Princess of the Void ch 76 - Tilt

Grant slides the microphone up his sleeve and finishes tying his laces. He straightens up and nods to the guard. “Damned complicated boots,” he says.

“Sire,” is the guard’s brusque reply.

“On Maekyon we all used these things called flip-flops.”

“As you say, sire.”

He gives the guard a practiced golden-retriever grin and wave and continues onward, pausing for a half-bow to a giggling duchess.

The bathroom has a stone relief carving of an impaled Taiikari woman standing before a thicket of spears, her face tranquil and satisfied as the lance through her midsection kebabs her. A globe sits in one of her hands, a curved dagger in the other. Grant makes eye contact with her while he pees. He’d like to leave the Core as soon as possible.

He removes his earpiece as he washes his hands. The hissing and rustling noises of his boot’s insides are blessedly cut off. He returns at a brisk stride to Sykora’s ready room, ducking through the door and down to his wife’s level as she sits in battle meditation.

“No trick,” he whispers. Her face flickers in response to his breath. “Inadama is trying to lose.”

Sykora sighs. Her eyes stay shut. “The condition,” she says. “It was always going to be the condition. Her favor. She doesn’t want me home. She doesn’t give a damn about my children. It was always the third. She just burned through two unacceptables to get there and hide her intentions.”

“She’s doing all this for money?”

“Not money. Hellfire.” Sykora’s fingers steeple against her forehead. “She said she’d pick the export. She acted as though she doesn’t care, but she does. She wants something from me. Something specific.”

“It’s not the Pike, is it?”

“The Pike was made in the Core, not its sector. It doesn’t fulfill the remit. And it costs an order of magnitude over a hundred thousand marks.” Sykora straightens up. “No, I can’t guess at what it is she’s looking to take from me. I suppose we’ll find out.”

“Why would she do it like this?”

“Extracting payment for titles is forbidden,” Vora says. She sits in the ready room’s corner, running a whetstone across her Princess’s spear.

Sykora nods. “Doesn’t stop anyone, of course, but the Empress’s eyes are surely close onto this situation. And this way, I’m cornered.”

“So what do we do?” Grant asks.

“We do exactly what we were going to do,” Sykora says. Her crimson gaze opens and lands on him. She smiles. “I am going to go out there and bleed my mother. And then you and I will return to the Pike and prepare the way for our family.”

“I thought you’d be more upset about this,” he says. “Even if she loses, she wins.”

“Oh, no. No, no. She was too clever by half.” Sykora stands up. “I suppose she thought I’d turn her in, or refuse. So she did this, instead, to deny me any leverage. To force me to tender whatever she demands with no consideration permitted. It’s smart on its face, but she has overestimated me. And underestimated our family. Majordomo.”

Vora is immediately at Sykora’s side, holding out the honed spear. Different from the one Sykora brought in, and bare of any banner or flourish. A weapon of war.

Sykora’s tail wraps around her Majordomo’s and gives it a tight squeeze as she accepts the weapon. “She could have just extorted me in her dreadful little office. I would have kept it from the Empress. I’d have paid what was necessary, to keep them all. All my babies.” She counts them on her fingers. “Two daughters. A son. And the Black Pike. But now—”

She closes her fist.

“Now I get to have fun first.”

***

The man playing the role Grant did, in the first duel he watched, is dressed in golden padding and cowled in black. The armiger, they’re calling him. He wonders why the translator picked that, and then remembers the translator is just an inert little lump in his brain. He’s thinking in Taiikari.

The armiger speaks in a booming, resonant voice. “To your corners.”

Inadama and Sykora wait for one another on slices of white and black painted across the sand. The audience, well-heeled and far more disciplined than a combat sport could ever call for, lean forward in their pews, set in rings above the combatants’ heads.

Atop the Embassy’s toroidal walkway, the Pike’s marines keep vigil, across from Inadama’s retainers. Time was Grant would look at a horned space soldier in black-and-red armor and be intimidated. Now those are his friends up there, and he wishes he was among them, and not here in the sterile pews.

“Set,” the armiger says. “Tilt.”

No motion. Not from either combatant. Just a held stare and a held breath.

Then Sykora’s spear flicks a circle, and Inadama leans on her heel, and they drop into a crouching, predatory orbit.

“Prince.”

Grant looks down. Narika of the Glory Banner is shuffling to his side, past a prim Viscount. “It’s good to see you again,” she says.

“Majesty.” Grant gives her the prerequisite half-bow.

“I hope you don’t mind my sitting here. My original place was supposed to be with my half-siblings.” She points across the arena to a cluster of dusk-colored Taiikari in fine-spun tunics and gowns, who fall into whispering at her motion—they must be watching her. Or him.

“Why the move, Majesty?” He finds he needs to keep his voice down; there’s little sound beyond the grunts and clashes of combat from the arena floor.

Narika shrugs. “What is there to say to them?”

“What is there to say to me?”

A brief and chilly chuckle from her at that. “I attended Sykora’s address. She told us how Eqtora was won. Unorthodox.”

“It was,” he says. “But it worked.”

“It did. Don’t misunderstand me.” Her shiny black pants squeak as she crosses her legs. I’m quite impressed. You risked a great deal, and it paid off. You’re either astoundingly lucky or a genius.”

“Perhaps I’m an astoundingly lucky genius.”

Narika snorts. “Perhaps.”

In the ring, Inadama lunges forward with a picture-perfect thrust to Sykora’s frontmost thigh. Sykora spins with the blow in a leg-lifted pirouette, lashing out with a seeking riposte that nearly nicks Inadama’s ear. A library-lecture murmur spreads through the observing crowd. A smattering of applause. The combatants back away, Sykora shaking her calf out. No blood, not that Grant can see.

“One must imagine the Eqtoran Republic employed the same controls you did, when they were calling the shots,” Narika says. “But to what degree was it sacred to them? Does that excuse their use in a way that keeps us culpable? Does the way you harnessed it trouble you?”

“I think that the alternative would have been far worse,” Grant says.

“Mmm.” She nods. “Fair enough. It was a worthy thing, either way.”

Inadama and Sykora have locked up now, spears pushing, close enough to bite. The armiger barks his command of “Back! Back to your corners!” And they separate, slow and deliberate and empty of trust in one another.

“I think we would be friends,” Narika says, as the crowd noise rises between tilts. “If it wasn’t for your wife.”

Grant has had the same thought, but Narika is a Void Princess, and Void Princesses play games. Even now, Sykora is glancing at him, whispering to Vora. Is he part of some play by Narika to distract? “Maybe we would be. But I’m who I am, and you’re who you are.”

“True enough.” She falls silent at that for a few breaths, then smiles wanly. “The eternal condition of the Imperial subject, hmm?”

“What’s that?”

“To be who one is,” she says, and falls silent for a time.

Set. Tilt. Feet hissing across the sand. The scrape of metal. The way Narika chews her lip as she watches her sister and mother circle and clash is so disarmingly like Sykora.

“Majesty,” he says. “Was it you?”

“Was what me?”

“Are you the one who told the Empress?”

Narika’s eyes flit from the arena to him. “Yes.”

A bolt of cold lightning up Grant’s spine. “Why?”

“She brought me in, demanded my recounting of the events on Ptolek II, and told me to speak truthfully,” Narika says. “And so I did. She held her suspicions already, I think, or I wouldn’t have been called upon. But I was her confirmation.”

“If Sykora finds out, she’s gonna kill you.”

“She’ll try. It wouldn’t be the first time, as I’m sure you recall.” A small and ambiguous grin on her lips. “But she’d have done the same thing, I think.”

Grant adjusts his uniform’s collar. It’s too tight around his neck suddenly.

“Back!” The armiger’s deep exclamation separates the opponents. “Back to corners.”

Inadama makes a show of her sharp turn away, whooshing her tail past Sykora’s face. She flounces to the white corner. Sykora stalks to the black.

Grant watches his wife hop on her spot and loosen her limbs. Inadama’s earlier attack has left a thinning patch along her thigh, but the spearhead didn’t punch through cloth or flesh. He looks to Narika. “Are the spears blunted or something?”

She shakes her head. “The uniforms are Malkesti-silk lattice. Hard to get through. A limb touch is the way. Or the face.

Sykora said she’d take an eye. Grant shivers.

The armiger is at his post once more. “Set.”

“Will you tell her?” Narika asks.

“Tilt,” comes the call, and again the fighters circle one another.

Grant remembers what happened the last time he kept something from Sykora. The narrowed eyes, the stiff spine. And the eventual acceptance.

“Yes,” he says. “Eventually.”

Narika chews this, and seems to manage swallowing it. She nods.

She’s right—Sykora would obey the Empress to sell her sister out if such a demand was made. And if the Empress was poking around the events on Ptolek II, surely she was already suspicious. But Grant is coming to understand that while he works things out in his head, Sykora functions best when she has someone to converse with and talk it out. He’s not sure whether that’s Taiikari psychology in general, or his wife in particular; either way he’s determined to be that person for her. That means finding the moment. Right now she is in a spear duel with her mom. This is not the moment.

“Why don’t you like your sister, Majesty?” he asks.

“Because she’s a tyrant,” Narika says. “She is cruel and imperious and superior, and she seeks every advantage she can over me.”

Sykora’s speartip whistles as it whips past Inadama’s face. The older woman flows back and down into a crouch, whirling the haft of her polearm toward Sykora’s legs. The Princess of the Pike vaults over the attempt; her point quests out again and strikes Inadama’s shoulder, but succeeds only in shoving her back.

“We’ve spent hectocycles picking at one another, trying to take whatever we can out from each other’s grasp.” Narika’s eyes dart as she follows the action. “She stole Ptolek. She is a conniver. A shark.”

“And you aren’t?”

“I am,” Narika says.

“What makes you different, then?”

“Nothing,” Narika says.

“How is that not hypocritical?”

Narika’s mouth quirks up a micrometer or two at its edge. “Because I don’t like myself, either.”

“Touch on white!”

Grant’s attention ricochets back to the arena. The fighters have separated. Inadama’s clutching her arm, where a shallow gash has opened along her bicep. Maroon blood leaks from the wound, dark on the pearly fabric.

Sykora twirls her spear across her shoulders, ending with the tip pointed at Inadama’s heart. “Yield,” she says.

Inadama coils her arm against her stomach. It leaves a smear where it drags. She blinks the sweat from her forehead. Then she stands and stalks to her side of the arena. The tip of her spear wavers in the air. “No.”

The armiger glides forward to the edge of the ring. “Set,” he says.

Both fighters lower their stances. Sykora’s heel scratches against the silica as it pivots back.

“Tilt.”

Inadama blurs forward. Grant is shocked backward against his seatback by the Marquess’s speed. Sykora chokes up on her spear, holding it like a quarterstaff, and catches Inadama’s overhead slice with a piercing thunderclap sound of knurled metal on metal. She slides forward along the length of the caught spear into a vicious hip-check that sends her mother staggering away and flecks her exposed calf with blood.

“The Sanmi defense.” Narika’s lip curls. “Sykora is toying with her.”

Another flashing exchange. The time for circumspect hesitation is over. Inadama parries. Sykora twists past her. A tail binds. A feathery crescent of kicked-out sand. A cry of pain.

Sykora has pinned her mother to the ground through her side.

“Touch! Touch on white!” The armiger rushes between them. Sykora releases her spear where it sticks in the groaning Marquess. She paces away. A team in white-and-green smocks crowds the arena now, speaking low and quick to one another over the rising conversation. Inadama hisses with pain as the spear is extracted and her wound patched and tended to. Sykora paces a slow circle. Someone hands her spear back to her.

"Be well, Prince," Narika whispers. As nobles natter and stand to get a better look, she steps awy from him.

"Narika," he says. "Wait."

She glances back to him.

He holds up a handkerchief. "This slipped from your pocket."

She peers at him, and at it. "Indeed?" She takes her handkerchief from him. "Thank you, then."

And she slips away into the gathering crowd, examining the strip of cloth as she goes. She doesn't need to. There's nothing on it.

Just a little more of Waian's training.

Inadama has managed to sit up. Her face is waxy, but her expression is determined. “You have won,” she says. “And I have my condition.”

“And you invoke it immediately,” Sykora says.

“I do.”

“I know.” Sykora lets her spear drop into Vora’s waiting grip, and strides past her wounded mother.

Inadama staggers to her feet. “I’ll be heard, Sykora.”

“I’ll hear you from aboard my voidship.” Sykora turns and glares. “After you’ve healed, and I’ve washed the last of your blood from me.” She raises her voice toward Inadama’s second. “See to the Marquess Palatine before she opens that wound further. I’m bound for the Pike.”

The armiger holds his hand out. “Will you not bow, Majesty?”

Sykora tsks and beckons with a flick of her tail. With the chunky clatter of marine armor, Hyax descends from the ringed platform above the arena, the Pike’s banner in tow. She passes it to Sykora, who thrusts it into the waiting hands of the armiger. He lifts it high above his head, at an angle to display the twin halberds of Sykora’s sigil. The crowd rise to their feet and applaud in silence. No cheers, no whistles. Just the murmuration of their clapping.

Sykora bows stiffly. Then she strides from the arena as though its sand scalded her feet. She holds her hand out to Grant. It’s caked with half-dried blood.

“Run from this with me,” she whispers.

He takes her hand and lets her lift him from his seat. They ascend the Embassy’s amphitheater steps, Hyax and Vora in their train. The applause of the Imperial Core nobles surrounds them, as thin and cold as frost.

***

The applause of the Black Pike bridge, safely ensconced once again in orbit, is warm and unrestrained and full-throated. Sykora’s first genuine smile in hours breaks across her face as she leans forward on the command deck’s banister and salutes.

She turns from her subjects, tail wagging. Every minute aboard the Pike is loosening her like she’s lounging in a spa tub. “Brigadier. Half-day for you and for the marines who escorted me. Excellently intimidating.”

Hyax salutes. “Thank you, Majesty.”

“Majordomo, half-day for you, too.”

Vora bows. “I respectfully decline, Majesty. Your shift is my shift.”

“I knew you would.” Sykora’s tail bats her majordomo’s shoulder. “Just wanted the intention stated. Prince. Meet me at my chair, if you please.”

“You bet.” Grant takes a seat on Sykora’s embellished throne, which is large enough to accommodate him. Sykora hops into his lap and groans with enervation as she sprawls across him.

“I would have stabbed every single mother on that planet to escape it.” She tips her head back against Grant’s arm. Her tricorne falls off her head; he snags it before it hits the floor. “What did that hellion Narika want from you?” she asks.

“Just to talk,” he says. “She was being philosophical at me about the Eqtoran annexation.”

“I bet she was.” His imp of a wife smirks with impish satisfaction. “We out-goodied her.”

Grant dangles Sykora’s tricorne above her. “You want this?”

“Uh-uh.” Sykora tugs Grant’s hand onto the top of her head. “This is my new hat.”

He scritches behind her ear. She sighs with gratitude.

“I don’t mean to force you to inherit my enemies, you know,” she says. “And I know Narika likes you better than she likes me. And I must have seemed quite cruel with the Marquess. I—”

“Babe.” He slips his palm under her head and angles it up. “You ripped my biggest hater’s throat out with your teeth. I’m in your corner.”

Several of the glass panes on the main monitor window honeycomb into one another. An insistent trill sounds. “Incoming hail.” The pinched voice of the Monitor ensign rises from the bridge. “Patterned to Marquess Palatine Inadama of Taiikar.”

Sykora’s ears flatten to the sides of her head. “Speaking of haters.”

Grant puts his hands on the throne’s armrests. “Should I get up?”

She touches his stomach. “Stay, if you’d be so kind. I want her to see you.”

He relaxes back down and rests a hand in Sykora’s lap. She takes it.

“Full answer,” she calls.

A connecting chirp. Inadama’s face forms in the great glass before them.

“Marquess Palatine.” Sykora tilts her head in a brief ducking bow. “I trust you’re recovering.”

“Well enough.” Inadama sits at that same pitted desk as before. She waves a medtech away from her shoulder. “I’ve had worse.”

Sykora smirks at that.

“You have won your freedom from me,” Inadama continues, over the echoing departure of her healer. “And from your term as Void Princess. Henceforth you will be known as Princess Margrave Sykora of Taiikar.”

“No,” Sykora says. “Princess Margrave Sykora of the Black Pike.”

“That won’t—”

“My majordomo informs me that it will.” Sykora widens her slouch. “I have no interest in pleasantries or conversation. I have no interest in knowing you, and you have no interest in me. This has become clear to me. Shall I send you my ledgers, or will we dispense with the charade?”

Inadama’s eyes drift upward with clear exasperation. “I do not need your ledgers, Majesty. No.”

“Spring your ambush, then, and I’ll grant your demand, and we’ll be done with each other.”

Inadama’s ear twitches. Just like her daughter’s does, when she’s holding anger back. “Fine. I’ll be brief.” She sits higher, twinging at the pain that surely rakes her half-healed side. “In the name of Clan Taiikar, you will retrieve a daemon for me.”