disowned me when I failed to go down with my first ship, the
'We all make mistakes,' said Frost, not looking at him. Silence smiled slightly.
'Aren't you going to tell us about your family, Investigator? We've both opened our hearts here. Tell us where you came from.'
There was a long pause, until Silence had almost decided he'd pushed it too far, and then Frost spoke very quietly, so that Silence and Stelmach had to concentrate to make out her words. She didn't look at either of them as she spoke.
'Officially, Investigators have no Family but each other. But I was curious, so I broke into the right hidden files and checked out my background. I found my parents' address and went to visit them. Only my father would agree to see me. I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn't listen. He was afraid of me. I never went back. No Family made me, Captain. I made me, with a little help from the Empire.'
'I'm glad we had this little talk,' said Stelmach. 'I was feeling a bit depressed, but now I've moved on to feeling actually suicidal. Why don't we all just swallow our tongues now and get it over with?'
'Because there's still hope,' said Silence. 'And because even if I am going down, I'll still fight them every inch of the way. Right, Investigator?'
'Right,' said Frost. 'Oh, look, the warrior priests seem to be recovering.'
The priests had got their breath back and were now back on their feet, though still leaning on each other for support. The military were openly chuckling and nudging each other. Some of the courtiers began to applaud again, and then stopped and looked to see if the Empress approved. Luckily for all concerned, Lionstone was apparently deep in conversation with General Beckett. So everyone else turned to look at the other man standing in front of the crowd before the Iron Throne: James Kassar, Cardinal of the Church of Christ the Warrior.
Said by many to be one of the most dangerous men in the Empire, he was tall and muscular, and wore black battle armor as though born to it. A large crucifix stood out in bas-relief on the armor over his heart. He'd been handsome once, but not anymore. Kassar had had a man executed as a heretic on questionable grounds, and the man's widow threw acid in the Cardinal's face. He struck her down a moment later, gutting her with his sword, but the damage had been done. His right eye was gone, eaten right out of the socket, and the right side of his face had been burned down to the skull beneath, so that discolored pitted bone showed clearly through ragged strips of flesh. His teeth gleamed through the remnants of his right cheek, giving him a constant ghastly half smile that had humor in it. His face was a fright mask to turn the strongest stomach, and he knew it. That was why he'd never had it healed. A regeneration machine would have smoothed the terrible wounds away, but he chose not to. Perhaps as a sign that nothing could stop or hurt him, perhaps as a reverse kind of vanity. There were those who thought it pleased Kassar to have a face that made others quail.
There were also those who said he'd had the guards who let the woman slip past them arrested and then lowered into a vat of acid, feet first, one inch at a time. Few people had trouble believing the story. Cardinal Kassar was known for his cold rages and a vindictiveness that masqueraded as a thirst for justice. He'd risen rapidly through the ranks of the Church through leading vigorous crusades against heretics, which could be anyone who challenged his or the Church's authority. He didn't hesitate to accuse anyone who stood against the Church's rising influence or who got in the way of his own personal ascent, even if they were friends or Family or previous allies. And as he rose through the ranks with unprecedented speed, people hurried to copy his zeal, if they knew what was good for them.
As a result, a useful way of dealing with one's enemies was to accuse them of heresy. No proof was needed; often the accusation was enough. There were tribunals, where the accused could present their defense, but they cost money. Justice has never come cheap. Things got so bad some people tried to take out insurance against being accused, to cover possible legal fees, only to discover the premiums were more expensive than the fees. That was when the courtiers first realized no one was safe anymore. The Empress wasn't slow to pick up on this and found the practice particularly useful for helping her keep her Court in order. If anyone started making trouble or getting above themselves, the word would go out and the unfortunate victim would be awakened in the early hours by the sound of holy boots kicking his door down. Soon anyone who even annoyed Lionstone had better have very strong ties with the Church, or a lot of money to hire lawyers. If you could find a lawyer brave enough to take on the Church these days.
The courtiers played the same dangerous game, denouncing each other every day for political, Family, or personal reasons, but they were taken less seriously. The truth quickly vanished in a morass of claims and counterclaims, until even the Church grew sick of it. So they just recorded everything, to be kept for future ammunition, as necessary.
Valentine Wolfe had been denounced so many times for all kinds of heresy that the Church lost count, including some that had previously been thought to be only theoretically possible, but the charges never stuck. No one doubted that he was an utter degenerate, with a drug habit strong enough to have killed half a dozen normal men, but as head of the Empire's first Family, incredibly rich and powerful, with the Empress's ear and support, he was for all practical purposes completely untouchable. Some wits made remarks about barge poles, but never when Valentine was around. Kassar still hadn't given up on him, but for the time being they settled for conspicuously ignoring each other. The courtiers watched avidly. Everyone knew the situation couldn't go on forever. It was just a question of which one made a misstep first; and then there'd be blood and hair on the walls.
People had been laying bets for months.
Valentine Wolfe stood a little alone in the heart of the crowd, as he always did. He was the head of the first Family on Golgotha, his every word a command for thousands of people, but he had no friends, or anyone who could say they were close to him. Valentine didn't give a damn. He never had. He'd always found himself infinitely better company than any of those who surrounded him. And given his continuing experimentation with every drug under the sun, and a few that grew only in darkness, his inner world was more than enough to occupy him in his quiet moments.
Valentine was tall and slender and darkly delicate, like a fairy-tale demon prince, only more unreal. His face was long and thin and dyed a perfect white. Heavy mascara surrounded his overbright eyes, and a thickly painted crimson smile gave his face its only expression. Jet-black hair fell to his shoulders in thick curls and ringlets that had never known a comb. He wore dark clothes with the occasional splash of color, red for preference, and ignored the passing dictates of fashion with supreme indifference. In his time, he'd used every drug known to man and kept his private staff of chemists busy coming up with new ones. It was truly said he'd never met a chemical he didn't like. Anyone else who tried to ingest the quantity and variety of drugs Valentine had would undoubtably have been poisoned a dozen times over, his brains helplessly scrambled; but by some dark alchemical miracle. Valentine thrived and prospered. And if he saw the rest of the world rather differently than most people and had the occasional animated discussion with people who weren't there, still, it didn't seem to be slowing him down any. He remained sharp, ambitious, and extremely dangerous.
But even he knew he couldn't go on forever as he was, without paying the price. He had the best doctors his considerable fortune could afford, and took frequent rests in his own personal regeneration machine, but his continuous extensive drug use combined with the never-ending pressure of his many intrigues to undo his precarious and hard-won self-control. He was burning himself up, inside and out, and his only response was to throw more chemicals on the fire. As a result, he was now so preternaturally sharp and tuned-in that he all but quivered where he stood. He was so incredibly aware that he could read body language as though it was the printed word, with everyone's merest gesture shouting information at him. Plans and plots and pieces of whimsy flashed through his mind, sparking like lightning, come and gone in a moment. His body might be attending the Court, but his mind was here, there, and everywhere, all at once. Valentine rode the waves of his mind like a surfer, perfectly balanced, looking down from the giddy heights of an endless curl. He found it exhilarating, but he never lost control. Or if he did, no one seemed to notice.
He remained convinced that if he could just discover the right combination of drugs, he could acquire a perfect equilibrium between the effects he needed and the side effects he endured. A perfect never-ending high, soaring like a bird, limitless and free. But in the meantime, he found he needed increasingly large doses of each drug just to get the same desired effect; and he had to take more and more new drugs to counter the malicious effects of older drugs, whose remnants were still lurking in his system. As a result he was thinner than ever and much more intense, jolted from moment to moment by his chemical express, and he could no more comprehend a life without his little helpers than a life without oxygen. He was also taking specific short-lived drugs for specific
