“He’s a maverick.”
“He’s a champion among these people, some of them.”
“He is, in the end, doing what he sees is right.”
“Even if that means murdering someone over a personal vendetta?”
“Even so.”
“That is how you see it.”
***
If there is a rational mind at work here, if there is to be termed a decisive stance on war, then it is not to be found in the coming moments. There will be nothing rational here. La Femme has seen enough. She will not act out of any favor to one side or the other, though she has been finding more and more respect for those she once fought than those she once fought alongside. The longer the war lasts, the less she’s interested in its continued devastation, no matter how it’s brought about, or why. She wants it to end, and she’s just seen her opportunity to do so.
***
Godsend realizes what he’s just done. He realizes that he has killed a man, without mercy. Is that the code he’s lived by, the heroic ideal? Is there any possible justification to this act, even considering his grief over Agog, his uncontrollable fury, and what Malcolm Bidd has come to symbolize? What has led him to that moment? Has he brought all of this on himself? Does it help to end to war?
***
The Staged Man has discovered a way in. He’s been hard at work for a long time now, employing the only weapon that has granted him any modicum of respect on the battlefield. He is not a warrior, though he is able to account for himself. His is the ability to conjure stratagems, to peer through the looking glass and interpret what he sees, as few others are able. He believes he’s done that now, and he believes the timing could not have been better. But there’s regret, as there always is, that it has come to this, that so much fighting, so much death, has been necessary to achieve this moment. At times he feels cursed.
***
The war is drawing to a close. Events have come into motion to confirm this, even though it is evident to all, like a feeling drifting about on the wind, which everyone comes to feel in time. The storm is passing, yet it still has its power, now more dangerous because of desperation, because there are a few things left that must be done. Godsend has never felt more powerful, too, and yet never more vulnerable, more frail. He knows there is something coming for him, just as he has come for others in these passing days. His might is about to be checked. How does he account for himself? Much of his behavior may be seen as those of a villain, in these days and those past, a mania born of a will imbued with a sense of divine right. And yet, in all this time, he has been beloved for what he has done, the good he has done, as has been his basic nature, as a hero. He has been the embodiment of the unconscious goodwill, the symbol of the universal call for salvation. Might he be condemned for the measures he has taken at times to fulfill the need he has sated? He has been a bringer of order. Order cannot be created without the acknowledgement of chaos, and if there is chaos, and the need for order, then the creation of order must be accomplished with chaos, so that it is embraced and not merely wished into oblivion. Things must be done. This is without question. If things must be done, and chaos is already established, then to claim ignorance of it in the face of the illusion of order, the illusion of control in the creation of order, then it must be said without question that we must accept that good cannot be created outside the shadow of evil. Good is the opposite of evil, yet good cannot exist without evil, because the two are by definition linked. Good cannot be accomplished without evil present, and in its presence and by its definition include evil, just as evil cannot be pure, cannot exclude good. This is the grey area that is life that is our constant refuse of conversation, which we nonetheless can never accept. We believe in good, but we don’t believe it exists. We believe that good is something that will come. Good has no present tense in our language. It is something we are capable of doing, but not of being, unless we bow down before it and refuse to take it within our own realm, which we know is imperfect, is evil, is good, is the grey area.
It is a difficult philosophy, and to say that a war can illustrate it is to slap the face of those who believe in good, because they refuse to see it where it is. They believe in evil more readily than good. Are these people themselves evil? What is a tyrant but evil? What is a democracy but evil? What is communism but evil? What is chaos but evil? What is order but evil? All these are evil, but they are good, too. Are you able to comprehend a tyrant as good? Godsend is a tyrant, and yet he is a hero. Can he be both? When he has put himself aside, he is neither good nor evil, but an agent of the grey area, who fights neither for good nor for evil, nor fights at all. His motivations a re selfish; his ego prevents him from seeing that his reasoning is flawed, that he would be better off continuing his fight, better off for his own sake, for his cause’s, for his allies’, for his friend’s. We call this a war, and yet it has not always meant that one side produces one person who kills someone from another side. That is not what ten years have produced. These are heroes and villains, mind you, the heroes who come to Traverse to wrest control from the villains who seek to retain their grip on the waking city. Godsend has been portrayed as a heroic villain, Malcolm Bidd as a villainous hero. Does that make either remarkable as one more than the other, more than the roles they are cast in? Have you found more sympathy for the villains, that a figure such as Benjamin Russ, who previously has been depicted as a merciless, vile and inhumane figure who wouldn’t think twice to kill a man without any rational reason, to build walls around a city while he breeds offspring who will only showcase the glory he wishes to portray, or Viper, who is never illustrated in his vitriol, or Barracuda, who has not orchestrated a single successful kill outside anecdotes? There have been two notable deaths depicted, both of them revolving around Godsend’s madness, and his inevitable confrontation with Malcolm Bidd. What are we left to conclude?
Are we, as does La Femme, to conclude that he should be the next victim, not from a warrior on the field but from an observer who feels in her blood the same petty motivations on which she scoffs? Is that what he deserves? No amount of dissuasion will prevent this act. Godsend dies from La Femme’s hand. His weakness, which only the cunning Ulysses Kincaid knew of beforehand? Would you believe a kiss of death from his countryman? Would you believe that Godsend has so literal an origin for his name? Does it seem too simple? It takes courage for La Femme to deliver it. It is as if she is killing her own brother, for in a sense, she is, but she will no longer watch as he misbehaves. She has seen enough. Is he aware, when it happens, what has happened, how this has happened? You may look into his eyes and see for yourself. In the middle of this city, in the middle of the end of this war, he has been struck down with a kiss. Godsend, the Alabama Lamb, the savior among men and the greatest of living heroes, has passed on. Such are the cruel fates. Gone without a fight?
***
The news strikes around faster than before. For the second time within days, Godsend has been felled. This time it rings more authentically, even the more absurd it sounds. Who defeated him but a woman who should have been his ally? The Staged Man no longer waits. Dust is with him at the moment, encouraging him, recalling how he brought Godsend into this war in the first place, how he found him. He recounts how he has already summoned Godsend’s unknown son, Catalyst, the offspring of La Femme herself, as a final agent of war, discovered in his mother’s mourned land. And yet Staged Man needs none of this to motivate him. He has always had exactly what he needed. He has had the Solomons inside this city, already welcomed as a poisonous gift, all this time. He has only to play his final card, which is marked with a name, Charles Solomon. His own.
The family that for more than a century has claimed the city as its own, and yet has chosen to sit it out at its own discretion, despite a personal tie that has already drawn the Solomons in. The kind of power they’ve held is not the kind that can be easily threatened, unless you know how to motivate it. Staged Man motivates the Solomons by making them realize that the martial law, the chaos, that was introduced, is exactly what they’ve always wanted, what separated them from their hated rivals through the years, from the Dread Poet to the Alarmist to Benjamin Russ, a descending catalogue of integrity, though a clear line of opposition, always a continuing reason to keep their guard up. What is there to protect now? The Staged Man introduces himself to the patriarch, Darius Solomon, as a brother, both in blood and in honor. He presents a theory that suggests there’s nothing left to fight, that if they give in now, they destroy Russ’s grip forever. Without someone to fight, he has no real power, because he will have nothing to show for himself. What will this war produce but a barren land? The Solomons have no choice: accept the gift of peace and receive what they’ve always wanted. They bless themselves, at last. That will be their victory.
“One could call you a serpent,” Darius says. Ten years ago, he read in the newspaper how his brother was found dead in his home, slumped over a desk, and he came home immediately. Who killed Truett “Cutty” Solomon? It was a hero. “You say that we all benefit, but I see your side gaining more, and our side less.”
“You see what you want to see,” the Staged Man says. “You’ve had this conclusion told to you from the beginning, and yet you refused to act. Now we’re making sure that it ends like this, because my truth is your truth, my kith your kin. We’ve all suffered in this war, and all that preceded it. Why not find a way to make its conclusion work for all of us? Even you, who sat on the sidelines, had your part in it, as well as losses. Take your stand now. You see this as a trap, and maybe it is, because we’ve all be ensnared, and this is the first time we’ve seen it. It’s a trap, and you’re going to spring it. What do you think you’ll find? The destruction of your city, and your salvation. You will still stand when all this ends. The war brings destruction, but it is not mindless. Relax, you’re being rewarded.”
“Another cursed gift,” Darius says. “But one I’m willing to live with. Too long has my family allowed this to continue. I see the wisdom in your plan now. We’ve allowed it to continue because we have been as much a cause of the conflict as we have been the builders of the walls that have sustained it. What were they fighting over other than walls? It’s time to bring about the destruction of these divisions.”
“I’m glad that you accept platitudes along with good advice,” the Staged Man says. “You have a vital mind, and for that, I am pleased to call you a brother, if for nothing else.”
“Families have gotten us into this mess,” Darius says, “mine, and others. I sometimes wonder what they’re worth.”
“As a patriarch,” the Staged Man says, “that’s a funny thing for you to say.”
“For a survivor,” Darius says, “it’s perfectly natural. Disaster cuts both ways. It makes you cherish, and it makes you wonder. Why do we have so much to lose?”
“That’s what life means to us,” the Staged Man says. “There is much to gain and much to lose. How much has been and will be lost in this war, so that something can be gained?”
“I hesitate to say,” Darius says.
“Then what is it that you would say?” the Staged Man says.
“Too much,” Darius says. “I hesitate because I know what that sounds like. Someone says that, and then the natural reply is, How do you decide that?”
“By what you are willing to give up,” the Staged Man says. “My identity has only ever been my own, because Charles Solomon has a family he does not want to give up, a wife, a son. He has another family that has allowed him to have these things, and infinite more. I am a virtual lord, and when I return, I will be treated as such. That is all I long for, my return to the comfort of my home. What is lost? Comfort. We make comfort as easily as we destroy it, and yet when we lose it, the labor always seems greater than the effort we put forth in making it in the first place. I have now surrendered an aspect of my comfort. How am I to know that I haven’t damned myself, if not by your hands, surely not yours, than by some other bastard’s? Some would say that I risked more than you have. I may have maimed my future.”
“That’s the chance you have to take,” Darius says. This conversation takes place in a bar, of all places, the gateway through which all are welcome, where all are made equal. The bar is called Tin Can and it is run by a man named Lincoln Mather. The two patrons sit around chilled glasses of a beer named the Old VM, a dying vintage soon to expire. No man living knows the origin of the beer’s name, not even the man who first ordered it, who now rests in his fate below the Palomar. In truth, unlike Godsend, there is no clever back-story that would seem almost too perfect in hindsight, an ironic tale best left for a conversation over…beer. There is no meaning behind it, just someone’s aimless creation on such a night, during such a conversation, when matters are spun so that they seem to make sense, so that there seems to be meaning in all the randomness that is life. The Old VM will fade away like a memory, just as the mark that pool hustler Marty Jennings, who became so famous here and yet who long ago faded into obscurity, except for those who remember him, for whom he means the world, who cherish the memory for what it still means for them, long after he’s gone. There will be reminders in the unlikeliest of places, the taste of the Old VM in other drinks, but it will cease to exist before long, forever. How has it lasted this long? Pure force of will. In a drink? Will is not a living thing. Will lives in the ether. It is what destiny always hopes to become.
The Staged Man knows that he won’t see his family again, not for a long time. The price for this success has been to reveal his own hubris, just as this war has done in so many others before him. He will be struck down, brought back to earth, to see it and appreciate it as few others have, through turmoil and toil. He begins a journey now that will last as long as the war, because that is the price he must pay. For this, he savors this beer more than most would, even given its vintage, its own fate. Will his family be there when he arrives, will his wife be true to him, will he be true to her? He watches as Darius Solomon leaves, paying the tab for the both of them, and takes another long sip, extending a moment he knows isn‘t worth what he’s paid, what he still has to. He has accomplished what he came for, what was expected of him, in the face of a terrible defeat, the death of a dear friend and cherished ally, the strongest hope beside himself for a resolution to this war. And yet, as he knew he always would, the Staged Man accomplished a pact that would see the victory through regardless. The Solomons, of whose clan he descends, will profit from the entanglements that have created the fabric of the war, and in doing so, will eliminate the spirit of the fight. There is ugly business left to accomplish, final acts of vengeance, warriors to bury and mourn, but there will finally be a peace at the end of this. Will there be a victor? In a shallow sense, the Staged Man gave his side that claim. But things are never that easy.
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