In the end, I chose defense, taking a bunch of the fabric in my left hand to ensure my arm was covered. “Stand down, soldier!” I said, pointing with the covered arm.
“You don’t give me orders!” It swung at me again, blade clipping off my arm as I raised it in a boxer’s guard, fist to my temple to shield my head. I did not want to draw my sword. Highmatter was too dangerous. It would make short work of the alien zitraa, would cut common steel like paper, but I did not want to maim that wonderful creature who was—after all—fighting for humanity and the Empire. We did not have to fight.
I glanced over my shoulder, saw one of the plainclothes men helping Valka back to her feet. “Get her out of here!” I shouted, turning back just in time to block another strike from that long and wicked blade. There was nothing for it. The zitraa was simply too long, and I didn’t like my chances fighting the Irchtani fist to claw in any case. Leaping back, I drew Sir Olorin’s sword from its holster and activated it with a touch. Liquid metal condensed into a blade a meter long and shone bluer than the sky. I raised it in a flat parry that caught the Irchtani’s weapon as it plunged through an arc that would have split my head in two. I felt no resistance as my blade passed through the zitraa, but the broken blade tore my cheek as it spun past and buried itself point-first in the ground behind me. Bleeding now freely from cheek and chest, I pointed the gleaming blade at Udax and growled. “Get on your knees.”
An alarm began to sound. The same braying vwaa-vwaa that had played from speakers in the bastille in Borosevo when I had fought and killed the cornered Uvanari. I hated that sound—there were too many ghosts in it. I kept my sword leveled at the Irchtani. “You’ve a fire in you, lad.” I looked back toward the keep, saw military prefects hurrying toward us across the yard, distinguishable by the open-faced white helmets they wore and the armor they had on over their uniforms even here on base. The sun—my sun—stood high in the sky above us, pale in Imperial white. “Watch it doesn’t consume you.”
Udax’s all-black eyes narrowed, and the feathers on its head stood up. I did not move, did not lower my blade, not until the prefects were upon us and forced Udax to lie face down in the dirt. No fitting place for a creature such as it. Only then did I stow my blade, the metal vanishing in air like the night fog beneath the first light of day. One of the prefects said something to me, but I did not hear him. There were more prefects swarming about us, forcing the Irchtani auxiliaries to kneel with their talons on their hooded heads. A stunner bolt flashed and one of the auxilia fell from the sky. It had been trying to flee.
“Hold your fire!” I snarled, and slapped the stunner from the man’s hands. Brandishing my sword hilt in the prefect’s confused face, I said, “Not more than six of them attacked us. The rest are innocent.”
“We’ll sort it out, my lord.”
“You will,” I said, throwing off my cape as one of my own men returned. “Is Doctor Onderra safe?”
The fellow tapped his chest in salute. “Aye, lordship. That elder of theirs and my triaster are with her. She’s fine.” I threw my cape at him. Seeing the blood on it and on my chest and face, he asked, “Are you?”
“I’m fine.” I pushed back my hair with bloody fingers. And then I put the man out of my thoughts, locked him in a room behind my eyes that no longer concerned me. “Pallino!”
“Here, Had!” My friend, my lictor, and first chiliarch was on his feet, leaning on the support of a fresh-faced prefect whose red hair and freckles reminded me of Switch.
Too many ghosts, indeed.
I clapped the man on the shoulder, and he winced as I asked, “You all right?”
There were deep gashes in his arm that would need medical correctives, and what looked like puncture wounds in his side from where one of the birds had stepped on him. He was clearly not all right. But the bastard grinned and tapped his new eye. “I’ve had worse.”
“We’ll get a pallet in.”
“I can bloody walk!”
“You will stand right there until they can carry you out! I won’t have you bleeding out because some fledgling,” I spat the word at Udax, “wanted to play the revolutionary.” As I spoke, my fingers found the silver chain still wrapped around my neck. I found the pendant, sure enough, the ring of silver enclosing the irregular piece of white shell. Still there. I let my breath out in a rush. “Where is Osman?”
CHAPTER 11
DECIMATION
I DID NOT, IN the end, run straight to Osman as I had planned. Better sense and Valka convinced me to go with Pallino to the medica and have my injuries seen to. The wound to my face was comparably minor, and a simple corrective bandage saw to it and to a pair of superficial scrapes on my arms I had not noticed. The wounds on my chest were, like Pallino’s, more serious, though I had the good fortune to be kicked where there was bone, and so Udax’s talons had not cut so deep as the claws of whichever xenobite had taken a chunk from Pallino’s side.
“Pallino’s all right?” I asked, tracing the corrective on my cheekbone with the tip of my smallest finger, a thin black line running from nose to ear.
I watched Valka purse her lips in the mirror. “Would you stop picking at that? It’ll scar.”
“You’d like it if it did,” I said sharply, but stopped all the same even as Valka shrugged.
“And yes, he’s all right. They put him under just in case. Sleep will be good for him, anyway. He did lose a lot of blood.”
I checked the patches on my chest, feeling the warmth in them where they worked to stitch shut the light puncture wounds. “Those claws were vicious . . . I still don’t understand why it attacked.”
“Perhaps it mislikes being a slave soldier fighting for the people who took its planet away.”
Glad that I’d stepped from my place in front of the mirror, I shut my eyes for the space of three breaths. I did not have the energy for that sort of discussion. “Please don’t do this now. I’ve been stabbed, see?” I indicated my chest wounds. “The auxilia aren’t conscripts, which is more than our men can say—hell, it’s more than I can say.” I tried to cross my arms, regretted it almost at once. The shock of the moment had ended, and the pain was creeping in. Maybe I could use a sleeping dose myself . . . but no, there was work to be done. Without my having to ask, Valka lifted my pendant on its chain and held it out to me. For once, she didn’t argue. Her brows drew down and together as she studied me. “They’re going to kill the one that attacked me.”
“You think?” Valka did not move a muscle. The pendant still swung from her crooked finger, waiting for me to take it. I couldn’t tell if her question was sarcasm or genuine curiosity.
I took the pendant from her and held it in my fingers. “Wait and see.” I ran my thumb around the silver rim of the pendant, feeling the sharp edges of the stony shell. The whole thing was no larger than a gold hurasam, perhaps more than an inch and half across. As it always did, it felt faintly warm to my touch, and when I closed my fist about it I still felt as though I could see it, as if its light shone through my fingers.
“Hadrian!” Valka’s voice slashed through whatever foggy reverie I’d fallen into, words spilling in like cold water.
“What?” I put the chain around my neck and scooped up the new undershirt and black tunic that had been brought for me, pulling one on after the other despite the ache in my chest.
As I strained, Valka said, “You were far away. I asked if you were all right.”
“I’m fine,” I said. Rubbing my neck and remembering the bite of the sword there, I said, “I’ve had worse.” I lifted my shield-belt from the counter and clicked it on, pausing long enough to adjust my tunic.
Valka did not rise to my macabre bait, instead nudged the bloodstained white cape bunched on the far end of the exam room counter. “What do you want done with this?”
“Leave it, please,” I replied. “That castellan’s due to appear hand-wringing be
fore too long. I’m going to need it.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to play both Anthony and Caesar,” I said. Valka stared blankly at me. “Never mind.” But I had a plan, and hoped to bring some good out of the day’s unpleasantness. “If you see Durand before me, I want to have Pallino sent back to the Tamerlane. Okoyo can keep an eye on him and stop him from hurting himself.”
A knock sounded at the door.
“Right on time,” I breathed, and stood up straight. “Enter!”
“Lord Marlowe, my most humble apologies. I cannot explain why the primitives attacked you so. You have my assurances the offender and his people will be punished for this insult. This treachery!” Sir Amalric’s apology tumbled forth faster than he could enter the room and fall to his knees. I barely had the time to turn around and face him. Before he could seize my hand and kiss it, I clasped them behind my back. “I’ll have his hide! His head. Whatever you ask.”
I looked down at the patrician groveling at my feet, this proud man and soldier, castellan of an Imperial fortress responsible for troop deployments across whole sectors of space, as he acted like an insect before my rank and name and blood. Palatines, I thought. Bashan Iseni.
Higher beings.
“Get on your feet, sir.”
But Osman did not stand. “My lord, the beasts were under my command. I’ve jailed them. My people are reviewing what footage we have to determine which of them participated, and the one that attacked your lordship is in a cell already. I cannot apologize enough. This should not have happened. The fault is mine.”
“The fault,” I said, glancing at Valka as I gathered my wits, “lies with certain young Irchtani hot of blood and spoiling for a fight. You can no more control their outbursts than you can stop your human personnel from going into the city and knocking the teeth out of whores when they find they don’t have the money. You can only chastise them afterward.” I took a step back and moved to seat myself on the rolling stool the medical tech had used while she patched me up. “For the love of Earth, man, stand up. That’s an order.”
All the same, it took the castellan a good several seconds to rise.
“What have you done with the others?” Valka asked. “The Irchtani that weren’t in the yard when we were attacked?”
Sir Amalric looked round, almost as though he were surprised to find Valka standing in the corner. “I . . . ma’am?”
“ ’Twere only a few dozen in the yard, but there are a thousand of them on site, are there not?” She crossed her arms, tossed back a ripple of red-black hair.
The castellan bobbed his head, swallowing. He looked like he might be sick. “I’ve locked down their barracks and posted a guard.”
“You’re treated them all as criminals?” Valka sounded scandalized. “You would not do the same if they were human!”
“With respect, ma’am, the lot of them have closed ranks. They won’t give us the names of the ones that attacked your man, so as far as I’m concerned every last one of the birdos is guilty.”
Valka interjected, “You can’t be serious!”
“Besides, humans don’t have talons and they can’t fly. The Irchtani are dangerous allies.”
“Emphasis allies,” the doctor said, fixing Osman with her most withering glare—how the man did not evaporate on the spot I’ve no idea. “If ’tis how you treat your allies here, sir, ’twould hate to see the way you treat your enemies.”
“Let us just consider ourselves lucky that no one was killed,” I said, thinking of Pallino. “And doubly lucky that my squire was not with us.”
The castellan looked round at me, confusion plain in his eyes. “Your squire?”
It was time to put the fear of God in the little man. Osman was not a bad sort by the standards of such men, but something in his manner annoyed me—and his treatment of the Irchtani in general did not sit well with me. “Did you not know? My squire is Alexander, Prince of House Avent. You and I are both lucky he did not join me this morning. Can you imagine what might happen if an Imperial prince were to suffer harm under your roof?” I almost, almost shuddered. “Beggars the imagination, doesn’t it?”
“You should have told us!” Sir Amalric snapped. “An Imperial prince! Here on Gododdin?” He was defensive, scared. That was just as well. He should be. And I needed him defensive if I was going to bully him into breaking protocol—which I was.
“Do not presume to tell me what I should and should not have done, castellan.”
I spoke flatly, without force, but even so the old, bald man quailed. “Forgive me. I did not mean offense,” he said, bowing. Valka watched me with bemusement, and I brushed past Osman to stand nearer the bloodstained cape.
My back to the castellan—eyes on Valka—I asked, “What do you intend to do?”
“If they were human troops, there’d be no question: we’d decimate the company.”
I stopped my hand midway to the ruined cape, shocked. I had not expected that. “Decimation?” Without lifting the cape, I turned. “Surely there’s no cause for that.”
“As I say, they won’t give up the guilty. And until they do the entire company is culpable.”
Decimation. Decimation was one of the more serious punishments the Legions leveled against its own. The offending unit—be it a decade, a century, a chiliad, cohort, or even an entire legion—would be gathered up and made to draw lots, blindly taking a coin from a chest. One in ten of those coins was marked with an icon of Death, and the men who received them were lined up and shot by the men who did not. Their former brothers in arms. Decimation had fallen in and out of practice over the long millennia depending on the will and whim of the various Emperors—here outlawed, there enforced. The Emperor William Siberian—whom Impatian named William the Cruel—ordered fully one hundred legions to decimate after the Jaddian principalities won their independence.
“I forbid it,” I said, glaring at the man.
“With respect, lordship, this at least is not up to you.”
“There can’t be more than ten thousand Irchtani soldiers serving in the Legions,” I countered. “Do you really want to be the man who wiped out one percent of them for a relatively minor incident? The Imperial office will not look kindly on such a thing, not least of which because I will name you personally in my report.” I seized the cape and held it up for Osman’s examination. “I remind you just whose blood it was that was spilled today. What do you think Legion brass will say when I—the victim—say your response was disproportionate and unjustified?”
Osman stammered, unable to articulate a response.
I tossed the cape at him.
“Where is Udax?”
“What?”
“The one who attacked me. The Irchtani. What have you done with it?”
The castellan looked at me stupidly, as if wholly unable to understand why I would possibly ask him such a thing. Blinking, he answered, “In lockup. In the dungeons. Why?” He was still holding the blood-stained cape, not really seeing it.
“Its life is mine,” I said.
Osman shook his head. “There is protocol. Internal Affairs will want to investigate—the Inquisition may get involved, thanks to your involvement and that squire of yours. Is he really a prince?” When I nodded, the castellan swore. “When I heard you were coming, Lord Marlowe, I was thrilled. The Halfmortal on my base. The Hero of Aptucca. I wanted to meet you. I didn’t expect . . .” he waved a vague hand, “. . . all this shit.”
“He has a positive talent for mayhem,” Valka said.
“What if this is just the beginning?” Sir Amalric said. “What if the birdos are up to something?”
I fixed the fellow with my best impression of Valka’s withering stare. “Up to something? All thousand of them? The thousand that you managed to lock down inside an hour? You’ll forgive me, but I’m not worried.” I touched the
corrective taped to my face again. But despite my bravado, I felt a shadow turn over in the pit of my stomach. What if someone was up to something? Not the Irchtani. I was no expert in Irchtani behavior, but Udax’s attack had seemed so out of the blue to me. Had someone put it up to attacking me?
We have something of a mystery on our hands, I thought. It wasn’t impossible that Udax had only been a weapon aimed at me, disguised as a bit of colonial racial tension. Was it? I cleared my throat. “Since we have the luxury of time, waiting for your scouts to get back to us, I will speak to the Irchtani elder. It seemed amenable to conversation.”
“That’s Barda?” Osman looked up from his examination of my cape. “He’s a good man. Bird.”
“I’ll speak to him,” I said. “And then I will speak to my would-be assassin.” I stood again, emphasizing my palatine height over the smaller man. “Very likely there is nothing to this save a few overheated alien egos. In the meantime, castellan, try not to commit a massacre. I know that can be hard for some men in your position.”
Turning on my heel, I made for the door, sweeping Valka along in my wake. I had no intention of giving Osman another moment to think or gather his wits.
His voice came after me. “Lord Marlowe?”
I looked back at him, confined my response to the lifting of one eyebrow.
“Your cape.” He proffered the bloody garment.
“Keep it.” I turned away. “I have another.”
CHAPTER 12
UDAX
THE DUNGEON STANK.
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