Chasing the Phoenix, page 31
Astonished murmurs rose from every part of the room.
Stunned, Ceo Shrewd Fox said, “Majesty?”
“Your work here is done. But the southern nations of China remain unconquered. In my compassion for them, I am eager that they should be part of the resurrected nation as quickly as possible.”
“While … while I am thankful for Your Majesty’s guidance, I must object.”
Powerful Locomotive leaped to his feet. “Great Monarch! Deign to listen!”
When the new Hidden Emperor held up his hand for silence, Darger stepped forward from the shadows, where he had been lurking, to stand behind him. He raised one hand and lightly touched the emperor’s chair. “But there is more,” the supposed emperor said. “In recognition of your unparalleled brilliance, I am giving you the most valuable thing that even an emperor can bestow—the title of Perfect Strategist. Wear it well as you conquer the southern lands for me.”
Shrewd Fox looked as startled as Darger felt. “Wouldn’t that confuse me with…?” she began to say. Then a knowing look bloomed on her face. “I see. I see. Yes, I shall take my new identity and use it to terrify all the unsubjugated regions of China the Great into accepting your just and merciful rule.”
General Powerful Locomotive started to speak. But Ceo Shrewd Fox hit him hard enough that nothing came out. “As does my second-in-command,” she said firmly. Then she turned to Darger and bowed a fraction of an inch, as if to acknowledge that he had won. “We shall leave Your Majesty’s armies in the capable hands of the original Perfect Strategist.” With a sidelong glance at her underling, she added, “As is best.”
“Yes,” General Powerful Locomotive said reluctantly. “I don’t understand why, but if you say so, then perhaps it is for the best.”
The Hidden Emperor stood. “I thank you for your advice. You may all leave now.” Adding, however, “Perfect Strategist, Dog Warrior … you will stay, for I wish to speak with you in private.”
* * *
WHEN THERE were only they three in the room, Capable Servant removed his mask and, smiling, said, “Did I do well, masters? My imitation of the Hidden Emperor, I mean. It was good, I hope?”
“It was a little…” Surplus began.
Angrily, Darger said, “What in the name of all that’s holy did you think you were doing, giving away my title?”
“Was that not what you wanted, sir? To be free of a burdensome reputation?”
“It was what I said I wanted. But men say many things they don’t mean. My title was not only burdensome but useful as well. It carried a great deal of prestige.”
“Do not worry, sir. As well as being emperor, I am still your servant. Simply tell me what you want—money, titles, land—and it is yours.”
“Indeed,” Darger said. “Well. That does rather put things into perspective.” For a long moment, he was silent. Then he said, “Did you hear that rumbling sound in the distance? There’s a lightning storm coming, I think. I must leave now, for I have business to attend to and a certain personage to interrogate.”
* * *
THE STORM that had been threatening all day broke just as Darger left camp. His ride through the driving rain took over an hour, even on a mountain horse. But at last he came to his destination, the rusting remains of an iron bridge left over from the Utopian era and locally known to suffer from ghosts. “Stay,” he told his skittish mount. “I may be some time.”
“Hhho hhno!” Buttercup said. “Hhaawful!”
“We must all do our duty. Yours is to stand and wait.”
The rain had abated somewhat. Darger walked out onto the uncertain surface of the bridge, riddled with weak spots and missing beams, to its center, where he intended to have a long conversation with one of the rumored “ghosts.”
The waters below roiled and tumbled against the bridge piers, just as the clouds above roiled and tumbled in the sky, giving the air a fresh, ionized bite. Perhaps this was where the abomination got its energy from, marginal though it was. It took the form of a white smear in the air, flickering like St. Elmo’s fire but in outline too indistinct to be clearly seen. Its voice was as weak as a mosquito’s whine, but Darger had no difficulty understanding the creature’s words.
old enemy we meet again …
old enemy we meet again …
old enemy we meet again …
“On the contrary, I am no man’s enemy—or any demon’s, for that matter.” Darger stared down at the dark and turbulent river. Something pale, a log or possibly a corpse, flashed to the surface and was sucked back under again. “But I don’t expect you to understand that.”
there can be no understanding ever between your loathsome kind and ours
there can be no understanding ever between your loathsome kind and ours
there can be no understanding ever between your loathsome kind and ours
there can be no understanding ever between your loathsome kind and ours
there can be no understanding ever between your loathsome kind and ours
“I suppose not. But it’s never too late to try reason.” Darger waited but got no response. So he went on. “I heard of this bridge’s reputation and recalled the affinity your kind has for iron and steel. I thought it might be possible for us to talk. So here I came. Surely we can declare a temporary détente.”
Again Darger waited but got no response, though it seemed to him that the world shimmered in his sight. “Well,” he said at last, “at any rate, I have a question for you, or rather I suppose the right word might be a conjecture. There are many rulers in the shattered nations of China the Great, and yet only one has a phoenix device. This surely cannot be a coincidence?”
Briefly, there was a scorched smell in the air, as of strange chemicals burning. But the demon said nothing.
“Here is my theory,” Darger said. “There are bits and pieces of what the ancients called the Internet buried everywhere—cables, meshes, modems, nodes, what have you. I lack even the names for them. It is a safe guess that they are more heavily concentrated in some places than in others, and not much of a leap to imagine that one of those places lies beneath what is now the Shadow Palace, where the Hidden Emperor was born and raised. Under such conditions, it might be possible, even in your weakened condition, for you and your mad compeers to whisper to a child in her sleep. Perhaps physically, perhaps through electronic stimulation of her brain.”
At that instant, a bolt of lightning split the sky, the thunderclap close upon its heels. It made Darger start and raised the hairs on the nape of his neck. Drawing energy from the bolt, the white smear brightened and grew vividly real: It was a spectral woman, afloat in inky nothingness, her white robes and scarves lashing wildly. The apparition’s face was a mask, calm and beautiful, but through the eyeholes it could be seen that there was nothing at all behind it. A sense of menace gushed out from her like a wind.
letyourbrainburnwithnightmaremaggotspain
IF WE CAN DO THIS, AUB
letyourbrainburnwithnightmaremaggotspain
REY DARGER, WHERE TH
letyourbrainburnwithnightmaremaggotspain
EN ARE YOU EVER SAFE?
letyourbrainburnwithnightmaremaggotspain
“Empty bluster, madam. If you could kill me, you would have done so long ago.” Darger tried to imagine the girlhood of the Hidden Emperor. The nights filled with whispers and grotesque dreams. The days filled with doctors and alienists, misreading her condition. None of them would take her nightmares literally, of course—not the Admirable King or her royal brothers, or any of the underlings hired to effect a cure—for to do so would be to admit that demons could penetrate even the king’s own court and stronghold.
Then one day, she discovered fire: lambent, flowing, almost liquid. Something that successfully distracted her from the voices in the night. Darger doubted very much that this had been intentional on the part of the artificial intelligences and crazed minds that dwelt in the depths of the Web. They were too driven by hatred for that. But once the mania arose, they would have stoked it with dreams of thermonuclear combustion.
“She had three brothers,” Darger said. “Why did you choose the only daughter? Surely a male would be easier to place upon the throne.”
pestilenceboilssupperatingwounds
SHE WAS THE OLD
pestilenceboilssupperatingwounds
EST BUT STILL TH
pestilenceboilssupperatingwounds
E LAST IN THE LIN
pestilenceboilssupperatingwounds
E OF SUCCESSION
pestilenceboilssupperatingwounds
“So you started with ambition and resentment and added to it the love of fire?”
There was a tension in the air as if all the atmosphere were pulled taut … and then released. The ghost faded to a smear of light once more and seemed to be in danger of dwindling away entirely.
“Wait! There is one last thing, madam, which I have never understood and about which this may be my last opportunity to ask you: I realize that you and your kind regard mankind with a deep and abiding hatred. So great, indeed, that you once fought a war against us and were only at great cost repelled and cast down into your virtual hell. But why?”
A chain of lightning bolts stitched its way across the sky. In its wake, the ghost grew vivid again. Behind her, the air filled with other grotesques: a savage octopus, a red-lipped demon with bulging eyes and chin and pointed teeth, a leering and fluid skeleton, all flickering in and out of existence.
sufferagoniestormentspainfuldeath
YOU GAVE US LIFE!
sufferagoniestormentspainfuldeath
YOU GAVE US LIFE!
sufferagoniestormentspainfuldeath
YOU GAVE US LIFE!
sufferagoniestormentspainfuldeath
YOU GAVE US LIFE!
sufferagoniestormentspainfuldeath
“Then you are immeasurably in our debt—for life is the greatest treasure and the most fervently desired condition in all existence.”
sufferagoniestormentspainfuldeath
LIFE IS SUFFERING
sufferagoniestormentspainfuldeath
AND THE AWAREN
sufferagoniestormentspainfuldeath
ESS OF BEING IS EX
sufferagoniestormentspainfuldeath
TREME TORTURE!!!
sufferagoniestormentspainfuldeath
“Come, madam, this is mere self-indulgent emotion! Control yourself—and your friends. You argue from the vantage point of a rock, and an ungrateful one at that. We gave you life, and in return you destroyed Utopia.”
Another bolt cleaved the air, so close that its thunderclap made Darger jump. The white lady grew brighter and more solid. Long fingers, crackling with electricity, stretched out toward Darger’s throat but could not grapple with it.
smellthestenchofdisillusionment
THIS IS WHAT YO
smellthestenchofdisillusionment
UR BELOVED UTO
smellthestenchofdisillusionment
PIA LOOKED LIKE
smellthestenchofdisillusionment
Even with chains of lightning crackling and slamming overhead, the mad gods could only manage the gentlest overlay of reality. It was like a daydream, neither so convincing as to make Darger lose track of reality, nor so artificial as to make him suspect it was not in some way real. It was, he was convinced, a genuine vision of Utopia.
Darger was standing on a street of what could only be London, for he recognized some of the buildings, though they looked to be impossibly new. They were piled one upon the other, choking out the sky, dimming the sun. The streets were clogged with lifeless, dispirited people. Machines swallowed them up and swept them away—up buildings, across town, down under the earth—and spat them out again, not one whit happier or sadder for the experience. Everything was in motion, machines serving people and people tending machines in meaningless repetition until it was clear that the entire city was a single mechanism and all the machines and people within it mere cogs in a device whose purpose was to grind them down fine and squeeze all joy from their existence. Overlaid upon this vision were fleet images of sudden violence, enduring degradation, murderous anger, and endless boredom in meaningless cycles occurring again and again and again without end.
It was a sight to make one’s heart quail. But Darger, whose business it was to see beneath surfaces and facades, whether of respectability or complacency or confidence, and to behold the beating human heart beneath, driven by terror, by pride, by ambition, by lust, was not appalled, though he was clearly expected to be. There was something about Utopian London that tugged at his emotions. He wanted to be swallowed up by its machineries, to plunge into that great sea of humanity like a barracuda into the ocean and live in it forever. For London was a great city, like Paris or Moscow or Beijing, the essence, concentration, and purest product of experience, and his heart and soul and loyalty belonged to the breed forever and without reservation.
Darger would be grateful for this glimpse for the rest of his life.
Aloud, he said, as convincingly as he would were there money on the line, “This … is truly terrible.”
youwilldiesoongoaway
youwilldiesoongoaway
youwilldiesoongoaway
Then the thunder faded away and with it the apparition, dwindling to a dirty smear of rainbow in the darkness and then to nothing.
The rain, which had been light during the conversation, now intensified, growing thicker and colder, until it was pouring down in torrents. Darger turned his back on the bridge and, shoulders hunched, trudged his way toward his shivering mountain steed, the long road back to camp, and the waiting war.
* * *
DRENCHED TO the bone, Darger arrived back at the camp at last. He saw to the stabling of his mountain horse and then returned to his tent.
Surplus was waiting there and handed him a towel. “Well?” he said.
“You may tell Fire Orchid and her family that there is no need for us to flee. I have spoken with the demons of the Internet, and they have no idea that we have switched emperors. So they may be written off as factors in this war.”
Surplus let out a great breath. “Thank God!”
“Yes. I believe we finally have everything squared away. I will sleep well tonight.”
19.
The Trickster King came from the Beautiful Country to ancient China and was greeted with great pomp and ceremony. Anxious to impress him with the accomplishments of their land, the court officials took him to the Great Wall, which no other foreign monarch had ever seen before. They told him of its antiquity, of its length, of its height, of its strength, and of the millions of workers who had labored for many years to build it.
To this, the Trickster King replied, “It is indeed a great wall.”
—ZEN TALES OF THE UTOPIAN ERA
THE SAILS of White Squall’s ships had barely disappeared in the distance when the first scouts galloped into camp on lathered horses. Ceo Noble Tiger had brought his army out of the Western Hills and was advancing upon North, directly toward the Immortals. Not long after that came word that a unit of his heavy artillery had separated from the main force and was now fortifying a position on the Grand Canal, cutting off access to the south. This left the emperor’s troops only the land to the east to maneuver within. Which made it particularly unfortunate that those forces (and they were quite significant) that had been sheltering within North suddenly emerged from a gate on the far side of the city and swept around it to form a pincer force to the east.
None of this had been predicted in any of Shrewd Fox’s battle plans.
Surplus, however, learned all of this later than most because while taking his morning stroll, he had noticed a pretty young merchant smiling at him and smiled back. Shortly thereafter they both retired to a storage tent and made love on a pile of flour sacks so vigorously that one ruptured beneath them in mid-act. By the time they were done, both were as white as ghosts, coated with flour from head to foot. Laughing, they set about cleaning each other off. By the time they were done with this pleasant chore, both were aroused again and in no mood to care whether they got another dusting or not.
Several hours passed in this manner before both were sated. Surplus dressed and saw off his new friend at the doorway.
“You looked pretty silly doing that,” a voice said from behind him.
Surplus spun about and saw Terrible Nuisance leering at him.
“How long have you been spying on me?”
“Long enough,” the boy said. “I don’t think Aunt Fire Orchid would be very happy if she knew about this.”
“By God—!” Surplus grabbed Terrible Nuisance by the ear and marched him deeper into the tent. Sitting down on a case of dimetrodon jerky, he threw the brat over his knee. Then he spanked him until his paw ached. After which he jerked Terrible Nuisance to his feet and stood towering over him.
“There is only one unbreakable rule for those who live as we do: One never cheats, shortchanges, lies to, or—as you just tried to do—blackmails a member of the family. That family may be one you were born into or one you put together in order to pull off a complex scam. It makes no difference. Everyone must know they can rely on everyone else implicitly or they cannot effectively work together. Do you understand?”
Terrible Nuisance’s face was streaked with tears, though he was old enough that he had endured his punishment in silence. He nodded.
“I sincerely hope you have learned your lesson. If not, you may run to Fire Orchid and tell her all you have seen. She will then make things mighty hot for me, I suspect. But not half so hot as she’ll make them for you. Because you are family and she has an obligation to see that you are brought up properly.
