Read The Hermetic Millennia Online
Authors: John C. Wright
The Hermetic Millennia
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author thanks his long-suffering and patient wife, who is the muse of all his ideas, as well as many kind readers who offered advice. I would like particularly to thank Sean McNulty, Latin scholar, and Tom Simon, pundit, for their assistance in difficult linguistic and historical matters.
CONTENTS
Part Two:
A World of Fire
One:
Theft of Fire
Part Three:
A World of Ice
Interlude:
A Cold Silence
Part Four:
The Long Wait
One:
The Tomb-Robbers
Three:
The Warrior-Aristocrats
Four:
The Warlock of Williamsburg
Five:
The Blue Men
Six:
The Testament of Soorm the Hormagaunt
Seven:
The Old Man of Albion
Eight:
The Testament of Oenoe the Nymph
Nine:
The Dying Place
Ten:
The Testament of Kine Larz of Gutter
Eleven:
The Coming of the Witches
Twelve:
The Testament of Ctesibius the Savant
Thirteen:
The Testament of Rada Lwa the Scholar
Fourteen:
Rumpelstiltskin and the Widow
Fifteen:
The Calculus of Fate
When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.—
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue …
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
PART TWO
A World of Fire
1
Theft of Fire
A.D. 2535
1. Sir Guy
All he wanted to do was stay dead.
Menelaus Montrose woke up while his body was still frozen solid. The bioimplants the battle surgeons of the Knights Hospitalier had woven into his brain stem were working well enough for him to send a signal to the surface of the coffin, activate the pinpoint camera cells dotting its outer armor, and see who was trying to wake him up.
The light in the crypt was dim. The walls were irregular brick, and in places were cemented with bones and skulls. Niches held both coffins for the dead and cryonic suspension coffins for the slumbering.
There was a figure like a metal ape near the vault door, which had moved on vast pistons and stood open. The light spilled in from here. Only things near the door were clear.
To one side of the larger metal statue was a marble sculpture of Saint Barbara, the patron of grave-diggers, holding a cup and a palm leaf in her stiff, stone hands; to the other was Saint Ubaldo, carrying a crosier, whose office was to ward off neural disorders and obsessions. Above the vault door was a relief showing the martyrdom of Saint Renatus Goupil under the tomahawks of Iroquois. He was the patron saint of anesthesiologists and cryonicists. Above all this, in an arch, were written the words
TUITIO FIDEI ET OBSEQUIUM PAUPERUM.
From this, Menelaus knew he had been moved, at least once, from his previous interment site beneath Tiber Island in the Fatebenefratelli Hospital vault. That had been little over a quarter century ago: the calculations of Cliomancy did not predict any historical crisis sufficient to require him to be relocated in so short a space as thirty years. That meant Blackie was interfering with the progression of history again.
The larger metal statue moved, ducking its head and stepping farther into the vault. Menelaus could see the Maltese cross enameled in white on the red breastplate. There were four antennae and microwave horns on his back, folded down. The scabbard for his (ceremonial) broadsword was empty, and so was the holster for his (equally ceremonial) chemical-energy pistol. Between helmet and goggles and breather mask, the figure looked like a nightmarish bug.
Montrose turned on the microphones on the outside of the coffin, and special cells in his brain stem sent signals to receivers dotting the inner coffin lid, and also to implants lining his auditory nerve. It sounded like a strange, flat, echoless noise, not like something that actually came through his ear, but he could make it out.
Menelaus turned on the speaker vox. “Why do you disturb my slumber, Sir Knight?”
He heard the ticking hum of motors and actuators coming from the armored figure. Like a mountain sinking into the sea, the big armored figure knelt. Menelaus realized this was strength-amplification armor. He tried to work out the Cliometric constellation of a set of military circumstances where this type of gear would serve any purpose that a sniper with a powerful set of winged remotes could not serve better, and his imagination failed. Unless the man was wrestling giants, or facing enemies who could walk up to arm’s length and tear the flesh from his bones, he did not see the purpose.
“My apologies, sleeper. Ah. Our records are somewhat dark. Are you Menelaus Montrose? You don’t sound like him.”
“Why the poxy hell do you disturb my poxy slumber, Sir goddam Knight?”
“Ah! Montrose! Good to hear you again, Liege.”
“Guy? Sir Guy, is that you?”
“Pellucid thawed me out two days ago. As we agreed, I have a veto over anyone trying to disturb you, even your pet machine. And it is His Excellency Grandmaster Guiden von Hompesch zu Bolheim now. They promoted me when I slept.”
“Yeah, they do poxified pox like that to you when you ain’t up and about to fend it off.”
Another implanted circuit in his brain stem made contact with a library cloth stored in an airtight capsule inside the coffin armor. The self-diagnostic showed much more deterioration than he would have expected. Half the circuits were dead, and file after file was corrupt. But he brought up the calendar, and a fiber fed the pixy image directly into the same neural circuits he was using to peer through the cameras.
“Pox! Thirty-five years. Rania’s not back yet? Any signals?”
“I have not heard, Liege. There is something that may be a signal. I would have prevented them from thawing you, if it were not significant.”
“So tell me.”
“An astronomer has detected massive energy discharges erupting from the Diamond Star. So it looks like your Princess arrived there years ago, and we are seeing now the result of some sort of macro-scale engineering. The data are ambiguous, and the Order thought you would want, with your own eyes, to look the data over and draw your own conclusion. Was I right to wake you?”
“Damn right, and thank you for asking. Have the astronomer send his data into the coffin. I can tell you the input-output registers.”
“I’d rather you thawed out fully.”
“My brain is working. What else do I need?”
“There has been a lot of wire corruption since you slumbered, Liege, and the Order made laws saying certain messages have to be delivered in person, naked eye, naked ear. Nobody uses or trusts the kind of interface implants you and I have.”
Montrose was not just surprised; he was shocked. His Cliometric calculations had not anticipated such a radical change in the basic social and technological patterns. One more thing to look into before he slumbered again. He said wryly: “Relicts already, eh?”
“A quarter century is a long time. And they insist I wear clothing, like an unevolved.”
“You ain’t talking aloud, are you?”
“No, Liege. Nerve jack. My suit has a short-range emitter.”
It took a long while for the molecular machinery clustered in the major cell groups in his vital organs, bone marrow, and parasympathetic system to restore him to life. Even through the nerve-block, there was something like growing pains, and his limbs trembled and shuddered. The last thing to happen was that special artificial glands released adrenaline into his system, and implants made of his own jinxed flesh, like the Hunter’s organ and Sach’s organ of electric eels, flushed with positively charged sodium and jolted his heart into action. Automatic circuits performed a few tests, just as undignified and invasive as anything a doctor would do, but with no bedside manner. Menelaus just gritted his teeth.
Montrose came up out of the gel, dripping, a white glass caterpillar-drive pistol in either hand. These 8-megajoule Brownings were waterproof, slightly curved, streamlined tubes of a white glassy substance, made with no moving parts and powered by a radioactive pellet likely to last 4.47 billion years. And they fitted nicely into his hands. (But he still missed his six-pound hand cannon as long as his forearm that he had used for dueling. The old Krupp railgun had been a handsome piece of artillery.)
Sir Guiden was still on one knee. He had removed his bulky helm, slung his goggles, and the wire from his skull-jack lay across his neck.
Underneath, his hair was close cropped, and he wore a black leathery cap that buckled under his chin. His face was rounder and fleshier than Menelaus remembered from 2501. Was that a touch of gray at the temples?
His age was hard to tell, since Sir Guiden sported a full-face tattoo shaped like a double-headed eagle: Wings surrounded his eyes, crooked talons curled on his cheeks, and twin hawk heads bearing crowns tilted left and right over his eyebrows. Montrose thought it one of the ugliest and most absurd decorations imaginable.
Montrose said, “I was wondering why you stepped in here all in full kit.”
“Because you are known to sleep with guns in your hands, sir. That, and no one else could talk to you.”
“So no one else has implants? The whole idea was that I could thaw my brain up to dehibernation, while leaving the rest of me iced, and that would save on wear and tear. Hurts like the pestilential devil to shock the heart awake, you know. Why couldn’t they just use a hand mic? Clip it to the coffin?”
“The technology is hard to come by, Liege. The automated factories were under Exarchel’s control.”
“What about that motorized ape suit?”
“You like it?” asked Sir Guiden, pleased.
“May my member get pustules if’n I don’t! Always wanted future soldiers to dress in roboexoskeletons. But it seems damnified impractical, and I surely don’t recall you wearing nothing alike to them when you climbed in your coffin.”
“I thawed in 2508 and again in 2526 to oversee certain operations.”
“War operations?”
“That, and moving the buried coffins when Rome was burned by orbital mirrors. The Vatican is gone.”
“How many people killed?”
“None. The city was already evacuated due to banner storms of hunger silk. The Consensus insisted that every city have an evac procedure in place, with an aeroscaphe like a lifeboat folded against the side of every house and tower. Lucky they did.”