Pytha’s eyes are bloodshot. Her work of sneaking Cassius aboard was discovered not long after I relieved her of command. My Praetorians, except Kyber and her circle, think she already escaped. She speaks only when I free her from her manacles. “You’re still sacking the Garter,” she says, noting the faint tremble of the ship.
“Yes.”
“Seventeen hours.”
“Yes,” I say heavily.
“If I ever see you again, I will kill you,” she says. “So why not kill me now? Too good to punch down?”
“I’m not a monster, Pytha. Cassius was an enemy combatant. You are not a fighter. I cannot kill you in cold blood any more than I can bear to bring his body home to his mother. I know that is not what he would have wanted. In the end, he chose Darrow. The Republic. They killed him, so let them bury him.”
She won’t even look at me. “Did he kill Atlas?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You didn’t deserve to kill that dragon. Cassius did. He was a true knight. Can I go?”
Wounded that she has nothing more to say, I nod. She pushes Cassius along on the gravSled toward the Archimedes and disappears inside. She will go to the Republic, I know, and carry with her sensitive information. But I know what she knows, and that presents opportunities to lay traps.
The ship rumbles as it lifts off. I feel a little sad as she turns the cannons my way. When she discovers they do not work, she flies out of the hangar and soon disappears. Kyber waits for me by the exit.
“Kyber, I owe you a great thanks. Not merely for helping me stop the Fear Knight’s coup, but for bringing honor back to the guards. I want no more of this kill-pool nonsense. No more cabals within cabals. There are still Gorgons amongst the ranks. We will sniff them out together.”
“Thirteen is a sacred legion, dominus. It’s part of the body of the Blood. It is a part of you, dominus. I will allow no corruption to gain a foothold.” I touch her shoulder. The whisper has never spoken more than in these last twenty-four hours, but command suits her, and the men respect her.
“With Rhone dead, there are very few candidates to replace him as Dux. There are many Golds who have already solicited me for the post. But it is important for all to know how close Gray is to my heart. I need someone the Praetorians respect. The post is yours, Kyber.”
Kyber salutes. “Gratitude, dominus. I will support you in every endeavor.”
I pat her shoulder and my com trills with an urgent message from the bridge.
* * *
—
I stand with the holograms of Cicero and Pallas reviewing the sensor report from their scouts. “Do we have any idea where this second fleet came from?” I ask.
“No,” Cicero says. “They are mostly Rim-style designs, some decades old, but it looks like the Pandora is the flagship. Very strange.”
“We can’t hit the Volk fleet before they unite,” I say. “And it looks like combined they will cause us some problems, perhaps even have the edge. It’ll almost certainly come down to boarding actions. We’re faster than the Volk, so I’m of the mind to pass on this scrap. What do your clients think?”
Pallas laughs. “When your transports dropped off their packages, their eyes started glowing.” I gave a few of the horticultural spoils to each of the houses that contributed ships. Nothing compared to my own personal share of the treasure, but the revenue from just a single breed of bean or tree will pay for their expedition and more, far more. “I say we head home with the victory, the riches, and get back to the real war. If these mongrels want a fight, let them meet there where we outnumber them four to one.”
“I agree,” Cicero says. “My sister’s held down the fort long enough. Mercury will bloom after this, and my clients have barely lost five hundred men and women all told. Enough shadows and dust. Let us go home. I long to feel the sun.”
“Home it is then,” I say.
I take a seat in Pytha’s chair as the pilot guides us away from Mercury.
I look at the world I leave behind. The green band that once circled Io’s equator is gone, replaced by a conflagration that mirrors the hellish flames of Io’s many volcanoes. I wish I could finish off the Volk and be certain Diomedes and Darrow are dead, but with the bounty of the Rim in my pocket, my Praetorians scourged of the disloyal, the Ascomanni purged, and the strings that made me a puppet excised from my limbs and heart, I give the order for my ships to sail back to the Core at full torch.
Later, I return to my room and sit in the quiet in the place where I sat when I spoke with Cassius. The imprint of his body still marks the sofa where he sat. I feel empty and melancholic, but also strangely at peace. I fetch Atlas’s bag from where Kyber stored it and set it on the table. I open it. Inside, still stained with Cassius’s blood, are fourteen golden cubes.
I think that’s where I went wrong with Atlas. He might have needed Diomedes or Vela to open the vault, but I don’t think Diomedes knew anything about Orpheus or Eidmi. Knowing the Rim there was probably some old blind White hierarch who held the secret, and would whisper it in the ear of a Raa should the dread weapon ever need to be used.
I pick out two cubes, one with the Red sigil, one with the Gold. The only question I have left to ponder is which, were he in my position, Silenius would use first.
89
DARROW
The Only Path
IT IS A CRIME how easy it is to forget home and those you love when you are at war. I used to feel guilty for how seldomly Pax would cross my mind. Usually it was only in a quiet moment before sleep or waiting for the shower water to grow hot. I would bring him mementos from distant battlefields as a way of proving he was in my thoughts. To him. To myself. To Virginia. Even to our household servants.
One of his favorite mementos was from the Himalayas on Earth. A Gold commando captain whose name I forget had a curious collection of glass globes that I discovered after relieving the man of his head. Inside the globes were tiny models of cities. Some had weather that shifted with the seasons. The one I brought home was a city trapped in perpetual winter.
I spent much of the idle hours in the Raa bunker recovering from my shoulder injury, finishing my memoirs to Pax, and telling him more and more about Cassius. That is probably why, as I emerge from the mouth of the Raa bunker three weeks after Lysander’s attack on the Garter, I think of that globe city and its fantastical buildings. Most of the atmospheric generators that allowed the bounty of the Garter to blossom and flourish on this hellish moon were destroyed in the two-day bombardment. But not all of them. Not Plutus’s. The atmogens were stationed beneath its everlasting defense shield, and though he could have, Lysander didn’t bother to send men to destroy them. As a result, a new climate has emerged.
Ash snows down on the buildings, on the blackened trees, on the barren fields where it gathers in drifts that shift with the wind much like the sea. The air is cold and those who bundle themselves against it move hunched like mourners across a solemn winter landscape. The gold of wheat, the green of corn, the purple of plum, the red of pomegranate, the blue of berry bushes far as the eye can see has all been washed gray.
But not all is lost.
Overhead, dark ripWings perforate a cloud and bank toward the mass of a jade green warship that hovers over the dead city. More ships trundle to the east and west, along the ashen band Lune has made of the Garter. Their spotlights carve through the grimness, searching for more survivors. It is only a fragment of the efforts Volga has made to help the people of Io, and Volga’s contributions are only a piece of the puzzle. Even though they might help spot survivors, Volga is wise enough to keep her Obsidians on their ships.