“Before I kill you, answer me one thing,” Julian said, stepping off the terrace. He was immediately soaked from head to toe by the rain, which streamed down on him. “Where is the Grand Bishop?”
“The Grand Bishop?” the man muttered.
This was not the reaction Julian had expected. A sincere believer should have shown awe and respect at the mere mention of the title, but what came from this man was only a bitter chuckle, as if he was laughing at everyone and everything—even himself.
“The Grand Bishop is lying right over there,” the man said, pointing at one of his dead companions. Poplin used the tip of his boot to roll the body unceremoniously onto its back. After a sharp look at the uncanny, aged face that was revealed, Poplin wordlessly crouched and peeled back a skillfully made mask of soft rubber. Another face was revealed in the dim light, belonging to a slightly built, even gaunt, but surprisingly young man.
“This is the Grand Bishop, you say?”
“He certainly thought he was. He was an imbecile, a kind of memorizing machine.”
“What are you talking about?!”
“The real Grand Bishop lies crushed beneath a gigantic sheet of rock on Terra. Give it a million years, and he might be dug up as a fossil.”
The man’s mocking tone showed no sign of faltering. Their encounter did not in fact last very long, but a kind of impulse to void his psychological bowels kept him talking. He told them many things: that the death of the Grand Bishop had been kept secret from the church’s believers, and that the imbecile had tried to take his place. That the twenty who had infiltrated the temporary palace, including himself, were all that remained of the Church of Terra. It all came out, like water from a pipe whose cap had been lost.
As he listened, a memory slowly came together in Julian’s mind, eventually forming the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle of his quest for vengeance. Julian had seen this man before, in the Church of Terra’s headquarters. He knew his name and his rank. It was Archbishop de Villiers.
The recovery of this memory led directly to action.
“This is for Yang Wen-li,” Julian said. He fired his blaster, and the beam of light bored right through de Villiers’ chest. The young archbishop tumbled over backward as if shoved by an invisible giant. As blood spurted from his wound, falling back to the ground in a crimson rain, he glared at Julian. There was no fear in his eyes, only disappointment and anger—apparently sincerely felt—over the interruption of his eloquence. Julian had no way of knowing this, but the expression was a slightly fiercer version of the one Job Trünicht had worn as he died.
The archbishop spat out blood and curses together.
“Killing me is pointless. Someone will come to topple the Lohengramm Dynasty one day. Do not think that this is the end…”
Julian felt not a single gram of emotion at this dying threat. The archbishop must have believed that he could save his life by providing the imperial security apparatus information about the Church of Terra. But Julian was under no obligation to ensure that his underhanded calculations bore fruit.
“Make no mistake about this,” Julian said. “The future of the Lohengramm Dynasty isn’t my responsibility. I killed you to avenge Yang Wen-li. Didn’t you hear me say so?”
De Villiers was silent.
“And to avenge Rear Admiral Patrichev. And Lieutenant Commander Blumhardt. And many, many others. More than your life alone could ever make up for!”
Two more blaster bolts pierced de Villiers’ body in quick succession. He twitched on the ground like a fish. With the third bolt, he was still.
“You might be the lead actor, but don’t get too carried away,” Attenborough said to Julian wryly. “You didn’t even leave us bit parts.”
Just then, they heard disordered conversations in Imperial Standard approaching. The three of them threw their blasters away, stepped back from the unmourned corpse of de Villiers, and waited for the military police to arrive.
Meanwhile, a man who had been the subject of praise and criticism both more public and vastly greater in scale than that of de Villiers was very close to death as well.
Paul von Oberstein lay on a sofa in a room downstairs, staring at the dark red crater in his abdomen as if to criticize its irrationality. Doctors were treating his grievous wound, but when they told him that he needed immediate surgery at a military hospital, he refused to allow it.
“When someone is beyond salvation, pretending to save them is not only hypocrisy, it is a waste of skill and effort,” he said coolly.
With the room stunned into silence, he continued.
“Tell Rabenard that my will is in the third drawer of my desk. He is to follow it in every particular. And tell him to feed my dog chicken meat. The poor creature is not long for this world either, so let it die in comfort. That is all.”
Realizing that the name “Rabenard” had aroused suspicion, von Oberstein explained that this was his faithful butler, then closed his eyes, shutting out the stares of those around him. He was confirmed dead thirty seconds later. He was forty years old.
Later, a surviving member of the Church of Terra would confess that he had thrown the explosive into the room where von Oberstein was in the mistaken belief that this was the kaiser’s sickroom. The minister had died in the kaiser’s place, but whether this was intentional self-sacrifice or simply a miscalculation was unknown. Those who knew him were divided into two camps on the matter, with neither perfectly confident in their position.
In any case, few remained interested in von Oberstein’s demise for long, as the kaiser remained at death’s door. This was, perhaps, just what von Oberstein himself would have preferred—to remain until death in Reinhard’s shadow.