“I believe Lady Sula would like to say a few words,” Eldey said, and shuffled to the rear of the platform, leaving her alone with her army.
She had prepared a farewell address, but the cheers had blown the words clean out of her head. She took a step forward, then another. Thousands of eyes followed her. She gazed out at the ranks of the soldiers she had made and thought,I am mad to give this away.
She had spent all her adult life hiding—hiding her true name, her true person behind the caustic personality and immaculate uniforms of Lady Sula. But hiding from the Naxids, strangely, had freed her from all that—all that she was, all that she had been, Gredel as well as Sula, had been unleashed in the service of gathering her army and fighting the enemy. The army was an extension of her, of her mind and nerve and sinew, and to abandon it now seemed as wrong as cutting off her arm.
The fighters were still looking at her, and the words still failed to come. Sula remembered that she’d written notes for her speech and loaded them on her sleeve display, and she glanced down at her sleeve and manipulated the sleeve buttons with half-paralyzed fingers until the words flashed before her eyes.
“Friends,” she began, and the army exploded in cheers again. Her mind spun like a pinwheel in the whirlwind of love and adoration.
“Friends,” she began again, when control had been regained both of the army and her voice. “Together we have lived a great adventure. With no resources but our own determination and intelligence we have built this army, we have engaged the enemy, and we have brought that enemy down in humiliation and total defeat.”
Another great cry went up. It was growing dark, and she had a hard time seeing the individual fighters against the dazzle of the spotlights, perceiving only the vague great mass that was her army, the organism that she had called into existence as an instrument of her will.
“None of you were required to take up arms,” she said, “but you were unable to tolerate the Naxid regime, with its murders and hostage-taking and theft, and you—each of you, on your own—made up your minds to strike a blow against these crimes.”
Cheers began again, but Sula shouted over them.“You chose your own destiny! You destroyed an illegitimate regime, and you did it all on your own! By your own choice, you made the High City yours! By your own choice, you sent the Naxid fleet fleeing from the system!”
Sula felt a wild vertigo as the cheers seemed to send her spinning like a snowflake into the sky. The dark mass of bodies and heads and weapons in front of her surged like a storm-slashed sea. The cries didn’t cease until she gestured madly for order.
“I thank you from the bottom of my heart for letting me lead you,” she said. “I will never forget you, or forget this moment.”
She took a long breath, and spoke the words she had been dreading.
“Now I am called to further duty against the enemy, and I must leave you.”
There were cries of“ No!” from shocked fighters who hadn’t yet worked this out for themselves.
“No one can take your achievements away from you,” she said. “Take pride in them, and never forget your comrades, or those who gave their lives.”
She raised a hand. “Fortune attend you all.”
Again the cheers sounded, and they resolved into a chant,“Su-la! Su-la! Su-la!” Her heart raced at the sound. She stepped back and let Lord Governor Eldey step forward.
He gave a speech, and Sula heard none of it.I am mad to give this up, she kept thinking.
Hiding from the Naxids had given her freedom. Now that she was Lady Sula again, she was once again in hiding, but from her own side.
Afterward she joined Eldey in the vehicle that raced for the city. Overhead, multiple sonic booms announced the arrival of other shuttles that carried elements of Eldey’s support staff and the thousands of personnel that the empire was bringing to the capital.
Bureaucrats to run the government, engineers to keep services going, and executioners to work their will on the vanquished. It was the way Zanshaa had always been governed.
“I wish you had not so much emphasized those people bringing down a government through choice,” Eldey said. “We really can’t have that sort of thing. But otherwise I think you did very well with them.”
“Thank you, my lord,” Sula said dully. Her mind still swam in the surge of emotion that had swept her that afternoon.
He looked at her with his large eyes. “You might have a future as a politician,” he said.
“I don’t have the money.”
“Don’t you?” Eldey said softly. “Well, there are ways.”
If she hadn’t been so exhausted, she might have asked what Eldey had in mind, but she just sat in the vehicle until it drew up to the Commandery, where the governor bade her good-night and continued on to his own residence.
Her sleep that night was an empty blackness filled with roaring, as if she were at the center of a huge, invisible army, all calling her name.
On Sula’s last morning in Zanshaa she reported to Lord Governor Eldey, gave him the passwords for the more critical files, and then formally resigned her command of Zanshaa’s military. She sent Macnamara, Spence, and her new cook, Rizal, ahead to the Wi-hun airstrip, and then had One-Step drive her to the city of the dead where Casimir lay in his stolen tomb.
A bitter wind scattered flakes of snow over the dried, brown blossoms of the flowers the cliquemen had piled on the sepulcher. The monument installed before the tomb projected a three-dimensional holographic image of Casimir, but it lacked the touch of mordant humor and the slight aura of menace that she remembered. The hologram looked more like the pale, cold face she saw on the floor of the hospital morgue.
Sula paused for a moment before the tomb, her hands in the pockets of her greatcoat, and then drew from her pocket theju yao pot. She held it up to the faint light and saw Casimir’s holographic image reflected irregularly in the blue-green crackle of its glaze. A sharp pain pierced her breastbone. How many deaths had the pot survived, she wondered, in the millennia since it had been carried away from Honan just ahead of a Tatar invasion? How many owners had lifted their eyes to the pot and drawn peace and strength from its timeless beauty?
Too many, she thought.
She walked around the memorial to the tomb itself, to the brushed titanium slab that sealed the doorway. Her reflection wavered uncertainly in the cold light. She raised the pot and smashed it against the slab. It crumbled to bits between her fingers. A sob broke from her throat. She stomped the fragments with her feet, and then a weakness flooded her and she leaned against the tomb for support, her head pressed to the cold metal.
You selfish bastard,she thought.You died and left me alone.
The cold metal was a shooting pain against her forehead. She gathered her strength and pushed herself away from the tomb, then began the walk back to the car.
Fragments of the pot crunched beneath her soles.
Everything old is dead,she thought.Everything new begins now.
THIRTY-ONE
Lord Eldey kindly offered Sula the use of his private yacht, theSivetta, which he would not be needing for the months he served as governor. Sula understood the historical reference to the grand old Torminel monarch, and Eldey was surprised and pleased that she knew.
On the shuttle from Zanshaa to the yacht, she flew past one of the huge merchant vessels that had brought supplies and personnel to the capital. The cargo ship was a gleaming mirror-bright dome, with the engine module on the far side like the stem of a mushroom. It was far larger than any Fleet warship, with room enough aboard to carry a cargo of ten thousand citizens; and it was only one of half a dozen ships brought to the capital. Clearly, the empire was very serious about keeping hold of Zanshaa now that they’d retaken it.