Thunderhead (Arc of a Scythe #2)(106)
“And why would I do that?”
“Because,” said Goddard, “in spite of your self-serving nature, I know that you are, at heart, a truly honorable scythe. And as an honorable man, it is your duty to serve justice.” He took a step closer. “You know as well as I do that this inquest is not at all in the spirit of fairness. I believe your formidable diplomatic skills can persuade the council to put their worldviews aside and make a decision that is fair and just.”
“And allowing you to become High Blade after a year’s absence, and with only seven percent of you intact, is fair and just?”
“I’m not asking for that—I’m only asking that I not be disqualified before the vote is tallied. Let the MidMerican scythedom speak. Let their decision stand, whatever it is.”
Xenocrates suspected that Goddard would be so magnanimous only if he somehow knew that he had won the election.
“Is that it?” asked Xenocrates. “Is that all you’ve got?”
“Actually, no,” Goddard said, and finally got to the heart of his purpose there. Rather than saying anything, he reached into an inner pocket of his robe, and pulled out another robe, folded and wrapped in a bow, like a gift. He tossed it to Xenocrates. It was black. The robe of Scythe Lucifer.
“You . . . you caught him?”
“Not only have I caught him, but I’ve brought him here to Endura to face judgment.”
Xenocrates gripped the robe. He had told Rowan that he didn’t care if he was caught. That had been true; once Xenocrates knew that he was about to become a Grandslayer, capturing Rowan seemed an insignificant matter, better left to his successor. But now that Goddard had him, it changed the entire board.
“I intend to present him to the council at the inquest tomorrow, as a goodwill gesture,” Goddard said. “It is my hope that it can be a feather in your cap, rather than a thorn in your side.”
Xenocrates did not like the sound of that. “What do you mean?”
“Well, on the one hand,” Goddard said, “I could tell the council that it was your efforts that led me to capturing him. I was working under your directive.” Then he paused to finger a paperweight on a table, setting it rocking back and forth. “Or I could point to the apparent incompetence of your investigation. . . . But was it really incompetence? After all, Scythe Constantine is regarded as the best investigator in all the Mericas . . . and the fact that Rowan Damisch visited you in your favorite bathhouse suggests, at the very least, collusion between the two of you, if not friendship. If people knew about that meeting, they might think, among other things, that you were behind his crimes all along.”
Xenocrates drew a deep breath. It was like being punched in the gut. He could already see the brush that Goddard was holding, and it was poised to paint a huge swath across him. Never mind that the meeting was entirely Damisch’s doing, and that Xenocrates had absolutely nothing wrong. That didn’t matter. The innuendo was enough to skewer him.
“Get out!” yelled Xenocrates. “Get out before I hurl you from this window!”
“Oh, please do!” said a gleeful Goddard. “This body of mine enjoys a good splatting!”
And when Xenocrates made no move, Goddard laughed. Not a cruel, cold laugh but a hearty one. A friendly one. He grabbed Xenocrates’s shoulder and shook it gently, as if they were the best of comrades.
“You have no need to worry, old friend,” he said. “No matter what happens tomorrow, I will make no accusation, and will tell no one that Rowan paid you a visit. In fact, as a precaution, I’ve already gleaned the bathhouse bartender who was spreading rumors. Rest assured, whether I win or lose the inquest, your secret will be safe with me—because in spite of what you may think, I am an honorable man, too.”
Then Goddard sauntered out. Swaggered was more like it—no doubt the muscle memory of the young man whose body he now had.
And Xenocrates realized that Goddard wasn’t lying. He would be true to his word. He wouldn’t cast aspersions on Xenocrates, or tell the council of how he had let Rowan Damisch go that night. Goddard wasn’t here to blackmail Xenocrates—his purpose was to simply let Xenocrates know that he could. . . .
. . . Which meant that even here, at the pinnacle of the scythedom, at the top of the world, Xenocrates was still nothing but a bug ever so carefully pinched between Goddard’s stolen fingers.
? ? ?
The guide giving Scythes Curie and Anastasia a personalized tour of the island’s highlights had lived on Endura for over eighty years, and exhibited a sense of pride that she hadn’t left the floating island once in all that time.
“Once you’ve found paradise, why go anywhere else?” she told them.
It was difficult not to be awed by the things Anastasia saw. Gorgeous gardens on terraced hills that looked like an actual landscape, skywalks connecting the many towers, as well as glass seawalks that ran from building to building on the island’s underbelly—each programmed with its own ambient sea life swarming around it.
In the Museum of the Scythedom, there was the Chamber of the Enduring Heart, which Anastasia had heard rumors of but until recently never believed truly existed. The heart floated in a glass cylinder, connected to biologically merged electrodes. It beat at a steady rate, its sound amplified in the room so that everyone could hear.
“One could say that Endura is alive, because it has a heart,” their guide said. “This heart is the oldest living human organ on Earth. It began beating in the mortal age, toward the beginning of the twenty-first century, as part of the earliest experiments in immortality, and hasn’t stopped since.”