Dominion (28 page)

Alis patched Steven into the coms system, and his voice sounded throughout the facility as the first prisoners poured into the core.

“My name is Brigade Pilot Steven Kerr,” he said. “We have seized Krasis on behalf of the Brigades and the Military. Would the officers in command please identify themselves?”

The rush of prisoners slowed, but Steven could see some of them staring suspiciously at Alis. He heard muttered threats, and knew that their bloodlust was up. He didn't want to have to shoot anyone, even with only a stun blast. There were easily two hundred men before him. If they turned on their rescuers, it would be a bloodbath.

“Everybody stay where you are!”

Even without amplification the voice rang clearly around the core, honed by years of shouting at recruits on parade grounds and obstacle courses. From the crowd of prisoners emerged the leaner, yet still massive, figure of Master Sergeant Hague. He approached the tower, pausing only to glance at the wounded Lerras.

“I always knew you'd come to a bad end,” Hague told him, then continued on to where Steven and the others were waiting. He stopped before them, clicked his heels together, and smartly saluted.

“Sir!” he said, addressing Steven.

“I don't outrank you, Sergeant,” Steven said. “I'm not an officer.”

Despite all that had happened, he was still technically a probationary pilot, with only a private's rank. If the mission on Torma had gone according to plan, he'd have received his commission as pilot officer immediately after. But of course, Torma hadn't gone to plan, which was how he'd ended up here, leading a raid on a prison moon. Maybe he should have been keeping a record of his flying hours, just in case. By now he'd have been a pilot officer ten times over.

Hague leaned forward and whispered confidentially.

“Well, I won't tell anyone if you won't,” he said.

He straightened again, and stared at a fixed point somewhere over Steven's left shoulder.

“Orders, sir?”

Steven looked at Alis, who shrugged.

“It appears that you're in charge,” she said.

Steven looked around him at the sea of dirty, drawn, expectant faces, so many of them still teenagers, because the Illyri had conscripted only the young and strong. Still, he was more youthful than most of them, but Alis was right: it appeared that he was in charge.

He stretched himself to his full height, ignoring the aches where he'd so recently taken a beating, and gave his first instruction.

“Secure the rest of the facility,” he said. “Then let's find you some decent food.”

Y
our Eminence, what a pleasure it is to see you again. You look absolutely ravishing!”

President Krake moved to embrace Ani, his rubbery lips sliding wet against her ear. Briefly she was engulfed in his sumptuous robes of white and green silk, the colors of the Presidency, and she smelled his heavy fragrance, mixed exclusively for him by the government's perfumers. It was rich and heady, with a hint of ripe banana, but underneath there was a note of salt and rot, for even the finest perfumes in all the conquered worlds could not hide the odor of Krake himself, seeping out from deep inside. The President was rotten to the core, a Military General who had long ago cast his lot with the Diplomats, exchanging credibility for power, for who would ever be greater or more powerful than the leader of all Illyr, or so Krake had reasoned? The answer was nobody, of course—except the puppet masters pulling his strings, and the quiet choreographers making him dance.

Still, appearances had to be kept up, so Ani endured his greeting for as long as was polite, and not a second more, before withdrawing. Not to be deterred, Krake put his arm around her, his jeweled fingers snaking beneath the short cape that fell from her shoulders, settling too comfortably onto her waist, pressing unhindered against the scalloped cutout of her dress, the feature of the gown about which Xela had been most enthusiastic.

“It's discreet, but so alluring,” Xela had said, “and, as Sister Illan says, you have the neatest figure for it, and the smoothest skin.”

Ani had lapped up the praise at the time, but she regretted her conceit now that she could feel Krake's sticky grip on that sliver of exposed flesh. She would have to have a word about that to Xela: no more cutouts, especially when she was due to see Krake. As for herself, she would have to learn not to indulge her vanity.

“President Krake, you're too kind,” said Ani, finally putting some distance between her and the President by reaching for the large bouquet of avatis blossoms she'd brought as a gift. She held them before her like a shield.

“These are but a little token of my esteem,” she added, “grown in the glasshouses of the Marque. The colors are different on Avila Minor. It's to do with the quality of the ultraviolet light, I am told.”

She peered at him from between the stems, offering them to him. He looked back at her in disappointment as he took them, his grabbing hands thwarted for the time being.

“And now let me have a proper look at you, President Krake,” said Ani, her voice like sugar. “Oh my goodness, yes. Life is clearly treating you very well. You appear to be in the finest of health. Have you lost weight?”

“Why, thank you, Archmage, indeed I have,” Krake said, preening. He was unduly proud of his cinder-block looks and his large, hulking body, which was excessively maintained and curated, if tending a little toward plumpness. If age did not wither him, it was only because he had the very best nutrition, the very best tailor and, naturally, the very best and most discreet surgeon, who tucked the President's flesh back into place whenever it started to unravel, which was often, Ani knew.

In fact, Ani knew more about Krake than he could ever have guessed. After all, he was married to the much younger Merida, a member of the Sisterhood. It was a match that had been orchestrated by Syrene a number of years before, back when the easily manipulated Krake's star was still rising, and his Presidency but a dream. Merida herself was elegant and beautiful, and outwardly demure, but she was also smart and sly. This combination made her a perfect agent for the Sisterhood, and her marriage put her right at the heart of the grand seat of the government in Tannis—palatial Opula—enabling her to stroke Krake's ego while he laid bare his secrets. Merida might well be Krake's wife, and mother to his children, but she was a devoted daughter of the Nairenes first and foremost, and it was with them that her loyalties lay.

Of course, there were others who were useful to Ani, and they assumed many guises. Briefly, she caught the eye of the presidential adviser who stood behind Krake, just to his right, dressed in the gold and black of the Diplomatic Corps.

Lord Garin.

His uniform skimmed to his limbs, neatly covering his firm, honeyed skin, hiding his sculpted physique from her sight, if not from her mind. Lord Garin was beautiful, both in uniform and, Ani knew, out of it. He smiled at her now—a naughty, secret smile—but she looked through him impassively, for this morning's purpose was business. With luck there would be time for pleasure later—pleasure, and the artfully leaked secrets that sometimes followed as Garin expressed his devotion to her. He gave her tidbits, and made her promises, and sometimes begged for her hand in marriage. Ani understood his game, for she was nothing if not practical; it was only natural that he should propose to her, because what ambitious young Lord would not dream of making the most powerful Illyri female of all into his bride, and even more so when she was so sweet-looking into the bargain? Yet she resisted his formal approaches of marriage, suspecting they might not have been offered at all if she had been just another Sister, with no power and no sway. Nevertheless, Garin was a glorious balm, and he did something to her. He did many things to her. Looking at him made her tingle inside.

“Do tell me, dear Krake,” Ani said, turning her attention back to the President, and secretly enjoying how Garin's brow furrowed unhappily at the perceived rejection, “how is our beloved Sister Merida? I long to see her.”

“Then it shall be arranged, Archmage! She is currently in the presidential apartments in the Tree of Lights. Shall I summon her here to greet you? I'm sure she'd be thrilled to pay you her respects in person. You know, I would have invited her to join us at our little luncheon, but I'd hate her to be bored by our business talk, or confused by the more technical details of diplomacy.”

He laughed as if the thought of Merida understanding anything complicated at all, whether diplomatic details or otherwise, was an amusing one.

Ani laughed too.

“Oh no,” she said. “Don't do that. Don't disturb her. Perhaps I can see her this afternoon. We can have a little chat, just the two of us, in your apartments. A catch-up.”

Krake was still smiling, but his eyebrows lowered suspiciously. He seemed about to find a way to insinuate himself into this meeting of the Sisterhood—Krake might have been pompous and vain, yet he was not entirely a fool—but Ani leaped in first.

“And, of course, we'd hate to bore you with our female talk, President,” she added airily. She laughed again, her right hand alighting briefly on his arm as she flirted to distract him. “I know how devoted she is to your comfort, and the care of your household. You won yourself a rare prize with her—as did she, with you—but we on Avila Minor still speak of her fondly, and often.”

We speak
with
her too, thought Ani to herself, still smiling as Krake preened some more, smoothing his clothes over his belly and puffing his chest out like a rooster. Only the week before, Merida had been spilling secrets about her husband, overflowing with information about whom he'd been meeting with, and what had been said, in one of the many informal conversations Ani regularly had with the clutch of Nairene Sisters who had been insinuated through marriage into the highest ranks of Illyri society. Syrene had certainly ensured they were placed well: a wife for a general, another for a high-powered bureaucrat; a Nairene here, another there; pretty, polite, elegant, diplomatic, and deeply duplicitous.

Merida was the most elevated of all, but she was in her thirties now, and bored witless by sharing her life with the blustering figurehead President, attending functions on his arm like a shining, perfectly poised charm while expected to keep her opinions and thoughts to herself. She was but the First Lady, she regularly complained to Ani, and a lady she was expected to be at all times. Her life was lived atop a pedestal, she said, where things were put on display to be admired, but there was nowhere to go from a pedestal except down. If her husband fell from grace—and all politicians eventually make that drop—Merida had no intention of falling with him, hence her continued role as a spy for the Sisterhood, albeit under the new Archmage, Ani Cienda. Even her own offspring weren't loved and valued as dearly as her Sisters.

“Are the children well?” Ani now asked Krake.

“Very well. Little Syrene is already talking about becoming a Sister. She's only seven!”

“Well, you know there's a place for her as soon as she is old enough, if you can bear to part with her. We'd be honored to welcome her. And what of the baby, Gradus?”

Ani tried not to wince as she said the name. It was one thing naming a child after Syrene—after all, at the time of the child's birth, Syrene had been Archmage, and Krake would have been anxious to remain in her good graces—but naming his son after her first, and now deceased, husband was quite another. It said much about the limits of Krake's power that nobody of any consequence was naming children after him.

She let Krake rattle on about his young son as they slowly made their way from the anteroom into the chamber where their official meetings always took place. It was a vast space, carved out of a mountainous chunk of deep blue crystal that jutted at an angle from the ground, as if it had burst from the earth aeons before. Whether it had, or if it was but a whimsical piece of architecture, Ani could not say—the chamber was ancient, its origins unknown—but the effect was startling. Its jagged spires cut into the air, fading from deepest ocean blue through sapphire to the palest aquamarine, and then the topmost shards melted into clear glass, letting in sunlight dappled with shadows of violet. They were striking surroundings, but that was of no consequence to Krake. It was obvious to Ani why he chose these rooms, and only these rooms, for her meetings with him; they were in a direct line of sight from the Tree of Lights, the shining skyscraper that was home to five thousand of Illyr's most wealthy and powerful citizens. Those peering curiously out of their Tree of Light windows toward the presidential palace of Opula—perhaps scanning it with their spyglasses—were more than likely to glimpse Krake in the blue room beneath the clear shards of the roof, talking to the female in telltale red. It offered visible proof that he was having yet another private audience with the public face of the mighty Sisterhood, and evidence of his importance.

As if to confirm Ani's suspicions, Krake now sat with his big face in a shaft of light, carefully angled toward the Tree, and insisted that Ani was seated with her back to it, her silver hair catching the lazy Illyr sun, the sweep of her red cape on vibrant display down the back of her chair like the tail of a bloodied peacock.

She tossed her head: let them look. Let Krake think that he mattered more than he did: such displays wouldn't cause the cleverest Illyri, the ones who really mattered, to alter their view of the puppet President. When compared to everything else Ani had to contend with, stroking Krake's ego was but a piece of grit in her shoe. She knew this and so she tolerated him. Anyway, she reasoned, she would have her reward later. She glanced surreptitiously toward Garin, and immediately looked away again to hide her secret pleasure. It was the only true inducement for keeping up this charade of consultation with Krake.