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CHAPTER 2

THE PRINCE OF THE HOUSE OF THE MOON


The prince had made a fatal error.

I surveyed him over the petrified wood table between us, waiting to see if he had seen it. I searched Aldia’s wrinkled visage, as if expecting to find the answer inscribed in the creases on his forehead. He looked like some fabulous sorcerer, his thick, white hair nearly so long as his snowy beard. He leaned upon one fist, studying the board, apparently heedless of his mistake.

Was that a smile on the papery lips? A sparkle in the deep black of his eyes?

“Are you going to make your move, mi sadji?” he asked, not lifting his eyes from the game.

“In a moment, Your Grace,” I said, studying the labyrinth myself.

Druaja was an ancient game, and one I’d come to truly appreciate only late in life. I had learned it on Vorgossos, when I tarried in the halls of the Undying, waiting for an audience. But I had come to enjoy it only in my Jaddian captivity. When Prince Aldia came to visit the Fire School—and on the rarer occasions when I attended the Alcaz du Badr, as on that day—he and I would play and pass a watch in conversation.

He was better than this.

I had moved the walls three turns previous, lowering the white. By so doing I had cleared a path for my third centurion to make his circuit of the board. Aldia had advanced his king such that by simply moving the piece a quarter turn around the hexagonal board, I might place my centurion behind him, leaving him with nowhere to go. It was an elementary mistake—if perhaps not one obvious at a casual glance.

Lifting the sardonyx figure, I traced the quarter turn, placed the centurion on the appropriate onyx hexagon. “Shahmat, Your Grace.”

“Is it?” The old man leaned back, chuckling. “Is it, indeed? Well played, my friend! Do you know, I’d forgotten you dropped the walls on me!” He collected his cobalt teacup with knobby fingers and drained it. “So simple a move! So direct! There is something sublime in such simplicity, do you not think?”

“Indeed, Your Grace,” I said.

Prince Aldia’s eyes narrowed over the rim of his teacup. “You are more somber even than your usual self, my funereal friend,” he said. “Am I to assume your meeting with the Emperor’s emissary left much to be desired?”

“You don’t know?” I asked, looking up from the finished game board.

“My Yahmazi have ears to hear, but whatever their reputation, I am not in the habit of prying into the private matters of my friends.”

The Yahmazi were the Jaddian secret police, and enjoyed a reputation as fearsome as that of Imperial Special Security. More fearsome perhaps, because they were even less talked about.

“My father is dead,” I said flatly.

“Ah,” Prince Aldia grew silent for a moment. “Mis dolorossos, mi sadji.”

I opened my hand in a reflexive gesture of acceptance.

“Your father was an archon, yes?”

“He ruled a continent.”

“Your brother is succeeding him?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I had not opened the lieutenant’s packet. Some tired voice deep in my soul had whispered. Let it lie. Let it lie until the lieutenant and his ship depart.

I had heeded that voice, and so ignored Crispin’s holograph along with the Emperor’s pardon and whatever else lay inside. “I have a sister, as well—one I never met. Possibly she inherited the prefecture. I really don’t know.”

“We tried to keep him from getting in at you,” Aldia said after a long silence. “The consulate applied every legal pressure. We threw everything we had at them: quarantine regulations, religious excuses, outright denials that you were even here.”

“They’ve known I’m here for decades,” I said.

“Since that business with the Oannosene, yes.”

Oannos was one of the Small Kingdoms, a dominion of little more than a dozen suns on the fringes of Jaddian space, along the border they shared with the Lothrian Commonwealth. They had sent a delegation to Jadd to treat with the prince. They had tried to assassinate him instead, and might have succeeded were it not for Hadrian Marlowe, who had been masked and was quietly in attendance.

“They knew you were here well before the Oannos affair,” Aldia said. “So it was for your father this messenger came?”

“You know it was not,” I said.

Aldia studied me with his dimming eyes a moment before reaching out to pluck my winning centurion from the board. “You haven’t read the letter.”

“So you do know what it says?”

“I told you I do not,” he said. “But I do know that your lieutenant has fought long and hard to get at you. They’ve been at dock more than three years.”

“You didn’t tell me sooner?”

“We had hoped the problem would resolve itself without the need to trouble your rest.”

“What changed?”

A pained looked flickered across the old man’s wizened face. “The Empire subsidizes our naval construction. In return we police the border with the Commonwealth. The consul threatened to . . . renegotiate our arrangement.” He closed his fist about the chessman. “The Lothrians have attacked our border worlds many times in the last half century. My admirals believe they will launch a full-scale invasion soon. We require Imperial funding to secure our border. I couldn’t jeopardize our security for your peace of mind.”

I told him I understood.

“It’s getting bad out there, isn’t it?”

Aldia weighed the chessman in his glittering hand as though it were his words. “Yes.” He restored the piece to its hex, and reached for his articulated lapis mask. “You know our fleets prevented a number of foreign objects from striking the planet over the last several years.”

“Foreign objects?” I looked sharply up at him. “Plague cannisters?”

“One assumes,” the prince said, fitting his mask in place. “There’s no way to be certain. They were vaporized.” The azure plates of his fersunan, his mask, fitted smoothly over his face. The mask left his mouth and chin uncovered, so that his beard thrust out unencumbered. “Shall we go? You must be returning to the island, soon.”

I nodded, and stood.

I’d heard reports of such attacks across the galaxy. Of small probes traveling at near light speed. Of how they would strike the upper airs of a world and fall to pieces, spreading their vile poison on the wind. The virus showed itself only slowly, incubated over the course of many days. The sorcerers of MINOS had done their black work well. Men and women might live apparently normal lives for weeks before the first growths showed.

Plagues were always falling out of heaven, carried by some poor unfortunate from some far-off world. They ravaged the plebeians mostly, for they had weaker immune systems than those of more exalted blood, and at any rate had no exposure to the animalcules of other worlds.

Such a monster had claimed poor Cat when I was just a boy.

This was something far worse, a demon hatched in glass cradles by arts black as hell.

LTH-81. Lymphotropic T-cell Human Retrovirus Mark-81.

I’ve heard it called many names. The Red Sleep. The Gasping Death. The Fleshing Plague. To many of the poorest beneath our stars it is simply the Rot. To the nobiles, it is Lethe’s Sickness. To the scholiasts, the lethovirus.

I will call it what it is, what I called it when I discovered it in the Ganelon fortress.

Cancer as plague.

The bodies of the afflicted quickly developed tumorous growths. New organs formed, or half formed, beside the old. New bone—brittle and spongey—sprouted from joints until the human form was twisted half beyond recognition.

In the end, the afflicted was reduced to a mass of indolent flesh, unable even to move. Unable to do anything but shed the virus into the unwitting air. They had designed it to instill terror. And they had designed it perfectly.

It is out there, even now, though it has mutated into lesser form. There were beggars on Sun Street at Summerfair with misshapen faces and eyes swollen shut. There are lazarets in every city of the Empire now, built to house the sick and dying.

Even now, there is no cure. LTH-81 was a retrovirus, and as with all retroviruses, infection remains for life.

“Jadd is safe for now,” Aldia continued. “By Atash, may it remain so.”

His chair floated off the ground and moved toward the wooden lattice screen between the pillars beyond which stood the water garden. Twin servants—mamluks in chrome masks with silver armor flashing beneath their blue and white cloaks—moved like clockwork to roll back the sliding screen.

The prince floated through the arch and out into warm sunlight. Passing out after him, I felt the static cling of an energy field that separated the cool air of the chess room from the garden proper. I walked beside him, bootheels ringing on the mosaic tiled path. A pair of black swans waded in the nearest pool.

“They always remind me of young Olorin, those birds,” the prince said, pointing. Peering up at me sidelong from his chair, he said, “All that black. Of course, you’d know a thing or two about that, would you not?” He flashed white teeth. I returned the smile more thinly. He must have marked the shallowness of my expression, for his own face fell, the plates of his fersunan clicking almost below hearing. “Why have you not read the Emperor’s letter, Dom Hadrian?”

“I don’t need his pardon,” I said.

The Prince of Jadd looked up at me, lips compressed to a thin, white line in his whiter beard. Presently he spoke, “They came all this way . . . and waited so long . . . only to issue you a pardon?”

I in turn studied the elderly prince. Clad as he was in cerulean and masked, he looked like some spirit of the clouds. Though I owed him much—and had given more—I had never told him of the Watchers, not in all our years of friendship. It was possible he knew of them already, just as the Emperor had known, and yet I could not bring myself to speak, sensing that to do so was to betray some secret covenant—not between the Emperor and myself, he was no friend of mine, not any longer—but between myself and the man I once had been.

The same embarrassment I had felt when I had struck the young lieutenant across his face returned that moment. Being old then and wise to the workings of my heart, I understood the feeling almost at once. I was not guarding any secret from the old prince. I was simply ashamed. Ashamed because to admit the lieutenant had come to me upon so dire an errand, and that I had sent him away, was to admit that I was faithless.

The call had come at last, and I’d refused it, was hiding from it even then, as Mashya hid in paradise from the eyes of God, who saw all things.

Had I become a coward in old age? Hiding behind my pride and pain?

“They came to ask me to sail with them,” I said, and turned my face to the great red sun, feeling the warmth and the gentle breeze on my face.

“Will you go?” Aldia had not moved.

I looked down at him, unable to hide my shock. “You would let me?”

“You are not a prisoner,” he said.

“I . . . ” My eyes narrowed. I was not sure his words were precisely truth. Not for the first time since Edouard’s visit, I thought of the blood they had taken when I first arrived, of the months I spent in a Jaddian military clinic, allowing them to test me and scan my brain. “I am an old man, Aldia.”

The prince laughed once more, a sound bright and sunny as the day whence had come his name. “Old! Dolá Deu di Foti, Dom Hadrian! Old indeed! There is yet more black in your hair than white.”

Recalling something I had said to Corvo long ago—or was it Varro?—I answered him. “It’s not the years,” I said. “It’s the light-years.”

Aldia du Otranto dismissed this with a gesture. “My cells have counted nine hundred ninety-one standard years,” he said. “You can still fight, so Master Hydarnes tells me. Al Brutan is the equal of any of us, he says.”

“He exaggerates,” I said. “Master Hydarnes bests me six times in ten.”

“Only six?” Aldia began floating along toward the colonnade. “That is being nearly equal, no?” A short stair of rose marble ascended to the colonnade ahead, flanked by ironwork trellises thick with flowers. As we reached the foot of the stair, the blossoms all opened their faces to us—as if in greeting—and a twittering as of birdsong filled the air about us both. I did my best to hide my discomfort. The flowers were unnatural, and though they were beautiful, they disquieted me.

Flora should not sing as fauna might.

The pleasure gardens of the High Prince of Jadd were everything they say. Twelve thousand acres of land—black-soiled and verdurous—extended in a great fan from the ringed palace of the Alcaz. There were hedge mazes vast as villages and filled with the sculptures of gods and monsters, swards where topiary armies—men and horses and war elephants—were locked in green and endless battles. There were waterfalls and pools and little rivers brimming with bright fish, and hothouses where jeweled snakes and scarabs crawled in glass enclosures. And the birds! Hummingbirds and nightingales, thrushes and herons and peacocks with their bright tails. Parrots and parakeets and the long-billed toucans that were the prince’s favorite.

And every one of them a work of art, wrought not by nature, but by the magi and the natalists of Jadd. The Jaddians—it is said—have never met an organism they could not improve. The singing flowers were only one example. Aldia himself was another. No lord of the Imperium—not even Caesar—would see so many springs.

For all his talk of my relative youth, I was already ancient. When it came, my dotage would come on fast. The genetic artistry of our own High College had stretched my vital years almost to breaking, and the signs of decline were already there. Still, I could expect health and strength at least a while longer, but Time—Ever-Fleeting—which had always seemed remote to me and open as the sea . . . oppressed me each day like a soaking blanket.

“Admiral Serpico telegraphed three months back,” Prince Aldia said as I mounted the top stair. Velkan Serpico was admiral of the fleet that had sailed with Prince Kaim to the succor of the Imperium. “The Cielcin attacked Nessus. They burned the planet.”

I stopped.

“You didn’t know?”

Nessus was lost? I thought of the great city of Sananne, of the Magnarch’s golden palace, and of the Magnarch himself. Miserable old Karol Venantian must surely have died in the intervening centuries, but I saw him clearly for a moment, in his official toga, standing upon a balcony in the vast shipyards as the horizon turned to flame. Most of all, I thought of Maddalo House. Of the English Garden and the fencing hall; of Valka’s study and the old library; of round windows and round doors.

Burned.

“It is getting bad out there, Dom Hadrian.” Aldia’s float-chair processed along the colonnade beneath the tiled canopy. “Serpico tells me we lost nine hundred ships in the defense. The Cielcin brought thirty-two of their worldships to bear upon the planet. I am told the world was nearly torn apart.”

“Thirty-two?” I shut my eyes, recalling then the tremors as the encircling Cielcin moons shook the planet Perfugium. The Cielcin had used the titanic mass of their vessels as weapons in themselves, tearing at the planet they besieged until the seas surged and the mountains cracked and fell.

At Perfugium, there had been only seven worldships.

“With Nessus gone, much of the telegraph network in your outer provinces is lost,” Aldia said. “The fleets cannot coordinate across the Centaurine volume. Doubtless there have been other attacks—ones we won’t hear of for many years yet.”

I imagined desperate starships fleeing lost and burning systems, each carrying messages of doom. Syriani Dorayaica would have coordinated a number of strategic strikes with the primary assault on Nessus. The Eikana Fuelworks. The Legion troop stores on Verthandi. Food production on Innis, on Gododdin, and Nohr. As Aldia said, the news would come only slowly, trickling in as the stragglers from lost battles got word to the surviving Imperial fleet.

“What of the Emperor?” I asked.

“Perhaps you should read the letter,” the prince said.

I flashed a look down at him, and bit back a retort. Though we were friends, I reminded myself that here was the Prince of Jadd.

Aldia smiled, and after a moment said, “Serpico tells me your Emperor is in hiding, directing the war effort from the provinces. They met . . . some years ago now . . . on Minnagara after the battle there. That was where our Olorin met and wed his princess.”

“The wedding happened?” I blinked at him, astonished. Surely such a thing would have been news on Jadd? I ought to have seen the broadcasts, even in exile at the Fire School.

“Only contractually,” Aldia said, acknowledging the salutes of his guards as he floated past. “The girl is en route to our holdings on Otranto. We’ve secured her bloodline, and she will be safe there, but the official announcement and the proper ceremony will wait until after the victory.”

“The victory?” I halted. For a moment, the only sound was the distant laughter of the children at their play.

Aldia looked round at me, “Our Olorin will not return from the fighting until the fighting is done.”

“But you talk of victory?”

“Is not victory our aim?” the prince inquired.

I had no answer for that. Peace had been my aim, once, a very long time ago. I had peace . . . on Jadd, and desired to keep it until Death and Time came—hand-in-hand—to carry me away. I turned to the rail, looked down into the tiled pool where the children of the Jaddian nobiles swam and splashed and fought with one another. Cassandra had been one of them, not so long before.

Peace.

As I watched, two boys leaped from the water to drag a third down with them, laughing. An older girl hurried to chastise them. At once I found myself remembering my own childhood, swimming in the pools of the Summer Palace at Haspida with Crispin while Mother’s girls sunned themselves. The son of some lesser archon had been there with us. What had his name been?

“Do you wish you could go back?” I asked. I nodded at the children glad at their sport.

“And be a child again?” Aldia shook his head, ordered his float-chair to come to rest beside me. “No, mi sadji. Far better what I am: an old man, and High Prince of Jadd besides. A Prince of Jadd may stem the tide, if only a little . . . and for a little while. But what could a child do?” He looked up at me, eyes sparkling. “Do not mistake me! I wish I were young and strong, and wish my legs could still carry me . . . but a child? No.”

“I only envy them.” I crossed my arms, tucked my chin against my breast. “They know nothing of what’s out there.”

“And that’s better, is it?” the prince inquired.

A laugh escaped me in the form of a single, solitary puff of air.

“Better that we be old men, Hadrian,” said Prince Aldia, “so that they might remain children awhile longer.” Almost I fancied that he was Tor Gibson, and that the pool we stood above was the ocean beneath the castle of my home. “Better that you be what you are.”

“And what am I, Aldia?” I asked, dropping all titles, all formality.

“I would not presume to tell you,” the great prince said, and gestured at the children in the water with one ringed and withered hand. “But ask any of them, and I do not think they’d hesitate.”

Al Neroblis, they would say. The Black Devil. Or Al Brutan, the brute.

And one, perhaps, might look on me with wide eyes and whisper Meta­mortali.

Halfmortal.

I could sense Aldia knew the shape of the thoughts flickering behind my eyes, for he smiled and said, “Shahmat, Dom Hadrian.” He adjusted the drape of his azure robes, and keyed an order into the arm of his silvered float-chair. It began to drift along the arcing colonnade, and I made to follow. But the prince was not quite finished with me, and aimed a question over his shoulder like one of the Parthian archers who were his remotest ancestors, and said, “What does your daughter think of all this?”

I drew up, letting him float away.

“Checkmate, indeed,” I muttered.


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