“This is not a decision I can make,” he said sadly. “You must decide as you see fit... And when you have, you must let me know your decision.” One ringed hand went up to still Lady Clare’s protest. “You are my advisor, advise me...”

Lady Clare looked at Lazlo and smiled, coldly, pulling images out of her memory. Not of the night they had spent together, disgusting though she’d found that. But of a clone that Lazlo kept hidden at his stone hunting lodge high on the edge of the Lot Valley. The big-boned blonde-haired peasant girl didn’t look like a Kyoko, but she was. Lady Clare had blackmailed Lazlo’s doctor in Cahors to run a DNA scan on the girl’s final double-X pair. It had picked up a Sabine Industries copyright tacked into the chromosome’s sugar-phosphate backbone.

Coding for intelligence she could understand. She’d insisted on that for LizAlec, along with some more unconventional modifications, and coding for beauty, for good health, even for sweetness of disposition, those she could understand, just. But that didn’t stop Lady Clare finding distasteful the idea of gene coding a sexual partner for stupidity.

“Well,” Lady Clare said. “Shall we take that vote?”

They didn’t, of course, not then. Lazlo wanted time to talk to the others, strike deals. Lady Clare knew that and she let him have it. Watching as the tall man moved round the other Ministers, glad-handing newly promoted underlings to whom he wouldn’t have given the nod had he met them in the marble corridors of the Tuileries two months before.

Lady Clare did nothing, except check if the coffee in the silver pot was still warm. It wasn’t, but she drank another cup anyway, without touching a bowl of vast crystals of amber-hued cane sugar from the Prince Imperial’s own estates in St Lucia. Her legs were so tired that all Lady Clare really wanted to do was sit. But anything that showed she might be tired, hung-over and old wasn’t appropriate with Lazlo present. So Lady Clare perched herself on the edge of a side table as if bored by the anxious groups that hung around Count Lazlo.

And while she was sitting being ostentatiously bored, Lady Clare tried to work out in her head exactly what she did want, keeping it personal like her analyst had always told her, until she fired him for repetition. In order, her list ran:

LizAlec back.

Her house undamaged (and with it Paris).

Her job...

The list was both selfish and personal. But Lady Clare didn’t have a problem with that. Global was out and she was learning to think small, or so she told herself. But still, she couldn’t have it all. To save LizAlec meant voting for surrender, the kidnappers’ warning had been unequivocal on that. Vote to fight and LizAlec died — if she wasn’t already dead.

The decision got no easier for being worried at. And Lady Clare was beginning to understand that it wasn’t that her head told her one thing and her heart another: she just didn’t know. Prejudice was the worst possible motive for selecting a side, but stripped down to nothing, which was where she stood, prejudice was all Lady Clare had. That, and a silent, almost unstated belief that if genetics counted for anything then LizAlec was a lot more dangerous and capable than anyone yet realized.

Hard thoughts for a mother to handle, but Lady Clare could and would. If Lazlo was for surrender then she was against it. As for LizAlec... Statistical probability and basic common sense said she was already dead, but Lady Clare couldn’t quite believe it, any more than she quite believed her daughter was still alive. Emotionally she hoped, but intellectually she was agnostic.

Her certainty had gone, hollowed out by hunger, by the loss of LizAlec and by the apparently endless storms. That wind had stripped resolve from her as brutally as it had ripped tiles from the roof of the Hotel Sabatini. Like the city, she was drowning in mud, in debilitating indecision. But she would do what she had to: decide.

“We fight...”

It wasn’t a suggestion: the words were her statement of intent. She still outranked everyone in the study, even if she only outranked Lazlo now by length of service. The decision was hers to take, though open statements weren’t her usual style.

The room stilled.

“We fight,” Lady Clare said fiercely, “because we don’t have any alternative.” Staring round, Lady Clare could tell that the others weren’t convinced, and she wasn’t surprised. Fat, balding or weak, they were even less impressed by the thought of having to get out there and fight than they were by the idea of dying. And she didn’t blame them. In their place she’d have felt the same.

Lazlo would always be beyond reach, but not the others and in memetic terms five was a very small number of minds to colonize. As always, Lady Clare started in hard: forcing unpalatable facts down their throats. Sugar syrup could come later.

“Whatever we do, most people in this room will die.” That got their attention. “Listen,” said Lady Clare. “We’re ministers, sub-ministers, heads of sections. Why would the Reich let any of us live?”

“No, wait...” The woman flipped up her hand to still Lazlo. “You can talk later.” One of the junior ministers smiled and then another. And Lady Clare breathed a tiny sigh of relief. Some of them at least were obviously enjoying the tall minister’s discomfort. She could bring round the others yet, Lady Clare just knew it.

“I want to tell you one of the Prince Imperial’s favourite stories,” announced Lady Clare. “It happened in ancient Greece, or maybe it was Rome...”

“Terrific,” the young finance minister who’d smiled when she put down Lazlo groaned aloud, but his muttered aside was friendly, almost resigned. The Prince Imperial was known for his ability (if ability it was) to draw a classical allusion from any event. There were those, Lazlo among them, who believed the old man knew more about Gallia Lugdunensis, Germania Libra and the Belgae than he did about what went on within the borders of his own empire.

Lady Clare wasn’t fooled and hadn’t been for a long time. Not since the old man had pulled three disparate facts together and suddenly asked her a simple but unanswerable question about the religious situation in M’Dina. That was when she’d realized he hid the mind of a tactician behind the clumsiness of a buffoon. His role model wasn’t the original little Corsican corporal who’d risen from poverty to be the first Napoleon. It was the stuttering Roman emperor Clau-Clau-Claudius.

“A general wanted to storm a city,” said Lady Clare. She kept her words simple. One of the ministers in the room didn’t oven have French as his main language, having been born in France Outre-mer. And besides that, simplicity paid. “But the city walls were high and the gates were strong. For weeks the general besieged the city, without success, until a treacherous slave came to him in the night and offered to open the gates from within in return for gold.”

Lady Clare let her gaze drift slowly across the room to settle on Lazlo: let the others make of that what they would, and they would...

“The general accepted and that night the slave opened a side gate to let the enemy slip in and kill people where they slept. The last person to be murdered was the city’s ruler, his throat cut by the general in front of the king’s slave.”

Lady Clare stopped, just long enough to check that everyone was listening. She had their attention right enough, every scrap of it. Even Lazlo had stopped peering at his nails and pretending to be bored. But then Lazlo knew what happened next, even if the others didn’t. Lady Clare wasn’t the only one to have heard the tale told by the Prince Imperial.

Lazlo could interrupt her now, of course. But that would only make the others all the more anxious to hear what happened. She had him and Lady Clare knew it. Pushing herself way from the table, Lady Clare stood to face them. Her voice dropped an octave, as she tried to sound as much like the Prince Imperial as she could, but most of them never even noticed.