Shadow of the Warmaster

3

As N’Ceegh and Zaraiz Pa’ao got closer to Gilisim Gillin, the air went thick with airships and yizzies; since the cuuxtwoks hid them from eyes as well as probes, they had to stay alert and do some fancy dodging to avoid being run over. They reached the Palace close to sundown, slipped past the Wall without triggering the melters and touched down in the garden atop the Palace tower.

N’Ceegh wore armor covering his torso, arm and leg sheaths with knives of assorted lengths and purpose in them; on his back he had a battery pac attached by cable to a heavy-duty cutter that needed both hands to hold it level when it was in use. The smaller cutters that Zaraiz Pa’ao wore were keyed to his hands. All he had to do was point, then tap a thumb against the side of a crooked middle finger. He had no armor; he counted on his agility and speed to protect him. The door from the roof garden into the palace was a bronze slab elaborately etched over all its surface. N’Ceegh melted it, jumped the runnels of congealing metal and the cooked meat of a hapless guard, went slatting as fast as his thin legs would carry him down a lacy spiral ramp.

The Palace defenses belonged to the days of the first Imperator and they were badly maintained; until recently no one, not even the professionally paranoid Grand Sech, had expected an attack on the Palace itself. During the past months there’d been some attempt to refurbish the alarms and automatic killers, but slave techs don’t make all that reliable a workforce when there’s a thought hanging in the air that the men in power are about to lose their footing.

Down and around they went, N’Ceegh leading, Zaraiz Pa’ao watching his sides and back, sweeping away resistance, not stopping to ask those they met what side they were on; the agile uninvolved dived for cover, the guards and slow reactors died. Down and around, going for the CommandCenter, multiply defended, massively armored spherical chamber, buried in the earth, resting on bedrock, built to resist intense bombardment, fire, flood, whatever. Half a dozen Tassalgans guarded the single entrance, a hatch with a complex wholebody lock programmed to open for two people and only two, the Imperator and the Grand Sech: The security was impressive, it looked impeccable, but no Imperator in all the long millennia of Imperacy, back on Huvedra or here on Tairanna, not one Imperator had ever ever locked himself in a room with only one exit; he always had a bolt hole known only to himself.

Before he escaped, N’Ceegh had spent nearly three years local in the Palace as one of Pittipat’s favorite toys. During those years he’d built weapons and other elaborate playthings for the Imperator and used his spare time to make spy eyes and ears for himself. He planted them everywhere, collecting data for his escape and his vengeance. Among his other unlovely attributes, Pittipat was a voyeur. He liked to spy on his own people and went slipping from peephole to peephole sometimes all night long. N’Ceegh laid a bug on him and tracked him a couple of nights and after that explored the web of passages on his own, mapping security systems and finally the area about the CommandCenter. Pittipat was on N’Ceegh’s vengeance list because he’d ordered a weaponmaster from Bolodo and thus had a share of bloodguilt for the ashing of the Pa’ao kin. After N’Ceegh was in the palace a month, his cold determination went hot where Imperator Pettan tra Pran was concerned, the old rip had an inherited talent for creating passionate enemies.

N’Ceegh led Zaraiz Pa’ao to the outlet of the Imperator’s bolthole.

He melted it down. Two minutes later the Pa’ao and his son leaped into the CommandCenter and confronted the Imperator, the Grand Sech and the clutch of Huvved techs busy at sterile white work stations.

Looking down melter snouts at the swarming Hordar, swinging back and forth, wiping away rank after rank of the marchers, flesh running like water off bones that ran like syrup into a puddle around the feet of men women children who kept coming on and coming on.

Talking with Seches in the Fekkris of Littoral cities. The faces all saying the same thing: the cities are emptying, the Hordar are leaving. Saying to the Seches: stop them, shoot them down if you have to, don’t let them leave, don’t let them come here, stop them however you can. We can’t send you anything right now, it’s up to you, stop them.

N’Ceegh burned the head off the Grand Sech while Zaraiz Pa’ao plinked the techs. As the Imperator woke from his initial shock and started scurrying toward the main exit, N’Ceegh sent a beam from the burner sizzling past him. Pittipat stopped and turned slowly, working on a smile as he turned. His eyes opened wide as he recognized the intruder. “Ceeghi?”

“!Hi-Vagh!” N’Ceegh muttered. Leaving Zaraiz Pa’ao to guard the exit, he stalked the Imperator, cornered him against a work station. “Down you,” he growled, “on the floor, Bitvekeshit.”

The Imperator’s head went up, his tentative smile vanished. “Nonsense,” he said.

N’Ceegh lifted the burner, pressed the front end of the tube against Pittipat’s stomach. “Ba’okl, choose, flea.”

The old man reconsidered his objection and stretched out on the floor where he lay blinking up at the Pa’ao. With visible effort he managed a smile, then broadened it into a genial grin that lit up watery blue eyes sunk in a nest of pseudo laugh-wrinkles. He was calm now, confident; despite his uncomfortable and humiliating position, he was sure he could manipulate the situation to his benefit, that he could pacify this old friend. “Come, Ceeghi, you’re a good fellow. What do you want? Just tell me. There’s no need for all this.”

N’Ceegh knelt beside him and touched a spray to his neck. The Imperator stiffened, worked his mouth; he couldn’t speak and he couldn’t move his limbs.

Zaraiz left his post and stood beside the Pa’ao, watching what he was doing.

Hobbling on his knees (plushy gray fur worn thin over the bone), N’Ceegh moved down the Huvved’s long spindly body, unbuckled the Imperatorial sandals, slid the long bony feet out of them. “My village is ash,” he said, speaking with emotionless precision in unaccented Hordaradda. He took a thin surgical blade from a sheath on his forearm and sliced off the Imperatorial great toes; he set them aside while he applied cauterizing patches to stop the blood flow. He slit the Imperatorial trousers up past the knees. “The house of my fathers is ash,” he said. He drew his knife across the hamstrings, severing them. He hobbled up a little farther. “My children are ash,” he said. With a deft twist of his knife, he popped out the Imperatorial testicles and dropped them beside the severed toes. He moved on. “My lifemates are ash,” he said. He lifted the left hand, drew his knife several times across the back of it, severing the tendons. “My craft-heir is ash,” he said. He removed the thumb, dropped it on the Imperatorial chest and applied a patch to the wound. “My bloodkin to the third degree are ash,” he said. He dealt with the right hand in the same way, edged along until he was bending over the Imperatorial head, looking down at the old Huvved’s face, ignoring the terror in it. “You are the prime cause of those things,” he said. “The bloodghosts of my kin cry for vengeance. Zaraiz, help me, keep his head steady.”

While Zaraiz Pa’ao held the Imperatorial head locked against his thighs, N’Ceegh drew the blade delicately along the top of the Imperatorial eyesockets, cutting away the eyelids without touching the eyes beneath. “Never close your eyes again to the death and pain you decree,” he said. Working with the same care, he cut through the skin and cartilage of the Imperatorial nose and lifted it away. “Never ignore again the consequences of your demands.” He used the point as a stylus and cut into the Imperatorial brow the Pao-teely glyphs for bloodguilt. “May the world know your soul, you who command death without thought. Let him go,” he said, “gently, my son, if you please.”

N’Ceegh got to his feet, brushed his hands together: “The paralysis will wear off in about an hour,” he told the old man. “Do what you will then.” He touched Zaraiz Pa’ao on the shoulder. “Time to go.”

They fought their way back to the roof against a stiffening but disordered resistance, reached the garden breathing hard from the climb with a few holes in unimportant places, a burn or two from richocheting pellets, nothing serious.

Stretching and yawning, so sleepy he didn’t like thinking about the ride back to the mines, Zaraiz Pa’ao strolled to the parapet and looked across the grass at the faint lines of rose and purple at the base of the clouds in the west; the sun was down and the dark was lowering quickly. He yawned again, glanced into the gardens below. He saw the tug. “Look, N’Cey-da, isn’t that the machine they were talking about at the Mines?”

N’Ceegh crossed to him. “!F-doo-ya! must be. Talk was the Outsiders come looking for disappeared who might be slaves.” He frowned at Zaraiz Pa’ao. “You my son now, Zhazh-ti,” he said, “my craft-heir, but you born Hordar. It is Torveynee I ask you, come with me away from Tairanna? Come with me to hunt the ghostblood?”

Zaraiz Pa’ao rubbed at his eyes. He was so tired; it wasn’t fair that he had to decide this without time to consider. He reached out a trembling hand and warm furry fingers closed around it. On the other side, there were lots of times before this when he’d chewed things over and over and sometimes he was right and sometimes he was wrong. Prophet help me, he thought. “I will come, I will hunt,” he said. “Promise you’ll teach me? Everything?”

“You my craft-heir, Zhazh-ti. What else? Everything, ya.” N’Ceegh grinned at him, hugged the boy hard against him. “!Fi! let us go push in on that line.”