The Falthe sitting next to me in the Irons leans over with a whisper of contempt. “The Carthii stuck their perfumed hand in the Minotaur’s mouth, and he’s dragging their whole house into his labyrinth bit by bloody bit. Hilarious.”
I give him a slight smile and sigh at Cornelius’s impending political decapitation. What’s that old maxim? Be wary of tyrants: they will help you today and own you tomorrow.
Atalantia doesn’t even need to rise from her black chair of office to ruin Cornelius’s life and demote one of the great houses of the Conquering to a middling power. “Cornelius, you could not be more correct. Ship production is crucial to the functioning of this state. A vote will only delay decisive action, and decisive action is needed. Therefore, I have personally dispatched ten legions to deal with this threat to the Society. I will bear all costs and all risks. Cornelius, tell your father, Asmodeus, to worry not. The dockyards will soon be in safe hands.”
Cornelius and his siblings pale. By month’s end, their six-hundred-year-old family heirloom will belong to Atalantia—exactly the fate I helped Heliopolis to avoid. The fools can’t even challenge Atalantia’s jurisdiction. They handed their inheritance to her on a platter.
“No gratitude for au Grimmus’s generosity?” Scipio au Falthe asks Cornelius from amongst his phalanx of hard-bitten siblings.
Cornelius eats the mouthful of shit, swallows, and thanks Atalantia for it. Her Iron bloc snickers. The Reformers purse their lips. The Rim deputation look at each other, smug at the comparative dignity of their Moon Council.
“Julia, who is next on the docket?” Atalantia asks.
“Storm Knight of the Rim Dominion, the rostrum is yours,” Julia calls.
Diomedes au Raa stands from his place between his mother, Dido, and his mentor, Helios, and trudges up to the rostrum. He begins without preamble and delivers the butcher’s bill for the last two months of warfare with his head lowered like a ram.
Diomedes is not a very good public speaker. Thicker than most of his colleagues from a life of high-gravity training, it’s obvious what the Raa heir was made to do, and it wasn’t to stand at a rostrum and sway hearts and minds. Politics and rhetoric were supposed to have been the destiny of Diomedes’s brother, Aeneas. Diomedes’s destiny was to be his family’s fist. When Aeneas died at the Battle of Ilium fighting many of the men and women who now recline in the shade above Diomedes, Diomedes was thrust toward a future he neither expected nor wanted.
Then his father, Romulus, died too and he became heir to a legacy seven hundred and fifty years old. Great expectations follow Diomedes. Chafing at that—and at the sophisticated airs of his audience—his words come like bullets.
From under heavy brows his eyes glare accusations searing enough to set togas on fire. When he finishes his report, he scowls up at Atalantia and her Iron bloc hardliners as if they, not the Republic, were responsible for the casualties. I am not spared his ire. After our talk in the theater, he does not appreciate my seating arrangement. He will see it as a grotesque hypocrisy. If I thought I saw an ally in him in the theater based on his embarrassment at Helios’s manners, it is confirmed by his obvious disappointment in me. Like all other Core Golds, I say one thing and do another. Snipe at Atalantia, sit in her section.
I glance at Horatia, who sits with the smaller Reformer bloc, and feel nauseated.
Diomedes does not surrender the rostrum as he should. He remains on the iron triangle in the center of the marble floor, glaring at Atalantia. She watches back from her chair of office. As does Ajax from his place with the Olympics on the wings of the speaking floor. And so do the hooded crows in the circular gap in the awning’s center high above.
Atalantia cocks her head in amusement.
“Diomedes. First to storm the Twin railguns. Then on to Earth to take the Middle East from the Red Sea to the Black. Then to Ceres, and the Belt, then all the way back to Earth. By Jove, young dragon, you’ve the wings of Hermes on your boots.” Atalantia pauses, smiles. “This must be the longest you’ve remained rooted to one spot since you arrived.”
The laughter is not limited to Atalantia’s bloc. It spreads into the more populous moderates in the center, where even Julia au Bellona smiles at Diomedes’s expense. The Reformers to Diomedes’s right, by far the minority, think the joke in poor taste.
I catch Horatia’s eye. She gives me three quick blinks, our signal. After our talk at Hercules Victor, she made her move at the Temple of Juno. Everything is prepared. My nausea deepens as I think of Glirastes curled on the floor of a dog kennel, waiting to see if I love him as much as he loves me.
Dido parts from her fellow consul, Helios, and replaces her son on the rostrum. It’s good Helios is not speaking. After a preview of his manners in Heliopolis, the last thing we need is our own Day of Red Doves. Dido is a profoundly handsome woman with charisma to spare. Strong features, penetrating eyes filled with mischief, thick hair of dark gold, and—peculiar for a consul of the Rim—she is bawdy, jocular, even funny. But it’s her temper that’s always been her liability.
“Atalantia, I can speak for us all when I say your boots are horribly lovely.” Atalantia’s boots are as marvelous as they are obnoxious. Black leather from a stygian cobra encrusted with great diamond skulls. “Yet, I swore war was in fashion. Not diamonds.”
Atalantia looks suddenly far less bored than when Cornelius held the rostrum. She doesn’t miss a beat. “The skulls started as carbon. Perhaps it is the pressure of carrying the war that has made them diamonds. Go on then, au Saud—oh, excuse me, au Raa. Lecture us as if you’re the one that’s been fighting the Rising for what…twelve years now, while we’ve been hiding behind our moat.” She smiles. “You paid a dear price to enter this war. How strange to flinch at casualties now.”
The room winces. The casualty of which Atalantia so casually speaks was Dido’s husband, who chose to die both in protest of the war, and because he hid evidence of Darrow’s destruction of the Dockyards of Ganymede from the Moon Lords, in violation of his honor. The same Romulus famous for his passionate, fairy-tale love for Dido. Who died, in the end, because Dido pressed for war.
“I hear young Seraphina was a virtuosic fighter and a credit to her father and her mother, and her people as a whole,” Atalantia says in reference to Dido’s daughter, who died in the fighting on Mercury. I saw her simply disappear when a rail slug hit her.
Technically, she was the Rim’s first casualty. The Colosseum goes dead silent.
I’ve seen razor duels with less tension.
Dido sighs, and I wonder if her opening taunt was bait to lure this disproportionate response from Atalantia. I think it was. At the price of much hardship, Dido has gained an air of wisdom and gravitas. And by choosing to ignore Atalantia’s insults, she now seems the true statesman of the two, which Atalantia doesn’t seem to mind.
Dido continues. “We should not forget the great peoples we few here represent. Billions wait for us to sort the troubles that disturb our age. Time and again, you have preached a message of unity, au Grimmus. Promises of aid against the Ecliptic Guard. Promises of aid in the asteroid belt. Promises of aid in the matter of Ceres.