Prophets

CHAPTER SIX

Geas

A soul’s value tends to appreciate considerably after it is sold.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

—FRIEDRICH Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Date: 2525.11.06 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

Nickolai had met Mr. Antonio before, of course, but—thanks to the reconstruction Mr. Antonio had paid for—this was the first time Nickolai had ever seen him.

To Nickolai’s new eyes, the man looked weak and pathetic even for one of the Fallen. He was thin, with twiglike limbs and a long narrow face. His hairless skin was aged, wrinkled, and dry. What hair he had was white and as thin as the rest of him. He smelled of the end of life. However, as close as this man might have been to death, for Nickolai he just wasn’t close enough.

They sat in a room in a Godwin club that sold privacy like Nickolai’s old employer sold exhibitionism. The room was sealed to vibration, light, and EM-transmission. Nickolai knew the screens were active because he had felt a disorienting tingle in his new artificial parts when he had crossed the threshold.

Beyond that, the room wasn’t quite designed for the type of meeting Mr. Antonio wanted. Leather harnesses dangled from the ceiling, chains dangled from the walls ending in velvet-lined cuffs, racks lined another wall holding leather straps, paddles, and various electrical devices. The dominant piece of furniture was a long padded table with various articulated arms that seemed designed to hold a wide variety of attachments.

Humanity’s passion for sin was wide, deep, and more infinitely detailed than any Nickolai had known. Next to the lusts of the Fallen, his own transgressions seemed almost childlike, laughable.

I’ve been among them too long.

“Are you used to the prosthetics now, Mr. Rajasthan?”

“Yes,” Nickolai said, even though he was privately unsure. Just this morning he had torn the handle off the bathroom door in his apartment, and almost daily he had headaches from looking at a world that was too sharp to these new eyes. However, he wasn’t going to admit weakness to one such as Mr. Antonio.

“Excellent,” Mr. Antonio said, in his uncomfortably fluid language. He smiled, oblivious to the aggression he showed to Nickolai with the flash of his teeth.

Although, Nickolai thought, perhaps not so oblivious.

Despite appearances, there were two things Nickolai knew about his human benefactor: the man was not stupid, and he was not weak. It was quite possible that Mr. Antonio knew exactly what was implied with the flash of his own tiny canines.

And the galling thing was that what it implied was correct. In the palace halls on Grimalkin he might have seen fit to scar someone for such an expression—much less one of the Fallen. However, here he was, in service to the naked devil himself.

“Mr. Rajasthan?”

Nickolai realized his attention had wandered, which was disturbingly unlike him. “Forgive me, sir. I was reminded of Grimalkin for a moment.”

If Mr. Antonio noticed how forced the honorific sounded, he showed no sign.

“I understand how it is being stranded in an alien land.” His smile faded. “Perhaps more than you’d know. But if you would please return to the present moment, however unpleasant the venue?”

He set a case down on the padded tabletop between them.

“The time has come for you to repay my generosity.”

“What exactly do you require of me?”

“Your services as a mercenary.”

Nickolai said nothing. There was little to say. He had agreed to the devil’s bargain. He could almost hear the priests laughing at how far he had fallen, down to prostituting the sacred craft of the warrior.

“I need an agent to attach to a private expedition. You are going to be that agent.” He turned the case around and opened it.

“How did you acquire—” Nickolai began, but cut short the outburst.

“A symbol of your service, Mr. Rajasthan. A token from he who gave you succor when you were shunned.”

He knows exactly what this means, Nickolai thought.

In the padded case was an antique slugthrower. The design was old, as old in fact as the design of Nickolai’s species. However, the handgun was obviously of a post-exodus model. The ancient humans who had designed Nickolai’s ancestors for warfare never would have bothered to add gold plating, scroll-work, or mother-of-pearl to something they saw as strictly utilitarian. They certainly never would have engraved quotes from scripture—not that the scripture in question existed at the time the first of these guns had been manufactured.

The 12-millimeter firearm Mr. Antonio had was one that belonged in the ceremonial guard in the temples and palaces on Grimalkin. It had probably been blessed by the temple priests.

Nickolai remembered well when he had passed his first trial as an adult of House Rajasthan. After twelve hours of uninterrupted sparring with priests and acolytes, he had limped, bruised, bleeding, undefeated, up the 367 steps to the cenotaph of St. Rajasthan. At the top, before the statue of the first speaker of his faith, his mother had presented him with a weapon much like the one Mr. Antonio showed him.

The words she spoke were not in the corrupt tongue of the Fallen, but came from the scriptures of his faith:

This is a symbol of your service, my son. A token from He who gives you succor when you are shunned.

Years later, when the priests had come for him, they had taken the gun. They had told him it had been melted down. It had become unclean from his touch.

Now, Mr. Antonio was not only returning his eyes and his arm but, in some sense, his honor as well. In another sense, he was taking all the remnants of honor he had left.

Could he accept the kind of debt this represented?

Nickolai looked into Mr. Antonio’s eyes and knew that the deal had already been made, and the debt went deeper than any material accounting. The man he now served was just making the deal explicit in terms he knew Nickolai understood.

Nickolai reached over and picked up the weapon. It was too large for any human to handle comfortably, but it rested perfectly in Nickolai’s new hand. The weight felt good, as if it completed the reconstruction of his missing limb.

Mr. Antonio smiled.

“So how do I become this agent you require?”

“You will need to join the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union. That will give you the contacts to apply for the position I need you in.”

Nickolai sighted down the barrel of the new weapon, nostrils flaring with the scent of gun oil. “You are certain that I will be hired for this position?”

“Mr. Rajasthan, I have no doubt of it.”