Shadow Call

by Michael Miller

  Nev and Devrak stood before the long table of uniformed men, with a scattering of witnesses filling the benches behind them. Both had washed and changed as well, Devrak into a blue suit like so many others here, and Nev into something similar, but with a silver sash overlaying the top, a black cape draped over one shoulder, and a thin circlet on his brow. It was probably the best they could do for kingly attire. He didn’t turn; he hadn’t heard me enter.

  General Talia left me in the aisle between benches to go take her place up front. Not every seat was filled at the table, so her absence hadn’t been glaringly obvious. I wondered who was missing from the group, and why.

  Solara was probably the why.

  I was relieved to spot Arjan and Basra on the benches toward the back, so I didn’t have to venture any farther into the room. Arjan had worn his same clothes, likely in a stubborn statement, but Basra…Basra was in a sleek dress, with eyes and lips lined in a lush reddish purple, brown crest of hair in a sleek wave along one side of her face. She was definitely female at the moment.

  I sat next to her and leaned over self-consciously, keeping my voice quiet. “You got to dress up too?” Not that I was surprised; she seemed reluctant to pass up the opportunity during a formal occasion. “Who loaned you that?”

  Her dress was significantly fancier than mine, a sleeveless silky green sheath that showed off her coppery shoulders, now strong and squared instead of in their usual indifferent slouch.

  “Excuse me,” Basra whispered in mock offense, “this is mine.”

  She must have had it in her bag or sent for it from the Kaitan. Of course she would have a gown, or maybe fifty, on board. I’d seen Basra in a dress more often than the crew saw me in one. Arjan stifled a smile, unselfconsciously seated with his thigh along hers, her hand clasped possessively in his lap.

  Again, I was happy for the improvement between them, but I had to swallow a twinge of jealousy as I looked up to watch the proceedings.

  It seemed they were just wrapping up. A man with silver-streaked dark hair leaned over an infopad, and his voice rang in the room, artificially amplified.

  “So we have an agreement, then, Your Majesty. We will fully back your claim against your younger sister, Solara Dracorte, based on the strong evidence provided that you did not commit regicide against the late King Thelarus and Queen Ysandrei, and that she in fact did, thus nullifying her own claim to the throne according to statute 311Z. We will also support granting Alaxak’s sovereignty, with the understanding that we will maintain strong political and economic ties.”

  He cleared his throat, and Nev bowed his head, looking anything but triumphant for some reason. My nervousness grew as the man continued:

  “And in return, Your Majesty will immediately complete the Dracorte Forging in a manner satisfactory to this panel. You will then swear to do everything in your power to end your sister’s unjust reign as soon as possible. And finally”—the words fell like a sword—“you will, with the utmost urgency and under our advisement, find the most advantageous match for a queen, preferably one that binds the Dracorte name to another royal family’s. With civil war upon us, now is not the time to be concerned about weakening bloodlines. It’s about strengthening our chances of survival.”

  It took me a second to process what he’d said under all the official language. Devrak put a hand on Nev’s back, as if pushing him forward.

  Nev nodded slowly, oblivious to the fact that my heart was shattering in the silence behind him.

  Both Basra and Arjan were casting sideways glances at me, but I didn’t look back at them, refusing to let my face show what I felt.

  I knew this was politics, but that didn’t ease the piercing sting in my chest, the ache like I couldn’t breathe. It didn’t calm the rising fury, at Nev, at myself. He should have spoken to me first in private, but I also shouldn’t have left myself vulnerable.

  We were a lost cause. This was the inevitable conclusion, and I should have seen it coming.

  But the man seemed to believe there was reason to doubt.

  “Do you agree that such a match should solidify and increase your standing in the systems against the usurper, Solara,” he pressed, “that we need the support of the other families to succeed, and that you will take our recommendations for a queen under strong consideration—Princess Xiaolan Daiyen being top among them? Do we have your binding word as King Nevarian Thelarus Axandar Rubion Dracorte?”

  Nev let out a deep breath that he seemed to have been holding. “You do. I swear it, by my blood and my throne, in my name and the Great Unifier’s.”

  Even though he was facing his generals and not me, he might as well have been speaking the truth that he’d been trying to communicate to me earlier, with his desperate kiss, his longing eyes, and his sliding grip. The word that was the last thing I’d wanted to hear, and so I’d been foolishly pretending that he hadn’t been saying it, like another hallucination:

  Good-bye.

  I slipped away from Arjan and Basra, leaving the room before Nev could turn around and see that I had been there at all.

  I sat up in bed, sweating. After all these weeks, it was the same thing that replayed in my dreams. Eton and the young guard grappling during our escape from the Dracorte citadel, just before Eton had taken off most of his skull with a single shot.

  I pinched just below my eyebrows, trying to wake up. I hadn’t even been the one to kill him, but my mind couldn’t let it go. He had been doing his job as best he could, thinking he was serving a good cause. Now he was gone. Witnessing his death had been the first time I’d grasped the true weight of the price that others would be paying for my choices. I’d been told such a thing my entire life, but all my intellectual understanding had evaporated when exposed to experience.

  I climbed out of my bed, which, after the Kaitan, was so comfortable I found myself having trouble sleeping in it, and padded across the thick carpet to the window that overlooked the Aaltos military complex. In the dark, the pulsing veins of flight paths streamed between towers garrisoning thousands of troops, and in the distance, I could see the gouges in the earth that belonged to Irgath, the deepest canyon on Aaltos. In the night, they looked like black cracks. But they were many miles wide, and thousands of feet below the surface lay the valleys where agriculture was still the primary way of life, cradling a culture that had started after the Great Collapse had wiped out contact with civilization. The heavier gravity here made for sturdier stock, with regard to both crops and human populations, and so the people were prime targets for military recruiters.

  For the first time in my life, I wondered if they would be happier had they been left alone. Now, if we went to war, those families would send their children, children who would be just as eager to do their duty as the young guard in my dreams.

  Ever since leaving Luvos, I had lost all desire to be a ruler. What I was doing now felt like necessity, and returning here didn’t feel like coming home, but revisiting a graveyard of hopes and dreams that had belonged to a different person, a different life. The last time I had stood, viewing the traditional domains of my family, my father had stood behind me, encouraging me to give up Qole. Now I was facing a test. If I succeeded, I still had to give up Qole and take my people into a civil war.

  I glanced back at the bed with an irrational hope that I would see her there, her black hair sprawled across a pillow. A hope for a reality that I was supposed to abandon but couldn’t stop imagining.

  Instead, my black-and-gray combat suit had been laid out beside the bed. Dawn was touching the darkness, and it was time to get ready for my Forging.

  * * *

  Something about the woman inspecting me was unsettling, but I couldn’t place it.

  The top of her head just reached my shoulder, but she was built in the sturdy manner that indicated she was a native of Aaltos. All that was really visible as she examined my w
rists and waistband for any hidden items was a shock of white hair. Dressed in the plain khaki jumpsuit of the countless orderlies that inhabited military installations, she was missing any indication of rank on her shoulders.

  I had taken a mag-rail from headquarters that had dropped me steadily under the surface of the planet. Now we were in a cavernous stone space. An ancient light fixture in the ceiling illuminated a set of doors at the opposite end. Heavy, tall, and bound with iron, they were relics of another age. After the Great Collapse, before the Belarius Drive connected planets, the humans on Aaltos had built a latticework of trails and tunnels to reach up from the deep canyons, especially Irgath, to facilitate trade and the transport of food. This would have been one of the largest of those.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her, wondering why she had no identifiers.

  “Not important,” she said dismissively, patting down my torso.

  She was checking me for illicit items that might give me an edge in the challenges ahead, which I found vaguely amusing. “I’m not sure what you think you’ll find. Hard to prepare when I don’t know what I’ll face.”

  “Like life, you mean?” She grinned and stepped back, wiping her hands in a show of being finished. She didn’t seem nearly as old as her hair would suggest, her open face lined more by weather than age. “Just doing my job.”

  I nodded. “Far be it from me to stop anyone from doing that.”

  “No? Weren’t the guards you killed doing theirs?”

  The question took me off balance. I had faced variants of it multiple times, but now that the trial was complete, I had assumed subordinates would return to treating me with the kind of respect and deference afforded to royalty.

  Apparently not.

  “I gave the guards a choice to abandon their duty in favor of what they knew to be right.”

  “Are you fighting Solara out of a sense of duty or rightness now?”

  I almost ignored the question and told her to be about her business, but exhaustion gnawed at my bones…and fear. I hated admitting I was afraid in halls that should belong to me, but so much depended on me that my fear, at least, was impossible to ignore.

  Admitting it helped me bite back the words. If I was afraid, in a position of privilege even now, then how would someone feel who had to follow a potentially unstable leader?

  “Both. It’s my duty, and citizens’ rights are being trampled, so it’s right to defend them,” I explained. “Given the context, my actions are both morally and lawfully grounded.”

  “True.” The orderly tilted her head, bright amber eyes on mine. “But citizens’ rights are trampled every day and no one bothers to do anything. Tell me the real reason you fought for Arjan then, and Alaxak now.”

  Everyone kept questioning my motives, as though I had secrets within secrets. A flash of irritation shot through me. Pretty sure I have fewer secrets than anyone I know. She wanted plain talk? Fine.

  “It’s simple. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I hadn’t taken action.”

  “I see.” She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together, examining a nonexistent mote between them. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a moral narcissist.”

  “Excuse me?” I narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, do you think of morality in terms of how it makes you feel, or how the consequences of your actions affect others?”

  Not only had my own father put that question to me back in Dracorva, I had asked myself the same many times, going over it in my head so often it felt like I was a planet locked in an eternal orbit, the end to which would only be eventual destruction. Father had often mentioned the greater good, but what was the greater good? Stability of the system? Saving as many lives as possible? Or was it sacrificing either stability or lives—or both?—in a way that would benefit others later? Qole, the only person to whom I might have spoken about it, had no doubt in her mind that breaking Arjan out of the citadel had been the right thing to do, and that challenging Solara now was, too. At least, I assumed so. It wasn’t that I doubted our actions myself, but for some reason, that surety gave me little peace lately.

  In the end, it all made me very weary. I could debate morality with the best of them, but I couldn’t summon the enthusiasm now. So I shook my head.

  “I do what I can, when I can. But if I see an injustice that my family caused, then I should be the one who rights it. How do you think I should have acted?” I paused. Maybe someone as outspoken as she was would have something new to say. “What would you have done?”

  “Doesn’t matter, I wasn’t there. And we make our choices alone.” She shrugged and gave me the circular benediction of a priest of the Unifier. “I pronounce you clean and ready for the Forging. I’ll open the door.”

  The motion pulled back the sleeve on her jacket, and the gold bracelet with the three interlocking circles symbolizing the Unifier flashed on her arm.

  My eyes widened. “You’re a priestess?” As far as I knew, there weren’t any priestesses in the branch of the Unifier’s Faith practiced in the Dracorte system; female clergy members weren’t forbidden, exactly, but it wasn’t accepted. Other families and systems had other practices, which was cause for endless debate and rancor.

  She walked to the control panel embedded by the door and held her hand up to it for a moment, and something large inside the stone walls shifted. “I am. My position has existed for as long as people have been on Aaltos. I am here to provide a different point of view on the Forging.”

  The Forging had already begun, apparently. This little exercise was part of it.

  “And what does the Church think of my actions?” I had wanted to ask the question since leaving Luvos.

  “I don’t speak for the Church, Prince, any more than you speak for your people,” the priestess said, not unkindly, as though disabusing a child of a favorite notion. “I do know we are unified in self-sacrifice, not sacrificing one another. And as for politics”—she snorted—“pah, what business is that of the Church?”

  “The morality of government is of paramount importance,” I countered, somewhat shocked by her words.

  She laughed outright. “Government is the sum of individuals, and you can’t legislate yourself into being a good person, I’m afraid.”

  I had hoped for something that would fortify me for whatever lay ahead, or let me cast away any doubts in setting aside the old in favor of the new. Her answer left me feeling as muddled as before.

  I stepped for the door. As I advanced, it rose, until I stood at the entrance, trying to discern the way ahead. Beyond it, there was no light, no visible path.

  I looked at the priestess and raised my eyebrow. “Any tips?”

  “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Worth a shot.” I shrugged and stepped into the darkness beyond. The door behind me closed, and the floor began to drop.

  * * *

  In the dark, the descent felt eternal, so long that apprehension turned to boredom. If I hadn’t been used to working on the Kaitan, I would have stumbled from surprise when the motion finally stopped and a door groaned open in front of me.

  I stepped out onto a bed of scree. It dipped into a rolling valley, the shadows startling with cold, the distant sunlight both inviting and blinding. A valley stretched away for several klicks before rising again, the trees giving way to grass, then back to trees that did their best to scale cliffs stretching higher than imagination permitted. There was a patchwork of farmland in the center of the valley, split by a shining ribbon of a river that encircled a tiny walled village. This was clearly Irgath, home to a way of life far removed from the concerns of royals. The only noise was the distant roar of wind in the cliffs above.

  Arranged in a semicircle directly in front of me were five people in black suits identical to mine. I stopped, regarding them warily. It seemed unlike
ly that I would be sent here to make friends.

  They ignored me, hunched around an infopad, arguing. I approached cautiously, still roundly ignored.

  “If we can get to a communications array, we can call in a fleet.” A woman with a face like a collection of knives was speaking.

  A much-too-handsome man shook his head. “There’s no time. There’s a shuttle in the village. I say we take that, use it to infiltrate the docks.”

  I cleared my throat. “Ahem. What, exactly, seems to be going on?”

  I received a series of impatient looks. “You’re late,” Tall, Dark, and Handsome said testily.

  “Am I?” Several things had become immediately clear: we were expected to fulfill a mission, there was no designated leader, and he clearly was hoping to receive that designation. I left the posturing to him. “Apologies, I took a few moments to discuss philosophy.”

  As he processed this, I glanced at the infopad. Its contents made me blink. It showed a readout of Aaltos construction docks. But there were no construction docks in orbit above Aaltos, and the ones in the readout looked exactly like those on Valtai. Solara’s new fleet.

  “I take it we’re supposed to find a way to sabotage that operation,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could muster. I was unsettled to see so close an approximation of our actual battle plans.

  “We have a small window of time to neutralize it.” The woman sketched out a few lines, showing where we were. “How is up to us.”

  Ground-to-vacuum operations weren’t unusual but were typically undertaken with a great deal more equipment than we had. Handsome’s plan sounded like the most expeditious.

  “So, shuttle, orbit, success,” I said, unable to keep the sarcasm at bay. “No possible complications.”