Chapter 5

The flames billowed out of the windows, the cream-painted exterior of the building was charred and sooted. The sounds of shattering glass and creaking timbers echoed into the air as the superstructure started to give way and collapse. The heat coming from the inferno was incredible. Thick black smoke wafted into the air, casting an ominous shadow over the whole scene of destruction.

I could only watch and ask myself one question.

How had I gotten this so wrong?

I clapped my hands loudly, letting my voice boom over the din of the workers and the TVs. “Ladies and Gentlemen, if I could have your attention, please. My name is Pete ... and I am going to be your executioner today!”

I must admit, the underwhelming response was not what I had been expecting. A few of the workers looked up, one or two of them squinted in my direction, and a single woman on the opposite side of the room cast a disapproving glance my way as she wandered from one desk to another. The rest of the room, with their headphones in and their focus squarely locked onto the screens in front of them, either didn’t hear me or chose to ignore me.

I growled a little louder to myself.

With a single thought, a wall of power washed out around me. Every hair on the back of every neck stood on end, every headphone popped loudly, and every screen went blank. Almost everyone looked up this time.

“Let’s try this again, shall we?” I roared into the suddenly silent office. “You know who I am, and if you don’t, you sure as shit know what I am. So with that information, you can work out pretty quickly why I’m here!” The ripple of nervous murmurs was starting to get louder as the violent rage on my face fell under the gaze of more and more inquisitor eyes.

The faces now staring at me were a mix of confusion and fear; most of them were a mix of the two, but one or two of them seemed to appreciate what they were looking at before the second wave of power washed out of me. The lights in the ceiling burst, raining sparks and shards of glass down onto my targets as huge swathes of them, suddenly and almost unanimously realizing the danger they were in, burst from their desks and made for the exits. It was only when the futile pulling and useless banging at the doors illustrated to my prey how trapped they were, did that overall sense of terror finally override that knee-jerked panic and settle onto the crowd.

“No, no, no, please. Don’t do this,” A woman’s whimpering and pleading voice echoed from somewhere close to the rear wall.

“Don’t hurt us, please.” Another came from my left

“Why are you doing this?” another female voice cried out from the cowering crowd of people as the whole group pressed themselves against the walls to get as far away from me as they could.

“Why?” I turned towards the sound of the second voice. “Why?!?” This was the last question I had expected to hear from the Inquisitors. We were at fucking war, and this bitch was asking why?? “I’ll show you why!!”

With only a thought, every screen in the room that hadn’t been knocked over and broken by the stampede flicked back to life, including the whole wall of plasma TVs to my right. Each of them started playing my memory of the attack from my point of view, starting with the moment I realized something had been wrong.

Every eye was staring in rapt attention at the display.

But mine were watching them. Looking for that telltale sign of joy or even guilt in any of them. Anything at all to tell me that they at least understood why they were all about to die.

There is something I should clear up here. Humans lie... all the time. White lies, big lies, small lies, lies of omission, outright betrayals, embellishing facts to make themselves look better or to make someone else look bad. If you think about it, humans lie with alarming regularity. But because humans lie so much, they have developed a skill that Evo’s, in particular, have woefully underdeveloped: the ability to spot deception.

As far as I could tell, it was different for Evos. Jeeves, in his infinite wisdom, told me that I couldn’t lie to another Evo if I wanted to. Not successfully, anyway. No matter how powerful I was, no matter how much more powerful I was than the person I was trying to deceive, I instinctively knew that the lie would fail. They may not have been able to see the truth, not without accessing my city, but they would know that what I was telling them wasn’t the trut. It was instinct, it was primal, It was part of the evolution of the species, and it transcended power. Lying to another Evo was literally impossible.

The closest thing to a lie I had spotted in my entire time with any Evo was Rhodri and Neil’s tactic to win duels, and that was hardly a lie, more like something nobody had ever thought to do before, and they simply had not been asked about it, nor had they advertised it. Hiding something from other Evos, call them lies of omission, was possible, but if Rhodri or Neil had simply been asked how they kept winning, the lie would have been discovered. There is no need to understand body language when a simple, albeit carefully worded question, could immediately tell you that you are being deceived. This meant that spotting the outward signs of deception was incredibly difficult for an Evo who had never had to develop that skill.

I, however, had spent the vast majority of my life as a human, not as an Evo. Although I could not claim to be a master of body language or micro-expressions, it was a pretty simple task to judge the look on someone’s face when watching a scene as horrifyingly, graphically violent as the one I was showing to see if they were happy to watch Evo’s being killed. Not being able to read the minds of any of the people in the room the way I would if they were human or an Evo, I had to do things the old-fashioned way.

The thing is, none of them were showing anything other than shock, horror, and no small amount of confusion. There were cries, whimpers, shrieks of fear, gasps of disgust or terror, even as my kin were being mowed down, long before theirs had met the same fate. Every single person in the room understood what was happening, they knew exactly who the victims of the attack were, and they knew exactly who the attackers had been. But not a single face was showing any sign of having the slightest clue why it was happening.

I had expected at least a few of them to hold the attitude of “yeah, they are Evos. We are at war. What did you expect?” If not an outright “Yay, they are dead!” But no, there was nothing. There was no defiance. There was no satisfaction. There weren’t even any conspiratorial ‘let’s get our stories straight’ glances. There was only confusion. I paused the video just before that ominous clapping started and turned back to the crowd.

“That is why!” I barked at the crowd.

The murmurs rose a little higher again. “That’s impossible!” a voice echoed above the others.

“It can’t be; it’s a lie. It has to be!” Came another.

The crowd was now looking nervously amongst themselves, but a lot of glances were being shot towards a single man who was standing, tellingly, between the rest of the crowd and me. He looked like the man in charge. He was shaking his head as if trying to deny this was even happening.

He cleared his throat and looked at me. There was no mistaking the fear in his eyes, especially after watching his on-screen compatriots being butchered as effortlessly as the attackers had been. This is where the spotting the lie thing came into play. This guy, not to mention every other face that wasn’t cringing in abject terror at the pissed-off Evo in front of them, was telling me that this was the first time they were seeing any of this. Either every single one of them was an Oscar-worthy actor, or they didn’t have a clue that this had happened until I showed them. My mind, however, was working at a rate that approximated Mach Two.

How the fuck could it be possible for them not to know? Was this sort of information not widely known? Did they compartmentalize their actions, so one Inquisitor hand didn’t know what the other was doing? How could they be this lax with security and yet work on a cell system for the dissemination of information? Hell, how could the Inquisitors pull off this kind of stunt without telling their own people to be prepared for some kind of reprisal? I mean, had there ever been reprisals before? Fuck! This was not going to plan!

“You,” I barked at the man in the tie, who everyone else seemed to be looking at for some sort of explanation. The point of my finger, after watching what that hand was capable of, made him, and every person in the crowd directly behind him, visibly flinch. “Sit!” It was all I could do to stop myself from smirking.

With the smallest gesture of my hand, a desk chair rolled up behind him and bumped into the back of his knees, seemingly entirely of its own accord. “You and I are going to have a chat,” I stared at the shrinking-looking Inquisitor and made sure to keep that dangerous edge in my voice. “What you say in that chat will determine how well the rest of your day, or life, turns out. For your friends here too. And trust me when I say that both could end at exactly the same time and with very little notice!”

“Don’t tell him anything, Miguel.” A man at the front of the crowd to my left shouted out. I spun around and bore my furious gaze down upon him. With a yelp, the man’s tie tightened to a noose around his throat before it dragged him to the center of the room.

“This little shit stain is going to get you killed... Miguel, “ I glared at the choking man between us. I glanced down at a nametag comically hanging from his shirt as my hand reached out toward the desk he had been standing at. A picture frame flew across the room and into my hand. I looked at it before turning my attention to the asshole on his knees. “Steffan, this is a nice-looking family you have,” I said menacingly. The man stopped struggling immediately, and his face paled. I didn’t feel great about threatening his family, and even in my anger, I had no intention of following through. I didn’t need him to know that, though. “Do they know what you do for a living? Do you think that, in a month or so, when they finished scraping your body parts off the walls, it will provide some comfort to them knowing that you deserved your death for working for an organization that murders innocent men and women?”

“But, we don’t...” Miguel said softly as the whimpering Steffan clawed at the constrictor around his neck. “We haven’t done that for generations...” His words fell away as my gaze lifted back toward him.

“Are you going to be quiet now, Steffan?” I asked, not taking my eyes off his boss. The man nodded vigorously before sucking in a deep, panting breath as his necktie was loosened. “Good. Now, off you fuck. Miguel ... continue.”

“It was ... It was after the Philadelphia accords. We haven’t been at war since then.” The thinning-haired man looked at me as if this answer should have been the most obvious thing in the world. I just arched an eyebrow at him. “I don’t understand. How can you not know this? You are a member of the Conclave. This should be common knowledge!” The man was getting frantic as if he could tell that these were not the answers that would see him and his colleagues make it out of there alive.

We stared at each other for a few tense moments before I took a deep breath. “Alright, calm the fuck down. Let’s just say I don’t have access to the Conclave’s archives, and I know almost nothing of their history. All I know is that I was at a party, and you fuckers attacked it! If you want me to believe that you didn’t know anything about it, you are going to have to convince me. Now, start at the beginning.”

The man took a deep trembling breath, but it had the desired result of seeming to calm him. “Okay ... Okay ... Do you know what The Schism is?”

“The breakaway of the Sect from the rest of the Conclave?”

Miguel breathed a sigh of relief, apparently knowing that much was a good start in his eyes. “Yes. Good, okay...”

For the sake of expediency, I am going to paraphrase the explanation that Miguel gave me. Not only was he giving me some information that I already knew, but to the man’s credit, he was rather nervous and had a tendency to waffle.

The Schism, as it turned out, was almost entirely confined to the American Colonies. Very few members who left the Conclave were in a different geographical location when it happened, and, in a roundabout way, this event was one of the things that turned an opposition movement into a full-scale armed conflict. At first, the Inquisition hadn’t realized that it was a separation within the conclave. They saw the war erupting and thought it was a play for power, the Conclave getting up to its old tricks. They were preparing to go to war to preserve human autonomy when they realized that The Conclave had almost no influence over the Continental Congress, meaning that this act was completely counterproductive from their point of view.

The sect though, far from being the innocent party that Charlotte had made them out to be, had just enough influence to start the revolution. They wanted to be rid of the conclave and this new nation was free from Conclave influence. The Conclave, of course, didn’t want that to happen and had just enough influence over the British Parliament to push them toward war. All the stories you hear, the Boston Tea Party, no taxation without representation, and so on, all grew out of legitimate grievances the colonials had. The Sect just gave them that little push to become militant.

As the war dragged on, the Conclave - or at least the old version of the Conclave that had existed before the “rule change” that Marco had told me about - basically collapsed. The number of Evos who left was just large enough to create an internal power vacuum, and their existing governing structure simply couldn’t cope with the loss. By the time the Battle of Valley Forge had ended, the internal political troubles within the Conclave had been resolved. The new archon had been elected, the rules had been changed and the new Conclave leadership just wanted peace. The Inquisitors, despite watching very carefully, recognized this as an internal Evo matter and basically left it alone. All they really did in the conflict was watch to make sure the Sect didn’t try to exert any undeserved influence over the newly forming country. And they didn’t. Most people think that the US won the revolutionary war, but that isn’t exactly true. Britain lost it in the same way that the US lost in Vietnam. They could have kept going forever, or they could have just overrun the country, but there was a lack of political will at home. Britain didn’t lose as much as they just walked away. That change in the desire for war in the British political system was, surprisingly, down to the Conclave. Once the old leaders had been removed and replaced, the will to fight just ... disappeared.

There would be millions of Muricans screaming heresy at this explanation. But this wasn’t exactly news to anyone else in the world.

Miguel went on, seeming to be satisfied that I was paying attention and not murdering anyone.

What very few people at the time seemed to appreciate was the depth of resentment felt by the old guard of the Conclave and the new policy of peace. Resentment aimed not just at the Sect but at the new Conclave leadership as well. As Marco had explained, they basically went rogue. Thirty or so years after the end of the American War of Independence, this rogue faction decided to attack the Sect, but more than that, they went to war with the Conclave as well. History remembers this as the War of 1812. This time the inquisition did get involved. The rogue faction had gained massive amounts of influence as politically connected military leaders, and, using the backdrop of the Napoleonic War, they argued that any nation helping France should be treated as an enemy of Britain. Parliament agreed and started attacking or confiscating American ships. At the same time, they manipulated the American President, James Madison, to declare war on Britain based on the economic impact this was having in the States. Then, using that war as a way to get their armies onto American - and Sect-controlled - soil, this rogue faction essentially went on a killing spree.

With most of their numbers now in the US and the majority of them at the heads of massive armies, they turned their wrath on anyone they could find, Conclave, Sect, or Inquisition. Anybody who was not with them was against them. None of the other sides were prepared for this, and the losses started to add up. The Sect - apparently to this day - believed they were being attacked by the Conclave. The Inquisitors understood that this was a rogue faction but assumed the Conclave was silently supporting them, and the Conclave was trying everything they could to end the conflict without drawing the wrath of the Inquisition while also trying to avoid another collapse of their internal political system. The Inquisition, in particular, was completely unprepared for this new form of war. What the Conclave and the rogue faction didn’t take into account was that even though most Evos couldn’t harm Inquisitors with their powers, the armies of loyal soldiers with muskets surrounding them sure as shit could. This was a realization that was only now starting to dawn on the Conclave after my experiences at the party. At the time, they just assumed, as they had explained in the Cathedral, that the Inquisitors that were killed couldn’t have really been inquisitors, simply by the virtue that they had been killed.

The Inquisition was at a bit of a loss. They had always hunted Evos the same way: they had sent a handful of their members against a single Evo, killed him, and then went after the next one. The problem was this wasn’t working when their targets were surrounded by literal armies of men. They were being killed faster than they could replenish their numbers. The end result, as far as the war was concerned, was that the Inquisition had to raise their own armies in opposition to the ones controlled by the rogues. This led to even higher casualties, not just in the Inquisition or the Rogues but in the human population as well.

This was where the first big surprise came up. In the early months of 1814, after almost 2 long years of bloodshed, the Inquisition received an envoy from the last people on earth they expected to hear from; The Conclave. The Napoleonic wars were over, Napoleon was in exile - at least until he escaped a year later - and there was a real possibility that the 150,000 men in the European armies would be transferred to the US theater. Once they were there and doing the bidding of the Rogue faction, that would be game over. The American conduct in the war to that point had been a shambles. They hadn’t won a single land engagement, and no less than eight invasions of Canada had been beaten back, sometimes by a force significantly smaller than the ones they were attacking with. There was even a case of an 8,000-man-strong force being turned around by a few hundred Canadian Militiamen. 150,000 Battle-hardened Redcoats, veterans of the fighting in France, the men who had liberated Portugal and kicked the shit out of Napoleon, would crush the US in a matter of months. Hell, they were even planning on sending over The Duke of Wellington himself. The Americans simply had nothing to match that. Not even close. Once the inevitable victory had been achieved, the Rogue faction would ruthlessly destroy the Sect and then would rebuild this new nation with themselves completely and firmly in control of it.

It turns out that this was as bad for the Conclave as it was for anyone else.

With a common enemy, the Conclave and the Inquisition formed something of an uneasy and untrusting alliance. There would be groups of Inquisitors and Evos in every American army, and between them, they would attack the members of the Rogue faction one by one. Sometimes the Evos would run interference for the Inquisitor strike. Sometimes the Inquisitor army would provide a distraction, and the Evos would take out the former member of their own organization. However, they chose to work in individual cases, the effect was undeniable. They started to win.

I had heard from Marco about the Conclave hunting down members of this faction before the party, but either he had skipped the part involving Inquisitor help, or, having happened decades before his birth, he simply hadn’t known about it.

In the year or so of these joint missions, something happened that neither side expected. They started to develop a mutual understanding, bordering on respect, for each other. The Inquisition started to understand that the Evos were not all power-hungry sociopaths willing to subjugate humanity for their own gains and were watching them risk, and often sacrifice, their lives in an attempt to stop the few that were.

The Evos started to understand the risks posed by the mentality that had governed their society for generations. This rogue faction was after nothing but power. They wanted absolute control over the young nation and were willing to kill to get it. What started as a justified attempt by the Conclave to stop them before their actions drew the attention of the Inquisition - and possibly being tarnished by the same brush - developed into an understanding that the Inquisitors had their reasons, possibly justifiable ones, for protecting humanity from Evo actions.

With all the rogue faction members finally killed or captured, the Inquisition and the Conclave agreed to pull out of the conflict completely and let it run its course naturally. The War was not a victory for either side. With the twenty-year war against France finally over and without the Rogue faction pushing for War with the US, the British appetite for it, once again, faded away. The Americans, knowing they couldn’t win a protracted conflict against Great Britain, were happy to accept any peace proposals that didn’t involve territorial losses. The Treaty of Ghent gave both parties what they needed to justify ending the killing to their own people and that, as they say, was that.

The war, which would quickly be almost forgotten by both nations, marked a turning point for the Conclave and the Inquisition. Having shown that they could work together, and with numerous relationships being forged in the crucible of battle between people who would have once been sworn enemies, neither side wanted to go back to the way things were before. Although Miguel had no idea how many Evos had been killed in the conflict, he did know that the number of lost Inquisitors numbered in the thousands. He also knew that the Conclave had not fared much better. So, in late 1815, only a few months after the Treaty of Ghent had been signed, the Conclave and the Inquisition sat down in Phildepelpia’s Independence Hall, in the very same room where the Declaration of Independence had been signed, and hashed out a treaty of their own. The document signed by both sides at the end of this summit came to be known as the Philadelphia accords.

“O ... kay...” I said after it became clear that Miguel had finished talking, apparently thinking that this somehow answered my question. “So what was in these accords?”

The thinning-haired man sighed heavily, still seeming to be amazed that I didn’t know this already. To be fair, I was starting to wonder the same thing. Parts of his story tied into what I had learned of the Sect and the Conclave from Charlotte and Marco, but the idea that the Conclave and the Inquisition had worked together, let alone had signed a formal peace agreement, was not only new information but seemed glaringly conspicuous in its absence for the parts of the story I had heard before today.