Ruler of Naught (55 page)

He shook off the memory and listened. The image spoke in an
archaic accent difficult to understand, but somehow he couldn’t will himself to
take another step forward. Anyway, he could tell from the position of his
lord’s head that the Avatar was listening intently—so intently that
interruption would be dangerous.

“... be that my house has failed of wisdom, and your
usurpation is a just one. If so, do not be too quick to discard what has worked,
while sweeping away that which has not. And do not ever forget the tremendous
inertia of society. Humanity has a basic wisdom of its own. Resign yourself to
working slowly—and do not misunderstand their resistance to change... ”

When the message ended, there was silence for a long time.

The fire crackled to life again as the ghost of Jaspar
Arkad, favoring the Lord of Vengeance with the appearance of a long, measuring
look, faded back into invisibility.

Barrodagh reluctantly moved to the side of his lord’s chair.
The firelight painted the Avatar’s strong profile in colors recalling the
karra-fires of his homeland; his gaze was fixed on infinity. With a tingle of
anxiety Barrodagh noted the dirazh’u lying limply in his hands.

Barrodagh remembered the words engraved on the stone in
front of the statue in the garden,
Ruler of all, ruler of naught, power
unlimited, a prison unsought
. Eusabian appeared to be struggling with the
magnitude of the burden his successful paliach had imposed on him—not that he would
feel the obligation to his subjects that the ghost’s speech had assumed. No,
thought Barrodagh uneasily, it was the lack of control expressed by that
quatrain that the Lord of Vengeance would resent most keenly, as evidenced by
his initial miscomprehension, there in the garden, of its meaning.

Then the Avatar roused himself, and threw off the mood that
had possessed him, visibly rejecting the counsel of the ghost with every bit of
the absolutism his ancestors had bequeathed him. He glanced at Barrodagh, who
recollected himself, trying to recover the triumphant feeling he’d entered
with.

“Lord, we have the Heart of Kronos.”

The dark eyes widened, reflecting the flickering light from
the fireplace. “Where?”

“It was recovered on Rifthaven by the Karroo Syndicate.”
Barrodagh swallowed, reluctant to go on, but knowing he could hide little or
nothing of this from the Avatar. “Along with two of the stolen items from the
palace.”

Eusabian stood up, glaring down from a monumental height.

“It was evidently the same gang of Rifters.” Barrodagh
hesitated, still weighing how much to tell Eusabian. He decided that an item of
less importance but nonetheless intriguing might take the sting out of worse
news still to be revealed. “The captain is an escaped Dol’jharian slave—a
tempath.”

One of the Avatar’s eyebrows quirked. “And the Arkad?”

"The Arkad was still with them. They escaped and were
intercepted by a Panarchist battlecruiser.”

Eusabian stared at him for a long beat. Then the Avatar
turned back to the fire, his fingers slowly beginning to work at the silken
cord. “A slave and a deposed prince.” He laughed softly, a cold sound. “I
wonder what the Panarchists will make of that combination?” He pulled at the
cord; it did not yield, the knots now braided into it resembling the links of a
chain. “Hekaath... they do not understand. No slave ever fully escapes its
master. The bond is stronger than freedom.”

He shook himself out of the reverie. “Have the Panarchist
prisoners transferred to the flagship. Divert the nearest Ur-equipped vessel to
Rifthaven to pick up the Heart, for a rendezvous with the
Fist
.” He
smiled, visibly relaxing from the strain of the strange interview with the
first Arkad.

“We will make an exchange. The Heart of Kronos will return
to the Suneater after ten million years, and the Panarch—truly the ruler of
naught—will go to Gehenna.”

He looked at where Jaspar’s ghost had stood. “And nothing
can resist me now.”

Barrodagh stared after the Avatar as he strode out of the
library. Then he tabbed his compad and queried Juvaszt on the
Fist of
Dol’jhar
, who confirmed his suspicions. There was no point in embarking
immediately: they would merely wait in space for several days to rendezvous
with the
Samedi
—the ship closest to Rifthaven, which Juvaszt was
dispatching to pick up the Heart of Kronos.

Well, he would explain that to the Avatar tomorrow. Despite
Eusabian’s boredom, Barrodagh doubted he had extracted all the pleasure to be
had from possession of his enemy’s palace—and he would be even more bored, and
thus more dangerous, while confined on the
Fist
waiting for the
rendezvous. And the delay would be useful: it seemed that Ferrasin was making
great progress toward extracting critical information from the computer.

The computer! His gaze snapped to the table next to where
Eusabian had been seated. He bent over the data socket, trying to decipher the
faint writing on the datachip.

Unable to make it out in the dim flicker of the firelight,
he reached down to pry it out of the socket.

There was a faint pop and the datachip disintegrated with a
spurt of flame which stung his fingers. Barrodagh whispered a curse as he
snatched his fingers away and stuck them in his mouth.

A faint glow caught the periphery of his vision, and he
whirled around to confront the ghost of Jaspar Arkad, not an arm’s length away
from him.

Its eyes seemed to focus on him. Barrodagh’s breath caught
in his throat and he stepped back; the arm of the chair caught him behind his
knees and dumped him sprawling across it, unable to retreat further as the
phantom slowly advanced toward him.

The ghost stopped in front of him, too close, and slowly, a
terrible, sly smile possessed its face. It bent over; Barrodagh could see
clouds of darkness moving behind its eyes.

“Willa-Drissa-Will!” the ghost hissed, and its face
distorted as its lips shot out on the end of a glowing stalk and lunged at
Barrodagh’s eyes.

Warmth flooded Barrodagh’s breeches and he gave a strangled
shriek. The ghost stood back as if surveying the effect of its attack. Then,
once more the stern founder of the Arkad dynasty, it chuckled quietly and
glided through the wall.

Furious, Barrodagh pushed himself out of the chair and sent
the carven table spinning across the library with a vicious blow. “I hate you!”
he cried, then stopped, appalled.

Just so had he screamed at his horrid sister when she locked
him up those nights so long ago. But she was long dead, his first victim when
he had come into power in the Dol’jharian bureaucracy. There was no reason to
remember her now.

He exhaled shakily and looked down at the stain spreading
across his crotch. Something would have to be done about that Ur-be-damned
palace computer. It must have known he was Bori, known the legends...

Then he shrugged.
It doesn’t matter now.
Soon they
would leave for the Suneater, away from the Mandala and its hateful machines
and verminous dogs. Then things would return to normal.

But as Barrodagh left the library to change his clothes, he
thought he heard a chuckle from the air behind him—a sound and a memory he
could not escape.

o0o

Morrighon didn’t know at first what had awakened him. With
the facility born of long practice, he scanned the whispers coming from the
communicators on the table near his bed as he gazed up at the ceiling, faintly
lit by the glow of false dawn. There was nothing but the normal chatter of the
channels he’d chosen to monitor this night—no. The Tarkan channel was more
active than usual.

Then he caught a single word:
karra
. Another
haunting, then. Perhaps it had been a mistake to monitor that channel. He
didn’t need to know about Tarkan encounters with the computer-generated
hologram that was making their duty such a misery. He closed his eyes.

False dawn?

His eyes snapped open. Barrodagh had transferred him to a
lower level of the palace after Anaris’s first meeting with Eusabian, as an
indication of his displeasure. There were no windows in his quarters.

He rolled over, propping himself on his elbows and looking
over the end of the bed into the room. His breath stopped.

The faintly glowing form of an old man in a Panarchist
uniform gazed at him from against the opposite wall. Morrighon recognized the
face from the first bust in the Phoenix Antechamber: Jaspar hai-Arkad. Though
he knew there was no such thing as ghosts, a chill of awe crawled along his
nerves.

It must be the computer.
This was a new level of
manifestation; he had to contact Ferrasin. The thought didn’t help: he found,
with a mixture of fear and disgust, that he still couldn’t bring himself to
move.

The ghost—
It is not a ghost,
his mind insisted
fiercely—smiled at him and faded back through the wall, leaving behind a faint
pool of light that shivered and crawled along the surface for a moment before
fading out.

Morrighon flung back the coverlet and padded into his work
room. The lights came on in response to his movement, banishing the darkness
and with it much of his disquiet. He seated himself at his desk, laying his
palms on its smooth, cool surface. Then he tabbed his compad.

“Ferrasin here.” The response came more quickly than he
expected, and there was no trace of sleep in the technician’s voice.

“This is Morrighon. The apparition... ”

“We are working on that now, senz-lo Morrighon,” interrupted
Ferrasin, the faint emphasis on the word “we” a warning that the technician
could not speak freely.

A light glowed on Morrighon’s compad, indicating a download
waiting. He tabbed the accept key as Ferrasin said, “We will have a full report
by morning.”

“Very well,” Morrighon acknowledged, and brought up the file
that Ferrasin had sent him under cover of their conversation.

A few minutes later, frightened to the edge of nausea, he
yanked on yesterday’s clothes and summoned a Tarkan escort to take him to
Anaris.

o0o

The chiming of the annunciator brought Anaris out of restless
sleep. He fought away confusion and looked at the chrono: 02:38. Alarmed, he
reached for his wrist and then his hand fell back when it encountered bare
flesh. He’d been dreaming of his years as a hostage among the Douloi of the
Panarch’s court, but he was among his own kind again. Annoyance mixed with
amusement as he remembered tossing his own boswell into the disposer just
before he returned to his father: what Dol’jharian would ever entrust his
thoughts to a machine that could be taken away?

Leaning over, he tabbed the comm. “Who is it?”

“Morrighon, lord.” The Bori’s voice was fearful. “You told
me to... ”

“Come in.”

Anaris sprang out of bed and threw on his dressing gown as
Morrighon entered, looking even worse than usual; he trembled, his clothes were
rumpled and smelled faintly, his thinning hair stuck out in wispy spikes in
every direction, and the paleness of his face exaggerated his bad complexion.

“My lord,” he said as the door slid shut behind him, “we
have received word from Rifthaven.” The Bori stopped, swallowing convulsively.

Rifthaven! Had Snurkel been right, then? Was Brandon there?

Better, was he now captive? Anaris suppressed a smile of
anticipation. He wanted some fun with his old enemy before he was disposed of.
And, in completing his father’s paliach, would take another step toward the
throne.

Morrighon’s expression became even more woeful, and some of Anaris’s
exultation faded out of him. “Widespread fighting has broken out on Rifthaven
among the Syndicates, even within some. It appears to have been triggered by the
discovery of the Aerenarch, as suspected by our primary contact there.”
Morrighon stopped again.

“And?”

Morrighon’s words emerged in a rush. “In the confusion, the
Aerenarch escaped. His ship was intercepted by a Panarchist battlecruiser. We
can only assume he is now on his way to Ares.”

Rage replaced triumph. Anaris felt his face distorting into
the prachan, the fear-face, as, once more, the laughing Arkad third-son evaded
him.

Morrighon stepped back, pressing against the wall, his face
a sickly hue.

Then a tendril of fear stilled Anaris’s rage. What report
had been made to his father? He forced himself to relax. “What does the Avatar
know?”

It took Morrighon a moment to find his voice, his larynx
working. “Snurkel recovered the Heart of Kronos,” he squeaked at last. “The
Avatar has accepted his explanations concerning the Aerenarch. No hint of our
role has emerged: Snurkel’s position on Rifthaven is precarious and depends
entirely on the Avatar now. He cannot afford any suspicion of double-dealing.”

Anaris’s anxiety began to fade. With what the Avatar
regarded as his key to complete victory now in his hands, Eusabian would have a
mind to little else. Still, it might be best to arrange accidents for the
seconds that he and Morrighon had suborned, especially Snurkel—from now on Rifthaven
would be of little importance, and they could only be a source of
embarrassment.

Then a thought struck him: his machinations on Rifthaven,
through Morrighon, had been the key to the Aerenarch’s escape. Savoring the
acidic bite of irony, he relived the many times Brandon and his brother Galen
had used his Dol’jharian instincts against him in their despicable games, until
he finally learned to think as they did.

It was you, as much as your father, who taught me to
think as a Panarchist.
The realization shocked him; with a kind of perverse
pleasure he recognized that Brandon was becoming a worthy foe.

And they were not finished with each other.