Behind him, someone was muffling a sob. He made the time to glance round: Copis, huddled in her chair with her tablecloth around her, was crying because now there were only three of them left. (And where was Gain Aciava? Or did his absence mean that the class of '56 was now down to two?) Poldarn decided that it was just as well he didn't have the memories that were presently filling Copis's mind, quite possibly hers alone now. It must be terrible to be the only one left, he thought, the last crow of the flock, the one suddenly forced to stand for the whole.
'Fine,' Tazencius said suddenly. 'Ciartan, will you please put that horrible thing away? You have my word, nobody's going to bother you now.'
I have your word, do I? Lucky, lucky me. Poldarn righted an overturned chair, pulled it out into the open where he could see most of the room, and sat down, the backsabre across his knees. (It was wet and sticky, but his absurd red velvet trousers didn't show the marks. Functional, after all.)
'Right, then,' Tazencius was saying. 'One last bit of carnage, and then will someone clean up this mess?'
Someone who'd been standing at the back, leaning against the wall since the first course was served, now took five steps forward. He was holding a wide silver tray, on which rested a black cloth bag about the size of a large cabbage. It held a man's head, which the servant held up by the hair. Poldarn had no idea who it was supposed to be, but there was a general mumble of satisfaction from the dinner guests; particularly from the Amathy house contingent.
Tazencius cracked a thin smile. 'Gentlemen,' he said, 'Feron Amathy is dead.' Someone handed him a goblet; he took it without looking round. 'A toast, then,' he went on, suddenly looking straight at Poldarn, 'to our good friend Feron Amathy.'
Poldarn felt an urge to look round, in case there was someone behind him he hadn't seen. But he knew there wasn't. Instead, he stared at Tazencius 'You, you idiot,' Tazencius explained.
Chapter Nineteen
'Me?' Poldarn said.
Tazencius smiled. 'You,' he said. Mostly silence; the only sound was Copis's muted sobbing somewhere behind him. Everybody else in the room was either dumbstruck with horror or frozen with embarrassment. Welcome home, he thought.
'You don't look pleased,' Tazencius went on, grinning affably. 'I was sure you'd want your old job back. I was trying to be nice.'
Poldarn doubted that. On the other hand he still had the backsabre, and if he made up his mind to a straightforward, businesslike exchange of lives, he had no doubt at all that he could carve Tazencius from ear to collarbone before anybody could stop him. He was surprised at how little he wanted to do that, all things considered.
'I don't understand,' he said.
Gentle murmuring from the Amathy house contingent, who clearly weren't impressed. Tazencius raised his voice over the sound and went on, 'Years ago the Amathy house realised that its most valuable asset was the prestige-not the right choice of words but you know what I mean-of the name Feron Amathy. For as long as I personally can remember it's been a byword for efficiency, ruthlessness and duplicity. So, when the original Feron Amathy died, they didn't let on; their new leader took the name, made out that the rumours of his death were just wishful thinking, and carried on as before. Easily done, since very few people outside the House had ever seen the great man, and for most of those who did he was the last thing they ever saw. Then, when I was looking round for a suitable wedding present for my future son-in-law and decided to give you power equal to that of the Emperor himself, the replacement was duly replaced by you, and the name came with the job. And,' he went on, 'when everybody was sure that you were dead and I needed to find a substitute to fill your place, he became Feron Amathy in turn. Then the House found out that you were still alive, changed its mind and wanted you back. He's dead,' a curt nod towards the thing lying on its side on the silver tray, 'which serves him right for annoying the rank and file; as I understand it, he had delusions of authenticity, actually started believing he was the commander of an army, not the chief executive of a bunch of thieves.' The Amathy house contingent didn't react to that. 'He was fighting a war, he thought: devising strategies, sending expendable units to die for the sake of the grand design. That's not how the House functions: they kill people, they don't get killed themselves. So they decided he had to go, and now-' He pointed at the object on the tray with his little finger. 'You, on the other hand, were perfect for the House; they only allowed me to replace you because I insisted-it was a condition of the contract. They gave me you, and I gave them Josequin, and a licence to plunder every city in the Bohec valley. A bargain, from my point of view; I got the whole Empire in exchange for a few of its cities.' He frowned. 'Unfortunately, it all went wrong without you, and now we have to clean up the mess.'
Poldarn lifted his head and tried to say something. Fortunately, his input wasn't required, since he appeared to have run out of words.
'You'd like me to begin at the beginning,' Tazencius said. 'Very well.'
He leaned back in his chair. Someone took the silver tray away, out of his sight. Someone else brought him a fresh drink. 'Many years ago,' he said, 'when I was young and foolish, a dimwitted cousin of mine fell out with a promising young army officer by the name of Cronan Suilven. My cousin was a coward; he didn't feel up to attacking the soldier directly, so he persuaded me to pick a fight with him, over some trivial matter. I did as he wanted; the duel was a fiasco, I was humiliated, finished at Court. I was determined to make Cronan pay, but by the time I was in any fit state to take him on, he'd been promoted to commander-in-chief; if I was going to destroy him, I'd have to become Emperor first. So that's what I resolved to do.' He paused and sipped his wine, taking a moment to savour it. Theatre, Poldarn thought contemptuously. 'I knew that in order to get rid of Cronan I'd have to create a threat to the Empire, something so terrifying that anybody who managed to get rid of it would be able to have anything he wanted; also, anybody who tried and failed would be broken, ruined, disgraced. It was about that time that your horrible relations began making serious trouble in the coastal districts; but of course nobody knew who they were or where they came from, nobody knew their language or how to communicate with them. I needed them, of course, as my threat. I needed them to extend their operations from mere seaside vandalism to full-scale acts of war: burning down cities, butchering whole populations. Fortune smiled on me; I found you.'
Poldarn glanced round the room. None of this seemed to have come as a surprise, either to the Amathy contingent or to the domestic nobility.
'You were my link with the savages,' Tazencius went on. 'I had you trained at Deymeson, and gave you my daughter, to secure you; you were, after all, my key component, the most important single piece in the mechanism. You had to be perfect, and you had to be completely, indubitably mine. That's why I gave you everything I ever really cared about-apart from destroying Cronan, of course. I gave you my daughter. All can say is, I've been punished appropriately ever since.'
Lysalis looked up at her father, her face blank, just for a moment. Then she went back to staring at Copis, who wasn't listening at all.
'But that wasn't all I gave you,' Tazencius went on. 'As well as the savages, I needed a strike force, something closer to home and easier to control. I never controlled the savages, you see; all I could do, through you, was make it possible for them to attack deep inland, come and go unharmed and with their terrifying anonymity undamaged. You've seen them, Ciartan, you know what they're like. Ferocious, certainly, and they have this bizarre ability to share each others' thoughts; but they aren't actually superhuman. If they started making raids deep into the Empire, it was only a matter of time before Cronan caught up with them and cut them to ribbons, and then I'd lose everything. But I needed them to be superhuman, invulnerable, unbeatable; so I made sure that Cronan and the government troops never got near them, or else I arranged for them to fall into perfectly planned ambushes, so that the savages could wipe them out to the last man.