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him?
Somehow it was worse that no marks showed.
    With a gesture of contempt the Dol’jharian conqueror
motioned them away. Then he spoke, but it was just more rhetoric about power,
and her mind arrowed back to the startling whisper that came out of the gloom
late after a shift: Sedry Thetris, of the
Seven-Eyes Cell. Wasn’t your password “When the bough breaks”?
    Her sweaty palms turned clammy, and memory of the tall,
gold-eyed man was replaced in the holo by the Panarch, brought to stand before
Eusabian.
    “It seems,” Eusabian said coldly,
“neither your prayers nor your priorities did you much good.” He waved a hand,
indicating the dead and the living, now herded along by the sword-bearing soldiers.
“Nor your loyal subordinates.”
    “What will you do when the Fleet
arrives?” The Panarch’s voice sounded weak in the vast room. Only Dol’jhar’s
could be heard clearly, from his position of command.
    “Your concern for my travails is
touching, Arkad, but your grasp of my power is faulty. . . .” He
went on to brag about the Urian missiles to the unbelieving Panarch.
    Old news. Why would Dol’jhar broadcast this? He must be having trouble controlling his
Rifters, Sedry thought.
    Her mind reverted to her own problem: the former Archon of
Timberwell, who had somehow found out about her betrayal, and now threatened to
reveal her.
    I admire you, the
suave voice had whispered, husky with amusement. You’ve done well for yourself in the shambles. There will be a place for
you in the new government if you are intelligent enough to recognize when to
fight and when to defer to those with greater experience.
    Anger churned in her guts. The Douloi did not lie—he did
have the power. It didn’t matter how she’d managed to slip up in covering her
tracks. He knew, so she either got him what he wanted—or died. The decision was
to be made here, right now.
    I want to know what
Nyberg is hiding, he’d said.
    She tightened her grip on her hands, her boswell still
recording. At any moment she could turn it off.
    But if she did do the noble thing and die, he’d merely find
another more willing tool—someone who might not work against him should it be
necessary.
    “So, Arkad,” the Bori’s gloating
voice broke into her thoughts, “are you curious to know your fate?”
    Sedry’s gaze shifted to the new Aerenarch, standing so still
before the holo. Rumor whispered of expedience, and of cowardice, in his own
survival. Was that true? His actions since were puzzling: he had not had his
father declared dead and started up another government. If he was waiting, was
it for this?
    She studied his profile, expecting to observe that Douloi
mask of privilege, as if they stood above mere human emotion. But there was no
mask. Pale with nausea, his eyes crimped with pain, he watched unblinking as
the Bori brought forward two boxes and set them down.
    “I’m sure you’ve spent twenty years
devising something bloody, and nothing will stop you now. . . .”
the Panarch said, still in that weak voice.
    Eusabian smiled. “I need not exert myself to kill you—not
when the denizens of Gehenna will do it for me.”
    A murmur, quickly stilled, rose up from the ring of watching
officers. Sedry watched the Aerenarch’s hands flex once, then drop to his
sides.
    The Bori said something gloating, and the Dol’jharian
responded. Sedry knew herself poised on the brink of her own precipice.
    The Bori made a flourish and lit the boxes: mounted inside
them, plainly to be seen, the heads of the former heirs. The Dol’jharian spoke,
but the words went past Sedry. It was all meaningless ritual now, the
triumphant conqueror parading his prize prisoner in order to ensure obedience
in his lower-ranked new subjects.
    Striking to her heart was the grief in the Panarch’s face,
twinned, amplified, in the Aerenarch’s before her. But where the Panarch
managed to smooth his features, assuming once again the detestable Douloi
superiority,