Ruler of Naught (85 page)

Quotation from
Descent into Hell
, by Charles
Williams, published by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, MI.
Copyright © 1937 by Charles Williams.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

The Phoenix in Flight
(Updated December 20, 2011)

Ruler of Naught

A Prison Unsought (Spring 2012)

The Rifter’s Covenant (Summer 2012)

The Thrones of Kronos (Fall 2012)

Pursued across the Thousand Suns by the implacable
Eusabian of Dol’jhar, Brandon vlith-Arkad is safe at last on Ares, HQ of the
Panarchist Navy—or as safe as he can be given the ritual deadliness of
Panarchic politics. Hampered by his reputation as a wastrel and suspicions of
treason, Brandon struggles to establish his authority as Heir so that he can
command a Naval sortie to rescue his father, Gelasaar III, the deposed Panarch
of the Thousand Suns.

Meanwhile, Brandon’s father, onboard the Rifter destroyer
carrying him to exile and inevitable death on the prison planet Gehenna, is
fighting his own subtle battle with his former fosterling and hostage,
Eusabian’s son, Anaris. Resigned to his fate, and unsure of Brandon’s, Gelasaar must
decide whether or not Anaris can rule the Thousand Suns, as his brutal father
cannot. For despite his fall from power, Gelasaar still holds the power of life
and death over everyone on board.

“The Rouge aegios on the Ivory temenarch,” said Lazoro.

Londri Ironqueen slapped the dwarf’s hand away from the
ancient dyplast cards. “Don’t touch them, you snarky blot. You’ll get them all
greasy.”

Her chancellor cackled and ripped another strip of flesh off
the roasted joint he clutched in one misshapen hand, chewing noisily. Londri’s
stomach lurched; early in her fifth pregnancy nothing was appetizing, but roast
meat was especially nauseating.

Overhead, the sconces crackled as an errant draft toyed with
the oil wicks; the thick shutters were drawn back from the deep, narrow
windows, admitting the predawn breeze, heavy with the scent of the
night-blooming bloodflowers that twined the tower of Annrai the Mad. Londri’s
stomach roiled again at their overly sweet, almost carrion scent.

Lazoro looked more closely at her. “How long this time?”

“Two courses.”

The dwarf said nothing for a moment; the only sound was the
slap of the cards on the low table between them. All her other pregnancies had
ended in miscarriages by the third month.

Then Lazoro poked at the cards with his free hand. “Now
uncover the Phoenix singularity and move it to the bar, which will free up...”

“I can see that better than you can, lump. They call this
solitaire for a reason, you know.”

Lazoro stood up, which made little difference in his height,
and performed an exaggerated bow, whacking his head into the low table between
them. “Your pardon, O Great Queen,” he intoned.

When he straightened up, one of the cards was stuck to his
high forehead, the starburst pattern on its back like a strange caste mark
above his gray eyes. He peeled it off and peered at it owlishly as Londri
snorted a laugh.

“The Nine of Phoenix,” Lazoro pronounced, flipping the card
around to show its face: nine heraldic birds enwrapped in flames. “Opportunity
and strife.”

“Opportunity and strife,” echoed a booming voice, startling
them both. “What else is new, O farsighted one?”

The bulky figure of Anya Steelhand filled the doorway,
shoving aside the hanging with one brawny, spark-scarred arm. The forge master
pushed her way into the room and dropped into a chair, which creaked warningly
under her weight.

“My passion for you, sweet flower of the forge,” replied
Lazoro, grinning broadly, “renewed as always by the sight of your lissome
frame.”

“Bah!” Anya snorted. She grabbed a flagon, pouring it full
of thick, fresh-brewed beer from the pitcher on the table, and sat down,
staring into the drink.

Londri snatched the card from the dwarf’s hands and slapped
it back on the table. He sat down again, his face serious. “You really do have
to decide about the Isolate woman at Szuri Pastures. Aztlan and Comori won’t
wait much longer, and if they tangle, the Tasuroi will move through. You know
they’re stronger than they’ve been in seventeen years.”

Londri felt a sudden, unreasoning rage and fought it down,
along with a surge of bile as the scent of the meat wrenched at her again. The
woman, an Isolate from the Panarchy, had been landed on the disputed border
between Aztlan and Comori. When it was found that her fertility suppression was
temporary, the two houses had nearly gone to war. Londri’s mother had imposed a
compromise: when the treatment wore off, Comori should have her firstborn,
Aztlan the next child, then House Ferric the third.

“The Telos-damned bitch
would
have twins,” said Anya
without looking up. Londri rubbed her stomach, aware of Lazoro’s concern.
Fertility was rare enough for those born on Gehenna, and child mortality was
high—she was the only survivor of fifteen siblings, none of whom had lived
beyond three years. Twins were unheard-of. Now Comori claimed both children,
while Aztlan claimed the second from the womb.

The Ironqueen sighed and walked over to the tall window.
Outside, the stars were paling, and fingers of actinic light reached hungrily
over the distant Surimasi Mountains, announcing the onslaught of another day
under the searing light of Shaitan, Gehenna’s primary.

Behind her came the shuffle of irregular footsteps. She knew
it was Stepan, the exiled gnostor who’d joined the Isolates in her mother’s
reign; a sapper-wyrm had chewed half his foot away, six years ago.

But she didn’t turn around, looking down instead, past the
tangled stone and timber complexity of House Ferric and over its surrounding
wall. Beyond, the growing light from the sky threw into bold relief the awesome
symmetry of the Crater, a perfectly circular gouge in the high, flat plain that
sloped up slowly to the brooding mountains beyond. The foundation of her
kingdom, and the center of human life on Gehenna, the Crater was the creation
of the hated Panarchists, their jailers, who had steered a metallic asteroid
into the planet centuries before. The metallic remnants at its center—the
treasured iron so rare elsewhere on Gehenna—were the source of House Ferric’s
supremacy; the rest of the asteroid, vaporized and wide-scattered by the
impact, rich in the trace elements necessary to the human body, had created the
Splash.

According to Stepan, it was a wickedly clever prison. “They
could have dusted the planet to add the trace elements we need,” he had
explained. “But this way, there’s just enough metal to ensure that we won’t try
to build a civilization without it—just enough to keep us fighting over it, and
so never a threat to them.”

She turned back to the others. “Why couldn’t it have been a
man? They’re so much easier to share.”

“They’d probably fight just as hard over a stud that threw
twins—no love lost there,” said Stepan, his precise Douloi accent grating on
her ears.

“Easy for you to say. They’re both staunch supporters of our
house, and they’re both right, in a way.”

“Right!” Lazoro cackled, waving his haunch of roast jaspar.
“Right? Since when does that have anything to do with it?”

The hanging was pushed aside again, revealing the seven-foot
bulk of her general, Gath-Boru. Moving with unlikely grace, he took his place
at the table.

“You know what I mean,” she said finally.

The dwarf had been her mother’s chancellor until her
untimely death twenty-five months before; without him, Londri doubted that the
Lodestone Siege would still be hers. He was almost twenty, the same age as
Stepan.

But Stepan would say sixty, and call it the prime of life.

However you reckoned it, she thought, twenty—what they
called sixty standard years in the Thousand Suns—was old on Gehenna. Deprived
in his youth of the supplements delivered from orbit by the hated Panarchists,
he’d fallen victim to one of the numerous deficiency diseases that were the lot
of so many on this strange planet. But it hadn’t affected his mind.

Lazoro smiled at her affectionately. “Of course I know.
You’re just like your mother. But she learned, and so will you, if Telos gives
you time, that right and might are uneasy partners at best.”

“And as long as I am here,” said Gath-Boru, his voice deep
and resonant from his massive chest, “you needn’t worry about that.” He filled
a flagon with beer. “There’s only one real question here,” he continued. “Which
one of them do we want to fight? Whichever one of them you decide against will
ally with the Tasuroi. Your army is ready, whatever the decision.”

“You cannot hope to make everyone happy with your decision,”
said Stepan, spreading his long pale hands on the table in front of him. “The
best you can do is minimize their unhappiness.”

“As well to say ‘water’s wet’ or ‘iron is rare,’” Lazoro
commented irritably. ‘That’s a tautology of government.”

The chancellor used his short legs to push his tall chair
back onto its two rear legs, bouncing precariously with his toes against the
table’s edge. It was a habit of his when he was vexed; Londri had been waiting
for him to tip over backward since she was a little girl. He never had.

She said nothing as the two bickered. A yawn cracked her
jaws open, intensifying the ache behind her eyes; the onset of dawn signaled
the usual end of the waking day for the inhabitants of Gehenna, and she had had
little sleep in the past few days. Her stomach churned, threatening a return of
the nausea that was never far away.

Underneath the table a hound commenced the rhythmic whimper
of a dream, its legs scrabbling in the rushes.

“There, there, bitling, not to worry.” Londri smiled at the
incongruous gentleness in Anya Steelhand’s husky alto. The muscles in the forge
master’s arm flexed as she reached down to stroke the animal’s head. The
whimpering stopped, replaced by the thumping racket of the big dog’s tail.

The big woman straightened up and glared at the two men
across the table from her, her pale eyes lent even more intensity by the
contrast with her glossy black skin. She slammed a big fist down on the table
and heaved herself to her feet; the candlesticks danced and the mugs rattled.

“You two would argue over the Last Skyfall itself!”

Lazoro’s chair fell forward with a crash as the dwarf threw
up his hands to cover his head in mock terror. Stepan merely looked at Anya,
unblinking, his round, plump face blank.

“House Ferric has the right to the third child,” said Anya.
“We get that all the sooner if we decide in favor of House Aztlan and divide
the twins, but that will leave us facing Comori and the Tasuroi—a larger force
than if we decide against Aztlan.”

She peered closer at Londri. “That’s the decision, Your
Majesty: is getting our hands on a fertile woman that much sooner worth the
risk?”

“Our spies say she is in fragile health,” said Lazoro. “We
can’t risk waiting.”

Twins. A wave of nausea welled up in Londri’s guts, and that
decided her, but before she could speak, the attention of everyone at the table
was riveted by a sound from the corridor outside.

THUMP, drag, THUMP, drag... As the noise grew louder, it was
accompanied by a hoarse grunting in synchrony with its rhythm.

The hanging in the doorway bellied out at its base and fell
back over a naked figure, albino-white and epicene, that leapt clumsily on all
fours toward the table like a child-sized toad. It was human, but no one could
have guessed its sex, if it even had one. Its face was blank of meaning,
somehow even less expressive than a corpse.

It stopped behind Londri’s chair; she twisted around, not
wanting to look, but afraid that if she didn’t, it would touch her.

“Oracle... Oracle... Oracle,” it piped in a high, thin
voice, thick strings of spittle hanging from its blubbery purple lips. Its eyes
were pink and crusted with rheum. “Szuri... Szuri... Szuri.”

Londri shrank back in her chair as it humped closer,
repeating its mindless litany. Anya was beside her, one big hand on the
Ironqueen’s neck, its horny weight comforting. The forge master kicked the
creature away, her voice hoarse with rage.

“Go away, you wretched abortion!” She bit off the last
word—the vilest curse on Gehenna—with disgusted precision. “Go tell your master
we will come, and not to send you again.”

The creature retreated, thump-dragging itself out the door,
trailing behind it a wailing cry: “Hurt... hurt... hurt.”

Londri caught a glimpse of Stepan’s face. The only Isolate
among them, his expression was one of horror—the others, born and raised on
Gehenna, merely looked uncomfortable or angry.

They don’t have things like that in the Thousand Suns.
They don’t have to.

“Are you all right?” Anya asked. “We can put him off.”

Londri shook her head. “Yes. No.” Her voice shook. Her
mother had never discussed this with her; her death had prevented Londri from
learning the true nature of the link between House Ferric and the exiled
Phanist who dwelt in the lowest levels of the castle. She only knew that every
time he called, her mother went, and so must she.

She stood up. “This just confirms that the Szuri Pastures
are important. Let’s get it over with.”

o0o

“Ow ow ow! R-run it again!”

Kedr Five’s voice, a squeal of laughter, was nearly drowned
by the guffaws of the others on the bridge of the
Samedi
.

“I can’t watch it again,” Sundiver cried, her slanted green
eyes running with tears. “Send it over the hyperwave—Brotherhood’s gonna love
this one.” She bent over her console, still whooping, her thick mane of silver
hair hiding her face.