They were both huge men, flat-featured, cold eyed, with cropped blond hair and a manner that was a mix of politeness and icy menace to anyone other than Terrarchs. Her, they looked genuinely glad to see.
Other servants, and stablehands, came to greet her and soon she was at the centre of a quiet storm of activity, as they welcomed her and made her comfortable. Her horse was taken and stabled. Her rooms were prepared. Fresh clothes and a warm bath at just the right temperature were made ready. As she always did at this stage of her return, she realised how much she had taken these things for granted, how natural it seemed to be in a world where she was the centre of so much flattering attention. She was grateful for it now, but she knew that would pass, and soon it would seem like things had always been that way, until she had to leave the cocoon and make her way in the cold world again.
After she was refreshed she wandered the house. It felt huge and empty, and the fact that her father would never come back to it made it seem all the more so. She paused in the library and looked at his favourite chair where he was wont to sit with his collection of histories and grimoires and books of Al’Terran lore.
As a child he had pointed out many fascinating things to her, had seemed remote and calm and the very epitome of what a civilised Terrarch should be. Only later, as she had come to understand the world of blood and shadows he had always inhabited, did she realise that was a mask, just one of many he had layered over his inner self.
She walked through the ballroom, vast and empty save for some kitchen girls on their knees scrubbing the stone floor, and remembered the balls that had filled the place with music and light, and the intrigues, political and erotic that had taken place in the darker nooks and alcoves. She found herself touching hangings and vases as if to reassure herself of their reality, and the reality of the memories in which they had also been present.
She moved to the huge sitting room with its large bay window and fine view of the street and saw that things had not really changed for other people as they had for her. Out there, the world went on, as it always did. Soldiers marched, nobles rode, merchants sold, thieves stole. Servants came and went, supplicants presented themselves at the doors of the more powerful.
Out there, all was clamour. In here, all was silence.
She knew there were things she should be doing, letters to be written, visits to be made. Great events were taking place, and she should have a hand in their shaping, but at this moment, she found it difficult to care. She wanted to stop for a while and think, to try and put things in perspective in a way she should have done long ago and never had. She wanted time and peace and stability and she knew those were exactly the things she could not have with a great orgy of violence about to sweep through the world.
Briefly she considered what she had witnessed in the West and on the road. She thought of the refugees and the walking corpses and the stink of strange sorcery constantly in the air. She suspected that the Empress’s sorcerers had their hands in that. She could feel the foul magic hovering in the air over the city. There were plenty more like Jaderac to be found at Court, Terrarchs whose ambitions justified their using any means, no matter how loathsome to fulfil them.
Yet for all the size of the Empire’s armies, and all the skill of its sorcerers, she was starting to wonder if this was a war it could win. The West was rich now in a way that it had not been a century ago, its Generals seemed more secure with the new technologies of war- with muskets and alchemy and cannon and all the other new instruments of destruction.
The Scarlet armies had cut through Kharadrea like a sword passing through a bale of hay. Queen Arielle’s forces had responded to the threat of war with far greater swiftness and savagery than any of the Empress’s advisors had forecast. Their humans seemed loyal to the new order. Every intricate scheme that Arachne’s advisors had tried, from raising the mountain tribes to allying with Ilmarec, had been foiled.
Her father, a most powerful sorcerer and assassin, worth a regiment at least on his own, was dead before the war had even begun. Without any pause it looked like the Scarlet armies were marching to meet the Purple. Where was the cowardice so many Sardean nobles had predicted when they saw how the Taloreans had backed down to their humans, granting freedoms and concessions at every turn?
It came as a shock to her to realise how inward-looking and isolated her people were. Living on their great estates, surrounded by the mechanisms of religion and state that reinforced their prejudices, they had convinced themselves that their foes were weaklings and fools, and that, as representatives of the true ancient ways of the Terrarchs, they would inevitably triumph.
It had been her fate to travel in the West and have her ideas challenged. She smiled sardonically. Of course, by her very nature she was forced to be more open-minded than her fellow Sardeans. Her basic training had undermined her faith in all orthodoxies. By virtue of birth, she had been forced to question whether any nation had a monopoly on virtue and of vice.
Her father would have laughed at her doubts. He would have pointed out how necessary this war was for the cause and how the coming chaos would be to pave the way for the great enlightenment. Somehow, he had never been able to see that in many ways, the Western nations were more in keeping with his ideals than the Empire was. He and his people had started off by rebelling against the stultifying rule of the so-called Angels. They had wanted a more equal and open society where the grip of the old on power was released. His thoughts on equality and freedom had never applied to humans though. To him, especially as he had grown older and more dependent on his dark magics, they had been only cattle, incapable of real thought or real life. It was not something she could really accept. She had spent too much time around them to be able to dismiss them so.
A servant knocked and then entered. On a silver tray she bore a letter. Tamara wondered who had sent it, for she had yet to inform anyone she had returned. Either a servant had talked or someone had the house under observation. Neither was surprising, really. It was common policy among many of the great Houses of Sardea. It did not even necessarily mean that one of her servants was a traitor. They might simply have mentioned the fact that the mistress was home while out shopping and been overheard.
She picked up the letter and noticed the seal. It bore a two interlocked serpents, the sign of Xephan, Lord Ilea, an associate of her father’s, the present Prime Minister. She slit the seal with a knife and unfolded the page within. It was dated that day and welcomed her home before inviting her to pay a visit. He had heard disturbing rumours about her father and wished to discuss his fate. It was laced with code words used by the secret Brotherhood to which all three of them belonged that let her know she had no choice but to attend.
She forced down a sense of outrage. Xephan was not her master, nor was he her father. He was not one to command her. She took a deep breath and composed herself. She conjured up a picture of the Terrarch in her mind — tall, slender, with curly hair unusual for her people, tawny eyes with gold flecks. A careful dresser, fastidious, a sometime lover of the Empress who thought himself a poet. A sorcerer of great skill, a seeker after hidden secrets, an initiate of many mysteries. At one time Xephan had been a pupil of her father’s but latterly had come to be a rival and one whom her father had feared for all his insouciance. He was a member of the inner circle of the Brotherhood, privy to all its great secrets.
The fact that he dared write to her in such a fashion told her much. He obviously felt very secure. For the first time she allowed herself to consider what the failure of her father’s schemes actually meant. Failure was not something that enhanced any Terrarch’s reputation, and the stakes had been high. Had rumours that her father had assassinated Kathea reached the capital already? His scheme to capture Asea in Harven had failed. The death of the Talorean candidate for the Kharadrean throne had been meant to redeem that- and would have, had he lived.