The Empress

by S. J. Kincaid

  And now I stared at Tyrus, feeling like I was gazing at him from another world as Fustian nan Domitrian lay on his stomach on the floor at his feet, in a pathetic display of tears. He’d literally been kicking and screaming when he was dragged in here.

  “Fustian,” Tyrus said, rolling his eyes up toward the ceiling, “I don’t know just how much of this is affected and how much is real emotion. You are a vicar and you are on hand. Tell me now if I can use you or if you should simply join the others.”

  The tears stopped at once. Fustian visibly trembled.

  “I could use a vicar at my side tonight. I am going to broadcast a gala to reassure the Empire that all is well.” He steepled his hands. “I will speak, and I will require words by the Interdict.”

  Fustian’s mouth wobbled. “But . . . the Interdict . . .”

  “Is not dead, nor is the Sacred City destroyed. Who will say otherwise?”

  “But . . .” Slowly Fustian connected the words. The despicable opportunist in him overrode the holy man. He positioned himself on his knees, and oh—how his face burned with eagerness. “There . . . there is not an Interdict here. Unless . . .”

  “Unless what, Vicar?” Tyrus drew it out, wanting him to ask for it.

  “Does Your Supremacy mean . . . Do you mean . . .” He was searching Tyrus’s face, desperate for him to end the suspense. “Do you mean to appoint . . . someone?”

  “The Interdict is the supreme leader of the faith. The words of the Interdict are those of the Living Cosmos, and they are to be obeyed by all. The Interdict is dead—but for all intents and purposes, I think there is an Interdict.”

  “I don’t understand. . . .”

  “Fustian.” Tyrus rose to his feet, eyes like ice. “Who do you think is your Interdict?”

  That was the moment the vicar caught on. And he was aghast, which made Tyrus smile in a distinctly predatory way. He absolutely despised this man and never needed to conceal it again. Fustian was too terrified to say anything but, “You. It is you, Your Supremacy.”

  “That’s right.” He stepped over to Fustian, took his face in his hands. “And who will move his lips to the true Interdict’s words and issue his decrees, and in turn receive all the wealth, reverence, and honors due to that Interdict?”

  “I—I will do so. I will gladly speak and decree as my gracious Emperor commands.”

  “Yes, I thought you would agree to it. You are a good little puppet. I have seen that again and again, and I will make you fat with honors. . . .” He dropped his voice to a lethal whisper only I could hear. “And I will enjoy watching you die if you give me cause to regret choosing you.”

  “Thank you. I thank you, I thank you. . . .” He kissed Tyrus’s feet. As Pasus had forced Tyrus to do before him in the Great Heliosphere. Tyrus watched Fustian with bare contempt for a lingering moment, before shoving his face away with his heel.

  There was no more disdainful gesture, but Fustian burbled his thanks for it. And I couldn’t bear another moment of this sight, of any of this. This was power. Naked and unvarnished authority in its purest form. It was revolting.

  I was halfway down the corridor where I’d been clamped to the wall and forced to watch Tyrus’s downfall, when a voice rippled from the speaker.

  “My love. No good-bye?”

  My heart raced wildly. I twisted about, and the surveillance cameras were trained on me. Helios devoured! His eyes were looking through those, weren’t they?

  “Do you see me?” I said.

  “I do.”

  A low chuckle from the speaker on the wall. “I’m not even talking, just thinking this. You know—I have the right mind for this. All one needs is focus, self-control. . . . Grandmother was born with the mind for this. Not like my uncle. How frustrating for her.”

  His uncle had never been able to do this. Randevald had had no self-discipline, no control over his own thoughts, his mind, so he’d been clumsy with the machines. He’d tried to kill us once. He deployed a missile, trying to frame it as a freak accident that ruptured a sky dome in the Alexandria. He’d blocked the oxygen from the repressurization closet. That was his best attempt.

  Tyrus would never have failed. His mind was a blade honed diamond sharp.

  He never will fail again, I thought with a cold shiver. He will gain more and more control, and in the future, any he wishes dead will die when he chooses.

  “I must go rest. Stop watching me,” I said. Then, “Please.”

  The security cameras sank down.

  “Don’t let me detain you. Sweet dreams, my love.”

  • • •

  I wasn’t sure I’d ever fall asleep again. The only thing I thought to do was look in on the one Grande whose welfare I had the slightest interest in. Gladdic had been inoculated before the Lumina tragedy, but that was years ago, and I wasn’t certain whether it had protected him from today’s Resolvent Mist.

  Gladdic’s last location had been on the Socrates, a smaller starship where the doddering old Senator von Eustace often held colloquiums, gatherings of intellectually-minded Grandiloquy and Excess. They were open to anyone, apolitical and philosophical in nature. The only requirement was a commitment to dispassionate, emotionally detached reason while in the space, and total sobriety. The refusal to allow intoxicants rendered the colloquiums quite unpopular. Eustace’s eccentricities did not help. He never used false-youth and enjoyed mocking his contemporaries who did. He was fond of critiquing power but refused any opportunities to advance himself—even when Tyrus tried luring him onto the Privy Council.

  Today’s colloquium had likely been intended as a viewing of my Ritual of Penance, followed by a discussion of its implications. The holographic projection ring in the center of the chamber still displayed the Great Heliosphere’s interior, now emptied out but for a pair of fallen Excess.

  Many of the potential debaters were dead on the floor.

  Gladdic sat at one of the great round tables, arms hugging over his body. He was just sitting there so still, alone at the table, he seemed as dead as the corpses about him. My gaze roved around the chamber, a low priority for service bots, so bodies were still sprawled about where they’d tumbled out of their chairs. There were plates of food, half-eaten, without corresponding diners to go with them, so there must have been more who were spared and fled.

  No sight of the old Senator von Eustace.

  “Gladdic,” I said.

  He just stared at the table. Two seats over, a man had vomited blood over the cloth before slumping over in his meal. Across from Gladdic, a woman’s leg jutted into the air from where she’d tumbled back in her seat.

  “Gladdic.” I seized his shoulder, clamped my hand down, shook him.

  Nothing. I raised my hand to slap him lightly, then thought the better of it when he abruptly spoke. “Nemesis.”

  His voice was calm. Eerily so.

  “What is it, Gladdic?”

  “Is . . . is this real life?”

  He’d seen this happen on Lumina. The realization struck me, and I cast a gaze about to take in the full horror of what he’d just witnessed. He’d been on Lumina and now, once again, it had happened. He must have had nightmares. Over and over, and here it was happening again.

  “This is all real,” I told him.

  And the words I spoke settled into my own conscious mind. That’s when I finally broke out of the numbed stupor of shock and looked around with clear eyes. Really looked at what Tyrus had done. There were no windows in here, so I couldn’t see the malignant space now devouring the six-star system, but I felt it. It crackled in my awareness, that thing, that festering sore on the universe that Tyrus had devoted himself to ending. That he’d just created. He’d planned this all in advance, prepared it as soon as I resurfaced, knowing the cost it would exact. It must have required time and care and effort. He’d known just how much destruction he would wreak and he did it anyway with absolutely no pity.

  That’s not Tyrus.

  And I knew it in my h
eart, in my soul. It clutched my throat in a terrible hand, but I couldn’t ignore the truth. How cruel the hopes had been, when he’d declared he loved me still in the Solarbliette. When he told me he’d freed himself of the Venalox—and he had. He’d done it.

  Just not in time. He never saved himself.

  My hands curled into fists. I knew just what I had to do.

  “I have a way out of here,” I said to Gladdic. “I’ll help you leave.”

  He dragged his sluggish gaze up to mine. “You do?”

  “There’s a transponder frequency in my possession. It will put you in contact with someone with a ship who can save you. You can escape. I need something from you in return. Can you get it for me? I need thermite.”

  He stared at me.

  I checked the pockets of the dead until I found a discreet-sheet, and jotted down Neveni’s transponder frequency. He gazed at it dully.

  “Contact this ship. Get out of here. But first, find me thermite.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” he said.

  “It’s a substance that can destroy a machine.” That was all I knew. “Please. This is more important than you know. Ask someone. You must have wealth. Pay someone. I have nothing else to offer, but I can’t get this myself. . . .”

  “Please. I don’t . . . Nemesis, right now, I just . . . I can’t deal with this. I can’t.”

  “For once in your life,” I snapped at him, “just one time, do not be a pathetic weakling, Gladdic! This is important!”

  A choked noise. Nova blast me, he was about to cry.

  He was so useless! I ripped back from him, ready to tear something apart. I couldn’t even enjoy insulting Gladdic. I just looked around and thought of what it would be like, growing up a sensitive person amid the Grandiloquy. His father threw him away for power, knowing he was likely to be executed. Then his father was murdered by an Emperor who went on to terrorize him, trap him, and force Venalox on him; and now after all that, he had witnessed this Resolvent Mist kill everyone around him for the second time. I’d been born with a core of hard diamond and struggled to soften, just in the slightest. . . . But Gladdic was yielding and gentle and weak, thrust into a universe shaped by those more like me.

  I rubbed my palms over my eyes. At times like now, I wished I had not learned to empathize with others. It was so burdensome.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to him.

  Then I walked back over to him, and I did something I’d been trying very hard to avoid. I put my arms around him in a gesture of comfort.

  The hug made him tense, and then he began to shake.

  “There, there,” I said. My voice was too clipped to get the intonation right, but I’d tried. His body softened, accepting the emrace.

  I pulled away and Gladdic still gazed at me in an entreating, lost way. He would not help me fix this. It would all be my task. I left him, my thoughts still swirling over that mysterious substance. Thermite. It would destroy that scepter and remove that hideous power from hands I could no longer trust with it.

  It would break Tyrus’s hold over this place forever. He would be enraged over the betrayal, yet the true betrayal would be to do anything else.

  In my heart, I knew something with total certainty. The Tyrus who’d asked me to be his wife that day on the Alexandria, that boy who stood on the sky with me in his library . . . he would have been horrified to see the future and know it led here.

  He would have died sooner than become a tyrant.

  So I would stop him.

  47

  WORD spread rapidly of Senator von Pasus’s dreadful attempt at a coup—a public narrative of his actions this time. And the very next day, Tyrus organized a great spectacle to demonstrate unity in the face of the devastation Pasus had wrought upon the six-star system of the Domitrians.

  He also did it to spread the myth that the Interdict was alive. Later in the ball dome—with a view of the writhing white of malignant space—those who were now a part of the new order hastily donned their finery. I endured the attentions of Shaezar with bewilderment.

  I couldn’t think of frivolity. Not now. Not with the task I’d set myself, the one I had no means of fulfilling yet: securing thermite, destroying the scepter, and saving Tyrus from himself. Tyrus met me in our viewing box, his hair thicker than usual in the absence of gravity. He drew me into my seat, then steered down into his own.

  “You and I will go out there. Fustian will frame what happened yesterday,” Tyrus murmured, “and I’ll speak to address the rumors, to reassure everyone. You need only appear at my side—the new Empress. Then our part is done.”

  Good. I couldn’t think to do anything else tonight.

  He added, “I mean to make it very explicit to everyone just how events must proceed from here. People need to have expectations in place early.”

  Then, applause. I looked down to see Fustian gliding out in the finery of the Interdict. . . . And wearing a close approximation of Orthanion’s face. The sight froze me, for how obscene it was to realize he’d been altered to wear the guise of a man who’d died. A man so much better than he ever could be. The starlit robes rippling about him looked all wrong with the bright glare of malignant space. Tyrus, at my side, closed his eyes a moment. . . . And the optics of the windows shifted to dim the view so Fustian could seem to glow with starlight, as intended.

  Fustian nan Domitrian’s voice had more of a rasp, but still did not quite sound like the real Orthanion’s as he said: “As you know, I have spent many centuries dwelling in the Sacred City.”

  My gaze slashed to Tyrus. Tyrus was focusing intently on Fustian, and I wondered if he’d told him beforehand what to say, or if he was thinking it to him somehow now. Perhaps Fustian had a device in his ear with words being piped to him.

  Tyrus had chosen his puppet well. Too cowardly to use the live feed to defy him, versed in all the lingo and mannerisms, and vain enough to exult in the attention.

  “And tonight, in the wake of this great atrocity wrought by the heathen Senator von Pasus, it is more important than ever that we reaffirm our faith in the Living Cosmos. And our love and reverence for our Emperor.”

  That was the cue.

  Tyrus took my hand, and we propelled ourselves out of the box and into the ball dome. The rippling silver of my gown floated about me, but something was wrong with the steering rings. I tried to flex them, to adjust my momentum. . . .

  They weren’t in my control.

  Tyrus was controlling them.

  So small a thing. So small, and he was probably doing it without conscious thought . . . but my determination to destroy that scepter burned brighter still. I couldn’t tolerate this.

  Tyrus spoke the words as though he’d rehearsed them in his mind for years, a denunciation of the Senator von Pasus who had seized power—and a mixture of some truths and some lies of Pasus’s doings over the years.

  “But now this enemy of our galaxy has been torn down, and we will come back from the tragedies of yesterday,” Tyrus pledged. “His co-conspirators are already being identified and dealt with. We will be avenged on all who sought to take this Empire from its people.”

  And a vast swirl of security, medical, and service bots zipped into the dome with us, a whirlpool of them, a display of might and spectacle that set the crowd roaring. Then Tyrus turned to me amid the gleaming vortex and took my waist. He pulled me into a kiss, and my eyes were open and . . . and so were his. . . . Until a subtle pressure of his hands, the insistence of his lips parted mine, and abruptly the encircling bots soared in all directions, and Tyrus and I spun upward in the chamber back to the box.

  Now, a performance. I couldn’t look at him without pain in my heart. So I tried to focus on the feathered dancers gliding onto the floor. The first threads of music from the Harmonids rose in the air. . . .

  And then familiarity struck me.

  I sat up straight and threw an incredulous look at Tyrus as the King’s Immolate began. “You banned this. You yourself banned
it.”

  “I was overhasty,” he said, threading his fingers together. “I overlooked the symbolic importance of the performance. It will send the proper message.”

  “You want all to see that you are just another Domitrian.”

  “I want them all to see that I must be obeyed.” And when he looked at me, there was something that made me wonder—was that aimed at me?

  The trained birds soared out, followed by the performance’s Immolate. . . .

  All seemed to go quiet about me. For I knew this Immolate. And I knew why Tyrus had been looking at me in quiet expectation, and I knew why he’d spoken of this sending the right message.

  Gladdic von Aton.

  Tyrus told me, “I mean to make this very clear to you: I miss nothing, Nemesis. Do not conspire against me again.”

  48

  I WAS out of my seat, but the lack of gravity nearly sent me hurtling upward. My hand flew to the ceiling of the box to anchor me in place. The entire rest of the universe seemed to be teetering.

  “Sit back down,” said Tyrus.

  “I will not,” I said furiously. “You are going to kill him.”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “You can’t do this.”

  “I disagree. Why thermite?”

  I didn’t speak.

  “Gladdic looked it up after your conversation. Strange inquiry. I noticed. Then I sifted through all the surveillance of his recent hours and saw what put that word into his vocabulary. Tell me, do you know what thermite is? I recall mentioning it to you—in a specific context. And how did you intend to get the scepter? Chop off my arm?”

  “I . . . Tyrus, no . . .”

  “It’s not there anymore. It’s tiny but it felt rather like a long metal splinter. I had it taken out.” He pulled out a case for a vapor rod, but I drew in a sharp breath to see him extract the familiar sliver of metal. “You wished to destroy this scepter.”