“You’re thinking about her again, aren’t you?” Katrya asked.
Sirus fixed her with a sharp glare, a harsh reminder of her status coming to his lips. Please be good enough to remember, miss, you are but a servant in my father’s house. The words died, however, when he met her eyes, seeing the mixture of defiance and reproach. Like most of the servants in his father’s employ Katrya had taken a dim view of his embarrassing but irresistible obsession. However, he thought it strange that she should care about such things now.
“Actually no,” he said instead and nodded at the shaft. “Simleon says it’s about eighty feet to the bottom.”
“You’ll die,” she stated flatly.
“Perhaps. But I increasingly fail to see any alternative.”
She hesitated then shuffled closer to him, resting her head on his shoulder, an overly familiar action that would have been unthinkable only a few weeks before. “It’s awful quiet up there now,” she said. “Could be they’ve all gone. Moved on to Carvenport. Some of the others think so.”
Moved on. Why not? Why stay once they’ve slaughtered everyone else? The notion was almost unbearably enticing but also dangerous. Alternatives? he asked himself, the absolute gloom of the shaft filling his gaze once more.
“Your father would have at least gone to look,” Katrya said. The words were spoken softly, free of malice or judgement, but they were still enough for him to push her away and get to his feet.
“My father’s dead,” he told her, the memory of his last interrogation looming large as he stalked away. The Cadre agent sitting at the foot of his bed, shrewd eyes on his, somehow even more frightening than the men who had tortured him in that basement. “Where is she? Where would she go?” And he had no answers, save one: “Far away from me.”
In truth he remembered little of Tekela’s escape. The hours that preceded it had been full of such agony and fear his memory of it remained forever ruined. His arrest had swiftly followed Father’s demise, a half-dozen Cadre agents breaking down the door to drag him from his bed, fists and cudgels the only answer to his babbling enquiries and protestations. He woke to find himself strapped to a chair with Major Arberus staring into his face, expression hard with warning. Arberus, Sirus soon realised, was also strapped to a chair and, positioned off to Sirus’s right, so was Tekela. He remembered the expression on her doll’s face, an expression so unlike anything he had ever expected to see there: deep, unalloyed guilt.
“I’m sorry,” she’d mouthed, tears falling from her eyes. It changed then, the obsession he had chosen to call passion, the delusion that had compelled him to pen verse he knew in his heart to be terrible and make an unabashed fool of himself at every opportunity. Here she was, his one true love, just a guilt-stricken girl strapped to a chair and about to watch him die.
Their attendants were two men in leather aprons, both of middling years and undistinguished appearance, who went about their work with all the efficiency of long-serving craftsmen. They started on the major first, Sirus closing his eyes tight against the awful spectacle and Tekela’s accompanying screams. They turned their attentions to Sirus when Arberus fainted and he learned for the first time what true pain was. There were questions he couldn’t answer, demands he couldn’t meet. He knew it all to be meaningless, just another form of pressure, added theatre for Tekela’s benefit. How long it took to end he never knew, but it seemed an eternity before his heart began to slow, transformed into a softly patted drum in his chest and he became aware of his imminent departure from this world. The basement disappeared into a fugue of distant sound and vague sensation. He heard shouts and thuds at some point, the sounds of struggle and combat, but assumed it to be just a figment of his fading mind. Despite the confusion he still retained the memory of the precise moment his heart stopped. He had read of those who returned from the brink of death to tell of a bright beckoning light, but he never saw it. There was only blackness and the dreadful pregnant silence left by his absent heart-beat.
The Cadre brought him back, though it had been a close-run thing as his doctor had been happy to tell him. He was a cheerful fellow with a lilting accent Sirus recognised as coming from the northern provinces. However, there was a hardness to his gaze despite the cheeriness, and Sirus sensed he knew as much about taking life as saving it. For days they tended him, generous doses of Green and careful application of various drugs until he was as healed as he could ever expect to be and the numerous scars on his chest reduced to a faint web of interconnected lines. Sirus understood this to be only a respite. The Cadre were far from finished with him.
The man who came to question him was of diminutive height and trim build. He wore the typical, nondescript dark suit favoured by Cadre agents, though the small silver pin in his lapel set him apart. It was a plain circle adorned with a single oak leaf that matched those of the Imperial crest. Sirus had never met anyone wearing this particular emblem before but all Imperial subjects knew its meaning well enough. Agent of the Blood Cadre.
“She left you behind,” were the agent’s first words to him, delivered with a tight smile of commiseration. “Nothing like misplaced love to harden a man’s heart.”
The agent went on to ask many questions, but for reasons Sirus hadn’t yet fathomed the Cadre’s more direct methods were not visited upon him again. It could have been due to his fulsome and unhesitant co-operation, for his experience in the basement had left no lingering pretensions to useless bravery. “My father and Burgrave Artonin worked together on their own projects,” he told the agent. “I was not privy to their studies.”
“The device,” the agent insisted, leaning forward in his chair. “Surely you must know of the device? Please understand that your continued good health depends a great deal upon it.”
Nothing, Sirus thought, recalling the way his father would jealously guard those artifacts of interest to his precious circle of select scholars. I know nothing. For a time Sirus had entertained the notion that such circumspection had been for his protection, the less knowledge he possessed the less the Cadre’s interest in him. But he knew such concern was largely beyond his father’s heart. It had been simple professional secrecy. His father had happened upon something of great importance, something that might transform their understanding of this entire continent and its history. Like many a scholar, Diran Akiv Kapazin did not relish the notion of sharing credit. Sirus had only ever caught glimpses of the thing, and indulged in a few snatched glances at his father’s notes. It remained a baffling, if enticing enigma.
“I was privy to . . . certain details,” he lied.
“Enough to reconstruct it, perhaps?” the agent enquired.
“If I . . .” He had choked then, the lies scraping over his parched tongue. The agent came to his bedside and poured a glass of water before holding it to Sirus’s lips. “If I had sufficient time,” he managed after gulping down the entire contents of the glass.
The agent stood back, lips pursed in consideration. “Time, I’m afraid, is both your enemy and mine at this juncture, young sir. You see, I was sent here by a very demanding master to secure the device. I’m sure a fellow of your intelligence can deduce to whom I refer.”