To Me A Kingdom, 2/?

Jan 07, 2008 14:11

Title: To Me A Kingdom
Author: Signy
Characters: The royal family, Glitch, Cain, and Raw, an army of tin men, and a few advisors who serve mainly as wallpaper.
Pairing: none
Warning: None.
Summary: Glitch is probably the most visible reminder of exactly how bad things were in the O.Z; finding out that he can’t be fixed is symbolic of how easy restoring the country isn’t. Nobody is taking it all that well.
Notes: The title is from a 16th century poem by Edward Dyer; the opening line is ‘My mind to me a kingdom is.’ Seemed apropos.

Part One is here: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/108716.html



To Me A Kingdom

When the hours slipped away without bringing anyone with good news to share, they all knew that something had gone terribly wrong, and they all braced for it in their own way. Azkadellia buried herself in work, the most tedious job she could find on short notice; she ended up with a heavy, dusty volume of tax records for the Ugabu region, all of which showed that what few inhabitants still remained in the mountainous province had apparently learned to live on a diet of stones. The records, she devoutly hoped, were mistaken or forged, as they seemed to be telling her that she had (or, rather, the Witch had, as DG would have reminded her, as if the semantic difference could hope to matter to her victims,) confiscated half again as much grain as had been raised per year. One hundred and fifty percent… she shuddered. Revitalizing their ruined economy, to say nothing of the equally ruined economies in all the other areas of the vast, vast O.Z., she mused wearily, would take a miracle-the sort of miracles Mother had depended on Ambrose to design.

She reminded herself sharply, some moments later, that there was too much to be done to waste time in tears, and that she had no real right to indulge in them, anyway. She wasn’t starving. Fortunately, the ink didn’t run much. The telltale spots were easily patted dry.

Ahamo went to his studio and ruined three successive attempts at a charcoal study of a papay tending a lone tree. Except it wasn’t just any papay, and it was tangled in the branches as much as it was tending them, like a ram caught in a thicket, in a reference no one in the O.Z. could ever hope to understand, but which had been teasing at his mind since the moment of the eclipse. Take your son, a man, long, long ago, had been told-for that man had no daughters-your son, the son you love, and offer him up as a sacrifice… and he had, he had sacrificed one child in an attempt to save her, and almost sacrificed the other to save the world, and yet both men had been spared, at the eleventh hour, and the children-all of them-were returned safely home. The willingness, the sages explained, had been enough.

And that was all well and good, he thought, crumpling a discarded sketch with perhaps more violence than was strictly necessary, but he was ungrateful enough to demand just that one more miracle, one more ram in the thicket, just enough to redeem the almost-son he’d resigned himself to losing annuals before.

Raw went to the gardens. Or what had once been gardens; not much remained of their former splendor. Between the Witch’s wanton destruction of all beauty and the gardeners’ attempts at removing the hideous abominations she had caused to be planted, they were in a sad state of disarray. What flowers remained were desolate and frightened; they needed him every bit as much as the castle inhabitants would, and their vegetable wants were far easier to satisfy. And-he admitted-he needed something simple and pleasant. He needed something possible, a problem he could fix. This would put heart back into him, strengthen him for the pain he knew was coming.

He knelt in the soft dirt, the earth supporting him with her boundless strength and the suns warming his fur, and gently began tending to a weed-choked patch of starflowers.

Cain didn’t know that anything was wrong, but for some reason, updating the duty rosters wasn’t quite getting done, and he decided after a while that it could damned well wait for tomorrow. Or for Jeb, whichever came first. Rank had its privileges, after all.

He thought about his favorite new training device-a (fiendishly difficult) obstacle course he’d designed to teach his men all about some of his least favorite parts of the job. Getting up from his desk, he rummaged in a supply closet, emerging eventually with a somewhat battered TDES-whatever. He never could remember the ridiculous alphabet soup acronyms the head-case liked to use for his inventions; most of the O.Z. called this particular gizmo a ‘crystal recorder,’ and that was good enough for Mrs. Cain’s little boy.

There was a pouch of crystals tied to the machine; selecting a blank one, he strolled out of the office to announce to a lucky group of ‘volunteers’ that they were being granted the opportunity to show the world how well they could negotiate the course. Right now, if you please.

Cain took some pride in the fact that none of the recruits allowed even a glimmer of their perfectly understandable dismay to show on their faces.

The Queen knocked gently at Ahamo’s studio door. He opened it, and offered her his hands, well-smudged with charcoal. They both noticed the dirt at the same time, and stared at his hands for a moment, then she laughed a little, and took them anyway, held them to her cheek.

“Tell me,” he invited, leading her to the least cluttered part of the room, the part that had a low couch. They sat down, and he put an arm around her. “I take it things didn’t go well.”

“No,” she agreed. “It couldn’t have been worse. Raynz said that replacing his brain would be impossible. And then he said… he said that even attempting the procedure would destroy what brain function Ambrose has left.” She swallowed, hard, then gave up on dignity, and leaned against him. He held her tightly, ignoring his still-smudged hands; some things were more important than laundry. “It was horrible,” she said indistinctly. “You can’t imagine-he was describing all the things that would go wrong, and what… what would happen to him…”

Ahamo weighed his options. The one he liked best-namely, walking, very calmly, to the dungeons and beating Raynz to death with his own arm-he, albeit reluctantly, dismissed at once. It wouldn’t help, and he’d almost certainly have to stand in line for the privilege. The second option-sympathy-had some attractive features, but would probably end with both of them in tears, which, again, wouldn’t help. He settled for a pose of calm, reasonable understanding. “How did Ambrose take it?”

She sighed. “Exactly as you’d expect him to,” she said. “Stoic as stone. He was more worried about DG than he was about himself.”

Ahamo grimaced, neither surprised nor pleased at that. “That’s not good,” he said. “Ambrose can’t just keep pretending that he doesn’t care. He’ll explode.”

“He wasn’t,” she said, and there was some bitterness in her voice. “He’s not pretending he doesn’t care, he’s pretending he’s not Ambrose. He’s insisting on being called by that asinine nickname.”

“Huh. He’s compartmentalizing-thinking of himself as two different people, then,” Ahamo theorized. “That’s probably not healthy either.”

“It’s not healthy and it’s not true,” the Queen flared. “He’s Ambrose, our Ambrose, and I won’t call him anything else.”

And she wouldn’t, Ahamo knew. Not even if it hurt him-or both of them-more than it helped. He didn’t say anything.

“I want him back,” she said, eventually. “Oh, gods, Ahamo, I want our Ambrose back. He’s right, he’s not Ambrose anymore, and I can’t bear it. I was so sure that wretched creature in the cells would… would fix him. I should have his brain removed,” she finished vindictively.

“Eye for an eye is no answer,” Ahamo said. “Leave the bastard in the cells where he belongs-if he decides to be helpful a little further down the road, gods know there’s enough work for him to do. In the meantime, we’ll just find a different surgeon for Ambrose. There has to be more than one alchemist in the world.”

The Queen nodded. “The Witch brought him to my prison once,” she said, somewhat irrelevantly. “An annual or so after the coup was complete, I think-time stopped meaning much. I’d thought him long since dead.” She choked, leaned her head on his shoulder for comfort. “But he wasn’t,” she continued. “It was worse. He was like an animal; he could barely stand on his feet, and he didn’t recognize me.” She shuddered, remembering, and decided not to tell even her husband exactly what the Witch had chosen to say. “I remember wishing she’d simply killed him outright. And then, of course… what kind of person would even think that?”

“A person who knew that there are things worse than death,” Ahamo broke in. “You can’t blame yourself for that. You were right-at the time. In the state you say he was in, death would have been preferable, and he’d probably be the first to admit it. But the thing is… he got better. And if we all stay strong, he’ll get better still. We’ll find a way, my love. I’m sure of it.” He smiled. “After all. We’ve recovered our girls, each other, and the whole Outer Zone. Finding one competent surgeon will be child’s play after all the rest of it.”

She smiled back at him, tears still glittering in the famous lavender eyes. “I love the way you always make the world become a brighter place for me,” she told him. “I missed you so, my love.”

“I missed you too,” he said, and he kissed her, both because he wanted, rather badly, to do so-they had fifteen lost annuals to make up for-and because he thought it was time this conversation ended. Apparently, she agreed, because it was some minutes before the kiss came to a conclusion, and not before they both gave some consideration to ripping each other’ clothing off, for all the world like a pair of love-struck teenagers.

Reason-somewhat reluctantly-prevailed. Ahamo glanced at the clock, and then wished he hadn’t; not only was it later than he’d hoped it would be, but the clock itself had been a long-ago Winterfair’s gift from a certain curly-haired little boy with a gift for tiktok mechanisms. “Oh. Didn’t we have a meeting scheduled with DG’s tin man?”

The Queen looked at the clock, too. “We certainly did. Ten minutes ago,” she agreed, brushing the wrinkles from her gown and getting up.
“Wait,” Ahamo said, and fumbled for his handkerchief. He wiped the faint evidence of tears and the fainter charcoal shadows from her face, then wiped his own hands. “There. You’re perfect. Let’s get going before they accuse us of losing track of time.”

“How dare they,” she said with false hauteur, and laughed.

Wyatt Cain did not believe in being nervous. If the royal couple had failed to attend his-admittedly less than critical-briefing on the state of the troops, it was almost certainly because they had a very good reason. And the mere fact that DG looked like she’d been dragged through the nine hells facedown-and kept sneaking tragic looks at Glitch when she thought nobody was looking-was indicative of nothing more serious than a spat that the halfwit probably wouldn’t remember come morning. Glitch himself looked even vaguer than usual; it had taken three promptings before Cain had gotten as much as a ‘hello,’ and the headcase was now staring dreamily at nothing. Azkadellia looked ill-at-ease, too, but that was nothing new, either; she was probably feeling apologetic for breathing his oxygen again. The small group of advisors was looking tetchy, too, but that probably had more to do with the fact that they’d spent fifteen minutes of their oh-so-valuable time watching a tin man rustling his papers and the princesses having an emotional breakdown. The representative from the Eastern Guild was making increasingly nasty comments under his breath, and his rhymes were getting more and more forced by the quatrain. No, nothing whatsoever to worry about. A perfectly normal day in the O.Z. Gods help them all.

Raw slipped quietly into the room. He didn’t do anything, just smiled a greeting and took a seat by DG, but somehow the Viewer’s mere presence calmed the troubled atmosphere a bit. Cain took a deep breath, and as he opened his mouth to say… something, he wasn’t quite sure yet what, when the doors opened again, and the rulers walked in.

Cain wasn’t much of a praying man, but he reflected-not for the first time-that if there was a god who watched over tin men, he owed him one. He saluted the royal couple as they seated themselves and formally brought the meeting to order.

“I’ve set up some new training exercises,” he said, once all the bureaucratic rituals had been observed. “This was recorded just this morning, in fact, and I thought you’d like to see how well the men are adjusting.”

A crystal player-a shinier, better-looking model than the one he’d had in his office, too-was already set up on the table, and he turned it on.

Nothing happened.

Somewhat embarrassed, Cain ran through his full repertoire of repair techniques; he turned it off and on, removed and replaced the crystal, blew nonexistent dust from the gears, and-as a last resort-thumped it in several strategic places.

Nothing continued to happen.

“Well, it wasn’t all that interesting, anyhow,” he said at last, wry in defeat. He pushed the device aside and reached for a leather folder full of papers. “Here’s the latest roster…”

As he went on, he didn’t notice Glitch reaching for the discarded machine, and nobody really took any notice when he retreated with it to the far end of the table. The advisors tended to ignore Glitch, anyway; they assumed he was kept on as a sentimental gesture on the Queen’s part, or perhaps on DG’s, and half the time he suspected they were right. The TDESPHTLs had always had this flaw, this tendency to jam; he thought he’d isolated and fixed the bug in a later model, but perhaps the fix hadn’t had the time to get off the drawing board. No matter. It wasn’t as though it was difficult to repair.

A number of machine innards were lined neatly on the table before Raw noticed the sense of peace emanating from the end of the table, and since the mystery was roughly ten thousand times as interesting as Cain’s spiel, he turned to look. Glitch was rapidly dismantling the machine, his hands dancing among the miniscule components with a sort of casual uber-competence utterly at odds with the glassy-eyed, vacant expression on his face.

Raw caught DG’s eyes, flicked his gaze to the end of the table. She turned to look, too, and her blue eyes opened wide with surprise. That, in turn, drew her mother’s attention; one by one, Cain lost his audience, and he trailed to a stop as Glitch-no, Ambrose, he decided-reached the problem, spat unceremoniously on his handkerchief, and cleaned a jammed cog. He slipped it back into place with a small nod of satisfaction, and began putting the machine together again. A minute or two after that, he seemed to notice the silence, a part still in his hand, and blinked, clearing his vision just in time to see most of the O.Z.’s power structure staring at him.

“What? Do I know… The name’s…Oh,” he stammered, fighting off a reboot with everything he had. “What’s wrong?”

DG just pointed at his hands. Obediently-if uncomprehendingly-he looked down. As he saw the half-completed machine in his hands, hope lit his face like sunrise, and it didn’t take a Viewer’s senses to know what he was feeling. His eyes locked on the guts of the player, he noticed the part in his hand, and brought it into his line of sight, forcibly willing himself to remember.

He repositioned the part in his hand-a rod bent at improbable angles-several times, but after an interminable moment or two, it became painfully obvious that he could neither recall nor intuit the proper placement of the piece. Every heart in the room broke for him.

As a panicky desperation drove the hope from his eyes, he put the rod back down and snatched another part-a metallic cube-apparently at random and tried to find a spot for that, instead. After a few desperate attempts, his hands began to shake, and the part slipped from his fingers, bounced off the table, and fell to the floor.

Very slowly, he got up, dropped to his knees, and retrieved the part. Resuming his seat, he placed the cube carefully back on the table with the other pieces, and gave up.

There was nothing dramatic about it, and nothing really to see-but his friends saw it, nonetheless. One moment he was fighting for his mind with everything he had; he wasn’t winning, per se, but he was fighting just the same. The next… the fight had gone out of him, and it was too much for Azkadellia to bear.

She stood up. “I beg your pardon, Commander Cain. I fear I’m feeling unwell,” she said bleakly, and with a sort of deliberate haste, she made for the door and shut it behind her. She didn’t start running until she was well out of earshot.

The silence she left behind her was palpable, and it stretched like warm taffy. Glitch, painfully aware that somehow, this was all his fault, stood up too. “I’ll just make sure she’s all right,” he muttered, and made his escape.

When DG got up as well, Cain was on the verge of telling that god who watched over tin men what he thought of him and his sense of humor, but the princess only moved into Glitch’s abandoned seat and studied the player. “He was three-quarters of the way there,” she commented, picking up the rod and turning it over a few times. She saw the place it had to go and slid it home with a satisfying click. “This is nice work. Nicer than the other side’s stuff.”

“He designed it,” Ahamo confirmed.

“Figures,” she said, slipping a crystalline cog over the rod. “He designed half of everything else.”

“Yes. He was the greatest scientific mind of his century,” the Queen mourned.

“DG doing well, too,” Raw commented, watching her piece the machine together.

“Well, I was raised by robots,” she shrugged off the compliment. “They were pretty big on mechanical skills.”

That, of course, was precisely the wrong thing to say; any mention of her other parents, (and she did still-and probably always would-think of the Nurture Units as such,) tended to upset her mother, and this time was no exception. Her face turned to stone.

Cain cleared his throat before things could get any worse. “Your Majesty,” he began, offering her the documentation that was the ostensible reason for the briefing. “There’s really not all that much to say. Everything’s going about as well as could be expected, is the meat of what I was going to tell you, except it would have taken an hour and involved charts. But really-there’s nothing here that couldn’t wait.”

Ahamo took the leather folder and tucked it under his left arm, and offered his wife his right. “Thank you, Commander Cain,” he said, effectively ending the pretense at a meeting.

The Queen rose, and smiled at him. “We’ll reschedule this for a more appropriate time; you’re doing very important work, and I want to know every detail.”

“Next time, we’ll make sure to have a working player,” Ahamo said, more to evoke the polite laughter always accorded even a bad royal witticism than anything else. It worked, and the room emptied out.

Cain dropped into his chair with a sigh. Raw had remained, and so had DG, still tinkering with the machine. “All right, kid,” he said. “What the hell just happened in here?”

She didn’t look up from the delicate gear she was trying to figure out. “Glitch met with Raynz this afternoon,” she said flatly. “Mother and I were there, too. He found out that putting his brain back isn’t going to happen. That he’d die. Or worse.”

Cain looked stunned. “That’s hard luck,” he said. “No wonder he was a bit off.”

“And then I had to make it worse,” she continued. “I said that I didn’t care, that we all love him just the way he is, and he practically ran out of the room.”

Cain didn’t blame him. It was one of those emasculating comments women never quite understood were a problem.

“DG meant no harm,” Raw pointed out.

“Every time I mean no harm, somebody else gets hurt,” DG-with, Cain had to admit, some justice-said bitterly. She shoved the last piece into the player, and pushed it petulantly away. The motion jarred the machine to life, and the room was suddenly filled with the images of strong young men and women running, climbing, leaping, and crawling over, under and through the course Cain had built.

Cain watched his soldiers for a moment, then thought about his friends, his rulers. Himself. He looked back at the soldiers. It must be nice, he thought dimly, to not be broken.

author: signy1

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