Silently, two Tekkar swordsmen walked out from behind the throne, confirming Ceravanne’s suspicions that there were more guards in the room. “You sneer when you speak of my converts,” the Harvester said. “I can hear your ill-conceived judgments in your voice.”
“It is unnatural for a Tharrin to take slaves,” Ceravanne said.
“The humans created us to be their slaves,” the Harvester spat. “Loving masters, wise stewards, beloved lords-or so they call us. But we were made to serve. We are their drudges.”
Is that what the Inhuman had taught her, Ceravanne wondered, contempt for mankind? “They love us, and we love them in return,” Ceravanne said. “Is that slavery, or something greater? We-you and I-have always given ourselves to them freely.”
“And what have they given you in return?” the Harvester spat.
“Their love, their companionship.” Ceravanne gestured toward Gallen and the others. “I came in the name of the Sparrow, and three people gave their lives that I might make this journey in safety. What greater love could I ask of them? What less could I give in return?”
‘‘Judgment!’’ the Harvester said. “Control! For ages you have sought to bring peace to this land. For generations you sought to bring the peoples of Babel together in harmony! And you failed! You failed with the Rodim, and for centuries have felt the worms of guilt eating at your soul. You have sought to bring about peace and happiness among mankind, but how can there be peace when there is no self-control? The Immortal Lords in the City of Life created the Rodim. They created the Tekkar. They created the Derrits and the Andwe and the Fyyrdoken-all without wisdom, always knowing the misery that such creatures would cause. For millennia they have set evils loose upon the world, ignoring your counsel if they ever deigned to seek it. You know that they are but ignorant children when compared to you. You would not give a child a surgeon’s knife to play with, but you have given mankind their liberty, knowing that with their liberty they would create the instruments of their own destruction. But in one year, I’ve accomplished more for the cause of peace than you ever did.”
“But at what price?” Ceravanne said weakly. “You enslave millions to control a few. You hobble mankind so that a few evil people cannot run free. Is it worth it?”
“Yes!” the Harvester shouted. “Worth it and more! There will be generations born in peace, people who never know discontent or suffering!”
Ceravanne listened to those words, and they cut her to the soul. Oh, how she had yearned to bring about such a change. For centuries the temptation had gnawed at her, to grasp control and put an end to as much human misery as possible. It did little good for the humans to create Tharrin leaders, and then continue their barbaric ways, killing one another and squabbling over soil as if nothing had changed. But the Tharrin hoped to lead men into some golden era of peace, not sit in judgment on them as if they were children.
And yet, and yet, Ceravanne knew that to seize control, even in the attempt to bring greater peace to mankind, would be to destroy the very people she most loved.
She gestured toward Gallen and the Bock. “You feign hardness and anger, but I know you. I have brought you the two men you have loved most in your life-Belorian and the Bock. Men whom you love, but men who love freedom more than they value their own lives. They’ve come to stop you. If you still love them, if you seek to strip from them their humanity, then be merciful to them. Give them the death they would prefer, rather than the slavery you offer! I say once again-cut us down and be done with it!”
The Harvester began shaking, and her gaze turned deeply inward, as if she were fighting some mighty battle. Her mouth opened, as if against her will, and she made a fist, pointed her finger at the Bock as if to speak the command for her guards to slay him, and lowered her eyes.
“It’s her mantle!” Orick shouted. “It’s controlling her! Take it!”
Gallen raised his head, and he was shaking mightily, his muscles spasming.
Ceravanne imagined the net of tiny wires in the woman’s head, like those she had seen in Gallen. The Inhuman might be broadcasting the Harvester’s every thought, every action, until she was no more than a puppet, moved at its whim. But if that were true, then all of them would be dead by now. And so she realized that the Inhuman was unable to control its subjects fully. It struggled to hold both Gallen and the Harvester at once.
Orick bounded forward.
“No!” the Harvester shouted, and a Tekkar guard obediently leapt to intercept the bear.
Gallen snatched his pulp gun, shot the Tekkar as he rushed past, and the bullet popped under his right eye. His skull cracked and expanded outward for a moment like a burgeoning wine bag, and shards of bone ruptured the skin. His eyes flew out, and smoke issued from the holes. His upper teeth broke off unevenly, spitting out to the floor. White shards of skull cut through skin, and blood spattered Ceravanne’s face.
The Tekkar guard crumpled in ruin, and Ceravanne screamed in horror at the sight. Time seemed to slow.
Gallen cried out, and the gun fell from his hand as the Inhuman regained control. Suddenly Gallen dropped back to one knee.
Orick stopped halfway to the Harvester’s throne as the second guard rushed forward, swinging his sword in complex arcs.
The Harvester merely stood, watching them all, and Ceravanne studied her every tiny gesture, every seemingly unconscious movement of the eyes. The Harvester had not cried out at the horrible sight of her guard, crumpling in ruin. The image of it had struck Ceravanne to the very core, but the Harvester was merely watching. And suddenly Ceravanne felt very uneasy. She had come here imagining that she and the Harvester were one, single organisms that had branched out on different paths. But now she wondered just how far they might have diverged. The Harvester stood rigid, trembling, but the murder of a man before her eyes had not seemed to cause her undue discomfort.
Ceravanne knew that the Inhuman planted memories from the lives of warriors in its victims, but now she wondered what that would be like, wondered how the horror of committing such atrocities would leave their mark on the Harvester.
In ages past, Ceravanne had turned her back on the Rodim, let their kind be slaughtered, removed from the face of the earth. It had not been a sin of commission. She had killed no one herself, had never even seen a Rodim die. But she forced herself to remain silent as the slaughter began. It had taken all of her will, sapped her strength, left her unable to sleep for thousands of nights afterward. She could not imagine ever committing a crime more horrible than what she had done.
But the Harvester stood before her, and she bore memories of war, of her own hands bathed in another’s blood. Somehow, Ceravanne had imagined that the Harvester would be able to disassociate herself from such memories, to recognize that she had never committed such atrocities.
But Ceravanne knew better than that. The peoples of Babel had been created because of the Tharrin’s inaction, their unwillingness to control mankind. If the Tharrin asserted more control, they could end this madness. Human misery was the gauge of Tharrin inadequacy.
And so Ceravanne felt the stain of blood upon her, the stain of blood for every man who had ever died under the sword, the guilt of every good man who was forced to kill in order to defend himself. The stain was always there. Ceravanne could feel her conscience whispering to her, though she tried to block it from her mind.
But how much more horrible would it be to have the Inhuman show her true waste and destruction, to live through the horrors of becoming a killer, to suffer the atrocities committed by others? How could Ceravanne bear it, if the Inhuman were to show her the misery her people suffered? How could the Harvester even bear to stand, to breathe, to speak while under the weight of such guilt. It was not the lies that the Inhuman told that so much bothered Ceravanne, it was the threat of all the damning truths. How could anyone bear it?