“Where am I?” asked Aenea. She had to attempt the sentence a second time because of her swollen lips and bruised jaw.
The Grand Inquisitor smiled. “We will answer all of your questions for the moment, my dear. And then you will answer all of ours. I guarantee this. To answer your first question, you are in the deepest… ah… interview room… in the Castel Sant’Angelo, on the right bank of the new Tiber, near the Ponte Sant’Angelo, quite near the Vatican, still on the world of Pacem.”
“Where is Raul?”
“Raul?” said the Grand Inquisitor. “Oh, you mean your rather useless bodyguard. At the moment, I believe he has completed his own meeting with the Holy Office and is aboard a ship preparing to leave our fair system. Is he important to you, my dear? We could make arrangements to return him to Castel Sant’Angelo.”
“He’s not important,” murmured Aenea, and after my first second of hurt and anguish at the words, I could feel her thoughts beneath them… concern for me, terror for me, hope that they would not threaten me as a means to coerce her.
“As you wish,” said Cardinal Mustafa. “It is you we want to interview today. How do you feel?”
Aenea stared at them through her good eye.
“Well,” said the Grand Inquisitor, “one should not hope to attack the Holy Father in St. Peter’s Basilica and come away with impunity.”
Aenea mumbled something.
“What was that, my dear? We could not make it out.” Mustafa was smiling slightly—a toad’s self-satisfied leer.
“I… did… not… attack… the… Pope.”
Mustafa opened his hands. “If you insist, M. Aenea… but your intentions did not seem friendly. What is it that you had in mind as you ran down the central aisle toward the Holy Father?”
“Warn him,” said Aenea. Part of her mind was assessing her injuries even as she listened to the Grand Inquisitor’s prattle: serious bruises but nothing broken, the sword cut on her thigh needed stitching, as did the cut on her upper chest. But something was wrong in her system—internal bleeding? She did not think so. Something alien had been administered to her via injection.
“Warn him of what?” said Cardinal Mustafa with butter smoothness.
Aenea moved her head to look with her good eye at Cardinal Lourdusamy and then at Councillor Albedo. She said nothing.
“Warn him of what?” asked Cardinal Mustafa again. When Aenea did not respond, the Grand Inquisitor nodded to the nearest Nemes clone. The pale woman walked slowly to the side of Aenea’s chair, took up the smaller of the two shears, seemed to think twice about it, set the instrument back on the tray, came closer, went to one knee on the grate next to Aenea’s right arm, bent back my darling’s little finger, and bit it off. Nemes smiled, stood, and spit the bloody finger into the wastebasket.
Aenea screamed with the shock and pain and half swooned against the headrest.
The Nemes-thing took tourniquet paste from the tube and smeared it on the stump of Aenea’s little finger.
The holo of Cardinal Mustafa looked sad. “We do not desire to administer pain, my dear, but we also shall not hesitate to do so. You shall answer our questions quickly and honestly, or more parts of you will end up in the basket. Your tongue will be the last to go.”
Aenea fought back the nausea. The pain from her mutilated hand was incredible—ten light-minutes away, I screamed with the secondhand shock of it. “I was going to warn the Pope… about… your coup,” gasped Aenea, still looking at Lourdusamy and Albedo. “Heart attack.”
Cardinal Mustafa blinked in surprise.
“You are a witch,” he said softly.
“And you’re a traitorous asshole,” Aenea said strongly and clearly. “All of you are. You sold out your Church. Now you’re selling out your puppet Lenar Hoyt.”
“Oh?” said Cardinal Lourdusamy. He looked mildly amused. “How are we doing that, child?”
Aenea jerked her head at Councillor Albedo. “The Core controls everyone’s life and death via the cruciforms. People die when it’s convenient for the Core to have them dead… neural networks in the process of dying are more creative than living ones. You’re going to kill the Pope again, but this time his resurrection won’t be successful, will it?”
“Very perceptive, my dear,” rumbled Cardinal Lourdusamy. He shrugged. “Perhaps it is time for a new pontiff.” He moved his hand in the air and a fifth hologram appeared behind them in the room: Pope Urban XVI comatose in a hospital bed, nursing nuns, human doctors, and medical machines hovering around him.
Lourdusamy waved his pudgy hand again and the image disappeared.
“Your turn to be pope?” said Aenea and closed her eyes. Red spots were dancing in her vision. When she opened her eyes again, Lourdusamy was making a modest shrug.
“Enough of this,” said Councillor Albedo.
He walked directly through the holos of the seated cardinals and stood at the edge of the grate, directly in front of Aenea. “How have you been manipulating the farcaster medium? How do you farcast without the portals?”
Aenea looked at the Core representative. “It scares you, doesn’t it, Councillor? In the same way that the cardinals are too frightened to be here with me in person.”
The gray man showed his perfect teeth. “Not at all, Aenea. But you have the ability to farcast yourself—and those near you—without portals. His Eminence Cardinal Lourdusamy and Cardinal Mustafa, as well as Monsignor Oddi, have no wish to suddenly vanish from Pacem with you. As for me… I would be delighted if you farcast us somewhere else.” He waited. Aenea said nothing.
She did not move. Councillor Albedo smiled again. “We know that you’re the only one who has learned how to do this type of farcasting,” he said softly. “None of your so-called disciples are close to learning the technique. But what is the technique? The only way we’ve managed to use the Void for farcasting is by wedging open permanent rifts in the medium… and that takes far too much energy.”
“And they don’t allow you to do that anymore,” muttered Aenea, blinking away the red dots so she could meet the gray man’s gaze. The pain from her hand rose and fell in and around her like long swells on an uneasy sea. Councillor Albedo’s eyebrow moved up a fraction. “They won’t allow us to? Who is they, child? Describe your masters to us.”
“No masters,” murmured Aenea. She had to concentrate in order to banish the dizziness. “Lions and Tigers and Bears,” she whispered.
“No more double talk,” rumbled Lourdusamy.
The fat man nodded to the second Nemes clone, who walked to the tray, removed the rusty pair of pliers, walked around to Aenea’s left hand, held it steady at the wrist, and pulled out all of my darling’s fingernails.
Aenea screamed, passed out briefly, awoke, tried to turn her head away in time but failed, vomited on herself, and moaned softly.
“There is no dignity in pain, my child,” said Cardinal Mustafa. “Tell us what the Councillor wishes to know and we will end this sad charade. You will be taken from here, your wounds will be attended to, your finger regrown, you will be cleaned and dressed and reunited with your bodyguard or disciple or whatever. This ugly episode will be over.”
At that moment, reeling in agony, Aenea’s body still was aware of the alien substance that had been injected into her while she was unconscious hours earlier. Her cells recognized it. Poison. A sure, slow, terminal poison with no antidote—it would activate in twenty-four hours no matter what anyone did. She knew then what they wanted her to do and why.
Aenea had always been in contact with the Core, even before she was born, via the Schrön Loop in her mother’s skull linked to her father’s cybrid persona. It allowed her to touch primitive dataspheres directly, and she did this now—sensing the solid array of exotic Core machinery that lined this subterranean celclass="underline" instruments within instruments, sensors beyond human understanding or description, devices working in four dimensions and more, waiting, sniffing, waiting.