Assassinorum kingmaker, p.17
Assassinorum Kingmaker, page 17
He raised his glass. ‘See you in the Lists.’
She swept away, smiling, walking through the sky-blue crowd, up onto the bridge, and crossing into the half where red tabards dominated. A fish swimming in many streams.
Hawthorn waited until Liselle was out of earshot and said, ‘She’s rutting that footman of hers.’
‘Mother.’
‘Well, she is.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘And you aren’t?’
‘No. Well, once or twice each, but that’s hardly the same thing. They’ve been carrying on for a year – it’s unseemly. I could’ve told you by letter but you do realise it’s been two years since you wrote, hmm? And that we only knew to expect you because of reports Dask picked up from some listening station she keeps in the out-system.’
So they’d gotten the manufactured signals traffic. Clever Koln.
‘I was engaged,’ Rakkan said.
‘Hopefully not, unless you want me to finally have that aneurysm you’ve been trying to induce ever since you were knee-high. Now tell me, what daemon possessed you to trade that ratty banner for being bonded to the Exalted Court? When I heard you say it, I nearly called for the exorcist.’
‘It is an honourable appointment.’
‘And one that does nothing for Stryder,’ she snapped. ‘When you came back, if you ever came back, I had hoped you would join your true house. I could use you.’
‘Yes, that’s what I was worried about. I am not a Stryder, mother, I’m a Stryder-Rau.’
‘Please,’ said Hawthorn, a word she only used as a type of curse. She had been in the Lists herself – thus her dual name – but had left in order to head House Stryder. Yavarius-Khau, after all, did not seem to be going anywhere. ‘Your father left you nothing but a diluted bloodline and a few hazy memories. You know Rau only offered the match with your father because they wanted to neutralise our line from sitting as the Crown for a few generations. Wouldn’t offer anyone suitable. I was so furious that I put it in the contract that you would only have my name – your father didn’t fight it. Didn’t even care you’d be just Rakkan rather than Rakkan-Fang.’
‘Yes,’ Rakkan sipped his vin, and tilted his head. ‘So you’ve told me. But you can’t smear a chivalric war hero, can you?’
She snorted. ‘Awful position your father put me in. Saves the High Monarch and dies doing it, and we can never speak ill of him again. Even though his outsider father was some upstart frigate commander, stinking of void reactors–’
‘Post-captain,’ corrected Rakkan. ‘Grandfather was a post-captain. And he made vice-admiral.’
‘Posthumously,’ she spat. ‘I don’t see why I must respect a man merely for being killed by the aeldari. Neither his sacrifice, nor your father’s, did anything for this house or this world – and now you’ve traded your leverage.’
‘Is it that bad?’
She shot him a look, lips curling in – what? Disgust at his ignorance? Resentment that he’d missed so much? Beneath the constructed consciousness of Rakkan, Sycorax felt herself stepping into deep water.
‘That bad?’ she hissed. ‘The High Monarch is… well… you can’t say what he really is. He’s capricious, let’s say, or eccentric. Last year he was a devoted partisan of Rau. Favoured them in the tournaments. Gave them Telshen Hall…’
‘Finally solved that, did he? It’s been disputed since you were in frills.’
‘Be serious, Linoleus. I never consented to wearing frills, even when I was a babe. He also had your poor cousin slapped from his assignment at court for nearly no reason at all. Some nonsense about not showing Rallan Fontaine enough deference in a meeting.’
‘Which cousin?’ Rakkan frowned.
‘Mauvec, of course.’
‘Ah,’ said Rakkan, scanning the blue-clad crowd. ‘I don’t look forward to that meeting.’
‘Well you did try to take Typhoon’s Teeth from him. But it’s been years, I doubt he’ll break more than a few fingers. But the point is, last year the High Monarch was antagonising us – then he wheeled around and dropped his lance straight for Rau. They can’t get a good ruling on anything this year. And when one of our squires killed one of theirs in a duel, well, the law states that it made our man a proper target in the blood feud. But he disallowed it, refused to let Rau fulfil the vendetta.’
‘Strange.’
‘He’s also closed their machine sanctuaries.’
‘What?’
‘Disallowed the ancestral machine sanctums. Referred to them as absurd superstition. The sacristans are livid, but they never make waves – after all, they can continue bowing and scraping to the Omnissiah, it’s just the Rau ancestral halls that are forbidden. He’s declared them a subversive belief – said they should be listening to his orders, not the ancestors – and threatened to bring in the Inquisition.’
‘That’s insa–’
‘Intemperate,’ she corrected. ‘No High Monarch is mad. And if one is, it is not said until after they’ve left their mortal shell and been absorbed to the Throne Mechanicum. You know the rules.’
‘Still, good for your faction, eh?’
‘One would think so,’ she said, ‘if one was a simpering moron. We’re hostage to him, Linoleus. He could change his patronage at any second and drive as hard at us as he did at Rau. Anything he wants now, Stryder will give him. He’s riding us to spit-froth like a horse. We’ll collapse soon. And if we don’t, Rau will rise up and kill us all. They think we’re behind it, that we’ve bribed or coerced him somehow.’
‘What do you think caused this change in his mind?’
The baroness turned and regarded him with sharp eyes. ‘You’re quite interested in house politics. Exactly whose son came back to me?’
‘War changes a man,’ Rakkan said. ‘At least it did for me.’
A textual dispatch from Rakkan, the real Rakkan, flashed across Sycorax’s vision.
ask about dogs
‘The hounds are well, I assume?’ Rakkan enquired.
‘They are!’ Hawthorn gestured to a footman, who weaved through the crowd with three lean stalkerhounds at his side. The man held the leashes taut in case the tall canines lost control and nipped at a plate of sluk mutton. They pushed ahead, snouts low, straining to get to their packmaster until they were able to lick Hawthorn’s outstretched hand. ‘Here, my lovelies. You remember Rakkan, don’t you?’
They sniffed Rakkan, the lead one growling low.
‘Yarrick,’ scolded Hawthorn. ‘You know Linoleus. Remember?’
‘I’ve been gone a long time,’ Rakkan said in excuse, glad the interviews concerning Hawthorn had been so extensive. He reached out to scratch the creature.
not behind the ears
Rakkan pulled his hand back, just as Yarrick opened his jaws.
‘He’s an old man now. And cranky. Now, that must be Macharius, but… who’s this one? Where’s Creed?’
Hawthorn sighed, then knelt and rubbed Yarrick’s silvered face. ‘Creed lived up to his name a bit too well. Squared up against an ursid on a hunt rather than running away. The new one is Ibram Gaunt. He’s a good little bird dog, aren’t you, Ibram? You lovely boy.’
‘The next time we have a Militarum delegation,’ Rakkan said, ‘best not to mention the names. They wouldn’t appreciate it.’
‘Why not? It’s a tribute. And it’s proper. Isn’t that what the Guard is for? Flushing the prey out of the bushes for us to shoot?’
‘It’s verging on heresy.’
‘A heretic? Me? What a thing to say about your mother. Besides, this is our world, we can do what we want.’
‘They leave us be as a courtesy, mother. We are part of the Imperium, whether you like it or not.’
Hawthorn wrinkled her nose. ‘Only in a technical sense. We have an understanding with the Imperium, Linoleus, we are not Imperial. Dominion was a settled world with ancient chivalric traditions when Terra was just feuding warlords and techno-barbarians. Never forget that, my son. We are older than their empire. It suits us to be a part of them.’
‘They might not see it that way, if it came down to it.’
‘If it came down to it,’ she said, lowering her head and looking at him hard, ‘we have a stack of treaties thick as a hymnal.’
‘Paper, I’ve found, provides very little armour when the lasguns start firing.’
‘Good thing Greyhound is made of adamantine, then,’ she said. ‘The Freeblade life has made you morbid, my dear. It’s quite boring. Where is that woman with my vin?’
When the cogitator screen snapped off, and the lock on his door disengaged, Rakkan assumed his duties for the night had concluded.
Was it alarming that the lights snapped briefly off, before red emergency light threw everything into crimson shadow?
Two drinks ago, it might have bothered him more. But the fourth drink always did him in. And how many had he had now? Six? Seven?
When he’d begun watching the ceremony in the basilica, the amasec bottle had been half full. Now it… wasn’t.
But how could they have expected less, making him watch his own homecoming? His mother speaking to that Sycorax woman. You’d think she’d recognise her own son.
Though she hadn’t, had she?
‘Old Yarrick knew,’ he mumbled to himself. ‘He could tell the scent was off.’
The dog knew him better than his own kin. If that wasn’t just a perfect encapsulation of his upbringing on Dominion, he didn’t know what was. One year with his mother’s people, changing custody at midwinter to spend the next year under his uncle and the shadow of expectation cast by his dead father.
A life split between hemispheres. Two families, two bedrooms, two different sets of cousins for friendship. Two lives.
And in each house, a constant berating of the other. Endless screeds about who had stolen the world from who. The failings of his mother’s people, and his father’s people.
That was their one thing in common: they all seemed to have a lot of failures.
In a way, he was glad to see this homecoming from a distance. Festival days and tournaments at Gathering Palace were always stomach-churning affairs, his two families uniting in a dance of revulsion and spite. No one able to talk behind anyone’s back any more.
All of them bragging, fighting, manipulating for his approval. Hoping that he would either join their house or – if he should be successful at court – grant them favour.
Better to be here.
Except, no it wasn’t. This deep in the bottle he could admit that.
Anyone could’ve told him that this would sting. Watching Sycorax be better at being him than he was. So clever. Deflecting, probing, keeping it light when he might have gone stormy and caused his mother to raise her ion shield. Being the person he once was. Getting the approbation, the attention.
She was a monster, of course. His mother certainly, but Sycorax even more so. They all were, these new companions-in-arms. Raithe with his steely coldness, looking at you with those copper eyes like you were equipment. Koln, who studied people like they were insects pinned to a board. Sycorax, with the brilliance to manipulate others’ emotions without the empathy to understand the damage she did.
Did they even know how badly this would hurt? Was that simple humanity beyond them, or did they simply not care?
At least the dog knew him. You can’t fool a dog. Good little vassals, them.
His eye fell on his father’s helmet. Sycorax had little interest in it – she’d tried wearing it as a prop when they returned to dress for the party, but it was dead, a curiosity – so she’d forwarded it on to Rakkan on the Stiletto.
‘Well, father.’ Rakkan picked it up, looked into the frosted eye slit. ‘Looks like we’re both observers now, eh? I’m two steps from a spirit in the helm.’
Staring at it, he felt his back prickle. Felt a pull of morbid curiosity.
The helmet they’d pulled off his father’s body when he’d piloted the Knight Jester. The great and martyred Sir Selkar Fang.
He could see that the padding around the chin was stained crimson. He lowered it onto his head, saw a cursor blinking in the left margin of his vision.
>Hail, Sir Selkar Fang
>What is the duty of a wounded Knight?
Taste of blood in his mouth. Choking. Smoke-twisted sky.
Rakkan tore the helm off his head. Looked inside, held it up to the light. For an eye-blink, he thought he saw the gleam of wet blood smeared around the mouth seal. But when he touched his face, all he felt was fear-sweat.
Dead. It was dead. Spitting nonsense. A venerated relic rumoured to have been used with Jester from the Settlement Era, irreparably damaged when his father died. But still and all, just an old helmet.
Throne, he was jumpy. He needed more amasec.
The first clue that he was too far gone was when he got up from his chair and had to catch himself on the table. What with the dark and the drink, he’d forgotten that Sycorax was wearing his leg braces – damn her for that too. He reached out for his crutches and slowly made his way towards the door, leaning heavily on one as he opened the heavy bulkhead and shuffled into the gangway.
Red emergency lights splashed this corridor too, deepening the shadows and enhancing the strangling claustrophobia of the ship. There seemed to be so much less space inside this ship than out. This was partially due to the locked cockpit with its hardwired flight crew. Likely there were smuggling compartments too.
Tricky people.
Rakkan clicked down the engine room corridor, rubberine caps on his crutches snagging slightly on the grated floor. When he boosted himself through the oval hatch to the mid-deck crew area, the going became easier.
‘Throne-damn Koln,’ he cursed. She’d promised him a facsimile pair of braces, but she hadn’t delivered. Clearly it hadn’t been high on whichever of her twenty priority lists took precedence that day.
No amasec in his cabin. Cadian Leolac, yes, but he’d learned his lesson overindulging on that during his last deployment. Besides, no good to mix. He was already going to be in for it tomorrow morning.
He swung to the galley. One advantage of the drink was that his pain dulled, making it easier to move around. Rakkan leaned one crutch against the galley sink and unlocked the liquor cabinet, rifling through the wire racks to a good amber.
There. A Culanaan. Thirty-one year. Probably a waste to drink it when this far gone, but what the hells, everyone else got a homecoming party, didn’t they? Even Gwynne was off with the sacristan order, chanting and being solemn at machines.
He pulled the cork, tilted it towards a glass.
Bang.
He froze, neck of the bottle poised over the tumbler.
That was an exterior hatch. Not the big cargo hatch at the back, or the crew hatches on the side – this was towards the cockpit. One of the emergency escape hatches Koln had shown him in case the craft ever went down. No more than a chute with a handle above it, meant to slide down, not climb up.
His brow furrowed.
Bang, bang. A squeal of protesting metal then: Crack.
That was a seal being prised open.
‘Gwynne?’ he called. He wondered if she was doing some kind of maintenance. He immediately felt stupid; silence answered and an icy trickle went down his spine, even to the vertebrae he could not feel.
His free hand fell to his jerkin pocket. The crisis vox Koln had given him. He’d joked about it then. Is this a call bell? Will you come and bring me another glass of drivet? he’d asked. Hot water for a shave, perhaps?
His pocket was empty. A flash memory: the crisis vox in his safe room, next to the amasec bottle. In the safe room he’d left when the power went out.
No, when the power was cut.
He swung himself around the kitchen, praying that the hitch-click of the crutches was not as loud as it appeared in his ears.
‘My apologies, baroness,’ said Koln, sliding up with a stemmed glass of vin as if called telepathically. She bowed low as she presented it. ‘I had to dispatch my colleague on an urgent errand.’
‘How dare you,’ Rakkan said with humour. ‘What could be more pressing than a woman with an empty glass? Pardon me, mother.’
‘Not at all, dear. I’ve monopolised you. A parent’s right.’
Rakkan stepped to a quiet corner, Koln at his elbow and speaking low as she activated her vox-dampener. ‘Anything serious?’
‘An alert from the Stiletto. Power loss, followed by a hatch breach.’
‘A welcoming party from Symphonia Dask?’ said Rakkan.
‘Possibly. Counterintelligence. Or some other faction trying to gauge us for inter-house reasons.’
‘Could they find our guest, or anything else they should not?’
‘Not with a cursory search. I have hidden the usual caches of false secrets. Private letters, an obscura pipe. A few pornographic data-slates. They might stop there. But this party will go late into the evening. The sergeant decided to take care of it.’
‘Is our guest in danger?’
‘Not if he stayed put, but the data-spike says his hatch door is unlocked and open. No bleat from the crisis vox, which means they might already have him.’
‘Damn it,’ Sycorax swore. And for the first time since they’d walked into Gathering Palace, it was Sycorax speaking rather than Rakkan. The accent slipped back into place. ‘We’re blown if they find him. No way to explain that. Unless we do a double-bluff, plant my kit on his body and claim he’s an infiltrator.’
‘Our man is on his way. Whatever else you think of him, he is capable of handling things. If we’re blown there’s not much to do but exfiltrate as cleanly as possible and re-approach, but in case that doesn’t happen, I need to stay and assess the political situation. It’s unlikely we’ll ever get both houses in the same room again.’
