Act One, Scene Ten
Catherine’s armored car navigated its way through the palace complex, and she wondered when she’d ever leave.
It was an enormous expanse, taking up over a mile of residences and palaces and offices and hospitals, the center of the web of control that was any twenty-first-century tyranny. Her father had sunk his shafts deep into the island’s core, and the sublevels and sub-sublevels stored everything from robotic armies and bioweapons to the computer system of Royal Intelligence, with separate laboratories for every field he had ever bothered studying. Over it all floated the Legacy Forge, now little more than a warning but still moored over the palace, guns staring out dumbly over the city her master had conquered.
The sun was still obscured, the clouds looking hesitant, as if still waiting to be told whether they would go home or start watering the gardens. For Helen’s sixth birthday party her father had arranged a thunderstorm by tracking down a weather-manipulator and making him a bid no one could top, and then raised the shields until the palace was a dome of rain and lightning, lightning that ran through the rain down the sides of the palace, triggering fireworks that rocketed into the sky before bursting into multicolored flowers…
Elgolian passed through the gates into the inner palace - a distinction without a difference; the tunnels that connected the rooms to each other went everywhere, in the outer and inner areas alike, guarded with force-walls and biometrics not men with guns - and then into the inner inner palace, where the Tyrant actually lived. The building hardly looked like where a king would sleep, three stories and stairs, the work of an architect building for a man who liked old buildings. For fifteen years she’d lived here, with her father and mother and brother and sister and Helen, and then she’d gone to college to see the world outside her homeland and hear what people who weren’t supervillains had to say about the world, and then...
And then she saw it all through newspaper headlines. Helen, Countess Ilderia, rebelling, claiming the throne. Helen, Countess Ilderia, striking again and again, striking and the Tyrant striking back and winning, the Tyrant devoting all the brilliance that had been spent defeating the Atlantic Six to a child he’d raised. A long pause and then the news that Ilderia was beaten and failing and a long, long list of the casualties. In America there were laws and there were rules and there was a code; American villains who killed instead of holding back could expect the noose or the needle or simply to be a casualty in their next fight. When villain fought villain in Novapest it was war to the knife. The last report had come only a few months ago: The last of Ilderia’s die-hard loyalists, fleeing a small town in Mexico with her body in a coffin. The picture of her with a bullet through her heart wasn’t in the newspapers, but Catherine had found it anyway and she’d recognize Helen’s face anywhere. Murdernet had confirmed it, and no one was still refusing to pay the bounties on her head. The war was over.
Elgolian opened the door for her, and she stepped out onto the concrete of the carport surrounded by the bloom of a thousand thornless roses, because her mother had turned to her father and said, “They need something to do, out here,” and her father had agreed and called in a small legion of gardeners, who left the palace grounds the ninth wonder of Novapest.
She remembered the speech that had been broadcast online from a thousand cameras when the shield finally lifted. The Durendal Mark Seven was adorned with a crown; it did not speak with her father’s voice, and it said, “Thus always to traitors” when it proclaimed the war over and won.
She wondered which one she’d see; the father she had known as a child, or the man the rest of the world feared. The twenty steps from the car to the doorstep stretched for perceived hours, and then she was through the door and into her father’s arms.
The embrace lasted, warm, comfortable, secure. She was taller than he was but she never felt taller; his absolute confidence made sure of that. Over his shoulder she could see her brother smile over the top of his screen, quietly pleased. Julius never showed strong emotion; even when he wasn’t in his Durendal, the Mons Meg, he always had an invisible suit of armor over him, of manners if not of steel. His body was his father’s, but slimmer.
After a few more long moments she pulled away and saw her sister standing in the hallway, hands clasped in a gesture of the purest kindness. Her hair was neat and perfect, the wildness of her early years tamed by an unbreakable will, and her golden eyes shone red. Catherine had first seen hellfire dance in those eyes ten years ago, but however low it banked it never left them now.
Elizabeth Balog stepped forwards, reaching out to warmly embrace her dearest sister, and Catherine, under the eyes of her father and brother, tensed while she took the hug. It only held for a moment before Elizabeth released her and stepped backwards and with a casual wave of one of the weapons of destruction attached to her wrist said, “Welcome back, Cat. How was America?”
She swallowed her first idea for a response, which started with All the better for you not being there, Bloody Lizzy, and her second, which involved a discourse on comparative historiography, in favor of just saying, “Interesting. Not compared to a war, just to anything else.”
“No serious difficulties, I trust?” Julius asked.
“None -”
“And you hid the bodies?” Lizzy’s friendly smile never disappeared. “I hadn’t heard any news myself, but you never know.”
“There were no serious problems,” she said firmly. “I didn’t kill anyone. Or have anyone killed.”
“But the family reputation!” Lizzy said, and her father said “Elizabeth,” with the tone in his voice that said he was stifling a laugh, and that was enough.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“And Mother?” Catherine asked.
“The hospital,” the Tyrant said.
“I should have gone there first -”
“An excusable error.”
“There won’t be any problem if I head over, will there?” she asked.
The Titanium Tyrant smiled. “Of course not. She’s expecting you.”
- - -
The hospital corridors smelled of disinfectant and despair and a faint, unreal floral perfume, and Catherine followed that last smell as she made her way through the unnaturally clean corridors of the royal hospital up to the rooms where her mother rested. Visions of horror drifted through her mind, nightmare dreams of miles of tubing and masks and bandages that left the mother she loved as a gutted wreck of a human being.
She drew a deep breath and opened the door. There was no tube, and no hospital gown; just her mother’s preferred loose suit, with a small medical cuff on one wrist for whatever monitoring reasons people were given such cuffs.
The Gorgon Queen smiled at her daughter and removed her mirrored glasses, and Catherine hurried to the bedside to embrace her mother.
“You look amazing.”
The Gorgon Queen held on to her daughter. “Prudence’s treatments are much better for the patient than chemotherapy.”
There was a brief flutter of hope. “Did she - ”
“No,” said the Gorgon Queen. “No, Cat, I’ll be dead within the year without a miracle. A month most likely.”
“Oh.”
There was a silence.
“You haven’t found any healers -”
“We’ve spent the past three years trying,” she said. “It’s the hardest thing for healing powers, of course - they’ll regrow it right the way it was if they’re not sophisticated about it - and the enhancements your father and I have picked up over the years certainly don’t help; the power interaction between Darling Dolores and my own augmentations would have put me in the hospital if I hadn’t been here already.” Catherine was having trouble seeing clearly. “We were close to securing Septimanius, but our agents lost him when Helen tried her stunt, which might have been why she tried anything so hopeless. I’ll be frozen when I die, but unless someone escapes from protective custody or one of our teams has a lucky break -”
“I should’ve come home earlier,” Catherine broke in. “I should’ve dropped class and taken a flight home -”
“No,” said the Gorgon Queen calmly. “You should not have. You asked then and I told you. It would show weakness to leave your work undone. You are my daughter, Catherine, and you must always be stronger than I am and seem stronger than you are.”
That is flatly impossible. “Yes, Mother.”
“Now,” her mother said, “the two of us need to talk. First, you need a share of the government. Your major was in political science?”
“Yes, Mother.”
She nodded fondly. “Good. Your father and I discussed it while you were at college, and the next time a county opens up, it’s yours.”
There it was. Her life’s destiny had been declared for her, and under conditions where she could not possibly refuse. “Thank you.”
The Gorgon Queen smiled. “Good. Now, I have one request, which, if it helps you grant it, you may consider my last.”
“If nothing else has killed you over the last fifty years -” she said vainly.
The Gorgon Queen kept speaking. “If, when I’m gone, your father does something stupid - I mean really stupid - tell him so. Your sister is too erratic and your brother is too devoted, so this needs to be your share of the project.”
The idea tried to enter her brain and failed. It was too big to get in. Telling her father he was a fool would be hard enough; she’d had twenty years of experience that he was always right. Telling the Titanium Tyrant he was a fool... “I can’t.”
“You must.” The Gorgon Queen closed her eyes, then raised her head to deliberately look at her daughter with a blank gaze. “The most important thing I’ve done is to keep your father sane. You must promise me that you will inherit that.”
Catherine opened her mouth, closed it. “I swear.”
The Gorgon Queen nodded.
“Good.” Then she was all smiles again. “I believe Greenrose was hosting a party tomorrow night to celebrate your return. You may want to attend - your friends should be there.”
- - -
When Catherine left her mother’s bedside she found her father in the back seat of the car, calm and composed as always.
He patted the seat next to him, and she sat down.
“She’s going to die,” Catherine said as the car started moving.
“So she tells me.” She leaned against him and he put an arm around her, and she tried to relax into it but her father was still - horribly, unnaturally tense.
“How do you -”
“I build weapons. Now we need to discuss your future.” The car took off; headed where, she didn’t know.
“She said you were going to make me a countess when you get the chance?” She didn’t really have anything else to say, so she hazarded, “Of which county?”
“The fifth or the tenth, I expect. Pyre is gruesomely incapable and likely to fold soon, and while Just has so far proven himself useful enough his actions in the rebellion cannot be tolerated, and I mean to purge him the next time I need a scapegoat.”
Right. My father is going to start me off fixing the biggest mess anyone made. Because he trusts me. She paused. “How did Pyre get the fifth?”
“He inherited it. Zero remains in exile. The counts of the Third and Fourth had no heirs and so reverted to the Crown, but Pyre was Zero’s legal heir as Whisper was Tower’s.”
“You gave Pyre a county?”
“The law gave Pyre a county, Catherine. I don’t break promises to my men.” He steepled his fingers. “Pyre is an able combatant with a strong power, he had done well enough as captain of his sister’s guard, and he was offended by Zero’s refusal to invite him to join Ilderia’s coup. By permitting it to fall into his hands I won his support against Ilderia, splitting the soldiers and knights of the fifth county.”
“But that means the people of the fifth have to live with Pyre.”
“Until he fails them, when I obtain their gratitude by removing him. Bad rulers teach the populace to be grateful for good ones.”
“Also, they can leave.”
“Indeed,” the Tyrant said, smiling. “Pyre’s county is inhabited only by those too senile or sentimental or lawless to walk the half-mile into Prudence’s.”
Or who couldn’t afford the rent, Catherine thought. Not that there weren’t other districts that weren’t Pyre’s, however bad they were...
“So…” She paused. “You gave the fourth district to Lizzy?”
“Which one should I have given to her?”
“None? She’s, uh -”
“Your sister,” said the Tyrant firmly. “And my daughter. Dear daughter, I conquered an empire so I could give it to my children. Your sister is very good at breaking rebellions and sniffing out conspiracies. Given the traitor’s knack for earning loyalties, your sister was the best choice to govern her former territory.”
“Yes, but - ”
“But?”
“She’s -” Catherine tried to find a way to say it. “She’s -”
“She is evil. My love, I am also evil. Your mother is evil. Julius is evil. For that matter, Prudence is evil. Recognizing that cooperation with your allies is necessary to achieve any goal is not incompatible with being fundamentally evil, nor is being a capable, intelligent person who works hard to accomplish your goals. Strategy has nothing to do with morality, and Elizabeth is every bit as intelligent as any other member of this family. And she is part of this family, and we are our allies.”
She swallowed her words. “Right. So. Fifth or tenth, probably.”
“If all continues as planned.”