The Empress

Then my thoughts stilled.

  I was more than that now. Was I not? Was this death truly necessary? Did I truly have no alternative to this?

  You wish me to stop lying, Tyrus had said, and I wish you to stop giving me reason to lie.

  Reason to lie. Like seeking out Gladdic to do what must be done—for fear Tyrus might not wish me to do this. And the truth was, I didn’t wish to do this either. Not to this harmless boy I had no reason to despise. Tyrus wasn’t a fool. He would preserve himself if it became necessary. I knew he would. All I’d been driven by since losing Donia was the terror of feeling that pain again. It had blinded me to the reality that Tyrus had survived years before I arrived, and he had killed in his own defense.

  I didn’t need to be his blade and I did not wish to be his Diabolic.

  Instead, I would be an Empress.

  I released my grip on Gladdic’s dark hair and stroked my thumb over the scalp I’d been tearing at—all the reassurance I could give him.

  “I’m not going to kill you. Go away.”

  Gladdic swiveled his wide green eyes toward me.

  “Go,” I repeated.

  He opened and closed his mouth, and Gladdic took the first tentative steps like he was waiting for me to change my mind, to reveal this as a cruel joke. Then his courage failed and he ran, and his footsteps thumped down the stairs like someone tripping in his haste.

  Seconds later, another pair of footsteps pounded up the stairs. Neveni peeked in, and I met her confused glance.

  “Um, just checking. I thought . . .”

  He’d come out, I hadn’t. A smile touched my lips. “You thought perhaps Gladdic Aton got the best of me?”

  “Yeah, that’s kind of ridiculous.”

  “Donia was so gentle and sweet, and she’d never harmed an insect, yet even if I were her, I’d be more than a match for Gladdic. Take him somewhere to be a human shield for this planet. I don’t need him.”

  “No problem.” She turned to leave, and that was the moment it dawned on me that she’d actually thought to check to see whether I was all right.

  As a friend would.

  “One last thing,” I called after her.

  She turned back, and my tongue seemed heavy in my throat.

  “Thank you for checking,” I said.

  She seemed puzzled, but just gave a smile. She would think it foolish, that this mattered to me at all, but I knew she had a great many friends. I did not.

  • • •

  I emerged from the heliosphere and smelled that floral scent once more, and knew it for jasmine. Sidonia’s favorite. The scent still lingered after I was escorted to Tyrus’s hasty assembly of those Senators with us who hadn’t defected.

  They’d been up all night, conducting the remote effort to retrieve Devineé.

  It had failed.

  Pasus had her, and soon she would be dead.

  “If they’re aiming for the Chrysanthemum, they have a head start on us,” Tyrus murmured, gazing at a map of all imperial territory, which from the side formed a shallow U-shape of stars. As it twisted, the expanse of space jutted out in several irregular points, mostly from the central focal point of that U. “So we hold position here. We use our service bots, repair the ships one by one. Lumina is a stalwart ally, and a powerful planet with extensive defenses. We’re too easy to ambush with the entry corridors to the six-star system. And I want a message sent to our allies at the Chrysanthemum: if other Helionics or even opportunists mean to defect—let them.”

  Murmurs of objection.

  “Let them,” Tyrus repeated. He leaned against the window, gazing out at Lumina’s purple-hazed surface. “I want to see who flocks to Pasus’s side. What are those words? ‘Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.’ So let’s hatch all of them. Now.”

  His advisers looked to one another uncertainly, perhaps wondering if they’d backed a madman after all.

  Tyrus missed nothing. He told them, “I am not at liberty to explain my . . . confidence to you, but I am certain this is a short-lived fracture. And you will all reap substantial rewards at its conclusion.”

  The promise of a bribe made them smile, pleased at the prospect. After all, trust was worth far too little on its own.

  Tyrus waited until they were gone to gaze thoughtfully at that shallowly curved U-shape of stars. At Lumina, we were closer to the point that spiked from the center of that U, and Tyrus zoomed in to examine the systems nearest us. Great spots of gray indicated zones of malignant space, and purple shading covered those vast swathes of space that simply could not be traversed due to gravity, radiation, debris. There was a very narrow corridor of habitable space amid these zones.

  I tore my gaze from it, looked at him.

  “You should sleep,” I suggested.

  His fingers were pressed to his lips. “Not quite yet.” He flicked his hand and zoomed out, and more of those purple zones swam past, more, and then that U receded into invisibility amid a vast spiraling swirl of stardust.

  He’d once told me the term “galactic Empire” was a bit of an exaggeration. Now my stomach gave a curious jump. I stared in dumb shock, because . . . because that was it? The great, seemingly endless expanse of space under Tyrus’s control fit into that tiny sector of the map, like a string amid those patches of intense radiation and heat and hazard?

  Suddenly this Empire, so great, felt small. . . . And the intense vulnerability of our position registered in my mind. “It will take weeks, maybe longer, for her to die, and then . . .”

  “And then there will still be a fracture. Yes, I am aware,” Tyrus said, threading his fingers together, just watching that galaxy swirl. “That’s why I’m keeping my hands off. As soon as I lift a finger in retaliation, I inspire true enmity. Vendettas. Holding strong, as though we are totally invulnerable—which we are if we stay here—and then offering a chance for his allies to win my forgiveness is the best possible course I can take. . . . I don’t want any of them to feel they’ve entrenched themselves and their backs are to the wall once she dies. I will take bribes to forget this—and stars know the treasury needs the funds.”

  “And Pasus?”

  “He’s the exception. They will all know it.”

  Then he zoomed in on our position again, and with his brow furrowed, he began to turn the image about as though to examine the space around us on all sides. A twist of his hands, and he shifted the image toward a zone of white that appeared as a cluster of hundreds of stars all joined together. They formed the nearest border of dead space separating the Empire and whatever else there was.

  “I’ve always found it interesting,” Tyrus murmured, “how Lumina, the greatest holdout of the old faiths, could be the one closest to the Transaturnine System, the prize of the Helionics.”

  The star system of the Sacred City. Where the Interdict dwelled.

  “Do you think he really exists?” Tyrus said. “The Interdict, I mean.”

  I didn’t answer. Just on instinct. It was something one didn’t say aloud. One didn’t question that.

  “The first thing I did when I ascended,” Tyrus told me, “was look at our classified files. I wanted to know whether the Interdict is real. And whether sentient aliens are out there, of course. You hear such rumors.”

  “Surely not,” I said. There were plenty of plant and animal life forms that hadn’t evolved on Earth, and far more simple ones. “Nothing like us.”

  “I found that we are in a habitable zone of this galaxy virtually ringed by places that would fry our ships and kill us in an instant if we left. If there is anything out there, we’re essentially cut off from it.” He gave a rueful smile, as though sheepish to even discuss that. “But Amon was taken prisoner along with his children to the Sacred City, and those children returned claiming the Interdict did, in fact, exist. Yet . . . yet were they just perpetuating the myth? If he were real, why do we see so little of him? A vicar emerges out of nowhere every few decades with a command or a demand for some tribute or other. T
he vicars would have us believe that same Interdict, Orthanion, is still living there in the Sacred City. It’s literally impossible for someone to exist so long. Even with med bots. Why so coy? Why not come in person?”

  “You sound like you have a theory.”

  “I think Amon’s children were terrified of meeting their father’s fate, and so they lied. I think the vicars have invented this man and enforced that belief in him by tarring doubters with the word ‘blasphemy.’ ”

  “I wouldn’t put that beneath them.”

  Tyrus abruptly turned off the image. “Nemesis, I think we need to go there.”

  I stared at him, flabbergasted. Then, “Go there? To—to the Transaturnine System?”

  “Yes,” said Tyrus, flashing a daring smile. “We’re but a few days in hyperspace away from it. We still have the most powerful starship in our arsenal—the Hera—and it’s in perfect shape to travel.”

  “So many pilgrims try to go there and never come back.”

  “Two possibilities,” Tyrus said. “One: they found the Interdict and stayed. Two: they didn’t find the Interdict, and someone didn’t want them to come back and admit it.”

  The second possibility . . . It was malevolent. But oh, it made so much sense.

  “The Hera is not a weak starship easily destroyed by an ambushing force,” Tyrus said, his eyes burning. “And if anyone makes an attempt . . . All they will do is give us more evidence we can then use. If the Interdict is, as I suspect, a fabrication of these vicars, then the threat of exposure will make them most amenable to doing as we wish, won’t it?”

  I stepped behind him and laid my hands on his shoulders, looking at that projection of the galaxy. It would cost us a few days at most, and yes—yes, the rewards of this visit would be great.

  “When do we leave?”

  14

  EVERYONE knew the origin of the Helionic faith. Sarolvana was an ardent follower of an old religion, and she chose to seek out Earth on a pilgrimage. Most who made the attempt did not return.

  Sarolvana did, but she hadn’t found Earth.

  Instead she happened upon the Transaturnine System and a place like no other, a wondrous starlight realm. Her devotion to the old faith shifted as the Living Cosmos itself instructed her anew in her time of solitude, and she returned to the young colonies from where she’d come—only to find that all she’d left behind were long dead, and she’d become ageless. She was over three hundred years old, yet appeared all of twenty-five.

  She spoke of the Living Cosmos and at first gathered only a few followers. So Sarolvana sought to prove herself, and vowed to her followers that she would leave them and return when they were of great age. In the decades that passed after Sarolvana again disappeared into the starlight realm, many lost faith.

  Then she returned, as young as she’d been upon her departure. . . . And they were all old.

  It was not false-youth. It was true youth. She’d been blessed by the divine Cosmos, and her followers grew in number as they saw with their own eyes how she’d been made immortal. But some asked questions that Sarolvana could not answer in a way they understood, so she began to share chemicals with them to open their minds, to give them the insight bestowed on her by the starlight realm. Coupled with her beautiful, resonant voice, a chemically influenced mind could be enlightened.

  Contemporaries sneered at this “cult of the stars.” They wrote it off as a pretense for young people to use drugs; they devised “scientific” explanations for Sarolvana’s immortality. Laws were created just to limit this cult’s spread, so Sarolvana gathered the most devoted of her followers and took them to the starlight realm. Then, blessed with her immortality, disciples returned still young to find themselves the same age as their great-grandchildren. They spread the faith even further.

  Still, there were doubters. So many doubters that upon Sarolvana’s final, fateful visit to the colonies, an angry group seized her, this speaker for the Living Cosmos. They proclaimed that a true ally of a thinking, conscious, feeling Cosmos would surely never be killed by it. They launched her into a star to burn to death.

  Yet Sarolvana did not die—not truly. The man who became the first Interdict roused from his despair and heard her speaking to him, for she had joined the pulse of the Living Cosmos with her death as all good Helionics must do, and in her name, this Interdict moved to dwell full-time at the Sacred City, training more and more vicars to send to all corners of the galaxy and spread the true faith. The Helionics had an advantage no others did: immortality, the ability to exist over lifetimes when others aged and died. And so Sarolvana’s truth spread, and now the faith of the stars truly dominated the stars.

  Centuries passed before that Interdict met a star himself, but his successor followed, and then her successor. Now it was Orthanion whose massive crystalline statue had towered over my head in the Penumbra, and if it was to be believed, he’d presided over the Helionics for a half an eon from within the Sacred City.

  It wasn’t humanly possible.

  And yet—Tyrus and I would soon see the truth for ourselves. One way or the other.

  • • •

  Since there was a chance this gamble could backfire spectacularly, Tyrus and I considered our options. There was only one person who had no involvement in the Chrysanthemum’s politics, who had enough personal enmity toward Pasus to serve as an objective observer.

  “What is it?” Neveni said when I gave her the electronic document.

  “It’s just insurance. If a month passes and we haven’t returned,” I told her, “it will unlock itself so you may see what it says about where Tyrus and I have gone, what we’ve meant to do. I can’t tell you more than that.”

  She would only see it if something went spectacularly wrong and we perished. In that case, the Luminars would have the knowledge to use to their advantage first.

  In the meantime, the rest of the galaxy wouldn’t miss Tyrus and me the fleeting few days we were gone, and the closest advisers would just think he was taking an inappropriate interlude in the serene wilderness of Lumina, far too casual about the developing firestorm in the Empire.

  He was hardly the first Domitrian Emperor prone to such eccentricities. “Such is the consequence of rule by bloodline rather than merit,” Tyrus sometimes said. If all went to plan, we would return well before Devineé perished, holding just the trump card we needed to force the vicars to give us the scepter. Then it wouldn’t matter if Devineé died and Pasus’s back was to the wall, and he lashed out wildly, desperately. Tyrus would have overwhelming force supporting him.

  If all did not go to plan, Devineé would still perish. We would be lost in the Transaturnine System, as so many pilgrims had been before us, and there would no longer be a Domitrian to claim the scepter—forcing an entire systemic change in the Empire that might or might not work out for the best.

  And of course, there was also that doubtful third possibility: that we’d end up the first people outside the body of vicars to encounter the Sacred City and the Interdict in centuries.

  It remained to be seen.

  There was no blissful time basking in the five days of hyperspace to the Transaturnine System. We gathered up tribute for the Interdict—just in case Tyrus was wrong and we did somehow end up in the Sacred City. It was paltry. Spices, jewels (some broken right off the wall of the Hera), artwork, and even some of Tyrus’s books.

  As we soared through hyperspace, I kept noticing Tyrus’s face. He had that expression like he was questioning, questioning himself, over and over.

  “Stop that,” I ordered him.

  His brow furrowed. “I’m not doing anything.”

  “You are thinking too hard,” I said. “I can tell. Stop. We made our decision. Let’s see it through and worry later.”

  “Worry later? You ask something quite impossible there,” he said. Then he reached out and drew me onto his lap, leaned his chin on my shoulder. “Distract me.”

  I’d never spoken just for the sake of spe
aking, but with the Interdict on my mind, I shared Sidonia’s old words about how we were all stardust formed into conscious beings. And then, as soon as I spoke of her, so many things poured out, all in a great torrent, and Tyrus just listened.

  “The vicar told her I didn’t have a divine spark, but she believed him in everything else, yet not that. She never accepted it. I told her I wasn’t like her. So many times, I told her.”

  Tyrus leaned over to press his lips to my bared shoulder. “She was a remarkable person.”

  My vision blurred. A knot lodged in my throat. She had been.

  “I think I will seek a higher price from the vicars than just the scepter,” Tyrus decided. “I want you granted personhood.”

  The words took my breath. I stared at him, astounded. “That can be done?”

  “It’s a legal and spiritual status. I am the law, so we need only fix the latter. I’ve no doubt you are a person, Sidonia had no doubt of it, and you must know the truth of yourself.” He reached over tenderly, smoothed my hair from my eyes. “At least, you should. We’ll do this.”

  It didn’t seem possible to me. It didn’t.

  Yet everything about us had been impossible, had always been impossible—and who knew what else there was to come?

  • • •

  When we dropped out of hyperspace, Tyrus took a place by the window in the Hera’s command nexus. We saw it in the distance, a great mass of pure blinding light—stars gathered so close to each other as though something more powerful than even a hypergiant star tugged them together.

  Then space changed about us, and rather than darkness, we were drawing toward bright, vibrant light strewn in currents that almost resembled raging rivers flowing through space. Then the Hera’s steady shaking turned to violent jolts as the gravity ripped at us.

  Tyrus rushed over to the navigation panel. The Hera was designed to steer itself, but the gravity here . . . It felt wrong. “What are those stringy lights?” I said.

  “I . . . I have no idea. Let’s pause here a moment.”

  I nodded, but he’d already ordered the Hera to a stop. . . .