The Thrones of Kronos

by Sherwood Smith

  Jaim turned the subject, sitting back and watching the interactions of the others. Montrose had prepared a meal, and late though it was, all except Dem ate with enthusiasm. Dem continued scrubbing his way steadily around the room.

  When he came near, Jaim looked into the scarred face, bland as a young child’s. “You don’t have to keep working like this,” he said.

  Briefly Dem’s gaze almost seemed to comprehend Jaim, then with no change of expression he went back to work.

  Tat’s soft voice spoke from behind: “It’s all right. He likes it—at least, he likes finishing,” she amended. “He can only do work that has an obvious start and end, and not much variation in between.”

  “All right,” Jaim said. “I just don’t want him thinking he’s a slave for those Dol’jharian chatzers anymore. Before his accident, what’d he do?”

  Tat’s shoulders were up defensively, a movement so automatic Jaim wondered if she was even aware of it. “He was a cook. Not trained like Montrose,” she finished on an apologetic note.

  “Good,” Jaim said. “Give Montrose someone to train, after we get through with the medtech on him.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “Vi’ya hasn’t forgotten that,” Jaim said.

  “I know.” Tat gave him a quick smile. “At least, I hoped.”

  Jaim indicated a table, seating himself. Tat dropped into the adjacent seat like an obedient student. “Look,” he said, “our status has changed, some good, some bad. Good: we’ve probably got unlimited credit, which means we can get all the upgrades to this ship we’ve ever dreamed of. You’ll be running comm, so get to know our console and make yourself a wish list. Lar and Sedry and I will do the same for the engines and weaponry. Lokri’s going to upgrade nav control. We’re going to have to be fast and smart, because our days of running after low-rate jackers like Hreem are over—at least for now. Who knows what’s in the future?”

  She nodded, serious and tense. “What’s the bad?”

  “We’ll be targets for every worthless blungebag who can’t make a successful living any other way. Ransom seekers, challengers who want to drop us for the fame, Rifters from the other side of the alliance who want a little revenge and don’t have the balls to go after the nicks directly. All those will sit up and sniff every time we dock. But worse than that is the reason why we’re leaving soon’s Vi’ya shows up.”

  Tat looked perplexed. “They don’t have the right medtech here on Arthelion?”

  Jaim shook his head. “Sure they do. Here’s what matters for us—and I’m telling you so you and Lar, and eventually Dem, can decide if you want to stay with us. You know about the pregnancy, right?”

  “Sedry told us. She said she had Vi’ya’s permission.”

  “You might not have had the time to consider what it means. If Vi’ya’s baby is mine or Brandon’s, either way we have no real problem. It incubates, comes here to fosterage when born. But if it is Anaris’s . . .”

  Tat shivered. “Can she hide it? Adopt it out?”

  “He wants it badly enough to have made a threat that everyone heard. He wanted everyone hearing. If it’s mine or Brandon’s, we send him the DNA proof and hope he goes away. If it isn’t, he’d blow up Rifthaven to track it down. Vi’ya’s not Dol’jharian enough to have it killed this far along, and if she did, he’d come anyway, for revenge.”

  Tat sighed. “The nicks. Won’t they cover us?”

  Jaim said, “If Vi’ya asked Brandon to, but that would start a war from the nick end. That’s why we’re going to Rifthaven, instead of doing the tech here. Vi’ya sees this as her problem, and she’s going to solve it. If we crew with her, it becomes our problem. We’re rich, we don’t need to make any jacking runs—but we are involved in high politics, so high we aren’t Rifters any longer, or nicks, or anything else easily tagged. Think about this. The stakes are high. Go or stay, the choice is yours.”

  “What’s life like anywhere?” Tat said in a subdued voice. “We always been Rifters—sudden wealth, sudden want, sudden death. Never seen a steady crew all my life. It’s why my pa and my sister Lut skipped out.” Tat made the age-old pact gesture. “But we like this crew. If you want us, we stay.”

  Jaim’s hand met hers and gripped. She left soon after, and Jaim made his way back to the bridge, which was now empty.

  He stood looking around, not at the sweat smudges on the consoles and the litter along the perimeter. For a blurring, unsettling moment he saw the ghosts at the consoles—not just Marim’s, but Greywing’s and Norton’s and Reth Silverknife’s and Jakarr’s and in the captain’s pod the laughing blond man who had brought them all together, and made them a kind of family: Markham.

  Sudden wealth, sudden want, sudden death.

  His gaze went to the patched place near the communications console, where the inactive hyperwave had been removed. Had it still been operational, tomorrow would have found them in fivespace already far distant from Arthelion, watching Brandon’s coronation. Instead, they would watch from orbit.

  Jaim looked up at the screen and envisioned not the figure on the mighty throne, listening to oath after oath, but the small figure standing to the Panarch’s right. He could imagine her browny-green eyes watching with pride and compassion, her brown hair elaborately dressed, her graceful body adorned in a gown of blue and white and silver, like frozen flame.

  Since his arrival on Arthelion Jaim had been aware of Vannis Scefi-Cartano’s attention not once or twice, but several times, and though she had not spoken, he had felt the impact of her speculation. She had changed from the first time she looked him over, there at the Aerenarch’s welcoming ball on Ares; even as her steps had brought her to political triumph, Jaim knew that her heart had suffered profound defeat, for he, too, had been watching in silence from afar.

  He knew that she had been taking instruction from Eloatri, and it was possible that Jaim might yet return to Arthelion when Vannis was ready to make that postponed pilgrimage to Desrien, and thus neither of them would go alone.

  The Flame wanders where it will.

  For the first time he saw the truth of the words he had uttered thoughtlessly for his whole life. He sensed his place—all their places—on the vast wheel of the universe, their path foreordained, yet chosen freely, the flame lighting their way when they faltered or stumbled.

  Reth? He sent the mental call out into the universe.

  There was no answer, but he accepted the burden of the finite laboring just out of perception of the transfinite. He moved at last, opening the storage bin to pull out cleaning materials. As he bent over the nearest console and started to work, he felt a profound, enfolding sense of peace.

  o0o

  Brandon touched the door control and slid into the service entrance leading to the Ivory Antechamber.

  Tomorrow he would take his father’s place on the Emerald Throne. Until this night he had postponed Gelasaar’s first request to him, spoken not from living man to living, but from a holograph made in blind faith to a troublesome third son whom Telos might have brought to power:

  “. . . But first, in the library of the Karelian wing of the Residence you will find Jaspar Arkad’s Testamentary. Each of your forebears has viewed it from that same room, as have I…”

  Brandon had made his pilgrimage to that library, to find it stripped bare, the chip that had been handed down to nearly a thousand years of Arkads destroyed. Brandon had an idea that its information was not lost, and it was to ascertain this that he now quested.

  But first a private quest.

  The air was still in the closet off the antechamber.

  He stepped through and paced silently along the perimeter of the antechamber. Once he’d sat on the stairs and watched a group of strangers loot his family home, but that was in reaction to the knowledge that an enemy had already taken control. He had promised himself since then that he would restore, if he could, the looted artifacts. Most of them had been recovered.

  He paused before an ex
quisitely carved jade lion, its edges muted by age—the latest one to come back to its place, bringing new meaning with it.

  Brandon paused before each blank plaque or display, now few in number. As a gesture of goodwill the triumvirs had returned those that had found their way to Rifthaven. Another completely unexpected cache of them had been found in a corridor below where he stood now, probably a quick stash by one of the Telvarna’s crew. Brandon touched one of the blank plaques, bemused to have found them still there. Perhaps Eusabian, in his arrogance, had assumed that he would recover them all; Brandon still could not comprehend a mindset in which vengeance required destroying the life of your enemy and then reveling in possession of his material things.

  Brandon had decided to leave the blank plaques as reminders of the limitations of his power. There was nothing he could do to restore the items that had been destroyed.

  Then there were the gifts that could not be bought back: the Stone of Prometheus, which Vi’ya had carried safely to the heart of the Rift and back, and the Tetradrachm, which Ivard had borne with him through all his strange journeys to the last and strangest, never to be known. Brandon touched the worn circle on the last plaque, where the coin had sat so long, and hoped Ivard was still alive. Where is he, and what has he become?

  Then he turned to face the Ivory Chamber.

  It was still not really safe, but he must make this pilgrimage or be haunted forever by the ghosts of those who had died here expecting to witness his Oath of Service.

  The doors opened freely, and he looked around. No longer littered with the smashed and burned remnants of the formal gathering Dol’jhar’s bomb had destroyed, the hall was empty. The windows had been restored, temporarily plain dyplast, admitting the dim moonlight from without. All traces of the tapestries, that last he’d seen ruined and tattered, had been removed. The walls were utterly bare. Before him stretched a vast space. On the seared doors to the Throne Room beyond, he saw a complex pattern, barely discernible in the darkness, all that remained of the inlaid glory of the Prophetae Gennady’s Ars Irruptus.

  A fierce whoosh of cold air buffeted his face. The tianqi had activated—and were sending in air straight from outside.

  That was the only warning he had.

  As he reached the center of the room, a man’s silhouette manifested from the gathered shadows, of medium height and spare of build. Brandon knew this immediately as a holograph of Jaspar Arkad. But the image’s eyes met his in a gaze of recognition that no holograph could ever fake.

  Brandon drew in a breath: though he knew about Jaspar’s manifestations both on Arthelion and at the Suneater, the Ban was so ingrained that the back of his neck gripped in atavistic fear, though his rational mind knew he was in no danger: The House computer, taken over by Jaspar Arkad in establishing the Panarchy of the Thousand Suns, repository of the diaries and memories of all his descendants—including Brandon himself—had somehow become sentient. That reflexive rejection of this transgression of the Ban warred with an almost vertiginous sense of awe.

  “You have come full circle, greatson Brandon, from abdication to acceptance. You will find the Testamentary where you, and only you, can access it. You must arrange for its transmission to those who follow.”

  “And then?” Brandon asked.

  The image smiled, and made a slight bow. “That is up to you. I cannot promise my unmaking, no more than you could yours. Perhaps you will find it needful to unmake the Ban.”

  “That would take centuries, even if it were agreed upon,” Brandon replied. “Which is unlikely.”

  “Perhaps. Events may overtake you.” The image held up its hand, forestalling his next question. “No, I will not speak of what I saw on the Suneater at the end. One good reason for the Ban is to force human beings to think for themselves, lest they become slaves to their machines. But the data will be here, should you need it.”

  “And you?”

  “I will be here also. Even the destruction of every node on Arthelion could not unmake me now, and you could not afford that, anyway.”

  A threat?

  “In any case,” continued the holo, “infanticide is not a feature of the Panarchy, and I am your child. Had it not been for your meddling, years ago and more recently, I might not have been. Accept your responsibility, and exercise it.”

  Brandon nodded slowly. “That is much the same advice my father gave me.”

  The image smiled. “Of course! How could it be otherwise? You will do well to follow it.”

  And then it faded away, and through the melting mist, Brandon saw Vi’ya. She walked forward and stood before him without speaking, her eyes as dark as the eternity of space. He kept silence, and let his eyes, and his heart, offer their own promise.

  But then she spoke, and in a moment all meaning, all joy, whipped away into nothingness:

  “I must go.”

  And now he who moments before had conversed with his ancestor’s shade, shaping the destinies of trillions, could not think at all. He could only act.

  Dropping to one knee, he held out his hands, palms up, in the ancient gesture of supplication, petitioner to sovereign.

  And for the very first time, she also knelt, slowly and deliberately. Then she touched his hands, palm to palm, and with her greater strength, turned them both vertically, fingers pointed toward the stars, in the age-old modality used in marriage.

  He listened without speaking as she told him, at first quickly, then in words that came halting, what he had to know.

  And they rose at last and left, hand in hand, the center of a whirlwind of protective fresh air.

  Holder of oaths, in loyalty sworn, the circle of fealty, a weight to be borne.

  On the morrow, he would give himself over wholly to service of those trillions, making an oath that would only end with his death, but tonight was his.

  o0o

  “Fifty thousand kilometers,” Lokri said. He leaned back and lazily cracked his knuckles.

  “Make orbit,” Vi’ya responded. She watched Lokri program the course into the nav console.

  For a time the only sound was the whisper of the tianqi until Vi’ya heard Montrose’s tread in the hatchway behind her. He stopped behind her pod and leaned against a bulkhead to look up at the big viewscreen.

  At comm, Tat worked quickly, sorting through the spectrum of novosti newsfeeds. Presently she said, “Here’s Cormoran—”

  The viewscreen flickered and they looked directly into the Throne Room from above the assembled crowd of Douloi, a restless sea of rich garments and glittering jewels. High above them an exultation of banners and blazons hung in celebration of the long history of the Panarchy, echoed in the bright tones of music sounding softly behind the susurration of the assembled throng. Below the imager a wide aisle ran to the Emerald Throne; beyond it, in shadowed distance washed by the enigmatic colors from the tall windows all around, the Gate of Aleph-Null loomed, and Vi’ya realized that their coign of vantage was above the Phoenix Gate.

  But a hint of dissonance distracted her as she scanned the vast room so faithfully reproduced on the big screen, and she puzzled at it until, with a cold bite of shock, she recognized that not one of the hundreds of people in the room was wearing black—unlike the last time the chamber had been used.

  Like billions of others in the Thousand Suns, Vi’ya had watched that anti-coronation—had it happened only months ago?—from this same vantage point. The grim legends of Dol’jhar briefly overlaid the scene, bringing with them a sense of the others in attendance there today, the ghosts of the Douloi slaughtered before the Lord of Vengeance for their loyalty to a deposed Panarch.

  She shook her head, dispelling the image of the memory of the blood lapping at the foot of the Throne. There was no hint of that today: color, light, music, the grace of Douloi movement in the dance of preference and deference that she could see but never imitate—all these washed away the bitter past in a glory of bright celebration.

  We are the Phoenix. Vannis had play
ed back that speech for her, but only now did she finally understand that symbol of rebirth, so foreign to her home world of ash and rock. Math the Lictor would have understood it.

  “Knew Nik’d get the best position,” Lokri chortled.

  On-screen, the crowd quieted, and the music changed, beginning with the Manya Cadena, evocative of the time that sundered them all from Lost Earth. From under the imager the Laergon of the College of Archetype and Ritual strode forth, bearing the reconstructed Mace of Karelais. He was followed by the ritual Polloi in her stark uniform of black and white, bearing the golden manacles of Service on an ebon tau-shaped staff with a silver snake entwined around it. And behind them, a slim figure all in white, all alone.

  “. . . would have been playing at the interrupted Enkainion,” she heard Nik say as the last notes of the Maya Cadena died away.

  Then Cormoran fell silent as the Laergon stopped before the Throne and turned around. Raising the Mace overhead in both hands, he bent gracefully from side to side, bringing its ends down on the floor, evoking the strange harmonics, like sea and starlight.

  The light in the vast hall changed subtly and the high ceiling seemed to vanish, opening to the stars. Below, with dizzying swiftness the perspective changed, though nothing moved, and now the viridian glory of the Throne was the clear focus and axis of all within the hall.

  “That’s not a throne,” Tat said, her eyes round. “It’s a tree.”

  As if Nik, or the unknown ajna artist, had read her mind, the perspective on the Throne slowly changed, growing to fill the entire screen. Vi’ya’s eyes were led upward to where the branches reached, gnarled into a complex lacework, for the stars. She had a brief image of a great Tree growing past the Palace roof, up through the atmosphere to space, the branches enfolding the Telvarna and binding it round with leaves.

  And she wished, for a painful heartbeat, that they were caught fast, protected by this symbolic construct of a thousand years of power, and wisdom, and will.

  No.

  She had learned to acknowledge the best that the Panarchy had to offer: the wisdom, and the will, and certainly the power. But protection was illusory; her fate was in her own hands, to make or to mar as she willed.