“And Marius’s maps?” Seraphina asks. “There’s thousands of kilometers of tunnel.”
“I’ll deal with the maps and your brother.” Dido dismisses the Grays. The centurion asks if he should take me to a cell. “Let him stay.” The Grays leave and Dido fondles the transponder that I gave her while looking me over.
I stay silent, knowing the die is already cast. Seraphina closes the door behind the Grays and looks at the transponder. “Are you going to summon Vela?”
“Perhaps.” Dido purses her lips. “It seems the only proper move in the game. I can recall the legions I sent to take care of Kardiff and Iola. Under that shield, Vela can last for years. We lure her into the Waste, we can destroy her legion in an hour. Solidify our control. Without Vela who will they rally around once Romulus sees reason?”
“You think he’ll see reason if you kill Aunt Vela?” Seraphina asks. “You kill her, you lose him. That’s not what I agreed to. We’ve done this without tearing our family apart. That is a victory to build our war on.”
I watch Dido for her reaction, gauging.
“Yes…” Dido’s thumb continues to trace over the activation button. “Yes, of course you’re right. We shall reason with Vela.” She tosses Seraphina the transponder. “Do something with that.” She turns to me. “Now, young Lune. This is the second time you’ve helped me. Considering the death of the Bellona, I am curious to know why you chose to betray my mother-in-law. Was is that you could not simply bear to be an honorable little boy?”
“Cassius died for his honor,” I say.
“No. He died because he murdered my brother, my daughter. Are you too cowardly to follow him?”
I look past her to Seraphina. “Death begets death begets death. It’s something my grandfather once said. And it’s why I did not free Romulus. Gold blood would spill, and there’s precious little of it left. Lorn au Arcos once said it is the duty of every man to listen to his enemies. When you spoke I listened. Your war is just. Cassius did not believe that, but he is gone. And to honor the dead at the cost of the living is a vanity none of us can afford.”
Seraphina has had some difficulty in looking at me since I entered the room, even when I recounted my story, but now I have her attention.
“I saw the Rising claim Luna. And I have watched for ten years as their supposed liberty gave way to anarchy. It is time order and justice return to the realm of man. That is why I helped you.”
“Not because you wish the Slave King’s head on a pike?” Dido asks.
“The worlds would be better without him in it,” I say.
“If you wanted that, you would have tried already,” Seraphina says. “You would have gone to your godfather in the Core. But instead you hid.”
“Cassius saved my life. I owed him a debt.” I do not say that I was afraid my godfather would blame me for the Fall of Luna and my part in it. “But with his death, that debt is gone.”
“Noble platitudes,” Dido says, eyes wary. “But Lunes have ever had silver tongues. I imagine you would have me free you?” I nod. “Many of my allies cry for your head. I would hate to disappoint them.”
“I have committed no crimes.”
“You are the residue of tyrants and genocides,” Seraphina snaps. “You are a Lune.”
“So you judge me by the faults of my ancestors? I thought better of you.”
“Interesting.” Dido examines me with a Venusian eye, wondering if I’m more valuable dead or alive. “But as it is, the decision is not mine.”
I frown. “Then whose is it?”
“Tomorrow’s trial will be a sham,” Dido says. “I’ve spoken to Helios, who will conduct the trial. He agrees, there is no evidence my husband knew about the recording. His containment of Seraphina’s return can be excused by saying he was trying to protect the peace and his daughter from harsh judgment. There was no treason. But the docks were destroyed on his watch. He will be impeached only for negligence in wartime for not investigating the Reaper’s duplicity. But then he will be freed and we will be on our course to war. As Rome had two consuls, we will have two Sovereigns. Husband and wife. Equals. He will have no choice but to lead at the front with me. So the fate of your life, Lysander au Lune, heir of empire, is not for me to decide alone. Together my husband and I will decide if you live or if you die.”
When Dido is through with me, Seraphina escorts me back to my cell. There is little conversation between us. But when she goes to close the door, I block it with my foot. “Did your mother send you to my cell?” I ask. “I want the truth.”
She stares back belligerently. “Since when has truth mattered to a Lune?”
OVER THE COM CHANNEL, Gorgo gives the address of a restaurant and tells me to meet him there tonight. I manage to keep the nervousness from my voice, but my hand trembles when I hang up the com. It’s a one-way ticket I’m buying. My only hope is that when I call in the cavalry, they come fast and hard. Otherwise the Sovereign’s pardon will be for one.
I know Volga will use it better than I could anyway.
Holiday tries to get me to go to a government facility to wait out the mean hours till the meeting, but I finally convince her that it’s better for the Syndicate to see me street-side during the day before miraculously showing up at the restaurant. She says goodbye without a smile and departs not back into the terminal, but through a maintenance door that leads under the docking platform. Lyria pauses at the door and turns back to me with my Omnivore in hand. “You’re probably going to need this,” she says. Holiday unlocked the trigger lock before she left.
“Sure you don’t?” I ask.
“No.” She frowns. “I didn’t make a deal like you. Don’t think they let you keep weapons in Deepgrave.”
“That’s why you never do anything for free,” I say glibly.
“I’ll keep that in mind.” She turns to go.
“Rabbit.” She turns to look back at me, and for a moment I wonder if I see hatred pass through her eyes. Did she say all that about Trigg just to get me to agree? She did. She was the honey to Holiday’s vinegar. There’s no forgiveness in her. Just exhaustion and anger at me and the world.
“What?” she asks.
The fleeting notion of apologizing vanishes. “Bit of advice. Get as far away from them as you can, as fast as you can. Or they’ll just chew you up and spit you out.”
“If I wanted advice, you’d be the last person I’d ask.” With that, she leaves.
I arrive via taxi at the restaurant, a glitzy joint on upper west Promenade, and have to wait for an hour before Gorgo arrives. Nervously pushing aside my drink, I follow him from the restaurant to a flier where several slick thorns in dusters search me for weapons and, as I said they would, look for tracking devices. They take my pistol. When they’ve decided I’m clean, they put a distortion hood over my head that’s set to submerge my senses in an arid, desert world.
Digital tumbleweed rolls across the cracked ground in front of me. In the distance, hungry wolves howl as my body jostles in the back of the flier as she ascends into the flow of traffic. Time distorts inside the hood as well. I can’t tell if it’s been an hour or four when I feel the ship’s landing thrusters kick in and the gentle bump as she sets down. They unload me as I see wolves approach across the false desert, hunting my digital presence. I’m pushed along till I’m guided onto a couch and at last the hood comes off, just before the wolves pounce.
I face an immense ant colony that stretches the length of a wall, all the way up to the ten-meter-high ceiling. Acid-yellow ants the size of my pinky toil behind the glass. They swarm in a mound of legs and teeth over some carcass above the surface of the colony and make a line to carry the food from the top desert level down into the belly of their labyrinth, past storage rooms, barns for aphids, egg hatcheries and nurseries filled with squirming larvae. In the center of the colony, an obese queen the size of a small cat with a swollen, purple abdomen excretes transparent eggs that are ferried away in the mouths of workers with bla
ck mandibles.
A nauseating cocktail of curiosity and revulsion grows in me. Gorgo lounges on a couch across from mine, his huge body out of place in the finely decorated room. He lights a burner. His datapad sits on the table, Omnivore next to it. “ ’Lo, Gorgo. What’s with the ants?”
“Duke says they soothe him,” he says, watching me through the smoke.
“Got another one of those?” I gesture to the burner.
He hesitates and then proffers me a pack of White Dwarfs. I reach across the glass table and take one. He tosses me a lighter. I light the burner and lean back to admire the place. It’s a trophy room. A rare diamond stolen a year after the Fall sits on a glass desk by the window as a paperweight. A war helmet with the crescent moon of House Lune hangs six meters up on the wall. A hundred other priceless treasures litter the room. Not one is nailed down or secured beneath glass, as if to say No man would dare take me. The arrogance is magnificent and balanced by menace. On a table sits the Duke’s bonesaw.
“Did he steal all this?” I ask. In admiring the room, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no way I can get across the table to my gun or his datapad before Gorgo kills me. He could crush my skull without breaking a sweat. He also has that weird locomotion they seem to breed into black ops Obsidians. He was probably a berserker, or maybe even a Stained. I’ve never seen one in the flesh.
How easy would it be for him to peel my arms from their sockets? I’ve seen Rising Obsidians do it to captured Gray legionnaires and Golds. Would I scream like those poor bastards?
“Eveything here he stole with his own hand. There was a Duchess before him. He stole her crown too,” Gorgo says.
“Surprised he doesn’t have the children in here on a pedestal.” I fish for a hint of their whereabouts. Would be a shame if I called Holiday and the cavalry and had nothing to show for it. Gorgo doesn’t take the bait. “Back to the ants…they soothe him? Is the Duke an entomologist as well?” Gorgo does not reply. He just sits there like a cultured yeti with those eerie eyes bugging out of his cadaverous face. “You don’t like me very much, do you, Gorgo?”
“No.”
“May I ask why?”
“You talk too much.”
“So?”
“Talking wastes wind, slows cogitation. Unlike you, I don’t need to wag my tongue to soothe my nerves.”
“Communication is the soul of civilization. Otherwise we’re like them, aren’t we?” I nod to the ants. “Carrying, ferrying, digging, and toiling. If you express yourself only through your work, what are you but an ant?” I want to get a rise out of him. His quietness irks me. “You really should try it.”
“I told him he should kill you. Like that Green.”
“I take it back. Maybe stick to silence.”
“I still think he should kill you.”
Gorgo isn’t the sort of man you want envisioning your mortality.
“But death is so permanent. You’d miss me.” I puff a cloud of smoke between us. “Any particular reason you want to put me in the ground?” My lungs feel tight tonight.
Gorgo doesn’t answer. I eye his black duster and black boots. “I’ve always wondered, the dusters…do they give them to you when you sign your employment contract or do you go out and buy your own from a criminal apparel store?”
“You’re funny,” he says.
“Thank you.”
“How’s that working for you, Gray? Being funny.”
I look around. “Pretty good. How’s being the Duke’s dog work for you?”
He just smiles that eerie metal smile of his.
The man puts the fear of hell into me. You can read most men, but not this gilded golem. I have no idea what he wants. Feigning boredom, I stand and walk the length of the ant colony. On closer inspection, I realize there are two species of ants, the colonies separated by a sliding glass partition near the ceiling. Hundreds of each gather at the partition. They’re little trundling war machines. Larger than the worker ants, with thick plates of shell armor, oversized heads, and comically large mandibles. The yellow ants crane their bodies upward like howling dogs and wave their mandibles in the air while the blue ants throb their stingers in and out. I look again above the yellow ant colony and peer at the carcass that feeds them. I step closer to the glass to see past the squirming bodies. Oh hell. It’s a severed hand nearly picked clean of flesh. Too large for the children. An Obsidian’s crescent metal Sigil can be seen fused to the bone of the metacarpals.
Dread rises from my balls into my belly. So the Duke collected on his debt. Belog? Wasn’t that the Obsidian’s name? I have a sudden urge to vomit. They’re going to murder me. That’s why they brought me to see the ants. They’re going to kill me and feed me to the fucking ants.
I turn away in disgust. Gorgo’s watching me with those quiet eyes that promise so much pain. He gathers his datapad and my gun, and stands when the Duke enters several minutes later. My heart plummets even further into my intestines, hitting each rib on its way down, when two Obsidian bodyguards follow the Pink into the room.
“Have you two been playing nicely?” the Duke asks.
“Relatively,” I say with an earnest smile of relief. “Gorgo is a bit taciturn.”
“It’s his charm. I don’t need you anymore tonight, Gorgo. Go play with your little toys,” the Duke says. “I took the liberty of refreshing your stock.”
Metal glints between Gorgo’s lips.
“His gun.” Gorgo hands over my Omnivore and leaves with a short bow. The Duke wears a black robe with a purple sheen and black slippers. “Ephraim, darling. So dreadful of me to keep you waiting. I hope Gorgo wasn’t too much of a bore.”
“Quite a vocabulary on that cold fish in there. Where did you find him?”
“Oh, we’ve been acquainted for some time. Let’s just say that we melted that gold in his teeth down together. Come. Come. I hope you’re hungry.” He keeps my gun and sets it next to the knives on his side of the table. Close enough for me to reach. I could get it and take his datapad to signal Holiday, but the Obsidians would peel me apart.
I watch them on the far side of the room while the Duke’s servants open the bottle of La Dame Chanceuse as we sit across from one another at a long table. The Duke eyes me playfully. “I must admit, I did not expect to hear from you so soon. I feared I might have been a touch too enthusiastic about killing your friends.”
“What friends? They betrayed me. Fuck ’em.”
“Coldblooded,” the Duke says. “I do like reptiles. Almost as much as insects!” He nods toward the ants. “Still, I thought it would take at least several weeks for the ennui to set in. It seems you are like me after all.”
“How’s that?”
“Restless minds make restless men.”
“It’s a terrible fault of mine,” I say with a small smile for his benefit. “I grow bored quick.” The man isn’t bothering with coyness now that we’re in relative private. His eyes rove my lips as he slips an apricot into his mouth.
“Not too quick, I hope.”
I let him see me eyeing the servants in the room, playing up my discomfort. “Lamont, bring the food and let us alone,” he says. “I think we can pour our own wine tonight.” The servants bring several silver trays of food out and set them on the table before disappearing from the trophy room. He doesn’t mention the trophies, but he wants me to see them else we wouldn’t be dining amongst them. The two Obsidians did not follow the servants from the room. As long as they’re here, I won’t be able to get his datapad. They linger at the far door. I can’t very well assault him with those two monsters in the room. They’ll rip off my arms and beat me to death with them as easy as they would kill a cricket. I look at them pointedly.
“Pretend they’re statues,” he says. “Heads are full of stone already.”
“I’m not used to having witnesses,” I admit.
“Yet you left so many when you stole the children. I thought you would detonate a charge in the shuttle once you lef
t, as I recommended.”
“If you wanted murder, you should have sent Gorgo.”
“Do I detect squeamishness?”
“I prefer to think of it as precision.” I glance at the guards. “Can’t we be alone? I feel like they’re going to eat me.”
“I’m sorry. They are here for my protection. I never go anywhere without them. A flaw in my physical design. Weak bones.” The lithe man sighs as if he shoulders the greatest of burdens. “They never tell you this, but the peril of power is the people that come with it. Servants, bodyguards, aides. So many eyes and ears and little reptile thoughts in their brains. All those years I wondered what the Golds would do if they knew what went on inside our skulls. I don’t think they did, or they would have exterminated the lot of us. Now I sit where they sit and I know what my men think. It’s an advantage.”
“And what do they think?” I ask, sipping my wine to try and calm myself down. My heart’s slamming in my chest. It hasn’t stopped since I saw the Obsidian hand in the ant colony. I dry my palms on my pant legs.
“Oh, tedious things. That they could cave my skull in with a wine bottle or slit my throat as I sleep or throw me out a window. The little fantasies of murder are what keep servants sane. They tell themselves they allow me my power. And if ever I become too dreadful, they will do me in and maybe take over. But of course they never do. They procrastinate their vengeance because deep down, they are afraid not just of me, but like all people they fear their own fantasies. Easier to cherish them and keep them inside where they are in control. Possible.”
He forks a serving of charred octopus swimming in a dark vinegar sauce onto my plate. The sweet scent combined with my nausea almost makes me gag.
“Do you think I’m afraid of you?” I ask.
“Isn’t that the heart of desire? No one wants to fuck what they don’t fear, because then there’s no validation from it, no power derived.”
“Interesting opinion.”
“That is why Roses were created. The first Pinks were more beautiful than we are now, but there was nothing inside them. No content beneath the shine. They were toys. Once you used one, the lust evaporated. So the Golds made us into inscrutable enigmas to hold their attention, masters of art, sex, music, and emotion. Enigmas they could never fully understand, and that lack of understanding is the heart of fear.”