Who, then, outranked a Megalodon? Who outranked an armored cavalryman of the Third Humans? Who else but an officer?
The gold creature in the iron mask was a Myrmidon, a Third Human. Rather, it was the Myrmidon, the sole representative of the race of which Vigil had ever heard. To see such a thing was as odd as to see a pterodactyl.
4. The Ancient of Days
“You said you were coming to kill me,” said Vigil. It would have been wiser to wait until he was addressed to speak, for Myrmidons (so legend said) were notoriously punctilious, regarding even minor lapses of courtesy or small formatting errors as being mortal crimes. “What changed your mind?”
The voice was a surprisingly rich, smooth, and melodic baritone, odd to hear issuing from a horrific metal mask. “It is no concern of mine if lesser beings misunderstand the denotation of a statement. I said I must descend the Tower to perform some killings. So I have. I told you to set your affairs in order. I meant you to assign your office to an heir. This was because you were about to be ambushed. You failed to do so, requiring me to preserve you. This was inefficient. Arise and walk!”
Vigil climbed unsteadily to his feet. “Why are you helping me?”
“The Schedule dictates that great Emancipation decelerate and come to rest and Torment come to an end. I oppose those who oppose this fate.”
“You serve the Schedule?”
“I serve the highest master, who serves nothing. Like you, he has a retaliation to fulfill and a mate to win.”
“I owe no retaliation to any man.”
“To this world, then. Do not play word games with me!”
Vigil was aghast to find his secrets known to this creature. Perhaps the Myrmidon had sent some microbe into his nervous system and hacked open his encrypted thought. One of Vigil’s internals uneasily reminded him that legend spoke of Myrmidons not so much as conquering the omniscient Swans as merely sweeping them aside. “What retaliation is yours? Your wars are long forgotten. You are the last of your kind.”
“Retaliation against the universe, which denies my master his due dignity.”
“Who is the mate you say he seeks? Myrmidons do not mate! They possess neither sex organs nor sex roles.”
“Adam in Eden possessed no office related to sex ere Eve was cloned from his side. My master is greater than he. Cease your prattle. Walk! The Table awaits. Nay, did I say walk? Run! Even so it may be too late.”
“My garb is torn! Shall I appear before the Table of Stability also panting from a herky-jerky jog?”
But the other did not answer, except to raise his hand and twist his fingers into a mudra that Vigil did not recognize. The blur of dream filled his mind …
4
The Palace of Future History
1. The Door Wardens
The mudra controlling him must have been very precise, for by the time he blinked his vision clear, an energy like fire was rippling through his muscles, making his legs and arms pump and tremble, and he saw the statue of the Sphinx loom before him. He was not just jogging. His body, without his consent, was sprinting headlong down the street.
Vigil shouted the verbal formula for uttarabodhi, the Mudra of Best Perfection; but it was too late, for he gained control of his legs a moment after he slammed into the broad, pale flanks of the gynosphinx.
Vigil was jarred and shocked by the impact with the stone buttocks. In part because his momentum carried him forward, in part because his numb limbs still moved, he found himself scrambling up across her back and sliding down her spine and stumbling and falling over her winged shoulders and plunging between her huge stone breasts.
Between the forepaws of the giant stone monster, a small fountain of fragrant water played. Of course Vigil found himself face-first in the fluid, legs kicking and jerking as excess possession-energy departing from his body danced through his muscles.
He raised his head and looked around. Something had cut him off from the local channels, and so his visual information was only coming in from his biological eyes and from the ornaments on his coat. There was no sign of the Myrmidon.
The Palace of Future History loomed before him, the dark slabs and silver columns softened in their severity by septfoil floral bunting that ran from one caryatid to the next.
Four sentries in silver helmets and dark armor, armed with pacification wands and ceremonial swords, stood at the tall glass doors, looking on in wonder. Their surcoats were emblazed with the silver spinning wheel crossed by a black spindle and black sheers. This was the heraldry of the Loyal and Self-Correctional Order of Prognostic Actuarial Cliometric Stability.
For a moment, the sentries hesitated, not quite stepping forward, reluctant to leave their posts, but perhaps wondering if Vigil were wounded, perhaps horrified at seeing a man maimed before their eyes by so vehement a fall, or killed. But then one sentry made an involuntary gulping noise, as if trying to swallow a laugh; and that was enough.
Suddenly they were bellowing with laughter, and guffawed, and gasped, and shrieked, and howled. Each time they began to recall their discipline and smooth away their smiles, one would see his fellow’s face trying not to smile, and the mirth would explode again. One of them dropped his wand to clutch his aching sides. Vigil suspected they had been taking drafts of lager or listening to Fox music.
The Sphinx was normally inanimate, but this was a festive day, and public monuments forbidden to move on other days were allowed to ward off excessively exuberant partygoers. She raised her lioness paws and made a remarkably delicate mudra gesture. At first he thought it was a greeting, but no, it was manidhara, also called the Gesture of Holding the Immaculate Wishing Jewel. The fingers were bent as if around in invisible oval, as if holding a gem too transparent to be seen—namely, the jewel of that compassion which hears all the cries of pain of the moral world.
The gesture not only dispelled the muscle-memory of alien impositions in his limbs, it gave Vigil the calm needed to forgive the strange, perhaps insane, Myrmidon who had imposed on him. Her gesture was magnificent, for the waters around him also grew calm, and nanomachinery in the droplets—for this was a basin of living water—spattered on his clothing began to repair and regrow the fabric and circuitry of his antique garment. Little glints of light appeared and disappeared around the edges of the cuts as they mended, like a dry leaf seen in a fire, edges red and tattered, but as if such a leaf burned backward in time.
The Sphinx said, “Who is the paragon of animals, the beauty of the world, in apprehension like a god, in action like an angel, so infinite in faculty, so noble in reason? Yet the cold and ever-famished grave is a-hungered for him until for aye; and what he should do, he does not; and what he should not do, he does. Who is he? Who art thou?”
She lowered her stone paw and raised him gently to his feet.
Vigil was impressed, nearly overcome, by the kindness of this higher being. He gathered his wits, wondering what she was asking him. His internals were silent, confounded, unable to help.
Despite the terror of the assassination attempt and the freakishness of Swan and Fox and Soulless Man and Myrmidon he had met this day, despite the strange omens of Wormwood afire overhead and the predictions of treason at the Table, despite all this, Vigil felt something inside him that at first he thought was an internal creature of hidden strength. But no, it was him, part of him, a spirit not willing to be cowed, growing brighter like a yellow flame.
“What other men are, I leave to them to say. For me, I am one who remembers his sworn word. That makes me a man.”