CHAPTER 52
A NEW ORDER
Selene delivered on her promise. That very day, she transmitted a holograph message to Forum. The process of negotiating, of renegotiating an alliance and unsteady peace between Latarra and the Imperium lasted many weeks.
It transpired that none of the security cameras installed in my apartments within the Arx Caelestis had been functioning the night of my demise. Aurelian’s men did not arrive on the scene until well after Selene and Cassandra—with Edouard and the Extrasolarians—had escaped the city via the Porta Prince Arthur, commandeered the Gadelica, and blasted their way out-system. They had found the place cleaned.
It was as if nothing had ever happened there. I knew Selene was right to fear for her life. She and Neema were the only witnesses to my death, the only people who might implicate the Chantry.
She was safer on Latarra.
I imagined a cadre of blindfolded cathars sweeping the apartments, scrubbing the bloody tile, scraping what remained of the flesh and dissolved bone from grout and molding. I heard the crinkle of plastic, the roar of cleaners.
Then they were gone, like the vultures they resembled.
Crows, Lord Black had called them.
The eaters of the dead. The pickers of bones.
All that Selene told her brother I cannot say, but I can guess. I know it was not the truth.
I suspect she told them a version of the story Lorian had told Harendotes, before the truth came out. That the Chantry had sent an assassin against me, against us. That I had urged Selene to flee, knowing that—alone of all the powers on Forum—I could trust my old friend, Lorian Aristedes. There had been no time to consult Aurelian, and no guarantee that he could have protected us in any event.
Rather than kidnapping the princess, Lorian Aristedes had saved her—had saved Hadrian Halfmortal and his little household from a conspiracy to shatter the nascent alliance between the Imperium and the Monarchy of Latarra.
That alliance was now secure.
The Emperor himself had written Latarra, following days of textual communication—the fastest means of communication via quantum telegraph—between Selene and Aurelian. An Imperial apostol—no less than Prince Matthias, one of Selene’s elder brothers—had been dispatched to Latarra to formally ratify the treaty. Those Imperial lords still clinging to their embattled worlds would retain Imperial protection, if they did not give up those worlds entire, but would salute Latarra as their suzerain.
At a stroke, Calen Harendotes had made himself almost as powerful as the High Prince of Jadd. He was now—by technicality of international law—the supreme sovereign of several thousand worlds.
And Kharn Sagara had bought that dominion with fool’s gold.
“I suppose I should thank you,” Lorian said, one leg thrown over the arm of his chair. “I heard how you and the princess worked to keep Jamina and the High Court off my back.”
“It was the least I could do,” I said, staring into the depths of the wine Lorian had unstoppered for the occasion.
We had not seen one another in months, and it would be months still before Prince Matthias reached the planet.
“Lady Ardahael doesn’t like you,” I observed.
The intus grinned. “She doesn’t like that I’m Imperial. Or was. There are twelve Commandant Generals in the Grand Army. One for each month. Three of us are former Empire. Myself, Gadkari, and Harred. Then there’s Jansen and Sen, both Norman. The rest are Extras. Jamina wishes we were all Extra.”
She doesn’t like that I’m Imperial. Or was.
Was.
“What do you mean, one for each month?” I asked.
“It’s just symbolic,” Lorian said. “The Monarch divided the navy into twelve fleets. Named one for each standard month.”
“Which are you?” I asked.
Lorian lifted his own glass in mock salute. “October,” he said, and drank.
I accepted this bit of trivia with a silent nod, resumed my study of the room. Lorian had invited me to his home, a grand but modestly sized building in the Printed City’s royal quarter—a district known to the locals as Façade. A high, turreted stone wall surrounded the Commandant General’s abode, complete with guns whose daimons kept unsleeping watch.
I turned from the window, cast my gaze about the room instead, at the deep shelves on the walls, shelves that held not books, but scale models of starships and artillery, each meticulously assembled. One in particular caught my eye, had caught it the moment I entered the Commandant General’s study. It was an Imperial battleship, black as night and gold accented. Her concave sides narrowed to a sharp prow, her body flat as a blade above, with the hanging towers and clustered halls of her lower decks descending from the ventral hull. She widened to aft, so that a convex arc of engines seemed a crossguard to the knife blade that was the vessel itself.
“You rebuilt the Tamerlane,” I said, nodding.
Once, I might have wept. I only smiled.
“I always liked models,” Lorian said. “I never could build them—you know—before. Didn’t have the dexterity. Used to slip with the knife and cut myself.” His voice had grown strangely far away as he twisted to observe the model Tamerlane in its glass case. “There’s a man in the city who designs them. He printed the parts for me. I painted them myself. I’ve got a small fleet of Imperial stuff here, but there are some weird ones. You ever seen a Tavrosi destroyer?”
“Once, I think,” I said, thinking back to my first voyage to Vorgossos. But I watched Lorian rise and followed him to the shelves, nodded with interest as he lifted the Tavrosi vessel—it was all of mirrored silver—for my inspection. I did not take it when he offered it to me, fearing that I might drop it. “I never took you for a craftsman.”
“Aren’t we all, in a sense?” he said.
I smiled at that, sampled the vintage the other man had poured out for me. “You know, the Jaddians say much the same. They say the ideal man is either warrior or poet.”
“It’s warrior and poet,” Lorian amended. “The Arthur Buddhists agree. Have you read Dinadan Vima?”
I could only shake my head.
“These are old ideas,” Lorian said. “Vima is in a sense just rearticulating them, but he was the greatest khandasattva—you would say knight-master or sword-saint, I guess—of the last five thousand years. Vima says that to be gurram, to be a knight, is to be fully present. It is the same in anything. Poetry, gardening, even building these models.” He gestured at the display with a curiously shy smile. “One must clear the mind—as the scholiasts do—not to achieve some impossible objectivity, but to allow the mind to engage fully. Not just the conscious, but the all of you.”
“I never took you for a philosopher, either,” I said, smiling gently.
The Commandant General shrugged. “I am more myself here than ever I was at home.”
I wondered then how long he had been a disciple of the Arthur-Buddha, and where he found their forbidden texts. I imagined him digging through old paperbacks in a shop no censor or inquisitor had visited.
“The Nipponese call this mushin no shin, the mind without mind,” Lorian said.
“The object is not to think, yes?” I asked.
“The object is not to need to think,” Lorian said, “but to act spontaneously, without obstruction. This is perhaps most important for the gurram, because war requires swift, decisive action. Strategy doubly so. I am often not accorded the time to agonize over my choices. Often, I cannot afford to think at all.”
“I think I know what you mean,” I said.
“I think you would have to,” Lorian said. “To do what it is you do. I find working with my hands keeps me sane. I figure if I keep working, one day I’ll find enlightenment. Maybe by accident. We can’t all be theodidacts.” Lorian replaced the Tavrosi model on its shelf. “Me? I never feel more real than when I’m fighting. In the thick of it, you know?”
I told him that I did, and asked, “Why are you telling me all this, Lorian?”
The little man looked up at me sidelong. “We’re going to attack Vorgossos,” he said, and when I made no move, he said, “Where do you think I’ve been? Up there.” He pointed through the ceiling. “The greatest part of war is won in the planning. I’ve been meeting with my people. With the other Commandant Generals, the free captains. With Jamina and His Majesty.” He leaned against an iron post between the banks of glass shelves. “Will the Empire bring their bombs, do you think?”
“They’ve already agreed to it,” I said.
“But will they do it?”
“They’ll do it,” I said more strongly. Seeing Lorian’s stony face, I asked. “What is it?”
“Atomics are proscribed under the charters.”
“Only for use against human targets. We’ve used them before ourselves, many times.”
The good commander—but no, he was the Commandant General then—said, “But so many . . . they’ll have emptied one of the Imperial stores. That means Chantry oversight.”
He was right. “It means a Sentinel fleet.” The Sentinels were the Chantry’s enforcers, the boots to the Inquisition’s gloves. One but rarely saw them. The bulk of their strength lay in Earth’s own system, protecting the homeworld. But when the Inquisition ruled that a planet should be burned out, a people destroyed, it was the Sentinels who performed that hateful task. They were the keepers of forbidden weapons, of the Emperor’s nuclear arsenals, of the planet-killers and of plagues to rival Lethe’s sickness.
Lorian’s face was grim. “The Extras and the Chantry together . . . ” he said at last. “Against Vorgossos.” He finished his glass, crossed the room to the narrow bar and poured another. “Never thought I’d live to see the day. The Mandari are right, we do live in interesting times.”
“Too interesting, I think.”
“I didn’t say that,” Lorian said. He grinned around his winecup. “Chaos is opportunity. You’ve seen with your own eyes what we’re building here, what the Monarch is building here.”
The Monarch . . . I did not say anything, but turned to regard the wall of model ships. There were lesser Imperial battle cruisers alongside the massive Tamerlane. I thought they were to scale. I read their plates. Caractacus, Dauntless, Skanderbeg . . . I recognized a pair of Jaddian warships, great gilt things more organically shaped. The largest model by far was an Extrasolarian spinship, precisely like the Mistwalker.
“It’s not like you to have nothing to say,” said he.
Not one word.
I longed to tell him the truth, that the man to whom he’d dedicated this second life of his was not the man he claimed to be. Calen Harendotes was a mask, a leaf of gold foil hammered over corruption. Kharn Sagara could not be trusted. I knew that much at least.
Yet how would he have responded if I had spoken? If I had offered him the truth?
Would he have taken it? Or simply spat in my face?
In the months since we had come to Latarra, I still had not found a way to tell my people the truth. Kept a prisoner in the palace, I had not dared communicate the truth to Cassandra, to Selene or one of the others. There might have been cameras hidden in walls, microphones floating on the air, no larger than a mote of dust.
I could never be certain I was alone.
Not without Valka.
Even the analog tricks that worked in the Imperium—Edouard’s note, or any of the various coded hand signs employed by Imperial Intelligence—could not be relied on. Much of the Monarch’s military staff was former Empire. Many of the signs—many of the tricks—would be known. Lorian himself must have instructed the Latarran forces on the Imperial playbook. I might have tried communicating in the Cielcin tongue, but Sagara spoke it. He had dealt with Otiolo in the prince’s own language, had dealt with others before.
Was even Lorian’s home safe? I doubted it, and did not dare.
“You’ve been to Vorgossos before,” Lorian said. “What are we up against?”
Your own master, I thought, turning but slowly to face the last of my Red Company. “Kharn Sagara . . . ” I said, “I don’t know what he may be like in battle. I did not fight him. But he has at his command a host of weapons designed and manufactured by the Mericanii themselves. How many there are or what their functions may be I cannot begin to guess. He has the one Sojourner I know of, a vessel so great as those of your free captains. And he has a host of SOM puppets at his disposal. I’d wager a hundred thousand at least—and perhaps more.”
Lorian sucked on his teeth before he spoke. “None of this is news to me. Zelaz and Eidhin have often visited, and the Monarch knows much of the strength of Vorgossos’s defenses. The planet itself is a warship, as I’m sure you know. There are tens of thousands of miles of tunnels, trenches. There are fuel reserves a dozen miles or more underground, and the engine emplacements at the south are more than a thousand miles across.”
“I never saw them,” I said. “We took the hightower from orbit down into the old city . . . ” Impulsively, I turned, traced the sloping dorsal hull of the ISV Skanderbeg with a finger, appreciating the gold leaf Lorian had applied to mimic the brassy accents that shone on the real thing. “It seems you know what we face far better than I . . . ”
The Commandant General—it was growing easier to think of him as such—shook his head. “I don’t know the man. This is not like fighting the Cielcin. They can be relied upon to behave in certain ways. Not so here.” His glass recharged, Lorian found his way to a low chair in the little sitting area about the holography well arranged in the center of the room, below and before the long desk against the windows at the room’s far end. Thus seated, he asked, “What’s he like? Kharn Sagara?”
That I could not answer him fully was a weight and sorrow I find now difficult to express. I, who had concealed much in my lifetime, and for less reason, was torn to pieces by the silence Kharn’s threat had imposed on me. Had that been the true intention behind his revealing himself to me?
But no. Cruel Kharn Sagara surely was, but cruel without reason?
No. In truth, he was not really hiding. Instead, he had signaled the reality to those who knew the signs. The Captains Zelaz and Eidhin, and Lord Black at least surely knew who he was. In establishing himself at Latarra, Calen Harendotes had declared war on his sister-self, had declared himself to those of his former allies who might support his claim over that of the woman.
Myself among them.
I was to be his hierophant, the greatest piece upon his board. With my powers, he hoped to outmaneuver his sister in the critical moment. I would have my part to play, and I would play it.
He meant to betray me, of that I had no doubt. To turn on me in the crucial moment. Calen Harendotes would use me until I was of no more use—and no more . . .
“She,” I said, deflecting. “Unless something’s changed. The Kharn Sagara who rules Vorgossos is female, at present. He changes bodies at a whim, each generation unlike the last. He’s lived for so long, he needs the novelty I think . . . but he is dangerous, Lorian. More dangerous than you know. He’s lived for more than fifteen thousand years, and I don’t think he’s truly human anymore.” I glared at Lorian as I spoke, willing him to understand that I was not only talking about the Lord of Vorgossos. “He has ruled that planet for eons. His palace is a fortress, one built by the Mericanii themselves. Even if we can land a force on the surface, it will not be easy to get at him. And then there is the daimon itself.”
“I know about it,” Lorian said. “You’ve met it?”
Too well could I remember the touch of those pale and bloated hands, those hands swollen, twisted by unconstrained growth—just as the bodies of the victims of the plague were twisted by its cancers. “Yes,” I said. “I have no way of knowing what role it might play in the fighting. Sagara has kept it in fetters, so to speak, but he may unleash it.”
That sobering thought silenced even Lorian, and he drained his drink. Presently, he laughed. “A daimon of the Golden Age,” he said, grinning in his wolfish way. “Now that’s an enemy worth fighting!”
His laughter was contagious.
We sat a while then in companionate quiet, neither one of us speaking. For the space of that silence, all was as if the previous two centuries had not elapsed at all.
“How long before the fleet gets here?” I asked.
Lorian shook his head. “The fleet isn’t coming. There’s no sense in it. We’ll rendezvous nearer Vorgossos.” He smiled. “Most Imperial ships can’t keep up anyway.”
“Why is that?” I asked, leaning forward. I had recharged my glass and seated myself in the long silence.
“Age, mostly. The Imperial fleet is massive, Hadrian. Some of the mainline battleships have been in operation for three or four thousand years. We can’t build them fast enough.” I noticed it was we for a moment. “It’s possible to do a refit, bring the engines up to spec—and there’s been some of that. Not nearly enough, and now . . . so many of the shipyards north of Orion are gone. Destroyed. It’s all we can do to maintain what we have.” He drank. “The Extras don’t build as much, but they build bigger, as a rule. Much bigger. That means greater fuel capacity. That means greater output, even if it means slower ramp.”
I nodded my understanding. Although a larger ship’s warp engine would warp space more efficiently once it fired, it was well known that the larger the vessel, the slower the jump to warp. The Cielcin worldships were notoriously slow to jump. It made catching them in a rout more possible. That was how Cassian Powers himself had caught the vessel-moon called Echidna at Second Cressgard, crippling her engines before she could jump to warp.
“So partly we’re faster because we’re newer, and partly because we’re bigger. The dreadnoughts, now? Ships such as the Tamerlane or the Huntsman? Those could keep pace . . . but the ships they’re like to send? Better to rendezvous near the target.”
“Where is the target?” I asked.
“That’s the other thing,” Lorian said. “If the fleet wanted to come here first, they’d be going almost exactly the wrong way.” He grinned. “Vorgossos is in Orion now. Sagara pitched his tent right under the Empire’s nose.”
I let that revelation sink in, admiring the genius of it. Alone in the dark, far from any star, Vorgossos would be almost undetectable, but near enough to his customers to make the trip worthwhile.
“Prince Matthias will be here in about two years,” Lorian said. “Apparently, they packed him on an interceptor, fastest ship they had.”
I had expected an even longer interval, but still the magnitude of the answer rocked me.
“Two years . . . ” I said. “So we have time.”
“Who’s we?” Lorian asked, smiling once more. “You and the princess?”
I froze. “What?”
The little man cackled, face transfigured with suddenly impish glee. “Anyone can see it, man. The way she looks at you . . . ” He seemed to sense my discomfort, said, “You haven’t, then?”
“Haven’t what?”
The intus made an obscene gesture.
“Valka is dead, Lorian,” I said, and drank.
“And she wouldn’t want you to be so damned miserable,” he said.
“Did Cassandra put you up to this?” I asked.
“I haven’t seen the girl,” Lorian said. “You’d better decide soon.”
“Why is that?” I snapped.
The little man blinked at me. “She’ll be heading back with Matthias, surely. Didn’t you know?”
I opened my mouth to speak. I hadn’t known. I hadn’t been a part of the formal process then for many days. But I should have known.
“They’d never let her go into a warzone, not if it could be helped. She slipped their net once already. They’ll want to pack the princess back into her tower as swift as may be.” His mocking edge returned. “You had best get while you can.”
I sat there, unmoving, astonished to find myself feeling bereft. In the years since our flight from Forum—mere months of which I’d been conscious—I had grown fond of the girl, of the woman she’d become. Had grown to find comfort in her presence, to admire her heart. Her resolve.
“You can’t tell me you’ve had no one these long centuries,” Lorian said. “And you on Jadd? In the prince’s pleasure gardens? You can’t lie, Hadrian. Not to me.”
I sensed a curious tension in the question, in the way the man looked at me. I studied him a long time. The little man was inscrutable as ever, his humor and mocking edge a mask pulled over . . . what?
Recalling Demetra, I hung my head. She had not been the first.
Yet that had not seemed a betrayal. Valka was gone, I knew as much, and the years were long, and lonely. I had not loved Demetra, nor the other women who had come before her to comfort me in my exile.
Nor had any of them sat at my feet below the Solar Throne.
Still, I had not expected the threat of her parting to fall on me so hard.
Did I love Selene? Could I love her? Or anyone again?
Handling the thought was like trying to handle a glead. It burned me, until I knew I must let it drop.
“I loved her, you know,” Lorian said. “Your Valka. She was always . . . good to me. You know, I think she was the first woman who was?”
“She was good to everyone,” I said. “Everyone who deserved goodness.”
“Then how do you explain either of us?” said he, and smiled. “You know, there was a time I hated you for sending me to that place.”
“I didn’t send you—”
“I know,” Lorian said. “But it was easy to lose sight of that there. Belusha was . . . ” He broke off. “Bad. The thought of you on Jadd . . . ” Lorian had returned to his desk by then, to his abandoned cup of wine. He lifted it, stared out the tall windows at guns that guarded his manse from the wild city beyond. “Time stops when you’re in prison, you know? It’s easy to forget it doesn’t stop anywhere else. It’s like sailing.”
How somber he seemed to me then, framed against the pale light of day, a little man in military blacks, his lank hair bound at his shoulder by a ring of dull Latarran gold.
“Lorian, I . . . ” I longed to tell him the truth. To tell him everything. But the Monarch’s threat was clear, and the full scope of his powers of observation were a mystery to me.
The smaller man looked round at me. “What?” he asked.
My caution returned, my courage left me. “It’s nothing,” I said at last.
Not one word.
A quizzical expression flickered across the misborn’s leucistic face, but he shook his head, knocked back his dregs.
“I miss her, too,” I said at last.