“The Beast lives within the Man, and the Man within the God.
“Dominate the Beast, and you will become the Man.
“Dominate the Man, and you will become the God.
“As a God, thank the Smoking Mirror that you are not a Beast, and pray that the Beast not rise against you, for when a God falls, the Beast writes its self within his very flesh.”
—General Principles of Gens Nxtlu
——
Year 161 of Imperatrix Lunja’s Rein (Year of the Pandemic, final year of the Last Era)
Reginal Palace, Sipparsu, Capital of the Imperial Rexarchy of the Western Hives
“Thiyyatt, Exalted Highness, open the door,” Daonial Ollstrent Pellnias demanded through the nervous system that separated him from the princess. The men who passed like ghosts through the darkened serail of gold and bonestiil didn’t bat an eye as they passed.
They knew him. As one of Regina Ittu’s most trusted advisors and messengers, he was no stranger to the wing where she kept her most favored companions. Those men, dozens of them, sprawled over couches and on pillows, drifting lazily in drug-induced stupors, except for those who had been chosen for guard duty this night.
Daonial—aging, balding, beginning to stoop—would never be mistaken for one of these companions. During the day, this place would be filled with the noise of manly sporting: swordplay, footraces, wrestling, shooting, climbing, and similar deeds, all designed to hone both the bodies and the minds of the men for Regina Ittu’s pleasure.
They were more than the queen’s companions, good for more than sport. They were a guard in and of themselves.
But they couldn’t protect Regina Ittu or her daughter Regia Puella Thiyyatt from what was coming. Nobody could protect the queen or the princess, not by force of arms. By sunrise, this palace would be rubble. Imperatrix Lunja was on her way to end the life of her rebellious vassal Regina Ittu of the Western Hives.
She would slaughter everyone she found, including—especially—the princess Thiyyatt. Everyone except Daonial. If the imperatrix found him here, she would reserve worse than mere death for him.
Imperatrix Lunja thought Daonial was her servant and had no idea he was a double agent on behalf of her vassal Ittu. Though Lunja knew Daonial by a different face and a different hair color, the key markers in his genetic signature would be unmistakable if she caught him and ran a genalysis on him.
In that case, it would be better if he died anonymous and unmourned in Lunja’s first strike. He did not relish the tortures that the Imperatrix of Tellus could inflict on him if he lived.
“Please, Regia Puella,” Daonial said, praying to Adon and Yesh that she would open the door. “Your mother sent me.”
True, but not the whole story. Daonial himself had been instrumental in convincing Regina Ittu to place Thiyyatt in his hands. The princess was an imperfect tool, but he’d had easy access to her genes and her person, and the plans he’d secretly set in motion in Imperatrix Lunja’s court required high-ranking royal blood as a Key.
Lunja was wrong about Daonial’s allegiance, but in a way, so was Ittu, who thought Daonial was merely her double agent. In truth, he answered to higher powers even than her. Ittu would be as dangerous as Lunja to him if she realized what he had done—for Adon, for Yesh, for humankind.
Nobody would listen to Daonial the Amrician, Daonial the Adonist. So that man had played the role of Daonial the vizier in order to preserve mankind.
None of which would be meaningful if Thiyyatt didn’t open the door. Humanity’s survival hinged on the whims of a brazen, unstable—some would say psychotic (though not too loudly)—princess.
The metal door swept inward silently, and the scent of lavender breezed out, filling Daonial’s nostrils. He was too old for the game, and his genes had been changed to make him immune to her pheromones in any case. Ittu wanted Daonial beholden to none but her. The queen did not trust her daughter any more than she trusted the rest of the sprawling imperial family tree.
So when Thiyyatt appeared before him, tall and naked, her unblemished blue skin glowing eerily in the moonlight through her window, her royal hair glinting like an ethereal dream and dancing like a purple mist around her ankles, Daonial was unmoved.
“Pellnias.” Her nose twitched as if she had smelled something foul. “I am isolated for three months, yet my mother chooses the middle of the night to send you to me. Why have you disturbed my sleep?” Her eyes narrowed dangerously, and Daonial smelled one of her tantrums gathering like a storm on the wind. “Surely it could have waited until the morning.”
“Clothe yourself, Exalted Highness. We must leave.”
She gave him a shark-toothed smile as her face darkened like a storm-cloud. “Low-born, low-blooded Pellnias, you would dare to give commands to the heir of Regina Ittu?”
“I bear the commands from your mother herself.” Daonial handed over an envelope sealed with Ittu’s mark. “Read quickly. Time grows short.”
She did so. When Thiyyatt finished and looked up, her eyes were glittering, her smile somehow even more predatory.
Daonial knew exactly what she was thinking. “Don’t,” he warned. “There is no way to escape this reckoning and retain the rexarchy of the Western Hives. If you betray your mother, Lunja will still slaughter you when she arrives. If you choose to stand against Lunja, she will bury you in a hundred pieces. Regia Puella, your inheritance is lost.”
“Impossible,” Thiyyatt breathed.
“Lost for the moment,” Daonial amended. Best not to give her further reason to throw a fit. “Please, Regia Puella.” Thiyyatt required a firm hand, but Daonial couldn’t help the note of desperation that crept into his voice. She had no idea of the cost: no idea of the reports of Abominations that were trickling in from other Imperial courts, no idea of Ittu's machinations in the High Court, and certainly no idea of Daonial’s role in trying to prevent this apocalyptic disaster that was building like a snowball despite his best efforts.
And she couldn’t know. It would only cause her to ask more questions, and time was terribly short.
“Please,” he repeated quietly.
For a fleeting moment, Daonial thought he saw a flicker of consideration beneath her self-indulgent expression. Thiyyatt, thinking beyond her nose? Of all the things happening this night, that shocked him the most. The flicker vanished after an instant, but as her long hair shifted to wrap about her, forming a silken dress of indigo, Thiyyatt folded up the letter and pushed it into her locks. “Fine. Lead on, Pellnias.”
As they slipped from the serail and into the palace proper, Daonial was thoughtful. He had thought Thiyyatt would put up more of a fight regarding the loss of her inheritance and her banishment to a distant stasis chamber. Perhaps the princess was finally developing a sense of responsibility?
That thought was quashed when they passed near the throne room of the palace and she, without warning, breathed a cloud of intoxicating bacteria over Daonial’s face.
She broke away from him and headed for the throne room as Daonial’s balance tilted. “Regia Puella Thiyyatt,” he slurred. “Come back.”
Daonial stumbled after her, his hearing roaring, his vision swimming, his feet staggering. He thought the halls were empty, which was odd. Or perhaps his fouled consciousness was misleading him?
As Daonial drew nearer the throne room, his several enhanced livers cleared the worst of his intoxication. The halls were indeed empty, and now through the ringing in his ears he heard Thiyyatt’s shrill shrieks and the muffled sounds of fighting up ahead.
He quickened his step, but even sober, he was an old man. The uncharitable part of him hoped he would not live to see this disaster averted. If he did, he would likewise live to see Thiyyatt brought back out of stasis, and he preferred not to spend another moment in her presence.
For now, he had a duty. It was only one night, he told himself as he entered the throne room. One evening, and then off to Lunja’s court in Umutukk to salvage what he could.
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And probably to die there.
Daonial expected to see Thiyyatt engaged in battle with her mother, casting SPELs to transform her hair to snakes and the air to poison. If not that, then he’d expected to see Ittu on her throne where he had left her only minutes before, after she had summoned him and given Thiyyatt into his charge.
He did not expect to see an amber barrier cutting the chamber in two, blocking the other side of the throne room. Thiyyatt raged and screamed before the wall. She had transformed her hair into snakes, and their royal scales glittered in the moonlight pouring through the skylights as Thiyyatt repeatedly slammed a hand against the wall. “You will not be rid of me so easily!” she shrieked. “I am Amaluk’s betrothed! The Imperatrix would have me as a daughter-in-law. She wouldn’t dare to hurt—”
Daonial limped up. “Regia Puella, look.” He pointed through the wall. The amber distorted the view, and between the translucent gold wall and the cold moonlight, the dais of the room suffered an unTellurian glow.
But someone who wasn’t raging and mad would easily be able to see the misshapen humanoid corpses on the other side of the wall.
Humanoid, but monstrous. Twisted, animalistic. Atavistic nightmares summoned forth from humanity’s oldest reptilian fears.
Thiyyatt shot Daonial a look as poisonous as the venom of her snakes, but she calmed and took in the scene. Three of Ittu’s manly concubines were holding a door on the far side of the wall against an enemy Daonial couldn’t see in the darkness. Regina Ittu herself held another door all alone, flinging bonestiil spikes into the dark, summoning up bacteria that could devour the adipose from a body in seconds, spewing desiccating streams 0f xenokaryotic fluid onto pustule-riddled arms and claws and clubs-strikers that swung at her from the shadows.
She drew her pistol, a weapon of ancient and deadly pedigree that dated, legend had it, back to the Heavenfall; an artifact passed down and lovingly maintained across generations. From its barrel flashed a beam of light that made the amber wall blaze like a hazy morning, and where the beam touched noxious flesh, the Abominations’ skin boiled, charred, and shriveled, and they died.
The weapon had only one power supply, a marble as big as a thumbnail set into its grip. Despite millennia of study, nobody had figured out how to replicate it. Once the power was drained, the weapon would be useless. Generations of Ittu’s family had drawn it in battle only a handful of times.
And now Ittu wielded it. This was a scene to be remembered forever, if anyone remained afterward, Daonial reflected.
Thiyyatt finally fell still as they watched her mother fight.
Ittu moved like a half-forgotten dream, sliding from puddle of moonlight to puddle of moonlight with the practiced ease of an immortal warrior who had decades of practice. Wads of corrosive phlegm splashed past her as she riled and taunted her Abominable foes. Frogs’ tongues covered in pus and ooze tried to ensnare her; she avoided them all. With her light-cutter, she burned whole lines of monsters dead.
Thiyyatt pounded at the wall again. It was useless, Daonial knew, for he himself had stolen the secret of the unbreachable amber from Lunja’s own archives in Umutukk. The Imperatrix kept her secrets close, but she could not keep all of them.
This wall wasn’t nearly as thick as the ones protecting Umutukk and the Imperial Palace within the imperial city. Given enough time, Lunja would be able to melt her way into the throne room. But for now, it kept Thiyyatt safe.
And it locked Ittu in with the Abominations. Daonial hadn’t expected the royal court to turn so quickly. The apocalypse was coming faster than he’d feared.
Ittu’s deadly dance of light and fire stilled. Abominable corpses steamed on the other side of the amber wall as the Regina—proud, beautiful, deadly—straightened up. Thiyyatt may have inherited her skin tone from her father, but her hair had come from her mother. Daonial imagined the indigo of Ittu’s braid glinting in the moonlight beyond the wall of amber as she turned toward Daonial and Thiyyatt.
Ittu had never needed pheromones to make Daonial feel weak-kneed. Her composure, her command, were sufficient; even her beauty, the results of centuries of directed breeding and genetic manipulation, was secondary to the force of her presence.
He always felt like the gazelle quailing before the lion when those violet eyes fell upon him.
A door opened near the dais. She didn’t look as several of her concubinal guard came rushing in. “Dakuri, Nabuchodrosser, hold this door with your life.” The men rushed to take Ittu’s place, and she came to the wall of amber, standing across from Daonial and Thiyyatt.
“You are sending me away,” Thiyyatt said.
“Petulant child, I am saving your life.”
“But—”
“There are events coming to pass that you have no knowledge of,” Ittu said. Her white teeth were guiding lights in the darkness. “Did you think I locked you away for three months because I was angered with you?”
Thiyyatt’s nostrils flared, but she said nothing.
“I was saving you. Daonial.” One moment Ittu wasn’t looking at him; the next, she was. “All is in place?”
Daonial had already briefed Ittu on his efforts in Lunja’s courts, so presumably Ittu was asking him to clarify for Thiyyatt’s benefit. She would need to know the way that he had prepared for her. “Yes. Thiyyatt’s genes are Keyed to the Imperial Palace in Umutukk, and I think I succeeded in using them to lock the Master-Minds that Lunja is using to control Magi as well. Umutukk will be hers to command, if she can get there.” Someday. But preservation of her life would have to come first.
The Master-Minds—or, more properly, the Synaptic Relays—were Tools of pedigrees so ancient that nobody knew when they had been created. Their purpose was to facilitate instantaneous communication between Magi. Synapsis, in other words.
One of them existed in the Imperial capital of Umutukk, and its nerves and roots stretched for hundreds of miles, connecting to distant substations and auxiliary Tools as if it were an enormous aspen colony. The other existed in Niemoller’s City, and had the even more important role of producing the Wisdom.
But Daonial had suspected, and now believed with a certainty, that the Synaptic Relays were talking to something else as well. Something distant.
Something hungry.
Something wicked.
Something that baked in twin suns’ light among silver sands.
“Control us?” Thiyyatt spat. “Even with the Master-Minds at her command, Lunja couldn’t.”
“And yet she has tried, child,” Ittu said. “Starting three months ago.”
Thiyyatt’s face went slack as she considered the implications.
Daonial held his peace. Even Ittu did not know that the spread of this Abominating disease hadn’t begun until he’d secretly interfered with Lunja’s experiments, which had driven various Magi across the world mad yet offered the Imperatrix little of the puppet-mastery she sought.
Even Ittu did not know that the Wisdom was not what it seemed, and that Daonial had sabotaged Lunja’s experiments not simply because he wanted to stop her from dominating the Magi of the world, but because he wanted to prevent an even worse enemy from gaining control.
Even Ittu did not know that Daonial had placed eyes in the heavens, watching for the foe that Daonial knew was coming. The foe causing the madness, the foe that had usurped Lunja’s attempted domination of the Magi of Tellus. The foe that lived somewhere in a silver desert beneath twin suns.
And even Ittu did not know that in sabotaging Lunja’s experiments and stopping that foe from dominating the Magi of Tellus, Daonial had caused the Abominating disease to arise.
When Daonial had interfered, the madness afflicting various Magi across the world had faded. Men and Wisdom alike came to their senses.
But immediately after that, the Abominating disease had spread, transforming the bodies of those same Magi.
And where the Abominating disease turned Magi into monsters, it transformed mortals into corpses. It infected their genes, formed terrible tumors, and changed their flesh so rapidly that their bodies gave out.
Daonial’s interference in the Master-Minds’ control seemed to have caused that disease. Were the monsters and the charnel-house cities better or worse than letting the mysterious enemy in the heavens dominate the Magi of Tellus?
Daonial had to believe that Adon would preserve a remnant. It was the only way he could sleep at night.
Ittu’s voice brought him back to the present. “The Abominations quickly followed Lunja’s experiments.” Daonial winced—was Ittu going to guess at his responsibility for them? “If my daughter’s genes have locked the Master-Minds, perhaps the Abominations will ignore her.”
Daonial breathed a sigh of relief. “Perhaps,” he admitted. The Master-Minds, Lunja’s dominations, the madness of the Magi, and the Abominations were all connected, but locking the first did not necessarily imply controlling the last.
“Then let me fight,” Thiyyatt said. “Mother, I will slay your enemies wherever—“
“And perhaps I am wrong and the Abominations will rend you limb from limb without a thought,” Ittu said. “And Lunja will kill us all. Thiyyatt, I charge you with surviving to continue our line through the ages.”
“But—”
“You will be safe in a distant stasis chamber until our family’s fortunes are restored. An honor guard waits for you there. They will join you and awaken when you do, and they will assist you in reclaiming your birthright.
“Listen to me, my daughter.” Ittu stepped to the wall. “Your ambition and ruthlessness are second to none.” Thiyyatt flushed at the praise. “I still remember how you hung your sister Istar above your throne, nailed by her ankles, until she bled out, for plotting against you. And how could I forget how as a tender girl of six, you poisoned your own brother Muranu? You are my heir, and nothing will change that.”
Ittu placed a hand on the wall, a shockingly motherly gesture. Her fingers stroked at the amber as if she wanted to touch Thiyyatt’s cheek. “Go now. Let me save you, that you might save our bloodline one day. Will you do this for me? Will you fulfill a final request from your mother?”
Thiyyatt looked as shocked as Daonial felt. Ittu commanded, she insisted, she punished until she received the submission she sought. She never requested.
Thiyyatt took a deep breath. Purple snakes transformed to purple hair. “I will.”
“Go with Daonial,” Ittu said. “Now, my heir. Survive. Awaken when Lunja is weak. Conquer Umutukk and take it for our line. And please do not forget me.” Ittu’s fingers tightened once on the amber wall. “A golden statue in memoriam would please me.”
Then Ittu spun and returned to the fight.
“Come, regia puella,” Daonial said. “I have a jetwhale waiting for us.”
Thiyyatt watched her mother for a few final seconds, then turned on her heel and strode toward the hall.
The jetwhale would get them to the mountains northeast of the Black Hives by dawn. Thiyyatt and her honor guard would be encased in the stasis-flowers a few hours after that. By sunset, Daonial could be in Umutukk again.
He would almost certainly die there, but he had to fix his failures. He had to stop the darkness from descending. He had to prevent the silver desert from swallowing Tellus, or else die trying.
Praying that Adon would spare a remnant for the future, praying that future remnant might restore whatever Daonial could not protect, he hurried after Thiyyatt toward the end of an Era.