The Dedication

The image looked worse completed.

Hanan had hoped, absurdly, that closeness might make it less offensive. Distance had allowed scale to perform half the argument. Perhaps, he had thought on the road out, proximity would reveal the thing as plated craft and scaffolding cleverness and kingly insecurity hammered into manageable form.

It did not.

Up close the figure was more obscene for being technically beautiful. The gold caught morning light and threw it hard across the plain, turning men into silhouettes against its shine. It was too tall for proportion and too smooth for anything except intimidation. The face had been rendered generically regal, which in Babylon meant that every ambitious man could imagine the features belonging to power itself rather than to one king with a frightened dream.

The furnace stood thirty paces to the right of the image.

That detail, more than the gold, clarified the theology.

It was not hidden behind service tents. It was not housed discreetly near the workers' quarter as a merely practical instrument for metalwork. It had been built within sight of the gathered officials, its mouth banded in iron, heat already breathing through it in visible waves.

The threat was part of the liturgy.

Mishael followed Hanan's gaze and said, very softly, "There goes the last honest argument."

Azaryah snorted.

"You were still entertaining one?"

Hanan ignored him because Azaryah's contempt had become less irritating than his agreement.

They stood in the provincial line assigned to governors, counselors, and secondary authorities of Babylon proper. The plain was filling quickly now: satraps in layered formal dress, judges with seal cases tied at the hip, prefects, magistrates, treasurers, military officers, temple functionaries, herald teams, musicians, royal guards. Rank arranged itself in arcs around the image with the same instinctive precision Babylon brought to every act of collective intimidation.

Above and ahead, the king's dais had been raised on timber and stone. Arioch stood to one side with the security captains. Ashpenaz farther back among the high administrative staff, his face arranged into that particular stillness he wore when privately offended by everything available. Nathrek stood near the king's right hand. Bel-iddin was a pace behind him.

Hanan wished, suddenly and with great force, that Danel were beside him.

Not because Danel could make the choice for him. That had become impossible the moment the king's order sent him west. Because Danel had the unsettling habit of making the moral geometry of a room visible before the room itself finished assembling.

Here the geometry was arriving too quickly.

Mishael unfolded the proclamation tablet once more, though all three of them already knew it by heart.

"The sequence will matter," he said.

"The sequence is bow or burn," Azaryah replied.

"Yes," Mishael said, "but the exact route by which they make men do it will matter."

Hanan let out a breath.

"You are both impossible in different directions."

Azaryah looked out across the plain at the furnace.

"And you are still looking for a seam."

That, irritatingly, was true.

Hanan had spent half the night trying to find one. Perhaps the language of reverence might be broad enough to survive. Perhaps attendance and worship could yet be separated by some procedural intelligence. Perhaps the king's ego wanted visibility more than kneeling.

Then he had seen the furnace.

No one built fire that near the ceremony unless the point of the ceremony was to train obedience through immediate demonstration.

A herald staff struck the wooden platform three times.

The plain quieted by degrees.

Nebukhadran stepped forward in full ceremonial array, gold and blue and warlike authority fitted over the more private instability Hanan had seen in him at closer range. He looked magnificent, which was one of the empire's chief practical problems.

"Peoples, nations, and languages," cried the lead herald. "To you it is commanded."

The words spread through the open ground by trained repetition, tier after tier of heralds relaying the decree outward until the edges of the crowd received it in the same tone as the center.

Hanan felt his mouth go dry.

"At the time you hear the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, drum, and every kind of music, you are to fall down and render reverence before the image that Nebukhadran the king has set up."

No ambiguity. No procedural shelter.

"And whoever does not fall down and render reverence shall immediately be cast into the burning fiery furnace."

There, Hanan thought, was the true sentence. Not only punishment. Immediacy. The room between command and consequence removed on purpose.

To his left Azaryah rolled his shoulders once, like a fighter loosening before impact. To his right Mishael folded the proclamation closed and tucked it into his sleeve with meticulous finality.

Hanan said, without looking at either of them, "If I start talking too much, stop me."

"You always talk too much," Azaryah said.

"Today I may do it in the service of cowardice."

That made both of them turn.

Mishael answered first.

"Fear is not the same thing."

"No," Hanan said. "But fear is excellent at subcontracting."

The first musicians were taking position now below the dais. Bronze flashed. Strings were tightened. The long curved horns were lifted and angled toward the sky.

All around them men adjusted robes, checked seals, and glanced once more at the furnace with the shallow distaste of people who had already decided that obedience counted as realism when enough witnesses were present.

Hanan looked again at the image.

Gold entire. No fracture. No silver chest. No clay feet. No memory of the stone.

Babylon had answered the dream exactly as Danel said it would: not by contradiction alone, but by building a lie large enough that lesser men could call it reassurance.

The chief herald raised his staff.

Around the plain, bodies stilled in practiced anticipation.

The first horn-bearer drew breath.