Hooded masks left only a narrow strip of facial skin exposed—and their eyes, which to Kathur were like those of night-stalking reptiles. Those eyes stared at her, and for a moment it was not difficult to read the expressions flickering within them, for they studied—no, they consumed—a woman whose single garment exposed or emphasised far more than it concealed.
And a woman whose right hand gripped an Alban
telek
with every appearance of knowing how to use it.
The
tulathin
exchanged significant glances, but they did not come any closer. Nor did they say anything to her, although it was plain despite the masks that they had not expected to find Kathur alone. The wounded and unconscious man sprawled on the floor quite as plainly did not count.
Then there were more footfalls, and these were not soft—they were the firm, decisive steps of one who by reason of power and authority had no need for secrecy. No order was spoken aloud, but each
taulath
shifted with disciplined precision, flanking the doorway; they paused one beat, then snapped to attention and executed the rhythmic movements of a full parade salute. The hard smack of open palm on chest and thigh sounded like a premonition of Kathur’s future. And then only if that future was kind.
A back-lit silhouette paused deliberately in the doorway for dramatic effect before crossing the threshold, and lamplight danced in sparkling motes from silvered rank-marks on a vermilion helmet as this third man turned his head slowly to survey the room. The helmet’s deep cheek-guards, nasal and lowering peak effectively masked his features, but Kathur had no need to see his face to know who he was.
“Well, my dear lady.”
Hautheisart
Voord spoke with a deceptive softness. “And where is he?”
Seconds crawled past, eon-slow, before Kathur could swallow enough terror for her acid-soured mouth to form the words of a reply. “Gone,” she said. What else was there to say? “He realized—somehow—that he was being kept here.” Then in mitigation, “But it was only minutes ago: I was able to hold him until then…”
Voord stared at her, saying nothing, eyes unreadable through the jagged shadows filling his helmet. “So. Then you tried to be clever rather than practical after all.” Another dreadful silence. Then he turned, ignoring her. “Tagen, Garet, hear me: is the perimeter secured?”
“Sir!” The response was simultaneous, that of automata.
“Then go. Both of you. Trawl the nets and bring any catch to… to the harbor. To
Teynaur
. And sail at dawn—whether I am there or not. Understood?”
“Sir!” Another salute and they were gone. Kathur watched their departure with resigned, sick despair in her eyes. The troopers were familiar to her: Voord’s honor guard, men who accompanied him everywhere. The executors of his will. Their dismissal was an insult like a slap in the face. She was no threat. Nobody.
Nothing.
The street had been dark and silent, swaddled by layers of gray fog. A figure emerging from the shadows at the far side of the street had walked with quiet purpose towards the shuttered facade of Kathur’s house; a house identified at last as the culmination and the goal of a long, weary quest. The figure was cloaked and hooded— nameless, faceless, sexless. But there was the merest suggestion of a sword’s outline beneath the folds of that heavy cloak, and the faint scraping of metal that was the sound of armor.
Then the silent stillness was shattered like a flawed glass mirror by the quick hard beat of hooves on stone, and a man on horseback erupted from the stable entry near the house at near-enough full gallop. Before the hooded one could do more than flatten for safety against the nearest wall, the black horse’s rider had gathered his mount and slewed it around in a metallic slither as iron shoes all but lost their grip on the slick pavement. Then man and horse were past and away in a swirl of sound and speed.
The figure by the wall straightened rumpled garments and still more rumpled dignity, stared for a few thoughtful seconds in the horseman’s wake, then studied the blank house-front as if considering whether to enter and possibly become embroiled in whatever was going on there. A fold of the cloak was flicked aside; and now the presence of both sword and armor was more than mere suggestion.
Two gray-clad men flitted down from neighbouring rooftops, crouched warily for a bare instant and then flicked into the house through a front door that was plainly left unlocked for just that purpose. Unseen, un-suspected and concealed by the fog-dense shadows, an outline made vague and uncertain by the mantling of a too-large cloak watched with fascination—but wisely made no attempt to interfere.
Especially when a third man, helmeted and clad in full splint-mail, stalked arrogantly towards and inside the house.
“Give me that.” Voord’s right hand, gloved with sable leather and red-enamelled steel, was already extended palm uppermost as if a refusal was so unlikely as to be unworthy of his consideration.
But such a consideration had already passed through Kathur’s mind with the speed and brilliance of a lightning-flash: not merely refusal, but
use
! Now, suddenly, without any hint of warning. The
telek
was already loaded and cocked, its safety mechanism disengaged, and the crook of her first and second fingers had already exerted three of the required five-pound pull. It would shoot on one pressure, and there was no need even to aim.
And the thought of that two-pound pull turned her belly sick. She could no more kill a human being—even one so patently inhuman as Voord—than she could turn the weapon on herself. And that was something which might be preferable to Voord’s company in this next hour. The possibility and the chance of success were gone now, all gone; only acquiescence remained. Kathur’s thumb secured the safetyslide; then she reversed the
telek
and laid it softly into the
hautheisart’s
waiting grasp.
His fingers closed, and with the weapon’s bore pointing at her Kathur half-expected to feel a dart strike home even before she had let it go. But there was no dart. Instead Voord hefted the
telek’s
weight, and its sculpted stock settled as snugly into his hand as a falcon onto a familiar wrist. Carved and shaped for a right-handed grip, it fitted well, and he looked at it with something as close to admiration as any Imperial officer would grant to a thing of Alban manufacture.
“Very fine.” He was speaking mostly to himself. “Yes. Very fine indeed. But then the Albans always were good at creating things to kill each other.” His eyes met those of the woman and locked with them, like a snake with a sparrow or a weasel with a mouse, and though there was a smile on his lips it did not warm those eyes at all. “Tell me… does it work?”
Now the dart
... Kathur’s body spasmed in anticipation of the tearing impact and her eyes snapped shut in a useless reflex that was no defence at all against the death she faced. Only when nothing happened did their painted lids flutter open again, reluctantly; she was terrified lest any movement at all would invite the response she dreaded, but more terrified still to remain in the dark.
“I said, does it work?”
“I…”
“Does it work?”
Her gaze dared to tear away from the weapon’s blank, black muzzle, but Voord’s own eyes were as implacable. Whatever answer she gave would be the wrong one.
“Does it work?”
“Ohhh… dear God, I don’t know!”
Voord’s teeth showed briefly in a shark’s smile. “Then let’s find—” A soft sound at his back broke his words off short and he snapped around with the
telek
poised and ready; then both it and he relaxed. “Ah… You.”
Kathur’s servant tried to lean his weight on one elbow alone, unable to take his other hand from the hole which Widowmaker had left in his thigh. Regardless of how tightly those fingers were clutching his own flesh, blood still seeped slowly through them. He stared at the two by the bed, barely seeing them through his pain and not understanding what was going on. But he recognised one at least; and was full of shame. “M-my lady? I f-failed you, my lady. I failed. Forgive me…”
Commander Voord’s head came round with the slow deliberation of a weapon-turret on a battleram, and his mouth formed the same silent
O
as the
telek’s
muzzle. The woman made no response by either word or gesture; she already knew how Voord’s mind worked. And because she knew, she reached out with a crazy courage that was near to suicidal and clutched the
telek
by its barrel-shrouds. The
hautheisart
stared at her hand, and then at her face with the expression of one confronted by some noxious vermin.
“No!” Her voice was soft, her intonation vehement, pleading. “Don’t. Even he saw no need—”
“He? Meaning the Alban. Didn’t what?”
“Didn’t kill. Not even in the heat of a fight. Because it wasn’t necessary. And it still isn’t…”
Voord’s thin lips moved, stretching to a brief smile before once again forming that sardonic
O
. He blinked, lazily as a cat, and in that feline blink reminded Kathur for just an instant of Kourgath who had shared her bed.
“No need. For an Alban. No need for a man who can hide behind his oh-so-very-flexible code of honor. No need where any excuse will do instead, so long as it can be couched in the proper terms. Oh yes. It’s easy then. But I too have been honored, lady, and in a better way. I have earned my honor, lady: I wear it for all to see. But I have no elegant little knife to let my life out if I fail. No. I must bear failure as I bear success. As I bear
these
.”
His left hand reached up to touch the rank-marks on his helmet and on the high-collared black robe he wore over his red armor, and Kathur stared. Not at the
hautheisart’s
double bar-and-diamond worked in silver on black velvet collar tabs and scarlet steel, not at the jagged-lightning insignia beside it—for though the thunderbolt of the Secret Police served to frighten the ignorant, it was still no more to Kathur than the branch of service in which Voord held his command. As, indeed, did she.
No… She stared at his hand.
When she had last seen it, when it had last touched her, it had been slender and graceful like the hand of a musician, its contact soft as a butterfly’s caress. Now… Now it was twisted, and crippled, and hooked like part of a military machine, a claw of distorted bone and sinew that was mercifully hidden by a leather glove. Now it was the sort of disfiguration which made men wince and look away and thank whatever gods they worshipped that they were still whole, untouched by war, or accident, or—whatever had done this.
“Yes indeed, dear Vixen. It is as I say. I wear my honor—whether I want to or not.” The frightful talon lowered from her line of sight, but its presence, and its shape at which the concealing glove had merely hinted, remained in her mind and made her skin crawl.
Voord watched it crawl. “I suffered this, my dear, and so earned my present rank. Now I suffer the responsibilities of that rank. I am
Hautheisart Kagh’Ern-vakh
. Concerned with internal security; espionage; counter-insurgency. And with the enforcement of—” a jerk of his wrist wrenched the
telek
from Kathur’s grip, “discipline.”
She flinched at the flat, vicious whack of the weapon’s discharge, and shut her eyes again; but she could not shut her ears to a crisp, moist sound like a melon hit by a mallet, or the hollow thump of bone on wood as her servant’s head was slammed back against the floor as if it had been kicked. Nor could she shut her mercilessly precise mind’s eye to the image that was seared into it as if by red-hot irons; an image that she could still see now. An image that she would always see. The instant of a man’s death.
He lay on his back, one hand thrown wide and the other still uselessly endeavouring to staunch the wound in his leg. But there was no longer need. And there would be no staunching of this latest wound, for it had already ceased to bleed. Blood and mucus was spattered across his cheek and forehead; his left eye-socket was a pit of oozing mush; a triangular chunk of his skull lay feet from where it had burst from the back of his head. But what expression could be seen on his ruined face was no more than faint surprise.
“Yes. It does work.” Voord spared a glance for his handiwork, looked back at Kathur as if analysing her reaction and then at the
telek
with the beginnings of an idea that was as swiftly concealed as it was to blossom. “It does work indeed. And so do you, Kathur. Most of the time. Like another woman I once knew. But Sedna failed as well. As you failed this time—and by disobeying my direct command. You must remember in future. Punishment should aid your memory.”
He made the weapon safe and laid it carefully aside; then removed his helmet and dropped it to the floor, gazing at the woman with his head cocked quizzically to one side. Sweat-darkened hair was plastered flat against his skull, and there were shadows in the sockets of his eyes that were not created by any light or lack of it in Kathur’s room. “The customary sentence is a bowstring— or impalement.”
As the meaning of his words sank in, Kathur stared blankly at him and then slowly cowered away as comprehension dawned. The only sound to pass through her loose lips was an unstructured whimper of raw fear.
“Yet it could be said—in your favour—that you tried. You were told to keep him drugged and bound. But you still succeeded until… what was it you claimed only minutes ago? Then if there was a plea for clemency on your behalf, the sentence might well be commuted. Would you have me consider such a plea?”
Though Kathur did not, and in her extremity of terror could not make any coherent sound, Voord watched her with a sort of cold appraisal and nodded at last. “I am content. The plea is accepted.” His hand reached out to stroke along her face and slowly down the rigid muscles of her neck.
The left hand…
Kathur cringed within herself, but dared not let her revulsion show. Not even when that dreadful claw settled like a gross spider on her shoulder and then with a bitter, self-mocking sensuality smoothed the heavy satin of her robe aside. The garment fell free of its own weight and whispered down to puddle in crimson folds about her ankles, leaving her naked and shuddering before Voord’s rapacious stare. Even then she did not move, did not attempt the classic cliche of one arm across her breasts and the other hand hiding her crotch; she merely stood with both arms hanging limply at her sides and her eyes lowered in a shame at her nudity that she had never felt with the Alban. She stood like a condemned prisoner facing the block, passively awaiting what fate chose to send her; and she heard the slow creak of leather as some effort of ruined muscle and tendon forced Voord’s fingers open; and she waited for the degradation of its contact on her body.