Sword of the Lamb Read online

  Sword of the Lamb (Book One of The Phoenix Legacy)

  Table of Contents

  Sword of the Lamb

  Copyright

  PART 1: APPRENTICESHIP

  Octov 3244

  Septem 3246

  Avril 3250

  Octov 3250

  July 3253

  PART 2: METAMORPHOSIS

  July 3253

  Augus 3253

  Glossary—General Terms

  Glossary—Outsider Terms and Slang

  More from M.K. Wren

  Connect with Diversion Books

  Sword of the Lamb

  Book One of The Phoenix Legacy

  M.K. Wren

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1981 by Martha Kay Renfroe

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For more information, email [email protected].

  First Diversion Books edition July 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-097-6

  Also by M.K. Wren

  A Gift Upon the Shore

  The Phoenix Legacy

  Shadow of the Swan (Book Two of the Phoenix Legacy)

  House of the Wolf (Book Three of the Phoenix Legacy)

  This book is dedicated in gratitude to Dwight V. Swain, a man with a rare talent for teaching well an art that defies teaching.

  PHOENIX MEMFILES: DEPT HUMAN SCIENCES:

  HISTORY(HS/H)

  SUBFILE: WAR OF THE TWIN PLANETS (3208–3210):

  PELADEEN REPUBLIC: LETTAPE #61:

  FROM LORD ELOR USSHER PELADEEN

  TO DR. ANDREAS RIIS

  I JANUAR 3210

  DOC LOC #819/8–232016–1618–122016 #61: 32116/118–113210

  My dear Andreas,

  I’m touched by your appeal to join you “underground,” and I admit I was tempted; it isn’t easy to face the prospect of one’s imminent death. But I took the Crest Ring of Peladeen from my father’s dead hand, and I swore the Oath of Allegiance to the Republic. These are both life vows, and I will not betray them.

  I must also decline for another reason. The Concord cannot let me live. The House of Peladeen must be destroyed or the memory of the Republic will continue to be a thorn in its side. The Directors will demand my corpse. If they don’t find it, they’ll hunt me down even into the remotest parts of the Centauri System, and they might discover your existence in the process. The survival of the Society of the Phoenix is too important for me to justify that risk.

  I considered sending the Lady Manir and our son, Predis, to you for sanctuary. I have no secrets from Manir, and she knows about the Phoenix. However, she refused this alternative as she refused to seek sanctuary of her relatives in the House of Kalister on Terra, which, as she said, would necessitate a public repudiation of me and the Republic. I would urge her to do so if it would save her life, but she’s a proud woman, and beyond that knows full well that the Kalister aren’t likely to risk the ire of the other Lords of the Concord to protect a very distant cousin so unfortunate as to be my wife.

  Manir might have considered the sanctuary of the Phoenix if she thought our son could be saved, but she sees no hope for him. The Concord can’t let Predis live for the same reasons it can’t let me live. He’s only a child, and it seems doubly cruel, but he might grow up to become the focus of future revolt, and so he must die, as I must, for the Concord’s peace of mind.

  I speak too much of death, but you’ll understand that. The end is closer than I thought when I last ’taped you. Pollux is lost, and by the time this reaches you, I’ll have retreated to the Helen estate on Castor. That planet is less hospitable to human life, and invading armies, than Pollux. This may be my last opportunity to communicate with you, Andreas. I have no solemn words to leave you, but I’m offering something more useful—the pragmatic fuel of existence, money. My messenger will be carrying a case with a lock keyed to your voice. Only part of this last bequest is in cash; I’ve had no opportunity to gather much in ’cords, and Republic drakos will soon be worthless. Most of this bequest consists of jewelry and unset stones; its total value is probably in excess of five million ’cords.

  I’m relieved to hear that the installation of your facilities is so near completion. It comes none too soon. I’ve assigned my chief ministrator, Master Hamner, the task of checking the Republic Archives to be sure no record of the original geophysical station remains in the memfiles. I have complete faith in Master Hamner; he will not fail you.

  Andreas, we won’t meet again, but I face defeat without despair knowing the Phoenix lives. I will be the last Lord of the House of Peladeen, and if the Republic goes down in history bearing the Peladeen name, I doubt the Concord will let it be spoken with pride. The Society of the Phoenix is my only hope. My hope for humankind, and my hope for immortality. If the time ever comes, Andreas, when the Phoenix rises from the ashes of this disaster like its namesake, let it be known that the Lord Elor had some part in its birthing.

  May the Holy Mezion and the All-God smile on this fledgling. I live and shall die in that hope.

  Elor, the Lord Ussher Peladeen

  Leda, Pollux 1 Januar 3210

  PART 1: APPRENTICESHIP

  PHOENIX MEMFILES: DEPT HUMAN SCIENCES:

  SOCIOTHEOLOGY (HS/STh)

  SUBFILE: LAMB, RICHARD: PERSONAL NOTES

  12 SEPTEM 3250

  DOC LOC #819/19208–1812–1614–1293250

  I’m an old man in some senses; an old man because I’m so close to the end of my life, not because of the number of years that have elapsed since the beginning of it. Those total nineteen, although they seem more.

  I thought I had come to terms with the myriad aspects of fear of death. I had learned to live with and in spite of the shadow of death. Under the shadow, the Shepherds say. Before the Selasid uprising in Concordia (in my mind it’s always the uprising), I had feared most the not being of death, a state that defies the being imagination. But the uprising was the watershed of my life, and that was due in part to the fact that it expanded—explosively—my cognizance of death.

  It introduced me to violent death.

  On an overcast autumn day—it was last Avril—the Elder Shepherd Satva and I sat in his visitation room in the chapel in Compound B discussing the concept of free will over tamas tea. I remember that conversation with extraordinary clarity; in fact, I can repeat most of it verbatim, and I’m not usually a mnemonic adept. Two old men, one in a young but failing body, measuring the dimensions of a concept meaningful to the other only in theological terms.

  When Satva’s acolyte, Lukis, came tumbling into the room with the news of the “trouble” in the third quad dining hall, only his fear registered with me, but Satva reacted with the ready reflexes of a man trained by intensive drill, although I’m sure he had never previously given any thought to how he would respond in such a crisis.

  The All-God and the Holy Mezion will guide your hand.

  He threw his brown and green Selasid Bond cloak over my shoulders, thrust my crutches into my hands, lifted me by one arm, ordering Lukis to take the other, and together they carried me out the rear door of the chapel. I translated “trouble” into “uprising” then as they swept me along, my feet dragging and bouncing helplessly in counterpoint to their hurrying, shuffling footfalls. Satva said something to indicate that our destination was the “door,” but I didn’t know what he meant.

  They happen so abruptly, these uprisings, with t
he instantaneity of a chain reaction, and although this one was only minutes old when Lukis burst into Satva’s visitation room, it had already engulfed most of the compound and would soon spread to the adjoining compounds, transmitted by the shriek of sirens, the disaster lights of fire, the massing of House guards, and, I’m convinced, by some subtle frequency emanated by the human brain in a state of terror.

  This one began in the service alley behind the third quad dining hall where three Selasid guards entertained themselves with the sequential rape of a Bondmaid, one of the kitchen workers. Her fellow workers couldn’t have been unaware of what was happening with only an open door separating them from her abject agony, yet none of them responded to it overtly. There would have been no uprising if the woman’s husband hadn’t entered the alley at that point.

  He killed one of the guards with his bare hands—a superhuman feat that, if he hadn’t been Bond, would have guaranteed him hero status in vidicommed legend—before he was cut down by the other guards’ lasers.

  But before he died, he tried to escape into the kitchen; the Bonds there panicked and ran into the dining hall, and in the melee a cooker exploded, adding impetus to the panic, which spread into the hall, filled to capacity—at least two thousand Bonds. They poured out of the hall (where the casualties were due primarily to trampling, not lasers), and out into the compound; the chain reaction was out of control. The guards ’commed for reinforcements, and no doubt the word “uprising” was first spoken then.

  The Lord Orin Badir Selasis later had submitted to him detailed reports on the “disturbances,” which assured him unanimously that it all began with an unprovoked attack by a Bondman on a House guard, and when his fellow guards came to his defense, the Bonds in the dining hall “revolted.”

  I learned the genesis of the uprising from the Bonds who were present in the kitchen and hall at the time. Those who survived. Neither Lord Selasis nor his Fesh overseers questioned a single Bond.

  But all that is in retrospect. I neither knew nor cared, any more than the Bonds, about the origins of the holocaust while Satva and Lukis carried me through the fetid baselevel passages. Above us the pedways swarmed with aimlessly fleeing Bonds oblivious to the ampspeaker orders demanding their immediate halt, pursued and overtaken by troops of guards firing—and using charged lashes or any other handy weapon—at malicious will.

  In my memory color, sound, and smell are interfused. Blue. The laser beams. And charred black, and pinkish red, and osseous white. Hammering, pounding, booted footsteps; shouts, cries, pleas, and, constantly, screams of pain. And saturating it all, the ghastly—what other word suffices?—odors of burned flesh and fear.

  My brother in his nightmares spoke of those odors. That was later after his personal Armageddon. He never spoke of that consciously; only in sleep when he couldn’t know I heard.

  The “door” toward which Satva and Lukis carried me was a hidden opening enlarged through a storm drain under the compound wall. That secret access surprised me; it suggested revolutionary intent and planning among the Bonds.

  But it represented only a relative revolution. The purpose of the opening wasn’t to offer Bonds a means of escape from the compound—and where would they escape to? The Outside, when the headprice on runaway Bonds is high enough to tempt any Outsider noddy or hound?—but a means of access into the compound for Bonds unfortunate enough to miss the curfew closure. The penalties for defying the curfew in Selasid compounds are inevitably painful and often maiming.

  We weren’t far from the “door,” and I was panting as hard as Satva and Lukis, yet I hadn’t run a step; I couldn’t. I could only clutch my crutches to my breast, aware that I’d be helpless without them when I lost my human crutches. On the pedway above us, Bonds and guards clashed in the limited passage ten meters in the air, and three Bonds were forced, or thrown, off the ’way. I heard their descending shrieks, heard sounds I can’t even approach in words as they hit the plasment, one no more than a meter in front of us.

  The light was dim and erratic, and neither Satva nor Lukis paused before turning into an even darker side passage, yet every detail of that image is as clear in my memory as my theological discourse with Satva on free will.

  It was a man, and his body seemed both to burst and to collapse on impact. Horrible, yes. I’d never considered the color of human entrails before.

  But what was clearest in my mind was a sense of outrage, not for the man so much as for his body. I mean, his physical, living body. It had been in some way violated, and I was horrified that such a sacrilege—that seemed the only applicable term—was possible.

  I saw death then as more than not-being, as a wanton violation of the infinitely complex, finely ordered mechanism that houses and sustains life.

  And I felt that violation as I hope the man himself did not; felt the sudden disintegration of the physical system, its bursting implosion; felt the whole agony and terror of it as if it were my own.

  Sometimes I wonder if we don’t think with our cells, and if the brain is only a sophisticated data processing and storage center. If so, wouldn’t every cell recoil from the dissolution of the order, the system, that gives it life?

  And if—as Lemric and Kow Daws theorize—social units can be treated as living organisms, what of the agony of the individual cells, the individual people, within the sustaining mechanism of the dying social organism?

  Whose pain did I feel?

  Satva helped me through the storm drain and outside the compound wall, where I found myself in a ’way channel that led to a transit plaza. He took the Bond cloak from my shoulders, propped me against the wall on my crutches, and with a plea for my blessing—my blessing!—returned to the compound. The ’ways above me teemed with Selasid guards and Conpol reinforcements, but I was alone and unnoticed.

  And I was Fesh, not Bond, and thus safe.

  Satva returned to his flock. And died with ten thousand Bonds who died—violently—in those compounds that day. Izak succeeded Satva as Elder Shepherd of Compound B, but Lukis won’t be Izak’s acolyte. He died with his Shepherd.

  Whose pain? Whose pain did I feel?

  CHAPTER I

  Octov 3244

  1.

  Theron Rovere walked with the cautious gait of the elderly, sedately dignified in his long lector’s robes, gray-bearded chin resting on his chest. His robes were white with edgings of black denoting a lector/professor of the University, the gold stripe around the flared right sleeve of his surcoat indicated that he was a GuildMaster, and the badge on his left shoulder with the lion crest in gold and purple was a reminder that he was born allieged to the House of Daro Galinin. But he hadn’t walked on Galinin ground for many years, and didn’t now. For the last ten years, he had made his home here in the Estate of the House of DeKoven Woolf.

  But that, like so many things, would soon be changed.

  Lector Rovere sighed and clasped his hands behind his back, noting, as he always did, the faint indentations worn into the slate path by ten generations of DeKoven Woolf footsteps.

  Minutiae. . . .

  One would think that at a time like this such trivia would escape his notice. A pedantic habit. But even as he considered the irony of it, he was remembering that the dappled shadows on the slate were cast by the eucalypt trees planted by Konan Woolf, the third First Lord of the House, over three hundred years ago.

  A light wind, warm with spring, swept the leaves; Octov, and beyond the grove Concordia lazed and buzzed in the crystal sunlight. The acacias were in bloom, their fluffy batons casting a sweet perfume into the wind. Rovere smiled, his eye drawn by a sharp chattering and a multihued flash in the branches above him. A rainbow lorikeet. But he was thinking of the conversation concluded only seconds ago in the small salon off the grove, and remembering the spectacular fury of the Lady Elise Galinin Woolf. It was this memory that brought the smile.

 
; Elise always made him think of spring, and perhaps it was appropriate, their parting at this season. He’d known her since she was a child, been tutor to her and her brother, Lord Evin Galinin. That he thought of her—even addressed her at times—as Elise was indicative of their long and close relationship. No other Fesh would dare address the Lady Galinin Woolf so familiarly, nor even many Elite.

  And if she made him think of spring, her wrath could only be likened to a spring rainstorm, quick and turbulent: Elise in a silken, floor-length gown of pale green—a true spring green—drawn to her full regal height, gray eyes flashing, fixed on her husband, her red-bronze hair cascading over her shoulders, glinting as if fired by her angry impatience.

  Elisean Titian. The color of her hair called to mind that term.

  Minutiae. . . .

  He wondered if she knew that women of the Elite and even upper-class Fesh throughout the Concord had among the choices offered by their coiffurers a hair color called Elisean Titian, an unnatural imitation of that candescent hue naturally her own. And he wondered how many of the women who availed themselves of that imitation knew who Titian was.

  Elise knew. But Rovere’s special field of study was Pre-Disasters history, and Elise Galinin had been one of his best students.

  “Phillip, you wouldn’t deny him an opportunity to tell the boys goodbye!”

  Theron Rovere’s gaze moved across the salon with its airy NeoMedit furnishings to the Lord Phillip DeKoven Woolf, who stood gazing out the windowall into the grove, a lean, dark figure clothed in rich, wine-colored hues, a summer night to Elise’s spring day, calling to mind another Pre-Disasters artist. Rovere frowned until he pulled the name out of his memory.