Shadowblood

Chapter Ten

Looking down from the hills above Askander, Tamara felt she was finally home. The city lay nestled around the Bay of Claws, a giant monument to the glory of her people. The chill northern sunlight filtered down through thin clouds. It was a light unlike any other she knew, estuarine, over-brilliant, as if the sky had taken on something of the glitter and sheen of the sea. Gulls squawked, and the air had the familiar wet, salt tang.

From up here she could see the mighty dragonspires of the Temples, the ancient walls the city had long outgrown and the statues of former Emperors and Empresses that dominated the squares set at each compass point of the central ring. A dozen more of them stood on huge island plinths in the bay, gazing out to sea.

Over everything loomed the Imperial Palace, a combination of fortress and royal mansion that dominated the city by its sheer size, massive as the cliff in which it had its roots, its walls every bit as strong as the rock on which they rested. It seemed an extension of the cliff, part of some great demonic tusk of stone emerging from the soil of the city. Beneath it was an endless labyrinth of dungeons in which terrible things happened to the enemies of the Empress.

As in all the lands she had ridden through so swiftly, there were signs of gathering war. In the bay a massive fleet was anchored, a mixture of galleons and trading ships pressed into service. The purple flag of Sardea fluttered proudly on every vessel. She was surprised that the fleet had not sailed yet. It must be costing a fortune to keep it there.

The rumours were true then. The Quan Sea Devils had closed the northern waters to all Terrarch vessels, and not even Arachne’s proud fleet would risk the wrath of those alien monsters. Kraken could smash even the mightiest ships in their tentacles, and the Quan possessed alien sorcery that was matchless on the ocean. So much for landing troops by sea on the coasts of Kharadrea.

She studied the city, drinking in its appearance. It was a place that represented all that was proudest and most ancient in the traditions of her people. Cynical as she knew herself to be, it never stopped surprising her that some small part of her responded to that. She was part of a generation who prided themselves on seeing through the follies and hypocrisies of their elders, and yet as she grew older she discovered that she had more in common with them than she liked to think. Perhaps it was her father’s influence.

Her steed panted, grateful for the rest. It was the last and strongest of the relay of post horses she had used since the border. She had driven it unmercifully, using magic when necessary to keep it moving, and she had made good time. The journey had cost her dearly in energy, but its hardships had distracted her from her grief and worries.

The sight of the city below her made it all worthwhile. She loved the place with its broad avenues and ancient alleys, its cafes and salons and palaces, its starving authors and civil servants and its rich nobles who packed it in season from every corner of the far flung Empire. She had grown up here, attending balls and Court functions, taken her first lovers, killed her first enemy, learned sorcery and stealth. She felt the same way about Askander as the First felt about the home world. If she truly had any place in this world, it was here.

With a word, she urged her mount down the long winding road, through the farmlands and estates, towards her father’s ancient townhouse.

Tamara rode through the outskirts of town. The South Road came in through the least fashionable area, where the poorer Terrarch families had their small mansions and the shops of the less expensive tradesmen catering to them were to be found. There were some factories and manufacturing concerns where coaches and saddles and guns and dresses were made. Corrals for livestock driven in from the country stank up some squares. Tanneries belched chemicals into the nearby waters as they turned hides into leather.

There wasn’t the huge slum population she so often encountered in the cities of the West. In the Empire, no humans had been driven off the land, and come to town in search of work. Most Sardean Terrarchs still measured their wealth by the number of thralls they owned.

Askander was considered backwards by the progressives of the West, but that was true only in some areas. In the study of sorcery and the occult mysteries, the Empire still led the world, and there were more scholarly bookshops, and monasteries here than in the whole of Talorea.

There was also a profusion of Temples and shrines to saints, and even at this time of the day, they were surrounded by human supplicants. Within each was an altar and hundreds of sacred ikons and above each altar was a picture of the Empress, revered by them as Madonna and goddess, the living embodiment of the greatness of Sardea.

It was an irony that Tamara’s father had always enjoyed pointing out. In Sardea, where humans were most oppressed, they loved and worshipped their ruler all the more. Many of the older generation claimed that it showed humans loved the lash, and lost respect for those who would not use it. She had heard the arguments trotted out again and again, spoken of with the certainty of religious truth but she had come to doubt them.

Something was happening in the West. The world was changing as the humans woke to the strength of their numbers. The old order would be swept away if it did not adjust to that new reality. Or unless it did something dark and deadly.

As she rode on the size of the buildings increased. Statues to famous Terrarchs stood proudly at every junction and over every fountain. Many clasped ever burning lights in their hands or had them mounted on their crowns or the blades of their swords. By daylight they were merely dull gems but by night they would emit their soft sorcerous glow.

She reached the Ring; its streets lined on the outer side by the palaces of the mighty, on the inner side by the offices of the great government departments such as the House of Gold and the Palace of War. Each of those buildings was sub-divided as a beehive into hundreds of offices where thousands of drones moved from small cells to administer the wishes of their masters who sat like queen bees in their central cells.

The main industry of Askander was government, and the maintenance of the small army of functionaries who oversaw the workings of the great bureaucratic machine. Power was the material that was dealt with here, cut and sewn by those who held it and dispensed to their representatives so that they might go and work the Empress’s will in the wider world. Every Terrarch family had their palaces here for that reason. They could not afford to be too far from the font from which all other benefits flowed.

She was getting stared at now. She had changed out of her earlier disguise but she still looked grubby from travel, dressed in male clothes, and armed. On the roads she had been one more soldier swept along by the winds of war. Here the Terrarchs were more elegant, finely dressed and spectacularly well-groomed. As she sometimes did, she felt suddenly rootless again, out of place among these glittering people, unsure of herself. It was a feeling that had swept over her since her father had begun her true education, and her training as a Shadowblood. She was apart from these people, separated from them by a terrible and holy secret, for which she could be killed if it were ever uncovered.

One or two of the high Terrarchs looked like they might like to hail her or challenge her, but that would not be polite, and it was always possible she was someone of very high status returning on some mission of great importance, so they did what was normal and ignored her.

She entered the Street of Saint Selena and was at once struck by the wealth and beauty of the mansions that fronted it, its proximity to the towering mass of the Imperial Palace that dwarfed them all. She saw the number of small private temples interspersed among the buildings, and the swarms of liveried humans going about their master’s business. She turned right and came to the gates of her father’s house, now her own, she supposed, and was gratified when the humans on guard duty recognised her and saluted her at once.

They were both huge men, flat-featured, cold eyed, with cropped blond hair and a manner that was a mix of politeness and icy menace to anyone other than Terrarchs. Her, they looked genuinely glad to see.

Other servants, and stablehands, came to greet her and soon she was at the centre of a quiet storm of activity, as they welcomed her and made her comfortable. Her horse was taken and stabled. Her rooms were prepared. Fresh clothes and a warm bath at just the right temperature were made ready. As she always did at this stage of her return, she realised how much she had taken these things for granted, how natural it seemed to be in a world where she was the centre of so much flattering attention. She was grateful for it now, but she knew that would pass, and soon it would seem like things had always been that way, until she had to leave the cocoon and make her way in the cold world again.

After she was refreshed she wandered the house. It felt huge and empty, and the fact that her father would never come back to it made it seem all the more so. She paused in the library and looked at his favourite chair where he was wont to sit with his collection of histories and grimoires and books of Al’Terran lore.

As a child he had pointed out many fascinating things to her, had seemed remote and calm and the very epitome of what a civilised Terrarch should be. Only later, as she had come to understand the world of blood and shadows he had always inhabited, did she realise that was a mask, just one of many he had layered over his inner self.

She walked through the ballroom, vast and empty save for some kitchen girls on their knees scrubbing the stone floor, and remembered the balls that had filled the place with music and light, and the intrigues, political and erotic that had taken place in the darker nooks and alcoves. She found herself touching hangings and vases as if to reassure herself of their reality, and the reality of the memories in which they had also been present.

She moved to the huge sitting room with its large bay window and fine view of the street and saw that things had not really changed for other people as they had for her. Out there, the world went on, as it always did. Soldiers marched, nobles rode, merchants sold, thieves stole. Servants came and went, supplicants presented themselves at the doors of the more powerful.

Out there, all was clamour. In here, all was silence.

She knew there were things she should be doing, letters to be written, visits to be made. Great events were taking place, and she should have a hand in their shaping, but at this moment, she found it difficult to care. She wanted to stop for a while and think, to try and put things in perspective in a way she should have done long ago and never had. She wanted time and peace and stability and she knew those were exactly the things she could not have with a great orgy of violence about to sweep through the world.

Briefly she considered what she had witnessed in the West and on the road. She thought of the refugees and the walking corpses and the stink of strange sorcery constantly in the air. She suspected that the Empress’s sorcerers had their hands in that. She could feel the foul magic hovering in the air over the city. There were plenty more like Jaderac to be found at Court, Terrarchs whose ambitions justified their using any means, no matter how loathsome to fulfil them.

Yet for all the size of the Empire’s armies, and all the skill of its sorcerers, she was starting to wonder if this was a war it could win. The West was rich now in a way that it had not been a century ago, its Generals seemed more secure with the new technologies of war- with muskets and alchemy and cannon and all the other new instruments of destruction.

The Scarlet armies had cut through Kharadrea like a sword passing through a bale of hay. Queen Arielle’s forces had responded to the threat of war with far greater swiftness and savagery than any of the Empress’s advisors had forecast. Their humans seemed loyal to the new order. Every intricate scheme that Arachne’s advisors had tried, from raising the mountain tribes to allying with Ilmarec, had been foiled.

Her father, a most powerful sorcerer and assassin, worth a regiment at least on his own, was dead before the war had even begun. Without any pause it looked like the Scarlet armies were marching to meet the Purple. Where was the cowardice so many Sardean nobles had predicted when they saw how the Taloreans had backed down to their humans, granting freedoms and concessions at every turn?

It came as a shock to her to realise how inward-looking and isolated her people were. Living on their great estates, surrounded by the mechanisms of religion and state that reinforced their prejudices, they had convinced themselves that their foes were weaklings and fools, and that, as representatives of the true ancient ways of the Terrarchs, they would inevitably triumph.

It had been her fate to travel in the West and have her ideas challenged. She smiled sardonically. Of course, by her very nature she was forced to be more open-minded than her fellow Sardeans. Her basic training had undermined her faith in all orthodoxies. By virtue of birth, she had been forced to question whether any nation had a monopoly on virtue and of vice.

Her father would have laughed at her doubts. He would have pointed out how necessary this war was for the cause and how the coming chaos would be to pave the way for the great enlightenment. Somehow, he had never been able to see that in many ways, the Western nations were more in keeping with his ideals than the Empire was. He and his people had started off by rebelling against the stultifying rule of the so-called Angels. They had wanted a more equal and open society where the grip of the old on power was released. His thoughts on equality and freedom had never applied to humans though. To him, especially as he had grown older and more dependent on his dark magics, they had been only cattle, incapable of real thought or real life. It was not something she could really accept. She had spent too much time around them to be able to dismiss them so.

A servant knocked and then entered. On a silver tray she bore a letter. Tamara wondered who had sent it, for she had yet to inform anyone she had returned. Either a servant had talked or someone had the house under observation. Neither was surprising, really. It was common policy among many of the great Houses of Sardea. It did not even necessarily mean that one of her servants was a traitor. They might simply have mentioned the fact that the mistress was home while out shopping and been overheard.

She picked up the letter and noticed the seal. It bore a two interlocked serpents, the sign of Xephan, Lord Ilea, an associate of her father’s, the present Prime Minister. She slit the seal with a knife and unfolded the page within. It was dated that day and welcomed her home before inviting her to pay a visit. He had heard disturbing rumours about her father and wished to discuss his fate. It was laced with code words used by the secret Brotherhood to which all three of them belonged that let her know she had no choice but to attend.

She forced down a sense of outrage. Xephan was not her master, nor was he her father. He was not one to command her. She took a deep breath and composed herself. She conjured up a picture of the Terrarch in her mind — tall, slender, with curly hair unusual for her people, tawny eyes with gold flecks. A careful dresser, fastidious, a sometime lover of the Empress who thought himself a poet. A sorcerer of great skill, a seeker after hidden secrets, an initiate of many mysteries. At one time Xephan had been a pupil of her father’s but latterly had come to be a rival and one whom her father had feared for all his insouciance. He was a member of the inner circle of the Brotherhood, privy to all its great secrets.

The fact that he dared write to her in such a fashion told her much. He obviously felt very secure. For the first time she allowed herself to consider what the failure of her father’s schemes actually meant. Failure was not something that enhanced any Terrarch’s reputation, and the stakes had been high. Had rumours that her father had assassinated Kathea reached the capital already? His scheme to capture Asea in Harven had failed. The death of the Talorean candidate for the Kharadrean throne had been meant to redeem that- and would have, had he lived.

She considered her options. The very nature of the way Xephan wrote implied a threat. She decided that she had better go and see him. Sending a servant to bring her pen and paper, she began to compose her reply in her mind.