The Banner of the Lector • Seneschals • The Armies of Empire • Blood, Blood, Blood • Assassin • Giving Up

I (Minna) found a hatch on the roof and lowered myself into the building, and went downstairs, and reached a lounge where all the chairs were tipped over and there was blood and broken glass and the smell of alcohol. There were four screens above the bar and three were broken but one showed a newscast. The person talking was like a person except covered in delicate blue fur, and they were mussed and sweating and did not look calm. The sound was not working, but then the person was replaced by a video of the Lector walking into some sort of large building, all columns and fountains. He walked with one of the ivy-colored giants from the world before and the robot both beside him. I wondered how the giant had come along. How could the Lector hold the robot and Polly and him all in his arms at once? And then I realized: he had made so much of the serum, he could give the gift of travel to those loyal to him, and bring them along to other worlds. He could control their doses, and make it so they would travel only once.

He was the guardian of the doors of the multiverse and I began to understand how his Moveable Empire could work.

Then the view switched to a video of the same grand building on fire. Polly was nowhere to be seen, and what I think now is that she was doing what I know she did later. She could make herself look like anyone, even the blue-furred leader of a country or a planet or suchment, and then she could do whatever things the Lector wanted her to do: declare wars, make treaties, surrender her world.

We stayed in that place for nearly seven days, which I think might be as long as the Lector can manage – I never saw him last longer than that, and by the last day he was a ragged mess when I watched him from my hidden perch in a building near the place he’d chosen as a palace. During that week I met the resistance fighters who could not believe their leaders had bowed to the will of an alien despot. They gave me glasses you could look through to make far things look close and that was very helpful for being a spy.

That was the world where the Lector unveiled the symbol of his empire, in a giant banner that he hung from the tallest tower first and then from the smaller ones. It is a pretty picture really: a white background, and at the center, a black tree of many branches. It is a symbol that makes me think of the orchard of worlds that Zax described to me, and I wondered if Zax got the idea from the Lector, or the Lector got it from him.

I watched the Lector go to sleep in that world, on the parade ground of a military base high in the sky. He took with him an army of blue-furred people, each given a drop of serum to drink and then a sedative. They took flying machines with them, broken down into pieces small enough for one soldier to hold, so ten soldiers or so could carry one whole ship. He left behind the giant (he calls those he leaves behind to rule his “seneschals,” and he likes to put creatures from one world in power over another world, perhaps so no old loyalties will interfere, and when he cannot do that, he leaves a ruler with a spidery metal crown that makes them loyal to him forever). He left behind others converted to his cause by machines or their own greed.

I learned that the Lector promised them he would return, and I understood his plan. He would sleep on through the worlds, conquering as he went, taking the technology from one world to master another. Infiltration and assassination and trickery and force: he had tools to use in every place. Someday, he would figure out how to control his power, or so he thought, and then he would return to the worlds he had taken over before. Even if he never came back, though, he would leave all these broken worlds in his wake, torn by war, betrayed by their leaders, full of the dead.

We went on that way, Zax. The Lector conquered, and I followed, and I watched. I woke next in the burnt ruin of some sort of sports stadium, near a crater that I think must have once been a town – there was half a library next to the rim. I heard the distant booms of artillery.

I went to sleep straightaway. I thought perhaps I could get ahead of the Lector, and try to warn people, but do you know how hard it is to convince people that an army from another reality is coming to conquer them? Even if people understand you, even if you can find the right ones to talk to who could do something about it, they think you are mad. You might convince them you are from somewhere else, and sometimes maybe they believe your warning is true, but the one time I managed that much, the local people could arm themselves with nothing better than stones and clubs and that could not stand against the oncoming empire.

I watched a world full of people with the heads of birds, as noble and peaceful and stately a race as I have ever seen, fall to the Lector’s forces, and the smell of burning feathers still makes me shudder. He had people with the heads of raptors and carrion birds in his employ after that, and he used them to conquer a world of archipelagoes and pools and peaceful sea-dwelling creatures with many eyes and no concept of armor or artillery.

The Museum of Trauma where I appeared in the next world soon had a new exhibit to add to its halls, or, it would have, if the Lector had not torn the building down, declaring the end of history in a world where history was worshipped as a god. He burned all the libraries there: he wanted his knowledge to be the greatest, and if it was not, he would tear down the greater until he towered in comparison.

By then at least I looked different, so when the Lector heard rumors of a woman warning people of his coming, he did not know (not for sure) that it was me, though maybe he wondered who else it could be.

We went to a world of high cliffs and giant birds with no intelligent life to be found, but he built a prison there, and dragged the resistance and agitators he had captured from the earlier worlds and left them in it. I wondered why he didn’t just kill them, but then remembered: the dead do not suffer.

Next a world of concrete where there were no people, but only intelligent machines that rolled around on wheels. I did not like that place but I gritted my teeth and I watched. He conquered those machines, too, because technology is a toy he can play with or break as he likes.

He hunted people and gathered supporters in a world of hunters and gatherers, who mostly subsisted on the eggs laid in their thousands by the slick, green-skinned predatory monsters that hunted the people in turn. The Lector took some of those eggs and a few worlds later his troops were riding the newborn beasts, transformed by little silver crowns into compliant war mounts. He found a world of stinking mines and enslaved children and did not change much there, except for the face that appeared on the coins: his own, with his tree of worlds on the reverse.

The world of skeletons with jeweled eyes and mechanical legs and the Church of the Sanguine stood against him for a few days, because the dead are hard to kill, and they did not have the sort of brains he knew how to control, and Polly could not make herself look like a fleshless god-corpse… but eventually the Lector broke that world, too, by sabotaging the pumps that circulated in the blood fountains, which animated the skeletons in some way I still do not understand. (Blood, blood, blood. There is so much blood in this story.)

It went on, and on, and on. I was a spy until I asked myself what I was being a spy for. I worked for the resistance when I could, when there was one I could find and they were willing to accept my help, but the Lector had so much power from so many places in so many forms that the resistance always crumbled, and the banner of the Collectorium always flew. His seneschals were the cruelest, most avaricious, most power-loving of his supporters, rewarded with dominion over worlds of their own. Mastery over a whole world was enough to sate the most ambitious… except for the Lector himself.

He continued to study his own blood, and to try to control his ability, and I heard rumors of rages, of smashed glassware in scores of labs, of orders of mass executions made simply because the Lector was furious about another failure. The idea of him gaining control over his ability was terrifying… but the idea of him failing wasn’t much better.

I decided I had to kill him. I am made to make things grow, to nurture and to save, but I know when a weed has to be torn up by the roots. I had to stop being a spy and become an assassin.

But the how of it was hard. The Lector always had Calamitas and usually Polly with him, along with other soldiers and bodyguards, including a skeleton with onyx eyes and gleaming hydraulic muscles who served as his chief interrogator and torturer. The Lector had made his own body even more inviolate with new technology, too. I saw knives and bullets fail to make any mark at all, and once he was knocked down by an artillery shell and walked out of the crater, scowling and directing the retribution. (I made some friends. I am a friendly person and those who fight the Lector always had something in common with me. I saw too many of them swing from ropes or die in fire. Too many I could not help or save.)

Once, I thought I knew my plan. I crept ahead of him and managed to lay explosives all around the site of my arrival. When the Lector appeared with his army, the bombs went off, and oh, it was glorious.

His soldiers died, and their war machines were destroyed. Polly was blown to pieces, and Calamitas too. I rejoiced. But the Lector emerged, his body shimmering in a sort of force field, and his torturer was intact, too, though missing a limb. I slowed him down, yes – he did not conquer that world, which was a bucolic and peaceful place where slow-moving shaggy creatures grazed and debated philosophy. But he repaired Calamitas. He regrew Polly from scraps, having learned from my methods. The Lector lived, and had enough small items of power on his person that he regained his position in the next world, and rebuilt his arsenal, and within a dozen worlds, he proceeded again, barely diminished from before.

The Lector suspected he had an enemy before. Now he knew he did, and he suspected it was me. I lingered in worlds behind him, and on rare occasions leapfrogged ahead, though I worried about going too far, because what if the Victory-Three was right, and the worlds did branch, and I found myself in a place where the Lector never came? It would give me peace, yes, but I did not want peace: I wanted to stop the invasive species from spreading and killing all the natives.

The problem was, by then, that the Lector was devoted to killing me. He still is. He no longer wants me to suffer. He just wants me gone.

In world after world, the Lector sent out hunters, creatures and machines, to search for me. Sometimes I heard him shouting: “That’s you, isn’t it, Minna? Did you steal a vial of serum somehow on the station and chase after me? Are you wearing a wig, you stupid sapling?” Things such as that, to try to agitate me maybe, or just because he liked to yell. “I am coming for you!” he said. “You are my enemy, and the enemy of my empire.” Posters with drawings of my new face and my old face appeared in the worlds he conquered. People who once would have sheltered me tried to catch me and sell me.

I did not know what to do. I was always full of fear. I did not know how to stop him. I grew tired and sad and alone and I missed my friends. So then I gave up.

I traveled, and I traveled fast, and a lot, to look for Zax. I always thought, Zax Zax Zax, in case that influenced where I traveled. I almost caught up to you. I asked questions, staying longer in places where I heard stories of you. They were sad stories, of the drunken stranger who only wanted to get more drunk and sometimes of his talking ring. Soon I heard stories of you being there a month ago, weeks ago, just days.

The Lector sent people with serum to chase after me, though, and the Lector came along sometimes too. He pursues me relentlessly because only I am a problem from world to world: I am the only thing that persists, his enemy that is ongoing. I lay traps when I can, and I warn people, and try to make his life harder as I go. He has gotten faster at creating his outposts of empire, and he is driven, and he is always just behind me now. Either the worlds we visit are ordered and we have no choice of where we go, or he is always thinking Minna, Minna, Minna, and following me to the worlds I visit. He is only a few worlds behind me now, at most.

I know I will find Zax soon. I must be so close. The next world, maybe. So I put my memories of all I have done and seen in a seed, and Zax can taste it, and know what I went through, and what we face.

I do not know what to do. I hope, if I can find my friends, oh, my friends, that we can figure something out together.