She nodded. “I’ll load the gun.”
Then something occurred to me. “Hey, didn’t you say that you gave a copy of your Goddess report to Grace?”
“Yes.”
“It’s funny, because she never mentioned it to me, and neither did Church. When did you give it to her?”
“At the end of August.” Circe looked down at her hands. “I tried to call her the next day, but she was already involved in something. I never found out what it was. Then a couple of days later I heard that she died.”
Damn. Bull’s-eye, right in the heart.
I closed my eyes. The whole mess with the Dragon Factory and the Jakobys started on the twenty-eighth. Grace died on August 31. Because of her the world didn’t die on September 1. The ache in my chest was so fresh, so raw, that I wanted to scream. I could see every line, every curve, of Grace’s beautiful face. I could smell the scent of her, taste her lips, feel the solid, lithe warmth of her in my arms.
I felt something warm on my forearm and for a single crazy moment I thought that somehow Grace had reached out of those shadows to reassure me. But when I opened my eyes I saw that it was Circe O’Tree’s hand on my arm.
“I’m sorry, Joe,” she said.
I took a breath and shook my head. Circe moved her hand away, a little embarrassed.
“I don’t think your report was ignored,” I said, my voice a bit thick. “I don’t think Grace ever had a chance to pass it along.”
Circe looked depressed. “God, I would hate to think that we could have somehow prevented this. The Hospital and the rest.”
“Let’s not Monday-morning quarterback it. We’re doing good work here. We’ll get this stuff into MindReader and who knows? We might actually be somewhere.”
Circe nodded but didn’t comment.
I snapped my fingers. “Wait … you said there were ten plagues. River of blood, darkness, frogs, ghats, flies, pestilence, boils, rain of fire, and locusts. That’s only nine. What’s the last one?”
All the blood drained from her face. “The last one is the worst of all. It’s the one that finally broke Pharaoh’s resolve and made him free the captive Israelites.”
“What was it?” I asked, but I thought I already knew, and the knowledge scared the shit out of me.
She recited the passage in a hollow voice. “This is what the Lord says: ‘About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt—worse than there has ever been or ever will be again.’”
She paused and watched my face as the horror sank in.
“The tenth plague is the death of the firstborn children of the entire country.”
Interlude Thirty
Crown Island
Six Weeks Ago
On the morning of the first of November, Toys walked down to a deck that overlooked a particularly lovely stretch of the island’s rocky coastline. He sat in a deck chair, alone with thoughts that had become increasingly troubled and convoluted.
Toys heard a soft footfall and turned to see that Rafael Santoro stood alarmingly close. Few people were able to sneak up on Toys. Peripheral awareness was something he prided himself on, and he was immediately irritated.
Santoro held two steaming cups in his hands. “May I join you?”
Four or five variations of “go fuck yourself” wriggled on Toys’ lips, but he held his tongue and ticked his head toward the other lounge chair. Santoro handed him a cup and lowered himself onto the chair.
The view was spectacular. The sun had risen above the rippling waters of the St. Lawrence River, red and orange fire igniting from a million sharp wave tips. The rocky edge of the island was marshy, with tall bulrushes through which blue herons picked their way with the delicacy of monks.
Toys cut a covert glance at Santoro, but the little man seemed not to notice. He sipped his tea and appeared to be fascinated by the dragonflies flitting among the reeds. The Spaniard had an interesting face, like one of the medieval saints on the tapestries in the dining halclass="underline" high cheekbones, hooded eyes, full lips, and a light in his eyes that suggested a complex inner life. The man’s appearance was so strangely at odds with what Toys knew about him: torture, extortion, terrorism, mass killings, and personal murders so numerous that they were recounted in summary form.
The Spaniard sipped his tea. “Tell me, my friend,” he said softly. “How are you enjoying life as the Conscience to the King of Plagues?”
“So, tell me,” Toys said after a few minutes, “what do I do as ‘Conscience’?”
“That depends on you, and on your King.”
Toys snorted. “I’m still adjusting to the concept of Sebastian as a king.”
“You find it amusing?”
“Amusing? Not in the least,” he said, and that was truer than his tone conveyed. “Though this whole setup seems a bit dodgy. It’s more like a movie than real life.”
“But it is life,” observed Santoro. “The world does not turn by itself. It requires that kings step up to lead.”
“Very profound.”
“It’s true. The Seven Kings have always existed. I speak in the abstract. Before the Kings there were others. Always others. It is a necessary evil, yes?”
“‘Evil’ is an interesting word choice.”
Santoro smiled thinly. “It is evil, by the standards of the sheep.” He gestured with his mug to the unseen lands beyond the sunrise. “But evil is a concept constructed by man, and therefore it is subject to laws and interpretations. If we were subject to the same laws we would have to own guilt for what we do, but we do not acknowledge the laws of any land. We maintain the conqueror’s point of view, which is self-justifying.”
“How so?”
“Tell me: who was more evil, Alexander the Great or Adolf Hitler?”
“Hitler.”
“Ah, but you say that without considering it. Hitler is regarded as evil because he slaughtered millions of people and tried to conquer Europe. By the standards of those who defeated him, he was evil. Alexander tried to conquer the entire world, a process that resulted in a higher percentage of deaths than during Hitler’s war.”
“Hitler tried to exterminate whole races of people.”
“Alexander issued challenges to cities and nations. If they surrendered to him, he let them live, and even preserved their cultures. But if they opposed him, he slaughtered them wholesale. He killed the men and sold the women and children into slavery. How is one more moral than the other? Do you want to debate degrees of acceptable genocide?”
“As a matter of fact,” Toys said, “I don’t.”
Santoro nodded and they watched the sun climb higher. In the glow of the new sun his saintly face was beatific. It troubled Toys and he turned away.
Santoro asked, “Do you feel it’s wrong?”
“Right and wrong is another discussion I don’t want to have.”
“That is as it should be, yes?”
Toys looked at him in surprise. “How so?”
“Well, my friend, if we are to accept that we are conquerors in the purest and oldest sense of that word, and if that means that what we do is governed by rules we set which, by their nature, are outside of the laws of any land, then right and wrong are concepts without substance. They don’t apply to us because they are specific to individual cultures and we are not.”
Toys sighed, feeling himself drawn into the discussion despite his better judgment. “What about basic human rights?”
“Ask the Chinese that question.”
“Pardon?”
“Human rights, as we understand them today, are based upon Western ideals of democracy. These Western values are themselves profoundly bound up with strong individualism, profiteering, and capitalistic competitiveness. The Confucian system does not subscribe to any of those values. There is not a single statement on human rights to be found within the Confucian discourse. Confucianism advocates duties and responsibilities and makes no case at all for individual rights. They believe that they act according to Heaven’s Mandate, in which the ruling body does whatever is necessary for the greater good, even if that means the sacrifice of individuals of the lower classes. Do you follow?”