Mason’s fists clenched, but in public he could not contradict the only living Mardi’s claims of what the Mardis tried to do.
“You’re still deceiving everyone!” Tully continued. “You think I don’t have evidence? There’s a recording circulating of you, MASON, and J.E.D.D. Mason meeting together with Mycroft Canner in Alexandria, only five days ago, both of you sharing secrets with Mycroft about the Seven-Ten list case, and proving both you and the Censor knew something about the Anonymous and Felix Faust lying about their own Seven-Ten lists, pretending they’d been tampered with, to try to cover up what really happened. You knew then what danger the public was in, and you did nothing!”
You must remember this scene, reader, when I took you into MASON’s citadel in Alexandria, and let you hear for the first time the verbal knot-work that is Jehovah’s Latin. The recording of that secret conversation had been leaked that morning, timed to do most damage, Perry’s doing, or I should say Perry-Kraye, through the complicity of a traitor Familiaris, Antonine Fusilier; MASON has not yet announced whether he will be executed when captured.
The Emperor was stone. “It is not your place, Hiveless, to interpret acts of which you have so little understanding.”
“It’s not your place to stop me, MASON.” One must admire Tully for pressing on while tasting Caesar’s anger face-to-face. “The world has a right to know what’s going to happen when the Senate session ends today. If I were telling the people to attack the Senate, or to attack you, or Tribune Mason,” he gestured at Jehovah, “you’d be right to stop me, but you have no right to keep me from warning the world there’s going to be a war.”
Martin and Dominic climbed up to flank Jehovah on the platform now, uncomfortable with how His stillness let Tully draw close.
“There does not have to be a war.” Jehovah’s voice seemed hollow next to Tully’s, as a play’s printed script reads hollowly without the actor’s passion to ignite it. “You are right that history has been one long string of violence, and that this three-hundred-year peace was bought only through blood. That does not mean we cannot make real peace now. When I let Mycroft Canner walk the streets again, they could have tracked you down, Tully, and killed you. They chose not to. When I give my report today, every person in the world will have the choice to hurl hate and stones at whomever they blame, or to refrain. They may refrain.”
I suspect Tully had not truly considered Jehovah his enemy until this moment. How dare He make the world think that my redemption proved mankind could be redeemed! How dare He make the world root for me! “Tribune,” Tully replied, cold, “only you and the Commissioner General know the full content of what you’re about to present to the Senate, so I’ll ask plainly: do you honestly believe anyone in the world will be able to take it calmly? Let alone everyone in the world?”
Jehovah’s gaze floated somewhere between Tully and the crowd, as if addressing an abstraction. “I would be a poor bailiff for the Humanists if I believed we have already seen the maximum of what a human being can achieve. What I will present today are proofs of what has already been said. Prime Minister Casimir Perry is actually the criminal Merion Kraye. The Anonymous has been secretly propping up the failing CFB for over a century. The Humanists have led Europe and the Mitsubishi in secret assassinations for two hundred and fifty years. These are facts we can endure—whether we will endure them we shall see. This is not the end of peace, it is the first chance we have ever had to make a real peace. In seeing how humanity comports itse—”
I saw red before I registered the sound, circus-bright red like finger paint against the marble, peppered with chunks of yellow-pink as Jehovah’s brain spilled across the platform, Martin, Caesar, and myself. A gunshot. I had not heard a proper gunshot since Saladin had knocked the last weapon from Seine Mardi’s hand, though the quick shocks of our handguns then were nothing to this blast, which thundered from all sides like God snapping his fingers. Jehovah fell, not dying but dead. His limbs, lifeless in life, convulsed as the nerves’ last tangled signals filled his hands and legs with madness, then stillness. Martin and I caught Him between us, the warmth of His blood flowing across our knees. Everyone screamed. Thousands, the Emperor, myself. What mattered, where the microphones were strong enough to pick it up, was what we screamed.
“Jehovah!” That came from the Emperor.
“Jehovah!” from Censor Ancelet as well.
“Jed!” from Kosala.
“Domine!” and tears from loving Martin, faster than the rest of us to move past shock to grief.
Tully screamed, no words, just scream, and I likewise lost my many languages as adrenaline and blood-wind flooded my mind with fever.
The crowd too screamed, erupting into stampede as the Forum drained like a fractured water drum.
“Tai-kun!” This last scream rose from Chief Director Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi, who had not been with the others on the Rostra, but now gave away his hiding place watching from the doorway of the Mitsubishi embassy. “Let me go!” he shouted as his own guards dragged him back into the safety of the doors. “My son is dying! Let me go!”
Guards covered the Rostra, human shields pressing us down beneath a wall of uniforms, Masonic gray, Romanovan blue, Senatorial gold, Utopians too, Aldrin, Voltaire, Tully’s nameless escorts suddenly visible as they leapt into motion. Only Dominic escaped the defensive prison, hurling his would-be protectors bodily aside as he leapt up onto the Rostra’s railing to face the assassin. ? Blasphémateuse! ?
Sniper, rising, smiled at the compliment. It had lain in wait six hours, motionless beneath a camouflaged tarp on the roof of the law courts which stood to the other side of the Rostra, opposite the bustling Senate House. The proud assassin let its cameras rise around it now, broadcasting to all the world the clean pride on its face, and the twitch of its delicate nose as it scented gunpowder rising from the rifle, enormous in its arms. Sniper’s Olympic medals are in pentathlon and pistol, not rifle, but I have watched it train in rifle too, freezing dead for the instant of the shot, even its heartbeat kept on hold for that immeasurable fraction when the weapon fires. With that skill in Sniper’s arms, eighty meters’ distance, and screaming innocents crowded on a balcony just below Sniper’s rooftop perch, little wonder the guards hesitated before firing back. That vital half-second let Sniper slide from its exposed vantage on the roof’s center peak down to the cover of the flat portico roof.