She fell and twisted and grabbed for Nonna’s fallen knife so that when Salvatore tipped towards her, turning slow, she threw the knife at his left eye. She got him.
Bleeding, breathless and blinded, Salvatore was bent forward. With both feet she pushed up at his chin and snapped his neck. Then she rolled again, avoiding his fall.
Sex and archery and fencing wasn’t all the Bride had learned. She’d just never expected to use her lessons. Not here, not like this. She’d thought the dangers were elsewhere. But then she remembered, no one had expected the Executioner to get so close to home. So close to the crown.
She rose to her feet. The only person left alive to do so. Her chest heaved under the tight cloth. She tried to tear the binding free, but Nonna had done a good job of trapping her.
The comms unit on Nonna’s body buzzed once.
‘The ship is in Terra’s orbit. Tell the Bride.’
Lucia let out a stream of fluent invective. She knelt by Nonna’s fallen form, straightening her into a semblance of repose, pushing the dead men out of the way. Then she strode to the hangar pit, unerringly, past the grave dug for her would-be husband.
She’d see to it there’d be more graves dug before the evening’s end.
Adao stood, dressed not in his Executioner’s uniform.
Superstitiously, he’d tucked the pistol into his borrowed trousers, sourced from somewhere by 2-I-C Holder. Around him, his squadron stood fully armed and expectant.
They all watched the hangar door.
Lucia mumbled half-forgotten prayers from her childhood.
Above her, the ship hovered like a dark cloud. She ignored the stares and murmurs around her as she slipped forward to meet the old Queen.
Salvatore’s sword was in one hand, Nonna’s blade in the other.
‘That was a relatively rapid trip,’ Adao commented to Holder, on the other side of the Executioner’s squadron.
‘In the end, we happened upon the most direct route,’ Holder replied.
Adao grunted.
Seven years. Lucia wondered what that did to a man. She wondered what it had done to her.
The old Queen lay dying at her feet, spilling her blood against Lucia’s painted toes. Nonna’s knife was in her neck to the hilt.
The Queen’s guards stood with their weapons half-lowered. They looked at the Bride uncertainly. There were no rules for what to do once the Queen was dead. Especially when her murderer was the next most likely Queen.
‘Stay,’ Lucia told them softly, like she was commanding a pet.
‘But the new King hasn’t even landed,’ one guard stammered. ‘There hasn’t been a ceremony—’
Lucia glared. ‘I wasn’t prepared to wait.’
‘If you reach for your weapon,’ Adao told Holder, ‘my squadron will surely kill you.’
Holder tensed. ‘How did you know?’
‘I’m the Executioner. I always know.’
The ship adjusted to meet the landing tunnel.
‘It’s an antiquated system, this Executioner role. It’s cruel,’ Holder snapped. ‘My mother deserved better.’
‘I’m sure she did.’
‘We all deserve better.’
Adao smiled. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d really smiled. ‘Do we?’
There was a rumble and whoosh as the ship entered the dock, so loud Lucia thought the worst had happened. Someone must have blown up the landing pit. They’d all die.
She held her breath and counted the seconds. The landing gear emerged and the ship settled in like a vulture to its nest.
Holder died half-crouched, her gun still in her hand and a fierce, wrathful expression on her face.
Adao’s borrowed clothes held hot beads of her blood. He’d seen a lot of dying in his time, but this one struck him as sad.
On his other side, Captain Welles blinked away tears.
‘I’m so sorry,’ the Executioner told him.
‘Not your fault,’ Welles answered gruffly. ‘It’s a shame it won’t make any damn kind of difference to Central.’
‘You can’t kill a tradition by killing a man,’ Adao agreed. ‘Tell me, how did you both come to be on this ship?’
‘We were assigned randomly.’
‘Of course,’ the Executioner muttered. ‘And Holder, was she… your daughter?’
Welles nodded, like he could barely remember himself, it had all happened perhaps a lifetime ago. Then he reached for his gun.
Amidst the shouting of the security squadron it was unclear exactly who shot the Widower Welles.
The hatch opened and a ramp was pushed up to meet it.
The Queen’s guard took up formation around Lucia. She leaned around them and shouted, urging the landing crew forward. Urging them to enable the release of the Executioner.
Adao cursed all the systems of Central, the failed failsafes and ridiculous, disastrous randomness.
Below, he spotted the Bride in torn—why torn?—black cloths. Her face was marked with dust and paint, and she shone with sweat. There were lines around her eyes and mouth that he didn’t remember.
They suited her.
Lucia watched the security squadron sweep into view at the top of the ramp, faces stony and pale. Pale, that’s what she noticed. Pale, indoor faces. Pale like the colours of grief.
A figure took its place behind them. Was it Adao? She couldn’t quite make him out. She strained, leaning sideways, listening to the hiss of expectation around her.
Adao moved into the space in the middle of the squadron so that Terra was all but hidden by their shoulders.
They descended the ramp together and, one by one, they placed their feet on the ground.
Lucia noted, first, that he was dressed in soft fatigues. A soldier’s cast-off clothes a size or so too tight. He was overweight with thinning hair. He was older than she remembered, older than seven years should have allowed.
He walked like he thought he might break, descending the ramp with exaggerated care. Lucia looked past him, trying to be sure she hadn’t made a mistake, trying to find the young man she remembered. But there was something oh-so-slightly familiar in the posture of this stranger, the way he hung his shoulders in the foreign clothes.
She watched him put both feet firmly on the deck in front of her and take a deep, deep breath. Like he’d come up from the bottom of the ocean and needed to remind himself to breathe air again. He was jittering, a gun held in one slack, twitching hand.
The Executioner was freed as soon as his foot hit the ground.
‘Herewith, the role of Executioner will be filled by one called Li Min, from the world known as Diqui,’ intoned one of the security squadron.
Adao felt the relief rise like a tide. He stepped towards the dirtied Bride.
She discovered his name on her lips—‘Adao?’—and reached for him. It felt easy.
He was hemmed in by the security squadron, still clinging to their rifles. Bereft of their rank, they seemed uncertain what to do next.
‘You’re free,’ Adao told them.
He forced his way through to the Bride.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said—Adao, ex-Executioner, King of Terra—standing so close she could breathe him in, ‘about my future.’
The Bride exercised an uncertain smile. A ghost of the smile whose memory he’d clung to all these seven years.
‘And?’ she said.
‘And, indeed,’ Adao agreed, unsure himself now that it was here in front of him.
The Bride smiled more widely. She smelled of blood.
He wondered if all beginnings felt this way.
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Incomplete No. 7 / The Executioner Goes Home Page 5