“The asshole of the worlds!” the legion shouts.
“And gifts. Cicero au Votum.” She thrusts forward Cicero on the end of a leash and holds up a rotted head. “And Ajax au Grimmus. The rest of him couldn’t make it.”
32
VIRGINIA
Parley
LYSANDER PARALLELS MY WALK across the metal wasteland. To my right, the lights of starscrapers sparkle with promise on the southern horizon. The northern horizon is bleaker—a mountain range of utilitarian mesas strewn with artillery obelisks shattered like trees by lightning. For two weeks, war has raged over most of the moon. I hardly recognize it.
As our armies grind against one another, their commanders have snuck away for this secret meeting.
I clomp forward. My welder boots are magnetic and heavy—clumsy as stipulated. With honor all but dead, the demands from both parties for the meeting were extensive and fraught with suspicion. But in the end, it comes down to trust. Trust that neither of us wants to die, and trust that we both have more to gain from an adversary with some modicum of social comportment.
A couple hundred steps from our airlocks bring Lysander and I together under the shadow of a crashed warship. The young Lune is more physically intimidating than I expected. Gone is the little boy from Octavia’s garden, the one who used to lose to me at chess over and over again, never tiring of it. He is taller than I am by a head and a half now. His pulseArmor, riddled with field patches and pressure seals, is that of a man who’s faced weeks of corridor fighting and emerged with a reputation for luck and leading from the front.
His face is a mirror of mine, haggard from strain and sleeplessness. This is not a spoiled, entitled princeling. This is the last of Silenius’s blood. A man who has come to see if he too can conquer.
Lysander and I fall back on tradition. He touches his heart with an open palm and extends it to me. I repeat the gesture and set my palm on his. His is larger. We draw back and he extends an analog audio cord.
The accent of the Palatine fills my helmet. “Sheathed is my blade, held fast by my word,” he says.
“True are my words, secured by my name,” I reply.
“Salve, Augustus.”
“Salve, Lune.”
He smiles, somehow still a little shy, or perhaps playing at it to set me at ease. “How many of our ancestors have said thus to each other do you think? The formal rites of parley?” he asks.
“On the field of battle? Formally? Four, all told.”
“Not five?”
“You’re counting Oceanus and Agrippa.”
He frowns. “I shouldn’t?”
“No. Oceanus may have been a chip off Silenius’s block but Agrippa was adopted into my house after the Genetic Accords. He had as much Augustan blood in his veins as you do. Which is a little over one point nine percent, actually.”
He smiles. “You always did know your history.”
“You, on the other hand, seem to have embraced theatricality. I remember a more bookish boy. A more prudent boy. You’ve learned to gamble on shock.”
“I have. Your husband is a stern teacher.”
Lysander’s face is not as classically handsome as Cassius’s or Apollonius’s, instead his is the lean hunting-dog ideal. Like Roque’s face, but intense instead of romantic. And it is a face no longer burned. According to our intelligence, it was fixed just before his speech at the Colosseum. Right before his true debut. He’s replaced the scar with marks of sorrow. Ajax was close to him.
“I doubt you had Darrow’s full attention. You must wonder what will happen when you do. Will you measure up?”
Lysander meets my tone. “I am here. Above his planet. Talking to his wife. Where is he?”
“Oh, he’ll turn up when it’s most inconvenient for you, I’m sure.”
“I’m sure. He’ll be wanting this back.” He turns bodily so that I can see the two razors sheathed on the outside of his left thigh armor.
One is familiar. When I gave Darrow his razor after the Institute, I had no idea what a symbol it would become. He was mocked for its curve by Tactus and his fellow lancers. They were too embarrassed to fence with him. Lorn wasn’t. Twelve years later, every child knows its shape. Now Lysander pats the hilt. The gesture makes no sound in the vacuum.
“I did have his full attention, Virginia. For a moment. In a dark street. He was tired, wounded but so was I. I broke his sword. Probably his arm. And put my razor through his chest. Then he fled and left his sword behind. It was not cowardice to run, he’d simply been outmaneuvered. Just as you are now.”
I nod to the statue of Darrow to the north. “Have you seen it up close yet?”
“Not yet,” he says. “But by week’s end, we’ll have pushed you off the pole, and I can take a closer look.”
“Pay special attention to what’s in his hands. It just looks like a sphere from far away. It’s not, at least in its details. It’s hundreds of manticores, hydra, skulls, hammers, eagles, a few Poseidons, mermaids, centaurs, and crescents he has taken from the prows of Gold warships. No room to include any from ships smaller than a destroyer-class. You understand? That is consistency against intense competition, Lysander. For twelve years now. One battle does not make you a lord of war.”
“I have Darrow’s blade. I have Darrow’s warship. Now I have more than a third of your moon. I also have seventy thousand of your best troops encircled in Sector Three. Your men are exhausted. We have legions that haven’t even landed yet. By the end of the week, half your army will be cut off and herded toward the Hollows, where we will kill them.”
“Fine. By the balls then,” I say.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You don’t have me by the throat. You have me by the balls. You can wrench and twist and it will cause me terrible agony. But in the end, they are just balls, and I am a woman, so I will go on, enduring without my balls and I will pester you with death by a billion cuts. Except it won’t be me. I am not a captain who goes down with his ship. I am a Sovereign, who will delegate to people more suited for tunnels and darkness and the horrors that happen there.”
“Pegasus Legion is at less than half strength. You’d waste them here?”
“No. Rat Legion. I believe even you know them.”
By his expression, I see their reputation does proceed them. “They were on Mercury…” he says.
“Sure. Sure. But you know how legions work. Like snakes shedding skin. What we’re left with is the old skin between theaters. The tough skin. The veterans who earned their discharge. Ones that went toe to toe with Atlas. You know. Our worst, because they learned from the enemy. Odd, their centurions petitioned me personally to come up here. Something about you impaling their brothers and sisters from Heliopolis to Tyche.”
He sighs. “That was Atlas.”
“Poor man. Gets blamed for everything.”
“You judge my name, not me.”
“Yes. How unfair to prejudge a man based on something he can’t control.” I smile. “What reflection of you shall I judge then? Your company? Your politics? Your deeds?”
Gears move behind his eyes as he squints at me. “Bluff. All omens, no figures. You may have snuck in Rat Legion, but if you try to bring real numbers, Helios and Dido will eviscerate them as they come up the gravWell. We are invested in Phobos. We will take it.”