The Ascent to Godhood Read online

  So, she had to be selective, but she wasn’t secretive. She said, I am going to change the structure of the Protectorate. I am consolidating my power, and you can either stand with me, or against me. There will be no cracks and divisions in the Protectorate I am building. It will be strong, it will stand, it will not fall.

  First of all, she tested the loyalty of the royal guards. These were pugilists from the Grand Monastery, with whom she had a good relationship. They were meant to be above politics, leaving such trivial matters behind in the pursuit of spiritual purity and oneness with the Slack. Hekate asked them to leave their monastic order to serve her. Leaving the order was as big a deal back then as it is now. The pugilists had been initiated as children. They had dedicated their entire lives to the monastic way. To leave the order was more than leaving family behind. It was rejecting their entire identities.

  Yet a large number of them still left. Maybe a third. Some of them were swayed by what she offered them: wealth and a life away from the austere strictures of the Grand Monastery. Others were loyal to her, to what the throne of the Protectorate represented. This was the seed of the schism between the Grand Monastery and the Great High Palace. She split them apart. From then on, the Protectorate no longer relied on the Grand Monastery for royal guards; the defectors trained new recruits. Hekate cared little about the thousands of years of tradition she was destroying. All she wanted was a compact, loyal force of soldiers to reshape the face of the Protectorate with.

  With this small army at her back, her next step was to get rid of all the governing councils, ministry elders, and the like. In this Hemana had trained her well. She sweet-talked, she blackmailed, and of course she intimidated. But she was crafty about it, more cunning than her brother, even. She didn’t simply execute the deposed bureaucrats wholesale—there is a fine line between being a tyrant that is feared and a tyrant that is hated, and she didn’t want to cross it. On the other hand, she could not leave them be to plot against her, couldn’t let them live in the city with all their wealth and contacts, simmering with resentment. So, she generously allowed them the chance to leave for the provinces with their lives and the clothes on their backs. The younger ones were to take elixirs that would render them barren, stemming the possibility of children coming back for revenge.

  Many of them refused this fate, preferring to die with their dignity intact. They had spent their lives serving the Protectorate, they were old; were they supposed to build new lives as common peasants? Letting a few martyr themselves was fine with Hekate. It was their choice, after all.

  In the wake of that carnage, Hekate shaped the Protectorate that you now know—the ministries grouped under three pillars with an overseeing consul for each one, and the Tensorate folded in as the fourth pillar. She had ambition fit for a dozen people, and in her chamber with her scrolls and ink, she envisioned a completely new society structured to her particular whims.

  Was it brilliance? Was it madness? Well, both of them are states of mind, aren’t they? It depends on who’s telling the story. What is called madness in one mouth is called brilliant in another. The mad who succeed and win love—or at least little hatred—are remembered as simply brilliant.

  Which one was it for Hekate? I’m the one telling the story. I say it was both. She was mad, but her madness was also brilliance. For good or for ill, she changed the Protectorate forever.

  Of course, it all sounds easy when I talk about it like this. As though she waved a hand and the rest of the Protectorate fell into place. But you know that’s not how it happens. Oh, you know. You can imagine the dark things that happened in the cracks covered by these pretty pictures. The knives in the night. The children orphaned. The blood washed out before the light of the next sunrise. When the threads of fortune change direction, how many are caught in the trap of their weaving? How many are strangled or have their throats cut?

  I spent those years as a spy, or whatever you want to call it. I did whatever she needed me to do. The stuff she wouldn’t let anyone else touch because it was too sensitive. I carried out special missions. Broke into houses. Learned martial arts from ex-pugilists. Oh, I learned so much in those days. The art of subterfuge. Ways to be invisible at the right times. How to threaten a man without lifting a finger. Everything I am now, everything I did as the leader of the Machinists, I learned in those days.

  There was no word for what I was. I was not her lover, although we were lovers; I was not her confidante, even if she held me in confidence; I was not her advisor, even when she sought my advice. A new hierarchy was solidifying around her, but I had no official place in it.

  Yet I enjoyed it. There was a freedom in being beholden to no one but her. I would do anything she asked me to, and I was proud of it.

  I remember the first time I killed a man. He was just a servant, coming in to clean his master’s room in the cloudy murk of a night-cycle. And there I was, a stranger all wrapped in black, fingers prying apart boxes that held his master’s secrets. I saw him draw breath and open his mouth to call the whole house down on me. Before I thought, I cut his throat, from here to here. Blood all over. Good thing the floors were very expensive wood, very well laid, no gaps in between. Rich folks’ floors are so easy to clean. And he already had buckets and rags with him. Hiding his body was the hardest part. I took his clothes and hid the bloodstains with some of my black scarves. From afar, in the dark, you’d have thought me just another servant of the house. I had just enough slackcraft to help me carry the body. I buried him outside the grounds.

  You know what part still fucks with me? The household didn’t notice he was gone until a week later. His brother came looking for him after he didn’t show up for a meeting. The servants thought he’d been sent home. The masters didn’t care. A whole person, missing for a week, and nobody noticed.

  They never found the body. The household thought he stole the things I took and ran. Sold it for a handsome profit to the Protector, who used it to blackmail. All while his bones rotted in the soil an arrow’s flight away.

  Once you’ve ended someone’s existence forever, you’re never the same. There was nothing left I wouldn’t do. I killed for Hekate again. And again, and yet again. I didn’t enjoy it, mind you. I’m not a demon. But I didn’t lose any sleep, either. Why should I? I thought I was doing the right thing.

  Don’t raise your eyebrows at me, child. You think the Protectorate you know is rotten and corrupt? You should have seen it as it was, before Hekate cleaned it up. Sure, she was cruel and vindictive, and sure, many have suffered under her rule. But many more suffered in the years before she came to the throne. Would you look at the peasants who are no longer starving, or the women who have the choice to live as they please, and tell them that they do not deserve what they have today? If a few drops of blood had to be spilled along the way, so be it. It’s like a game of xiangqi, after all. Sacrifices have to be made. Your conscience is clean, that’s great. Mine isn’t. And I’ve learned to live with that.

  Chapter Ten

  Kanina. There isn’t enough wine in this place. Not enough wine in the whole world.

  Please. Don’t tell me about my liver. Do I look like someone who cares about her health? I came here to get drunk. That’s what I’m doing.

  Hmm. I left eventually, of course. How did I do it? Or why? I . . .

  Look. I was with her for a really long time, alright? Decades. I watched her crush the two southern rebellions and the Tsing uprising in the capital. You remember that, huh? Were you even walking then?

  Oh, so your mother told you. Yes. It was over forty years ago. How old do you think I am?

  Hah! I’m flattered, but no. I’m much older than that. Hekate, you know, longevity was one of her research interests, on top of . . . other things. We took all these elixirs when I was younger. I guess they worked. She could have lived past a hundred, I guess, if the bomb hadn’t gotten her. Heavens, I hope that’s not my fate, to live that long. I fear it may well be. I don’t know what she did t
o herself, or what more she did to me. Oh, that would be a fine last revenge on her part. I fucking hope not. I can’t take another thirty years in this cursed existence.

  Fine. You want to know how I turned from Hekate’s most loyal lieutenant to her greatest enemy? I can tell you that part, too. It won’t make you like me any better, I assure you.

  The wild ride that started Hekate’s rule slowed over the years as the tempests of upheaval eased. She had learned to control the ocean, and no longer cared about the waves. Around her, the Protectorate grew steady and strong in the patterns she determined for it. Sure, there were uprisings every now and then, little eruptions of discontent here and there. But putting out those little fires was nothing. Most of the provincial rebellions mussed nary a hair in the capital.

  With the calming of the situation, Hekate had much less need for me to do the dirtier parts of my job. Increasingly, I found myself handling paperwork, maintaining lists of informants and those who had earned Hekate’s trust—or ire. Hekate was busy, I was busy. The passion of our early years faded with the unrest that had fueled it.

  About ten years into her regime, Hekate started thinking about heirs again. The wounds inflicted by Nengyuan’s death had healed into silver scars. She told me, I will never marry again. Who needs a husband to continue the family line? Not me.

  Again, she was very methodical about it. For a stud she chose a young Tensor who was promising in all the right ways—clever and gifted in slackcraft, but with zero ambition and the personality of a wet noodle. She didn’t want him leveraging his paternity, see. His name was—what was it? Liao. Liao Jing, that was it. Her first four children were sired by this man, until he died in a mysterious accident. Drowned while on vacation to the south coast. Maybe it really was an accident. Maybe. Anyway, I had nothing to do with it, so my conscience is clean.

  Yet Hekate kept producing children after his death. After Tamiya, Chunling, Yaoshun, and Kohana came Deryang, Mie, and Sonami. Sonami was going to be her last, she said. She didn’t need any more. Seven children were enough for her to secure the future of the Protectorate. She would train them from birth to succeed her when she finally left this existence for good.

  Court gossip assumed there was a second person—or a series of people—responsible for the last three children. But I knew of no such thing, and at that time, I thought I knew all her secrets. I didn’t, of course. You’ll see in a bit. But what I did know was that soon after her coronation, Hekate started a unit of the Tensorate that was so secret, only a handful of people knew it existed. That secret unit was tasked with research into human reproduction. I fully believe they finally developed a way to create children with only one parent. To make perfect copies of Hekate, so to speak. It’s been remarked upon that the last three of the Protector’s children look very much like each other, hasn’t it? Especially that Sonami. A devil’s replica of her mother at all stages of her life.

  Hekate became very involved in the management of her children’s lives. She left the weaning to wet nurses, but once they were old enough to walk and talk, they became her sole property. A far cry from the days when she and I would clear time—one afternoon a week—to play with Nengyuan. No point to it except the pure delight on a child’s face, untainted by the blemishes of the world around them.

  Around that time, I started thinking about having children of my own. It started as a string of idle thoughts that wound its way through my mind as I lay awake reminiscing, and grew steadily until it was a burning that consumed me day and night. Maybe it was the act of growing older; maybe it was watching Hekate recede even further from me as she surrounded herself with her children. Her hope for the future. What would be my legacy? What would I leave behind when I was gone? My thoughts turned again and again to the family I had been taken from as a tender child. I remembered how my sister Xiuqing had given me that jade elephant, the most precious thing she owned, as a going-away present. I’d abandoned that trinket—along with everything else—in the dancing house that fateful night when Hekate made me hers.

  I wondered how my family was, what they were doing, if they thought of me at all.

  I started hiring bed-partners to get me pregnant. Boldly enough, I didn’t ask Hekate for permission to do this. I was my own woman, after all. I thought: I’ve given so much of my life to her. My loyalty has earned me the right to choose the path of my future.

  Several years passed, with no result. There was an uprising in the capital. The Grand Monastery was recruited to help quash it. The Protector’s final pair of children—the twins—were born and packed off to the mountains as a blood price. Still my womb remained barren as the desert plains of the north. I had been trying, and trying, and trying. Nothing worked.

  I didn’t want to approach Hekate with this. We had drifted apart enough that it would be embarrassing. It wasn’t like the old days anymore when we were both tender, fiery girls.

  But my desperation grew. I knew that children would be harder to come by with age. I was running out of time.

  Finally, I could stand it no more. I had hoped that Hekate would sense something was wrong and come to me and ask. But she didn’t, and the desire within me was so strong, I could no more hold it back than I could a storm river. I went to her private chambers, which I no longer slept in, and said, I need help from your Tensors.

  She said: What for?

  I told her, I’m having trouble conceiving. I know your secret unit can help me. I want children.

  She looked at me for a long, cold moment. And then she laughed.

  Oh, my darling Han, she said. I thought you would have it figured out by now. The years have dulled your wits, I see.

  I didn’t understand what she meant. I was confused, hurt. Like a baby.

  She said, You are barren, my dear. No amount of slackcraft will undo the damage caused to your womb by the elixirs you took all those years ago.

  What elixirs? I asked, confused.

  She said, The ones I laced your food with.

  How can I describe the blade of betrayal that vivisected me in that moment? The shock, the dizziness, the pain? All I could muster was a What, why?

  She said, I didn’t want you having children. I thought they would distract you from your purpose.

  I said, So, you fed me elixirs without my knowledge? The same elixirs you were feeding to your enemies? You poisoned me!

  She said nothing. She was unapologetic. She had never truly apologized for anything she had done in her life, and she was not about to start.

  You know what the worst thing is? She could have just asked me to stay childless. I would have done it for her. Gladly.

  But she didn’t want to ask me. She didn’t trust my loyalty. She just took away my ability to have a child. She took away my choice.

  That was when I knew she had never seen me as an equal, she never would. Fuck, she didn’t even see me as fully human. She was a dictator, and this is how dictators treated those under them.

  Our relationship had meant nothing to her.

  I suppose I always knew this. I had been in denial. For years. Years! I deluded myself! I thought she at least cared for me. I thought she appreciated me as the person who had been with her through the worst moments of her life, as the one person who had never doubted her, as the person who had kept her secrets for decades. But I was wrong. She was, after all, the woman who had killed her own brother on her way to becoming Protector. The woman who told me plainly that she would never trust another person, and had laughed at me when I said, Trust me.

  Why didn’t I believe her when she told me?

  I wanted to lash out so badly. I wanted to kill her where she stood. But my years as her spy and assassin had honed my instincts and my self-control. I knew that attacking her would be futile. I would die on the spot, and what then? Would she even shed any tears over my death? Or would she triumphantly say, I was right, and then go on with her life?

  No. If I was to die, I would give her hell before I did.

&nb
sp; I went back to my quarters. I pretended to be angry for a few days, then pretended to forgive her. I told her she was right to do what she did. That she was infinitely wise. That of course my body and my future were hers to do with whatever she wished.

  I hid my resentment and let it burn like an old mine fire. I looked and looked for ways to exact my revenge.

  Now. In the north of the Protectorate, the exiled Tensor Shao Weiyi had been cultivating the new movement he called Machinism. He had been helping peasants to build machines that could do what Tensors did, but by using mundane principles, free of slackcraft. Word of his work had been spreading in the rural areas, and rumbles of it were reaching the capital. It was a movement that was starting to gain enough support to annoy Hekate.

  Shao Weiyi, the leader of the movement, had retreated into the mountains in the north and begun spreading word to his supporters all over the Protectorate from there. He would send forbidden materials into villages, the local authorities would confiscate them, and a small, angry uprising would break out. Hekate would quash a rebellion in one village only to have another spring up. It was wearing on her. She wanted the problem obliterated, once and for all.

  She told her pugilists that she wanted Shao Weiyi captured. End him, and his little movement would be over.

  Over the next few months, her people caught many prominent Machinists, closing in on Shao Weiyi’s inner circle. I processed all the paperwork. It was just one scroll after another in my usual daily pile, and I paid it very little mind. Trivial. Trivial stuff. And then, one day, something in a report snared my attention.