“Kaaa!” the stickles shrieked.
The overpass began to shake.
With careful fingertips he closed the nerveless flaps of skin that hid his third eye. As he opened his norm eyes, the rank, sweet-sour scent of the stickies* mass coupling wafted up at him. Energized by die psychic networking, they set to rutting in a frenzy. Soon the
excess of their seed would flow down onto the broiling hot roadway, where it would erupt into pungent steam.
Watching the stickies mate, Kaa felt something stir between his thighs-his own need for sexual release. Though he could have used any or all of the mutants beneath him to achieve a climax, he did not. He was celibate and had been all his life. Control of self was the most important thing he had learned in his long imprisonment. Control of self was the founding power, the basis of all else.
His meticulously constructed conception of himself, of his future, didn’t include premature fulfillment with either mutie or norm. He had turned down the advances of all of the baron’s discarded daughter-wives, as well as several of his current granddaughter-wives. More than once, the jewels of Elijah’s inbred harem had hiked their long skirts over their hips and, bending over, offered up their blond mounds for a quick poke between the iron bars of his cage. Because Kaa had bided his time, waited for his main chance, in the end he had stolen something infinitely more valuable than a few moments of pleasure in the company of the baron’s halfwit concubines, something even more delightful than the planting of a three-eyed baby in the belly of every one of Elijah’s pure-norm bitches.
It had taken decades of subservience and humiliation, decades of pain, for Kaa to gain the baron’s complete trust. And the pain wasn’t merely his own. Kaa had acted as Elijah’s headsman, executing his fellow muties for crimes, real and imagined, against the royal
personage. Once he had gained the man’s confidence, he wasted no time using it to get what he’d always wanted. From the moment he’d understood what it was, he’d craved access to the tyrant’s vast collection of pre-dark memorabilia, known as the Apocalypticon. He was the first and only mutie Willie Elijah had allowed to see his treasure, which he kept in a bank vault near his twenty-five-story palace.
On that initial visit to the Apocalypticon, Kaa had realized that the baron had no idea what all he had collected and no particular interest in finding out. Possessing it was enough for Elijah, until Kaa had explained that if the baron wanted to keep everything, it was vital to catalog it all. Otherwise, how would he know if anything had been stolen?
In point of fact, the archive had already been plundered by Kaa himself. When the baron’s back was turned, he had taken a fragment of text from a broken book he found on the floor, which he had rolled up and stuffed inside his shirt in case he never got a chance to return. It was a dangerous and impulsive act If he had been caught stealing from his master, his death would have been agonizing and stretched out over many days, perhaps even weeks.
He later came to believe that he had been fated to pick up that particular book. Of all the pieces of forgotten knowledge in the storeroom, he couldn’t have chosen anything better to carry back to his cage than the Legends of Charlemagne. In secret, long before the baron had agreed to let him be the librarian of the
Apocalypticon, he had read, analyzed and divined great truth from the ancient fragment. It had opened his mind to the idea of a creature of singular destiny, a creature who could unite all his people in a war of liberation. It showed him the possibilities for a return of honor, for final justice against cruel despots, for an empire that would span the width and breadth of Deathlands, an empire cleansed of norms.
It had also taught him the concept of romantic love, which dovetailed nicely with his lifelong celibacy. Because there was only one mutie female meant for him-his true love-he was right to wait to mate. He named this unknown female Angelica, after a brave and beautiful princess in the fable of Rinaldo. It was for Angelica that he saved his seed All that he had built so far, all that he would build in the future, he would share with her. And the two of them would found a dynasty that would rule for a thousand years.