I woke to a smell of coal smoke, and grease, and ozone. A shrill steam whistle woke me, and I jerked up from my leaning against a flattened “V”-shape of bolted iron.

My feet clattered on the metal floor, and I looked about to see a small room with windows overlooking air. Up front, a small crowd of perhaps twenty-five humans in dark suits, starched white cotton shirts and suspenders, and the females wore crinoline skirts and whalebone corsetted blouses, and nice flat hats.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the capitol of the world, London, and the …” A click, a shudder, and a whistle interrupted the attendant’s prepared speech at the front of the crowd, and he paused expertly, and then continued smoothly. “…docking tower atop the London Crystal Dome. You have now been to the top of the tallest structure in the world. Congratulations. Come back soon to fly on Victoria Imperial Dirigibles.”

They left in decent order, ladies first, and the children in tow, and displaying good manners. Then a door to my right opened, and out came a line of second-class passengers. They wore much the same style clothing as ‘their betters’, but it was of lesser quality, and more rough-used.

But along with the attendant in a resplendent red coat, and dazzling array of brass buttons, it assured me I was in a place of formal clothing. This was unfortunate, since I tend toward less formality in attire. Still I slipped into the crowd of second-class passengers, and walked out into open air.

A walkway of fine metal grating extended from the belly of an iron-armoured dirigible to a tower atop a giant sparkling Crystal Dome that covered possibly a hundred square miles of space. The tower was a good two football fields high, and I felt terrifically exposed and high up with only a metal wire grate between me and ker-splat if I slipped off the walkway which swayed in the breeze, or make that occasional gusts.

Icy cold, and shockingly powerful gusts and vortices spun off that giant dome below us, and moved the whole dirigible and the walkway when the winds felt the will to do so.

And looking back, I was impressed with the turretted weapons dotting the dirigible, and the heavy iron armour until with an almost audible clunk in my head, I realized the dirigible should in no way be held stable and not crushing, much less flying.

Any reasonable support structure would collapse under the weight of the sheathed and jointed iron armor. The thing should be a collapsed pile of iron on the ground.

And the guns looked odd as well. I’ve seen a lot of projectile systems, and even understand a fair bit about them, but this looked like nothing like that.

A polite murmur got me moving again, and we descended an elevator to one of the Common Levels near the level of the ground where public business could legally take place. The Private Levels were barred from business, and used as homes.

Steam-powered trolleys spun by in a vast station. We transferred to horizontal transport and split to our separate ways. I headed toward Trafalgar Square Trolley as it was the only name I recognized.

On the noisy trolley, I surreptiously studied a newspaper. It was May of 1895 Anno Domini, and the Queen, no name included, was to address the country on the anniversary of the Wales Incident at Trafalgar Square.

It seemed many of my companions were from Press Street from the way they scribbled and eyed each other. I would have expected some open sarcasm, but either good manners forbad it, or something else was going on.

We got there, and Queen Victoria, an old, dumpy, but good and very powerful personality on whom authority rested easily spoke to a crowd. Her words were relayed by phonograph records, and replayed to large crowds in other cities.

She spoke movingly of the deliberate, unprovoked, and unwarned explosion of the hospital ship, the Princess of Wales, that had been on a mission of mercy. The Sheikh of Upper Hyderabad whose domains touched the Empress of India’s seemed to have been responsible, and he had been harried from his country by British Redcoats, and gone into hiding to foment more mischief.

Even now, the King of Spain dawdled between two foreign ministers. One desired to hunt down this barbarian who scoffed at the civilized laws of war, and the other sought to make terms with the barbarian and shunt the load of protecting civilization onto the British Empire which stretched from Siberia to Vancouver to Mexico City to New York to New Delhi, and beyond. If so, then he declared himself a child unfit for an adult’s burdens, and would be treated as such by an annoyed grandmother, Queen Victoria.

A great fire had been set in Madrid we were told, exactly nine hundred eleven days since the explosion. Hundreds were dead, and yet in this very capital, the ambassador of the Sheikh came to talk with the Queen.

“In my wrath, at this despicable attack, I would desire to shorten the ambassador by a head, but I am bound by my given word. He shall suffer no harm here. Once he gets home, however, he and all his bandit kin shall be hunted to extermination!”

This got a great cheer from the crowd except among the press who sat glumly on their hands. After the speech, I talked to them, trying to find out the source of their discontent.

They felt the Queen was not listening to them. From what they said about frequent meetings with the Queen, it sounded like she listened, but did not agree. People have that problem, they think if you listen to them, you will agree if they feel passionately about something.

The Queen was a hard, but fair woman I would say. I felt sure after seeing her that she gave all sides a hearing, and then made up her own mind.

They claimed that past transgressions caused the rage of the Sheikh’s people which he only expressed. To this I asked them if this justified murdering a thousand nurses on the way to help a plague-ridden city. They had no reply that made sense.

Saddened at the nature of humanity, I walked away and sought consolation in good food and drink. Feeling better, I walked into the dimly lit streets with their jutting blasts of steam coming at me at odd angles as I strolled the now nighttime, and mostly deserted street.

Hearing cheerful noise, I headed toward it aware that later I needed a place to stay. However, my gold from Conan was readily accepted in this cosmopolitan city.

A great display, apparently free to the public after being donated by a local lord, of iceskating mixed with acrobatics on rings near the rink, and interspersed with singing, and coloured with the most frivolously wonderful and gaudy streamers to delight the child in all of us greeted my eyes. It was like a three-ring circus in its intensity; there was literally too much going on at one time to see it all.

I found a seat and was given some popcorn, “Courtesy of Lord So-and-so”, and relaxed. After a bit, I realized I had not done what I usually do upon entering a world, which is to sense for versers. So, since I was already receptive, I did, and found four.

Disturbed, I sat up and heard a child wake up next to me in a tram. The young girl of maybe eight spoke to her mother.

“Mother, I had another one of those dreams. The angel came to me, and told me something.”

I waited for Mom to scoff or to politely listen with hidden disbelief. Instead, Dad, and older brothers leaned in to listen with worry evident. A strange world that had heavier-than-air dirigibles, vastly heavier, and angelic visions sent to little girls.

“The Stormlord has come. The King of Spain will choose to offer false friendship to the Sheikh, but the Sheikh will not be foolish enough to accept it.”

The father nodded.

“Makes sense, Mother, the Sheikh wants half of the Spanish kingdom. He’s not going to be put off by some paltry gestures, that’s just going to make him think his opponent is weak.”

Mother spoke softly.

“Maybe he was lying. Male braggadocio as my little sons have been guilty of a time or two.”

“Maybe.” Father said while looking at the dark eyes of his little daughter who shook her head in sad negation.

Chills ran up and down my spine. Sweat broke out on my forehead, and I just had to get up and walk about. Brushing past some people with the best courtesy I could manage which was poor, I walked about the inside track of the stadium while the ice show went on unnoticed by me, and one little girl.

For I was the Stormlord. On a distant world, a god had prophesied that I would come to a world and rain lightning down on the wicked, and darken the sky with their burning. Trembling, I leaned on the inside rail when I got to a block of people in the path.

I prayed desperately for this to be ‘not true’.

I felt like praying ‘Father, let this cup pass from me.’ But I shrank from comparing my minor suffering to the Lamb of God’s pain.

Finding the crowd moving along, I moved with it without thought or consideration.

Looking up nearly fifty stories, I saw painted clouds on the ceiling. I pointed them out, and people about me grimaced. The ordinary folk of this crowd knew the deficits of living in London Dome. It was crowded, it was fake, it was noisy, but it was also a good job, enough money for the necessities and some extra joys for almost everyone who lived here, the best medical care within minutes, great spectacles, the excitement of being near the center of the world, and the widest possible markets with goods from everywhere on Earth available for cheap prices, and work that uplifted humanity was available here.

London Dome was not perfect, but on the whole only the deliberately blind or the raving partisan of the country would claim it was a bad place to live.

And then I found myself shunted between armed troopers who were searching people, and up some steps. They never searched me for some reason.

And I found myslelf at the top of the steps, and standing on the edge of a marble stand fifty yards across its radius. On it were inscribed the nations and cities of the Earth. The British Empire in royal blue held over half of the planet’s surface.

And atop England, and in the center of the circle sat a throne which held a dumpy and grumpy woman who did her social duty and greeted her subjects. Actually as I stepped closer to her, I was surprised to see that she actually enjoyed this. She only faked her grumpiness.

And then I stood near the center of the circle and waited while around me important men and woman stood about waiting upon or visiting or trying to hold a conversation with the Queen of England. The ‘yeller’ or herald announced each person as he saw an opportunity, but it was manifestly clear that most of the court wanted us, the commoners gone, and we served primarily as a diversion for Victoria.

When she got bored with her ministers of government, she chatted with a few commoners. When she wanted to signal her displeasure, she cut off a minister, and chatted with a few commoners.

I told the herald my name. Tadeusz.

And then I was announced to the Queen.

“The Stormlord has come. And his entourage.” The herald spoke in a strange voice.

And I terribly wanted to spin around, instead I did my verser sense trick and felt versers behind me. But it is simply not done to turn one’s back on the Queen, so I let my back itch while the most powerful woman in the world studied me with pitiless precision.

She waved me closer.

“Where are you from?”

“Outside the universe, majesty.” I replied with my head now clear of shock which I was beginning to suspect had been the point of the little girl. Someone with a capital “S” had wanted me here, and had yanked my strings hard to achieve that.

She nodded as if that was the only answer that made sense.

“I and my ancestors had my preachers praying for a sign over every infant born in the last two hundred years. Nothing. I had hoped for more warning than this.” She sighed.

“The thousand year prophesy is come to fruit in my lifetime. ‘A storm will come upon the People of the Islands who stand at the helm of the World, and a lord of storm will come to them, and deliver them by destroying the storm, and with him will there be four messengers.’”

She motioned the other four up, and I saw the four versers I had last seen on a dead world in a near-finished universe. They had been punks, but Someone afflicted them with permanent empathy as a curse for their crimes. They looked the same physically, but the clothes and the eyes were different.

Pain had etched itself into their souls, and each had responded differently. But all had been improved. The girl looked a tower of strength who had found herself and pity. The first of the boys looked wounded like he had been in a long battle with Good, and finally surrendered. One still looked cold, but he nodded formally for he had accepted Good even if he would not let concern for others touch his heart, still his head knew the virtue of, er, virtue. And the last looked a little broken in the head, but with a manic fervor for righteousness. The last thanked me for my part in cursing him.

One punishment, and each reacted differently. Its one of the reasons it is hard to make public policy. You have to try to aim your policy at the center mass of the bell curve knowing as you do so that you alienate some at the far edges of the curve.

And then a storm of protest descended on us. A group of the peers of the realm protested my presence in sneering tones suggesting that they were much smarter than the others who might support me.

“He will inflame the Shiekh. You must cast him out, and let the Shiekh know you put no credence in this false prophecy. This will show your goodwill, and at last we can be friends, and repair the damage we have caused to the Shiekh’s country.” The man who spoke wore authority and wit well with the kind of patrician benevolence you want in your aristocracy, but something about him smelled.

And then the girl shrieked.

“How much did he pay you?” And she fell over crying on the ground while I studied the man with narrowed eyes. For a second, he looked guilty, but then he manifested outrage.

I could not say if it was real or fake. The others hissed at this shocking breach of decorum on my team’s part until Victoria cleared her throat.

“I would need proof.” She said softly like dirt falling on a coffin lid. Absolute silence rippled out from her throne to still the crowd down the steps into stillness. And suddenly I became aware that Victoria might be more of an absolute than constitutional monarch unlike her doppleganger.

The girl on my team rose to her feet, and stared with a tear-stained face at her target. He laughed uneasily, and she began to look disgusted. Then she spun, and pointed at another woman who wore nearly five pounds of silver.

“In her purse is a letter with blue ink and something called Jennilaire perfume dousing it.”

More protests and scorn and the letter was produced. It described a meeting between the Shiekh and the woman and the man where they discussed means to influence the monarchy and the below-market sale of coal which the Shiek’s country had in abundance to companies which were associated with the man and the woman.

“Anyone else?” Victoria asked into the sudden silence. And the girl on my team, and in fact the whole team began to study faces.

They picked out eleven of the forty. I recognized one of them as a newsman on the trolley I had ridden on.

Suddenly one of the guys began to shout in a strange voice at Victoria.

“You cannot do this, your majesty. I run the largest paper in the country, the Times. I’m its editor. We decide what’s good for the nation.”

Everyone looked confused for a moment until they realized the empath was channelling the thoughts of this editor.

“No, I decide. You are supposed to report as honestly as you know how.” Victoria said.

“You can’t do this to us, we are the important people. I have friends in all the right clubs, the smart clubs, better than those idiots on the other side who just want to break things, just like a man.” It would have looked humorous to see a football player sized man channel a thin, but hard-edged woman, but it did not, not in these circumstances.

“I’m sorry for your embarrassment, but did you think your oath when you put your hands between mine, meant nothing?” Victoria replied with her face grown strange and desperate.

“Please, people, its just one woman, an old woman, can hardly stand up. Why must we be destroyed, all of us, please.” The whimpering pleading shamed the man it channelled although I found it completely understandable. These Victorians were harder than me.

“Captain of the guard take them away, and see that the men receive a pistol with one bullet, and the women a pill.” Victoria ordered, and grim-faced guards with drawn swords took away the flower of the pacifist movement to be tried and executed or found to have committed suicide and thus regained some measure of honor.

Once they were gone, Victoria collapsed to her knees and whispered to the girl. The girl nodded in the negative, and Victoria pulled herself together.
Still, she looked ten years older, and stricken.

Traitors are not merely hated for the weakness and defeat they bring, but for the pain of exposing and punishing them which wrings the heart.

With permission the girl relayed to me Victoria’s suspicion of a cousin. The girl had cleared the cousin who merely had a soft head and an astonishing lack of logic, but not a traitorous heart.

The loyal members of the court, and my team escorted the Queen to bed.

The next morning I woke in Buckingham Castle, and frowned. The setting was glorious, but the cause of my being in the setting was hateful.

Over breakfast, we heard the King of Spain had chosen the foreign minister known for supporting peace with the Sheikh.

A week passed, and we strengthened the defense of the realm, and I familiarized myself with the strange steam-based technology that seemingly defied logic.

And I was introduced to a Secret of the Realm. A ray that would detonate with insane fury any hydrocarbon. The hydrocarbon in coal would release its chemical energy which would make it possible for the nuclear energy in the coal to be released, at least a small fraction of it.

It was a raygun that with a proper target could overawe Hiroshima.

And then I asked them if the leader of the program was one of the Traitors. Worse, I found out he did not need to be, for the secret was out to many other nations.

And then we heard that the Sheikh was giving up his requirement for half of Spain, or at least that was one way his statement could be read.

Secret agent work by my team found out that the Spanish had offered technologies for this raygun to the Sheikh in exchange for their safety. But when the King was in private rebuked by the Queen, he explained that it was no matter. They had only sold part of the technology, and they knew the Sheikh did not have the rest.

The Queen replied with some bitterness as to whether he knew that the other tribes such as the Sheikhs had these other technologies, and that if they shared, they could have a working device? The King blustered and left to go home happy to have put the bullseye on someone else.

Over the next year, we tracked things like the movement of monies and weapons and secret labs, but there were so many little fires that we could not attend to them all. And one of the worst was that we could not directly attack the Sheikh’s rich relatives because they were “our loyal allies” even as they financed the attacks against us in overseas bases.

The problem was that it was politically sticky to attack them, might actually provoke some mass uprising. And so they messed with us by raising the price of coal and financing terror against the outskirts of the British Empire, and they used Spain as a safe zone.

We would chase enemies who if they could would race for Spanish waters. Even if the Spanish caught them, they would just find a pretext to release them. Meanwhile, the immigrant population of Spain that was the same as the Sheikh’s got more and more restless, and the Spanish King kept having to kiss up to them with some new law or the other.

But worse than Spain, or the financiers of terror/our loyal allies was a small country up in Central Asia where they quietly created a business market for Hydrocarbon Rayguns, and then built a design that any half-competent technician could build.

See, it had been a difficult challenge, and now any guy with five years of experience and a free year’s salary for a working man could make one. But we found out about this the hard way.

A great boom startled the Queen and the rest of her court at tea. Reports filtered in. Liverpool was gone.

We started frantic rescue efforts. And investigation efforts.

The next day, Glouchester went up, but we had a witness even if he was blind. A coal ship had come into the port, and a Hydrocarbon Raygun had risen from its hold and blown the fully loaded ship and the city to bits. The witness had been in a lighthouse looking at the harbor with a telescope.

They took him to the Temple of Athena. That was another oddity. I expected Christianity, but these Victorians were devout worshippers of Athena. And their figure of evil was Ares.

It was interesting, two gods of war in the same pantheon. One cunning and wise, and the other, a great brute and often incompetent, but random destruction rarely requires much skill. The official position of the Court was that the Sheikh was a servant of Ares even if he claimed to be a follower of Zeus.

We might have had a hard time completely piecing things together, but an ambassador from the Sheikh explained it to us.

“Now, you cannot protect your cities. Even if you blockade, you need that coal. The Raygun is small and easily hid. Eventually we will get another one shipped in, and another. You can surrender to the Sheikh who will be merciful. You will be offered the chance to convert, if you do not you will have certain legal rights, not as many as a true believer, but enough. And your laws will need to be changed. This blasphemous policy of letting woman discuss who they marry, and of letting woman have the vote, or property will halt.” He spoke on with swelling arrogance. For a while after the Purge of the Traitors he had been timid, but not now. And all the while he spoke he ignored Victoria, and spoke to the men in the room.

“I rule here.” Victoria said when he started repeating himself.

“Not anymore.” The ambassador sneered which had several dozen hands go to swords or pistols, until Victoria raised her hand.

“No, despite his barbaric ways, we are Englishmen. We will not break our sworn oaths. None of them.” She added the last with peculiar emphases, and turned to look at me.

“Well Stormlord?”

The Ambassador snickered, and swaggered about to look at me. And suddenly a simple plan that I could start in a few hours occurred to me.

I smiled which has stilled tougher men than the ambassador, but he made a raspberry, and I wrinkled my brow in perplexity until I found myself speaking.

“The pieces are played. Let it ride.”

And suddenly a look of inhuman malevolence shown in the Ambassador’s eyes.

“All right, Lady. I’ve made my play. Let’s see You match it.”

I found myself shaking my head. Poor Ares still thought He had won.

And then She was gone from my head leaving me free to act.

“Turn from your path, sir. You know whom you serve now. Please.” Maybe the “please” did it; maybe the asking for mercy strengthened the ambassador’s confidence. He shook his head.

I looked at my team, and nodded, and they got the foldable ATV’s powered by a turbine they had. It would be a relatively simple matter to reconstruct them, and turn them into flying ‘horses’ for my Four Horsemen. I started to work, and two hours later was finished.

“Don’t make us do this.” I asked the Ambassador.

“Do what?” He asked, and then sneered.

“Destroy you.”

He laughed a great belly laugh.

“My empaths have been scanning the mood of the people of the Sheikh’s country and roundabout. The leaders and the people are ready to follow blindly and kill us all to the last Englisher. But they also are willing to change their mind if one man, known to all would come out, and say he was wrong, why things might be avoided. You, Mr. Ambassador are probably the second-most famous of your countrymen in the world. You can stop this. But if you don’t then no one can. The empaths are clear, you support this, even without a word, and it will crystallize. There is no word we can say that will reach them now. Only you can reach your people and save them.”

The Ambassador sneered again.

“Save them from you? I shall enjoy having you as my house slave.”

I bent over, and began to cry. Great gasping sobs rang out from me while the other members of the court looked on in sympathy except for the Ambassador who chuckled and bellowed for some wine to be sent. It was in the same spirit that one gives a dying man his last request.

“Put them on.” I ordered, and Hydrocarbon Rayguns were mounted on the flying horses.

I turned to offer one last chance, and he threw a bottle across the court at my head.

“Mount up, and do it. After you are done, if you wish, I will ask for removal of the curse.”

They, my team, nodded, and mounted the horses and flew away. Slowly at first up the hallways, and then they were grateful for the heavy leathers as they shot forward at hundreds of miles per hour.

The Sheikh’s country was extraordinarily rich in hydrocarbons. The same with the nations and tribes near him.

We heard the explosion on the other side of the planet. We, no me, had just instituted the hoof-and-mouth method for dealing with terrorism. Nuclear genocide. Hitler was a piker.

I watched uncaring as the Ambassador ran at the Queen with his hands outstretched in claws, and a guardsman’s sword swung in a precise circle that separated the Ambassador’s head from his shoulders in one smooth movement.

If there was anyone left alive over there, I’d tell them that you do not provoke people who have the power to kill you by promising to kill them, and then depending on their forbearance.

I walked out, and did something I almost never do. I got drunk as fast and as hard as I could. My horsemen never came back, not that I could have looked in their eyes anyways.

And then a grey-eyed girl walked through the door of the bar I had ripped off the hinges.

She sat down across from me.

“If you want to blame someone, blame me.”

“Can you do this? Appear in physical form?”

“You are unconscious. Remarkably little tolerance for alcohol. We can appear in dreams.”

“Why?”

“Why what? Why evil? You know why. Human freedom. Why you? You fit the job, and you would survive it which is a plus. You’re not going to go crazy like you think you are. Some bad days and hours are ahead, but you’re too tough, too unimaginative, too grounded to crack for this.”

“Why are people so stupid?”

“Ah, well there are reasons. Let me explain it to you.” Said the goddess of wisdom as she began to talk and weave a healing spell with her soft words.

Tadeusz