Only my echo answers.
5
LYSANDER
Games
Shrill whistles pipe froma shimmering mirage as the wild sunbloods gallop out of the desert. The surviving youths of Mercury’s ruling elite pursue the white horses, herding them in a ritual stampede toward the storm gates of Heliopolis. The horses pour through the triumphal arch erected to honor my victory over the Rising and into the streets of the city itself.
The horrific burn scar Darrow’s boot left on my face itches like mad. Truly it’d be easier to be rid of the thing, but a scar from Darrow is a point of honor and a good reminder of what he’s done to our Society whenever I look in the mirror and see the wrinkled, shiny horror that makes my eyelid droop. I resist scratching it. There are eyes on me. From my place atop the triumphal arch with Glirastes and Rhone to either side, I nod to a Blue. With a warble from the gravity engines the arch rises. We follow the horses as they press deeper into the city, their hooves rattling the surface of the Via Triumphia.
Behind barricades, the morning crowd is already drunk on spiced-clove wine from Keryx and cactus brandy from Polybos. Despite the herculean efforts of our sanitation divisions, radiation from the atomics used in the Battle of the Ladon still infests the continent. The radiation has made many of the citizens grow bald. In defiance of this pestilence of baldness, they boast wigs of eccentric length and color. And they remember well that it was Atalantia who sowed this radiation, not Darrow.
In the eyes of Mercury, Darrow and Atalantia are equally loathed, butI am beloved. Pouring money into a planet will do that. They chant my name. Behind me, my Praetorians stare down at them like a row of militarized falcons. My whisper, Kyber, crouches to the left. My last line of personal defense, the discreet Lunese Gray follows me everywhere. Today she plays a Copper. Her sensitive jaguar-mod eyes rove the rooftops from behind chrome goggles.
“They love you like children love their father,” Glirastes says. Wind whips my cape behind me and tugs at Glirastes’s brilliant orange robes.
Rhone grimaces. “If only love wasn’t so…expensive. And if only all those voices belonged to soldiers.”
“These people are the heart of the Society,” Glirastes calls over the wind and the clamor. He shields his eyes from the sun to look south of the city to the spaceport. There theLightbringer,beset by swarms of construction skiffs, looms like a mountain. “It’s the thump of military boots and the buzz of welders that is the music of insolvency!”
“Better to be impoverished and strong than impoverished and popular,” Rhone replies. Though he cuts a fine figure in his purple and silver parade uniform, Rhone is no parade soldier. A veteran’s veteran, he’s fought on thirteen spheres and wears the evidence in the phalera on his chest and the scars on his face. He is no blunt object. A violent intellectual, he was Aja’s favorite Gray, and he is now the clever engine of my growing military machine. “Mobs may seem strong as the sea, but give me a starShell, and a Moses I will be.”
Glirastes sharpens a retort.
“If you can’t get along, silence is preferable,” I snap, annoyed at their mutual and growing enmity. “You’re both heroes of the people, so wave your gory hands and lobby me later.” I wave to the people below. Block by block the crowd grows denser and more drunk. Sunburnt women in wigs shout down from rooftops. Children climb their fathers’ shoulders to wave the flag of their favorite racing team. The gold and white of Team Hermes dominates the main boulevards as the sunbloods flow south, past the bazaar, through the partially restored Water Gardens, where the stampede completes a circuit and then turns gradually toward the Hippodrome, our destination.
At the grand building my arch settles down over the entrance to the executive reception plaza. We disembark between two columns of Praetorians. In the lift to the executive level, Glirastes physically side-checksRhone to take his place at my side. Rhone is so surprised that by the time he regains his balance, the doors to the elevator are already closing. I hold up a hand and signal him to meet us up top.
The gravLift ascends. “I don’t know if force is the right idea with Rhone,” I say.
“How else can I penetrate the purple and black wall that follows you everywhere but with my hips and wits?” Glirastes glares at Kyber who stands in the corner. Somehow she was already in the lift waiting for us. “But one always manages to slither in.”
“You have something to say. Go on and say it.”
Glirastes, the greatest architect of his generation, is bald, hawkish with heavy eyebrows, gleaming orange eyes, and a stooped, predatory posture that once made him seem hungry and unctuous, but also impervious to any drug or construction catastrophe known to man. More and more, though, the posture also betrays his fragility. He seems like a man teetering over a cliff. These last months have been hard on him. In the end, artists are a sensitive breed.
“There are rumors the Saud denied you a loan. Is it true?” he asks.
I sigh. “You know what I miss most about being assumed dead? No gossip.”
“Rhone is steering you to ruin,” he blurts out.
“Glirastes, old friend, these games were your idea,” I say. “The people need hope, you said.”
“The games are a pittance compared to what you’re spending on ships and legions. And it’s not the games so much as the guests who trouble me. You dirty your hands dealing with the likes of Rath and the Carthii.”
A tired line. “But I should cover myself in eagle shit?”
“Hardly a fair comparison. You’re bleeding money. Lady Bellona is…distinguished. Far more than just a banker or a brute. She is a broker ofpower. She might not control the Two Hundred, but she influences a sizable block of senators. Most of whom have no love for Atalantia.”
“Yes, and perhaps if you sang my praises in her ear, she might actually have deigned to attend my games,” I say. “Instead, she sends no note, no emissary, just her racing team. It’s been nothing but insults since she sent Rhone to aid me in the desert.”
“Perhaps she did not sponsor you to be Atalantia’s plaything,” he says.
“Would a plaything smuggle legions to the Minotaur?” I ask. “Now you’ll moan I am reckless.”
“You’re juggling asps, my boy. Forget Bellona money. If Atalantia…Hades, if the Carthii discover you and the Minotaur have a secret pact—” He glances at Kyber. “I don’t understand, Lysander. Why him? The Minotaur is an insane person. He craves the ephemeral. Experiences! Satiation of his lusts! No man is more your inverse, and yet you waste the wealth that could rebuild Mercury to sendhiman army.
