Golden Son

  “There you are.”

  “Kill him!” screams Cassius’s mother. “Kill him now!”

  “No!” roars Imperator Bellona. Too late.

  Mustang’s eyes widen.

  I turn in time to see the circle dissolve, crumbling inward as though it were made of sand. Not altogether, but tentatively. One Bellona sprints at me in silence, low, deadly. Another follows. Then Tactus comes from the Augustus group. Then another lancer. I hear my friend’s war howl. A second echoes. There’s more than just one Gold present who was in my army.

  Cagney au Bellona is first to me. My stolen blade rasps toward my neck. I duck, but I would have lost my head had Mustang not thrown up her own blade to deflect the slash. Sparks sting my face, and Tactus takes Cagney from the side, cutting her clean in half.

  Screams.

  The Bleeding Place collapses entirely. Golds of Bellona and Augustus sprint to protect their fellows. Others flee. Karnus slashes at Tactus—too much for my friend. I rush to his aid, saving him till Victra and others come between Karnus and us. Mustang is lost in the fray. I search frantically for her. A blade flashes at my head.

  Shouts boom as the Sovereign calls for peace. But it is beyond her. A woman screams at Cagney’s ruined body. Dozens of men and women, all with blades, slash into each other. Tactus takes a razor through the shoulder defending me again. I spin to my friend’s aid and hack the arm off the Bellona man as he pulls his blade out of Tactus. I jerk my friend toward me. Slashing a path clear. A blade scratches my forearm. I glimpse Mustang in the chaos, covering Cassius’s wounded body. I don’t know if the Bellona will kill her. They let her sit at the table. Still, I don’t know. I rush toward her, throwing my weight into the bodies between us. Tactus helps.

  I smash into a woman. Antonia. Her eyes light up as she brings a knife up to my stomach, but Victra, her sister, punches her in the face and Tactus starts kicking her in the head as she falls. Victra offers me a laughing smile until Karnus jerks her down by her hair. He’s fought off as Leto enters the fray, turning back the tide with the precise thrusts of his rainbow razor. The Telemanuses join him, father and son decimating the Golds who come before them with razors half the size of my body.

  “Tactus, on me!” I shout.

  Tactus is bleeding, but he’s up and howling madly like he’s still fighting beside Sevro. Together, we jump high in this easy gravity. He knows I go for Mustang. But the Bellona are too thick. Razors too deadly.

  “Mustang!” I shout, fending two Bellonas off. Slash away one’s face and punch another in the throat with my aegis. Another joins them. And another, till there’s a thick Bellona bullwark blocking my path.

  “Protect the ArchGovernor!” Mustang shouts at me, voice more composed than my own, making me feel an idiot obsessed with chivalry. Of course she does not need me to save her. “Protect my father!” And though I can’t see her amongst the throng, I obey.

  I let Tactus jerk me away by the collar toward our retreating line, which is being assailed from the side. Someone else roars for us to protect Augustus. Others scream to defend Imperator Bellona and Cassius. Many family lords have been carried away by armed cadres of family members, who back out of the chaos with their blades at the ready. They flee the spire, using the lifts to take them from the place, as gravBoots were forbidden. It’s nearly deserted. The Sovereign’s Praetorians—purple-and-black-clad Obsidians and Golds—cluster around and fly her from the ruined gala. Razors and pulseBlades fill calloused hands. Grays come led by Golds in Praetorian purple to disperse us. They wear riot gear and their scorchers shoot painballs and scatterwaves at the battling families, scattering the Golds like summer flies.

  “AUGUSTUS!” huge Karnus screams as he rushes from the Bellona ranks, through the scatterwaves like a madman. He knocks someone down with his shoulder, shatters a lancer’s face with his aegis, and charges headlong at Augustus, hoping to kill his family’s rival in one fell swoop. “AUGUSTUS!”

  Leto, our best swordsman and Augustus’s ward, intercepts him in front of the ArchGovernor.

  “Hic sunt leones!” he calls to the sky.

  Leto moves like the sea, fluid and terrible in his grace. He crashes Karnus back and is about to open him along the belly when suddenly he falters. Freezes mid-swing. Karnus stumbles back, then straightens, perhaps confused that he is still alive. He cocks his head at Leto, who reaches for his thigh, as though stung.

  Leto sinks slowly to a knee, arms sluggish. His long hair tumbles over his face, then he seems to freeze in place, suddenly motionless in the center of the chaos. Sad eyes glow with the engine plume of a passing ship as it coasts peacefully into the horizon. He is beautiful in that moment before Karnus chops off his head.

  “Leto!” Augustus roars.

  His eyes widen and he pushes against the Telemanus men, who bear him away. I glimpse the Jackal tucking his silver stylus into his sleeve, the one he spun on his fingers as he proposed our secret alliance.

  We lock eyes.

  He grins toothily.

  And I know I’ve made a deal with the devil.

  13

  Mad Dogs

  We flee the top of the spire. I had to leave Mustang behind. She knows what she is doing. Somehow I had managed to forget that. She always knows what she’s bloody doing.

  “They won’t hurt her,” Augustus says to me, and I believe it’s the first time I’ve seen emotion on his face. No. The second time. When he screamed for Leto, it was as if he’d lost a son. He looks that way now, face slack and older by twenty years. He lost his eldest son. He lost his second wife, the mother of his children. Now he loses the man he adopted to replace that son, and he fears for the woman who reminds him of that wife.

  If they do hurt her, it’s on me.

  I’ve set things in motion. For once, it couldn’t have gone better. Blood trickles down my hands, sheeting between the fingers, pooling around the cuticles in a horseshoe. Knuckles flex white where there is no blood. It disgusts me, but this is what my hands were made for.

  We flee the place of winter and trees, having drenched it red. Many carry our wounded, nearly a dozen in number. Seven dead. Barely twenty unscathed in the entire entourage. Others are missing. Matchless Leto is gone, Pliny’s aide was cut apart, and one of our Praetors took a blade in her neck from Kellan au Bellona.

  I carry the Praetor in my arms and try to staunch the bleeding as we take the lift down the spire. Hard chance. Victra presses a piece of her dress against the wound.

  I’d give anything for a pair of gravBoots. We cluster tight around our lord. Razors out. Blood soaks my arm to the elbow. Sweat dribbles down my face and ribs. Red drops splatter at our cadre’s feet against the lift’s floor, dripping from hands, wounds, blades. Yet there are white smiles slashing the faces around me.

  I’m hot in my uniform, so I undo the top buttons. Tactus bleeds beside me. His wound goes through his left shoulder. Clean thrust.

  “It’s just blood,” he tells Victra, who worries over him.

  “It’s a hole in you.”

  “Not a strange thing.” He smiles at her waistline. “Goryhell. You’ve hole in you, and you don’t see me complaining. Sheeeeeeowww.” He yelps as she jams a bandage from her dress onto his wound. He laughs in pain a second more, then looks at me and shakes his head, eyes wild and happy. “Training with Lorn au Arcos, man. You sneaky ponce.”

  He saved me from Cagney. I nod and bump bloody fists, past slights and wagers on my life temporarily forgotten.

  Many of the other Golds, the Praetors, the knights, the martial men and women in particular—and we have more in proportion to our Politicos and economists than most houses—wipe their brows, leaving ruddy smears. These are the sort of Golds who would tell you the problem with being a Gold is that everyone is already conquered. Means no one worth fighting. No one to use all that training and all that power against. Well, I just gave them a fresh taste of battle. And even though their Governor’s ward is dead, even though their chief Praetor ble
eds out on my shoulder and Mustang is in enemy hands, they want to play. And making corpses is the game of the day.

  Old and young look at me hungrily. Waiting to be fed.

  This is what it’s like being the alpha, the Primus. The others look to you for guidance. They can smell the tangy odor of blood on you before it’s even there. Age doesn’t matter. Experience doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I provide these sick sons of bitches with fresh kills.

  Children cry around us, startling me. Such fragile things in a night like this. The sons and daughters of Augustus’s youngest sister. Their father strokes their hair to calm them. Snorting, his wife bends and slaps each child across the face till they cease their whining. “Be brave.”

  Our Obsidians and Grays are not waiting for us on the ground. They’ve been taken somewhere. Neither are the Sovereign’s Obsidians or her Golds coming through the air. Which means she hasn’t yet decided what to do. Just as I thought. She can’t slaughter us. For a house to wipe out another house is one thing, but for the great leader to do it with the power and funds entrusted to her by the Senate? It’s happened before, and that Sovereign was beheaded by his daughter. The daughter who now sits on the throne.

  Oh, she must hate me for this.

  Below the lift, lights glow along the cobbled paths that cut through the huge forest of flower trees. The musicians no longer play. Instead, we hear shouts and screams and long periods of terrifying silence. Golds run beneath. Fleeing to the stone halls past the forest, where they can access their ships, fly home. Only, some aren’t fleeing. They are hunting.

  Something has happened I did not expect. Other family feuds find satisfaction tonight. It felt the same at the Institute when the other students realized it wasn’t a game. That there weren’t rules. An eerie feeling, a notion that devils roam the grounds instead of men. Who knows what anyone will do now that the rules are gone?

  There are four hunters in the distance. A pack of three men and one young woman dash silently through the forest. They hop a brook. Running with all the vigor of the hungry. All the ambition of youth. From House Falthe, it seems. I recognize raisin-eyed Lilath, the girl the Jackal sent to deliver the holo of me killing Julian to Cassius. With her is Cipio, the stout young man who once aided Antonia in and out of the bedroom.

  We watch them in silence as our lift descends. Carrying death, the lean pack streaks through the trees toward an unsuspecting line of House Thorne family members, all in dresses and suits of red and white; too late they head frantically for the stone halls. Their standard is the rose. It falls as the killers burst from the trees. A family dies. Scary how quiet and fast it is with razors. Different from my duel. I took my time. They don’t. I see a boy of ten cut apart. There’s no mercy for Gold children. They are not seen as innocent. They’re enemy seeds. Destroy them or fight them years from now. A woman in a ball gown slashes back, manages to kill one of the Falthes before being cut down. Two children run. One is caught. The other escapes. She’s the only one.

  Then the Falthe lancers dance. Taking large, exaggerated stomps. They turn in different directions, grinding their toes into the dark ground. They aren’t dancing.

  “Goryhell,” Tactus curses, and rubs his face.

  “The children …,” Victra whispers.

  Augustus says nothing, his face as resolute as stone.

  “The Thornes have fifteen children.” Tears bead in Victra’s eyes, surprising me.

  “Monsters,” the Jackal whispers, sending chills up my spine, because his acting is so damn good. He couldn’t give a piss.

  Children. Would Eo have sung if she’d known this was the chorus? We all carry burdens. And as the killers slip away from the murdered family, I know my burden will crush me under its weight one day. Just not today.

  “Data jammer deployed,” says Daxo au Telemanus. He flashes me the datapad on his wrist. “Datapads are dead. They don’t want us contacting our ships in orbit.”

  Augustus looks at his blank datapad and says that soon the other families will be summoning their Obsidian, Gold, and Gray attendants. We must be off planet and back in a position of strength before the tide turns against us.

  “You made this chaos, Darrow. Deliver me from it.” He leans toward me and feels the pulse of the Praetor I carry. “Get rid of her. She’ll be dead in a minute.” He wipes his hands. “The children weigh us down enough already.”

  The Praetor murmurs something to me as I set her on the floor of the lift. I don’t know what she says. When I die, I will say nothing because I know the Vale waits on the other side. What waits for this warrior? Only darkness. I didn’t even understand her last words, and we discard her like a broken sword. I close her eyes with my bloody fingers, leaving long, fading marks. Victra squeezes my shoulder.

  Standing, I give my orders to the lancers and the other men of war. There are fifteen I would consider good killers. Some my age, others well into old age. Yet not one contradicts me. Not even Pliny. The Telemanuses in particular seem eager to follow. Each holds my gaze longer than necessary, nodding deeper than mere formality.

  “I hope no one is bored.” They laugh. “We’ll have company if another family decides they may earn favor with the Bellona or the Sovereign by taking the ArchGovernor’s head,” I say. “We must kill that company, and carve our way to the hangars. Telemanus, you and your son are now the ArchGovernor’s shadows. Attend nothing else. Do you understand?” They nod their massive heads. “Hic sunt leones.”

  “Hic sunt leones.”

  When the lift reaches ground, forty men and women wait for us. Family Norvo of Triton and Family Codovan of Jupiter’s moons.

  “Unfortunate odds,” Tactus sighs.

  “Cordovan and Norvo are ours,” Augustus replies. “Bought and paid for.”

  “Rapscallion! Codovan, you rapscallion!” Kavax thunders. “I thought you were a Bellona man!”

  Augustus expected something like this.

  I take command of the new Golds. Again, I thought someone would object. They just stand watching me, waiting for my orders. All these Praetors, all these politicians and sinewy men and women of war. I hold back a chuckle. Amazing the power you have when you’re bloody up to the sleeves and none of it is your own.

  We escort the ArchGovernor out of the forest. Three times we’re assailed, but I have Tactus take Augustus’s cloak and lead some of the attackers on a wild-goose chase. Roses of a thousand shades fall from the trees as Golds fight beneath them. They’re all red in the end.

  The gang of three from House Falthe try to ambush Tactus as he returns to the main body. He wheels on them and with little help lays all but Lilath low. She scampers off as he kills Cipio and stomps on the dead man. “Babykillers,” he spits over and over, till Victra pulls him away. I watch for the Jackal. Every moment I expect a dart in the back, to die as Leto did. But the Jackal merely follows, as does his father. No one saw what he did to Leto. Or if they did, their fear silences them.

  When we reach the stone halls beyond the forest, finally crossing a white limestone bridge, the rules of the Society seem to return. LowColors skitter out of our way as we, now seventy strong, storm through the halls to the hangars to leave this moon. But when we reach our hangar, we find that our ship is gone. We rush to the landing pads lined with trees and grass. All the family ships are missing. Society ripWings patrol the sky.

  We question a shaking Orange. Tactus holds him up by his collar. He shudders as he looks at us seventy bloody souls. He’s never spoken to a Gold before, much less ones like us. Victra knocks Tactus’s hand away and speaks quietly to the Orange.

  “He says the ships were required to return home two hours ago.”

  “First they don’t let Obsidians into the gala, now this,” Tactus mutters.

  “That means the Sovereign planned something,” says the Jackal. “A something that was never allowed to blossom. She removed our Obsidians, our ships, to isolate the houses from their sources of power,” he explains, eyeing the Tele
manuses warily. “Marooning us. What do you suppose she had up her little sleeves, Father?”

  Augustus ignores his son; he’s looking to the sky.

  “Mothermercy,” Victra curses.

  “Gather yourselves!” Kavax bellows to his warriors.

  “Piss on my face.” Tactus goes pale beside me.

  I look up and see doom coming. “Praetorians!” Seventy razors curl out and we fan apart in case they have energy weapons.

  “Darrow. You’re with me,” Augustus says.

  The enemy is little more than black dots in the night sky. But our eyes are keen. The dark bastards streak from the darkness and impact the ground like fallen devils, always in their threes.

  Thumpthumpthump. Thumpthumpthump. Thumpthumpthump.

  They land between the trees on the grass, blocking our way back to the Citadel. Obsidian Praetorians and Gold knight-captains. The Praetorian Obsidians are titanic, like golems pulled from the stone of some mountain. Crueler by far than those we used at the Academy. No armor like theirs in all the worlds. Dark purple inlaid with black, like coral curling over their titan bodies. They stand in tight squad formation, loyal and bound to each other as they are to their faith.

  Thumpthumpthump till there are ninety-nine. Thump. Their Golden commander lands last, on a knee. He rises, tall helmet a laughing wolfskull. His cape of gold, emblazoned with the pyramid of the Society, kicks sideways in the wind. An Olympic Knight. There are twelve in the Solar System, sworn to protect the Compact of the Society against all who’d defy it. This is the Rage Knight, the post Lorn filled for sixty years till he left for Europa. They represent what the Golds see as the dominant themes of man, the same as our school houses. A man slighter than myself wears the armor. So the Sovereign’s already filled Lorn’s former post.

  “Declare yourself, knight!” I shout.

  The knight allows his helm to melt back into his armor. His flaxen hair falls over an ugly hatchet face. Wet from sweat, lined with age and stress. I bark out a laugh when he smiles out that sideslash of a mouth. I draw stares. Now they’ll only think me madder. The Rage Knight falls from the sky, and I laugh in his face.