“The Galliens.”
“They’re gone now, that fambly tree has been chopped down… although some say a few still live…”
I knew that a few still did, because I’d met three of them. I had no intention of telling Hamey that.
“But there was a time, even when my father’s father still lived, when there was many of the Gallien. Fair they were, male and female. As fair as the monarchs Flight Killer’s rooted out.”
Well, he hadn’t rooted all of them out, but I had no intention of telling him that, either.
“And they were randy.” He grinned, showing his teeth, so strangely white and healthy in that haggard face. “You know what that means, don’tcha?”
“Yes.”
“The menfolk planted their seeds everywhere, not just here in Lilimar or the Citadel but in Seafront… Deesk… Ullum… even the Green Isles beyond Ullum, they say.” He gave me a sly smile. “And the womenfolk weren’t above a little adventure behind the door either, ’tis told. Randy men, randy women, and precious little rapin, for many common folk are happy to lay with kingsblood royal. And you know what comes of that sort of sporting, don’t you?”
“Babies,” I said.
“Babbies, just so. It’s their blood, Charlie, that berdecks us from the gray. Who knows what brince or courtier or even the king hisself laid down with my grammy, or my great-grammy, or even my mammy? And here I am without a spotch of gray on me. There’s Eye, that great ape of a man, without a spotch, Dommy and Black Tom without a spotch… Stooks and Fremmy… Jaya and Eris… Double… Bult… Doc Freed… all the rest… and you. You who don’t know a shitting thing. It almost makes me wonder…”
“What?” I whispered. “What is it you wonder?”
“Never mind,” he said. He lay down and put one of his thin arms over his bruised-looking eyes. “Just you might think twice about warshin away the dirt.”
From down the corridor the one they called Gully bellowed, “There’s some here that wants to sleep!”
Hamey closed his eyes.
4
I lay awake, thinking. The idea that the so-called whole people were protected from the gray at first struck me as racist, right up there with bigoted dimwits saying white people were just naturally smarter than black people. I believed—as I’ve already said—that those of so-called royal blood put on their pants one leg at a time just like the unfortunate creatures sweating on the Belts to keep the Lord High’s lights burning.
Only there was genetics to consider, wasn’t there? The people of Empis might not know about it, but I did. There could be unfortunate results as bad genes spread, and royal families were good at spreading them. Hemophilia was one, a facial malformation called the Habsburg Jaw was another. I had learned about such things in eighth-grade Sex Ed, of all places. Couldn’t there also be a genetic code that provided immunity to the deforming gray?
In a normal world, the person in charge would have wanted to save such people, I thought. In this one, the person in charge—Flight Killer, a name that didn’t exactly inspire feelings of safety and security—wanted to kill them. And the gray people probably didn’t live long, either. Call it a curse or a disease, it was progressive. In the end, who would be left? I guessed the night soldiers would be, but who else? Was the Flight Killer surrounded by a cadre of protected followers? If so, who would they rule once the whole people had been eradicated and the gray people had died off? What was the end game? Was there one?
Something else: Hamey said the Galliens had ruled Empis for time out of mind but that fambly tree has been chopped down. Yet he’d also seemed to contradict himself: In a way they still do. Did that mean Flight Killer was of… what? The House of Gallien, like in a royalty-centric George R. R. Martin Game of Thrones novel? That seemed wrong, because Leah had told me （through her horse, of course） that her four sisters and two brothers were dead. Also her mother and father, presumably the king and queen. So who did that leave? Some bastard, like Jon Snow in the Thrones books? The crazy hermit somewhere in the woods?
I got up and went to the bars of the cell. Down from me, Jaya was standing at the bars of hers. There was a piece of bandage tied crookedly around her forehead with a bloom of blood seeping through it above her left eye. I whispered, “You okay?”
“Yes. We shouldn’t talk, Charlie. This is sleeping time.”
“I know, but… when did the gray come? How long has this Flight Killer been in charge?”