Nightmare Kingdom: A Romance of the Future (10 page)

Adaeze met her look with a steady gaze. “Mom, you know I can’t listen in on your people. They aren’t telepaths. Their minds are closed to me.”

She continued to look questioningly at her daughter. “I might be able to hear from our people in Terrainaine,” she added in a voice so soft that Claire had to lean forward to hear her.

It wasn’t the time to argue about which was
our
people. “And what are the people of Terrainaine thinking and saying?” she asked gently.

After breakfast Jamie was given an official tour of the ship, seeing everything but the empress’s private quarters, and was even more impressed.

Isaiah would drool at the possibility of such a ship coming into their possession. At this point the only thing they had were a few aircars, good only for travel in short hops around Sanctuary.

He was treated as a VIP visitor with the greatest friendliness possible. He supposed the Princess Adaeze’s crew was more accustomed to normal speech than most Aremians since they were regularly in the company of the Empress Claire. No doubt Mathiah hadn’t left his wife to live in total silence. Or maybe they were just trying their best for him, concerned that he’d been injured on their watch.

He had seemed to genuinely care for her, even Jamie had to admit that.

After the trip through the compartments of the luxury ship, he had no choice but to excuse himself for a rest period. He still felt weak and sick and the last thing he wanted to do was collapse embarrassingly in front of these tall, strong aliens.

He hoped Claire would come to him, but when he’d lai
n down long enough to sleep a little and feel considerably stronger, he went looking for her.

He knocked at the door that had been indicated as off limits as the empress’s personal dwelling, half expecting that the imperial guards would come rushing to drag him away.

Instead, the door opened, and the younger fair-haired princess stepped aside to allow him to enter.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he apologized when he saw Claire and the other daughter seated near each other as though in conversation. “I thought we might talk things over.”

The older girl glared coldly at him, but Claire nodded. “We do need to have a discussion,” she agreed, her tone neither friendly or unfriendly. He might have been just another suppliant granted an interview with the all powerful first lady of the Gare.

Nobody invited him to sit down, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to remain standing for long. He was too weak. So he seated himself in a huge, cushioned chair designed for someone considerably larger than himself and prepared to do more listening than talking.

The silence would have become awkward after a few minutes if he had not been somewhat accustomed to the company of the telepaths of Terrainaine. The two girls weren’t even looking at each other, but he had a strong feeling they were saying all sorts of things to each other. Claire sat just as silently, but her forehead was wrinkled with thought.

He waited until she looked
directly at him. “What’s going on?” he asked as though they were alone in the room.

“Mr. Jamie Lewis Ward, you presume to
o much,” the older girl exploded furiously.

“Adaeze, I’m sure he didn’t mean . . .” her sister began apologetically, but Claire interrupted.

“This isn’t the empire, Adaeze, and he is not your subject.”

“Really, Mother,” the girl responded, but stopped when her mother raised a restraining hand.

Jamie was impressed. He wasn’t sure he could have managed a child with the powers this one had. At the same time he couldn’t help wondering what had happened to the pretty impulsive young girl from Chicago who had depended on him.

She’d ruled as empress for half her life, he reminded himself.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he told Claire, ignoring the girls. “Maybe I’d better go. We can talk later.”

“No.” Claire still held that slim little hand in the air, restraining him as much as her daughters. “We need to talk now. Adaeze might prefer to be excused.”

The girl’s lovely face turned red, but she shook her head. “I’m staying right here. I have a right to be heard.”

“We will listen to your opinion, Adaeze, but the adults will make the decision.”

The girl leaned back reluctantly in her chair, but didn’t look any more resigned than she had a moment before. Jamie guessed that Claire still held the reins on this filly, but only by a light hand.

Claire turned to Jamie. “At this point, we are still headed toward Sanctuary, but my daughter has just confided some info that might change our plans.”

Again he waited, settling more firmly into his chair as he felt the darting glances of the two girls, one concerned and the other fiercely angry.

“What she has heard may be only rumors, Jamie, but the people in Terrainaine are saying there has been another raid on New London.” Her face looked pinched and white. Claire had herself once been the subject of one of those raids. “The first since my husband obtained power. Mathiah is no longer here to keep his promises to you or to me, Jamie. He did all he could when he named me regent, but his mother saw to it that his plans were put aside and that she,
in the name of the little emperor, rules the empire.”

Jamie allowed himself a single comment. “Can’t be much of an empire when they can’t communicate from one world to another.”

She nodded. “Power is consolidated on the home world. The rest are in various stages of independence, but Terrainaine is under the firm grip of the dowager empress’s forces.”

Jamie felt as though his stomach dropped. He’d left New London to come looking for Claire and terrible things might have happened while he was gone. “You said there was
a raid?” he directed the question at Princess Adaeze.

She looked at her mother as though for permission to refuse to answer.

“Tell him what you heard,” her mother instructed.

“It’s just rumors, talk on the streets in Terrainaine, but they’re saying that two children were taken. Michel, my cousin the emperor, is unwell and will need the services of a catere.”

Catere.
Jamie closed his eyes briefly. Not only Claire, but he himself had been used for that purpose. He had been injected with drugs that made his blood seem to boil in his body and tortured close to death, all in the futile attempt to save Prince Darin, the emperor’s older brother.

“Do you know who they took?”

She shook her head. “A boy and a girl. No names were known.” She looked away from him to her mother. Claire gave a little nod. “The gossip is also that you have run away from New London to join my mother. It is considered a great scandal.”

He wasn’t worried about that. “How soon can we get back to Sanctuary?” he asked Claire.

“You might best ask if we should go there, Jamie?” she said with what was for Claire uncommon gentleness. “I’m not sure we wouldn’t draw more fire to the community if it should become public knowledge what my daughters are. And you can understand that I don’t want to put them in danger.”

It was as if the two of them were alone in the room and the two young girls had faded into the background.  “That’s your choice to make, but it seems to me that there is no place more safe for them than New London itself
. There’s not a person in the empire that wouldn’t recognize you on sight and there’s no disguise that would hide your identity for more than a few days.”

She inclined her head slightly, but made no comment.

All right, that was for her to decide. “No matter what you do, Claire, please, please help me to get home. They need me there.”

He sensed, or imagined, a furious exchange of words between the two princesses and wondered if it wouldn’t be terribly frustrating to be parent to children like
these who could talk right over your head without you understanding a word.

The debate went on all night and well into the morning with Claire’s daughters both arguing that going to New London would be a huge mistake.

“We will stand out among the Earthlings,” Lillianne pleaded. “Mom, they will bomb us and that little town out of existence.”

“Or send in the army to shoot everybody, these people you want to protect and us as well. We must go someplace where we can blend into the population,” Adaeze was uncompromising.

“Like where?” Claire asked in
a carefully assumed tone of reasonableness.

She watched her daughter’s face that betrayed nothing of her whirling mind. Adaeze’s intelligence was off the charts by any Earth standard, but Claire figured she was going through a list of the known habitable planets. The Aremian
Empire had spread out from the home planet to many worlds and she would be willing to bet her daughter couldn’t think of one where both girls wouldn’t be immediately recognized.

Finally Adaeze said, “Only give me a little time. I’ll think of the perfect location.”

Claire shook her head. “It doesn’t exist. Our images have been shone across the worlds. And the superstition that a woman with a man’s talent must be destroyed is deeply ingrained in the people. They would consider it an honor to kill you, my love.”

Adaeze refused to yield, but Lillianne asked a question in a quivering voice. “Does that mean we might as well give up and die, Mom?”

“Never! If you think that’s what I’m saying, then you’re totally and absolutely wrong.” She played her trump card. “Your father would expect more than that from us.”

Lillianne’s shoulders sank. “Then where would he expect us to go.”

“New London.”

Adaeze stared at her with distrust. “He said that?”

“Well, no, but . . .”

“You are only trying to make us do what you choose? You want to live among those barbarians.”

Claire didn’t bother to argue about the barbarian status of her home world. As far as Adaeze was concerned, the inability to speak telepathically was all the evidence needed. “We will go to Sanctuary . . .”

“Blood,” Adaeze spat out the word.

“To Sanctuary and New London, and we’ll go openly as the former empress and the two princesses of the Gare. We won’t even try to hide. Everybody will know we’re there and we will be sheltered by that very openness.”

“You’re out of your mind,” Adaeze said with disgust.

“But Mom, they will come and kill us,” Lillianne agreed.

She shook her head, getting to her feet. She had a lot to think about before they landed on Sanctuary. “The last thing your Grandmere wants is to destroy the people of New London. They provide the
best chance Michel has of surviving his newly discovered heritage.”

“But they already have two,” Lillianne argued reluctantly.

“They’ll be afraid more will be needed. And we will be surrounded by people the empire wants to keep alive. That will be our fortress.”

Lillianne nodded slowly and even Adaeze couldn’t seem to think of a good argument against the plan.

They
went home without a lot of fanfare. Nobody came out to watch them land and most certainly there was no welcoming party when they walked the few miles into town.

The houses they moved past were not lighted against the
dark and only the glow of the moon gave them visibility to move ahead. It was the middle of the night so the residents of New London could be sleeping quietly in their homes. Jamie didn’t think so.

He felt sure they had taken refuge in the fortified building he and his friends had worked on all these years. He took no pleasure in the thought that he’d finally been proved right and they’d needed what security they could find to protect them from the
Gere. He’d rather have been wrong.

He wondered if this was how Churchill felt during the bombing of
Britain; vindicated and yet somehow sorry that he’d been right after all. He’d been like the mythical Cassandra, gifted with the ability to prophesy disaster, but cursed with disbelief.

“It’s actually rather pretty here,” Lillianne said in surprise. “Lovely homes, flowering plants that scent the air. Maybe this won’t be so bad.”

“Where are the people?” her sister asked.

“It does look deserted,” Claire agreed, sounding concerned
.

Jamie barely heard them. “We’d better stop and camp at my house.” He led the way to a cream-colored stucco building with the red roof he’d recently repaired. It wasn’t a large dwelling; as a bachelor he hadn’t needed much space, but there was room enough and blankets enough to make extra beds on the floor. This reminded him of the nights when he and the other youngsters recently arrived from Earth had slept in just two houses, trying to keep safe from the unknown danger which was stealing from their populace.

At least now they knew what was going on and had collected weapons to protect themselves. Oh, he knew they wouldn’t have a chance if the Gare decided to eliminate them. But the advantage was that the last thing their enemy wanted was to see all of them dead. They were needed.

Inadvertently another memory rose. Just outside town there was a cemetery where the original settlers had been buried. Encouraged by
revolutionaries among the Aremians themselves, they had determined to fight back against the steady stealing of their children.

The result had been the official execution of every man, woman, and child, excepti
ng only the board of elders, who had been left to suffer the penalty of losing all their kin and friends, for the sin of leading their people to stand up for themselves.

Old George was the last survivor of the twelve elders and Jamie and the others were the sacrifice sent by Earth to prevent the incursion into their world.