She didn’t need to outline the reasons why. Jael saw awareness of all the ways it could turn sideways in everybody’s faces. He tapped his fingers on his thighs, trying to imagine how Death’s Handmaiden saw this playing out. The woman was crazy, no doubt, but she had regimented ideas about the way things functioned and regarding the role of Death. Did she see the reaper as honorable? That would be the best-case scenario for them. If she believed it was mercurial and unpredictable, then she might renege on their agreement without a second thought.
Finally, Tam said, “It’s an all-or-nothing gamble right enough. But I don’t see us weathering the conflict unless we take the risk.”
Einar laughed. “If we’re going to lose, we might as well go out big. None of this holing up, dying in fives and tens, over a long, dreary turn.”
“Do you care to discuss it more, or shall we put it to the vote?” Dred asked.
“No more talking,” Wills begged. “My head aches.”
“It’s all the voices,” the big man joked.
Dred scanned the room, her green eyes keen. “Right then. Hands in the air, all in favor of a suicide assault on Abaddon.”
What the hell. Jael put his hand in the air.
Ike and Wills left theirs down. But Einar and Tam swung them up. The princess in chains considered for a few seconds, then lifted her own, though her vote hadn’t been necessary for a majority.
She pushed to her feet in an obvious dismissal. “It’s decided. We cast our lot in with Silence, Mary have mercy on our souls.”
“Since when?” Einar muttered.
To Jael’s surprise, the big man offered him a hand up. He took it and followed him out of Dred’s quarters. They dropped their dishes in the galley, where a thin man glared at the addition to the washing-up pile. Jael wondered if they had even rudimentary housekeeping chores in other territories. From the look of Entropy, though, he guessed not. It was a wonder Silence’s people didn’t die of disease or food poisoning.
They probably do, and she calls it Death’s lottery.
He felt odd, adrift, as if he needed to go talk to Dred, but she’d made it clear she was done with the lot of them. The big man slung an arm around his shoulders unexpectedly, which made Jael think he had been drinking, but Einar didn’t smell of booze. But apparently that was his intention, as he dragged Jael over to the barman, who gave out liquor chits. Though it was impossible to prohibit drinking, Dred made sure not to send men out on patrol if they had been.
“We’ve earned a few rounds,” Einar said.
Jael couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a proper bar, so he sat down beside the big man and accepted a glass with amber liquid in it. “Does this come from the Kitchen-mate?”
“No. The men would riot if there was no grog when the thing breaks down.”
“That’s . . . impressive.”
Einar laughed. “Dred knows how to keep her men happy.”
The obvious truth of that rubbed him raw. To cover his misplaced anger, he downed the glass in one swallow. There was no point in mentioning that he was physically incapable of getting drunk. His metabolism was simply too efficient. If Jael imbibed enough to poison a normal man, it just left him mildly buzzed for half an hour or so. But he didn’t plan on telling Einar that.
They drank steadily, companionably, for an hour. The big man grew ever more loquacious, and by the time he had six glasses in him, his arm was a permanent weight around Jael’s shoulders, and he was calling everybody over who would listen to introduce them to his new best mate. The other Queenslanders were used to this, obviously. They indulged Einar even if they already knew Jael.
One convict looked like he wanted to start something with the big man worse for the drink, but Jael aimed a sharp look at him. “I’ve got his back. Sure you want this weight?”
Men almost never took him seriously. It was the damned pretty face, but in here, when you had no scars to speak of, it likely seemed scarier than Einar’s ravaged mug. You have to ask yourself, why can’t anybody leave a mark on him? Apparently deciding the answer was more frightening than he could deal with, the convict hurried off with a muttered excuse about being due on patrol.
Einar wasn’t as drunk as he’d been pretending, though, as he watched the inmate go, thoughtful. “What is it about you, mate?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” That was a lie, the first of many, probably.
“You do. And you told Dred. I can tell by the way she watches you.”
“I suppose she’ll put the word out if she wants people to know.”
“Do you?”
Jael shrugged. He didn’t, really, but since when had anyone given a frag about his wishes? “If you want to swap stories, we can. You tell me yours, first.”
“All right,” the big man said unexpectedly. “What’re you asking? About my pretty face, or what I did to get locked up in here?”
“Either. But mostly the latter,” he was forced to admit.
Don’t bond with him, a cautious inner voice ordered. It’ll be harder to sell him out if you need to. Not if. When. But it didn’t stop him from paying full attention when the man signaled for another glass and downed it in a single swallow, as if he needed liquid courage.
“I was a soldier, if you couldn’t have guessed. Away a lot. I wasn’t the best, or I wouldn’t look like this.” His self-deprecating tone made Jael want to dismiss the scars, but they weren’t trivial, and the man had earned them. Whether they were pretty or not was beside the point. Einar went on, “I had a wife. And . . . I loved her, more than anything.”
The man clenched the lip of the table, his knuckles turning white. Even the booze didn’t seem to be enough to dull the memories. Comfort fell completely outside his purview, so he only raised a brow in silent expectation. Damn, I knew any story that ends here has a painful trajectory.
“One day, I came home from deployment to find my beloved wife six months pregnant.” The brow bisected by a scar went up, and Einar’s expression was ironic. “Problem was, I hadn’t been home in nine months.”
“Shit,” Jael said.
“I’d always had a temper though I never laid hands on her until that day. I . . .” The big man shrugged. “Lost my mind. There are no excuses. When I came back to myself, she was dead. I strangled her. Killed the unborn babe.”
“Not to cast doubts on your story, but that doesn’t seem extreme enough to land you in here.”
The big man showed his teeth in what couldn’t remotely be called a smile. “That’s because I wasn’t done. I found out who had been screwing my wife, and I killed him. He had friends. I killed them, too. Then his brothers came after me, and—”
“Now we’re getting to the necessary body count. I get the gist.”
“To revenge,” Einar said, lifting his glass.
“I’ll drink to that.”
Jael wasn’t ready to tell his own story to anyone but Dred, but fortunately, he didn’t have to. A few minutes later, Einar passed out, his head on the table. The other men cast disbelieving looks, obviously comparing his size to the big man and wondering how he’d managed that. Jael just offered a cocky smile and strolled out of the hall. If he was lucky, he could put in a few hours in the hydroponics garden before the next emergency.
23
Feverish Preparations
“Hold the base still,” Wills ordered.
Since it was just the two of them, Dred obeyed. She much preferred the bone-reader when he wasn’t pretending to be crazy. Though sometimes episodes did genuinely overtake him, they weren’t as frequent as he let on. She didn’t begrudge him the fiction, though, as it kept other inmates from bothering him. Even in Perdition, there was a superstitious dread of harming a madman.
A day after their return, he was installing a turret at the east checkpoint. There was no ammo chamber built into the floor, so it had to be reloaded manually. All the men would need to be trained in that, but before it was necessary, they had to get the thing working. Wills
had been trying for an hour before she came along, and he was in quite a testy mood, as it was rare for him to require this much effort to get something affixed to his liking.
“I need something to solder this in place,” he muttered.
“Could your bot help?” She recalled the thin maintenance laser.
“Genius. Hold this, I’ll be right back.”
Dred nearly toppled backward as he released the full weight of the gun into her hands. Somehow she steadied it and kept it from toppling. That could’ve been disastrous. Especially if it hit the firing mechanism on the way down. Biting back a curse, she glanced over her shoulder to see one of the guards moving to help her. Idiots.
He didn’t ask if she was all right, just took part of the weight for her. “These are motion-activated, right?”
“Yes, you won’t need to fire it.”
The convict grinned, showing rotten teeth. “Pity.”
She donned her iciest look. “I’ve got it. Step back.”
It didn’t do to permit too much familiarity. Sometimes it was lonely, but better this way; she couldn’t have the men remembering she had been Artan’s preferred bedmate before she’d killed him. It might give them ideas about their place in Queensland. Tam had worked too hard to build her legend for her to screw with it now.
Fortunately, he obeyed, as how she would’ve forced the issue with her arms full of turret, she had no idea. Dred laid it down on its side, away from the firing mechanism and turned to look for Wills, who was on his way back with R-17. The work went faster with the bot’s help, and two hours later, the first turret was installed.
“Why didn’t you have 17 with you?” Given that the droid had accompanied Wills everywhere since they found the thing, she was surprised he hadn’t been using it.
“Ike was finishing some upgrades.”
“Like what?” she asked, as they headed back to the hall.
Wills glanced around as if to make sure there were no eavesdroppers, then whispered, “He’s programmed it for self-defense.”
“That’s phenomenal news.” It was a relief to know some drunken idiot wouldn’t break R-17 in a fit of rage without realizing how critical the droid was. But she couldn’t circulate the truth, or somebody would steal it. Even in Queensland—the least hellish of Perdition’s territories—she couldn’t alter the fundamental nature of the citizenry. “Great work.”
“Ike did most of it. He’s not much for general repairs, but he knows a lot about bots.” The bone-reader offered a shrewd look, running a hand through his wild hair. “He’s building something, by the way. I want to get back and see if I can help.”
“Report,” she demanded.
This was how Artan lost control. He lost touch, stopped paying attention to the details and thought only of his own pleasure. You need to keep your finger on the pulse.
“He’s got spare parts, the scrap from the Peacemaker. I think he’s trying to build a defense bot, like they have in Abaddon.”
“It would relieve my mind if we had it up and running before we march.”
“Me, too,” Wills said soberly.
Dred remembered that he’d voted against trusting Silence. It bothered her that her two oldest advisors both thought it was a bad idea to commit to the assault. But what’re my choices? Wait for Priest and Grigor to join up and come to Queensland? Death’s Handmaiden seemed the lesser of the evils in this situation, not that she felt delighted with that conclusion.
Sometimes you just have to roll the dice.
“I’ll want a reading before we move out,” she said then. “But not today. Find Ike. Keep me posted.”
“Yes, my queen.”
Great, now Tam has Wills saying that, too. Only he didn’t offer the same ironic edge as the spymaster, who knew full well that she wouldn’t be sitting on the scrap-metal throne without his intel and machinations. All I did was kill a man I hated. Tam did the rest.
She lifted a hand in parting, then went to see Tam. He’d filled her in about how he’d crushed a budding rebellion, using Calypso to quietly spread the word that Dred’s people knew about the meeting . . . and that anyone who attended would be executed. Not surprisingly, there was nobody at the appointed coordinates at 2300 hours.
After he thwarted Lecass, Tam had left last night to scout Entropy to see if they showed signs of honoring their commitment. Dred needed to talk to him to see what he’d discovered, so she checked the hall first. She found him breaking his fast alone and joined him. As Dred hadn’t eaten, she grabbed a bowl of mush, tasteless but filling.
“Do you have any idea why Einar didn’t come to bed last night?” she asked.
The spymaster nodded. “He was drinking with the new fish. Think he’s still passed out.”
Dred didn’t ask where Jael was; she refused to be curious. But with Einar on a bender and Tam out spying, she’d slept alone for the first time since Artan died. It was . . . strange. She hadn’t gotten much rest, keeping an eye on the door in case someone took the opportunity to attempt assassination. From what Tam had told her, Lecass was looking for a way to get the job done. She suspected his patience would run out soon.
“What did you learn?”
Tam frowned. “Not as much as I wished. The angle was bad, and the lighting was worse. Silence doesn’t speak, even when she believes nobody else is around.”
“So you observed a signed exchange?”
“Exactly. And my vantage wasn’t ideal; her throne room is set up to prevent surveillance.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense,” she prompted.
“It was bits and pieces except this. ‘We’re nearly ready.’ In context, I think it was a question for the Speaker.”
“That, coupled with her adherence to her own code, gives me hope,” she said softly.
The spymaster inclined his head. “If I’d caught her talking, it would make me doubt, too. But she seems fully invested in the Death’s Handmaiden persona. It’s my assessment that she couldn’t betray us without losing face with her followers.”
“Why would they care?” she asked.
“In her mythos, Death is unknowable, but even-handed. If he makes a bargain, he keeps it.”
She said thoughtfully, “I remember some stories like that, where Death comes for one person, but through cunning or negotiation, another soul is taken, or the reaping is deferred.”
“Exactly. Death is inexorable but not treacherous.”
Dred pushed out a breath. “I wish you had been able to get indisputable confirmation, but I imagine she must be wondering if we’ll follow through on the frontal attack.”
“The thing that troubles me,” Tam said, “is that she wins even if you lose. You agreed to her demand for the new fish as payment if our stratagem fails.”
Breakfast forgotten, she pushed to her feet and paced before the table. “I had to entice her somehow. What else did I have that she wanted?”
“I’m not saying it was a poor gambit, only that I can’t fully trust allies who stand to gain from our defeat.”
Dred muttered, “I suppose we have to wait and see what she wants more, additional space and resources or a single man. Even one like Jael.”
“There is that. From her followers’ perspective, annexing more territory would be the greater coup. And Silence cares about how she appears.”
“Does she? I wouldn’t have guessed.”
“Oh, it’s all studied. I don’t think she’s entirely mad.”
“I know there will be casualties, but . . . do you truly think we’re doing the right thing?” She spoke quietly, so the men nearby couldn’t overhear her doubts.
“I do. There’s no guarantee, of course, but I don’t like our odds without this alliance. We had a chance against Priest on his own. Less likelihood of defeating Grigor. He has too many soldiers. Together? We were doomed.”
Dred could always rely on Tam for the honest analysis even when it didn’t paint a pretty picture. With his verdict, she squared away the last of her un
certainties. The Dread Queen couldn’t permit anyone to see her waver even though she was largely a figment of Tam’s imagination. Life had shaped Dred into a killer, not a leader.
But we make do.
She left Tam to finish his breakfast and made her rounds. Unlike Artan, she made a point to circulate among the Queenslanders. It was impossible for her to know them all well personally, but she remembered names, at least. Dred called out greetings as she went, but Martine stopped her. The other woman had been angry since Priest’s raid, but she didn’t look hostile at the moment.
“What’s up?” Dred asked.
“First, I’m apologizing for what I said the other day. I wouldn’t have Artan back unless you were offering me his head on a stick.”
Given that Martine had been instrumental in blocking Lecass, Dred’s smile was sincere. “I hear some people feel that way.”
Others missed him because he’d had his special pets, who didn’t have to work or do anything but sleep with him.
There had been less organization, less attention to detail, under his regime. And he made the mistake of ignoring Tam once too often. The place was also filthier, smellier, and there had been a lot more drinking. She marveled that Grigor and Priest hadn’t moved on the territory when that jackass ran it. But maybe it took them this long to come to terms. Wouldn’t surprise her, as the two weren’t the most reasonable of men.
“But that’s not why I wanted to talk to you. This way.”
Warily, Dred followed the other woman back to the dormitories. She’d never slept in here, as Artan had claimed her as part of his harem straight off the prison transport. He had found it amusing to encourage rivalry between his females, driving them to fight for his favors. At first, she refused to participate, only to discover that one didn’t survive Artan’s wrath more than once.
With some effort, she pushed those memories aside. Martine seemed oddly nervous, an expression at odds with her normally pugnacious demeanor. The other woman paced a few steps, before blurting, “I’d like more responsibility. Tam said my loyalty would be recognized, and I’m not sitting around, waiting for you to decide on a reward. I take what I want, right?”