Note preceding the story:
This tale is very heavily integrated into the other stories in my head-canon, concisely Crickets and Epistolary. In this, the year is IS 533.
Legitimate
a brief foray into Genso Suikoden III
by Mithrigil Galtirglin
---
"You're my father, aren't you," he whispered.
"Yes," I answered, though he had not phrased it as a question.
--
The custom of purchasing a surname had been around for centuries. Those who garnered sufficient material wealth or social imminence considered it the pinnacle of their ascent. In Harmonia, most notably among the second-class, there were those who were, to be poetic, content to go without Opera tickets for a year while they scrimped for a place in the dress circle in the decades to come. These men, and occasionally women, founded lines and earned their sigils and heirlooms and notes in the margins of the Harmonian almanacs, at least until one of their progeny committed a sufficient slight against the Empire to have it all revoked. While it was not frowned upon for the clergy to indulge in such ventures, it seemed a rather unnecessary endeavor, as the clergy, first, are effectively exempt from the caste system, and second, are highly unlikely to retain both the surname and the right to have children.
So when the fourth Bishop in attendance was introduced to me as His Eminence Mathiu Brunnen, I was a touch unprepared. Not shaken, and, upon reflection, not surprised, but curious in a way I'd not been since my distant youth.
I nodded politely, and he curled himself into a bow, his gloved fists held to his stomach. I knew he would be three score years old, and he looked both older and younger, much as I had at that age, and in many of the same ways. His hair was fully grey, like a good pair of spurs, and rather ample. It jutted out like dozens of knitting needles from under his deep blue skullcap. He leaned on a full staff rather than a cane, and his eyes were as bright and pale as the crystals embedded in its crown, as big as coins and knucklebones. When I met the Demon Crowley, a decade and then some later, I understood Mathiu Brunnen's eyes.
When he came out of the bow, he remained stooped until his aide-de-camp handed him back the carved staff. He was shorter than I, well-fed and cow-broad under his military robes. When the aide gave him back his prop, he smiled briefly, almost apologetically, but with a nod to the long cane I leant on.
I do believe I liked him from the start.
"The Staunch Company is yours, Lord Silverberg," he said, and his voice was a crackling, serious sort. "I'm certain you've devised an effective way of deploying us at sea?"
"Several," I said. He tended to phrase statements as questions and questions as statements. I would learn this eventually. I think the quirk was an outgrowth of his assertive nature, and far too much time spent in a confessional, hearing the same petty sins recounted in mantras that became mania. "Though I will admit, defensive fighters as yours will be more insurance than infantry."
He nodded. "Should suit most of them fine. But what's this I hear about shield-cannons?"
"In due course," I said--and then, through my monocled eye, saw the Rune on his forehead where the grey bangs parted. Right where my Pale Gate Rune had been staring back at me for decades, his Eminence Mathiu Brunnen wore a Shield Rune, calligraphy-thick and glowing from use.
"Mathiu will probably be quite a help with that," Sasarai giggled, as if explaining to a child.
I turned to the Archbishop, whose expression was positively smug, and reflected on the little homicidal games my younger brother had gone through as a boy, plotting the elaborate deaths of his classmates when they slighted him. I ran through five or six different courses of action my which I might kill the Archbishop and take his Rune for my own, but of course decided it would be counterproductive.
Beside me, Yuber seemed to have picked up on the thoughts. The Demon sniffed at the air, knowing the dramatic influx of power into this ship's cabin for what it was. "Three bearers," he said.
I silently thanked him for changing the subject, and indicated him to Sasarai. "You surely remember Yuber--" I began, but Yuber had already stalked past me and gone straight for Orosi.
His Eminence Orosi of the Ash Company was, as arcane rituals would have it, Archbishop Sasarai's double, from the cut of his thin brown hair to the frail, effeminate hands--the left gloved, the right not--to the delicate spread of his little black boots. I imagined that he'd been coddled and treated almost like a doll when he was as young as he looked. But the Bishop Orosi had a smoldering air to him that the Archbishop lacked, much the same way Luc once had a distance to and glimmer in his eyes. Yuber was, of course, drawn to it like a butterfly to spilt sugar.
"Tell him to shut up," Yuber demanded of Orosi.
"Would if I could," the Bishop snapped back, with an almost oblique innocence he'd no doubt learned from Sasarai.
This seemed to confuse the third (and youngest) of the Harmonian commanders, Lazar of the Chill Company, whose hand was on the hilt of his sai already. "Tell who--"
"The little Karayan maggot," Yuber answered, so neither Sasarai nor I had to. "Tell him to shut his goddamn maw and stay dead."
Orosi glared, and for a moment it was as if Luc was manifesting behind his eyes, not (as Yuber no doubt believed) the slightly-more-recently dead Chief Hugo of Karaya. "You know as well as I that it does what it wants, Hachifusa."
"Then stop being a weak little mortal and make it want what you want."
"You dare call me weak--"
"Peace, the both of you," I said, and my voice held an echo. A moment after, I realized that Mathiu had said the phrase at the same time, and held out his right hand much the way I would have before I had attuned myself to the cane. Mathiu was visibly incredulous, his bright mage-eyes youthful past the crows-feet, and he turned to me with a certain thirsty confusion. My face was still as ever.
I did note, though, that the narrow eyes that Yuber and Orosi were shooting at us, respectively, were markedly similar. And all the while, Lazar rested his hand on his weapon, and Sasarai folded his hands together like a doll's and gloated behind his placid, scheming smile.
---
I wrote rather furiously in my journal that night. Considering that Sasarai would most likely outlive me and read this, I took care to pace every insult to systematically inundate him, beginning with disparaging his behavior as akin to an adolescent girls' and culminating with remarks invoking his lack of a right to meddle in human affairs seeing as he was merely an anthropomorphic vessel for a power not his own to exploit a power not his own. I believe I was overly cruel, and I knew Yuber could sense it, pacing behind me like a cross between a caged panther and an art connoisseur. He would stalk, and then stop, and even when I could only hear the cabin's floors creaking I could still feel him hunting down the fully-formed idea, following the trail of blood it dripped from the wounds he'd already given it.
"I am going to kill True Fire," he growled. He was ten feet away, glaring out at the starless ocean, but the words went straight to my ears.
"Wait," I told the Demon, without pausing. I believe I was still in the middle of expressing my thankfulness that Sasarai would never exist outside his Divine Father's construct.
The Demon's eyes bored into the back of my neck, the way his hands often did when he gave up on trying to control himself. "How long."
"For the duration of your contract with me."
"Why."
"Because I do not want His Holiness to break our alliance before the carnage starts, and neither do you." I finished the entry and turned the seat of my croaking chair around to face Yuber and perhaps end this quickly.
Apparently my placidity was enough to derail his train of thought, but not unseat his rage. It rarely was. He was staring at his right hand now, through the white gloves, at the Rune that curled around his bones and veins and only I had seen and lived. "Why haven't you had True Earth killed and become him," he spat. Yuber, it seemed, was also at a loss for articulating questions at the expense of demands.
I sighed. "For someone with centuries of experience, your grasp of mortal politics seems a touch deficient."
"He's not mortal anymore and you've got promise." That it was the first time he'd expressed such a compliment was not lost on me; that he chose to wait until I was eight decades old was, until I revisited the matter alone. He looked up with only his red eye. "Give in, Silverberg."
I could not help but smile. I had not read of him tempting any others of my predecessors. There was a certain abstract flattery to it all, that he misunderstood me enough to think I desired to convert to his existence. "You seem to be implying that I desire for him to die." I said, and that none of my fear escaped into that statement went without saying.
His frustration with me was as plain as the cut of his sweater. "You did back there."
"Yes."
"And you do now." His voice was like death by drowning, and now his eyes--both of them--were on the journal, splayed across the desk. "Do it," he growled, coming away from the window. "Kill him, become him, then I'll kill True Fire and burn down the whole damned fleet. I get blood, you get to be immortal, and you personally ensure that this damn contract ceases to exist."
I could feel old bruises resurfacing as he neared me. My fingertips hurt, my fading eye and the monocle-rim around it hurt, everything red with scars. I thought of my Grandfather's palms and spoiled milk. "Leave me, Yuber."
He did not. "It's the other old maggot, isn't it." There was no humor in his voice, no thrill in his disparate eyes, no smirk on his lips. I gathered his confusion had made him angry, perhaps jealous. My scars still throbbed.
"What of him?" I asked, with only experience rendering me calm.
Yuber stopped just outside his own reach of me, arms hanging at his sides, the fingers curled slightly like an anticipating brawler's. "He smells like you."
"He would." We were speaking in whispers. The sight in my better eye was wavering, noticing every flickering shadow my lanterns cast on the cabin walls.
"And why is that?"
"It amuses me that a predator such as yourself has to ask that question." I said it more for my benefit than his, and perhaps 'amuse' had been a poor choice of verb, but with his eyes honing in on mine--his silver one boring through the monocle I wore, his red one seething into my better--I had more deep-seated concerns than my vocabulary.
Yuber smirking was among the better courses this discussion could have taken. "Oh, I get it. He's your spawn. The one you churned out before you called me." He leaned back a touch, as if to stifle a laugh that I knew would never surface.
"Overlooking your vulgarities," I admitted, "yes."
"Seems to me there's cause for vulgarity."
"You have a point." I thought for a moment that, perhaps, he would let the subject drop, now he had another card to play against me, but almost as I dismissed the notion as luxury he set back on our earlier admonishment of the Archbishop, to which I was not ungrateful to return.
The Demon spat, and turned back to the window, watching his personal battlefield of the ocean's surface with the darker of his eyes. He kept the other trained on me. This was no longer frightening. "And True Earth's the female."
With a thought to my own written insults, I sighed. "He does seem to be getting to that point, but no, His Holiness is not the mother. I am uncertain as to what happened to that woman, actually. Perhaps I shall ask His Holiness."
"You know, your grandfather did that."
The casualness of that statement clouded its intent, and I actually had to ask the Demon's meaning. "Asked his Holiness?" I turned my chair back to the desk, prepared to make a note of this conversation.
"No, filth," the bored growl shot toward me. "Fornicated. Created maggots that weren't Silverbergs."
"Well, it's only natural," I said, salting the half-dry notes I had made earlier. The pain in my scars was subsiding, for which my handwriting was thankful.
"One of them showed up when I was with him," he said. "Smart-assed bastard, got himself killed protecting that puppet king."
"Ah, right." I stretched my mind to recall the servants whispering, and did not have to strain to remember a tale in a scroll and a bawdy tavern ballad and which of the two was the younger. "I had speculated."
"I was there when the roof caved in about that," the Demon mused, yawning and stretching, his fair hair quavering in the air behind him. "Real nice fight, got to watch the old man bleed."
I had long grown accustomed to the Demon's idiosyncracies, and the particular sheen of his smirks when the idea of hurting me or any of my grandsires was almost pleasant. He drew out the "e" of bleed with his deep, lazy yawn, and scoffing. Killing off my entire family was the one term he could not break until the end, and thus he never tired of the anticipation. I still feel his scars, though time and magic have dulled them; tiny lines on the sides of my throat, the backs of my wrists, my fingertips, one close to my forehead that my hair hides. In the years before this, when Grandfather had died, I appraised the cadaver before we burned him, and many of his were in the same places.
"Maggot broke Silverberg's nose," Yuber said. "Tough little bastard."
---
The first of the depinosophies with His Eminence Mathiu Brunnen was the indirect result of Sasarai not being able to hold his liquor.
My own dalliances with alcohol were frequent but shallow, more so in the decades since reshaping my life around the islands, when their culture defined propriety on a more social scale than I had been accustomed to on the continent. I found myself bribed with wine as often as coin, fine liquors as often as powerful artifacts. Some of these I kept for display, as I suspected they were intended for; some I sold or bartered. Many a bottle had been opened to sway or placate some reticent contact.
I was quickly indoctrinated into the social practices of the Archbishop Sasarai. The three Bishops were attuned to Sasarai's frailty and thought little of it; I appreciated the knowledge that Sasarai knew all paths to tipium grove.
He was, to put it bluntly, a giggling drunk. A clinging, foppish, hopelessly amused and clear-voiced testimony to the lubricating powers of alcohol. He drank to excess and he drank to forget. I would later discover that his hangovers affected the tides. It was not as if he ever maintained the appearance of the ninety-year-old man I knew him to be, but when under the influence he was positively juvenile.
In the end, the remaining Bishops drew lots about who was going to escort him back to his cabin, and by "escort" they meant "haul bodily". Lazar had retired earlier, and Orosi lost the wager. When the time came, Orosi rose and slurred an apology on the Archbishop's behalf. It was strange, seeing a conscious almost-Sasarai with an unconscious not-himself-Sasarai draped over his shoulder, through my cautiously less-capernoited-than-they eyes.
Mathiu laughed, deeply. He held his glass very tightly, like a peasant, and his cheeks and nose were flushed.
"You seem to be used to this display," I recall saying, as soon as the young-looking men were gone.
"It's the duty of children to care for their parents when their parents can no longer take care of them," he replied.
I assured myself that he knew not what he said. "So his Holiness is, in a way, father and teacher alike."
"Father, mother, teacher, legend..." He rattled off the list with a gyrating hand, sloshing the finger-height of brandy in his glass about. "His Holiness, in a way, is old-young, man-woman, violent-docile, power-frailty."
Inevitably. "Man-god."
To my surprise, Mathiu shook his head. "No, he's human. He'll be human until he's been one for too long."
I gave a thought to Yuber, then, and the years of youth he so loved to hang over my head. "So that's how it works."
Again, Mathiu shook his head, more fervently this time, so that the clinging grey bangs tossed. He glanced at the door, then up at the gently swinging lamp. "It's not when men decline to die that they become legends."
I understood his meaning. "It's when they decline to die when they otherwise ought to."
"Yes," he said, staring at the ceiling.
"His Holiness has survived several attempts on his life," I said, declining to cite my own.
"Yes," he said, again, and turned his eyes from the lamp to me. So bright, so young, in the face of a man of sixty. "So have you. You are legendary, he is legendary," he added, tossing the glass back and forth with the swirling of his wrist. I suspected I hadn't noticed the gesture before only because he'd been leaning on his prop the entire time.
"But not yet a god," I said, the 'yet' more in reference to the Archbishop.
The glass stopped tossing, and Mathiu grinned. "If he opts to become one, more than his tenure will factor into it."
"To be sure. Other True Rune Bearers have gone centuries without becoming godlike."
"You're speaking of...?"
"Geddoe, most notably." It had been nearly two hundred years for him, I knew, and still he failed to destroy Sasarai. "And the reverse can also be said, some Bearers become gods having only lived decades."
"Taiji the Flame Champion."
"Precisely." I had almost forgotten my drink, not that I cared for it anyway. But this man...I had never envisioned conversing with my Lucian in this fashion. Perhaps I had tried, I could no longer recall, and it had been decades since I had seen or heard from my son at all. Would he, at nearly fifty now, be as sagacious as this Bishop?
I drowned the thought. "There is a better word for what the long-lived find themselves becoming."
He raised an eyebrow--well, half of the one he seemed to have, what with his wrinkles, which were deeper than mine by virtue of how he kept himself. "A better word than 'god'?"
"Demon."
"Like yours?"
"He is not 'mine'."
"Are you 'his'?"
Lucian would have never dared ask that. I would have given him the world if he had. As it stood, Mathiu, across from me in this swaying cabin on this minute ship, in the seat my son had sat in once or twice in silence, was eager-eyed and erudite, with a...again, I would not understand those eyes until I knew the Demon Crowley, the power and persistent thirst that betrayed an old soul with a young man's desires.
Again, I drowned the thought, this time with a sip of the brandy, the fruit of the islands putting my mainland sensibilities in their proper light. "More than he is 'mine'," I admitted. "There is a certain ambivalence to the situation. He is in my employ, but, my dear Bishop, to presume I control him would be delusional. And he is the more powerful, and thus exerts a distinct measure of influence on my decisions, but in the end he is more or less enthralled by my will and course of action."
"On his terms."
"One deals with all beings on their terms." I set down my glass. "It is usually the wisest thing to do."
He laughed, the same as before, his eyes closing in a fashion I nearly regretted. "I can't imagine a Demon's terms are pleasant things to operate under."
"I've had time to acclimate. Besides, nikhedoia is a rather effective nepenthe."
"That I can imagine."
"What it amounts to is that I will die and he will not, not for a good long while."
"How did you come to be in league with him," he wondered aloud, but with a downward inflection that might have posed the statement as rhetorical.
Rhetorical or not...after, whenever I considered how much I craved to tell him how Yuber...I likened it to coveting your enemy's second-in-command. The benefits of drawing him to your side would be incalculable, the tactical advantages phenomenal, the positive effects on your renown innumerable...and if you actually succeeded in such an endeavor the value of your target would completely arefy.
But he had not asked, and so I did not answer.
---
"Maggots weren't meant to swim," the Demon growled.
I ignored him, and kept my eyes on the sunset. It was the foreboding red that our crewmen in the past had sang about, before Yuber had instilled such great fear into those who sang that those manning the Precipice had waned to a reticent, complacent two dozen. When those sailors retired or were lost, their replacements were attracted by and held to the same standard. It had been years since I had music on my ship, and I no longer missed it.
But at that sunset, my frail eyes lent credence to the memory of a cant of warning, dredging itself through the riggings of my mind. O woe to the crew, from the captain on down, it went, of the 'Merry now broken and dead. She flew toward horizon, her flanks right aglow, but her sails were a-dripping with red, my friends. A marriage-bed red, a maidenhead red, her sails were a-dripping with red. And the song proceeded to thinly veil an excess of sexual metaphors as the mighty sea and the portentous horizon made the ill-starred ship their mutual whore.
"They were meant to drown," Yuber went on.
"Many do," I said. I watched out of the corner of my good eye as the ugly scowl formed on his smooth jaw. His cheeks went concave and teeth ground, and the sunset cast rings around the silver of his eye.
He spat over the railing, and his cheekbones became streaks of shadow. He'd turned me from the horizon and I hated him for it. "In packs. The weakest maggot drags the others down when they try to save him."
"A good thing then, when they crowd; it facilitates your slaughtering them."
He turned and openly glared at me, his other eye uncannily like the sun. "It can't get any easier."
"I can make it harder for you," I reminded him, quietly. "You can make it harder for yourself. Neither of us wants to."
He did not deny that I was correct. As I suspected, however bored he was, he'd grown accustomed to stalking the sea. He was the rumors that followed in my wake, the new nightmare that raked the skulls of island-children and figured the speech of playwrights, the gossip behind the media's purported conspiracies whenever an unsinkable ship sank and its perfunctory lifeboats were rendered into food for the brine. Don't swim out too far, nurses would warn their charges, or the Black Leviathan will get you. And when the children protested, and said they would be able to see a sea-dragon a long way off, the nurses would caution, but sometimes he has the shape of a man, the captain of a ship, young and comely, and to see him is to die.
O woe to the crew, from the captain on down.
---
The second of the depinosophies with His Eminence Mathiu Brunnen was the indirect result of Sasarai being able to keep a secret, namely where he was sending those birds.
His Nasal were a tight-beaked, efficient flock, likely subject to the same visceral fear of dolorous reprimand that had plagued the Bishop's horses during the old days of ground-warfare. There was, however, one chatty bird, flat-stone-grey, female, and smaller than the others, whose reconnaissance tended to drive Sasarai to prophesy something relevant to whichever coming battle. I suspected--not entirely correctly--that he had a mole among the ranks of the Coalition. To be fair, I did not care if his Holiness betrayed us, but I was prey to a certain curiosity. After all, that loose-beaked bird knew the location of my ship. In the end, the recipient of those letters evaded me for years, until it ceased to matter.
The grey bird had come again in the midst of a quarrel-of-affairs masquerading as a meal, and Sasarai received her, took her in to feed her, then promptly shut the world out of that cabin. Orosi was rather offended, and had left in a tantrum for the ship of my Celestial Fleet that he was fast making his own, a destroyer called the Red Giant. I let him, and I let the argument of strategy continue, but surprisingly enough it had ceased to be an argument when Sasarai and his precious doppelganger had gone.
"He's going to come himself, isn't he. Schvarzeleber," Mathiu quickly clarified, pouring himself a rather large glass of persimmon liquor and Kamaro vodka.
I nodded. "Without a doubt. It is only a matter of time."
The Bishop toasted, glanced out the window, and drank with a hearty laugh. "Figures I'm the only one here not a Star of Destiny, and the only one not you who understands what kind of war this is."
I had never heard someone so blunt in using the term. "You're not under any Star?"
He shrugged, sloshing the pale orange liquid around in his glass with every half of the gesture. "Just the sun."
He expected that to make me laugh. When it did not, his smile sank just a touch deeper into the thick lines in his cheeks, and his eyebrow lowered. The sunset from beyond the cabin's window reached in for us and blackened the dimensions of his cassock and collar, like shadow-bindings and a phantom noose. I reached my mind out for Yuber and heard only the uzzard sea, voracious as its surface reddened. The Demon must have been smiling.
I lay my hand on the map nearest me, Na-Nal and its subterranean grottoes. "Do you consider yourself to have the art?" I asked, and Mathiu no doubt knew my meaning.
"Yes." He came closer. His voice had quieted somehow, perhaps only because mine had as well. "Of course I pale beside his Holiness, simply by virtue of being not of his day, or your day."
"Or experience." I adjusted my monocle, intent on the schematics before me and the voice beside me.
He set down his drink and went about pouring another, in all likelihood proposed for me, though I'd already had a few. "You asked if I had the art, sir, not the science. The science is what is affected by experience; the art is sown when a man is born. I am not under his Eminence's star, nor any other, and am lucky for the scant measure of talent I have reaped."
His organic metaphors amused me. "I will grant that this train of thought is of interest to me. Do go on."
From here on I could not bring myself to look at him, his voice was so like a child's. Not for pitch or choice of word, but he had the air of someone meaning to placate, a dissenting student's tone toward a famous but conservative teacher. I had spoken to Apple much in this way in my youth at Soldat. He was not humble, though his words were self-deprecating. "I see the art in the science," he said. "I know one from the other..."
What he did not say, I noted as I plotted a course in graphite through Na-Nal's dangerous mines, was that he was jealous. Of course, such an inclination was unfit for a man of the cloth.
"The science is a field, he went on, "and in its center is a great well of it, of the art..." He trailed off, and finished mixing whatever he had in mind for me. At this point, I was rather unparticular about it. "It feeds the field, but is exposed in a ring of stone. I can draw from the well, touch the water, taste it, gather it, bathe in it, even give it to others. But the field, though sufficient, is not bounteous, and the water in the well sits too deep for me to see the bottom. With every bucket I draw...I fear..."
I visualized. The field I saw was at Altestein, just after a thaw, the ground carved with red earth and the straw-colored entrails of recuperating grass. The well had never been part of Grandfather's--now Lucian's--estate, sparkling granite with well-worn cement and a roof, perched on decrepit pillars of wood with shingles as worthless as a snake's secondhand skin. Its smell filled me, and I obfuscated it with the alcohol at my side. Persimmon and clarity, the same as the Bishop now drank. "I see," I told him when the silence surpassed the bounds of propriety.
I listened to his staff as he lifted it, and hobbled with its aid to the table he had left some of his drafts on. "What is there, Lord Silverberg?" he asked, casual as a barkeep.
"At the bottom of the well."
"Yes."
I turned to him, and kept him in my good eye. "Is it water that feeds the fields? That you taste, gather, bathe in?"
He looked down at his roster, at the numbers--not names--of men from his Staunch Company he was assigning to each captain in my fleet. I believe he did not actually understand, but he claimed he did, though he appended a doubtful turn to the end of the phrase. After, he added, "I suppose I have betrayed a fear to you, Lord Silverberg?"
"Yes," I answered, because it was a question.
"Will you do me the same service?"
I believe it was the schnapps that allowed me to. "Crickets," I said. "Absence."
He nodded.
---
"I keep forgetting to actually ask what you make of him," the Archbishop mused after his tile was set down.
"For half a year?" I took it into my hand with the other En Moain kings and dismissed an En Kuldes in its stead. "Perhaps you are losing your faculties in your old age, your Holiness."
Apparently, he was collecting Lazlo tiles, and set my discarded one aside with the two from his hand for a Pon. "Oh, ha. No, it's just that your opinions of people as people never seem to matter. To you, I mean." He smiled, and flicked some hair, still as young-looking as the rest of him, out of his eyes. "You cooperate with people you don't care for rather easily, case-in-point myself," he added with an almost jaunty wink. "And of course the Demon, whose bedside manner is something I'd rather not imagine. You're a paragon of objectivity." He discarded a purple tile emblazoned with the face of Marco En Llordrian.
"But my opinion of His Eminence Mathiu matters to you." I drew from the deck. It was an Earth Rune, which I set aside with the Water and Wind I already held.
"I imagine the curiosity won't be sufficient to kill me, but yes."
I displayed no appreciation of his ironic statement, though it may have masked my disgust more effectively if I had. "I could withhold my feelings out of sheer spite," I said, and gave him another En Kuldes.
He drew from the waiting pile instead. "Yes, you're quite good at that. But why bother?"
"What color was his hair, growing up?" I asked, before he could play his tile.
"Hm...there used to be a tree in one of my gardens at the Palace. A thick Falenia maple, with leaves shaped like a beaver's feet. In the autumn, when autumn lasted, the leaves would take their own sweet time turning, and would cling to the tree even after the first snows. And in the early afternoon, if the sun managed to break past the clouds, it would melt the snow on the boughs and they would drip down the leaves, forming into icicles by twilight. The leaves would freeze, then fall when the ice pulled them down in clusters and the wind would pulverize them by dawn. That color, Lord Silverberg, less...well, bloody than yours."
"Your Holiness is quite the poet, these days."
He waved his half-dead hand as if to swat the compliment dead. "Psh. I merely miss the autumn. These days, it is nearly always winter."
I drew. "Reach."
---
The third of the depinosophies with His Eminence Mathiu Brunnen was the indirect result of Geddoe existing for the apparently isolated purpose of ridding the world of Sasarai.
On the eve of battle, no less, the wild card decided to infiltrate my flagship, only to be apprehended by Orosi-masquerading-as-Sasarai, as was his wont. While the disguise fooled Geddoe only for a moment, it was a moment enough to divert Geddoe's magic from leveling and sinking the ship. Orosi took the bolt in his shoulder, but the burns made it up to his chin and ear. When Orosi defended himself--and by 'defended himself', I mean 'struck back like a cornered animal'--it took both Mathiu and Sasarai's intervention to repel Geddoe, and it took all I had to restrain Yuber. His howling probably reached the other half of the Celestial Fleet, leagues to our West. Yuber ended up taking out his frustrations on some of the prisoners belowdecks, regardless.
We were all of us exhausted and unnerved, Orosi infirmed, Sasarai panicked, and in the morning we would be at war regardless of any of our feelings on the subject. And so Mathiu and I drank, to steel our old hearts for the morning, the battle with Dragon Knights and pirates cowering together out of sheer terror at our might. I would, as ever, be on the Precipice, far from the battle; Mathiu would, as ever, be the principle mage on my Flagship, the Cumulonimbus; and Yuber would, as ever, be stalking the surface of the waters, taking any lives that the sea itself could not.
"Why do you wear an earring?" the Bishop inquired, taking care to set the lantern as far from the open bottle and half-filled glasses as possible.
"I acquired it as a young man, shortly after I finished my studies." I had been inebriated then, as now. This time he was the cause, as opposed to the result.
"So it's commemorative."
"In a sense."
"Of?"
The cabin was so dark then, positively caliginous... I could have dispensed with my monocle and it would have made no difference in how little I saw. His eyes were shining and the bottles streaked with spectral candles, pale imitations of the lantern's flame. The remaining Goldschlager swam with its schools of swarming foil, patient and stubborn as the treasure they invoked. He stared back at me with eyes just as vast and clear, across two mere feet of table and over forgotten revisions and drained bottles.
I swallowed past the pungent scrape of cinnamon. "Why did you purchase a surname?" My voice was dry and as old as it should have been.
"How do you know it was purchased?" he asked, smiling and leaning closer. The sleeve of his robes blanketed most of the enemy territory on one of the maps that had made this table its base of operations.
"His Holiness raised you," I said. "You were an orphan."
"True, but that doesn't mean my parents didn't leave me a name."
I remembered the color that Sasarai described and framed his face with it. I wiped the wrinkles away with spectral hands and mentally smoothed out the Shield Rune on his forehead as if I had been the one to give it to him. He was ebullient, popular with the women-folk though hardly a heart-throb, the kind of men my employers would have clapped on the back when I stabbed them in theirs. He would wear light blue and always leave his gloves behind. "Have you ever questioned your first name?"
He tipped back his head and the glass he held with it, then rapidly shook his head as the alcohol went down. He shook my folly of an image off with it, and everything was withered and grey again. "Just because you happen to be right doesn't mean the opposite could not have been true," he said, and I could feel the words on the tip of my nose.
I felt my jaw slacken. I might have smiled. "Why are you avoiding the question?"
"Old habits that refused to die, I guess." He lifted up the Goldschlager and appraised the bottle, then poured himself another shot with a serious curl to his lip. "As a boy I liked to think my parents left me something. Other than an occupation, I mean. I spent most of my young life trying to avoid wallowing in the idea that I was unwanted."
"Most of?"
He left enough to pour the rest into my glass, though it wasn't quite empty yet. "I eventually got it into my head that someone had to want me to happen. And I devoted myself to serving him," he concluded, setting the empty bottle down with a thud, altogether too close to the lantern.
For a moment, I thought he meant Sasarai. I believe I almost shivered from the spark of sheer hatred that ran down my arm and straight to the glass I was holding. I then realized that he meant something a good deal more worth his attention than the Archbishop.
It rang correct, that his relationship with Fate would be diametrically opposed to mine.
With his elbow on the table, and his drinking hand tossing back and forth with the sloshing low-rimmed glass of gold-flecked liquor in it, he reminded me of half the contacts I had sold out and cheated in my lifetime, trading some incendiary information for mischief and potch. And at the same time, he had Caesar's smirk and the angle of my father's eyebrows. "Whether or not the people physically responsible for creating me meant for me to exist, there's a short list of things that have kept me alive until this point. I'm on it," he established, counting with the fingers on his free hand, "and something more than me is on it. I gave up on relying on anything else long ago. It's gotten me to this point," he finished with a shrug, a brief toast, and terminated the Goldschlager.
I edged my glass toward him, even though he had only just filled it. "So why did you purchase a surname?"
"Because I could," he said, low. "Brunnen," even lower. "For 'well'."
"And have you ever questioned your first name?" I realized that my voice had sank as well, probably from muscle-memory and the potent familiarity of the nuances of this discussion, though the subject matter had never once been breached.
I watched him breathe, what little the bottles and obstinate lantern and my own ocular frailty allowed me to see. "His Holiness named me," he exhaled. "When I was old enough and learned that he named me for one of his adversaries, of course I questioned it."
For reasons only the manufacturers of alcohol understand, I nearly whispered. "What did he tell you?"
He finally realized that I was offering him the last of my glass, and took it. "That a name is just a name," he toasted, "and blood is just blood." It took two heavy gulps, and the shadows on his sagging throat stretched and creaked, with the muscles welcoming the last of the cinnamon liquor with the apathy of the sea itself.
I could feel the sweat gather on the inside of my gloves, on my sore, recently-cut fingertips. I was pleased, I was frightened, and the schnapps had had its way with me long ago. I felt like a child, defeating my own pen-and-ink regiments.
He set down the glass but held onto it, the table's admonition echoing through the dark. In a voice more like his prayers than anything else, the Bishop recited, "'Mathiu Silverberg suffered a defeat at the hands of his own conscience and subsequently launched an offensive on the world at large.' You wrote that."
"I remember."
"'He interred himself for years, gathering strength in anonymity but for those he educated. He shirked his name, cast down his crest, and reinterpreted his creed. Without th--'"
"--'Without the trappings of his lineage to guide him, he allowed his disgust to shroud his eyes to the repercussions of his own reticence,'" I said, with him. "'Dissent and rebellion festered, and in the end only the compulsion of his own blood, his martyred sister Odessa, would suffice to drive him to decisive action. Even then, his shame impeded any ventures to regain the good graces of our noble house, and only the legitimacy of his attachment to Leon at the end of his life allowed him to conduct his war to the swiftest available end.'"
He grew quieter as the passage faded into memory. Alone, I concluded, as I had written, "'He is no disgrace, but my heart sinks to recall his vagrancy.'"
"You're my father, aren't you," he whispered.
"Yes," I answered, though he had not phrased it as a question.
I stared at his bright eyes through the glass that enabled me to see at all. Perhaps it was the drink, perhaps my own fancy, but I saw myself in him then; the assumption of calm, the cast of Grandfather and Yuber and marble that I had memorized in mirrors as a child. I knew not what he thought, but that it troubled him enough that he turned his very eyes to shields.
"That makes sense," he finally said, doubled over his glass.
I imagine that I betrayed even less than he of my feelings; I did not even know what they were, if they were. We were old men, with hearts beyond changing, his well-tuned to his strong rhythm, mine atrophied on a prisoner's rations and all too accepting of its bare bones and despondent thread-thin chains. My desk-clock tapped out its rounds in the darkness behind us, marching through the twenty-third hour, and I realized how sober I truly was.
"Are there others?" he asked, still inscrutable. I felt a surge of pride, and answered.
"Two." After a touch, I remembered. "And Lucian."
"I am the eldest."
"Yes."
He nodded and pried his hand away from the glass, which had been empty for quite some time.
---
"Please..." the prisoner wheezed. "Please, give me the answer..."
I would have no more of this.
I had drunk my fill of naval warfare and barked my share of orders for the seventy-odd hours for which I had been awake. My body was beginning to rebel against me and side with time. I had spent hours on edge, darting between the major vessels in the Celestial Fleet as we beat back the Coalition and endured their legion of Goyan reinforcements. The shield-cannons had appeared to hold back much of the Dragon-fire and allow for use of the tallnets. I had only four times before this seen a dragon dead, and today I had orchestrated the killing of what reports claimed was a dozen and a half. And by virtue of good timing I had prevented Yuber from making a crimson spectacle of the youth I recognized as Schvarzeleber's Third, fighting despite a broken spear-arm beside the corpse of his mount.
And then Schvarzeleber himself had brought the reinforcements.
His Third was in the Precipice's lonely brig, what some of my more sardonic men had dubbed the Guest Room in years past. I was about to leave him to interrogation and give my crew an elixir for their collective cabin fever. And here the Dragon Knight was, pleading. "Clarify," I demanded, without looking back.
"Is fate..."
"Is fate what? Unchangeable?" How dare he invoke McDohl. "Do desist with citing the works of your betters. The more you attempt to alleviate your pain with the strength of dead men, the more we'll have to administer to breach it."
He spat through the bars. "I'll never run out of heroes."
"Nor I of the desire to unmake them," I said, and gave the interrogator the signal to begin.
I left them, then. The muffled screams reached me only when I turned into my cabin and saw the Archbishop, staring out the dark window like a lover begging for a shooting star.
"Lord Silverberg," he sang, and turned to face me. His voice was uncertain and quavering, and he was holding his dead metal hand in his living one, massaging the palm as if that would resuscitate it.
"Your Holiness," I said, and shut the door.
"Your array of Our forces has proven effective." He turned back to the window. "We are pleased," he added, and it was a plain lie.
I humored him. "Good."
Even as he waved a vague indication at the reports that had already been turned in and were spread across my desk, he began to summarize them. "Though they still hold the island, the sea is ours. Proportionally, we were victorious. We took fifty-one of their ships, destroyed five. And they destroyed only seven of ours."
I would have entertained hopes as to less. "And the shield-cannons?"
"Threw them for a loop, I'll say." I could make out his reflection in the night-window now that a heavy cloud had crossed the moon; his eyes were out of focus and surprisingly bereft of malice. "The formal reports are only now coming in. I cannot, however, speak for the lost vessels as to whether."
The sound of my cane on the floor echoed with an unfamiliar strength as I made my way to the scrolls and missives. "Doubtless they proved ineffective in specific cases. How was it on the Ariel?" I had put him on that destroyer with a certain spiteful irony.
His voice was almost blasé in its candor. "The mages are exhausted, but we were far enough away from the action that I believe the fatigue is part boredom."
I refrained from commenting on his paranoia, however justified.
"And the dragons, I think, were at the greatest fault for our losses. It is as you foretold..." he mused, and his voice faded, and I sat down at the desk, my knees creaking with the fatigue. "You seem to be avoiding a very important question," he said, and it seemed louder only because he'd finally taken his eyes off the empty sky.
"Do I."
"Yes," he said. "Which ships went down."
"I'll know tonight," I replied, waving a tired glove at the reports that had already arrived, aware that there would be more. I began to unfurl the topmost.
His calm, clear voice was almost of no consequence. "You will. But I thought you would be concerned about the Cumulonimbus."
I believe I froze.
"Futch did quite a number on the flagship, I'm afraid," the Archbishop went on, his small feet so loud on their way across my cabin floor. I felt the sea under us, heard the lantern swing overhead, the clock trudge on, the door open. "According to the survivors, Mathiu's last words were 'tell him I don't mind.' Someone told me, and I was just as perplexed as he was."
"...Thank you, your Holiness," I managed to say, but he had already left, ostensibly forgetting to close the door. He may not have heard me had he stayed; what passed for my voice then was barely the ghost of gestures and wind-chapped lips.
---
I buried myself in numbers. Hours awake, costs incurred, men lost. I had made it emphatically clear to my men that at sea, men were always "lost" and never "missing", never "dead". If the body was not present when all hands were called, it was food for the gluttonous sea and we never spoke of it again.
Fifty one Coalition ships taken and its crews executed, five destroyed. One hundred and twenty six thousand seven hundred fighters, that we knew of. Seventeen dragons. It was estimated that one hundred and fifty thousand Coalition fighters had sated the sea.
Seven full vessels of my Celestial Fleet, amounting to eleven thousand four hundred and seventy three. Another seven thousand twenty two dispersed among the ships that had not been destroyed. Many of those seven thousand were the mages that had been responsible for the Rune cannons, and the shield-cannons in particular. They had hemorrhaged to death when the dragons shattered the magic projections.
I was almost able to avoid the names of the individual ships, until I had to calculate costs. I wrote that my flagship had been lost, a singular vessel. Once it became singular, it regained its name, Cumulonimbus. Once it regained its name, it regained its shield, its principal mage, who was also a singular being. And once he became singular, he regained his name.
Half of it, Sasarai had given him. The other half, he'd bought.
By reports, he had held off the Dragons until Schvarzeleber's reinforcements came, and then there had just been too many. Some said he'd cracked under the strain of Schvarzeleber himself, but I believed such a notion was romantic at the least, fanciful even. Years later, when I learned that it had indeed been so, that the Chibi Star, his Muramasa, and his white dragon were directly responsible, it changed nothing.
Yuber found me with the pen in my hand and the lanterns as good as out. It was the truly dead of night, the hour in which on land the insects rule the earth. He said nothing. I had not slept since before the battle and would not dream of doing so now. He appeared in the corner, reeking of salt and gunpowder and blood, always blood, and I didn't have to see him to know his glowing skin and indifferent smirk.
"Yuber."
"Hn."
"Would you have served him?"
He knew. "Would he have called me?"
"They are the same question," I said, louder, but still in the hoarse whisper my voice refused to break from.
"No," he answered without a pause.
I almost-asked the darkness, "Why not."
"You answered that," the Demon said.
"Why would he not have called you?"
"You heard him. All that talk about wells and fields. He's not a Star."
I had wondered, "Does it take one?"
"No."
"But you can not imagine someone who is not a Star of Destiny actually going through with it."
He yawned, and I could hear his joints creaking as he stretched. "There are a lot of maggots on this earth, Silverberg. Even after all we've done. And they're nothings. You figured that out a long time ago."
I set my pen down on the island of papers this desk had become in the void. "He was not one of your 'maggots'."
Every scar on my body could feel Yuber's lips curling into a smile. "He is now."
My family's bargain with the Demon is paid in those "lost". My side, the enemy, whatever lives we can claim to have had a hand in, we give to him. And though Yuber is bound not to end the Silverberg line, and to kill none born under a Star of Destiny...
"...He counts," I finally said.
"You'll be pleased to know, Silverberg," he says, suddenly close, suddenly quiet, at the nape of my neck. "Somewhere in that battle, you cut your debt to me in half."
Another hundred and seventy thousand nameless lost.
I picked up the pen. I set it back down. I think I must still have been breathing, but cannot be certain.
I have a rough idea of how many men I have given this Demon. I know my numbers. I crossed into the hundred-millions in my seventies. When this war began, five hundred million. As of that battle I had nearly a billion souls to my credit.
One of them is his Eminence Mathiu Brunnen.
"It's been a while since you've cried," the Demon said.
I felt no tears on my cheeks. I was not crying. But the tightness in my chest and the shivering in my hands told me that I would, and damned if I would give him the satisfaction. "Leave me, Yuber," I ordered, calmly as I could.
"Been even longer since I've seen it." Were it not for his breath on my ear and the glint of red near my monocled eye, I would have thought the voice inside my head.
"And it will get longer," I told him. "Leave me."
His growl shot through my chest. "Cry, filth."
I spun the chair to face him, and tried to say, "If I cry--" but had no idea where the words would take me.
It did not matter. One moment I was turning, the next there was nothing but clatter and falling papers and his hands biting into my neck. I could see his eyes sparking, red and silver, and feel the chair teetering underneath me, balanced tenuously on two wheels-for-legs, the back tilted just as precariously against the edge of my bed. Gloves or no gloves, scarf of no scarf, familiarity or none, I could feel his claws in every wound he'd ever opened on my skin and some he hadn't.
"Cry," he demanded.
"Even--even if I wo--would, I can't with you suffocating me."
His hair jabbed passively at the corner of my good eye, not to be outdone by the rest of him. "The one before you cried when his spawn died."
"I remember." The courier finally came. I had been nearly eight.
"He cried for hours. I enjoyed it."
"I know."
"He was another one. He counted."
"My father was not one of your maggots."
"He is now."
"My son--"
"I should be happy you're not crying."
"Yuber--"
"Means you're more than a maggot."
I stopped. If there were any words he could have said to win, those were they...but on the edge of eminent anguish, with him cutting off half of the air I breathed and any pretenses I had about my purpose on this earth, I still refused to let him see tears. I had given him an ocean of blood and another of tears in the sixty years he'd served me, and while he'd had my blood since before I'd ever shed it I would let not one tear of mine be his.
"No," he rasped. "It's not control."
I sank into the chair, slack in his stranglehold, breathing as much as I could manage, and closed my eyes. Under me the chair creaked and scraped along the bedframe.
"Not yours," he whispered.
"Leave me."
He let the chair fall. Of course it took me down with it. My hipbone connected with the chair's back on the way and I fell with the full weight of what I had done. I still managed not to scream, but the pain was enough that I curled in and clutched at my side, like a child, but quieter than a child in my place would be.
Towering over me, Yuber had the gall to chuckle. "Maggots," he spat, and finally turned to go. "They count. Your mate, your spawn, the man who spawned you. I killed them for you. And now you're halfway out of debt. You aren't like me yet, so I know there's something--"
"If I don't feel, you win," I choked out, but it needed to be said. "If I feel, you win."
"You always were more complicated than the other maggots," he almost chided. It was unnecessary for me to demand he leave again. He stalked out on his own and shut the door behind him, and I did not watch him leave.
I clawed to my feet, looked around for my cane and decided I did not need it. I recall sitting on the edge of the bed for a spell, just staring at the journals and the pens on the floor. There was ink all over my letter-opener. Some of my scrolls were scuffed and marred with the grease from the chair's runners. The curtains had caught fire from the lantern from my desk and the trim had melted, which, viscous, put the tiny flames out of their own accord.
I understood a great deal in those moments, some of which I have forgotten, and very little of which I find myself able to articulate herein. It is a tightness in my chest, even now, akin to what a cork must feel in the neck of a bottle after some time. I was cognizant...of so many things, but most of all that Fate was...
There. That is all I can say. I knew, in that moment, that what thwarted me was no man, no Demon, not even truly an arbiter. The fritinancy in my ears, dead forests full of crickets, was Fate having a good, hard laugh at my expense. It was There. I knew it like my own scars.
The sun rose. I still had not slept, but decided that I might, if I could wash the stench of the sea away. Before my bath, I walked about the bath-cabin for a spell, ascertaining that I had not broken or bruised anything of mine beyond repair. It occurred to me to, perhaps, evaluate the scars behind my legs, the seams I had carved as a youth when I summoned Yuber at the first. I sat on the edge of a bench, let my cane rest beside me, and tried to crane to see the backs of my legs. I contorted myself this way and that, but, as I surmise I suspected from the beginning, the efforts proved fruitless. Perhaps I might have been able to in my youth, but even when I had first made the cuts I had not appraised them. And now, when I desired to admire my handiwork, I could not bend myself to.
That alone lent me strength to continue that war.