“Tell au Grimmus I’m sleeping,” I say. I can’t take mockery now.
The valet bows and disappears. There’s a bang and a laugh. Ajax enters, stinking of battle and wet fur. So large and rough, in a house so clean and genteel, he seems from another dimension. Tossing his leopard cloak on a chair, he crashes into a seat.
“I don’t want to talk,” I say.
He twists a jamRing on his finger. A pop censors all noise beyond his bubble. “Didn’t come to talk. I came to eat.”
He begins his campaign against the food. When he’s finished and the servants have carted the remains of two huge salmon away from Ajax, I pour us glasses of wine. He hesitates before drinking. “I’m hardly in a position to poison you, even if I wanted to,” I say.
“No, I just promised myself I wouldn’t drink this month.” He considers the wine. “I killed thirty-one people today. Slag it.” He sips and sighs. “So, you kneeled after all.”
“How did you know?”
“She gave you my cook.” Presumptuous as always, Ajax helps finish the bottle and begins inspecting my gifts. He frowns at a fragile ivory scepter. “I remember when she used to give me presents.”
“Have them. You know what she’s doing. How insincere it is.”
“It’s sincere,” he says. “That’s the problem. Long as I’ve known her, I’ve wondered what goes on in that head. It’s a world unto itself. Inscrutable from without except by its seasonal weather patterns. For me it’sautumn. For you, she wants it to be summer, but you seem intent on making it winter.”
“Autumn, eh? The waning season.” I watch him for a time. “Do you love her?”
He shrugs. “Don’t have to love oxygen to need it.” He stands abruptly to fetch more wine. When he returns, he comes back with three bottles, and we migrate to a lower patio set into the cliff. Waves crash against effigies of water dryads that hang off the patio’s edge. They crash in silence. Nothing can be heard beyond the jamField.
“She’ll have a fit about this,” Ajax says, wiggling his jamring. “I’ll be punished. Who knows, maybe she’ll take the cape from me.”
“Do you want that?”
He shrugs and asks, “Who does she have of yours?”
“Glirastes,” I murmur, fixed on the soundless waves.
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you?”
“It’s easier to make me out to be some callous heel, isn’t it?” he asks.
“It’s your defense mechanism. You tell me. I never know when you’re being sincere.”
He shrugs, because he knows it’s true. The husky, mild-mannered boy lives on only in his mind, in mine, and in Atalantia’s. If he can only be made to realize that, how she abuses that boy inside and how I cherish him, maybe I can reclaim him from her. “She will honor her word. You can protect him.”
“Do you want Atalantia to sit on the Morning Chair?” I ask him. “Do you believe that is what is best for the Society and its people? Do you think it’s best for you?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” he says. “You’ve both made that clear.”
“I think it does.”
“Do you?”
I don’t answer for a time. Lights glow over the sea. Warships taxi. The Twins of South Pacifica twinkle high above. The guns were scuttled by the garrison when Diomedes seized the orbital station with his Lightning Phalanx, but I have heard rumors that mysterious Rim physanikos, that cabalistic subset of their Orange caste, have been spied studying the structure.
“Are you familiar with the ghost raptors of Varazana?” I ask Ajax. “It’sa species of bird on Callisto. There’s said to be less than thirty left. Chameleonic feathers, top speeds of two hundred and thirty kilometers per hour. It has a curious trait. If caged, it will maul itself to death with its own talons. Do you know why?”
“I’m sure you’ll tell me. I don’t read. I train.”
“Before her death, Varazana confessed that she designed the bird to have a certain psychology. It was the most perfect thing she’d ever made. And Varazana would rather see it dead than be kept as anyone’s pet. It was made to be the emperor of the sky.” I sip my wine. “Do you remember when Atalantia came back from her tour of the Rim?”
“I was visiting Mercury with Grandfather, I believe.”
