A Conflict of Orders (An Age of Discord Novel Book 2) (56 page)

“The Emperor has not asked for the Promise to be honoured.”

“
I
am asking,” replied the Admiral.

“You are not the Emperor.”

“Indeed. But remember this: your positions may not be in the Gift of the Emperor, but my father has sufficient influence to see that you no longer occupy them.”

F
or the past two weeks, Ahasz had taken to spending the day at one of the observation posts. He would send away the trooper on duty and take his place at the telescope. In part, he did so as punishment. He was not there to watch for incursions by Palace defenders. Instead, he panned the telescope across Mount Yama’s facade and hated himself for the damage he had caused. The statues of the emperors Edkar I and Poer I which had once flanked the Grand Entrance were no longer recognisably human. Edkar had lost his head weeks before and one arm ended at mid-bicep. Poer had fared no better. One leg was missing from knee to groin, his lower abdomen sported a great hole, and his face had collapsed leaving only a suggestion of features. For almost one thousand years, those two figures had stood guard over the District, had awed and reassured in equal measure those subjects who visited the Imperial Palace. Now they were ruined. There was no fixing them.

There was no repairing the rest of the Palace’s facade, either. Balconies had collapsed, leaving open the rooms behind them. Ahasz could see dusty furniture, artworks hanging precariously from walls, even bookcases in which all the volumes had been reduced to anonymity by a thick layer of dust.

He had done this.

He had destroyed one of the wonders of the Empire.

The loss was irreplacable. The Imperial Palace would have to be rebuilt. He no longer believed he would take the Imperial Throne, but…
If
he did, he could see himself spending his new regnal government into penury in an effort to return the Imperial Household District to its former glory. He would not want to do so, but what choice would he have? The health of his rule would be judged by its trappings. No good emperor, people would believe, could reign from a ruin.

Ahasz sighed. He had created this situation. He had not expected to be quite so… harmful to the buildings in the District. But he had known his assault could turn protracted.

His plan had depended upon it.

A low roar began to echo about the District, reverberating off the mountains to each side. Puzzled, Ahasz stepped down from the observation post and looked up. The sky was clear and blue and cloudless. He frowned. The noise was getting louder. And it sounded like gas-rockets… and yet not like them.

There was a pulse to the sound, a pulse with so fast a syncopation it merged into a single continuous throb of noise. Turning his head one way then the other, he determined it was coming from the south and turned to stare in that direction. He put a hand to his brow and peered at the mountain top.

A shape shot into view. Low. Clearing the ridge by a matter of feet. It hurtled across the District, north to south, faster than Ahasz could spin to follow it. But he had seen enough to recognise it.

A jolly boat.

“Man the swivels!” he yelled.

There was a swivel mount some five yards further down the trench. He ran to it and saw its crew gawping with mouths open at the mountain over which the jolly boat had flown. He followed their gaze.

The ridge was crumbling. Rocks split and tumbled, rolling down the mountainside and landing amongst the Ruins with great booms. Stones rattled down to rain down on the ancient palace. Boulders flattened walls, destroyed mosaics; smaller stones chipped carvings and filled the corners of rooms open to the air.

It was a moment before Ahasz realised what had happened.

Drive-tubes!

The jolly boat had not been using its gas-rockets but its drive-tubes. They were strictly banned below one thousand feet, and precisely because of the damage they could cause.

Ahasz took control. “There may be more,” he told the gunners. “Be prepared. They’re travelling too fast to track in flight. You’ll have to take them as they appear.”

The corporal in charge of the swivel saluted smartly. As Ahasz walked away, he heard the woman instruct her crew in more detail than the duke had given.

Was, he wondered, someone about to launch an attack on him? But who? There was no force on Shuto capable. He had seen to that.

The Admiral. She had finally arrived.

It could be no other. As the thought occurred to him, he stopped and put out a hand to the trench wall beside him. He felt the rot-slimed wood beneath his hand, smelled the fug of burnt earth and unwashed bodies which seemed to flow through the trenches as water did a river. The Admiral. She had arrived. Fresh from her victory at Geneza —

No. The trip from Geneza to Shuto took weeks. He tried to remember exactly how long. It had been over a decade since he last went on pilgrimage to Zolima. If he remembered rightly, the journey took some six weeks, if travelling via Podboi. Assuming all the Admiral’s vessels were naval, that meant over one hundred and ten days in elapsed time.

He pulled his hand from the wooden wall, wiped it on his thigh and continued along the trench. The Admiral would launch her attack soon. She had come to rescue her father. Just as he had expected, and intended, her to do so. He knew her well from the years they had spent together, and thought it unlikely she had changed much in the years since she had left him.

As he approached a T-junction, he heard a voice to his left asking for “his grace”. Female, and she sounded familiar. Not one of his officers, of that he was sure. But certainly a voice he knew. It was a moment before he placed it: Druzh! His spymaster. He had not recognised it because it was so unexpected. She had not been in the trenches since the beginning of the siege.

He turned the corner and there she stood, asking for the duke’s whereabouts from a trooper. She was inappropriately dressed, wearing low heeled boots, a loose dress, and a thin jacket. He could see troopers staring at her, because she was clean and not clad in clothing she had clearly been wearing for weeks.

“Sofia,” he said, approaching. “What brings you here?”

She pivoted smoothly to face him. “Your grace. I have news I felt you should hear.”

“The Admiral is here,” he said flatly.

Druzh nodded. “She arrived in orbit some three hours ago. According to my sources, she was met by the Lords of the Admiralty.”

“And what? They tried to stop her?”

“I don’t know, your grace. I suspect not. They met for a couple of hours and then left. There was no battle.”

He turned and glanced across the greensward at the obsidian cube of the Imperial Admiralty. Within it, he had a team ready to run a protocol on the Navy Accounting Mechanism which would reduce the service to pennilessness. He doubted the Admiral cared over much about that, but surely the Lords of the Admiralty would have impressed the precariousness of their situation on her?

“Do you have any intelligence that might help me?” Ahasz asked Druzh.

“I am sorry, your grace. Your own intelligence on her fleet is more comprehensive than that of my sources. I can tell you only she appears to be commanding from the battleship
Empress Glorina
.”

“Not
Vengeful
?” That was a puzzle. Had the Admiral sent her battlecruiser on some secret mission?

“She may not have survived the battle at Geneza.”

“Who? The Admiral? Or
Vengeful
?”

“The ship, your grace.”

“The Admiral’s troops will be down here soon. They’ve already over-flown the District. Leave now. It’s likely to get messy and very dangerous.”

He took her by the upper arms, leaned close and pecked her on each cheek. “I have been grateful over the years, Sofia, for your work. You have my word that it has not been for nothing.”

He left her and returned to his troops for the battle ahead.

“We will lose,” Ahasz said flatly. He looked down at a plan of the trench complex displayed on the glass of a notepad. “The Admiral will attack from the air and our defences will mean nothing.”

“There is time for you to escape, your grace,” said Colonel Tayisa.

Ahasz turned to look at him. “I have no intention of leaving,” he said flatly.

“But if we are defeated…”

“Make no mistake, Tayisa: we cannot win.” He turned back to the notepad on the table. “I wish only to minimise casualties.”

While, he said to himself, making a plausible fight of it.

He sighed and crossed to his bunk. He sat down, put his hands to his knees and gazed at the opposite wall of the command post. Rough slats of wood, dark with the mud which had leaked through. For one hundred and seventy days he had lived here. On this crude cot with its thin mattress and heaped blankets. Had eaten from the dented metal plate and drunk from the battered metal mug, which both sat on the table.

The end was near and he was grateful for it. The hardship had been, on occasion, almost too much to bear. But he was not a man who gave up. He had endured, he had persevered. He had waited out the Emperor in his Palace, he had waited out the Admiral: her trip to Geneza, the battle there and her journey to Shuto.

Another sigh.

“They will take me, Tayisa,” he said, “and they will punish me. You need not worry for yourself. Give your allegiance to my sister and she will protect you.”

“Your grace, no.” Tayisa moved to stand before the seated duke. “I will not leave your side.”

Ahasz stood. “Very well. But we cannot know how this day will go.”

The door to the command post banged open. A militia trooper stood in the entrance. “Your grace, your grace! Jolly boats!”

Ahasz followed the trooper out of the underground chamber and into the trench. He stopped and gazed up —

The sky was full of boats.

They roared in from every direction, came to halts one hundred feet up and began to descend. So many. Pinnances and jolly boats and launches. Ahasz could not count them all. Two hundred? Three hundred? His forces were surely outnumbered. He laughed, pulled his sword from his scabbard and brandished it at the descending army.

“The Navy Accounting Mechanism, your grace!” bellowed Tayisa over the blasting gas-rockets of the boats.

Ahasz chopped the air. “No! Do nothing! Tell Ashma to escort Skattia out of the Admiralty Fort.”

The beams of swivels crisscrossed the sky. Where they hit boats, hulls and keels and drive-tubes burst into flame. Hot metal debris rained down on the trenches, sliced and blasted from the small craft. Somewhere to the rear a basilisk fired and hit a jolly boat. The small craft was consumed in light. A ball of black smoke appeared in its place and burning debris was propelled out from it like a coronet of falling stars. Another boat, damaged by a swivel, dropped from the sky and hit the ground at high speed. It seemed to crumple into the earth and its hull cracked apart with a sound like rocks falling. Troopers spilled out, thrown up and to the side, before the boat burst into flames and the fire consumed them.

Bellows and screams and the roar of gas-rockets and the hiss and bang of directed-energy echoed across the Imperial Household District.

Ahasz ran forwards and stopped at the T-junction. Troopers gathered around him—not just his house militia, but also Roundheads and regimentals.

A jolly boat shot low over the trench, its keel almost close enough to scrape the parapet. The noise was deafening. Dirt flew up into the air and black smoke billowed over their heads. A piece of metal, cherry red with heat, landed in the trench. Someone screamed.

“We can’t fight here!” yelled Ahasz.

He turned and began pushing his way through the soldiers packed in tight about him.

“We need to get out of the trenches!”

Slowly the message seemed to get through, and the troopers began to pour down the defile and out onto the rear slope of Palace Road. Now Colonel Tayisa began shouting orders: “Form up! Protect the duke!”

Figures were already charging back and forth across the churned-up ground. Ahasz saw a company of Housecarls meet a company of blue-jacketed troopers. He did not recognise the regiment. Hammers swung down and were met by axes. Ahasz turned about. There were more and more soldiers in unfamiliar tunics on the battlefield. Light blue with dark blue frogging; dark blue with green and red facings; grey with yellow frogging and dark blue facings… These were not his troops. Along the length of Palace Road, jolly boats and pinnaces sat bobbing on their chargers while their prows split open and disgorged lines of soldiers. Behind him, the basilisks fired, filling the sky with their eye-searing beams. The swivels fired too, narrow beams lines of directed-energy spearing up from the trenches.

And still boats filled the sky.

Troopers in red and dark blue ran from the defiles leading to the trenches, charged out and crashed into the lines of attackers.

Green jackets—Imperial Marines!—ran at the company surrounding Ahasz. A squad of Roundheads ran out to meet them and marines fell beneath their hammers. But they could not hold them all, and many of the marines ran past and ploughed into the wall of Vonshuan militia.

Ahasz held his sword high. Beside him, Tayisa had drawn his own blade. Bodies milled about them. It was too close to fight. Ahasz stumbled and would have fallen. Tayisa grabbed his arm and hauled him upright. A gap opened before them. Ahasz ripped his arm free of the colonel’s grip. He stepped forward and found himself confronted by a marine-lieutenant.

Ahasz killed him. He feinted left, brought his point round from the right. He dodged the other’s blade and lunged. He took the marine through the throat. He pushed the body away with one hand and pulled back his bloodied sword. An axe blade whistled down, just missing his shoulder. He stepped back and a Vonshuan militia trooper moved into the gap. The axe took her in the side on its next swing. Blood sprayed across the marine and two regimentals beside her.

Someone grabbed Ahasz’s arm. It was Tayisa. “Your grace! It’s too dangerous here!”

“I won’t run from the fight!”