The Thrones of Kronos (94 page)

She’d asked him once, but all he’d said was, “I don’t have
to see it.”

Which really wasn’t an answer at all.

She dismissed the mysteries, and the exasperations. Time for
yet another art, one in which she was especially adept and inventive, and which
insured his attention would remain solely on her.

o0o

Brandon surrendered gratefully to Eleris’s insistent
fingers, aware that the respite was just that.

White heat flared, then faded to lassitude when Eleris got
up to bathe and oversee the last arrangements for her imminent party.

Brandon lay back on the soft moss, breathing in the
astringent scent of the crushed greenery as the lassitude faded in its turn, leaving
a sense of regret, and even guilt. “Politics is boring,” Eleris had said when
they met. “I live for pleasure.” It was that which had prompted him to accept
her invitation for a protracted pleasure cruise, just the two of them, leaving
the universe behind.

But one can’t leave the universe behind, one can only choose
which aspects of it to engage with. She had been straightforward about her life
of pleasure, so why shouldn’t she take an interest in his Enkainion, and the
subsequent life of pleasure he was expected to lead afterward?

Bringing him right back to . . .

The
Luxochronus
had been realtime on the DataNet
since it settled into Arthelion orbit, its cryptobanks discharging and taking
on the data that every ship carried between the stars. And among the floods of
data being exchanged there had been one simple message, relayed by neural
induction to his inner ear, in a voice he’d not heard for ten years:

Markham sent me. Meet?

Just four words, and a confirming signature and time-stamp
in machine-neutral cadence, but coming now, only a month before his Enkainion,
they were enough to blast all Brandon's calculations, causing him to almost mention
Markham vlith-L’ranja, once his closest friend.

You know very well what you will be doing after your
Enkainion.

Except that he didn’t. Was this com an attempt at revenge,
further entrapment, or an avenue of escape?

The voice and signature suggested the first.

Lenic Deralze.

Between one heartbeat and the next, memory seized Brandon,
shifting him from Eleris’s scattered cushions to the cold, austere hallway
outside the Academy cadets’ brig after Markham’s arrest: Brandon was again
twenty-three, too shocked to speak as Deralze crossed the invisible line
dividing an Arkad from those who served, shoved Brandon up against the wall,
and shouted in his face. “
You’ll walk away from this like you Tetrad nicks
always do, knowing that however you chatz up, the blunge always lands on
someone else. Your”
—He’d used a vulgar phrase from Rifter argot meaning
literally “braided members” to refer to Markham. “—
and you said nothing.
Nothing!”

Even more searing was the memory of Deralze’s disgust and
loathing as he tore off his blason and threw it at Brandon’s feet.
“You can
keep your worthless life, and my Oath with it.”

Why was Deralze contacting him now? The time-stamp indicated
the message had been waiting only hours for him. That meant Deralze was already on
Arthelion.

Perhaps entrapment was a better explanation. How else would
such a message have gotten through the rings and layers of security placed
around him by Semion?

Brandon rolled to his feet and bent to pick up his clothes
as he considered his oldest brother. It had been five years since they’d seen
one another last, but Semion still monitored every aspect of Brandon’s life.
“Our father ordered me to safeguard you, and so I shall,” Semion had said not
long after Galen’s Enkainion.

Brandon retrieved his shoes and padded across the moss to
the bath, which was designed to look like a woodland stream.
Semion has to
know that any mention of Markham would get my attention
.

The question was, why? And why now? It was ten years since
Markham was cashiered—and his family ruined. Ten years since Brandon’s own
career had been summarily ended.

Was this message one more link in the strangling chain that
would culminate in his Enkainion? Brandon threw his clothes into the cleaner,
then tabbed the control to raise the temperature of the water in the artfully
decorated stream. What irony! His Enkainion, everybody agreed, was to be so
brilliant that it would be broadcast throughout the reaches of the Thousand
Suns, to Downsiders, Highdwellers and lawless Rifters alike.

He turned the boswell around and around in his hands,
fingering the stylized band of interlocked links. Most people would give anything
to be born an Arkad; to live in the Mandalic Palace on Arthelion, the central
jewel of the Panarchy’s countless planets and Highdwellings; to possess his
limitless wealth, his position at the peak of the Douloi social circle.

Brandon snorted in rueful amusement at the turn of his
thoughts: chains, strangulation. He tossed the boswell down onto the silky
blades of grass beside the stream. What if the message really
was
from
Markham? He’d taken the Riftskip, fleeing his Douloi roots into the chaos outside
Panarchic law.

Why would he contact Brandon now? It made no more sense than
Semion concocting some elaborate trap, when he already controlled nearly every
aspect of Brandon’s life.

Brandon shook his head, and stepped into the hot water. He
could endlessly consider all the possible implications of this message, but
three were certain.

One: he couldn’t trust that the message was from Deralze.
The former bodyguard might know how to get around the Palace codes, but Semion
wouldn’t have to.

Two: he couldn't trust the goals of whoever had sent the message.
If it wasn’t one of Semion’s moves, the fact that it had reached him at
all indicated deeply-compromised security. If Brandon responded, he could be
made to disappear altogether.

Three: none of that mattered, for his disappearance was
foreordained. If he went through with the Enkainion, and the plans so carefully
laid for a life of social brilliance, he would symbolically disappear forever,
replaced by a simulacrum engineered by Semion.

Brandon smiled bitterly, savoring the irony. Two lives
removed from ultimate power, but here and now, virtually no choice.

He reached for his boswell, and began to compose his reply.

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