by Jo Zebedee
She couldn’t ignore him. She’d married him knowing, even then, that things weren’t straightforward. The marriage might be long dead, a farce of a political convenience, but to leave him, alone with his memories, was beyond her. It would be a betrayal of the years they’d spent together and what she – it had been her actions that had set everything in motion – had done to him. She opened the door and sat on the bed a little away from him. He wouldn’t want her closer. It wasn’t something he could take, to be reminded of what they’d lost.
“Oh, Kare,” she said. He nodded into his hands. She waited until, slowly, his shoulders stopped hitching.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice muffled, and her throat caught – he thought he had to apologise to her, as if he’d brought things to this.
“Don’t be,” she said. “It’s all right to be like this.” Their counsellor had said so, years before: he had to learn not to blame himself, that until that blame moved away he’d never get past what had been done to him. It had been like talking to the sand – as soon as Kare shifted one part of his history, another came, and another, a constant barrage.
He lifted his head and she gasped; he looked like he was in hell, his eyes red-rimmed. The pain-lines around his mouth were tight, standing out in his pale face. “Ten years, Sonly.”
“Next week,” she said, but he shook his head.
“For me, it’s today. For Sam and Lichio, too. Today was when I got my powers back.” He looked at the ceiling, drawing a long breath, and then back at her. “I told myself I’d face what had happened and get past it. I thought I’d win and we’d put everything behind us. I made a hell of a job of it, didn’t I?”
She didn’t reply. There was nothing she could say that she hadn’t before. No different tack to take, no new words that might give healing where others hadn’t.
His quiet voice broke the silence. “Beck died ten years ago.”
It always came back to Beck. A part of her wished he’d survived and suffered like Kare had, that he’d learned to know what it meant to do so. Silom had hoped for that, too, she remembered – he’d been right about that, as he had been about so many things.
“So why isn’t he dead?” he croaked. “Why does he come back every night? There is no respite, no single night when I haven’t woken back in my cell. I’ve tried everything: pills, drink, nightfire. I’ve stayed up for days, until I collapsed with exhaustion. But every night he comes to me and it starts over again.”
“I don’t know,” she said, hopelessly out of her depth. There was no way to touch a wall like Kare had, to chip at the hurt and find the person beneath. “It’s not like either of us can snap our fingers and make it better.” As soon as the words were out, she regretted them.
“Like magic, eh?” He gave a half-smile but swallowed; he wasn’t smiling, not really. He was putting a front on, the front he carried through every day, letting no one past it.
“I didn’t mean that.” She reached for him, but he flinched away.
“But the magic’s gone, isn’t it?” he said. “I’ve never told you – or anyone – how many hours I have sat willing, wishing, screaming at myself to find it. To find some remnant so I can be me again.” His voice hitched. “And I gave it away. It was the only thing that might have made things better, that could have saved Silom, and I gave it away.”
The never-ending circle of guilt, the reasoning of why he’d blocked his mother instead of killing her, the cycle that ran from Beck to his mother and back again, the people who’d taken the person he’d once been. The people he didn’t believe he could face.
He looked up at the ceiling as if to steady himself. It had been years since she’d seen him like this, his chest and back bare. He was so familiar to her: his height, his build, his smell. She touched his back, gently, knowing he found himself repulsive and couldn’t believe she didn’t. This time he didn’t flinch, but took a deep, shaking breath. His skin was soft under her hand. She traced her fingers along his muscle line, up onto his shoulder, along his rippled skin.
Once, doing this would have made him pull her against him and kiss her. She wanted to be transported back to that time, before the hell of Omendegon, to be the woman who didn’t know what lay ahead. She wanted him to hold her, and for them to be close; her insides were melting with the need.
He met her eyes, and her heart jumped in desperate hope. Then, he closed his hand over hers and lifted it off, gently shaking his head. He couldn’t. Hurt crept through her, filling her. He couldn’t help it, he wanted to be closer, but it still hurt that she hadn’t been enough for him to get past his demons. She’d wanted to be.
“Today,” he said, and touched his neck, “this was what a six-year-old boy wanted to see of me. He didn’t see it as a mark of shame, or servitude. He saw it as the sign of strength.”
“He was right,” said Sonly, forcing the words past the hard lump in her throat. “You’ve never been weak.”
“So, why can’t I see that?”
“I don’t know.” Because they’d got it wrong at the beginning. She had focused on Kerra – they’d lost so much time – and told herself she was giving Kare space to heal. Instead, she’d given him time to build a wall around himself, as surely as he’d built this compound, and the wall was just as bleak. Now, she could see she hadn’t known how to help him; then, it had felt like he didn’t want her to.
She wished she could go back ten years. She’d take him in her arms until he knew she wasn’t going away, that nothing mattered – not the empire, not the Senate, nothing except making him better. She swallowed her tears. “Kare, what can I say?”
“Nothing.” His voice was steadier and, when he smiled, it almost looked like he meant it. Who knew what that smile, and all the others, cost him? What those moments of pretending to be normal, of holding up the façade, had done to him? “We’ve said it all, so many times.” He stood, and she did, too. “Thanks for coming, thanks for listening.”
She walked to the door, but paused. She wanted to tell him he meant more to her than he knew. She shook her head and turned away. He knew, and it made no difference: like he’d said, they had said everything too many times before.
***
Lichio sat on the compound’s outer wall, shielded from the courtyard by a gun placement, and scanned the desert. There; he picked out a distant smudge against the sand. The transport bay of Clenadii Quarry. The rest of the quarry lay under the desert sands, slowly being covered, as Kare had ordered the quarries abandoned in favour of modern facilities not reliant on slave labour.
He rubbed the pitted scars on his wrist, left by shards of rock while he’d worked there. He was lucky; he’d been running out of the strength needed when Kare had broken them out. That he had lasted so long was down to Silom. He’d forced Lichio to get up every day and made him eat what passed for food.
He flexed his right hand; he couldn’t think of Silom without remembering the pull of the trigger, his sluggish mind fighting the Empress’ demands, the sickening knowledge of what he’d done. They’d been complacent; sure, she’d been beaten, but all it had taken was one moment of opportunity for her snake of a mind to whip out. He tried to take a deep breath, but couldn’t get it past the tightness in his chest. He had to calm down – he had the Military Anniversary to run tonight and security, already complicated, had become nightmarish in the light of the warning he’d received not half an hour ago. He’d come out to get space to work out how the new intelligence impacted on his plans, not turn himself in circles.
It was from a reliable source, and warned of an attack at the event, but was nothing new – at least three events in the past four months had been subject to a similar warning. It wasn’t even specific enough for him to know where to look. He cast his eyes over the desert that stretched and stretched. The tribes would attack in one manner, the families in another.
He tried to breathe in, but it barely went past his throat. A wave of dizziness made him gra
b for the wall. He had to clear his head. He glanced around, confirmed he was alone, and pulled a knife from his pocket, flicking it open and turning it so the sun glinted off its slender blade. He hadn’t come outside for thinking space: he’d known exactly what he intended to do.
He pushed his sleeve up and laid his knife above the second of two almost-healed cuts. He drew the blade across, slicing through his skin, pressing until he hissed at the pain. He cut deeper, concentrating on the sharp blade, and took a breath, right to his stomach. The welling blood seemed to carry the stress from him, to cleanse the past and give him a chance to do his job.
He flicked the knife closed, and pulled a packet from his pocket. He’d promised Josef he wouldn’t do this again, that he’d call him first. He stared at the cut; his lover would find it and know what it meant. He was the only one who ever had – no other lover, man or woman, had been able to see past the facade of General le Payne, the Intelligence chief who protected an empire, to Lichio who didn’t know any better way to cope.
Well, Josef wasn’t here, and in his absence it was up to Lichio to find a way to get to the end of the day, if not intact, at least sane. This worked as well as anything. He ripped the packet open with his teeth and held the gauze pad against the cut, slowing the blood. When he lifted it away the bleeding sped up, and he pressed down again, the antibacs in the pad making the cut sting. His shoulders relaxed. Two condors soared in the distance, not far from the quarry. Idly, he wondered if they’d flown over it when he’d been there, their sharp eyes seeing everything that happened.
His comms unit buzzed once but stopped. He didn’t reach for it. He’d be back on duty in a few moments; whatever it was could wait until then. Already, he could feel his mind stirring, the cogs whirring as the new intelligence took its place with the old, giving him a fuller picture of the threat. Given the source, it was unlikely to be from the families. The tribes, then, or a faction in the city. That narrowed his remit.
He took the pad away. The bleeding had almost stopped. He rolled his sleeve down and pulled on his dark, formal jacket. After a final glance over the desert, he got up, stepped around the gun placement and onto the stairwell to the courtyard. The function room needed to be secured – he’d do that first – and then a briefing for tonight’s security team.
Should he warn Kare about the new intelligence? He mimed balancing something in his two hands. No, Kare had been off the scale with tension that morning and there was no way to call the function off; it wouldn’t help to be informed of a threat that would probably never materialise.
CHAPTER NINE
Baelan watched the soldier make his preparations to leave for the compound. He was so jealous he could taste it, like the dark medicine his mother gave him when he was ill: rich, sticky and metallic. It was his life-oath, to kill his father. He focused on the desert-scoot the soldier was about to mount, one showing the insignia of the empire. It was bigger than the scoots the tribes used, its four treaded wheels lifting the carriage and double-seated pod well off the desert sand, although it was as battered as the tribes’ scoots – the Empress’ old insignia scraped off, leaving a scar on its side that hinted at the hidden nature of this army.
An army he wasn’t part of. The engine started to smoke, tendrils rising in the still air, and Phelps nodded sharply at Baelan.
“Calm down,” the general grated, his voice hoarse from cigaro-smoke.
“Yes, sir.” Baelan balled his hands into fists, and the tendrils stopped, only a lingering smell of burning left in the air. His forehead tightened with the strain of holding the power within himself. It felt like handling a snake the wrong way around, and it took a moment before he was able to breathe in any way easily. Phelps was right, though – things happened when he got annoyed, and even though he was better at controlling himself, the power kept growing, making him feel he was in a race he couldn’t win.
“How did my Lady control it?” he asked, when he felt able to speak.
“She practiced.”
Baelan frowned. He practiced all the time, and it made no difference. Phelps’ gaze moved to the distant horizon, where the Emperor’s compound rose from the desert like a wall of rock. Each year it grew bigger, a statement from his father that he intended to own the desert as well as Abendau and its palace.
Baelan’s mouth curled into a sneer – his father would never own the tribes, and the desert was theirs. If his father ever faced the eighth-birthday challenge of the tribal children – two days in the desert with only the clothes on their back – he’d be dead on the first day. Baelan had been lucky to survive his, barely making it to the cliffs fringing the plain before nightfall so he could sleep on the ledges, safe from the lizards. There were always a few children who didn’t come back each year despite the months of practice in advance: the desert must take its sacrifice.
His shoulders dropped. Someone had taught him to survive in the desert – no one had taught him about his powers. The only member of the tribe with any psyche of his own – Delwar, an out-bred loner and barely tolerated – was so much weaker than Baelan he’d taught him nothing. In the absence of any knowledge that might help, it seemed safer to find ways not to let the power out. And that meant not losing his temper.
Phelps approached the marksman. “You know what to do?”
The soldier nodded, his lack of ankhar setting him apart from those around him. “Of course, sir.”
His eyes had a distance in them, as if he’d seen things that had hardened him. He scanned the horizon, reading it. He was one of Phelps’ men, brought onto the planet and only posing as one of the tribes. His presence was a reminder that this mission was Phelps’ to carry out, not the tribes’. It was too intricate to be entrusted to anyone other than a professional soldier, Phelps had said, insistent enough that the tribes had acceded to him. After all, he was the military specialist.
Phelps slapped the soldier’s back. “May our Lady’s pleasure go with you and sustain you.” It was hard to tell if the general meant the blessing or if he used it merely to placate the tribes. As ever, his face was hard to read and his thoughts were his own.
The soldier inclined his head, but his eyes carried an edge of irony. The blessing was for the benefit of the watching tribes-people, then. Baelan couldn’t decide whether to admire Phelps for fitting in with the tribes and using them to carry out his mission, or detest him for not being braver and standing up to them.
The soldier sobered; he knew, as they all did, that he might not return from Varnon’s compound. He climbed onto the scoot, settling into its high, wide saddle. The sturdy vehicle would be quick and steady, its camouflage programs perfectly matched to the desert sand. The soldier nodded to Phelps and pulled the scoot in a tight circle, sending up a plume of sand. It roared away, the sound muffling in the warm air as it vanished.
Phelps turned to the rest of the squad. They all stood to attention, their combat uniforms tidy but showing no insignia. The only thing giving them away were the tattoos on their wrists when they saluted. Baelan squinted, taking in the star in the centre; he’d been right, this was a Star-ops squad, the legendary assassins of the Empress’ old regime.
“Both le Paynes and the girl are to be kept alive,” said Phelps. “The president may need persuasion to sign the Senate over; the brother might be it. Or the daughter.”
“The traitor?” asked one of the soldiers.
“Alive.” Phelps gave a smile that was hard to read, but looked close to sympathy. “Our Lady has some unfinished business with the good doctor. I’m sure she wouldn’t want us to remove her opportunity to follow through.”
The captain of the squad saluted, and indicated for his men to follow him. They left on a convoy of smaller scoots. In moments, they’d been swallowed by the desert sands, impossible to track. Baelan smiled. Phelps was smart, not like Varnon; when the Emperor’s forces attacked, their ships and ground troops were visible for miles, noisy in the desert, not part of it.
> Phelps turned to Baelan. The desert was quiet with the troops gone and the tribal guides dispersing back to the camp. He grasped Baelan’s shoulder. “Your quest is just as important.” A tightening of his hand. “More so.”
Baelan looked at the horizon. The words were of no comfort. A tribesman knew from earliest childhood that his oath was what gave him status. If his was stolen from him, carried out by someone else, he’d never become an elder. He nodded, carefully, musing. Surely, if he did free his Lady, he’d be recognised for it.
Phelps crouched in front of him. “I have hundreds of marksmen, all trained and eager, but only one person with your powers, born of him. Our Lady needs you. A man of the tribe accepts his destiny, and doesn’t turn from it.” He lifted Baelan’s ankhar, turning it so the stone caught the light and shone like a real emerald.
Baelan followed the pendant’s movement. He wanted to stop the chain twisting, but to snap the ankhar was to break his tribal link, and he didn’t dare move. Phelps held the stone for another moment and then dropped it. It thudded dully against Baelan’s chest. The general leaned in. “You are a man, now, aren’t you? Or did I choose my son without wisdom?”
Baelan fought against the urge to pull away from the sour cigaro smell and direct, hard eyes.
“I’m proud of my role,” he said. “I wish only to serve my Lady.”
Phelps’ gaze moved back to the compound. “Your father…”
“Yes?” Baelan struggled to keep his voice calm. Phelps had known his father. He’d been the one to find him and bring him to his Lady. He’d met him and talked with him.
“He’s not like you, Baelan; he has cold blood. He murders innocents: he murdered your brothers.” Baelan nodded; he knew the story. There had been three mothers selected, all carrying Varnon’s seed for the Empress, yet only his mother had survived. The others had died in the battle for Abendau, and then in the desert, hounded out of the city and harassed by Varnon’s army. “He was blessed with his power, but used it for harm and imprisoned our Lady. Your actions will atone for his wrongdoing.”