField covers Heliopolis, where my husband licks his wounds. What hell does he suffer? What greater hell does he prepare for his enemies?
It is torture to see and not to know.
But worse still to know and not be able to affect.
I hope he knows we have not abandoned him.
That I still love his heart, despite its weight and anger and complications.
I love him so much I cannot bear to think of him.
I turn the Sphere to look down at the New Forum, where the Senate is soon to assemble. A grand crowd, a million strong, pours through the great Citadel gates beneath the Silenius Arch to witness the vote. According to the Compact, the Tribunes decide if the public should witness. Despite the fever, they are right to include them. It will be beautiful when Dancer and I unite the Vox and the Optimates in common cause. When Publius’s betrayal fails to hijack the vote. It will be a victory for our way of life and our means of governance. In the plaza east of the New Forum, vendors sell sticky sweets and steam swirls up from hot spiced Martian wine. Children hold their parents’ hands. Men carry icons of their political religions. The Vox with upside-down pyramids, broken chains. Some broadcast my head with a bloody crown from holoprojectors on their shoulders. The Optimates stand in small clutches with plastic slingBlades or pegasuses or lions projected into the air.
“Don’t look too bloodydamn happy,” Sevro mutters behind me. “Dancer still has to prove he’s not a load of steaming shit.”
“And you have a Queen to kill.”
I cycle the Sphere until Old Tokyo fills the view. The megacity of Earth sprawls in the night. With the information gleaned from the Duke of Hands’ memories, I have found the Syndicate Queen’s refuge. Fifty thousand of my house troops along with Darrow’s Seventh Legion will move in a coordinated strike against Syndicate operations on Earth, Mars, and Luna, while Sevro and two cohorts pull the chief weed out themselves. They will do it when all eyes are on me and the vote.
“Looking forward to it,” Sevro says.
I turn from the central plinth to find him standing behind me in the Sphere with Daxo. Fully armored, wolfcloak on his shoulder, face painted jade green, he is ready for transport. Beside him, Daxo looks the picture of majestic civility in his senatorial toga. His arms are bare beneath the toga, and how mighty those Telemanus limbs look—made for violence, but restrained in favor of words because he trusts me, if not my faith in demokracy. Kavax saunters in to join us. He stands quietly behind his son with a hand on his shoulder and Sophocles threading between his legs.