My troops may gossip and cast aspersions, but when they see Aurae’s slender arms straining under the weight of a single canister of helium-3, a dozen men and half again as many women rush to help her. Thraxa shoves them all away and takes the canister. Harnassus tries to pretend he’s not jealous of the soft smile Aurae gives Thraxa.
Used to the reaction, Cassius rolls his eyes and sets down his four canisters with flair. He pops a foot atop one and leans on his knee. My eyes drift to the helium, and I imagine embracing Virginia the moment I step off theArchimedesin Agea.
“My goodmen, the finest Martian helium-3 available, courtesy of my mother’s smuggling operations on Starhold. Always did love filching from her purse. Behold. Your zephyr wind home.” His eyes narrow. “Provided you haven’t molested my ship beyond repair.” He glances at Colloway, who watches him with beleaguered resentment. “Did you tell him, Char? No of course not, it’s all on me. Typical.”
“Tell me what?” I ask.
Cassius sighs. “It’s Sevro. He’s not dead. Worse, in fact. A sordid affair. He’s been sold at a high-society Syndicate auction.”
“Sold,” I repeat. “To whom?”
Cassius winces. “That’s the part you’re really not going to like.”
4
DARROW
The Sordid Affair
The hologram fills thegreater half of my quarters.
A man hangs suspended in the air of the Syndicate auction house. The man is naked, scrawny, and smeared with tattoos and scars. His head is covered by a giant helmet in the shape of a wolf’s head. When the pale-eyed Syndicate auctioneer waves a hand, the helmet detaches and floats into the air to bare an ugly, cantankerous face that means more to me than my own flesh.
Sevro.
Love has seldom caused me such physical pain.
There is a moment of confusion in Sevro’s Red eyes. The same eyes Mickey the Carver took from me and exchanged for my Gold ones. Then agony as he realizes where he is. He hangs his head in shame, then lolls it back and forth. Even with his broken nose more crooked than a lightning bolt, his hair wild, his ears masticated, and his lips tattered, even with ten years of war and what happened to him on Luna wracking his body, I can only see the weird little wolfchild who saved me and Cassius from freezing to death in a loch. The teenage menace who used to stare at me from beneath a stinking pelt, half ready to run, half aching for a hug, desperate to prove he’s worth a damn.
The boy inside the war-rent man pants in fear. It breaks my heart to watch his eyes search the auction floor as the enemy bids on him. They’re anonymous, the bidders. Holographic projectors conceal their identities, beaming absurd avatars of beasts and gods from their starships orinner sanctums into the auction house. Sevro is unwilling to even look his tormentors in the eye.
I have never seen him so beaten.
The image cuts out mid-auction, replaced by grand military architecture. Stars and distant warships glitter out the mouth of a hangar flanked by caryatids of the Carthii family. A hauler mech, escorted by a pack of Syndicate thorns and an arbiter of the Ophion Guild, stomps out the back of a steaming blockade runner. The mech sets a cargo box down on its end. Four legionnaires in gray armor and white capes stamped with a purple bull open its giant lock. The cargo container parts down the center. Pressure hisses out.
Inside, Sevro hangs imprisoned in a slave rack. Months of beard growth covers his jutting chin. His hair is long and shot with white. Waste tubes with pressure motors worm out his emaciated gut downward into plastic sacks. He was shipped muzzled and conscious with barely enough calories to keep him ticking. His eyes are open and bloodshot and staring at someone beyond the hologram with familiar, tired hate.
A manly voice purrs.“They whisper you are dead. That is how you left me: for dead. But I have claimed a new domain.”The hangar disappears, replaced by an angelic, evil visage.“Are you dead, Darrow?”Apollonius au Valii-Rath waits for an answer, as if this weren’t a recording he made for me to see.“If you are dead, then this dark age has ended with a whimper.”He looks despondent and casts his fierce eyes to the sky.“No. You are not dead,”he says to himself, then levels his gaze and lets his smile creep.“You cannot be dead. I know it in my war-bred bones. But you are not on Mars, nor Earth, nor with your adamantine woman defending your sphere, nor raging against the forces of Helios and Atalantia at the head of your inimitable Ecliptic Guard. So, you must be hiding, wounded and weak. Scuttling in the shadows, a mouse in the dark. Young Ajax, son of Aja, aggrieved and dauntless, seeks your blood. So too the Rim, and their myriad hunters, chief of all: Diomedes, the Storm. They will catch you if you make for Mars, little mouse. They lie in wait. Clever, patient, hungry. They will never let you lead another army. Better to come here. Better to pass the time with me.”
He peers at me like a dragon might when hearing of a distant treasure—acquisitive, scheming, entranced. He runs his tongue along his teeth.
“To tempt you, I have acquired your mongrel at no small sum. On Lunahe was ill-treated. Ninety days of reprieve and dignity will I grant him in my domain, but on the ninety-first day, he will be released into the Hanging Coliseum of the Dockyards of Venus, as were the Carthii captives of old. And like the Carthii of old, I, along with my guests, will hunt him upon equine wings, and mount his head on a spear and feed his organs to the war pyre.”He closes his eyes as if imagining the wind through his hair as he rides a Carthii pegasus, and the scent of burning flesh as he laughs with his friends by the sacrificial fire. When his eyes open, they shine with madness.“Unless you come to me. Unless you come and we decide at last who is hunter and who is prey.Until then, my noble foe,per aspera ad astra.”
The light of the hologram fades, then the hologram starts over again, an endless loop. Screw pauses the image. Harnassus, Thraxa, and Colloway slump in the gloom around my small breakfast table. Screwface itches his stump. Cassius leans against the door with his arms crossed watching me. At his feet sits Aurae, her eyes closed.
“Where did you get this filth?” Screw demands from Cassius and thrusts a finger at Aurae. “Did your Siren conjure it?” Even Harnassus thinks that’s ridiculous. Aurae doesn’t bother opening her eyes to address the accusation. “Why is she even in this room?”
“I can leave,” she replies.
“Slag that,” Cassius says. “After what we went through to steal the helium, you should all kiss our feet.” He pauses. “Never mind, you’d probably all enjoy that, you creeps. But to answer the query: I didn’tgetApollonius’s message. The mad bastard has been transmitting that from the Dockyards of Venus for two months. Due to all the jamming, I only picked it up three days before my contacts at Starhold linked me up with Colloway.”
“So you just happened to come across it,” Screw sneers.
Cassius remains droll. “After being cut to ribbons by Raa Dustwalkers, breaking my word to Diomedes au Raa, racing across half the system to plunge through the Ash Armada into a warzone to save Darrow, then back through the Ash Armada again—under the guns of theAnnihilo,theAnnihilo—I ally with the Minotaur, a grandiose ruffian overcompensating for his poor heritage whom I haven’t seen since he was quoting Milton high on lexamine and blowfish poison in a Martian brothel fourteen years ago?” He bats the air like a cat. “Please. If you’re desperate to insult me, at least do me the dignity of being lucid.”
“Dignity.” Screwface pitches his head back and laughs. “That thevirtue you imparted on your impaling protégé, the Heir of Silenius? Dignity?Ha!”
At the mention of Lysander, Cassius’s smile disappears. “Atlas impaled your troops, not Lysander. It’s not his style.”
