OUR DROPSHIP SETS DOWN in a fortress carved into the heart of a lonely mountain. The gray stone juts up out of the frozen Ionian waste like a tombstone, while the hangar, cut into the top of the mountain just beneath gun bartizans, is vast and scored black from ages of passing ships.
A coterie of masked legionnaires and a tall Gold woman of mature years greet us. She’s lean, with withered patience, a pinched mouth, and a methodical, droll disposition. Her hair is chopped short, a cut that looks self-administered. Vela au Raa, sister of Romulus and his favorite captain during his war against my grandmother. Her mech units made hell out on the smaller moons, and gave me a fair amount of respect for guerrilla warfare as I watched from afar on Luna.
My neck aches from the injection site of the antiradiation drugs they pumped into me after my brief exposure. Nausea swirls. I watch Vela greet Seraphina with a chilly touch of their foreheads.
Seraphina does not look like the girl I rescued. The grime and blood are gone, the girl replaced by a woman who walks with a storm in her veins. Her lips are full, her nose slightly hooked, her dull Gold eyes sleepy and large, with thick eyelashes. Her hair is buzzed and notched on the right side. She is not beautiful by the standards of Luna’s courts. There’s something too feral about her. Something wild beneath the laconic movements and unsmiling face.
Little Hawk indeed.
Cassius catches me watching Seraphina. “What did he do to you?” he whispers, hunched in his manacles.
“Educated me.” I grimace and play off the horror.
“I told you not to run your mouth.” He eyes my wind-burnt face. “Gods, man. You look like a lobster.”
“I feel like one too. Cooked and buttered.”
He looks at the Golds preparing to lead us into the fortress. “Follow my lead. Every word here counts.”
I try to breathe out the sibling peevishness. It clings in me, but not enough to convince me that he’s wrong. If my little flight out the ship taught me anything, it is that Cassius knows these people better than I do, for all my studies.
The halls of the fortress are bare rock, like the hangar, and seem to have been carved crudely by clawDrills. Errant marks abound. Protection glyphs riddle the archways, like wood eaten by termites. The place is abandoned except for Romulus’s soldiers and the fortress’s other two breeds of denizen—robed Obsidians with bare feet and bald heads, with iron pyramids emblazoned on their simple gray robes, and several White hierophants who wear strange perruques made of coarse blue-black hair. This is a remote installation. A fortress that’s been left to molder. Why are we here and not in Sungrave?
Romulus is trying to hide something. Is it simply his daughter’s indiscretion? Or is it that recording Pandora asked about? What did she think Seraphina was bringing back? What could be so valuable to spark all this?
There is no furniture in the warroom of the fortress. Huge pillars support the uneven domed ceiling, and at the far side wait a coterie of shadowy forms.
My heart beats faster as we draw closer to a great stone throne made for a man larger than a Gold. I search the shadows, expecting the infamous warrior to be lounging upon it. But Romulus au Raa, twenty-third Lord of the Dust, Sovereign of the Rim Dominion, does not sit upon the throne. He sits at its foot, cross-legged on a thin cushion, wearing only a gray scorosuit.
His cheekbones are high, the lines of his jaw long and leading to surprisingly sensual lips riven with two scars. His hair is dark gold, streaked with gray and tied behind his head in a simple bun, through which pierces a stick of black wood. His right arm was lost in the Battle of Ilium and never replaced. A sliver of his bare chest, moon pale, shows as the collar of his suit falls open from his quiet labor.
He makes adjustments to a dissembled black hasta in his lap. Longer than the razors of the Interior, it stretches to two meters in its active, rigid form, resembling a lance. Silver figures are etched into the metal. It is not their ancestral sword, Starfire. That was lost at the Reaper’s Triumph when his father’s corpse was robbed—its owner now a great mystery.
I find myself admiring his poise.
There is an intensity to his quiet, like a lone cold stone sitting in a still pool of water. A humility to his bearing and expression that I did not expect, and in some way makes me feel as if we stumbled upon an ancient creature in his private garden, one who has seen the shaping of worlds, the sundering of empires. I feel calm, but very, very small as the myth earns flesh. Unlike me, he stood before the Reaper but did not surrender his moon. He gave an arm and a son to protect it.
The Obsidians push us to our knees.
An ugly Gold in his mid-twenties with a crisp dark goatee and close-cropped hair emerges from the shadows beside Romulus, watching us with intelligent, mismatched eyes. He looks like a spider smuggled into human flesh, all knobby joints and spindly appendages, lending him a covetous air. His forehead and jaw are overgrown, and the skin and coloring possess the anemic quality of a skinned rabbit, except on his neck where there are several small brown splotches.
The famous fiend, Marius au Raa. I knew him when he studied at the Politico Academy on Luna as a hostage. I remember him a boy of thirteen, quiet, resentful of the parties and as disdainful of his peers as they were of him. I duck my head, worried he might recognize me.
He does not.
His eyes linger a moment, then pass on, absorbing us all as he ignores his sister and brother to exchange a few hushed words with Pandora.
When Romulus has sealed his razor’s casing again, he breathes a long, sonorous note of air from his nose. Marius touches his shoulder. “Father, they’ve arrived.”
“And they’ve brought gahja,” Romulus says.
When he finally looks up, I am struck by his gaze. The left eye is missing. In its place is a smooth globe of blue marble. Romulus eases himself to his feet and greets his son Diomedes. The younger man must bend at the waist so that their foreheads touch in their fashion. “Son.” He turns to Pandora. “Pandora, you have done well. Please.”
She nods stiffly and rises from her deep bow. “Only my duty, my liege.”
He smiles at his sister, Vela. “The Ghost never changes.”
“I would not know what to do if she did.”
“Thank you, Pandora.” Romulus sets his hand on her shoulder. “I wish I could tell the Moon Council what you have done. The Rim’s greatest servant deserves more than just my meager thanks.”
She nods obediently. Before her master, gone is the hound, replaced by a pup. The adoration is shared by Diomedes and the rest. I feel it seeping into me. Only Cassius seems immune. His eyes rove for some means of escape, as I should be doing.
At last Romulus comes before Seraphina, who kneels, her shaven head bowed, her eyes fixed on the ground. Her father lifts her chin and kisses her on the brow. “Seraphina. My burning one. How I missed you.”
“Father.” She looks up at him with absolute love on her fierce face. “I didn’t know if I would see you again.” Has anyone ever looked at me with such love? He presses his forehead against hers. After a moment, he pulls back and looks at us.
“You bring gahja.”
“They’re friends,” Seraphina says. “I was set upon by Ascomanni….”
“I heard,” Romulus says, sparing a look to Pandora. “Let me see their hands.”
With the help of the guards, our hands are shown to him; he looks down at our palms. “You are not Scarred. So why do you both have the calluses only a life with a razor could give?”
Diomedes glowers down at us, as do the others.
“My name is Regulus au Janus. We’re water traders. I was once a warrior by necessity,” Cassius admits. “I never earned a scar; my family wasn’t well placed enough to earn me admission into the Institute. But I served Augustus, as all our family have. When my home was taken by the Rising, I picked up a razor and fought…until Mars was lost, then I fled with my brother, Castor.”
“So you accepted exile over death,” Romulus says. “I see.”
He looks back to his daughter. Cassius glances at me to make sure I continue my silence. “Why did you not tell me where you went, child?” Romulus asks his daughter.
“Would you have let me go?”
“No. When you disappeared…I thought you had died. When I discovered that you went to the Interior…”
“You wish I had?”
The words wound him. “No…” Vela and Marius seem to disagree. “I would have moved the worlds to bring you home.”
“But instead you sent your dog to hunt me down,” Seraphina says. “She killed Hjornir. Hjornir, Father. You’ve known him since he was a child. You taught him how to hunt. All he ever wanted was to serve Gold, and that bitch pulled out his teeth.”
“He was a slave who disobeyed his master,” Romulus says.
“Did you tell her to torture him?” Her voice softens. “Did you?”
“I did,” Marius says from behind his father.
“You?” Seraphina hisses. “Of course it was you.”
“Do you expect a concession of regret, sister?” he asks with soft malice. “I daresay the fate of your pet should be on your conscience. Jeopardizing the Pax Ilium for a flight of fancy? What if the Slave King and his Horde had caught you? War would follow.”
“You might try sounding less pleased about it, brother,” Diomedes says. I note the tension between them, filing it away for later, and glance at Cassius. He’s eyeing the razor Romulus left on his pallet.
Seraphina spits at her brother’s feet. The greatest sign of disrespect on a world barren of natural water. “I weep for a world where a worm like you could order a man like Hjornir to the dust.”
Marius does not rise to meet her anger, he just sighs.
“Did I raise a dog?” Romulus asks her.
Seraphina’s face reddens. “No, Father.”
“Then don’t act like one. Your brother is my Quaestor. And his service has been faithful. I would have questioned Hjornir myself had I been there.” Seraphina looks away from her father in disgust. “He conspired with you to break a legal treaty. He was a traitor.”
“Then so am I.”
“Yes. You are,” Marius says. “Strictly speaking.”
“Boy…” Romulus stares at his son till the man lowers his head in apology. He turns back to address his daughter. “You broke the peace. A peace that has protected our moons for ten years. You went against your Sovereign. You went against your own father. Why? What could you possibly seek?”
“The truth,” she says passionately.
“What truth?”
“The truth of what happened to our docks.”
This gets Cassius’s attention, and mine.
Diomedes blinks. “What mystery is there? Fabii destroyed them for his Sovereign.” Unlike the utter destruction of Rhea, my grandmother cannot claim responsibility for the destruction of the Ganymede Docks. She gave no such order. Roque au Fabii’s reasons for crippling the far worlds died with him. Or did they? I lean forward in interest.
“So you’ve been listening to Mother’s fantasies again?” asks spindly Marius. “And did you find anything?”
“No,” Seraphina says, hanging her head. “Mother was wrong.”
I catch the slightest movement of Romulus’s lips, so slight all but a Pink and a boy raised by my grandmother might have missed it. Relief. Interesting. He feared she would bring something back. “You wanted war so badly?” he asks his daughter.
“I want justice,” Seraphina says. But she has noticed something else, and echoes my own thoughts. “Why did you not bring me to Sungrave? Why here?”
“All of Io believes you are on a mission for me,” Romulus says. “That is what I’ve claimed. If the council discovered the truth—that you went into the Gulf of your own accord—you would be executed for treason. I brought you here to protect you.”
“Then where is Mother? Why is she not here?”
“I think you know why,” Romulus says. “She used you, child. She would have had you spark her war. But as I told her, you cannot draw blood from the stone. There is no mystery. No conspiracy. Fabii destroyed our docks. Anything else is the fantasy of a warmonger.” Romulus steps back from her. “Now what am I to do with you?”
“Let me return to Sungrave. Let me serve the Rim.”
Romulus looks down at his daughter, but his eye is fixed on the past, heavy with the weight of age. He lost his firstborn daughter in the Reaper’s Triumph. His son Aeneas at the Battle of Ilium. How much more will he lose? he wonders. I know because I have seen that same look in Cassius’s eyes. The same weight in his spirit.
“If only I could,” he says to her. He nods to the robed Obsidians. They seize Seraphina from behind. She struggles in vain against their huge hands.
“Father!”
“Were I stronger, I’d bring you before the Moon Council. But I don’t have the heart to watch you meet the dust. You risked a war. You broke the law. Now this place is your home. Living quarters have been installed for your comfort. But it has no communications equipment. It has no transports. The nearest outpost is three hundred kilometers away. The Sohai I leave behind will be here for your safety. But they will have no kryll. No scorosuits or radiation shielding. If you attempt to leave on foot, the dust will devour you in a kilometer. This is the fate you made yourself.”
I don’t know these people, but I feel a keen ache seeing family trauma as Seraphina begs her father not to do this, for her brother to stop him. But they’re right, it was not her place to risk war.
Diomedes looks pained. “It is this or death. I am sorry, Little Hawk. It has to be.”
Face torn with betrayal, Seraphina is dragged cursing from the room. Cassius and I are left on our knees, a sick feeling spreading through me, as I realize that we too must be forgotten. All those weeks in the cell just to face the same end. For me. For Pytha. For Cassius.
“What of the gahja?” Diomedes asks his father.
“They could be the Slave King’s spies…” Marius murmurs. “Interrogate them.”
Romulus paces before Cassius and me.
“You saved my daughter’s life. For that, I give the gift of my thanks and my son has given you the gift of reprieve from torture. By the calluses on your hands, I know you are men of weight, and so I awarded you the dignity of my attention.”
“We’re your guests—” I begin, prepared to launch into a long spiel about honor and dignity. But he speaks over me.
“Guests are invited. You cannot stay. You cannot leave. So the only right I can afford you is a swift end.” He turns to Pandora. “Behead them, put their bodies into their ship, and then cast it into Jupiter.”
“Diomedes,” I say, hoping I gauged him right.
There’s a small hesitation in the large man. “They saved Seraphina’s life,” he says.
“And to keep her alive, there must be no witnesses to her return except those we trust,” Romulus replies.
I search for some clever gambit, straining for an outlandish conceit that might save us. Something out of the Reaper’s own book. Cassius is preparing to launch himself not at Diomedes, but at Romulus himself, to try to take a hostage. I know the current of my friend’s mind, and how I might help him using my body as a shield against Diomedes. I’ll likely die for it. But he’ll have a chance. The tension builds first in his muscular neck, then his toes as he finds purchase on the stone. And just before Cassius is about to fling himself forward, the ground rumbles under our feet. Diomedes steps back from us.
“What was that?” Diomedes asks. “Volcanism?”
“No.” Romulus puts a hand to the ground. “A missile strike.”
Vela pulls her datapad and snaps several questions into it. “Romulus, we have incoming vessels. Our escorts are down.”
“Impossible,” Marius whispers. “No one knows we are here.”
“Evidently someone does,” Romulus replies. “How many ships?”
Vela blinks hard at her datapad. Romulus is forced to repeat himself, “How many?”
“Ten warhawks.”
“Ten?” Diomedes repeats, startled by the number.
“And more chimeras.”
“How could they get past the orbital defenses?” Marius asks.
“They didn’t come from orbit,” Romulus murmurs. The Golds all tense at the implication. Vela takes control.
“Pandora, have your Krypteia stall them in the hangar.” Pandora salutes and heads toward the hallway, flanked by her men. Vela turns to the rest of the bodyguards. “Protect your Sovereign.”
But then Romulus begins to laugh.
“Father?” Diomedes says, sparing a confused glance at Marius as their father sits back down on his cushion and sets his razor on the ground. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting…”
“For what?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Your mother.”