The Hierophant's Daughter Read online

  “What’s wrong with her eye?”

  “I know who she is,” called the boy, to his mother’s visible anguish. “She’s the Governess of the whole United Front, all North America.”

  “‘Was’ the Governess, lad. Come here.” The Hierophant waved a regal hand, and over came the boy, in danger far graver than his sister by virtue of age. As Dominia’s breath stilled, the Holy Father reached across the table to pluck up her donut in offering to the boy. “What’s your name?”

  “Murph McLintock.” Donut acquired, the breathless child edged toward the Governess as much as manners allowed.

  “Do you see the Disgraced Governess’s eye, Murphy?” asked the Hierophant. The boy turned to regard the (slightly) less notoriously evil martyr.

  “It’s all full of blood.”

  “Let’s play a game. What do you reckon the odds that the Disgraced Governess’s eye will stay intact ’til morning?”

  The grim boy regarded the jelly extruding from the edge of the donut. “What happened to her?”

  “Dominia? Would you tell Murphy what happened?”

  With a resentful glance at her Father, Dominia turned her good eye toward the boy. “I was in a car accident. On the way to the shore.”

  Her Father pressed. “To do what?”

  “To…leave.”

  “To run away,” corrected the Hierophant, his solemn expression still aimed at Murph. “To abandon her post and deliver information to the enemy. This woman is a criminal.”

  Face writ with anxiety, the boy stepped back from the table. The Hierophant’s smile never wavered.

  “Have you ever met a martyr before, lad?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “What do you think? Is a martyr different from a human?”

  “Dad says—”

  “I don’t care what ‘Dad’ says. I want to know what Murphy says.”

  Between the Hierophant and the Governess, the boy swallowed like his saliva had been replaced by sand.

  “Yes. Martyrs are different from humans.”

  “And how are we different?”

  “Well, humans are born, and then we die. But martyrs are born human, and then they die, and then they’re born again as martyrs.”

  “And what happens when they’re born again? What makes a martyr superior to a human?”

  The boy’s face tightened, and Dominia thought, that’s right, we’re not superior, there’s nothing that makes a martyr superior, nothing that merits his treatment of humans, and you don’t have to say it; but, of course, she didn’t vocalize this thought. Instead, she sat frozen as she’d been in the instant of Cassandra’s death. She was back in that dark and bloody room until Murph said, “Well, they’re fast, and strong. Some are geniuses—magical, almost, like you. They don’t have to worry about anything, even if they get into an accident and need a wheelchair like my aunt Hilda. ’Cause they get better so fast. My aunt doesn’t live here,” added the child, chin raised in a defensive posture. The Hierophant chuckled to himself.

  “And what does a martyr need, my boy, to sustain that second life?”

  “Human flesh.” The boy spared a reluctant glance for his sister in the Hierophant’s lap. “Or blood.”

  “That’s right: although, flesh is better. And how is a martyr made?”

  “By eating,” whispered Murphy.

  “Yes, dear boy. By eating the flesh or drinking the blood of a martyr. And other means, of course, not suited for young ears.” The Hierophant winked at pale Carol, who rested her elbow upon the back of the couch and cradled her forehead in that worried hand. “What other things are passed that way, lad? Outside of martyrdom?”

  “Well, sicknesses. But it’s a sickness, isn’t it? Martyrdom? It’s a kind of sickness, and that’s why all the rich people left in—when was it, Mom? I saw on the history program one day, but I don’t remember. After Mars was good enough for people to start living there.”

  “1744 Anno Lucis,” his mother answered from behind closed eyes. “My ancestor wasn’t quite seventeen, too young to go with her fiancé, so they forged her documents and pretended she was eighteen. They had to leave their baby behind, and that’s why we’re still here.”

  “To think, Carol, you begged before to know why I was here—coming as you do from a family of criminals! Martyrdom is not a sickness, my boy. It is the cure to sickness—all sickness. But it is more than mere earthly cure. It is a mission. A privilege. It is an honor in which one becomes part of something grander than oneself. Grander than one might ever comprehend. One becomes a gift to the world. To reject that, and see that as anything but a privilege…do you suppose that is right, Murphy? Do you think it is fair that a martyr should reject the role chosen for them? Should they deny the importance of their task, and the importance of the tasks being done by their brethren?”

  Caught in a trap by the sensibilities of his age, the reluctant boy shook his head. The Hierophant’s hands spread in Dominia’s direction. “There you are, my girl! I have no choice.”

  He snatched her right eye from her skull in a motion so quick Dominia could only scream in tandem with the children before propelling from the table to writhe upon the floor. Blood oozed through her fingers while her legs kicked to fend off the pain; meanwhile, the girl’s panicked feet carried her cries to her mother. With his most feline expression of amusement, the Hierophant dipped the much-abused sac into his tea.

  “We never did place a proper bet, lad, so I’ll count that as a ‘win’ on my part, if you don’t mind. Do you like your life the way it is?”

  “No!” Dominia arched her back against the pain and gnashed her teeth, unable to lift her hand away to view the unfolding scene. “Don’t do it! Don’t do it, you bastard!”

  “I will deal with you at an opportune juncture,” said the Hierophant. “Come here, Murphy. Answer the Holy Father.”

  Again, obligated by well-instilled values, the boy neared with but a flicker of attention for the crying mother who cradled her second child and prayed for her first. Amid all her screaming pain, Dominia thought to herself how praying would only make the situation worse, but she had no strength to say it as her free hand fumbled around her belt.

  “I love my parents.”

  “And your sister?”

  With more reluctance: “Yes.”

  As the boy answered, the Hierophant lifted the lid of the sugar bowl and scooped a few generous teaspoons into the cup. “What if I told you that you could keep your family safe from me forever? All you’d need do is trade your life for them.”

  “No,” cried Dominia again, a word useless to him.

  The wise child asked, “You don’t mean really die, do you?”

  The Hierophant smiled in that mockery of patriarchal tenderness which was his trademark. “No, I don’t. It has been a long time since I’ve been a new grandparent.”

  “Murphy, don’t.” His mother made one futile plea, but the boy looked in her eyes and saw her fear, saw her neck wet with the tears of his sister. Strangled with grief, Murph turned back to the Hierophant.

  “I’d do it for them.”

  “You’ll come with me and grow into a man who will never age beyond his apex. Never sicken. Never die. You’ll have wealth beyond measure, more friends than you could count; I’ll make you a duke, or an earl. Not so bad a trade for your old human life? For your family’s lives?”

  Mute, the boy shook his head. The smiling Hierophant offered the cup of tea and blood. That nauseating admixture stood poised millimeters from the boy’s lips when Dominia managed to lift the gun and, half blind, pull the trigger.

  She would wish for the rest of her life that she had gotten the shot off sooner, and that Murphy’s last memory of life before the bullet ended his suffering wasn’t the tea of ocular matter nearing his lips for the sake of his cowering family. She would wish and wish and it would never change, that second of realization that she had killed a child to save him from martyrdom. Nothing about it would change, neither t
hat cry from his mother, which pierced the air for miles around, nor that cold, dead-faced look from the Hierophant, who regarded the corpse, then his daughter, with disappointment.

  “That was a stupid thing to do.”

  “Well, you know me.” Dominia took a haggard breath while the Hierophant, in a petty rage, stormed across the room to snap the necks of both mother and daughter. It was the most painless death possible for either of them after the night’s direction. “I’ve never been your favorite.”

  “You could have been, had you ever tried to adapt. Nothing you could have done for me, for the Family, ever could have made you my favorite child until you accepted my love into your heart! Yet you have always refused it, that love. All the things I gave you—all the sacrifice, the attention and education. The land. Your governance! Oh, Dominia, what an awful shame!”

  Feeling pathetic, Dominia endeavored to turn her last bullet on herself, but recalled as she pulled the trigger that her last had been spent on Murph. The Hierophant swept the gun out of her hand, as angry as if she’d been successful. “No, no, no. You ridiculous woman. Shall I take both your eyes? Eager as you are to destroy your world, I would do you a favor by blinding you to it.”

  “Fuck you,” she said, and was whipped across the face with the handle of the gun.

  “I have never been as humiliated by your mouth as I was tonight. What a pitiful waste.”

  He drew back his leg and kicked Dominia once, hard, in the stomach. As her hand shifted protection from her eye socket to her winded gut, the Holy Father clutched her by the throat to fling her against the table. Precious more than a rag doll, she lay upon the broken shards of a porcelain vase and its half-dead posies. The Hierophant regarded her with a heavy sigh.

  “Oh, Dominia, my dear. How sad I am to leave you thus. Should I tear out your tongue to let you drown in your blood? That would be easiest, perhaps. Instead, I’ll take these.” He bent and, with one great hand, forced open her jaw. With the other, he reached into her mouth. After a sickening snap-crunch-pop, first came one silver fang, then came the next. Dominia kicked and screamed, and the family’s border collie crawled into the room to bark in an effort it knew was fruitless. The Hierophant was careful his fingers were free of her teeth before allowing her to shut her mouth again. Then he slipped the incisors into the pocket of his waistcoat, wiped his hands clean of blood on Dominia’s leather breeches, and smiled at the dog.

  “Hello, hello! How are you? Aren’t you a lovely boy.”

  As the towering man approached it, hand outstretched, the dog’s ears pinned back. It edged away with a growl.

  “So upset. Wouldn’t you like a new friend?”

  Once, twice, the dog barked, and Dominia, when she turned her head, caught a glimpse of white tooth. Please, go hide! But the Hierophant chuckled over his shoulder at the Disgraced Governess.

  “Perhaps I’ll leave him to keep you company while you die.” With a lamp from an end table, the Hierophant shattered the most modern object in the room—the holo-center and its attached phone, all tucked in the corner by the couch. Too woozy to protest as he shattered the projector and tore wires from the installation within the wall, Dominia let her head roll back against the floor. “Call some friends on your watch if you’d like us to trace their numbers, assuming you haven’t excised yourself of friends as you’ve tried to excise yourself of family. It’s a few hours until dawn. When it comes, why not crawl to meet it? A few minutes after, you’ll have nothing to worry about. Oh, but—leave the door open behind you. Wouldn’t want the dog to starve once his family is down to bones.”

  As her Father’s back receded along with her gun, her teeth, and her sense of reality, existence faded into the whine of the dog. How funny: after all this time, all this luck, all one thousand battles, Dominia felt certain she’d die in her sleep.

  Fate, of course, would never be so kind.

  II

  Adrift

  René Ichigawa seemed a resourceful man, so Dominia wasn’t surprised when she jolted half upright to find herself enclosed in a casket that was, in its turn, enwombed within the sound of waves. No, the surprise came when she tried to lift that casket’s lid and discovered her enclosure had no lid at all. As her nostrils were assailed by the smell of wet dog, she turned to make visible the McLintock border collie, once hidden in her new blind spot. The delighted dog barked, and while Dominia struggled to regain her bearings, footsteps hurried across the deck. A shaft of light belched into the lazaretto where she’d been stowed alongside other odds and ends with no place topside.

  “It’s still hours before dark, Dominia. You’ll need your rest; go to sleep.” René’s face appeared, the Franco Japanese professor’s foxy features softened by what looked to be gunpowder (or mud) that contoured his face and ears. “The fishing boat is still on schedule to pick us up, and the wind is with us, so we may make it to them by tonight’s scheduled rendezvous.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “Then we’ll sail all the way to Japan!”

  Dry-mouthed, Dominia regarded him, then the dog. “All the way to Japan, with me and some mutt sharing a storage locker?”

  “Purebred, I thought. He’s not yours? He insisted on following us and wouldn’t get off the boat.”

  “The Hierophant killed his family.” Her mouth felt wronger with each word, and as she remembered her missing incisors, she rubbed her upper lip and grimaced at the bare gum. As her hand moved up and encountered fabric around her forehead, René reached into the lazaretto to slap at her fingers.

  “Leave that alone! Martyr or not, infections are real. Count yourself lucky he left you alive, and with that.” He pointed at the diamond resting on her heart; her hand lowered to Cassandra’s smooth facets. Oh, Cassandra! Dominia pushed the image of her wife’s lost body away with a tight swallow while René carried on. “I made a bandage out of my tie—you’re welcome—but when we get to Japan, we’ll have to get you a new one.”

  “A new bandage?”

  “A new eye.” He glanced between Dominia and the dog, certain he’d get his answer from one of them. “What happened?”

  “There was a mole. There must have been. Someone who knew we left tonight. The escorts you arranged had me almost to the coast when Elijah and his cronies crashed into us. Without Cicero, no less, which means they’re serious. I don’t think I’ve seen them apart since 1994.”

  “The Lamb! What a nut. The fang trend, I suppose I get, but ram-horn implants?”

  “Don’t laugh. He needs them to filter all the pleas if he’s going to focus on one prayer at a time.”

  The human did laugh, of course. “Like a tinfoil helmet! So he’s just a schizophrenic?”

  She didn’t feel like arguing. That the Lamb’s miracles had physical effects were a given. Not believing in him was like not believing in gravity; but so was believing in him, because nobody could fully explain gravity, either. “I don’t understand how any of it works—hardly anybody does but my Father—but it does. Without those implants, he hears all prayers, all the time. Of course he’d seem insane without them. When you can make anything that’s possible happen with surety, you’re going to be the focus of a lot of attention.”

  “Like he’d waste his time helping a non-martyr…or even a martyr, most of the time.”

  She wasn’t yet inclined enough against her Family to trash the Lamb along with the rest of them, and said, “He saves martyrs every week, every time they get dragged in to Mass to taste his blood—that’s one whole week of not having to eat human flesh. Not if the martyr doesn’t want it.”

  “And how is this different from the Lazarenes?”

  No reason to get annoyed; she hadn’t believed the tenants of the Holy Martyr Church in years, shouldn’t be getting sensitive about it. Better to keep it about her Family. “I wasn’t sure I’d made the right choice in leaving. Not until I saw the Lamb in the tanque that hit us. Now, I realize this is my only option.”

  Irritation marred René’
s face. “I thought you were committed to this.”

  “I am now, aren’t I?” When his features didn’t relax, she scoffed. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Throwing away my governance on some crazy hope that—”

  “The Hunters know where Lazarus is,” insisted the professor. Back into religion they slipped again, despite the Governess’s best efforts. Or—well, not a Governess now, was she? Back to a General again. Debatably. She struggled to reframe her own perception of herself as the human carried on, “Whether resurrection is possible—I’m skeptical, myself. But everybody seems certain Lazarus is a real guy, and I’d give an awful lot to see if he can make a miracle. Prove it or disprove it. Who wouldn’t? Since my idiot cousin is so convinced of it, I might as well see for myself.”

  The dog watched with an occasional wag of its curled tail. She turned from it and asked René, “What happened to you?”

  “We were ambushed right while I took a pee break—the reason I survived! The Lamb must have come for us after attacking you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter. As long as we have you—and as long as I’m alive, of course!—we’ll be in perfect shape.”

  “Even if you die, don’t worry. I’m staking my life that resurrection is real, right?”

  Weakly, she returned René’s laughter as he once more sealed her into the lazaretto. The border collie turned big blue eyes on her, spicing it up with a hopeful tail wag that carried on until she ruffled its ears.

  “I still might eat you, you know.” As she spoke, her tongue wiggled into one of the gaps of her stolen cuspids. The replacement, a furry canine, responded with a knowing whine as she lay her head against the ropes that formed her pillow. “Yes,” she agreed, “pretty pathetic.”

  By now, the Internet brimmed with rumors about her. The cracked face of her smartwatch, even with its location functions long disabled, perceived enough to indicate it was 1300 hours in their time zone. More proof to Dominia that the thing’s functions were never capable of being disabled. If it was accurate, she had hours before the sun would relieve her from her prison. Most of Europa’s highest citizens—certainly those around the Hierophant’s preferred castle of Kronborg—had already seen news broadcasts (with subtitles, even) uploaded to every livestream Internet site in which the Hierophant had his fingers: that being, of course, most of them. With a few taps of the watch’s digital screen, she picked her own primary source, San-5 News, and found its stream featured an angry, spray-tanned martyr hostess already shouting at the camera with the odd wild gesticulation and, once, the tossing of her pencil.