House of the Wolf (Book Three of the Phoenix Legacy) (32 page)

No one outside the Phoenix could tell him that. No one except—

Orin Selasis. Ussher knew.

The steps to the execution stand. Alexand had to devote his full attention to them and to containing the surge of nausea.

Seven steps. He remembered that; Rich remembered it. Rich remembered the figure standing at the top of the steps dressed in mourning black, face-screened, motionless, present as a testament of faith.

Alexand looked up and saw the figure there, looking down at him, and at first it didn’t seem unreasonable. But this man wore the black helmet of the SSB.

The stairs. If they’d give him a little time, he could manage them, and if he could explain to the guard on his right that holding that arm only made it harder.

Rich, stay with me. I’ve made it this far. . .
.

That battering wind of sound. He
could
feel it now. The stand vibrated with it; he felt it through the soles of his boots, and there was terror in it. He was panting; not enough air. Not enough air in this huge Plaza for their rage and for him.

And was it not a righteous rage?

Overhead in hovering ’cars, peering out from alcoves and windows, PubliCom vidicams were recording the execution of justice for all the Concord, for history.

A righteous rage, and he understood it.

“
The Brother! Brother! Brother! Brother! Brother of the Lamb! The Lamb! Lamb! Lamb! Lamb
!”

That he didn’t understand.

Or perhaps he only feared it more.

He paused when he mastered the last step, and his escort allowed him that. Perhaps they needed the pause, too, to try to make sense of what was happening in this crowd.

The sky was a glory of pink and scarlet, and from this level, the whole of the vast tapestry of beings filling the Plaza was visible, dazzling under the helions. Along the promenades were lines of Directorate guards, gold helmets flashing, and on the roofs above them, white-helmeted Conpol squads manned X
⁴
laser cannons. The execution stand was lined on three sides with more black uniforms. SSB. He noted that as an anomaly. Below the stand, stretching all the way across it, was a close-spaced rank with helmets of gold. At the top of the tiers of steps, guarding the entrance to the Hall, was a Conpol rank armed with shoulder-mount X
³
s. Above them in the clefts of the Hall, more X
⁴
squads were posted, and above the buildings, black Conpol aircars hovered.

The Concord was ready.

But for what? Who had foreseen the metamorphosis taking place in this crowd now?

The roar was stunning, mounting incredibly beyond the limits of tolerance, but it was no longer a shapeless sound that might be mistaken for a storm howl.

“
The Brother! The Brother! The Brother! The Brother
!”

It beat back and forth across the expanse of the Plaza, smashed into the faces of the buildings, recoiled, swept back to strike another wall, recoiled again.

This righteous rage belonged to the Bonds, rage against the man they called holy because he was the brother of a saint; the man who betrayed them by being someone else, by being a man arrayed in uniform, a man who commanded war and death, and a man who tried to kill the noblest of the noble, the strong and gentle father-leader of the Concord.

The tapestry was shimmering like a desert mirage; the hammering clamor seemed to set the air in motion. Great masses of double hues were coalescing, Bonds in their House tabards, consolidating into solid entities within the larger entity. And as those took shape, the excluded particles, the Fesh, shifted toward the periphery of the mass, making room for the expanding bicolored aggregations creeping amoeba-like toward the execution stand.

“Oh, ’Zion, we’re down for it now!”

The voice was less than half a meter away or he wouldn’t have heard it. One of the SSB escort.

Alexand turned, trying to keep his eyes in focus as he looked toward the center of the stand. The faceless man in the red uniform waited there by the stabile laser.

Rich, I’m afraid. Where did you find that light that was never quenched until death put it out
?

Was I not proud, too, my brother? Did I not know how many people depended on my courage, then and for the future?

You were one of them.

Alexand took the first step toward the executioner.

This was Written.

Bruno Hawkwood looked down into the Plaza from a second-level windowall where a place was made for him by the Fesh crowding for a view without his asking it by word or gesture.

The brute volume of the sound from that vast multitude was audible even behind glass ten centimeters thick. It was a sound to inspire fear, and he felt it around him, passing like an electric charge from one person to the next.

It was happening, the turn of Destiny the Concord and Orin Selasis hadn’t foreseen.

Yet something in that reading sounded a dissonance.

The scene shifted out of focus, and that served as a reminder. He counted out ten beats of his heart, gauging the intervals. Time enough, but not time enough to answer questions already answered.

Two narrow halls took him back to the central well and the lifts. He’d made a brief detour to seek that vantage point at the windowalls and, once away from them, found himself virtually alone. When he reached the lifts, he floated up one level, then traversed a short arc of the well and turned into a broad hallway of white marble, as solemnly proportioned as a cathedron nave. It was fifty meters long and ended at the great history-carved doors of the Chamber of the Directorate.

A silent place now; he could hear the roar of the mob outside as a malevolent murmur. Normally, there would be guardsmen at the lifts and at least four at the Chamber doors where only one occupied the check station; he was apparently immersed in the screens behind him.

The sixty fluted columns ranked along the hall seemed delicate, even airy, in proportion to the height of the ceiling, yet they were two meters thick at the base. Hawkwood walked among them in dwarfed silence as he might in a forest. But he wasn’t entirely alone.

Behind one of the columns, ahead of him and to his right, someone was hiding. He heard soft footsteps, glimpsed something dark disappearing behind the column.

Perhaps he had underestimated Master Ranes.

His pace didn’t falter, but he veered closer to the column as he proceeded. If someone were waiting in ambush for him, he would probably delay until Hawkwood passed and had his back to him. Hawkwood let the regular beat of his footfalls serve as reassurance until he reached the column.

Then he lunged around the near side, and in a few quick, precise movements had the potential assailant pinned against the fluted marble, his hand at the throat in a grip that with a slight increase in pressure could be lethal.

Hawkwood also had the muzzle of an X
²
pressed against his own chest at the level of his heart.

Yet he loosened the grip on the throat that might have provided a bargaining lever with the laser. The woman caught in his counterambuscade looked at him with a fearless, unwavering gaze that bespoke deadly intent, but she hadn’t come here to kill Bruno Hawkwood.

He stepped back, hands falling to his sides, and bowed.

The Lady Adrien Eliseer Woolf.

The Prime Sign.

Now he could be sure.

Alexand took the first step toward the executioner.

Had they forgotten the drum roll?

Official murder needs ceremony to make justice of it.

No doubt they hadn’t forgotten, but even on ampspeakers it was too frail a sound to assert its presence in this battering torrent.

The face of the Shepherd, Izak, flashed in and out behind the rampart of guards as he flailed through the crowd, staying abreast of Alexand in his long, last walk. When Izak saw Alexand looking down at him, he flung himself at the living barricade, arms outstretched, hands reaching out, palms up.

“
My lord! Oh, my lord . . . my lord
. . .”

Alexand couldn’t hear the words, but he recognized the shape of them on the old man’s lips before he disappeared, thrust back into the tumultuous human currents.

The words, the hands reaching out, not in angry fists, but in open-palmed appeal, and the grief written in that ancient, skeletal face, stopped Alexand in mid-step.

“Izak! The God help me—
Izak
!”

Rough hands pulled at him, impelling him forward, toward the executioner.

“Come on! No help for you out there!”

He fought for balance, staggering with the impact of realization. The guard was wrong; he was only stating negatively what he feared.

There
was
help for him out there.

He had misjudged the timbre of the voices when the Bonds took up the name of the Brother. He’d thought it anger, thought they believed themselves betrayed by their holy man.

Had he learned nothing about them in all these years? The judgments of the Concord were as incomprehensible to them as if they were spoken in an unknown tongue. These Bonds were calling out the name of the Brother in resounding shock and grief, and their rage wasn’t for him, but for those who brought him here to kill him.

Rich had a year to prepare his followers for his apotheosis; they expected it and understood it as his Testing. Still, violence had almost erupted in the wake of his death, and there weren’t three thousand Bonds in the Plaza that day. Today there were twenty times three thousand, and they hadn’t been prepared for this Testing. They were told Galinin’s assassin would die here today, and came to find the Brother. It wouldn’t be conceivable to them that the two could be one and the same.

Alexand reached the center of the stand, and the SSB escort retired, leaving him to the Directorate guard captain and two sargents. They wore no face-screens to hide the stark fear in their faces.

The sargents came up on either side of him, but the moment they touched him, the sound that seemed at absolute maximum peaked to an even higher volume, the line of guards in front of the stand sagged and strained to hold. The two sargents seemed paralyzed, staring out at that clamoring mass as they might at an approaching tidal wave.

Alexand felt his lips draw back, felt a cold elation within him that might have been laughter.

No help for me out there? I have an army, tens of thousands ready to die for me, convinced that would buy them a piece of sainthood in the Beyond. With a gesture, I could unleash that savage tide to sweep onto this flimsy box and smash it, to surge up the tiers of steps and batter down the great doors of the Hall, sweep on, pounding through the marble corridors until it reached the Directorate Chamber itself.

He saw the blue lightning of lasers as the guards fought off an assault on the steps, heard screams, not of anger, but of agony. And the smell—

“No—oh, God, no!
No
!”

He swayed, felt his knees on the verge of giving way. Izak, I’m not a saint; my visions are imperfect.

But this one was becoming acidly clear.

He might unleash this pent, ravening tide, and it would overwhelm the execution stand. It might even take him with it, carried along in a protective eddy, and the MT fixes were probably still in his boots. There was a chance—

But the tide would never reach the Hall.

Before that, the orders would be given. The lines of guards at the doors and along the promenades would close ranks and open fire. The X
⁴
canon squads on the roofs would turn their guns down into the Plaza and open fire. The ’car squads overhead would converge and open fire.

This vision was perfect and so horrifying, he began to weep when he realized it hadn’t yet transpired. There were skirmishes along the barricades, but they still held.

And he understood now the how and why of this.

Izak, and probably other Shepherds, had been told that Alex Ransom was the Brother for the sole purpose of making this hideous vision come to pass.

Selasis. Ussher knew about the Brother. Selasis meant to create an Armageddon here that the Concord would never forget. The Bonds might hold the Lords responsible, but
they
would blame the Phoenix. They would never forget and never forgive.

Alexand sought Izak and found him only because he was so close; the black barrier had been forced back against the stand.

“
Izak! Stop! You can’t let this
—
IZAK
!”

But Izak didn’t hear; he wouldn’t stop shouting.

Hands clamped on Alexand’s arms; faces pale and rigid with terror under golden helmets loomed only centimeters away.

“An ampmike! Get me—let me
talk
to them!”

The guardsmen didn’t hear; they were too frightened. They were pulling him toward the executioner.

“No! Let me—not
yet
! Don’t you
understand
?”

They didn’t understand; they didn’t hear.

Yet if they let the executioner carry out his duty now, there was no way to stop the tide. The vision would come to pass, the tide would become a horror of carnage.

He channeled every vestige of strength left him to pull himself free of the hands that would drag them all to death. He couldn’t hear his own cry of pain and despair.

Free. Only for seconds. Alive and free. Seconds.

He stumbled to the edge of the stand, swayed there, shouting into that raging, booming tide, crying out in the Name of the Lamb for peace.

They didn’t hear him; his voice was drowned in the howling roar. Too late. Too late. . . .

Rich! Help me! Oh, my brother, my sainted brother
—

Now he could be sure.

Bruno Hawkwood looked into the face of Adrien Eliseer Woolf, the Prime Sign, and his elation took the form of a sensation of vibration, as if he were a bell struck in a vacuum.

He said in a near whisper, “Forgive me, my lady, for laying hands on you so roughly. I didn’t expect you here.”