Dark Empress (73 page)

She raged silently for a moment in the privacy of her head.

He was going to have to suffer, after all. No quick kill. Trouble or no trouble, Samir deserved slow and painstaking. She pulled herself up to her knees and realised that a note had been pinned to the bottom of the section of hull that had been torn from the side of Samir’s ship.

Angrily, she ripped the parchment square from the shattered timbers and straightened, stretching. Who the hell did that little monster think he was? When Asima got hold of him, she’d stretch his death to take days, or even weeks. She looked around the small cabin and noted the faint glimmer of light around the cracks of a door. A proper cabin on a daram, then, and not down below in the hold somewhere.

Unfolding the parchment and concentrating in the low light, she read the short note as she approached the door, her expression moving slowly as she read down the page from puzzlement to anger and finally to plain horror.

She read the last line and allowed the paper to fall from her shaking hands as she threw open the door to see not the corridor and deck of a daram, but a jetty marching back through the water to the harbour of Lassos, the black mountain hovering high above.

Her cry was heard by no living soul. Nor would any other she ever made.

My dearest Asima

I feel that the situation is painfully obvious, but I do believe that your arrogance blinds you to certain truths and so I feel the need to explain this to you.

My ship, the Dark Empress, is no more. Like the phoenix of legend, she has risen from the flames of battle and been reborn as the Retribution and, if you think just a little, I believe you’ll understand why,

The ship has a long history, and ‘Dark Empress’ is not the first name by which it was known. Back in the early days of the Emperor Quintus, the ship was commissioned under an Imperial order and, with its sister ships of that order, was named for members of the Imperial family. This ship took the name of Sabinia, the Emperor’s mother. She was, as you may be aware from your histories, one of the family line that fell foul of the hereditary insanity of the dynasty and it is when she began to manifest her vicious madness in acts of random and senseless violence and megalomania and was finally ‘disappeared’ for the good of the Empire that the Imperial ship of the line Sabinia became the ‘Dark Empress’, for that is what Quintus’ mother will ever be remembered as.

But the ship, like her captain and crew, has been redeemed.

We are reborn into Imperial service and the title of Dark Empress, passed from Sabinia to my ship, needs to be passed on, to divorce us from this wickedness.

But, and I imagine you can see where I am going with this, there is an obvious successor. Like Sabinia, a promising, beautiful and clever young woman who descended into vicious madness and megalomania, this new ‘Dark Empress’ has reached the point where she needs to be ‘disappeared’ for the good of the world as a whole.

And Lassos will be no more. No living foot other than yours will step on the cursed island ever again. You can no longer visit your evil upon the innocent people of the world but, like a soothsayer friend of mine once told you, you were destined to rule as an Empress.

I hope your Empire trembles at the sound of your commands.

I wish you luck in your rule. May it be long and peaceful.

Your friend,

Samir.