I lose Sevro in the fray.
The enemy presses in, firing at us from the air above, chewing into our ranks. I’m slammed sideways by a concussion munition. As I try to gain my balance, an Obsidian a head taller than me hits me in the chest with a pulseHammer. My pulseShield shorts out. My armor caves inward. I feel several ribs crack and I tumble back. He knocks me to the ground before I can lift my head. Stomps on my hand as I try to stab him with my razor. His axe lifts high into the air, the moment slowing. Thraxa lies pinned to the ground, a razor in her thigh. Alexandar tries desperately to reach me. I roar in fear as the pulseAxe comes down. It smashes through my helmet. The energy blade glows with a pale fire, its edge centimeters from my face, held back by squealing metal. The heat radiates into my eyeballs, filling them with aching pressure. The Obsidian wrenches the axe sideways. My helmet rips from its sockets. He cries his war chant and kneels on my chest, a crooked knife in his hand. He grabs my hair with an armored hand and saws on the front of my forehead to claim my scalp.
Bazzoooohhh. Bazzoooohhh.
A trumpet’s clarion call rides in with the wind. The Obsidian looks up to see a flight of armored knights falling from the sky, a violent figure in purple Minotaur armor at their head. The Minotaur lands before the Obsidian and hacks him in half with a running two-handed upward blow.
Apollonius has come.
His knights fall upon the Ash Guard, carving them with razors and smashing them off the face of the landing pad till not one is left alive. Apollonius sings as he kills the Golds and lurchers who try to make a last stand at the doorway down into the fortress.
“I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night
Taught by the heav’nly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to reascend!”
He picks up a Gray with one hand and smashes the man’s skull into the hull of the Ash Lord’s ship until there’s nothing to hold on to. Fresh from the kill, he wheels on me, his Minotaur helm blood-soaked and battered, and for a moment I think he will strike me down. But his helm retracts, and from his sweaty face and tangled hair, he stares at me with wild, loving eyes. He helps me to my feet.
“What wrath we summon together!” he roars. “Reaper and Minotaur, legends unholy. We broke them on the beach!”
How in the hell did he do that?
He was outnumbered four to one.
One of his men helps me to my feet. I’ve lost my helmet, but my face is so covered in blood from the attempted scalping that even my own mother wouldn’t recognize me. Apollonius skewers the heart of a wounded Gold and turns to his bodyguards. “Vorkian, Gaul, rejoin the hunt. Slaughter them to the last man.”
His men jump from the tower back toward the battle, which rages inland of their beachhead below. Apollonius comes toward me and extends his arms, taking me into a hug. Bewildered, I stand there as he pulls back. “A divine spectacle, Darrow.” He looks at my men with a smile. “A more glorious band of devils there is none. What a path you cut, like fallen seraphs amongst mortal men.”
Sevro limps toward me. His left arm bends the wrong way at the elbow and I can see charred flesh through fissures in his armor. I scan the remains of my Howlers and realize with a sinking feeling that Pebble and Clown are nowhere in sight. Thraxa sits propped against a retaining wall as Tongueless administers first aid. Alexandar alone is uninjured. His shell is a smoking wreck, but he stands free of it, almost elegant amidst the carnage despite the shell-shock in his eyes. “Alexandar.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Call the Nessus and hold the roof.” I turn to limp toward the security door leading down from the landing pad into the tower. “Sevro, Apollonius, with me.”
I WAKE FROM A FITFUL SLEEP and expect to see Cassius standing there, filling the door, asking me if it’s the night terrors again. But he is gone. I remember slowly, then all at once. There’s a presence in the room. By the window an old Brown watches me. I’m too tired to be startled. His bark-colored eyes smile with deep respect from underneath cirrus-cloud eyebrows.
“Dominus Lune, I beg pardon for interrupting your sleep. But your presence is requested.”
“By whom?”
“A friend.”
Seraphina? He walks past my pallet, careful not to trod on the fabric, and sketches a strange symbol onto the stone wall. It rumbles very softly, dilating inward to reveal a hidden passage through which he seems to have entered. I hesitate, wondering if it could be some sort of trap. He wags his hand impatiently. “Come, come, dominus. She awaits.”
I follow the Brown in silence through the tunnels. He leads on through the darkness till we reach another wall where he sketches another symbol and the wall retracts. The Brown leads me into a sitting room and closes the new aperture behind us. He gestures to several silk cushions on the floor by the hearth.
“Wait here, dominus. May I prepare refreshment?”
“Tea, if you have it,” I say instinctively. Then I feel my hunger. “And food. Anything will do.” He bows and limps away. “Excuse me, steward. What is your name?”
“Aruka,” he says softly.
“Thank you, Aruka.” I dip my head in Rim fashion.
He bows again and leaves me there.
This room reflects the pre-Color heritage of the Raa more than any other. It is traditional and austere but for the use of wood. Tatami flooring, woven from pale igusa grass, stretches to a bank of windows overlooking the frozen waste. Entire tree trunks, stained a warm honey color, support the stone ceiling. A length of cypress forms the tokonoma, a raised alcove where a small tree grows and a razor hangs in midair above a gravWell. I’m drawn to the room’s lone eccentricity: a grand old piano made out of heartwood. It is a marvel. Of course, Ceres and some of the larger asteroid depots have pianos, but those are cheap plastic synth jobs. The wood to make this must have come from Ganymede or Callisto.
I run my hands over the piano’s keys. I was wrong. The piano is old. Perhaps older than the Society. Two golden S-shaped markings are imprinted on the fallboard above the keys. My hands run over the polished fiddleback grain. I close my eyes and imagine I can feel the energy that grew this tree on my face, that I can hear birds in the sky again. After ten years, they sing like I heard them yesterday. A flicker of a memory, no longer than the flash of a lighting match, burgeons in the recesses of my mind. A feeling, a scent of something lost.
Am I just homesick? Or is it something more?
“Do you know how to play?” a woman asks.
I turn to see Romulus’s mother, Gaia, shuffling into the room. Her back is crooked, shoulders slumped. In her youth, she would have been a slight thing. Her wrists are fragile as the stems of wineglasses, and her skin paper-pale and veined like bleu cheese. In fact, it seems all that keeps her from tipping forward and shattering on the floor is a thin wooden cane and the enormous arm of the grand Obsidian who escorts her. She clutches to him as if he were an old friend. He is aged, like her. A hunched gray golem with intense beetle-black eyes buried deep in the folds of an ancient face. His head is a boulder. His ears chipped and pointed at the tips. The lobes filled with gold disks the size of chicken eggs imprinted with the lightning dragon. A long uncut white beard hangs down the front of his gray scorosuit and is tucked into his belt.
“No,” I answer. “I never learned.”
“A child of Hyperion alien to music? What a crime. But you must have been a busy little thing. Your grandmother no doubt teaching you the alchemy of turning moons to glass instead. Or were those lessons the province of your godfather?”
The senile mask she wore before her family is gone. Curious.
“My godfather taught me to finish a fight,” I say. “Two hours of strategic instruction every day.”
“If only he had taken his own lessons. Then Darrow would be a memory instead of a ten-year plague.”
“My godfather is still the only man to ever best the Reaper in battle,” I say. “And I rather think it the habit of an indolent mind to indict a single man for a civiliz
ation’s failure.”
“True. Back and forth they go. But now a peace.”
“So they say.”
“What a thing it must be for you. Lorn for a grandfather. Octavia for a grandmother. Magnus, Aja, Moira, Atalantia…trapped between so many giants and having to watch the birth of two more.”
“Two?”
“Darrow and Virginia. I rather think it the habit of a boy’s mind to believe the man could exist without the woman.” She smiles.
I feel a sudden surge of enjoyment at the riposte.
I like this woman. She reminds me of Atalantia.
“All others here call him the Slave King, yet you do not?”
“That brat is flesh and bone. Why feed the legend?” She wheezes as her Obsidian helps her sit on the flame-maple bench. “Thank you, Goroth.” He turns from her to take a place at the window, and as he does I see a screaming skull has been tattooed to cover the back of his head in blue ink. “Don’t let the old blackeye frighten you,” Gaia says. “He’s as batty as I am.” Goroth shakes his head in disagreement as he reaches the window. “Oh, quiet, you.” She pats the bench beside her as she produces a thin white pipe from her robes, along with a match. “Sit here with me, Lysander. I will teach you.” She strikes the match on the calluses of her heel and holds the flame to the pipe bowl.
Glancing uneasily at the Obsidian, I sit down in the cloud of smoke at her side.
She pats the piano. “My husband gave this to me as a gift when I was twenty-nine. Do you want to guess how old I am now?”
“You hardly look older than sixty,” I say with a smile.
“Sixty!” She cackles. “What a rogue you are! That Bellona philanderer rubbed off on you, I see.” She scrutinizes me. “I hope you didn’t catch anything from him.”
“He was like a brother to me.”
“Well, that’s not saying much in the Core.”
“My home is Luna. Not the Core.”
“Pfah. It’s all the same to us.”
Why am I here? In accepting the invitation, I’ve walked into some scheme. Is this a test of some sort? Just because I’m grieving doesn’t mean the dance has stopped. If anything, the pace has increased as the coup solidifies and the dissenters are clipped one by one. While Cassius may be gone, I still have Pytha to protect. Seems a lofty goal at this point.
Gaia is unaware of my inner turmoil as she touches the keys and strokes out a simple melody. A strange sense of belonging courses through me and I forget about the dance.
“Must be grotesque for you, seeing age,” she says. “I know how the deviants in the Core love their rejuvenation therapy. Pfah.” She hacks something into a crusty handkerchief, examines the prize, then makes the kerchief disappear back into her thick kimono. “Your grandmother never looked older than sixty, but I remember her when we were both girls dancing at her father’s galas. I was a plain little thing to her. She had such jewels. Such refinement. But was always so haughty. Pretending she didn’t know who I was. A sizable stick up her gahja ass, that one. But now I have the last laugh!” She cackles again. “How old are you, child?”
“Twenty.”
“Twenty? Twenty! I’ve ingrown hairs older than you.”
I laugh despite myself. “You’re not very discreet, are you?”
“Ha! I’ve earned indiscretion.” Her cloudy eyes soften and she pulls on her pipe before pointing it at me like a finger. “I know you wear the mask of court. What did they call it again?”
“The dancing mask.”
“Yes. That. You Lunes are famous for it. The composure. I once saw your great-grandaddy bitten in the face by a Venusian manticore at his birthday gala. Took a chunk out of his cheek and he didn’t even flinch. Just bit the thing back, threw it to its handler, and ordered champagne. Terrifying man, Ovidius. Might be too hot-blooded for the mask myself, but I see through yours. Your friend died today. And so did my grandson, granddaughter, and grandniece.” She reflects on them for a solemn moment and drags from her pipe.
“I will miss them. Even that noxious scorpion, Bellerephon. But I will not say I am sorry. That is life, neh? Play with blades you get pricked. Like my kin, your Bellona made his bed long ago. But you are different. Your weapon is in there…” She pokes my head. “If you are wise and lucky and live long as me, you will learn this pain is just a drop in the sea.” She sets a hand on my heart, her eyes intense. “So feel all of it, boy, before time makes you forget.”
“Could you play something for them?” I ask.
“For them?”
“The departed. Cassius and your kin. A requiem, perhaps?”
She laughs. “Yes. Yes. I like your gray matter.” She turns to the piano and begins a song, slow, mournful, that sounds like the wind in my dreams. As her fingers drift over the keys, the song wakes something inside me besides grief—a shadow, a shadow of a shadow in the library of my mind, something I never knew forgotten. I feel a presence at my back, though there is no one there. I smell a perfume that is not in the air, and feel a heartbeat against my spine that ceased to beat so many years ago.
Gaia senses my unease. “Are you well, child?”
“Yes,” I say distantly, only now realizing that I’ve set my hands on the keys, blocking her from playing. I should take my hands back, but instead press down on a key. The note sings through my body. The memory coalesces. Warms. The shadow dripping from it like dirty snow from a statue. I find another key. My eyes close. My hands move and more notes emerge through me, taking me to another place, another time, a spirit inside guiding me, a spirit that has long been caged and hidden so I did not even know it was once there. But now it flies. The cobwebs of my mind burn away.
My hands glide along the keys and a song pours out, a requiem for Cassius and all those others I have lost. I’m swept away by its music to a far-off study where a fire crackles and a small leopard paces around my legs. She is behind me. Her hair falling around my cheeks. Her earthy scent filling my nose. Her dazzling eyes and truculent mouth. All of it, all of her in that moment rushing back on the wings of the melody. When the last mournful note hangs in the air and my hands linger on the keys, I sit there breathless, tears streaking my face.
I look over at Gaia, confused.
“I thought you couldn’t play,” she says.
“I can’t,” I murmur. “Unless I forgot.”
“How could you forget something like that? It was splendid, child.”
“I don’t know.” For a breath, for the briefest flicker, I saw her. The face of my mother. The soft skin. The small nose and strident mouth. Those eyes that burned in a face time stole from me. Or was it something else that stole it away, a lock placed upon her memory that the music unfastened?
“My mother played,” I say, remembering now.
“And she taught you.”
“Yes. I…I don’t know why I couldn’t remember.”
“Sometimes bottling pain is the only way to survive.”
“No…I don’t forget,” I say, somehow knowing there’s more beneath the shadows that I’ve yet to remember. A whole life buried in my own mind. “I never forget anything. My grandmother said it was my greatest gift….”
“Sounds more like a curse to me.” She watches sympathetically. “My mother died when I was young like you. Even though she would be a withered fossil now, I remember her as she was young. Young death is divine. It freezes the flower in time. A gift in a way, to remember her as that instead of watching age ravage and devour…” Her blue-veined hands pull absently at the loose folds of her neck. “…till she is a shadow of what she was.”
“I don’t think you’re a shadow,” I say. “I think you are rather marvelous.”
“I don’t need your pity,” she snaps, startling me. Then she smiles and taps me with her pipe again. “You’re not as good at being a rogue as the Bellona. Are you? You flatter an old fool, but I think it’s another who has stolen your heart.” Her eyes twinkle with mischief. “My granddaughter.”
“You’r
e mistaken.”
“There are easier women to fall in love with. But you know that. Don’t you?”
“Love? There are more important things than love.”
“Like?”
“Duty. Family. She let my friend be butchered. His death is on her.” I hang my head. “And it is on me. There is no love between us. Only a slight mutual curiosity—understandable and now fled.”
“She kept you from being tortured,” Gaia says. “When her mother discovered it was Cassius behind that mask, Seraphina begged her to spare your life and to let Bellona have an honorable end.”
“Before she knew who I was,” I say. “The only thing Lune and Raa share is responsibility for losing the Society. For allowing Darrow to divide us and spending precious resources and ships against one another.”
I turn to her.
“What do you want?” There’s a dull ache between my shoulder blades that now is working its way into my head. I’m weary of this. She’s talking like we’re old friends, pretending that we mean anything to one another. On another night I might have patience for it. “Why did you bring me here? It wasn’t to commiserate or show me your piano. I know I’m going to die. Is that why you’ve stopped pretending you’re senile? Because you know I won’t last the night?”
“No. It is because I want your help.”
“My help?” I laugh bitterly. “Why would I ever help you? I gave you the war you all seem to want. Isn’t that enough?”
“Who said I wanted war?” She tries to get up from the bench. Goroth rushes to help her, his own knees crackling as he comes. She shoos him away and manages on her own with great difficulty. She extends a hand to me. “Come. I will show you.”
I hesitate, then take her hand. I support her as she leads us back through the door through which Aruka disappeared earlier. It leads us into a humid artificial solarium that smells like flowers and pastries. Luminescent ivy crawls up the walls. The steward is there, pouring tea at a low table at which sits a lone, hunched woman with short dark blue hair in a prisoner uniform.