The Godgame (The Godgame, Book 1) (5 page)

TREVOR

Trevor Rothschilde smiled lazily after Embla.
I must keep an eye on that one
, he thought. Even made busy by her duties with the animals, she was still a potential threat, too much of a free-thinker. There were certain secrets that she might, if she were to discover them, react less than favorably toward. Her father had convinced him to allow her to be the Keeper of the Beasts, but Trevor was not convinced it was enough. He promised himself to discover which lazy coward had passed the responsibility of the Archon’s letter to Embla, and have Embla’s father expel that individual to the Black Halls.

Tucking the note away safely in a pocket near his heart, just for a moment, he turned to Skin. “You should be careful around Embla,” he said. “She is not to be trusted.”

Skin smiled.

Trevor moved closer, close enough he could feel heat from her body. She was tall, her legs long and muscular. His eye level came to just below the rise of her breasts. He reached one hand out and carefully touched the bare skin at her side, sliding his hand up her back, stopping near her spine. She was so smooth. He could feel his heart quicken, his penis stiffen.

Skin trembled beneath his touch.

For a moment, he almost lost control. He wanted to grab her, take her, make her scream with pleasure. He wanted to be forceful, and fast. He reached out—slowly, and with great restraint—and gently brushed his lips against the skin just below her breasts. Her body shuddered again and he could feel it going through him as well. He forced himself to pull away.

“What does it say?” Skin asked.

“What’s that?”

“The note.”

He’d almost forgotten. Only Skin could make him do that, forget his business. He took a step back, pulled the note from his pocket. Carefully, using a technique with his hands closely guarded by the exarchs, he peeled away the sticky coating without ruining the paper beneath, and unfolded the note.

Skin looked down at him expectantly.

Trevor frowned as he read.

Skin reached for him and he brushed her hand aside. “Not now,” he said, and began walking quickly up the path through the garden.

~

The mastodon raised its head to regard him as he passed, but when he turned to look, the animal was positioned as it had been originally, tusks lowered, drinking from the pink pool. It was always a bit unnerving to walk through this part of the garden, where the statues became those of much larger animals, posed to interact with the trees and shrubs and flowers. One could never get used to it, no matter how long one worked among its verdant colors.

The note contained good news, if it were true. Had he and the Archon finally found the one they needed? The Talosian citizens were restless, rumors were beginning to blossom, certain voiced opinions and ideas that could be very dangerous if allowed to spread and pollinate. Galen was no longer effective. They needed someone new, someone who could pacify the people, show them everything was fine just the way it was. They needed a miracle. Could this boy be that miracle? There were some who seemed to think so.

He was now walking through the section of the garden where the pillars became caryatids, women carved from stone with bodies twisted and extended, many with their eyes closed, mouths slightly open, heads thrown back. They moved sensually out of the corners of his eyes.

When he reached the small circular pool at the center of the caryatids, he stopped. He reached into one of his many pockets and produced a key. He walked up to the nearest stone woman, who stared at him, presenting her nude body motionlessly. He slipped the key into the keyhole that lurked in the crevasse between her eyes, and turned it easily.

For a moment, the ground rumbled beneath his feet as the canals shifted, then the air was filled with a wet, organic smell, that of the pool being drained. He watched the plants that bobbed at the surface of the water first begin to revolve slowly, and then to spin, sucked down and out of sight as the contents of the pool funneled away. A toad of some kind, warming itself in the comet’s light on one of the plants, attempted to jump to safety at the pool’s edge, but was not fast enough and missed by inches, lost in the violent movement of the water, most likely to drown in the tunnels beneath.

Trevor smiled.

In a matter of seconds, the pool was empty, the water diverted to another pool in another part of the garden, as was done daily by the gardeners to ensure the flora in all sections were given proper time to soak in the moisture they required.

Where the water had been, there was now revealed a spiraling stairway of uneven stone steps. He stepped forward, and began his descent into the Ziggurat.

The Archon would be pleased, if he still cared. Over the course of several years, the Archon had placed more and more responsibility on Trevor’s shoulders, and now allowed him to make certain decisions without his exalted approval. In Trevor’s mind the Archon had grown lazy, but so had all of the heirotimates, fat, unable to cope without their myriad extravagant pleasures. Trevor would not allow himself to be like them. He had true ambition, had always found ways to rise in the hierarchy, despite his humble beginnings. He was not so easily seduced by mere wealth. He did not want the weakness that resulted from over-indulgence; he did not seek pleasures of the flesh, only dominance.

He was not heirotimate like his colleagues. He had been born a commoner and started as a messenger boy, running important documents and letters that could not be trusted to the corrupt mail system or over the telelines throughout all parts of the city. He had been known for his speed and efficiency, and, of course, his discretion. He had been strong and athletic, had been the fastest runner in his school growing up. He had built a reputation and soon people of importance had been requesting him personally. He had run messages for low-level officials and for leaders of illegal gangster groups. He had never been one to discriminate, and had been careful not to ask questions.

At first, anyway.

He was patient, and kept his mouth shut to build trust, until the leaders he worked for felt comfortable enough with him to volunteer information.

When he’d been eighteen or nineteen years old, still just a kid really, he’d been employed heavily by a woman who went by the name of Cameron. She was, at that time, responsible for the majority of illegal nova fruit importation and distribution. She was very busy and had used Trevor to carry frequent messages between her and her sister Shelley.

As time went on, the messages became more and more frequent. Cameron eventually confessed to him of fighting with her sister. She told Trevor her sister was unstable, that she’d threatened to report Cameron’s business practices to the authorities. She asked Trevor to not only deliver her notes, but to listen, to discover what he could.

He soon found that his charm, coupled with people’s natural trust in him, could be used quite effectively for information gathering. And, before long, Shelley was confessing her jealousy for her sister’s enterprise, telling him through swollen lips how she had been the one to start the business, before Cameron—the bossy older sister who had “no sense of vision or creativity”—had stolen it from her, as they lay together in Shelley’s bed, the fluids from their recent act drying to a crust upon the sheets.

As the fight between the rival sisters became more and more heated, and Trevor’s time became almost entirely devoted to running notes back and forth between them, as well as serving as a quiet and sympathetic listener and boy toy for both women, Trevor was able to read between the lines, learning much of the politics of business. He learned of trade and commerce. He learned of money and debt collection, that intimidation and force were sometimes required. But mostly he learned about people, that it was people who made the rules, who decided what was important, what was right and what was wrong. Society was governed by rules, and those rules were written, changed, and manipulated by those with enough intelligence and will to do so.

Eventually, Cameron told him that Shelley must be killed. She asked if Trevor could do it, but he was not a killer and had declined. He had, however, told Cameron he knew an assassin perfect for the job and that he could lure Shelley to the spot of her execution, if such services were required. He and Cameron had come to an arrangement, and the date and time had been set.

When he told Shelley about her sister’s plan, she was furious. Shelley demanded retribution, and that he reassign his assassin to Cameron, to which he agreed readily. Shelley smiled at him then. “I knew you were mine,” she said, pulling him to the bed, where she forced him down, slid him inside, grinding on top of him, clawing at his chest.

A couple of days later, Trevor hid in the loft of a dilapidated and long-abandoned warehouse, in the shadows, an ideal location to watch. He waited.

Cameron came first, insistent she have an opportunity to confront her sister before the assassin struck. She walked slowly into the building, entering the musty air. She came forward into the open area. Something in the floor creaked beneath her.

Trevor sucked in his breath.

Cameron stopped, brushed at her clothing, and took a pose rigid and defiant.

Shelley came a few minutes later, entering from the south side as Trevor had instructed. She walked up into the open space until the moonlight illuminated her face. She was smiling at her sister.

“Bitch,” Shelley said.

“Yes, you are,” Cameron responded childishly, as they must have done many times as sisters.

“Thief! You’ve always been a thief!”

“And you’re a low-life whore.”

Trevor suppressed a gleeful snicker. There was no assassin. He didn’t know those kinds of people. Both sisters thought the other was about to die.

They came at each other, dashing across the open warehouse floor, which shuddered and cracked alarmingly, like ice grown too thin over a frozen lake, but neither of them noticed, too consumed by their hatred for each other.

When they met in the middle, Trevor nearly clapped his hands, rocking where he perched.

They grabbed each other, clawed, pulled hair. They fought like sisters, neither with the courage to inflict anything more serious than scratches on exposed skin and bruises from thrown elbows. They twirled in a violent dance.

Trevor didn’t know if the floor would give way beneath them or not, but he did know that it was dangerously brittle. He’d sometimes come to this warehouse when he was a kid to play and explore. He’d always been fascinated with abandoned places. One day, the floor had given way beneath his feet and his body had plummeted into darkness. He’d caught himself just in time, and had managed to pull himself up. He’d discovered there was a large open cavity beneath the warehouse, cave-like, an eroded section of the subterranean Library of Halencia—flooded with murky water, just as were all of the tunnels beneath the city, but the drop was still far and he knew he would have perished had he not caught himself.

He watched the sisters fight. Perhaps they expected the assassin to intervene at any moment, for a stealthy figure to dart from the shadows, stabbing the rival sister in the back while the one still standing smiled at the other and spoke practiced words of triumph.

But already they were losing steam, their angers cooling, their eyes blinking back the intensity of their emotions, once more allowing rational thoughts to enter their minds.

As Trevor watched, a thought occurred to him for the first time: what conclusion would the sisters make if the floor failed to give way and they lived? When the assassin failed to appear, who would they look for? Their anger, perhaps united, might turn against him. If they now stopped what they were doing and began to communicate, to compare notes, they would both surely come to realize Trevor had been lying to them both, playing them for fools.

The smile began to fade from Trevor’s lips as he watched the sisters growing tired.

They pulled away from each other and sat back, panting, staring into the wild eyes of the other.

Trevor could hear the floor groaning, ancient wood protesting beneath the weight of the sisters, but holding strong. What could he do? As soon as the sisters began to catch their breaths, they’d begin to talk. He couldn’t allow that to happen.

He looked around, seeking something heavy to throw—a rusty chunk of metal, a piece of stone ornamentation crumbled from the architecture, anything—but all that surrounded him were the rafters and dust. He could climb down, but his position was precarious and there wasn’t time. All he could do was watch.

“You...bitch…” Shelley panted. “Where is...assassin…”

“Assassin?” Cameron replied.

The sisters looked at each other, they looked long and hard and something passed between them. The less-intelligent might have read it as some sort of sibling telepathy, but Trevor knew it for what it was: a dawning realization they shared.

Trevor watched in horror as slowly Cameron crawled to her sister, but instead of striking Shelley, she embraced her. They hugged each other.

From his shadowy perch, Trevor wrung his hands. His heart was beating quickly, his face hot. He couldn’t think what he should do, not yet. He was filled with a shameful fear.