Dark Foundations (32 page)

Back on the
Triumph
, Lezaroth ordered the transfer of the baziliarch with Hanax supervising, ostensibly because it required a senior officer. In reality, if anything went wrong, he could blame it on the under-captain.

The creature, in its dormant state, was housed in a syn-crystal container the size of a large room that could be transferred by robotic tugs.

Steeling himself, he returned to the steersman chamber.

I hate talking to steersmen.
But I have no option. I need to get everything I can out of this creature about what happened on Farholme. I must ask the right questions.

The handler let him into the chamber. As the door slid shut behind him, Lezaroth blinked, trying to force his eyes to see in the gloom. A chill vapor wrapped around his feet and a foul smell struck his nostrils. He looked up, seeing on the high ceiling the spheres that represented the local stars. He stepped forward, his feet crunching on bones.

As Lezaroth walked toward the seat where the steersman sat, he gazed at the floor.
I do not wish to look at this being
. Finally, he looked up, seeing a tall, thin, hollow form, resembling a man.

He tried to reassure himself
. I must remember that while I can hear him, he cannot read my mind.
Only a
baziliarch can do that.

In a few paces, he stood in front of the dimensional column, with its six sides carved with the great incantations that only the Wielders of the Powers knew. Behind it sat the steersman. Lezaroth saw the light glinting on the metal crown and below it the empty voids of the eye sockets. With a rustling sound, the being rose up with an uncoordinated motion, a distorted parody of the human form—the epitome of emptiness.

Who are you?
said the voice in Lezaroth's mind.

“I am Margrave Sentius Lezaroth, Fleet-Commander by personal appointment of the Lord-Emperor Nezhuala, Dynast of the House of Carenas.”

The captain himself.

“Indeed. It is an honor to be received by you. We value your services.” Lezaroth saw that the being's strange fingers looked like dry twigs and were stained with drying blood.

I do not wish to go to Farholme.

“Why not?”

Something happened there.

“What?”

A kinsman of mine was killed there. Destroyed.
There was fear in the words.

“I'm sorry. How was he destroyed?”

A man did it.

“On his own?”

Yes.

“Tell me about it.”

I felt fear. My kinsman was very afraid. There was a man. A man destroyed him.

There was a silence.

“We will protect you,” Lezaroth said. “This ship is bigger. We are well armed. We travel with a powerful ally from the Nether-Realms.”

The husklike figure tilted forward.

Yes. One of the seven is with us. I feel his presence. But I am afraid.

“We will find this man and kill him. You will get revenge.”

I want revenge.

Despite the cold, Lezaroth realized he was sweating. “If we go to Farholme, you will get revenge.” He heard the shakiness in his voice.

What else?

“You will have new flesh. Women. Children.”

Good. Do you promise?

“Yes.”

You know what happens if you cheat me?

“Yes. Just get us all to Farholme fast.”

Revenge and children?

“Yes. It's a promise.”

The fingers clicked as if in agreement.

A promise then.

As Lezaroth turned to go, suddenly a thought struck him. “Did you get the name of the man?”

A name? Yes, there was a name mentioned.

“Can you tell me that name?”

Perhaps.

“Please.”

Ringell. Lucas Ringell.

Lezaroth did not return to the bridge as he had intended. Instead, with his tired mind reeling, he took the elevator to the summit of the dorsal spine of the
Triumph
and headed to a small chamber with wide views fore and aft over the ship. An apemorph—“a chimpie”—was checking panels inside but, at his entry, the creature made an urgent grunt, bowed, and fled.

Lezaroth walked to the curved glass window and looked out. As his eyes adjusted to a scene lit only by starlight and some stray illumination from the ship, he was able to make out the robotic tugs towing away a crystal box that gleamed with a faint blue light under the stars.

The baziliarch was on his way.

Lucas Ringell
—
that name again. The lord-emperor said that Ringell's name had been mentioned among the powers. Whoever has taken on that name is the great adversary. And the lord-emperor wants him dead at all costs. What will he reward the one who slays this man?

Lezaroth stared at the enormous mass of the ship that projected far ahead of him and blotted out the stars.
Funny
.
When the lord-emperor mentioned the name Ringell, I thought it some sort of a
fantasy
.
But hearing it just now from the steersman, I believe it
.

He looked at the immense number of stars that enveloped the ship. Around one of those pinpricks of cold light ahead was Farholme. The lord-emperor's enemy—
his
enemy—was there. A man who had killed a steersman.

For the briefest moment, Lezaroth felt fear. He looked again at the ship before him with its stark proud array of weapon turrets, its forests of surveillance antennae, its arrays of gaping missile tubes, and the proud ensign of the Final Emblem of the Dominion on its hull. And as he did, any trace of his fear fled.
I command the latest and greatest full-suppression complex—three-quarters of
a million tons and the most formidable accumulation of weapons the human race has ever built. I have enough sheer power at my command here to erase an entire mountain chain in a second and enough range to obliterate a city from a hundred thousand kilometers. And I have more than just brute power too. I have enough Krallen to cleanse an entire planet of its population within a few weeks.

He felt reassured.
There is no threat. On the contrary,
my enemy is there and trapped. Within weeks we will be face-to-face and I will destroy him and the lord-emperor will be delighted.

He caught a glimpse of his tired, troubled face reflected in the glass.
But I must be careful. I must be sure that I alone take the glory. Neither Hanax nor the ambassadors must do that.

He smiled.
How strange.
My biggest fear is not of the Assembly, but of those on my own side.

13

A
fter the memorial service, Merral's life slipped into a routine. Every day except the Lord's Day, he would rise at six, pray, and read his Bible, and then go for a twenty-minute run. Although Lloyd could move fast when the need arose, he was no runner and arranged for two young soldiers to accompany Merral, each carrying the new pocket-sized cutter guns hidden beneath loose running tops. After the run, Merral would shower, eat breakfast, and then be driven to the Planetary Administration building, where around half past seven, he would start his long day. Typically, what followed then was a succession of meetings, both real and virtual, interrupted at times by a trip to observe some piece of new equipment or oversee a new maneuver. Sometime after six, he would return with Lloyd to the Kolbjorn Suite where they would take turns cooking supper. After eating, Merral would work until late in the night, looking at papers, assessing plans, or reading reports. It was, he knew, an unsustainable pace, but he consoled himself with the fact that it didn't have to be sustainable. He only had to keep it up for weeks.

But how many weeks? Merral kept a calendar chart on his wall on which he crossed off each day. It was a necessary evil, he decided, but the unrelenting reduction in the days left to the end of summer increasingly came to haunt him. Soon only sixty, and then fifty, days were left. And that, he grimly reminded himself, was the maximum.

Yet at first slowly, and then with an encouraging pace, the Farholme Defense Force grew. The regular forces were recruited, trained under programs devised and often supervised by Zak, and then assigned to units. The three regiments were dispersed to new bases across Menaya: the Eastern Regiment to a new site just west of Halmacent, the Central Regiment to a landing strip at the southern end of the rift, and the Western to just outside Varrend on the Tablelands. In order to provide some cover across the vast distances of the islands of the southern hemisphere, six mobile brigades, each 150 men strong, were raised and posted to six different islands.

Farholme became used to the sight of green-uniformed soldiers transiting through its airports and driving along its roads.

And in the lowest levels of the Planetary Administration building, a basement was cleared out, equipped to refuge standards, and given communication links and lockable doors. Merral was troubled by the name it became known by but knew of none better: the
war room
.

Merral tried to ensure that he had at least one undisturbed meeting a week with Vero.

Late one still and humid afternoon, three weeks after the memorial service, Merral met with Vero. On a whim, Merral arranged for Lloyd to take the two of them out on a small sailing vessel in Isterrane Bay. As Lloyd struggled to use the faint breezes to take them around the bay, Merral and Vero talked in the shade of a low awning by the prow.

“So, what's the progress with the irregulars?” Merral asked.

Vero peered over his dark glasses. “It's good and bad, my friend.”

“Tell me about the good first.”

“By now almost every settlement has a core group.”

“Whose task is to recruit others.”

“Right. That seems easy enough. Everyone wants to join. But in most of the large settlements, we have now issued a small cache of weapons and at least some explosives. There are a lot of people like your uncle Barrand tutoring the irregs in the handling of explosives. And there is the promise of guns as soon as enough are available.”

“So how many irregulars are there? Clemant asked me that the other day.”

Vero shrugged slightly. “He would. About twenty thousand. We have issued that number of the brown jerkins and berets. But there are more irregs than uniforms.”

“You can't be more precise?”

Vero gave a wry smile tinged with concern. “My friend, let me tell you a secret.” He lowered his voice. “One of the positive features of the irregulars was that the enemy would never be able to know who they were. I now realize that this has a negative side.”

“You don't either?”

There was a little awkward laugh. “Well, it's getting that way.”

“Vero, that's all very . . .”

“Irregular?”