March to the Sea - Empire of Man Book II

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Rus From led the prince and his bodyguards to a back corridor of the temple/palace and an inconspicuous door that revealed a long spiral staircase which appeared to have been hammered from the bare rock of the Diaspra outcrop. The dank, Mardukan-sized stone steps were both steep and slippery with condensation, and as the party descended, the temperature dropped precipitously.

The stairs seemed to spiral downward forever, but they finally reached bottom at last and emerged into a dark, soot-streaked room illuminated only by a few sputtering torches. The cleric led them from there down a curving hallway/tu

Then they turned a curve, and the priest paused as the passageway disappeared ahead of them into a curtain of plunging water.

"I must ask your warriors to leave their helmets at this point," he said.

"May I ask why?" Roger asked, eying the curtain of water dubiously. "And am I to take it that we have to pass through that waterfall?"

"Yes, we do," From said. "There are two reasons to do so. We are about to enter one of the most holy of the Secrets of the God. Beyond that Curtain of the God is His other self: the Dark Mirror of the springs above.

"We chose to use this place as a meeting ground for that reason, but also for the same reason you must first remove your helmets then pass through the curtain. It is believed that this will disable your 'transmission devices.' They are, I believe, susceptible to damage from water, yes?"

"Yes," Roger said with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

"Georgiadas!" Pahner snapped. "Tell the Prince to agree. Then set your helmet on retrans and we'll monitor the feed from your toots."

"Sir," Georgiadas said with a swallow, "it would probably be best to go with the priest's suggestion. That's what my ... intuition says, anyway."

Roger looked at the lance corporal, then at his helmet.

"Right. Georgiadas, Willis, off helmets." He looked down at his practically new suit and winced. "Kostas is going to kill me."

"We can monitor, Sir," Julian said as he manually adjusted the gain on the video, "but we can't send them audio."

Pahner nodded in understanding. The toots pulled video and audio off of the appropriate nerves and rebroadcast them, but while the broadcast could be picked up and boosted by the helmet systems, the Marines' toots were not designed to receive audio and video. Marines were fighters, not intelligence agents. As such, they were supposed to have their helmets on whenever it might be necessary for them to receive anything like that. Roger's toot could both send and receive audio and video, but he couldn't retransmit through the Marine helmets, largely as a consequence of the enormously redundant security features built into the implant hardware of any member of the Imperial Family.

"We can send them text if we need to," the captain told the sergeant. "Bounce it through the helmets, then to the guards' toots, then to Roger. Input isn't that big a deal; I think Roger's going to be walking out of that meeting unmolested, and I've got the rest of your squad armoring up in case he doesn't."

"I hope it doesn't come to that," O'Casey said pensively. "If Rus From is being used as a messenger, we can assume that the group behind this plot is even larger and more powerful than we'd thought. If we have to use force, it will gut Diaspra at exactly the moment it most needs solidarity."

"If we know that, then they know that," the NCO said stolidly. "They have to, and they won't do anything to jeopardize the preparations."

"Let's hope so," Kosutic said, then smiled. "But, take it from me-His Evilness knows partisans aren't always reasonable."

"Well, that was refreshing."

Roger shook the droplets from his fingers and wrung out his hair, then looked around the torch lit room at the circle of hooded, lantern-carrying figures and fought down a smile.

The room was part-cavern and part-construct. The back wall had been mined out to enlarge a natural grotto, but the far wall was mostly natural, and a small spring welled up at the base of a wall of sculpted limestone. It was surrounded by stalagmites and stalactites, and the light of the lanterns shone through the stone and water with a hollow translucence. Behind the spring was a small, natural ledge, the edge of a dry waterfall. It had been scrubbed immaculately clean, but fine discolorations indicated that something other than water flowed over it from time to time.

The site was probably as secret as they came. And it was still lousy tradecraft.

"This is the Dark Mirror," Rus From said, stepping up to the spring. "It is the brother of the God of the Sky." He nodded at the gathered figures and waved his lower hands in a gesture of deprecating humor. "And this is the dark mirror of the Council."

"Unless I'm much mistaken," Roger said dryly, glancing around the gathered figures in turn, "it is most of the Council."

"Whether it is or not, is beside the question," one of the robes replied.

"Chal Thai," Julian said. The voice print recognition was almost instantaneous. "Shit."

"We represent the dark mirror of the surface," the robed figure continued. "On the surface all is agreement, but in the shadows there are questions."

"We seek to change the society of our city," From clarified. "To break it of its dependence on the temple."

Roger blinked.

"But ... you're a priest," he blurted.

"Yes," the cleric replied with a gesture of resignation. "So I am. But what I am more than anything else is an artisan. An ... artist. I create things with my hands, things that move and work, and that is my true calling. But to do that?" He made the gesture of resignation again, this time with a negative emphasis. "To be a creator of things in Diaspra, I must be a priest."

"The Creator," Julian said.

"Nicht scheisse," Pahner responded. "Send a message to Roger. Do not agree to anything, but don't turn them down flat, either."

"Yes, Sir."

"So why am I here?" Roger asked.

"We feel there is a need for change," another figure said. "The power of the temple has grown too great. It is ... choking us. We could be a great city, a city as powerful and well-regarded as K'Vaern's Cove, but we have this great choking beast of the temple on our backs."

"We don't hate the God," another voice chimed in. "But we feel that it's time and past time for the power of the temple to be reduced."

"Gessram Kar and Velaum Gar," Julian read the voice print identifications aloud as he hit the "send" button.

"Hail, hail, the gang's all here," Kosutic whispered.

"Yes," Eleanora said with a note of desperation. "It's a 'quorum of the Senate of Rome.' "

"What?" Pahner asked.

"One of the arguments for Caesar's assassination having been legal was that the conspirators who effectively signed his death warrant constituted 'a quorum of the Senate,' " the history professor said.

"Oh," Pahner said. Then, "Oh."

Roger read the text message received by his toot and tried, again, not to smile. They must be having gibbering fits at the command post.

"To an extent, I agree," Roger said carefully. "And I'm sure-" actually, he was positive "-that my advisor on such things, Ms. O'Casey, also agrees."

"She does," From said. "Eleanora and I have had long discussions about the local political situation and your human political history. Our conversations and the points she raised were what convinced us to arrange this meeting. They gave us hope that you would ... assist us in this endeavor."

Pahner's head turned like a tracking tank turret. His eyes nailed the chief of staff, who shrugged and held her hands out, palms up.

"How was I to know?" she asked.

"You didn't happen to give them a copy of Machiavelli or Permuster while you were about it, did you?" the Marine growled.

"The ... precautions that we took on the way in were, of course, to defeat your 'electronic' transmitters," the priest/technician continued. "Conversations with your Marines indicated that they were susceptible to water damage. I presumed that your helmets were sealed, however, which meant they would have been unaffected by the Curtain."

By now, Roger was familiar enough with Mardukan expressions and body language to easily recognize smugness when he saw it. The question was whether he ought to pop the bubble or permit blissful ignorance, and he decided to go with ignorance for the time being.

"This is all very interesting," he said, "but you still haven't indicated what you want us to do."

"Isn't it obvious?" another voice practically hissed from the shadows. "This 'New Model Army' looks up to you. The people see you as saviors sent from the God. If you were to overthrow the temple, it would be over without the slightest bloodshed. Over in an instant."

"Grath Chain," Julian said in a surprise.

"No way!" Kosutic said, then glanced over his shoulder at the voice print labels and shook her head. "But ... he couldn't have been in on the plot from the begi

"A recent and ill regarded addition, unless I miss my guess," Eleanora told her. "Note the distance between him and the others, his position in the group, and Rus' body posture. Not well regarded at all, at all."

"It's a bit more complicated than that," From said with a quelling glance at his fellow conspirator. "Gratar is a revered figure, what your chief of staff would call a 'saint,' although we have no such designation. Overthrowing him will be hard, but because he's so well-regarded and because he's so deeply and genuinely devoted to the God, he's doing more damage than any ten previous prelates."