“Your grandmother and I had an understanding, but Amalia and your aunts have always resented our profits.” He spoke softly, leaning in towards Crispin so that almost his words were lost in the wind that whipped at his black robes and Crispin’s traveling cape. “If you and your sister were to disappear, I would be left heirless, and with Amalia as the new vicereine she would be in a position to block any further requests I might make to the High College for a child.”
A black lump rose in Crispin’s throat, and he nodded. They were palatine. Their genetic code was so complex, so over-written that it was impossible for any palatine to have a child in the old way, without the decoctions and uniquely tailored enzymes that protected against deformity or the stillbirths so common amongst those palatine nobiles who sought to have children outside state control. He shuddered, imagining his father living out his days alone in Devil’s Rest, his house destroyed by political maneuvering: denied fruit or flower. It was enough—almost enough—to make one envy the plebs.
“You think Amalia will try to kill Sabine and me … for the uranium business?”
“I think you should be on your guard.”
“You’ve had news of this plot?” Crispin matched his father’s posture, turning his back against the wind.
The Lord of Devil’s Rest shrugged his shoulders, kept his eyes on Crispin. “There is no plot, boy. I’m telling you to be on your guard. Your mother is bad enough, but these Kephalos women …” His voice trailed off. Crispin understood. Lord Alistair had never forgiven his wife for letting Hadrian slip through her fingers. Whether or not she’d aided his escape no one had been able to prove, but Hadrian had vanished from her palace at Haspida, and Father’s suspicions ran deep. He had wanted Hadrian to be a priest, one of the Chantry’s holy Inquisition. He would have been an invaluable ally, a piece of the family where no power short of the Emperor could touch him.
“I’ll keep her safe,” Crispin said, setting his jaw. “Depend on it.” There was a time, once, where news of a potential plot against his life and his sister’s might have filled Crispin Marlowe with delight and the thrill of the challenge. No more. But he was no coward. “It may be there’s no threat at all. It could be our grandmother just wants to see us one last time.”
Lord Alistair turned away. “Your grandmother …” The rain around them had increased, and looking around Crispin noticed that none of it had fallen on their heads. He looked up distractedly, a frown creasing his square face. The droplets were impacting the shield above. Father had brought out the heaviest shield he could.
He can even hold back the rain.
“Your grandmother,” Lord Alistair said again, “does nothing without reason. She’s palatine. She can’t afford not to have reasons. The question is whether or not the reasons that bring my children to her together—at the same time—are her reasons or someone else’s. I heard you tell the girl there was a chance Elmira might be planning a marriage for her.” He’d been listening. Of course he’d been listening. His eyes were everywhere, in every part of the castle and throughout the city below. And not only his eyes. It was no accident that brought the two of them out onto the tarmac of the landing field in the middle of the rain. House Kephalos certainly watched its most powerful subordinate, just as House Marlowe watched them.
He had enemies. He was right to keep so careful a watch. And they were right to watch him.
“We haven’t broadcast the change in flight plans to the planet’s datasphere. They still think you’re going into orbit and dropping down again. No one will look for you over the mountains.”
“Good.”
“Keep our family safe, boy.”
Despite his more than fifty standard years, Crispin bowed his head like a child, “Yes, Father.”
Crispin was a moment before he realized his father had extended a hand to him. He froze. He could not recall Lord Alistair Marlowe ever extending his hand that way—the way the plebeians did in greeting one another. But it was no such thing. The Archon of Meidua held, half-concealed by his flowing sleeve, the leather-wrapped hilt of a sword. He must have carried it in a pocket within that sleeve like the scholiasts did. Crispin had never seen it before. Careful to conceal the weapon with his black cape, Crispin slid the thing into a coat pocket. He was no knight, and so was not permitted to carry highmatter as a rule.
“It’s shielded, unless you use it,” Lord Alistair said. “Keep it close.” The younger man swallowed, and unable to find the words said again only, “Yes, Father.”
Numbly, he turned back towards the pavilion and the waiting guards. He could no longer hear the sound of thunder, no longer make out the whine of the shuttle warming up. Impossible as it was to even imagine, he knew his father was afraid. Crispin could not remember a moment—a single moment—when Lord Alistair had been afraid. He wasn’t afraid for Crispin’s sake, or for Sabine’s. He feared to lose. To lose everything he had built, everything he had rebuilt from the ashes of his own father’s death and his family’s disgrace. Crispin had no illusions about the fact that his father would have as gladly sacrificed him if it suited his interests, just as he was now glad to arm him.
Maybe that was unfair.
At the entrance to the shuttle terminal he turned and looked back. His father hadn’t moved, but stood out beneath the cover of the prudence shield, dry despite the rain. Whatever impression Crispin had—or thought he’d had—that his father had been afraid was gone now. Lord Alistair might have been carved from stone, a piece of Devil’s Rest come down from the acropolis and over the city. The fact of him re-centered Crispin’s universe, and suddenly the ground beneath his feet was solid once again. Stone as well. He raised a hand in salute to his dark lord, and turning ducked out of the rain and the coming storm.
Chapter 3
Flight
“What did Father want?” Sabine asked when Crispin took the leather couch beside hers in the shuttle’s rear compartment. She’d strapped herself into the crash webbing and sat with legs apart, hands on the arms of the couch as though it was a throne. Her resemblance to Father seemed somehow sharpened by that posture. How had he ever thought she more resembled Mother?
Crispin busied himself with his own restraints, mindful of the lump made in his jacket by the presence of the sword hilt. “Nothing. Just a private message for Aunt Amalia when we see her.” He draped his cape over the arm of the couch, using its cover to surreptitiously move the weapon from his jacket and into a pocket of the outer garment. Father had said the thing was shielded, that the exotic matter that made up its blade would not be detectable by whatever manner of eye or species of scanner might spy him between that shuttle and the royal palace at Artemia. Such technology could not have come cheaply. He must have bought it off the Wong-Hopper Consortium or one of the other big companies. They dealt in such dubious items, as they dealt with the Extrasolarians that made them.
Presently a servant—one of the three dozen guards who was to accompany them on the shuttle—approached and made to take the cape. Unthinking, Crispin slapped the man’s hand away, and scowling said, “Hands off!” Realizing the sharpness of his tone a moment later, he said,
• • •
“No. Thank you, soldier.”
A bit taken aback, the man saluted and withdrew.
“If you two are both in place, my lord and lady, we’re clear to pull away from the gate.”
The woman who had spoken stood in the door leading to the shuttle’s cockpit. Unlike the others, she wore no combat armor, only a black flight officer’s uniform: belted wool jacket, red-striped trousers, and high leather boots. Black and black. Her hair had once been bronze, but the years had turned it the color of bright steel. She had been Hadrian’s friend when they were boys. His lover, maybe. Hadrian always had strange tastes. Captain Kyra—she had no surname that Crispin had ever heard—had been pretty enough, in her fashion. Too thin to be any proper sort of beauty, and with her short curls she’d seemed to Crispin almost half a boy—far from the sorts
of women he preferred.
And she was old. In truth, she couldn’t have been more than four or five years his senior, but the flight officer was plebeian, and without the benefit of genetic tinkering her face had wrinkled, her hair had grayed, and much of the strength had gone from her limbs. Crispin could hardly believe that once it had been thus for all mankind. That the sixty standard years she carried had done to her what six hundred had not done to his grandmother. The Vicereine-Duchess Elmira Kephalos was nearly eight hundred standard years old, and it was only in the last twenty or so that her body had begun to show the decline of old age. Crispin—who was only a little more than fifty—might bear the strength and vitality of youth again for just as long and watch a dozen generations of Kyra’s family serve his own throughout his long life.
“Very good, captain, thank you,” Sabine said, her words impinging on Crispin’s thoughts. “Do you know how long the flight will be to Artemia?”
Kyra touched the brim of her flight cap in polite salute. “Flying low as we are? About six hours.” Her brown eyes wandered from Sabine to Crispin. “I can arrange for a sedative, if either of you would like.”
Thinking of his promise to father, Crispin shook his head, “No.” The flight officer touched her cap again and vanished into the cockpit. She reappeared a moment later, poking her head back through the bulkhead, “Lady Sabine, once we’re free of Meidua’s air space, you can join me up front if you wish.”
Crispin didn’t have to turn to know his sister was smiling. Sabine and the flight captain had been close ever since his sister was young—as though Kyra were some surrogate for their distant and somewhat exiled mother. He didn’t hear what followed next, but swiveled his couch into the forward-facing position so as to get a better view out the shuttle window as it taxied away from the terminal gate. The rain fell more quickly now, and the sky away east over the Apollan Ocean grew dark as space and heavier, so that it seemed a slick of oil floated against the underbelly of the day.
Usually, Crispin would have been looking forward to a visit to Artemia with anticipation. Good food and good wine and good fighting in the coliseum. With the end of summer fast approaching, the horse races were due to start and the new gambling season with them. And there were the women, of course. Though House Kephalos bore only women by long tradition, they kept a harem of both male and female concubines, and Crispin was eager to see what manner of new faces had been acquired in the years since his last visit. But now? Now Crispin wished he were going anywhere else. To Haspida or Euclid—even offworld. He’d have gladly followed Hadrian to the edge of the map in that moment rather than go to Artemia … if what Father said was true. If there were a trap, shouldn’t they be doing something about it?
What was Father planning? And why hadn’t he been told about it? The shuttle pulled away, moving into position for liftoff. Acceleration pressed Crispin back into his chair, turbines whining as the shuttle picked up speed and leaped into the air. They angled immediately back and left. The city dropped away below them, and the white mound of the acropolis with its castle like a crown of black teeth sank as well. The silvery line of the river ran across the highlands from the locks where it fell all the way to Meidua below. Turning, the base of the hightower rose up—three miles high and rising into the storm, its running lights blinking red to warn off the approach of air traffic. Behind them, their dark home stood unmoving atop its promontory, masked behind its double walls with their merlons like snarling fangs. Ten thousand storms had broken on Devil’s Rest.
It would break ten thousand more.
Ahead? Ahead there were only the points of the Redtine Mountains, black against the darkening sky.
Crispin settled back against the cushions of his flight couch and closed his eyes.
Sleep came too easily to his troubled mind.
Chapter 4
Fallen Angels
The crash of thunder woke him, and Crispin lurched to his feet—or tried to. The crash webbing held him in place, and Crispin succeeded only in flailing like a speared fish against his restraints. He was just glad Sabine wasn’t there to laugh at him. She must have moved up front with the captain after Crispin dozed off.
The shuttle rocked. “What the—!” The words escaped him involuntarily.
Boom!
A flash shone in through the windows along the starboard side, filling the cabin and the bulkheads to fore and aft with light. Not the white gleam of lightning. Red.
“That’s cannon fire!” one of the soldiers called from behind. “No way in hell, Raz!”
“I’m telling you, that’s cannon fire!”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about! There’s no way that’s—”
Boom!
The shuttle rocked again, red light carving grainy shadows against the dull metal structure of the aircraft. Crispin slumped against the wall, crouched just long enough to pull his cape back around his shoulders. It was all right. They were all right. Whatever was going on, the shuttle was shielded. They could take an attack. An attack. Father had been right after all! But they hadn’t even made it to Artemia yet! Unbidden, thoughts of his Uncle Lucian rose to Crispin’s mind—killed in a shuttle crash when Crispin was just a boy.
“Captain!” he called, staggering against the door frame on his way into the shuttle’s cockpit, “What in Earth’s name is going on?”
Sabine was strapped into the seat immediately behind Kyra’s copilot—a huge man with short-cropped hair and hunched shoulders. It was she who answered. “We’re being shot at.” Crispin thought Sabine sounded remarkably calm, but noted the way her knuckles stood out white on the arms of her chair.
Crispin threaded his hand through a nylon loop that hung from the ceiling and leaned against the bulkhead to steady himself. “In the mountains?” he asked, looking out the windshield and down at the mountains beneath and about them. “In our mountains?”
“Could be raiders,” the copilot said, voice tight against his teeth. “Take us up to thirty thousand feet,” Kyra put in. “They might not have the range.”
Boom!
Another shell. Another crimson flash.
“They must not know who they’re firing at!” Sabine said. “If they’re raiders, they might think we’re a cargo hauler. Smugglers? They could think we’re one of the uranium shipments?”
“No,” said a remarkably calm voice—and Crispin was surprised to find it was his own. “They know exactly what they’re doing.”
Sabine twisted round in her seat. Her face was very pale. “But how? Father didn’t announce the change in flight plans. No one should know we’re here.”
That plucked a string in Crispin’s mind, and leaning over the console towards Kyra and the junior flight officer he said, “Get a distress signal to Devil’s Rest.”
“Already done,” the copilot replied. “Not sure if it got through.” Crispin seized the man by his epaulet, fist tight in the crisp wool jacket. Despite his size, Crispin pulled the man half out of his seat. “What do you mean you’re not sure it got through?”
“Crispin!” Sabine put a hand on his arm.
“They could be jamming us, my lord,” the man said, tight voice suddenly higher, quavering. He had remembered that this was his lord’s son he was speaking to.
“Jamming us?” Crispin repeated through clenched teeth.
Sabine’s fingers tightened on his arm, “Crispin! He’s trying to fly the shuttle!”
A sensor pinged on the console, flashing white and chiming noisily as it could. Kyra’s hands skittered over the console, and she turned the yoke sharply, throwing them into a banking turn that tipped the aircraft almost on its side. Another concussion rocked the vessel, but more distantly. Crispin had a brief view of the ground outside the starboard window almost directly below them. The tops of the mountains were a mere two thousand feet below: red clay and white stone and the gray- green scrub of highland forest. There was no snow in the mountains. They were not high enough to keep their caps through
even the Delian summer, mild as they were.
Another explosion rocked the shuttle, and Crispin lost his grip and fell against the wall of the cabin.
“Shields still holding, ma’am!” the copilot said.
“Thank you, Tracy,” Kyra said, pulling the shuttle out of its turn. “Can we return fire?” Crispin asked, struggling back to his feet. Captain Kyra’s words were void of any emotion as she said, “This is
just a passenger shuttle, my lord.” She keyed a command into the console and added, “You should strap in.”
Lord Crispin Marlowe hesitated a moment, his hands gripping the back of the pilot’s chair. There had to be something he could do, hadn’t there? His eyes swept over the console, around the room. There was nothing. Nothing. Snarling, he took a seat beside Sabine and strapped himself in.
“Where are they?” His sister asked, craning her neck to look out a porthole in the side of the cabin wall. Crispin looked out his own window, but he saw nothing.
“Nothing on scan,” Tracy said, “could be groundlings?”
Whatever Kyra said next was lost on Crispin. These weren’t just smugglers. Smugglers wouldn’t shoot at a shuttle if they thought it was carrying enriched uranium from the factory centers in the mountains. They used harpoons that short-circuited a shuttle’s electrical systems and dropped them from the sky. This was something else.
“They’re trying to kill us,” he said, stupidly. He grit his teeth, wincing at how unspeakably dim that statement had been.
Neither Kyra nor her copilot dared to say a word, but Sabine snapped, “Of course they’re trying to kill us, damn it!”
“No, no!” Crispin said, trying to spy their attackers out the window. “I mean I don’t think these are smugglers.” His father’s warning about Aunt Amalia rang in his ears. “I think this is an assassination.”
The Lesser Devil Page 2
