The King of Plagues

She laughed, deep and throaty. “It is surreal. We’re remaking the world into what we want it to be.”

“I hadn’t expected you to be the driving force for this thing.”

“Oh … you know, ‘behind every great man is a—”

“totally psycho power-hungry bitch?”

“Exactly.”

“And sonny boy is fine with that?”

“He’s less devoted to the Goddess than his fellow Kings, but he’ll do his part.”

“What about the others? Are they all still in your corner?”

“They are,” she said as she ran her fingernails down his chest and over his hard stomach. “I have a special relationship with each of the Kings.”

“God, please don’t tell me that you and your son are—”

“No.” She laughed. “Just the other Kings. I’m corrupt, lovely boy, but not tacky.”

“Thank god for small mercies.”

“Thank ‘Goddess,’” she corrected.

“Ah, yes.”

They lay together and watched as several meteors burned their way through the blackness. Minutes drifted past them on the current of the night.

“Sebastian … ?”

“Mm?”

“You loved her, didn’t you?”

“Who?”

“Amirah. Your pretty little Iraqi mad scientist. You really loved her, didn’t you?”

He closed his eyes, shutting out even the simple beauty of the star field above. “Love is a quicksand pit.”

“You’re being evasive.”

“Did I love her? Yes. Deeply, and despite the fact that she was married to another man, and despite the fact that I had several times planned to kill her, and despite the fact that she betrayed me and tried to kill me, I loved her to the end.” He made a low, feral sound and a shudder passed through his whole body. “I still do, and I wish I could take a scalpel and carve that emotion out of my body. I’m not joking, Eris … . If I could actually cut it out, I would.”

“Is that what your plan is? The course of action you proposed to the Kings—is that the scalpel you want to use?”

He sat up and looked down at her. It was so dark that she was merely a paleness woven into the fabric of shadows.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Eris propped herself on one elbow. “Oh, don’t take offense, Sebastian. You can’t possibly be dense enough to believe that you’re not damaged goods. We all are or we wouldn’t be the people we’ve become. You are one of the greatest pharmaceutical researchers on the planet, a self-made rags-to-riches billionaire, and yet you’ve spent most of your adult life covertly funding terrorist organizations and creating exotic diseases just so you could be the first to bring treatments to market. You’re a thoroughly corrupt mass murderer. You paid to have a certifiably insane molecular biologist design a pathogen that could easily—easily—have caused a global pandemic of apocalyptic proportions. If it wasn’t for Joe Ledger and the DMS, this whole world would look like a sequel to Night of the Living Dead. And now you have been brought into a secret society, a group that has asked you to help them destabilize the economies of the global superpowers by any means necessary. You are all those things, lovely boy, and yet when you spoke tonight about what you would be willing to do as part of the Seven Kings there wasn’t a flicker of greed in your voice. There wasn’t ego or megalomania. What I heard was a person in pain who wanted to stop hurting.”

“How do you know what I said or how I said it, damn it? You weren’t even there.”

She laughed. “I’m always there, Sebastian.”

Gault said nothing.

“And you, lovely boy, are still being evasive. Surely you have the balls to admit the nature of your motivations. Or should I go looking for them?” Her fingers brushed his upper thigh and he batted them irritably away.

“What do you want from me?” he snapped.

“Only the truth,” she said. “That’s the only thing that matters between us. Between the Seven Kings, their Consciences, and their Goddess. No lies, no secrets.”

The wheel of night turned and turned above them before Gault could bring himself to speak, and when he did there were ghosts in his voice.

“I … died,” he said. “When Amirah betrayed me, when it all crashed down … I died. I could feel it inside. It was like a poison had taken hold of me. You know how they say your life flashes before your eyes? It does. I saw everything that I had done; I saw all the versions of myself. The child, the lad, the young entrepreneur, the man. I saw myself expand into a captain of industry. I saw the specific moments of my own corruption. My first dirty deal. I saw the faces of the people who were dead because I wanted them dead. I saw the friends betrayed and cast aside. And I saw Amirah’s face—beautiful before her betrayal and beautiful and monstrous after. I saw the monster that lived within me. I felt the humanity in me die, Eris. I felt it go and …”

His fingers closed around hers and she squeezed back.

“ … and I was glad. God, I was so glad to be rid of it. It was a tumor, a canker.” His voice was a reptilian hiss.

“Sebastian … my lovely boy …” Eris bent toward him, finding his face in the dark. She kissed his eyes, his cheeks, his lips, and as he spoke his cold words were breathed into her hot mouth.

“All that remains is the monster,” he said.

Eris took him in her arms and held him. Tears flowed like hot mercury from her eyes and splashed on his shoulder.

“This is so beautiful, my sweet,” she said. “This is what Caesar knew when he realized that he was more than man. This is what the pharaohs knew, and the first emperor of China. To be a King—a true king—is to be greater than a man.” She showered his face with a thousand quick kisses. “You’ve ascended. You’ve become. Anything and anyone to whom you were attached before this moment is gone. You don’t need them anymore. You are a King, a true king of this world, and you will be a god in the next.”

They clung together in the darkness of their own passion.

BELOWDECKS, IN A cabin that was spacious, luxurious, private, but not as soundproof as its designers intended, Toys, the Conscience to the King of Plagues, sat on a bunk, his knees drawn up, arms wrapped around his shins, fingers interlaced, head leaning against the hull. The cabin was as dark and desolate as his heart.

He had listened to the sounds of Sebastian and Eris making love, and it had amused him, even aroused him. Then he had listened to their whispered conversation.

All that remains is the monster.

Toys stared at the darkness in his cabin, but what he saw was a deeper and greater darkness within. He looked at his own hands. They were bloodstained, too; he knew that. Since he had become Gault’s personal assistant and closest confidant, he had charred his own soul with unnumbered crimes. His Catholic guilt had been nicely off-line for years now, surfacing only long enough to compel him to light a candle two or three times a year for all of the lives he had helped to destroy. His comfort and solace had been that over the last two thousand years the Catholic Church itself had done far worse, even without counting the excesses of the Inquisition.

But this …

Somehow this felt beyond that, maybe beyond redemption.

And the irony was that the catalyst to these dark thoughts had been the word, the label that the Kings used