Where legitimate authority faltered, false kings reigned.
Columns of black smoke rose from foundries, pillars of white steam from reactors. These mingled in the light of Latarra’s thin, white sun and left vague shadows on the air. Through this forest of tangled columns, Syme’s shuttle descended, passing over neon streets and black water and the unsteady mass of mankind in the Maze below. Syme watched his reflection in the dark window glass. Hooded eyes peered back, blank and unfeeling. He smoothed his gray-streaked hair and listened to the monotone chatter of his pilot officer as the woman communicated with the city’s flight control.
They were awaited—and there was work to do.
Beneath them, perched on a rise above the river, stood the only true buildings in the monarch’s camp-city, the only structures founded on the native rock, alone amidst that sea of sunken ships. Syme recognized them at once from the holographs he had seen in the intelligence briefing: the monarch’s palace. How poor it seemed when measured against the topless towers of the Eternal City on Forum. A shabby collection of square-faced concrete-and-glass buildings clustered about the base of a drum tower but thirty stories high and crowned with a geodesic dome of mirror-glass. Reports indicated it had been constructed by the mining corporation that had mapped and settled Latarra before Harendotes seized the planet for his own. It had a corporate look, blank and artless—a monument to nothing at all.
“Touchdown in ten, sir,” the pilot said.
“Very good, Lieutenant,” Syme replied, touching his hair again. “Will Harendotes be greeting us in person?”
“No word on that, sir.”
Syme grunted, but not in surprise. He’d had no reason to suspect a royal greeting. Syme had reviewed footage of the man, watched his parades, listened to his speeches, and noted the electric way he spoke of peace and a place safe from both the Cielcin and the Empire, of a new order. It was no wonder millions flocked to him. The man had a certain hypnotic charm about him—and he was a fighter. They said he’d brought whole clans of the Extrasolarians in line with his own hand, for those barbarians recognized only wealth and power. To all accounts, Calen Harendotes was an unholy terror. When men spoke of him, it was with an almost religious reverence—the sort of tone reserved for heroes the likes of Cassian Powers and Hadrian Marlowe, like the Emperor himself. Such men did not greet dignitaries on the landing pad.
Not even those masquerading as Consortium directors.
No, Syme would be forced to wait. Waiting would allow the monarch opportunity to impress his visitors from the Consortium, to overawe them with the splendor of his squalorous world, to assure them that he was worth their investment. Harendotes had positioned himself to be a real power in the outer provinces. With the collapse of Imperial authority throughout the region, it was not unthinkable that a man in command of so large a fleet as the one on and in orbit around Latarra might forge something of a nation for himself. It would not be hard for Harendotes to sweep up the toppled freeholds and burned-out Imperial colonies, to forge alliances and broker treaties with promises of protection. There were those as far away as Forum who called him Calen the Conqueror already, and if things continued as they were, the man promised to become quite a thorn in the Imperial side.
It was why he had to die.
It was why Syme had traveled all this way under the flag of the Wong-Hopper Consortium. It was why he sat in the rear of a Consortium shuttle in company indigo with the cape of a regional director fastened about his shoulders. It was why his guard dressed in matte black Mandari armor, and not in the ivory and crimson of the Imperial Legions.
No Extrasolarian warlord would treat with the Empire, but the Consortium? The Consortium was an opportunity. Was opportunity itself. Business was business, after all, and the Consortium Mandari would not balk at the prospect of dealing with a creature like the monarch. Stability in the outer provinces was good for business, no matter who it was that brought the stability. The Consortium would want to talk, and Harendotes would want to listen, for the Wong-Hopper Consortium was among the largest weapons manufacturers in the galaxy, and the single largest manufacturer of terraforming and settlement equipment. If the monarch truly wished to secure dominion across the outer provinces, a deal with the Consortium would be too tempting a proposition to refuse.
He had not refused, and that would be his undoing.
* * *
Pneumatics hissed as the shuttle ramp descended. Syme lingered in the compartment as his guards—four men in the flanged armor of corporate soldiers—went first to secure the platform. While he waited, he accepted his cane from the pilot officer and tested the weight of it and the position of the trigger that would activate the highmatter blade concealed in the handle. It was but one of several weapons intended for the monarch. Security might find most of them, but Syme was confident they would not find them all.
The all-clear sounded through the conduction patch behind one ear, and Syme started his descent, pausing long enough to return the pilot officer’s crisp salute. Even if he succeeded, odds were he would never see the young lady again. Syme gave this reality little thought as he turned away. He had served Legion Intelligence for nearly eighty waking years, which was more life than the son of a common dockworker could have hoped for. The Office had taught him, trained him, uplifted his baseborn genes, extended his life…all so that he could better serve his Empire. And he had been of service, fighting in the shadows while other men fought in the light, each to protect the Empire and its people from those who would tear it apart. From the Cielcin, from the Extras, from this man who would be king.
Monsters all.
Syme knew a thing or two about monsters. He’d killed more than his fair share in his day.
But the creatures that awaited him on the landing pad in the yard were monsters in the classic sense. Inhuman. Black glass windows peered out from the square faces of buildings all around and stared sightlessly down. The plaza struck Syme as an oddly banal and familiar setting for such a horrific menagerie of monsters, and that only made them stranger. It was as if some splinter of subconscious nightmare had risen up and beached itself on the waking world.
“Welcome to Latarra, Director Syme,” came a reedy, masculine voice. One of the creatures stepped forward—if stepped was the right word. It seemed to slither over the ground, the hem of its robe rasping over dry leaves without the motion of legs to disturb it. Nearly eight feet tall, it was, and less than half as broad in the shoulder as any man ought to be. It had no face, or else what face it had was hidden in the depths of its black hood. As it advanced, it spread its hands, silver-skinned and three-fingered, and bowed. “I am Oneiros, majordomo to His Majesty, Our Monarch. Welcome to Latarra.”
The would-be assassin peered up beneath Oneiros’ hood, but there was nothing to see. Syme’s gaze raked over the rest of the majordomo’s party. As if to compensate for Oneiros’ skeletal thinness, there stood a musclebound titan of a man nearly as tall as the robed creature, but so hulking it was a wonder he could stand at all. He must have weighed a quarter ton, and from the way his brow and cheekbones jutted out around beady eyes, Syme guessed the man’s strength and size were gotten artificially. He was a homunculus, a mutant grown to order in a vat.
In the giant’s shadow stood a slim woman with green skin and hair like dry moss. Syme had seen dryads before; they were…almost human. So too the men of the guard, dressed in the monarch’s black and gold, seemed human enough, the white horsehair of their crests floating in the vapors off the fresh-landed shuttle. But the little, grub-like man who floated in a repulsor pod like some undeveloped embryo in its mother’s sac was anything but. Were those glasses it wore on its moon-like face? Or machines grafted to its soft skull?
Syme did his best to smile. “Thank you, Majordomo.” He kept looking around, surveying the coterie of machine men and genetic hybrids this monarch had sent to greet him. It took every ounce of control in him to suppress his horror and unease at the sight of the party. “Will it
be possible to meet with the monarch today? Our time here is quite limited, and we are eager to get down to business.”
Oneiros gestured with one silvery hand for Syme to proceed along the path towards the massive doors that waited ahead. “I have been asked to bring you to him directly. You should be honored, Director Syme. Most visitors have to wait.”
Syme’s fingers tightened on the head of his cane. “Then I am doubly grateful. These are dangerous times, and Latarra was very far out of our way. I do hope that we can come to some arrangement.” He paused, checking to see that his guards were in position behind. “I must say, I was impressed by the size of your city. How many people live here now?”
“No one is quite sure,” the majordomo said, gliding over the ground beside Syme, casting a shadow barely distinguishable from the shadows of the lampposts that slashed the pavement. “We estimate the number at approximately twenty-three million, and that’s just on the ground. We’ve nearly two million in orbit—most of those refugees and soldiers in fugue.”
“In fugue?” Syme asked. “Do you intend to settle them offworld?”
The majordomo turned its hood to study him. There was a twinkle in Oneiros’ voice as he answered, “Oh, yes. When we have a place to send them.”
“The Consortium will be happy to assist your master in this regard,” Syme said.
“Such is our hope, Director.”
They went on in silence for a moment then, passing through sliding doors and into a square-arched hall of sterile white and black. More guards in the monarch’s colors stood within, their faces hidden behind dark visors. Syme found himself reviewing every story he’d ever heard of the so-called monarch of Latarra. He had come seemingly out of nowhere centuries before. Whispers had come to Legion Intelligence on Forum of a man working to unite the disparate and fractious tribes of barbarians who dwelt in the Dark between the farther suns.
Reports suggested this Harendotes to be a renegade lord of the Imperium, a palatine from some ancient house. But the High College held no record of any house or bloodline called Harendotes, and what his right name might be, none could say. Still, Syme supposed it was possible. More likely still was the possibility that this Harendotes was an Extrasolarian himself, some black-barred barbarian prince, a genetic bootleg of an Imperial nobile, and no true palatine at all. It didn’t matter. The man’s origins mattered only if they could be used as a weapon against him, and it seemed to Syme that the man was above such weapons. No scandal could shake him from his place or weaken his hold over Latarra and its Maze. Whatever the real answer, Syme did not care. Disgraced nobile or barbarian facsimile, it did not matter.
The man would die all the same.
Oneiros spoke as he led the way along white corridors and out into a gray plaza, telling Syme a bit of the history of the palace on its acropolis, and about the city whose misshapen buildings cast cyclopean shadows against the eggshell sky. Syme listened only half-heartedly, trying to keep track of the route back to where his shuttle waited. Glancing back, he saw the other horrors in the monarch’s retinue following behind: the giant, the dryad, and the floating man. Black banners hung from staves that lined the road across the plaza, and from the face of the drum tower ahead, each embroidered with a golden falcon, a winged hellion with talons spread. It certainly looked like the banner of an Imperial house, fringed with a spiral labyrinth pattern. When Syme remarked upon this, his spectral companion said nothing. The majordomo slithered on ahead. Such symbols could be imitated.
More guardsmen flanked the stairs that led up to the central tower. So still were they that Syme would have thought them statues, were it not for the indicator lights blinking green and red on their vambraced arms. So many of them. Syme smoothed his gray-streaked hair once more and gripped the head of his cane. He abandoned all hope of regaining the relative safety of his shuttle and said a prayer to Mother Earth that the pilot officer would be able to escape.
Heavy glass doors slid silently aside, and they entered a pillared hall faced with black-veined marble. Boots trod on Tavrosi carpets an inch thick. Ahead, the iron grill of a lift carriage rattled open. Oneiros gestured that Syme should lead, and he filed in with his four guards. The majordomo drifted in after, along with the floating, grub-like little man with the machine eyes.
“Are they not coming with us?” Syme asked, gesturing to the giant, the dryad, and the other inhuman counselors of the monarch’s court.
“There is no need,” the floating man replied, voice high and cold. “His majesty awaits in the glass gardens above.” As he spoke, the little devil rotated, floating belly up in the air mere inches from Syme’s face. He shut his eyes.
From the perversion of the flesh, O Mother deliver us, he prayed.
The instant the little demon finished this answer, the grill slid shut and the lift began to rise, not rattling, but with the smooth whisper of magnetic levitation.
“Leave him be, Zelaz,” Oneiros said from the corner.
The floating man drew back. “It’s not often we have such distinguished company, Oneiros. His majesty will be pleased.”
“You must forgive my companion his rudeness,” the majordomo said. “Zelaz is Exalted. His kind are unused to ordinary men.”
The floating demon grinned, revealing needle-like teeth in pale gums.
Syme was relieved when the doors opened, and he followed the majordomo into a low-ceilinged vestibule, where six more of the monarch’s guards waited, faceless and white-crested.
“Your men must wait here, Director,” Oneiros said, indicating a space by one of the huge, squat pillars that flanked the chamber.
“I beg your pardon?” Syme asked, and leaning on a bit of the arrogance expected from a true Consortium director, he said, “I am a Regional Director of the Wong-Hopper Consortium, sirrah. I will not be stripped of my protections!”
“His majesty has asked to meet with you in private,” Oneiros said, and bowed, bending his body almost in half, defying all conventions of the human skeleton. “You may keep your personal shield, of course. But your guards and effects must remain in the vestibule. It is a matter of security, you understand.”
“Security…” Syme muttered, and made a sign to his men. Stay alert. “Very well.” He turned towards the heavy metal doors.
“Director!” the demon Zelaz interjected. “You are wearing a sidearm.”
Syme froze. That would have been too easy. “Apologies.” He unclicked his phase disruptor from its holster and lay it on the counter beneath Zelaz’s hovering bulk. Without being asked to do so, he removed a knife from inside the vambrace on his right arm—leaving its ceramic counterpart concealed in his top of one boot. They did not ask him to remove the rings from his silk-gloved hands, not detecting the microscopic needle or the hollow chamber beneath the stone that held the potent hemotoxin.
“And your cane,” the gremlin asked.
“You would not part a gentleman from his support, surely!” Syme protested.
“You are a fragile, ordinary human,” Zelaz said, “but not so fragile that you cannot walk alone.”
The would-be assassin hesitated only a moment. The highmatter sword concealed in the walking stick had been a long shot, but it had also been his best hope of winning back to his shuttle. He glanced at Oneiros. At Zelaz. Did they know what it was? There was no way to read those inhuman faces. No way to know.
“Take care of it,” he said, laying it gently on the counter. “It has been in my family for generations.” A lie. His family had been nothing but longshoremen and foundry workers for generations.
“It will be right here when you return,” Oneiros said and swept a hand towards doors that opened with a groan.
* * * * *
Chapter Two
The Shadow On The Throne
The doors opened on another set of doors. An airlock. Syme stepped within and waited as the doors shut behind him. The airlock cycled. Light behind. Darkness. Light ahead. A sliver at first, then a chink, then a wedge tha
t dimmed and resolved into an image of crumbling splendor, along with a draft of warm, wet air.
The glass gardens, Zelaz had said. The topmost level of the monarch’s tower had been given over entirely to a wet climate conservatory. Panels of polarized glass hung above the tops of overgrown trees and filtered the sun from Latarra’s anemic white to the rich blues of Earth long lost. Birds sang in the trees, and water played in silver fountains.
Syme stepped out, advancing along a path minutely tiled in black and white herringbone, here and there warped and shattered where the roots of mighty trees had disturbed sterile order. An iron lamppost stooped over the path, bent and mangled by the growth of one ancient ash. It still shone despite its ruin, despite the daylight streaming through the dome. A rodent of some species Syme did not recognize scurried across the path.
“Hello?”
There was no answer, nor any sign of the monarch.
Calen Harendotes was nowhere to be seen.
“Hello?”
Syme checked his hair with silk-wrapped fingers and followed the broken path around a bend. A fountain loomed ahead, its centerpiece a red-veined marble statue of a nude woman reclining, her head thrown back, her breasts on full display. So lifelike was she that she seemed almost the counterpart of the stony guards: almost alive, where they were almost stone.
“Hello?” Syme ventured for a third time. “Majesty?”
“Come forward, Director,” came a flat, dry voice from the trees ahead.
Syme pushed past the fountain and around a bend in the path. There, beneath the very apex of the dome, was a mirrored pool thick with lotus blooms, with the bright shadows of koi flitting among their roots. Upon its tiled margin in a throne of leather and black glass sat a very old man. He did not turn as Syme approached, but sat contemplating his fish, gnarled hands gripping the arms of his chair. He sat on the left side of the pool so that he faced Syme at right angles and watched the other man’s approach with gray and tired eyes.
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