The Lost King (41 page)

Dion didn't need to
drink liquor. He was tasting a stronger, more addicting wine—power.
He breathed it in and sucked it up. He stood there a long time,
saying nothing, meeting the eyes, drawing them to him, feeding off
them. It was exhilarating, like the first time he flew the Scimitar.

The spark of
divinity—flame or devouring fire.

Without saying a word,
Dion turned and left the bar. Marcus glanced at the bartender and
shrugged.

"Kids!"

The ship's bells chimed
the watches and three days came to an end at last.

Derek Sagan emerged
from the chapel. He'd spent the entire time in the tiny altar room.
Nothing but water had passed his lips, and that sparingly. He'd slept
on the bare, chill metal of the deck. He was gaunt and grim and
looked as if he'd fought all the legions of heaven.

He bathed and broke his
fast. Putting on his armor and a pair of gauntlets—hiding the
old scars and the new—he concealed his ravaged face behind the
cold metal of his helmet and unsealed the door.

"Send for your
captain," he ordered the man standing guard-duty outside.

The captain entered,
fist over his heart.

"
Ave atque
vale
, my lord." ["Hail and be well." Ancient
Roman salute.]

"And to you,
Captain." Sagan returned the salute. "You bring a message."

"I do, my lord."
The captain paused. He did not understand what he was saying—it
was in an archaic language. He had committed it to memory
phonetically and he needed to be certain in his mind he had it
absolutely correct.

"The blood-dimmed
tide is loosed.'"

Actually it came across
more as "ze blud-dmmmmd tid iz luuzed" but Sagan understood
the garbled words of the line from Yeats's poem
The Second Coming
.
He knew who had sent it; he knew what it meant.

"Satisfactory,
Captain. When it is 2300 hours, bring Lady Maigrey and the boy, Dion,
to my chambers. Request Admiral Aks to report to me now."

"Yes, my lord."

The captain left upon
his assignment. Derek Sagan poured himself a glass of water and
raised it in salute to the door of the chapel.

"I am well on my
way to victory. Any further argument?"

Alone in her room,
Maigrey finished
Little Dorrit
:

They went quietly down
into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed
along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the
arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made
their usual uproar.

In vain man's
expectations;

God brings the
unthought to be,

As here we see.

Euripedes,
The
Bacchae

Maigrey's guards
escorted her to the double doors decorated with the phoenix rising
from the flames that guarded the chambers of the Warlord. The
centurion standing outside the doors spoke a few words into a
commlink set into the wall, and Maigrey heard the harsh answer, "Let
her enter."

The guard started to
push open the door, but Maigrey halted him. "Wait," she
murmured. She smoothed the folds of indigo blue velvet, adjusted the
cowl over her hair. The centurion would think, no doubt, that she was
preparing herself to be ushered into the presence of the lord.
Maigrey wasn't; she was stalling. She didn't want to enter his room,
his private chambers, his sanctum. It would be
him
. All
him
,
all memories, and she didn't think she could bear it.

But what am I going to
do? she thought. Stand here in the corridor, looking like an idiot?
If I don't walk in there, he's beaten me. How do I expect to defeat
him, destroy him if I can't summon the courage to walk into his
bedroom?

Lifting her chin,
disguising her fear beneath an imperious air, she stepped toward the
door, and the guard—caught by surprise at her sudden
movement—hastened to open it for her.

I would know this room
anywhere, Maigrey reflected. If I were set down upon a strange world
and entered these chambers, I would know them for his.

There were the same
familiar objects, objects she had forgotten, yet if they'd been
missing she would have noted their absence. The collection of Roman
artifacts—armor, swords and daggers, shields. An ancient
helmet, a broken sandal worn by some long-dead plebeian, a statue of
Apollo Loxias, the god of the longsight. There were no new additions
to his collection, which Maigrey found odd and foreboding. He paid
homage to his past, but was not bringing it into his present ... or
his future.

The furnishings were
more numerous and more luxurious than he'd been able to afford when
she'd known him. But they were in the same style, arranged in the
same way with taste and simplicity. Had Maigrey been blind, she could
have walked around this room without hesitation. She knew where
everything was; everything was in its place. She could have sat down
in a chair and wept.

Instead, she clasped
her ice-cold hands together and took a step forward. A robed figure
emerged from behind a plain black screen.

"You kept . . .
that?" Maigrey stared.

Sagan was dressed in
black robes, his father's robes. His head was bare; the cowl rested
on his shoulders. He wore his long black hair loose; it fell in
heavy, gray-streaked waves to his shoulders, curling slightly at the
ends. He looked older, more haggard without the strong shielding of
the armor. Maigrey glanced at the dark, cold eyes, then looked
involuntarily at his wrist, knowing what she would see and seeing it,
she swiftly averted her gaze. The sight of the new scar unnerved her.
He was still practicing his faith. Somehow, she had presumed that
following the revolution, he would have renounced it, as he had
renounced everything else he had once believed in. The past,
apparently,
was
intruding upon the future.

"Come this way, my
lady."

With an abrupt,
commanding gesture, Sagan beckoned her around behind the screen.

Drawing a deep breath,
Maigrey followed him. The screen hid from view a large open area.
This part of the chamber had been cleared of all furniture except a
long metal table covered with a black cloth marked at each corner by
a silver eight-pointed star. Another black cloth shrouded several
objects in the table's center. Tall, thick, beeswax candles stood in
silver candle holders at either end. Lifting the black cloth, Sagan
allowed Maigrey to see the objects beneath it.

"Is it all
correct, my lady? Is it as you remember?"

Yes, it is as I
remember. Their own investiture came back to her clearly. The two of
them, because of the mind-link, had gone through the ordeal together.
The voice of the priest, Sagan's father, had reverberated around her,
around the room. It had been the first time he'd spoken since he took
the vow of silence—an act of penitence for his great sin. It
was to be the last time anyone would ever hear him speak:

Two together must
walk the paths of darkness before they reach the light.

Maigrey pressed her
hand over her mouth. She couldn't read Sagan's thoughts; they were
heavily shielded, and she hoped he couldn't read hers. Not that it
mattered; he could undoubtedly see the pain on her face.

"My lady?"

His impatient voice
came from a great distance, through a thick and blinding mist.

"Yes, it's all
correct."

She tried to say the
words but the mist was too thick, robbing her of breath, of strength,
of sanity. It was billowing, blinding, suffocating, and she was
sinking beneath it when she felt him near her, felt his hand upon her
arm, steadying her.

His voice was in her
ear, his breath warm and moist on her skin. "When this rite is
ended, so is your usefulness to me. You will not know when, for I
will not give you opportunity to thwart me, but sometime soon, rest
assured, my lady, I will come for you."

Maigrey tensed; anger
and excitement and the need to keep her plans hidden from him burned
away the mists. She wasn't succeeding well. He gazed at her, amused.

"You're going to
fight me, aren't you, my lady?"

"You'd be
disappointed in me if I didn't, wouldn't you, my lord?"

Calm and composed
again, she glided away from his touch and saw a smile flicker across
the thin, stern lips.

You challenged me
deliberately!
She marveled. Neither spoke, except in their minds.
To give me back my courage! Yet you could kill me now, without a
moment's hesitation. You hate me that much. Or is it me? No, not me
but what I remind you of, what I am to you. Your past, our past. And
more than that—the future. A future that was bright and
glorious and full of promise. Now it's bitter and dark and stained
with blood. By erasing me, you erase all that and, with the boy, you
once again have youth and hope.

You were always a
romantic, my lady. You should have listened to the prophecy. There
was nothing in our future except darkness, betrayal, death. By
ridding myself of you, Maigrey, I rid myself of the one person who
possesses the power and the understanding necessary to stop me. It is
that simple.

That simple? Then
why the doubt, why the confusion? I see your mind, my lord, and your
purpose is not clear. Something clouds it, casts a shadow over it—

Sagan turned from her
abruptly. The chain of thought severed, leaving behind a bleak
emptiness. Maigrey remembered the sensation. It had always occurred
when they broke the close mental contact between them. Even if they
had been miles and miles apart, they both felt as if a chill wind
were roaring through the hollow tunnel of their minds. Each was
forced to concentrate a moment, force each one's own soul to move
back in to fill the void.

This had not happened
to them since the mind-link had been reforged. It only indicated how
strong the link had grown—despite themselves.

"My lady?" He
wondered if she was ready.

"My lord." As
ready as she'd ever be.

The clock's digital
readout lacked a few minutes of 2300. Dion sat nervously in a chair,
staring at the computer chess game he'd started days ago and never
gone beyond three moves. When the knock came at his door—the
knock he'd been expecting ever since he'd received Sagan's message—
Dion didn't move but stared at the screen, brow furrowed in
concentration as if he had nothing on his mind except his gambit.

The knock was not
repeated. The hatch slid open; Sagan's centurions had no intention of
bringing their charge late.

"It's time."

The centurion who spoke
was Marcus. Dion would have greeted him by name, but the soldier's
face was stern, forbidding any attempt at familiarity.

His mouth dry, his
hands wet, the young man rose to his feet, nearly overturning the
chair in his nervousness. It had been a foolish thing to do, he
realized—sitting there for over two hours speculating,
guessing, imagining, trying to recall if Platus had ever dropped one
tiny hint about this ritual. Now I'm stretched taut as a string on
Platus's old harp. If someone touches me the wrong way, I'll snap.

Marcus eyed him with
cool curiosity. Dion did not know, but the centurions had themselves
been speculating what the Warlord wanted with the young man at this
hour of the night. Everyone on board ship knew who Dion was, by now.
They knew he was the heir to a throne stained in blood. They knew he
was wanted by the President and Congress. They knew—or thought
they did—that he might very well face execution unless he
renounced his birthright. Perhaps Lord Sagan was going to discuss
that issue with the boy right now. A "discussion" with the
Warlord was rarely pleasant—he could make a man renounce the
fact that he was a man at all. It was even money among the crew
that—when they saw this young man again—Dion would be
lucky to remember his name, much less the fact that he was king.

The ride up the
Warlord's private elevator was accomplished in silence broken only by
the soft hissing of life-support and the almost inaudible whoosh of
the hydraulics. The centurions escorted Dion to the golden double
doors decorated with a blazing phoenix and turned, silently, to leave
him.

"But—what?"
Dion felt helpless, paralyzed. He could barely force words from his
parched throat.

"You are to enter
alone," Marcus said, from the shadows. "Go ahead. The door
will open. You are expected."

Dion heard the words as
ominous, whether the man intended them to be or not. He hesitated and
the thought came into his mind that he could turn and run and no one
would stop him. And he realized, at the same moment, that this was
Part I of the test. Raising a shaking hand, he pushed on the door and
it slid silently open.

Dion stepped forward
and was almost immediately blind, swallowed up by darkness. The door
shut behind him. He held still, afraid to move until he could see,
not wanting to impair his dignity by bumping into something.
Listening, he heard a soft sigh and the rustle of smooth cloth and he
knew Maigrey was here. She did not wear the starjewel. Perhaps its
light was considered intrusive.

Within the thick
blackness, a darker, heavier shape moved—the Warlord. "Stretch
out your hand."

Dion did so,
hesitantly.

"You feel the
cloth at your fingertips?"

Groping, Dion found
it—some sort of coarsely woven fabric.

"Strip off your
clothes, drape that over your body."

Flushing in
embarrassment, despite the darkness, Dion did as he was commanded,
struggling with folds of the fabric, trying to figure out how it was
worn. At last he found an opening he figured was for his head. He
slipped it on and the crude robe fell over his shoulders and touched
the floor. It left his arms bare and he shivered in the room's icy
chill. The fabric was like rope. It itched and, when he moved,
scratched irritably against his skin.