Servant of the Empire (57 page)

‘Keep going,’ Kevin exhorted Mara.

A few steps more, and he sensed the rain lessening with each stride.

The Acoma retinue reached the street that bordered the arena, and the distant voice of Milamber cried, ‘Fire!’

A collective peal of terror arose from inside the stadium. Mara looked back in horror, afraid for the unfortunates who were still trapped. Kevin turned to hurry her on and, through the pattering fall of thinning droplets, saw a thing of terrifying, alien beauty. A display of flames played through clouds that even yet splashed icy wetness upon the earth. Jagged bolts of lightning rent the sky. A burning sting grazed Kevin’s cheek as a rain of pure fire began to fall.

Mara screamed. Flame blossomed in the silks that covered her head, and the wet did not stop them igniting. Soldiers slapped at the flames with their gauntlets, and the odour of seared hide and lacquer grew choking on the smoke-filled air. They ran. Falling fires spattered sparks
across the pavement, and, in fear for their lives, they ran harder.

Lujan pointed. ‘There!’ A hundred yards away, across a streaming expanse of puddles and flame, sunlight shone down untroubled.

Kevin dragged Mara into a sprint, and still those last hundred yards stretched like miles. And then they were safe in the sunlight.

The soldiers slowed to catch their breath at stern orders from Lujan. Winded men made poor fighters, and the streets were a seething mass of frightened people and soldiers battle-ready to defend their Lords. Kevin seized the respite to look back. The madness above the arena had not stopped. Fire splashed down in lurid streaks, and the cries of the dying and the injured mingled into one vast wail.

The streets were packed with suffering, blazing scarecrows that danced and flapped in an agony of burning. Singed survivors raced into safety and collided with craftsmen and slaves who had paused about their business to gape. Many had fallen prostrate out of fear, while others made protective signs against the gods’ displeasure; the most simple just stood in mute astonishment.

A faint word carried over the confusion. Kevin couldn’t make out the meaning, but at a wave from Lujan he gently urged Mara forward. ‘Do your feet hurt? We’d better keep moving. I think we’re still a little close to the action.’

Mara blinked, white-faced with exhaustion. Numbly she said, ‘The matter of shoes must wait. To the town house.’

Lujan sent one soldier ahead to bring more warriors from the garrison to guard the Lady in her walk across town. Skilful in his guidance, the Force Commander kept to quiet streets; he avoided the temple precinct, where worshippers and priests seethed around offering-tables, chanting and singing a rush of placating prayers. Runners hastened on unknown errands, and beggars roved districts that were not
in their usual province. Wary of attack, the soldiers kept together; Kevin kept a grip on Arakasi’s knife. No ambush materialized, but an odd buzzing sensation rippled through the ground underfoot.

The vibration swelled to a deep-throated rumbling, and Kevin knew a flash of fear. ‘Earthquake!’ he shouted. ‘Into that doorway! Now!’

Lujan and his warriors wheeled smartly. They forced aside a trio of commoners who sheltered under the arch of an alehouse door. Made of solid stone, the portal had once supported two wooden panels, torn down forgotten years before.

The warriors passed Mara between them, sending her reeling into cover under the overhang. Kevin stumbled in behind her, and, pressed on all sides by armoured men, he felt the earth fall out from beneath his feet. The warriors staggered and buckled to their knees; others fell prostrate, while the litter bearers whimpered with their arms over their heads. The force of the quake sent people reeling and falling in the street, and screams arose from inside the alehouse as ceiling beams collapsed and plaster and debris rained down. Crockery mugs spilled and clattered; buildings outside shed roof tiles, and cornices, and coping, to crash and shatter on the pavement. Balconies collapsed, and screens tore, and people fell bleeding like tossed litter.

A stone wall nearby collapsed in a grating puff of dust, and the shaking increased. A bucking, surging motion rolled the length of the avenue, and the air rang with the grinding crash of splintering timbers and masonry. Kevin fought the heave of the earth to reach Mara, but a pair of soldiers already lay atop her, shielding her with their bodies.

On and on the madness raged; the very ground writhed like a thing in pain. From across the imperial precinct, in the vicinity of the arena, the noise of wrenched stones rumbled and roared like an avalanche. The sound raged tireless as the
sea, cut by tens of thousands of voices shrieking in horror and pain.

Then the earth stilled between one heartbeat and the next. Quiet fell, and sun shone down through a haze of raised dust. The street was left in wreckage, a battleground of rubble and moaning wounded. Mashed between stones, crushed under splintered falls of lumber, lay the silent, bloody dead.

Kevin pulled himself to his feet. His cheek burned with blisters, and his eyes stung from grit. As the soldiers around him also recovered their footing, he helped Mara to rise.

Looking at her soiled face, with cobwebs of charred silk dangling from her tangled headdress, and wet robes plastered to her body, Kevin repressed an urge to kiss her lingeringly on the lips. Instead he dusted a fallen strand of hair from her earlobe and wakened the sparkle of an emerald ornament. He breathed a shaky sigh. ‘We were lucky. Can you imagine what it must have been like within the arena?’

Mara’s eyes were still wide with shock. She was past all attempt to hide her trembling, but her voice held a grim hint of iron as she said, ‘We can only hope that our Lord of the Minwanabi remained too long at the games.’

Then as if the wrecked beauty that surrounded her suddenly wounded her, she gestured curtly to Lujan. ‘Back to our town house, at once.’

Lujan formed up his company and began the long trek back through the devastated avenues of Kentosani.

Arakasi appeared later, his servant’s garb dusty and singed. Far from the arena and the site of Milamber’s wrath, the Acoma house had taken only mild damage. But now a dozen warriors held the outer door, and more stood guard in the courtyard; the Spy Master advanced with cat-footed caution. Not until he sighted Lujan in the hallway did he finally relax his stance.

‘Gods preserve us, you made it,’ the Force Commander greeted in a hoarse-voiced rush of feeling.

In an instant, Arakasi was directed upstairs, where he bowed before his mistress.

Mara was seated on cushions, freshly bathed, but still pale from the day’s excitement. A scraped knee showed beneath her lounging robe, and her eyes were shadowed by an anxiety that lifted at the sight of her Spy Master. ‘Arakasi! Well met. What news do you bring?’

The Spy Master arose from his bow. ‘With my Lady’s forgiveness,’ he murmured, and he raised a stained cloth and dabbed at a bleeding cheek.

Mara motioned to a maid, who hurried off for healer’s salves and a basin. The Spy Master tried to brush her solicitude away. ‘The cut is of no consequence. A man sought to take advantage of the confusion and rob me. He is dead.’

‘Rob a servant?’ Mara questioned. The excuse was transparent; more likely her Spy Master had risked grave danger on her behalf, but she abided by his wishes and refrained from embarrassing him with questions.

When Mara’s party had arrived at the door to her town house, they had found the Spy Master absent, along with the bulk of her soldiers. Leaving a small garrison with Jican, Arakasi had made his way back toward the arena, but the madness caused by Milamber had disrupted his passage through the streets. The two parties had passed and missed each other in the pandemonium.

The maid arrived back with a basket of remedies. Mara nodded toward Arakasi, who looked irritated but submitted to having his cheek doctored at his mistress’s insistence.

While the maid dabbed at the Spy Master’s wound, Mara asked, ‘The rest of our soldiers?’

‘Back with me,’ Arakasi answered, unwarrantably peevish. He flicked a dark look at the maid, then finished his
report. ‘Though one warrior took a blow to his head from falling pottery, if you can believe, and is probably going to die.’

Mara watched the filth and old blood that came away on the cloth. ‘That’s more than a scratch. The bone shows.’ She added the question that burned to be asked. ‘What of the city?’

Arakasi ducked the maid’s hand. In a movement quick as a predator’s, he caught up a clean rag and held it pressed to his injury. ‘My Lady should not bother herself with a servant’s aches and pains.’

In the softening gloom of twilight, Mara’s eyebrows rose. ‘And servants should not bother to aid their mistresses by risking imperial charges for handing a blade to a slave? No’ – she raised her hand as Arakasi drew breath – ‘don’t answer. Lujan swears he didn’t see. There was a knife that turned up bloody in the pantry, but the cooks insist it was used to slaughter jigabirds.’

Arakasi loosed a sharp chuckle. ‘Jigabirds! How apt.’

‘Very. Now answer my question,’ Mara demanded.

Still delighted, Arakasi obeyed. ‘All is in chaos. There are fires everywhere, and many wounded. Kentosani looks as if it has been overrun by an invading army in the quarters around the arena. The Warlord has retired in shame, humiliated by the Great One, Milamber. The spectacle was too public and caused too many innocent deaths. I wager Almecho will end his sorry life within the day.’

‘The Emperor?’ Through her excitement at this momentous news, Mara kept track of the prosaic. She dismissed the maid with orders to fetch a tray of supper.

Arakasi said, ‘The Light of Heaven is safe. But the Imperial Whites are withdrawn from all parts of the palace save the family suite, where they protect the Emperor and his children. The Council Guards remain on duty, but with no orders from the Warlord to direct them, they will not act.
By nightfall, it should be presumed that house loyalty will prevail, and each company will return to its own master. What rules we know are temporarily suspended, with the council weakened and the Warlord shamed.’ Arakasi shrugged. ‘There is no law, except as strength demands.’

Mara felt chilled in a room that seemed suddenly darker. She clapped for servants to light lamps, then said, ‘Lujan should hear this. Do you think we could be attacked?’

Arakasi sighed. ‘Who can know? All is madness out there. Yet if I were to hazard a guess, we are probably safe for the night. If the Lord of the Minwanabi survived the destruction of the games, then he is most likely hiding in his quarters, as we are, taking stock of personal losses and awaiting word that sanity has returned in the streets.’

The tray arrived, brought in by a servant with Lujan striding hard on his heels. Mara motioned for her Force Commander to be seated, then had a round of chocha poured. She sat back and sipped the hot, reassuring liquid, while Lujan bullied Arakasi into treating his wound with salve. The warrior’s graphic descriptions of suppurating sword cuts were enough to intimidate the bravest, and Arakasi’s courage mostly stemmed from stubbornness. Roused to pity by her Spy Master’s harried frown, but not enough to let him escape being bandaged by the capable hands of her Force Commander, Mara judged her moment and intervened. ‘If Almecho takes his own life, there will be a call to council.’

Eager for the diversion, Arakasi scooped up a cold meat pie. ‘A new Warlord.’

Lujan tossed the unused bandage back in the basket of remedies. ‘Any who attend the election will be taking grave risks. There is no clear successor to the title.’

Yet that danger, while apparent enough, was not the worst imaginable. Mara raised steady eyes in the brightening light of the lamps. ‘If ever the Acoma presence must be in
force in the council, it’s to elect Almecho’s successor. Only five Lords command enough following to strive for the title, and one of those is Desio of the Minwanabi. His claim must never be permitted to succeed.’

‘You have made bargains,’ Arakasi allowed, ‘compiled enough promised votes that you could carry an influence. But with all normal order overturned, do you dare rely on who will be present to be counted?’

Now Mara’s fatigue showed plainly. ‘No greater risk could exist than Desio wearing the white and gold.’

Lujan fingered his weapon hilt. ‘Could that happen?’

‘In the normal course of events, no. Now …?’ The Spy Master shrugged. ‘This morning, would any one of us have guessed the reign of Almecho could end in disgrace before sundown?’

The night beyond the window seemed suddenly more than dark. Menaced by gathering fears, Mara longed for the comfort of Kevin’s arms; but he was outside with the warriors, helping to repair gaps the earthquake had opened in the wall. Milamber had broken more than stones and heads in his contest against the Warlord. His deed had undermined all hierarchy within the Empire, and the dust would be long days settling.

‘It would seem we must be ready for any eventuality,’ Mara announced with firmness. ‘Arakasi, when you are able, you will be needed back in the city. Keep abreast of every rumour. For soon the powers of this Empire will change their course, and if we do not lay our path carefully, we may be crushed in the byplay.’

There followed a tense, sleepless night, while Lujan’s warriors rearranged furnishings and pulled old battle shutters out of storage. The ancient dwelling in Kentosani had not taken assault in many centuries, but the old walls were solid. The warriors fortified the gates and the doorways as best they could, their work lit by slaves bearing lanterns.