The Dragons of Babel

"She always asks after you. Guardedly, of course. Are you being cared for properly?"

Will snorted "I asked for a sword so I could keep in practice with my fencing. I was thinking of an epee, though I could've made do with a toil, but I didn't actually specify that." He raised his voice. "Light!" A line of garden torches burst into flame making the silk party canopy behind them flutter. "Take a look at what they gave me."

He held out both hands flat and a sword appeared in them. Drawing the blade free of the scabbard, he gave it to Florian.

"A Masamune!" Florian held it up so that the torchlight glittered from the martensite crystals m the habuchi. "Look at the nie! Like stars! It is a privilege just to hold it."

"Yet they gave it to me."

"Who better?"

"My skill is mediocre at best and I've only ever practiced with a European blade. Before they gave me this, I'd never even held a katana. Surely it belongs with somebody who can appreciate it."

"You're in quite a mood tonight." Florian put a hand on Will's knee.

Will looked at him in astonishment. "Is that what you want?" "What? No," Florian said. "Oh, I'm perfectly willing, of course. But what I really want is a king. An absolute monarch is a weapon finer than anything Masamune ever crafted, and I want to wield one with my own hand." He gestured with the sword. "One stroke to cut through the bureaucracy and red tape that keeps Babel from ever accomplishing anything. A second to behead the lawyers. A third to strike down the traitors who return from the War and spread tales that it is bogged down and unwi

"There are good reasons for laws and lawyers and truth-tellers." Will stood. "Nor do I value action for its own sake." He walked in among the trees and Florian followed.

Twelve trees grew in the garden of the Palace of Leaves. These were the Birch, the Ash, the Alder, the Willow, the Hawthorn, the Oak, the Holly, the Hazel, the Vine, the Ivy, the Water-Elder, and the Elder. The Vine was a tree only by courtesy, of course. But taken together, the garden formed a grimoire written in the runes in the Alphabet of Trees, and thus to one who could read them (and there was no shortage of such in His Putative Majesty's service), all auguries were implicit therein. Further, in accord with the quantum-astrological law, "As Above. So Below" and the principle of reverse causation, its foretellings must inevitably bring whatever they predicted into existence.

"Behold." Will plucked an elder leaf from a limb hanging over the edge of the garden and dropped it over the railing. It twisted and looped in the night wind and then was lost to sight. "I have raised a storm half a world away," he said. "Or perhaps I have quelled an earthquake. A child will be born with two extra fingers. One who was meant to be lame will be whole. There's no way of knowing, is there?"

"No."

"So is it wise to meddle blindly?"

"Not blindly, lord, but boldly." Florian fluidly moved into a fighting stance. With a stroke of the katana too swift for the eye to track, he lopped a limb from a birch. The blade struck a glancing blow off the trunk of an oak. Bark flew. "A ship sinks! A city declares bankruptcy! Revolutionaries launch rocket attacks across a previously quiet border!" Twigs showered down upon his head and he laughed. "Glory falls from the sky!"

"For the love of the Seven, stop—you don't know what you're doing!"

"Why should I care?" Electrical fires crawled about Florian's face and hair. "For me, anything—even if it entailed my own death— would be preferable to peace and stagnation."

Will felt the dragon-anger rising up in him and choked it down. "Put the katana away," he said, and the sword disappeared from Florian's hand and its scabbard from the bench. And to Florian: "Your scheme, then, is to replace a functioning democracy with the rule of force. "This brute anarchy and nothing more."

"Why should you defend the old regime? A democracy is a bovine thing that wants nothing more than to be left alone to endlessly chew its cud and fertilize the fields. It has no taste for blood. It lacks the capacity to endure hardship, nor does it welcome pain. Only in extremis, and at the urging of the elite, will it rise to greatness, and when the crisis is over it inevitably sinks back down into the muck of inaction and petty corruption."

"You had best pray that I am not the king. For I would never trust one such as you."

"No, Majesty. I am the only one you can trust, for I have revealed myself completely to you. Think you the others are saner or less ruthless than I? Pfaugh! They will smile and flatter and lie, all from the same mouth, and you will know they are misleading you but not to what purpose. But I am a tiger—you understand me. So when need comes, you will turn to one whose biases you know."

"Then I suppose that there's a bright side to the fact that the situation will never come about." Will leaned heavily on the garden rail, feeling the exhausted breath of the city warm on his face. A thousand windows gleamed on the skyscrapers below. Almost whimsically, he said, "I could leap over the edge here and now and fly away."

"If you had wings, you mean." "Even without them. I'd be free. For a time," Will said darkly. He turned back to face Florian. "I am weary and I am going in to sleep now. You may retire from my presence."

"My liege." With only a hint of a smirk, Florian withdrew.

Will remained, staring out into the darkness, thinking thoughts he would not have cared to share with anyone. After a time, a polite voice said, "Sir? Will you be needing your bed turned down?"

"Fuck off, Ariel."

A Pretender did not wake himself up. The music of fairy flutes entered his dreams to warn him that his sojourn in the lands of sleep was come to an end. Then a soft and deferential voice informed him that it was morning. Twin yakshis eased him from the bed. A dwarf in red velvet read him the day's schedule as he was being dressed.

"... Immediately following the test by fire and oil. After which you will oversee the installation of the new garden furniture."

Will stretched and yawned, sending the yakshi who was fitting him into his brocaded vest dancing after his hand. "Is that really necessary?"

"If you'll recall, it was your own request, sir. You were deeply involved in the design."

"Oh, yeah." Will absently scratched his stomach, earning a small but fetching pout from the second yakshi, who was kneeling before him, buttoning his trews, and now had to undo them again in order to tuck his blouse back in. He flapped a hand negligently. "Pray, continue."

"There will then be an hour's free time, which may be spent napping, or in light sports, or in educational pursuits." "I'm in the mood for a monoceros hunt."

The dwarf smiled indulgently, as one might at a willful but fundamentally sound child who didn't know how transparent his attempts at deception were. "There would scarcely be the time, sir. Also, while you're on probation, you can't leave the palace. If you wish, you could go up on the roof and hawk for pigeons."

"It's not the same thing, is it, Eitri? I think I'll spend the hour in the cabinet of curiosities."

Half the palace was forbidden to Will because it was taken up by the the living quarters of the servants needed to make it function, and it would be wrong to embarrass them by barging in una