Empire of Unreason (35 page)

“Impossible. She was the most mild, inoffensive—”

“Hercule, she
shot
at me. I think you did not know her as well as
you thought.”

His head tilted away from her. “Perhaps not,” he admitted.

“Go console your children. Give me time, so that you do not rashly
deprive them of a father as well.”

He nodded, then suddenly pressed his face into his hands. “I
haven’t even told them yet,” he said. His voice quavered. “I don’t
know what to tell them.”

Adrienne wanted to comfort him. She wanted to help him.

She had not the faintest idea of how to go about it, and so left him
there, weeping into his hands.

Menshikov raised himself on one elbow and regarded her. “Rumor
says
you
did it,” he said, “or commanded your demons to. It seems
reasonable to me.”

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She frowned, and he laughed. “I’m joking, of course.”

“How would you know what everyone says, lying abed?” Adrienne
demanded.

Menshikov coughed and sat up, wincing. “I know you think ill of
me. I deserve it, I suppose—I was, after all, as drunk as a
churchman when the usurpers took the throne I guarded. But
consider—all these years I have survived where others have not. I
have endured the tsar’s fits of rage, a hundred efforts to supplant
me as his favorite, more than one knife aimed at my back. All this
despite the fact that I am not nearly as clever as I think I am. It is
because I always keep words in my ear. I cultivate friendships
where I must. I have an instinct for it.”

“Do you think I killed her?”

“I do not care. She was no friend of mine, nor was her father. What
I do care about is finding my tsar.”

“How do you imagine the two are related?”

He snorted. “These people were content to follow you to the ends of
the Earth when they thought you a saint. And yet, turn a saint
upside down and you get a devil, yes? You are dangerously near
having your feet in the air. No one hates so much as one who once
loved, that is a tact. Are there hardships ahead of us? Yes. Will
these people face them for you? I begin to doubt it.”

Adrienne pressed her hands into her lap, a demure habit still with
her from childhood. “You imagine yourself a better leader, Prince
Menshikov?”

“I am the leader the tsar intended, am I not? I thank you for
rescuing me, of course—”

“It was an afterthought,” Adrienne told him. “Such was not my
primary aim.”

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“Nevertheless, you knew it was politic to do it, and you did.”

“I’m beginning to regret it, nevertheless.”

“Well. I suppose you could kill me, too.” He spread his hands and
smiled. “I’m joking, of course.”

She smiled coldly. “If you really think me a murderess, that is an
extraordinarily stupid suggestion to put in my ear.”

“I said I was joking. I don’t think you killed Irena. Assassination is
not your style.”

She allowed herself an ironic smile at that. She had, after all, tried
to assassinate Louis XIV, the greatest king the world had yet
known. Still, Menshikov was right: she had failed because she
didn’t have murder in her.

Then.

She leaned close. “Here is the plain truth,” she breathed. “I seek
the tsar, yes. But that is not my most pressing goal. I am searching
for something much more dear to me and much more dangerous to
the world. So let me tell you without embellishment, Prince
Menshikov, that while I did not kill Irena, I will not hesitate to kill

you
if you place yourself in my way. I rescued you as a favor to the
tsar. But the tsar may or may not still be alive, and I would much
rather live with his displeasure than surrender my command.

Furthermore, once the tsar learns of your graft and incompetence,
he may well demand your execution or exile himself—you know
Peter. All that presupposes, of course, that the throne of Russia is
ever regained, something even the tsar will not likely do without
my aid. In brief, dear sir, I am more valuable to him than you, and
should he be forced to turn a blind eye to the fact that you expired
in my care—wounded and sick as you are—I
do
think he will
manage it. Are we—” she reached out and tapped his forehead “—is
this getting in there?”

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Menshikov’s face twisted into a sour grimace. “You will need my
aid,” he said. “You will need a leader the people trust.”

She uttered a bright, false laugh. “Well, who do we have like that?

No one.” She patted his arm. “I’m joking, of course!” But she leaned
in again. “You understood all I said?”

“I know when I’m being threatened.”

“Oh,
very
good. Then I shan’t have to repeat myself, as I might to a
dull-witted child.”

He shrugged as if indifferent, but his face betrayed his fury. The
prince was not a subtle man.

“Now, if you will excuse me, I think I will retire. Sweet dreams.”

His only answer was to lie back down.

Coffee with the students offered her some relief, though she
thought she caught worried and speculative glances even from
them.

Linne and Emilie advanced the preliminaries of their work, and
Adrienne was interested enough in it that her cares were, for a
short time, forgotten.

“In classifying the malakim,” Linne began, “we are presented with
the problem of criteria, as they are mostly unseen, and their
characteristics are unseen as well. We started by classifying their
effects—that is, we know from mademoiselle our teacher that some
mediate between affinities. Others have connection with the
elements of matter, and manipulate that matter in small ways. Still
others, such as those that move this ship, repel against gravity.

“The most interesting thing about this is that each sort is capable of
contacting or repelling a single kind of affinity or matter—except in
the case of the mediators, which blindly create links between
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elements they can
not
effect in any way singly. This means that the
malakim differ from creatures of matter in being even narrower in
their design. God had made each for a
single
purpose.”

“You mean as he made men?” Elizavet asked.

“And some not even good for
that”
Crecy quipped.

“No, no!” Elizavet said. “I was not joking! I mean that some men
are designed by God to be kings, others to be peasants, others to
work at the docks—”

“Don’t forget,” Adrienne broke in, “that while your father is tsar, he
has also labored at the docks, built ships with his own hands.”

“Oh.”

“In theory, any man could be a king,” Emilie said. “And in history it
has happened that a man of less than royal birth rose to lead his
country. Cromwell in England, for instance.”

“Who?” Elizavet asked.

“Continue, Linne,” Adrienne said, shaking her head.

“Yes, well—but the tsarevna gives us an analogy to work with.

Imagine the ranks of men, from emperor to peasant. Imagine that,
by design, one
cannot
do the job of another. Suppose, too, that God
designs the kings and tsars of the malakim, the kings and tsars in
turn create the dukes and archdukes, those in turn design and
produce the counts…”

“Or better,” Emilie put in, “God designs a workman, and the
workman designs his tools. The tools, in turn, design the tools
necessary to reproduce themselves—”

“This becomes very confusing,” Elizavet opined. “Now we have
shovels making the spade with two backs? I don’t understand.”

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

Adrienne did, however. “I’ve never—That’s very, very interesting, if
true. On what do you base this?”

“On Newton’s notes and on your own. The malakim are made of
patterns of affinities, which can be observed. The lesser sort are
simpler, but their affinities are to the greater sort—as if, well, as in
the Bible story, where Eve was made from Adam’s rib. As if the
more powerful malakim, the greater ones, pull pieces of themselves
to fashion lesser—and more specifically natured—ones.”

Adrienne had a sudden, vivid memory of the forest woman, of the
spirits that were like appendages of her self. What had she said?

About learning to use her own substance and the substance of
spirits?

“I want to see your notes on this,” Adrienne said, “all of them. I
want you to walk me through it, step by step. If this is true, it is the
most significant discovery regarding the malakim ever made.”

“It is hypothesis only,” Linne cautioned, “based on too little data.

What we really need is what Newton had. We need to reproduce his
experiments but take them further than he did.”

“Tell me what you need, and we will see what we can come up with.

Perhaps we can use parts of one of the taloi, as Newton did…”

She stopped, almost out of breath. It was unbelievable. Her heart
was pounding, and in her belly, already, she knew they were right.

How had she missed this so completely?

Because she hadn’t looked, of course. She had let her brain be
charmed to sleep by lullabies of power.

That night she dreamed again of walking through the crumbling
ruins of Versailles. Light fell through huge gaps in the ceiling, and
pools of stagnant water collected on the marble floor, grimy
mirrors that let her see herself. She wore the
grand habit
Louis
XIV had given her, and her hair was caught up in an elaborate
EMPIRE OF UNREASON

tower.

“Hello, my love.”

A soft voice, a rustic accent. A man, stepping from the shadows,
lean and lanky, beautiful to her eyes.

“Nicolas?”

“Yes.”

“Where have you been?”

“Waiting. I wait still.”

She moved to clasp him, but he backed away.

“Nicolas, will you not hold me?”

“I cannot. It is not to be—not yet. But walk with me.”

“Very well.” They began walking, beyond the rotting palace into the
gardens. The gardens had once been a marvel of the world, their
precise geometries laid out by as remorseless a logic as any
equation. Now thorns entangled statues, clumps of yellowed grass
sprouted through the stone pavements.

“Remember when first we walked here?” she asked him.

“Of course. You explained the gardens to me.”

“You wondered why something so beautiful from a distance could
be so painful to walk in.”

“But now I understand,” he told her, his eyes dark and sad. “I
understand that they were a product of reason.”

“What?”

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“Look again.”

She did, and suddenly all was transformed. The returning wild was
beautiful, the false symmetries it destroyed were the ugliness.

“Thus grow things when only God shapes them,” Nicolas
murmured. “Don’t you see? You and your kind—Newton, the rest—

they pretended that reason was the way to know God. It is not. It is
the antithesis of God, a weapon aimed at him. It is an addiction, for
it seems to offer the chance to be ostjod. You know this, in your
heart, but deny it, build elaborate pretensions that you are doing

his
work.”

“You aren’t Nicolas.”

“No.”

“But you aren’t Uriel either.”

“No. Uriel is my servant.”

“You claim, then, to be God?”

The thing in the shape of Nicolas laughed gently. “I do not.

I will tell you the truth, Mademoiselle, I am no more certain that
there is a God than you are.“

“I do not doubt God.”

“Of course you do. For years you have seen the angels, commanded
them, worked through them. You have looked upon our world, the
real world, which lies behind the cloak of gross matter. And yet
where have you ever seen God?”

“Uriel told me that God is outside the world.”

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

“So we believe, for it is convenient. After all, that would explain
why
we
can’t see him either.”

She lifted her chin, challenging. “Why do you tell me this? Do you
plan to kill me?” A sudden thought. “Did you kill Irena?”

The image of Nicolas shook its head. “Your students are right: the
more powerful we are, the more removed we are from the finite,
from matter. Our humblest and most lowly servants are those most
effective in your world. I command legions of my kind but cannot
personally stir a single atom. Does that seem strange to you?”

“It begs the question. You have human servants.”