In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (39 page)

A faint sound came from behind her: the whisper of the steel-and-ceramic casing of a pistol being drawn from a holster. A slight pip came an instant later, a sign that the pressure gauge was showing sufficient methane, and then a
snick-click
as nonlethals were substituted for the usual neurotoxin. A shot into the base of the brain would be
quick enough for practical purposes, and would leave her gracefully limp rather than convulsing and spraying the surroundings.

The Coercives of her colleagues made similar preparations. Two more of her own household troops knelt before her to either side, spreading an absorbent towel; it was always in readiness, but usually simply a matter of ceremony . . .

I have lived all but a few moments of my seventy years in the Real World by ceremony
, she thought.
It is appropriate that I terminate my world-line in a congruent fashion
.

“I make Apology without Condition to the Ruby Throne. I express my final gratitude and praise to the Emperor for his mercy,” she said firmly, drawing the small sharp knife from her sleeve. “Tollamune! Tollamune! Tollamune!”

The edge was kept sharp enough to part a hair drifting downward, and the steel had a slight blood etching; this was not the first time her lineage had made a miscalculation, though few as serious as hers. She set it under the corner of her jaw and drew it down diagonally with a single hard stroke.

There was an instant of intense stinging pain, hot and cold at the same time, and the world vanished.

The Thoughtful Grace shrank back a little from Sajir sa-Tomond’s anger. The recorder they had intercepted for him on its journey back to the Palace of Restful Repose fluffed its feathers and hid its head under a wing—memories of cases when the bearer of bad tidings suffered for it having been imprinted on its genes. Then the Tollamune Emperor contained himself with an effort that brought a blue tinge to his ancient lips and a frown to the face of the Imperial Physician.

“I am disappointed!” he said in emphatic mode, leaning back in his chair. “This chain of events is unfortunate in the extreme!”

All the chair’s efforts could not massage the tension out of the muscles of his back; he ignored it as he might have the siren call of sleep when alertness was essential.
De’ming
made small humming sounds of distress as the interrupted meal disrupted the smooth progression of the courses, and the physician frowned again. Sajir’s appetite had been irregular of late, another sign of stress. Suddenly
the sweet-musky scent of the incense and the way it blended with the iodine odor of the chilled soup was nauseating.

There was a ritual to an Imperial meal, even an informal one here in the presence chamber of his personal rooms. The others who had been given the privilege of eating with him stood and took two steps backward from the pearl-inlaid surface, hands in sleeves and faces toward him. Sajir saw, and forced himself to relax, drawing several long deep breaths and feeling his forebrain take command of the hormones. And the deep patterns of the limbic system at the base of his brain, where the club-wielding ape still snarled beneath the most cultured of beings, and the reptile brain below that.

We are not beasts to be commanded by instinct
, he thought.
My body readies itself for fight or flight, but neither is appropriate here. I must
think,
not react. Mindless, hasty reaction is the role in which I have cast Prince Heltaw in this round of the Game of Life
. Sh’u Maz!

“Prince Heltaw will
not
sacrifice his hostage; this is a mere bluff,” he said meditatively. “To do so would be to lose his last piece.”

He took up another wedge of fluffy bread and dipped it in the
nakaw
and nibbled, despite the way it turned to dust in his mouth and caused the threatened closing of his throat. The others sat once more. Several of them were young Thoughtful Grace; it was his habit to invite junior officers of the Sword of the Dynasty to such occasions on a rotating basis, for several purposes. Despite everything, he inwardly smiled slightly to see them eat once more with speed and voracity, trying to finish before he lost his temper again. The food of the Imperial table was quite different from that commonly served in barracks.

The momentary amusement washed away in an ocean of sorrow:

If she dies, it will be as if I have lost Vowin again. I do not think I could endure that a second time. Even the Imperial role in
Sh’u Maz
recognizes that there are limits to what one individual can sacrifice for duty
.

Daiyar cleared her throat in the long-standing signal that meant reluctant-contradiction.

“Supremacy, he will order a lethal excruciation of the Terran if your offspring refuses to meet with him.”

Sajir looked at her. She went on, “He will calculate that no amount of acquiescence will be sufficient to spare his lineage in the event of Deyak sa-Sajir’s effective accession to the Ruby Throne.
In part this is a projection of his own most likely course of action, were he in her position, and in part a rational extrapolation from the known personality traits of Teyud’s . . . Deyak’s . . . parents. Thus, he will take revenge before ending his own life. At that point, there would be nothing to lose.”

“All or nothing,” Sajir murmured.
The problem with that is the likelihood of receiving nothing
, he thought.

“Bring me the Terran, Franziskus Binkis,” he said. “And mobilize a battalion, with appropriate transport. Transport for myself as well. Heltaw did not specify a meeting within his own demesne. He is not yet so powerful that he can prevent a Tollamune making transit through Dvor Il-Adazar. Pieces may yet be doubled, to his detriment.”

Encyclopedia Britannica, 20th Edition
University of Chicago Press, 1998

MARS
:
History of Contacts

The strategies of the U.S. and Eastbloc missions to Mars have been mirror images of those adopted on Venus. Whereas on Venus the United States landed its probes close to Kartahown, the only large city on the planet, the USASF base on Mars was established on the shores of the Northern Sea, far from any civilized Martian settlement, and made its first contact with the provincial city of Zar-tu-Kan. In turn, the Eastbloc mission was placed close to the curious Petra-like capital of Dvor Il-Adazar, once the center of the Crimson Dynasty’s planetary empire, and still the largest and wealthiest of the Martian city-states. This choice may have derived from a serious underestimation of the power and subtlety of the culture based there.

Mars, Dvor Il-Adazar
Palace of Restful Contemplation
May 27, 2000 AD

Jeremy Wainman almost missed the pain. “Emphasis on the
almost
,” he murmured to himself.

They’d put him back in his old cell.
Very Martian
, he thought.
I escaped because someone outside busted me out. So they take precautions against
that,
and otherwise just stick me back in the same jar. Terrans would have put me in a different cell, or added all sorts of new locks, whether it made sense or not. But if there’s no problem, they don’t try to fix it. Very . . . sensible
.

They hadn’t bothered to feed him, either. Whatever they were planning would be over and done with by the time he really began to weaken with hunger, so why waste food and water and effort?

Also very Martian; I wouldn’t have believed that being compulsively
sensible
can be so goddamned
annoying.
If it weren’t for Teyud . . . and Baid tu-Or, God rest her . . . and Doctor Daiyar and a couple of others . . . I could become sorta prejudiced about them. Poor Sally—I can understand how she felt
.

At least they’d restored the personal kit he’d come with, so he had depilatory cream and wipes to clean with. Looking and smelling a little less like a monkey fresh out of the jungle couldn’t hurt, and certainly improved his morale. He paced while he thought; the same set of beady eyes stared hungrily at him from behind the ventilator grille, and the same clawed hand occasionally reached hopefully at his face.

What’s Teyud doing? Where is she now? Is she all right, Goddammit?

The door opened. Three of Heltaw’s Coercives stood there, two with their pistols leveled; one held a pair of manacles, flexing and writhing in his fingers.

“Extend your hands,” the one with the manacles said. “Cause no additional difficulty, or excruciation will be administered. Haste is essential and the irritation born of frustration is rife.”

Which boils down to: Don’t fuck with me, it ain’t the time. But I like the sound of it, a little, anyway. Prince Heltaw’s in a hurry. That means things can’t all be going his way
.

He held out his hands; the Martian flicked the . . . whatever it
was . . . and it wrapped around his wrists in an instant double loop, tightening until the bare, suedelike surface was just short of being uncomfortable. He had a strong suspicion that if he tried to wrench his wrists loose, it would clamp down harder, and the glinting, wirelike intrusions in its surface would probably make it a stone bitch to cut.

Well
, he thought snidely,
even tying people up with worms can work if you’ve got forty thousand years to get everything
just so.

They hustled him out of the cell, down the corridor and into the great, hemispherical chamber where the
Paiteng
riders had their lair. He blinked in surprise when they entered; it was empty of people and of every adult riding bird, and there was a litter of gear and papers—very unusual for Martians, who tended to be finicky about neatness unless they were in a tearing hurry. Then they turned along a colonnade flanked by arches, and into an elevator. Despite the fear gripping him, he found himself distracted for an instant by the interior—the crystal walls were shaped like the feathers of a
Paiteng
’s wings, so that you stood as if embraced by them. The effect was striking, even if recent events had made him a little jaundiced about the giant creatures.

The room the doors opened onto was almost as large as the
Paiteng
stables below.
Would you call it a courtyard?
Jeremy thought.

It was open to the sky above, at least visually, though covered by a high arched dome of glassine; within it was a broad shallow bowl chiseled—or gnawed and dissolved—from the reddish native rock, and shaped into concentric rings of terraces. Those bore gardens, tall lacy trees and banks of plants in stone urns or trays, and pavilions ringed by slender columns of jasper and chalcedony. Those might be open or closed off for privacy’s sake by an ornamental stone carved into the consistency of lacy fretwork. The strong, almost medicinal perfume of Martian flowers was in the air, and the faint musky-spicy smell of incense.

People thronged the terraces; they weren’t crowded, but as close to it as it came on Mars, many of them leaning on the balustrades whose uprights were carved in the likeness of predatory
dhwar
with their wings outstretched, making an endless series of arches. It was quiet, much quieter than it would have been with a Terran crowd of the same size, despite a fair number of children being held up so they could see; just a murmur running like the wind
through leaves. And it was
warm
, which was also something he hadn’t often experienced on this icebox of a planet.

Then his mouth quirked as he realized that it was only about sixty degrees Fahrenheit—his standards had changed. He was still sweating a little in his longjohns and desert wear and robe. It was moist, as well; an artificial waterfall ran down the opposite side of the bowl, flanked by broad staircases and sprouting upward in a fountain at each level. His sinuses and nose drank in the vapor gratefully and greedily, and he could feel the constant slight ache there start to abate. He’d gotten so used to it that it was the fading that attracted his attention.

“Well, that’s extravagance,” Jeremy muttered in his own language.

He fell silent when one of the guards prodded him with the narrow muzzle of her dart pistol.

Well, it is
, he thought resentfully.
It’s like having a bunch of diamond-and-emerald mechanical birds in the trees in your garden, even if it’s recycled. It’s like the sort of thing the French court did at Versailles before the Revolution. Look at the way the kids are being shown the rare sight of actual running water in the open air . . . though I suppose the dome counts as a kind of cover
.

The center of the bowl-like courtyard dropped sheer for twenty feet, down to an octagonal platform of white marble, cut into squares by strips of jet. It was surrounded by a water moat . . .

Jesus, that’s an
atanj
board! But it’s huge! And where are the . . . uh-oh
.

The Game of Life was occasionally played with living pieces, particularly here in Dvor Il-Adazar, where archaic habits lingered on; he didn’t think that any Terran had ever seen it done, certainly nobody from Kennedy Base. Each of the eight sides of the board had an arched stairway leading up to the surface level, gossamer-light structures like spun silver, built so that they could be retracted. They were the “Despot’s Road,” the way for the master player to access the surface below. Two of them were extended now, one on the eastern side and one on the western.

I don’t know what’s going on here, but I certainly don’t like it
.

On the side of the wall opposite the stairs-and-waterfall arrangement was a tall gate, wrought in curling black iron and polished bronze in the shape of lilylike flowers. That showed how old this
place was; it had been built during the Lilly Period. A prickle of awe touched his spine.
Atanj
matches had taken their bloody course here when his ancestors were cracking hand-axes out of flint and each other’s heads with the result. However many times everything had been renewed, it was a place that had seen crowds like this during the Great Tranquility.