Songmaster (10 page)

Riktors Ashen arrived unannounced on the planet Garibali, his last stop but one before Tew. He preferred to arrive unannounced on Mikal’s errands. Yet there was no sign that he had flustered anyone; there was no panic when he presented his credentials at customs. The official there had simply bowed, asked him his preference of hotel, and arranged a private car to take him there. It disturbed Riktors because it meant that things here were worse than reports had hinted. The problem might be just the nation of Scale, where he had landed, or it might be the whole world, but they had been expecting an imperial messenger—and on a nominally free world, that meant that they knew there was some reason an imperial messenger ought to come.

Someone had been busy calling. The hotel staff was ready for him when he arrived. Riktors watched with amusement as the elaborate courtesy occasionally gave way to terror—in the hotel, at least, Mikal’s emissary had not been looked for.

There was a woman waiting for him in his room.

Riktors closed the door. “Are you an official or a whore?” he asked.

She shrugged. “An official whore, perhaps?” She smiled. She was nude.

Riktors was unimpressed. However efficient they were in Scale, they certainly had no taste. “Talaso,” he said.

“Yes?” she asked, puzzled.

“I want to see him.”

“Oh, no,” she said helplessly. “I can’t do
that
.”

“I think you can. I think you will.”

“But no one sees him without an appoint—”

“I have an appointment.” He reached out his hand, touched her neck almost affectionately. But there was a small dart in his hand, and though she winced at the sudden, sharp sting, the drug worked quickly.

“Talaso?” she asked sleepily.

“Immediately.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“But you know who
does
.”

She led him out of the hotel. He did not bother dressing her; she was incapable of feeling any shame under the drug, and Riktors felt it appropriate. Symbolic, perhaps, that the entire world stood naked before him.

It required the drugging of another confused official before Riktors Ashen stood outside the door of Talaso’s office. Talaso’s receptionist called the guard, of course, and there were three soldiers with weapons leveled, prepared to kill Riktors before he was allowed to enter. But then the door opened and Talaso himself stood there, poised and self-assured.

“Let Mr. Ashen come in, please. I meant to see him tomorrow, but since he is so impatient I will see him now.”

Reluctantly the guards let him by, and Riktors entered the room. He immediately began the formal accusation. “You are known to be constructing starships capable of military activity. You are known to be overtaxing. You are suspected of having a police force three times the legal maximum, and you are accused of dominating and requiring tribute from at least four other nations on Garibali. The facts, the suspicions, and the accusations are enough to bring you to trial before the emperor. If you resist arrest, I am authorized to pass judgment and execute sentence myself. The charge is treason; you are under arrest.”

Talaso did not lose his smile. Perhaps, Riktors thought, perhaps he does not realize the danger. Or he thought that because my tone was so matter-of-fact he could resist or delay or argue.

“Mr. Ashen, these are serious charges.”

“You will come with me immediately,” Riktors said.

“Of course I honor the emperor, but—”

“This is not your trial, I have no time to listen to your protests, and it will do you no good. Come along, Talaso.”

“Mr. Ashen, I have responsibilities here. I can’t just leave them on a moment’s notice.”

Riktors looked at his watch. “Any further delay or attempt at delay will constitute the treasonous crime of resisting the emperor’s arrest, for which the penalty is death.”

“You forget,” said Talaso, “that I have three guards standing behind you and you made the foolish mistake of coming to my nation, to my city, alone.”

“Whatever gave you the idea that I am alone?” Riktors asked mildly.

Talaso looked irritated; this, Riktors knew, was his first realization that he just might have been too confident. “You are the only passenger who debarked from a registered passenger ship.”

“The emperor’s soldiers have already won complete control of the port, Talaso.”

“It’s a passenger ship!” Talaso said angrily. “You can’t fool me. The sealed identifier declares it to be a passenger ship! The identifiers are absolutely tamperproof—”

“By the emperor’s own decree,” Riktors said.

“Shoot him,” Talaso said to the guards, who stood with their lasers in hand. But they were already collapsing from the drug Riktors had released by clamping the muscles of his buttocks tightly while scuffing his boot along the floor. Talaso’s terror suddenly won out, and he was trembling and shouting for help as he fumbled for a weapon in his desk.

“Talaso, you are guilty of treason, sentenced to death; look at me.”

Talaso tried to hide behind the desk; but he did look at Riktors, just for a moment. Just long enough for Riktors’s dart to strike him in the eye.

Talaso clutched at his face; then the poison struck. He vomited violently, so violently that his jaw dislocated. He sprawled on the desk until the spasms began. His muscles contracted sharply. He jerked and flopped over like a fish drowning in air, until one of the spasms struck with such force that his neck broke. Then he lay still, his hair matted with his own vomit, his face turned at an angle from his shoulders that it could never have assumed in life.

Riktors grimaced. It was an unpleasant business, serving as Mikal’s emissary. Still, he had done it well enough these past years, and at last he had been promoted to the palace guard. He could have been moved into the job of assassin, an ugly business of stealth and well-contrived natural deaths, a dead-end assignment. Riktors was sure he would have been a good assassin, and he had good friends among that most private group—but much better to govern. That was the part of his job that Riktors actually liked, and thank God the emperor had chosen to let him follow that path instead of the other.

He turned and opened the door. More guards had just arrived. Riktors killed them all, along with Talaso’s receptionist and the official whore and the confused official who had led him here.

Then he called in other bureaucrats from nearby rooms. He brought them into Talaso’s office and showed them the corpse. “I assume there was holographic recording equipment running,” he said. There was. “Duplicate it and broadcast it immediately throughout Scale and all over the world.” The official he looked at was confused. “My friend,” Riktors said, “I don’t care much what your job has been before. I am the government of Scale now, in the name of the emperor Mikal, and you will do what I say or you will die.”

The corpses around him were proof enough of power. The official left quickly, and Riktors continued giving orders, already setting in motion the changes that had to be complete in a week for him to stay on schedule, that had to be so thorough that no new dictator could spring up on Garibali for centuries. He picked up the phone and called the port. His second-in-command had been waiting for his call.

“Proceed,” Riktors said. “I have Talaso here, dead of course, and we’re moving well.”

“And I have a message for you from the emperor. His agents on Clike have found that the rumors were unfounded and your visit there has been canceled. He orders you to proceed to Tew when this work is accomplished.”

Tew. The Songhouse, and Mikal’s Songbird. “Then would you please inform the Songhouse we will be arriving a week earlier than we anticipated.” Courtesy could not be forgotten, not if the machinery of government were to run smoothly. The Songhouse. That frozen, frightening woman, Esste, and the beautiful child who would not sing for him. Petty politicians and adventurers like Talaso were easy to handle. But how to fight with singers, how to win a gift that could only be given freely—those were questions whose answers could not be found. That was an assignment that could not be handled routinely, and if he succeeded it would be because they let him succeed, and if he failed it would mean the end of his career, the whimsical end to his ambition because he had once happened to be the soldier nearest to Tew that Mikal Imperator could trust.

Damnable bad luck.

He sat down at the receptionist’s desk and began to reorganize the government of Scale while his soldiers took control of every other government on Garibali, one by one, and placed the rule of two billion people in Riktors’s hands. In the delight of power, Riktors soon put the Songbird far into the back of his mind, where he need not worry. Not just yet, anyway.

It was the fourth day that Ansset had tormented Esste. It was near dark outside, and the High Room was growing cold. He had stopped singing an hour ago, but he could not move. He sat in the middle of the floor and looked at Esste and was afraid.

She sat still, her eyes open, looking forward but seeing nothing. Her hands rested on the table in front of her. She had not moved from that position since Ansset began his song in the morning.

And now he was full of doubt. He did not understand what was happening to her. The first time he had been excited because he had actually changed her. While her Control had held and she still remained silent, she had stopped work, had lost her struggle to concentrate on the computer in the table. He had thought the end would come the next day. But the next day she had held on, and the next, and today he realized that she was not going to break. He knew that these were the songs that would make her afraid. But he had no idea what fears he had summoned up.

Each night he had gone to sleep with her frozen at the table; each morning he had awakened to find her asleep in the blankets. When she woke she said nothing, hardly looked at him, just got up, ate, went to the table, and began work. Each day he had started to sing and, each time a little sooner, she had stopped working and taken her day-long pose of studied inattention.

What am I doing to her behind her face?

Ansset felt restless, felt that he had to move. He delayed (Control) and when he got up he got up slowly (Control) and did not walk back and forth but instead headed directly for a shutter and tried to open it and realized that the very attempt was a sign that his Control was slipping. At the thought he was instantly aware of the walls of rock inside him, the deep placid lake that grew ever deeper within them. But something was stirring at the bottom of the lake.

He touched the cold stone wall between the windows and heard the whine of wind outside. Perhaps the first storm of fall was coming. Why had she brought him here? What was she trying to achieve?

What have I done to her?

He looked into the lake, looked deep and began to understand what was happening to him. After eleven days in the High Room he was beginning to be afraid. Things were out of his control. He could not leave. He could not force Esste to speak to him, or even to weep or show any sign that she felt anything at all. (Why is it so important that she show a sign of feeling?) And now he was feeling things within the walls of his Control that did not belong there. Fear stirred at the bottom of his calm. Fear, not just of what would happen to him in the High Room, but of what he might have done to Esste. He could not put it into words, but he realized that if something happened to her, something would happen to him. There was a connection. They were linked somehow, he was sure of it. And by raising her fears he had raised his own. They lurked. They waited. They were inside his walls and he did not know how he would be able to control them.

Speak to me, Esste, he said silently. Speak to me and be angry with me and demand that I change, abuse me or praise me or sing idiotic songs about the cities of Tew but stop hiding from me!

She did not look alive or human, her face empty like that, her body motionless. Human beings moved, their faces expressed things.

I will not break Control.

“I will not break Control,” he sang softly. But in the moment of singing he knew it was not true, and the fear moved sluggishly within him.