Anyone with sufficient self-belief, enough ruthlessness and (Luseferous believed himself modest enough to admit) an adequate supply of luck could — if the will was there and the times required such determination — conquer and destroy. Judging how much to destroy for the effect one wished to achieve, knowing when to be ruthless, when to show leniency, even when to exhibit beguiling, rage-sapping generosity and a touch of humour; that required a more measured, a more subtle, a more — he could think of no other word for it — civilised touch. He had that touch. The record spoke for itself. To then go on from there and use the sad necessity of destruction to create art, to form an image of a better place and forge symbolic unity… that was on another level again, that elevated the mere war-maker, the mere politician, to the status of creator.
Tendrils of smoke rose all around the central column of steam, dark paltry vines adorning a huge pale trunk. These marked where defending aircraft had fallen and where fires had been started by the crater-weapon’s ground shock, no doubt. Part of the artistry involved in such a work was creating a great declivity without utterly destroying all around it (a new, reborn city had to grow here, after all). Some sophistication of weaponry was required to achieve such precision. His armaments experts attended to such details.
The Archimandrite Luseferous looked about him, smiling to his chiefs of staff, all standing respectfully at his heel, looking a little nervous to be here in the fresh air of another newly subject planet. (Yet was it not good to breathe in that fresh air, for all its alien scents? Did those strange new odours not themselves mean that another treasure had been added to their ever-increasing domain?) Above and behind, bristling war craft hovered and hummed, attended by small clouds of sensory and weapon platforms. Spread in a ring all around were his personal guards, most lying or kneeling on the grass, their darkly glinting weaponry poised. A few in military exoskels lumbered around or squatted, splayed feet squashing into the earth.
At the foot of the hill, beyond another ring of guards, beneath a watchful buzz of guard drones, the refugees moved like a slow river of dun and grey.
Stilters; groundbats, whule. A Mercatorial species. Disconnected all these millennia, certainly, but still a Mercatorial species. Luseferous looked up into the pale green sky, imagining night, the veils of stars, and the one particular sun — pointed out to him from orbit just forty hours ago, while the invasion forces were being prepared for the initial drop — growing steadily closer as they crawled and fought their way towards it, which was called Ulubis.
* * *
In the bright, golden-hued air of Sepekte, with the Borquille Equatower a thin stem in the hazy distance, the little Navarchy ship approached the palace complex, sliding through an ancient forest of kilometres-tall atmospheric power columns and between more modest but still impressive administration and accommodation towers. It disappeared into a wide, gently sloped tunnel set into the reception plaza in front of the enormous ball that was the palace of the Hierchon, an eight-hundred-metre sphere modelled after Nasqueron itself by a long-departed Sarcomage, complete with individual bands of slowly contra-rotating floors all sliding round a stationary inner core. Changing orange-red, brown and ochre swirls of pattern, convincingly like the view of the distant gas-giant’s cloud tops seen from space, moved across the face of the palace, hiding windows and balconies, sensors and transmitters.
“Major Taak? Lieutenant Inesiji, palace guard. This way, please. Quick as we can, sir.” The speaker, whose voice sounded like a human child talking with a mouthful of ball bearings, was a jajuejein, a creature which in repose resembled an insectile tumbleweed sixty or seventy centimetres in diameter. This one had drawn itself up to Fassin’s two-metre height, marshalling a host of twiglike components coloured dark green and steel blue to resemble a sort of openwork head like a bird’s nest — thankfully it had not tried to make a face — and had balanced itself on two vaguely leglike stalks. The rest of its body, offering glimpses of the reception cavern’s floor beyond, was just a cylinder, adorned with belts of soft-looking material and small metallic components that might have been jewellery, gadgets or weapons. It half-turned, half-flowed to a small open cart where the ship’s whule rating was already depositing Fassin’s luggage.
Fassin turned and waved to the groggily cheerful Dicogra, joined the jajuejein in the cart and was whisked away through a brief security reception area to a lift and a curving corridor which took him to a suite of rooms with what looked like a real outside view of the city — north, with pale, jagged hills in the far distance. Lieutenant Inesiji placed Fassin’s bags on the bed with fluid grace and informed him that he had exactly three-fifths of an hour to freshen up, don his ceremonial court clothes and present himself outside his door, whereupon he would be escorted to the audience chamber.
Fassin blipped a safe-arrival message to Bantrabal and then did as he’d been told.
The circular audience chamber was glittering and warm, walls of white gold sparkling under a ceiling-filling galaxy-shaped cloud of tiny sharp lights impersonating stars. Lieutenant Inesiji showed Fassin to a position on one of the many platforms set into the shallow, stepped bowl of the chamber. A human-conforming seat malleabled its way up from the floor. He sat in it — stiffly, in his bulky court robes — and the lieutenant told him, “Please stay where you are for now, sir’ in a sort of gargled whisper, executed what might have been a bow, turned into what looked very like a cartwheel, and rolled away back up the slope of gangway to an exit.
Fassin looked around. The chamber looked like it might hold a thousand people, but he was one of only about two dozen people present, distributed around the shallowly conical space as though to maximise the distance between each individual. Humans — all, like him, in cumbersome, rather gaudy court dress — just about outnumbered the others, but he saw another jajuejein — balled, either resting or sleeping, criss-crossed with iridescent ribbons — two whule sitting like angular grey tents covered in silver flowers, both looking at him, a pair of quaup, one of the two-metre-long red-tan ellipses floating and also looking at him (well, certainly pointing at him), and the other stood on its end, either also snoozing or possibly at attention — Fassin’s knowledge of alien body language was wide but shallow except where Dwellers were concerned. Three large environment suits containing waterworlders completed the non-human contingent: two of the esuits, looking like aquamarine impersonations of the quaups, most likely contained kuskunde; the third was a matt black lozenge the size of a small bus, radiating warmth. That esuit would almost certainly contain an symbioswarm Ifrahile.
In the centre of the chamber, at its deepest point, just before a set of wide, tall, concentric platforms which broke the symmetry of the space, there was an incongruous-looking device which looked like an ancient iron cooking pot: a black-bellied urn a couple of metres in diameter, capped with a shallow dome and sitting on a tripod of stubby legs on the buttery sheen of the solid gold floor. Its surface was pinstriped with thin vanes, but otherwise it resembled something almost prehistoric. Fassin had never seen anything like it before. He shivered, despite the warmth of the chamber.