34
The Worst of All Possible Worlds
The bronze doors slowly swung open, and in strode the incinerated scythe. The room filled with gasps of shock and the squeaks of chairs as all those gathered rose to take a closer look.
“Is it really him?”
“No, it can’t be.”
“It’s some kind of trick!”
“It must be an imposter!”
He moved down the center aisle with a gait that was not his. Looser than before. Younger. And somehow, he seemed slightly shorter than he had been.
“Yes, it’s Goddard!”
“Risen from the ashes!”
“The timing couldn’t be better!”
“The timing couldn’t be worse!”
Entering the chamber in his wake was a familiar figure in bright green. Scythe Rand was alive, too? Eyes now looked to the open bronze doors, expecting that Scythes Chomsky and Volta might also return from the dead today, but no one else entered the chamber.
At the rostrum, Xenocrates blanched. “Wh . . . wh . . . what is the meaning of this?”
“Forgive my absence these past few conclaves, Your Excellency,” said Goddard in a voice that sounded markedly different, “but I was severely incapacitated, and thus unable to attend, as Scythe Rand will attest to.”
“B . . . but your body was identified! It was burned down to the bone!”
“My body, yes,” Goddard said, “but Scythe Rand was good enough to find me a new one.”
Then a flustered Scythe Nietzsche rose, clearly just as blindsided as everyone else by this turn of events. “Your Excellency, I wish to withdraw my nomination for High Blade,” he said. “I wish to withdraw, and officially second Honorable Scythe Goddard’s nomination.”
More chaos erupted in the room. Angry accusations and cries of woe, but also excited laughter and bursts of joy. Not a single emotion was absent as people reacted to Goddard’s return. Only Brahms seemed unsurprised, and Anastasia realized now that he wasn’t the mastermind, he was the worm in the apple. He was Goddard’s finger in the pie.
“Th . . . this is highly irregular,” sputtered Xenocrates.
“No,” said Goddard. “What’s irregular is that you still have not apprehended the beast who ended dear Scythes Chomsky and Volta, and attempted to end Scythe Rand and myself. Even as we speak, he runs rampant, killing scythes left and right, while you do nothing but prepare for your ascension to the World Council.” Then Goddard turned to the scythedom. “When I am High Blade, I will take Rowan Damisch down, and make him pay for his crimes. I promise you that I will find him within a week of becoming High Blade!”
The proclamation brought cheers from the room—and more than just the new-order scythes roared their approval, making it clear that while Nietzsche didn’t have the votes to win, Goddard just might.
Somewhere behind Anastasia, Scythe Asimov summed it up best.
“We have just entered the worst of all possible worlds.”
• • •
Up above, in the administrative offices of the scythedom, a first-term apprentice searched frantically for a coin. If he couldn’t find one, he’d be reprimanded, but worse, he would be humiliated before the entire scythedom. How fickle the world, he thought, that his life, his future, could rest on a single coin.
At last he found one, tarnished green, in the back of a drawer that could have been unopened since the mortal age itself. The raised image was of Lincoln—a mortal-age president of some note. There had been a Scythe Lincoln. Not a founder, but close. Like Xenocrates, he was a MidMerican High Blade who had risen to be a Grandslayer, but had tired of the heavy responsibility, and had self-gleaned long before the apprentice was born. How appropriate, he thought, that the copper effigy of his Patron Historic would play such an important roll in the naming of a new High Blade.
When the apprentice returned to the conclave chamber, he discovered, to his dismay, that things had changed dramatically in his absence, and he lamented that he had missed all the excitement.
• • •
Xenocrates called for Scythe Curie to come down to the front of the chamber for the coin flip that would begin the debate—a debate that would be far different from the one she had expected. Marie decided to take her time. She rose, smoothed her robe, rolled her shoulders to get a kink out of her neck. She refused to give in to the anxiety of the moment.
“It’s the beginning of the end,” she heard Scythe Sun Tzu say.
“There’s no coming back from this,” echoed Scythe Cervantes.
“Stop!” she told them. “Wailing that the sky is falling does nothing to stop it.”
“You must defeat him, Marie,” said Scythe Cervantes. “You must!”
“I intend to.”
She glanced to Anastasia, standing stalwart beside her.
“Are you ready for this?” Anastasia asked.
The question was laughable. How could one ever be ready to battle a ghost? Worse than a ghost, but a martyr? “Yes,” she told Anastasia, for what else could she say? “Yes, I’m ready. Wish me luck, dear.”
“I won’t do that.” And when Marie looked to Anastasia for an explanation, the girl smiled and said, “Luck is for losers. You have history on your side. You have gravity. You have authority. You are the Granddame of Death.” And then she added, “Your Excellency.”
Marie couldn’t help but smile. This girl whom she had not even wanted to take on in the first place had become her greatest supporter. Her truest friend.
“Well, in that case,” Marie said, “I’ll knock ’em dead.”
And with that, she made her way to the front of the chamber, standing tall and proud to face the far-from-honorable Scythe Goddard.