His life had begun that summer, and his early days had been filled with signs not of love and fruitfulness but of Apocalypse. There wasn’t a preacher in the park who didn’t have Revelation by heart that year, nor a whore in Drury Lane who wouldn’t have told you she’d seen the Devil dancing on the midnight roofs. How could those days not have influenced him: filled him with a horror of imminent destruction, given him an appetite for order, for law, for Empire? He was a child of his times, and if they’d made him cruel in his pursuit of system, was that his fault or that of the age?
The tragedy lay not in the suffering that was an inevitable consequence of any social movement, but in the fact that his achievements were now in jeopardy from forces that—if they won the day—would return the Imajica to the chaos from which he had brought it, undoing his work in a fraction of the time it had taken for it to be achieved. If he was to suppress these subversive elements he had a limited number of options, and after the events in Patashoqua, and the uncovering of plots against him, he had retreated to the quiet of the Kwem Palace to decide between them. He could continue to treat the rebellions, strikes, and uprisings as minor irritations, limiting his reprisals to small but eloquent acts of suppression, such as the burning of the village of Beatrix and the trials and executions at Vanaeph. This route had two significant disadvantages. The most recent attempt upon his life, though still inept, was too close for comfort, and until every last radical and revolutionary had been silenced or dissuaded, he would be in danger. Furthermore, when his whole reign had been dotted with episodes that had required some measured brutalities, would this new spate of purges and suppressions make any significant mark? Perhaps it was time for a more ambitious vision: cities put under martial law, tetrarchs imprisoned so that their corruptions could be exposed in the name of a just Yzordderrex, governments toppled, and resistance met with the full might of the Second Dominion’s armies. Maybe Patashoqua would have to burn the way Beatrix had. Or L’Himby and its wretched temples.
If such a route were followed successfully, the slate would be wiped clean. If not—if his advisers had underestimated the scale of unrest or the quality of leaders among the rabble—he might find the circle closing and the Apocalypse into which he’d been bora that faraway summer coming around again, here in the heart of his promised land.
What then, if Yzordderrex burned instead of Patashoqua? Where would he go for comfort? Back to England, perhaps? Did the house in Clerkenwell still stand, he wondered, and if so were its rooms still sacred to the workings of desire, or had the Maestro’s undoing scoured them to the last board and nail? The questions tantalized him. As he sat and pondered them he found a curiosity in his core— no, more than curiosity, an appetite—to discover what the Unreconciled Dominion was like almost two centuries after his creation.
His musings were interrupted by Rosengarten, a name he’d bequeathed to the man in the spirit of irony, for a more infertile thing never walked. Piebald from a disease caught in the swamps of Loquiot in the throes of which he had unmanned himself, Rosengarten lived for duty. Among the generals, he was the only one who didn’t sin with some excess against the austerity of these rooms. He spoke and moved quietly; he didn’t stink of perfumes; he never drank; he never ate kreauchee. He was a perfect emptiness, and the only man the Autarch completely trusted.
He had come with news and told it plainly. The asylum on the Cradle of Chzercemit had been the scene of a rebellion. Almost all the garrison had been killed, under circumstances which were still under investigation, and the bulk of the prisoners had escaped, led by an individual called Sco-pique.
“How many were there?” the Autarch asked.
“I have a list, sir,” Rosengarten replied, opening the file he’d brought with him. “There are fifty-one individuals unaccounted for, most of them religious dissidents.”