‘If I could, do you not think I would have done so?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I have seen a great many things, Kai, but some secrets are hidden even from me,’ said the figure, indicating a handful of hooded pieces that Kai was sure hadn’t been there a moment ago. ‘I have watched this moment many times and replayed our words a thousand times, but the universe has secrets it refuses to reveal until their appointed hour.’
‘Even from you?’
‘Even from me,’ said the figure with a wry nod.
Kai took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes. The skin around them was irritated and sore.
‘The Choirmaster always said regicide was about truth,’ said Kai as they took turns to move their pieces across the board.
‘He was right,’ said the figure, moving his Emperor another square forward. ‘No fantasy, however rich, no technique, however masterly, no insight into the psychology of your opponent, however deep, can make regicide a work of art if it does not lead to the truth.’
Despite Kai’s averred lack of skill in regicide, the game appeared to be balanced in neither player’s favour, though he had more pieces remaining. After the opening salvoes and the mystery of the middle game, it was clear the endgame was now in sight. Both players had lost a great many pieces, but the lords of the board were coming into their own.
‘Now we come to it,’ said Kai, moving his Empress into a strong position to trap his opponent’s Emperor. In the early stages of their game, Kai’s Emperor bestrode the board with confident swagger, while his opponent’s had remained steadfastly in defence, but now the master of onyx drew nearer the fighting line.
Their pieces jostled for position, and Kai had a growing sense that he had been lured into this attack, but he could see no way his opponent could win without the ultimate sacrifice. At last, he made a confident move, sure he had the onyx Emperor boxed in by his cardinal pieces.
Only when the robed figure moved his Emperor boldly forward did he realise his error.
‘Regicide,’ said his opponent, and Kai saw with growing admiration and shock how deftly he had been manoeuvred into baring his neck to the executioner’s blade.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘You won with your Emperor. I thought that almost never happens.’
His opponent shrugged. ‘During the opening and middle game stage, the Emperor is often a burdensome piece, as it must be defended at all costs, but in the endgame it has to become an important and aggressive player.’
‘It was a bloody game,’ Kai pointed out. ‘You lost a great many of your strongest pieces to bring my Emperor down.’
‘Such is often the way with two equally skilled players,’ said the figure.
‘Do we play again?’ asked Kai, reaching for the pieces lost in the game.
The figure reached over and took hold of Kai’s wrist. The grip was firm, unyielding, and Kai sensed strength that could crush his bones in an instant.
‘No, this is a game that can only be played once.’
‘Then why is the board ready to play again?’ asked Kai, seeing that all the pieces were restored to their starting positions without him having touched them.
‘Because there is another opponent I must face, one who knows every gambit, every subtlety and every endgame. I know this, because I taught him.’
‘Can you defeat him?’ asked Kai with a mounting sense of unease as a shadow moved on the edges of the oasis.
‘I do not know,’ admitted the figure. ‘I cannot yet see the outcome of our meeting.’
The robed figure looked down at the board, and Kai saw the pieces had moved once more, into a convoluted arrangement that defied interpretation. He looked up and saw his opponent clearly for the first time, seeing the burden of an entire civilisation resting upon his broad shoulders.
‘How can I be of service?’ asked Kai.
‘You can go back, Kai. You can go back to the waking world and bring me the warning Sarashina gave you.’
‘I’m afraid to go back,’ said Kai. ‘I think I might die if I do.’
‘I fear that you will,’ agreed the figure.
Kai felt a cold knot in the heart of his stomach, and the fear that had consumed him since the Argoreturned with a sickening lurch. The sky darkened, and Kai heard muttering voices raised in argument from somewhere far distant.
‘You’re asking me to sacrifice myself for you?’
‘No sacrifice is too great for the scalp of the enemy Emperor,’ said the figure.
COLD MIST GATHERED around the many benches bearing laboratory equipment, and the hum of generators could be heard beyond the insulated walls of the low-ceilinged chamber. Banks of equipment that would not look out of place in the halls of a Martian geneticist whirred as centrifuges spun clinking vials of raw materials, incubators nursed gestating zygotes and vats of nutrient-rich liquid fostered the growth of complex enzymes and proteins.
That such a well-equipped laboratory existed on Terra was not surprising, but that it was to be found in the heart of the Petitioner’s City was nothing short of miraculous. It was akin finding a fully functioning starship buried in the ruins of Earth’s prehistory.
Babu Dhakal tended to a silver incubation cylinder in which a chemical soup of elements bubbled with life. The clan lord’s armour had dulled with condensation, and the dying flesh of his face was limned with hoarfrost. He no longer felt the cold, as he no longer felt pain or heat or pleasure. One by one, the joys that made existence such a gift were dying.
Just as hewas dying.
Dhakal’s former master had wrought him to be faster, stronger and more powerful than any of the feral barbarian gene-sept warriors that claimed fealty over Humanity’s birthrock, a soldier to drag their world back from the anarchy into which it had fallen. Those had been golden days, when the eagle and lightning banner had marched before unstoppable armies of Thunder Warriors.
Battles had lasted weeks on end, with body counts in the millions and duels of titanic warlords that sundered mountains and split continents. Those victories were now dismissed as lurid hyperbole, and historians now refused to believe that such clashes of arms could possibly have been fought. Why their worthless hides were not flogged for this dull-witted blindness was beyond him, but in his heart of hearts he knew that this dreary new age could not sustain such legends without scoffing at the sturm und drangof those heady, bloody days.
Dhakal remembered toppling the Azurite Tower with his bare hands, and wondered what the scuttling little remembrancers that documented this shining bauble of an Imperium would make of the tales he might tell.
The machine before him chimed and Babu Dhakal turned from reveries of his glory days to the task at hand. The silver steel tube vented coolant gasses and a ribbed tube gurgled as nutrient fluids drained away. The upper half of the cylinder hissed open, revealing a gauzy mesh cushion, upon which lay a glistening organ of raw, fresh-grown meat. A web of artificial capillaries fed the organ hyper-oxygenated blood, but patches of necrotic black veined the organ like a diseased lung.
‘Not another one,’ whispered Babu Dhakal, his hands curling into fists. ‘I am trying to correct what cannot becorrected.’
He closed the incubation cylinder gently, taking deep breaths to calm the rising fury within his chest. He supposed he should be used to such failures, but he was not a man to whom such acceptance came easy. Would he have fought through five battle legions of Grinders had he been such a man? Could he have cast down the Hammer Halo of the Iron Tzar had he been a man to accept failure?
He gripped the edge of the bench in his thick hands, buckling the metal with his furious disappointment. Babu Dhakal wanted to sweep the equipment from the benches and vent his towering fury on the laboratory that had defied him for so long, and only with the greatest effort did he manage to restrain himself. Like everything else in his body, impulse control was eroding and he was a hair’s breadth from becoming no better than the barbarian people thought him to be. Yes, he had killed men since the bitter day of Unity, yes he had yoked a city’s worth of people beneath his rule, but had he not done that with a greater purpose in mind?