The Testimony of Her Eminence and Most Puissant Sentience Tara del D’myn, Matriarch of Skarsia and All Humanity, Nuncio to the Combine of Sentients
“No luck,” Zosim reported. “He seems to be wandering around in the woods.”
“That’s really odd behavior for a Cu’enashti,” I replied. “They’re social animals – ah, plants. They prefer hanging out in human communities to forming ties with their own kind, but in absence of either, they always go back to their tree.” But then again, D’noe was never properly socialized. It was the result of his unfortunate circumstances. But then again, maybe not. Nan-Zee was never properly socialized, either. It would be Cu’enashti logic to emulate that.
The point being: he could be the arboreal equivalent of a sociopath.
“Captain Zosim!” summoned an officer. “I’m getting a report of a large civil disturbance in Eavis Tillinghaven. A riot.”
A riot in Eavis Tillinghaven? It was a moderately-sized city which had grown out of a farming community, about 60 km inland from Capital City. There was nothing in Eavis worth rioting over. I could hardly believe that there would be a protest against me on my own homeworld. “Did SSOps do something outrageous?”
“We’ve got cam-contact. It looks like a group of soldiers gunning down the people. They’re wearing the uniform of the 5th Matriarch.”
“Almiss,” I murmured. Apparently, my offer of clemency had been refused.
A holoprojection of an on-scene police officer appeared in the center of the War Cathedral. “They just…appeared out of nowhere. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Damn it, we’d been keeping the existence of teleportation a closely-guarded secret known to only top officials in human and Cu’endhari government. Rumors had circulated since the Floatfish had used it on some drunken partygoers at the opening of the nightclub Everybody Goes to Tommy’s, but it had been passed off as a fabrication of their inebriation. Almiss had obviously gotten the technology from the SongLuminants, but it was careless for him to use it so openly. If Venahalee succeeded in her ridiculous bid for power, it would cause her no end of trouble later when the aristos demanded access to the technology. It would be even worse when it became openly known that people of Cu’endhari ancestry could not be teleported.
“It’s crazy. They rushed through the center of the city and made a beeline for Larchan Public Groves. And now they’re spraying something onto the trees, and the families of those trees are trying to stop them, and are being shot, and we’ve got mothmen in the skies. Personnel from my unit should be here in a few minutes, and the commander told me that he’s called in the army.”
“That’s why D’noe is wandering around aimlessly,” I realized. “It never occurred to me that he’d be a grove tree and not a forest tree. And he’s at least smart enough to know he’s a target, so he didn’t want to bring attention to his family.”
“You think Venahalee’s trying to get rid of him?’ said Zosim.
That was my conclusion. “She’s decided he’s a liability, and she’s desperate to get the Staff, so she’s counting on having the redundancy of a second Archon.”
“Can Lamark really control the power grid in the Domha’vei from Shambhala?”
“Doubtful. And it’s even more doubtful that Nan-Zee will cooperate with Venahalee if D’noe is killed. In fact, it will pretty much assure Lamark will try to make her Matriarch.”
“Get me Ta’al Erich,” said Lord Danak, running into the room. “And I completely agree. This situation is ridiculous. They’re sacrificing so much for a short-term gain. It’s like they’re panicking, or…”
“I wonder. Do you think the SongLuminants have cut them loose?”
“You think the SongLuminants were giving them instructions, and on their own, they’re none too intelligent?”
“It’s not lack of intelligence so much as lack of subtlety. The 5th Matriarch’s method was always to grab what she could, then keep it through savage enforcement. She never cared about civilian deaths.”
“That was almost thirty years ago,” said Zosim. “The Domha’vei is different now. The citizens won’t stand for it. I’m not sure why they ever did. And the Cu’endhari certainly won’t stand for it.”
“She frightened the Cu’endhari into keeping their existence a secret, and she played Skarsians and Volparnians off each other by provoking old resentments from the War of the Sexes,” Danak answered. “The only way that Almiss could keep control now would be to return to those conditions. Perhaps an inept Archon is part of the plan. Since Dolparessa has grown in strength, he’d need to alienate Skarsians from Dolparessans as well.”
“In other words, he’d destroy everything I’ve spent the last three decades building, just to put his daughter on the throne. Fuck him.” I gave him a chance. There’d be no more mercy – I couldn’t afford it.
Ta’al Erich’s holographic image appeared standing next to our police contact. “Almiss is a fool,” said Erich. “Lamark and Venahalee have been publicizing their power grab for days. No one is reacting. The government of the Archon and Matriarch is seen as having a legitimacy extending beyond the mere possession of a technological implement. Part of it is good governance – believe me, no one on Volparnu wants to go back to the days of the 5th Matriarch, days of economic scarcity, oppression, and constant insult to our manhood. And part of it is that the people believe that there is really something special about Ashtara, that it isn’t just caused by his connection to the power grid. People believe that he really is a god.”
I realized that it would not be good to disabuse them of that notion. Ash needed to get his act together, and fast.
For a moment, we stared at the camera images of chaos; the police finally arriving on the scene. It was a slaughter. The police are trained to deal with civil and criminal matters, not a military assault. In a few more minutes, the army would arrive, but the enemy soldiers were already starting to torch the trees. The only real resistance was a handful of mothmen, attempting to quell the flames, but having some difficulty. The problem, of course, was that the inflammatory agent was chosen for its chemical complexity, something it would take a Cu’enashti time to analyze and transmute.
I scanned the attackers for Almiss and Venahalee, but had no luck. Apparently, they were not going to risk themselves on the front lines. Did the bitch seriously think the old battlequeens were going to follow a coward?
And then, in the corner of the image, I saw a speck of blue. A speck becoming larger. It was another mothman. An enormous mothman, heading straight for the soldiers. I’d never seen one so big, not even Ash in his original form.
The soldiers fell back, rattled a bit by the frightful apparition. They were Skarsians; it was probably their first encounter with mothmen. In fact, they probably thought it was Ashnanzee – geez, how is that going to go? Both of those fuckers will want to be Ashnanzee, and will fight over whether they get called Ashnanzee I or II.
But it wasn’t Ashnanzee. I recognized her – it was Elma’ashra.
She descended in front of the grove gateway, folding into the human form of Windsong. “Halt,” she said in her rich, mellifluous voice. “I have sworn that never again shall nau’gsh be burned on Dolparessa. Leave this place.”
“There’s only one of them!” cried the enemy commander. “How tough can she be?”
Lord Danak and I shared a baleful glance. Ta’al Erich shook his head.
The commander motioned for the soldiers to go forward, launching a volley of plasma-fire at the doused trees. But nothing happened, and I could only assume that the inflammable chemical had been transformed into a flame-retardant.
“Let’s see how you like it,” said Windsong.
Suddenly, the soldiers’ uniforms burst into flames. The troops dropped and rolled, screaming. But it didn’t turn into a conflagration; Windsong meant only to warn. If she’d wanted, she could’ve incinerated them.
The troops were hurt and scared shitless, just in time for the army to arrive. Windsong had already turned her attention to the worst of the wounded police. Other reinforcements arrived also; the sky was blue with mothmen rushing to the aid of their families and their seedlings.
Several hours later, the captive soldiers were claiming to be part of a radically xenophobic group called the Cu’enashti Eradication Army. They denied having anything to do with Her Eminence Venahalee Almiss, the 7th Matriarch. Which was enormously stupid since only Venahalee’s supporters – all three dozen of them – would have used that phraseology.
The disturbing thing was not that Almiss wanted plausible deniability of an attack against civilians – that was to be expected. It was that he was framing his excuse in terms of ethnic hatred. He was already sowing the seeds to reshape the Domha’vei the way he wanted it: species against species, world against world, all played against each other by the power-hungry Matriarch.