Beyond the broken battlewalls, Io darkens as it slides into Jupiter’s shadow. Only the Garter glows on. Its artificial suns cast light over the fragile world of orchards, grain fields, and silver mists. Refugee camps fill the distant spaceport and wind through the citrus groves all the way up to the stone folds of the goddess’s robes. I hear the camps also cover the next level of the Garter beneath the surface.
Demeter of Plutus, the great statue that sits to the north of the city embedded in the side of a harnessed volcano, wears a passive expression. The goddess clutches a bundle of grain to her chest in her left arm. Her right arm is held out, the hand open, the palm up. In that palm, she cups a simple circular building of Europan nickel that emits a silvery light. Like moths, the dusky-robed Moon Lords rise from the city or descend from their ships to attend Diomedes’s summit.
All the beauty seems so inconsequential when someone you love is in danger. Stone, states, philosophy, they feel so secondary to the fleeting preciousness of life.
Beneath the statue, in the agricultural offices in the heart of Plutus, the Dustwalkers deposit me in the room of an archGrower and depart, leaving two at the door in reserve. There, in a simple sitting room, Gaiawaits with the man of the hour. Diomedes and his grandmother are both dressed in homespun vestments. Gaia’s are brown and gold. Diomedes’s the color of storm, a dragon pin and the lightning bolts of his office the only embellishments. Gaia, curled on a cushion by a window looking over grain fields toward the statue, does not turn as I enter.
The box containing Fá’s head lies on a chair. Pyrphoros lies in Gaia’s lap. I feel possessive of the blade, protective of the Daughters who made it and what they’d think of it lying on the lap of the woman who ran the Krypteia for half her life. To many, especially Athena, Gaia would be considered the architect of the Rim’s subtler form of tyranny.
“Any word from Lysander or Cassius?” I ask Diomedes.
“Not yet.”
My anxiety deepens. I glance at the House of Bounty. “We’re going to be late to your own summit,” I say. “We are still attending…yes?”
Diomedes does not answer.
Gaia nods out the window toward the building in Demeter’s palm. “For five hundred and nineteen years theekklesiahave met in the House of Bounty before every cycle. I remember my mother taking me there when I was a girl. Sitting on the steps listening to the growers bicker about the next harvest, the rotation of the crops, the fertilization of the soil. This is the first time it’ll host a conference of war. Diomedes has told me of the triumvirate he wants to make with Lune.”
“It can be a conference of peace too,” I say. “We could end war in our lifetimes. I assume Diomedes has explained his plans with Lune and me. Will you lend support?”
Gaia turns a little to look at me. Disgust fills her eyes. “No.”
I glance at Diomedes. He already knew this. I’m baffled. “Diomedes gave me his word—”
“Diomedes is a servant of the Dominion. His personal guarantees and honor are subservient to his duties,” she says. “My son Romulus knew this. He lied about your crime to keep us from war, Darrow. He shamed himself for the sake of his Dominion. So too will Diomedes.”
I feel the world sinking out from under me. She’s not going to let me go to the summit. “You’re going to let Atlas get away with it,” I whisper. “You’re going to just swallow it all.”
“The Volk will pay for their crimes. The Daughters are terrorists. Lune will destroy them. And I will destroy you,” she says. I search Diomedes’s face for signs of shame. There are none.
“Atlas is responsible for the deaths of millions of your people,” I say.
“Yes,” she says.
Oh no. No.
“You already knew,” I say.
“I am cursed to be the mother of Fear. My boy is so much like me. He feels too much. He is tortured. But he has his duty. And I have mine. That is what my son told me when he visited me in my cell when I was held captive by his pet warlord. It was his last revenge, you see. When we sent him as hostage to Luna, I did not see him off. I couldn’t bear it. The last words I spoke to him were, ‘Do your duty.’ ”
I feel like I am drowning. All my allies, all my people out here will be undone by this woman who is so old she will not live to see the future she steals from them.
“You are the matron of House Raa,” I say. “You are part of the Moon Council. You have a duty to your people. You would cast the moons into the shadow of another lie? Worse, you’ll demand your grandson bear its weight? Tell me, Gaia, how will it feel to watch Diomedes march to the Dragon Tomb when this lie is uncovered? To watch him waste his life the same way Romulus,your son,wasted his own.” I can’t help but laugh.
“Are we amusing to you?”
“No. You are tragic.” I look at Diomedes, unable to understand.
He just watches his grandmother.
Gaia hefts Pyrphoros. “What does it take to master one of these blades, Darrow?” Gaia rasps, but answers without giving me a chance to reply. “Pain. Discipline. Sacrifice. We of the Krypteia have a sacred charge separate from the edicts of the Moon Lords to keep order in these spheres. The hierarchy is essential to order.”
“Flawed as it may be, the Republic has proven that is not always the case,” I reply.
“Twelve years!” she cackles. “Twelve, all at war. We have secured contiguous government for more than a half a millennium, boy. Your frail experiment hasn’t the legs for another year. You think Gold is the problem?Pfff.There has always been a human pyramid, in every civilization beneath the sun. It is human nature to crawl upward. But if there are not rigid ceilings, everyone will think they should have everything. Then what do you get? An unstable structure at war with itself. Ravenous resource consumption, the despoilment of natural habitats, beauty, worlds. Your Republic and your free market rape natural sanctuaries,poach rare beasts to extinction, consume, devour what took an epoch of order to build.”
She glares at me. “I can speak twenty-one dead tongues, name every species of wildlife in our spheres, recite the caloric intake of at least one hundred and thirty cities in this Dominion. I have dedicated my life to the study of social engineering, to the history of humanity, and you tell me that a Red who can’t name five moons of Ilium should have the same say in government? Demokracy gives humanity what it wants, boy. The hierarchy gives humanity what it needs. Structure, and hope to escape our own stupidity.
