Lara had not even looked at Kirkus that night.
Not once.
This girl at the table, Rianna, she had a way of glancing at her fiance that made Kirkus feel uneasy; if he had been remotely inclined towards self-analysis he would have recognized it for the envy that it was. But instead, he merely sat with increasing ill humour and watched with darkening eyes.
One of her hands lay beneath the table as she ate, Kirkus observed. Peering closer, he saw how that same arm kept moving to a rhythm, though so delicately it was barely enough to notice. Kirkus grunted. With the showy subtlety of a drunk, he dropped his unused napkin to the floor, and ducked beneath the table to squint along its underside. There. Her fragile white hand gloved in lace, the tips of her fingers stroking lightly against her fiance's crotch.
Kirkus retrieved the napkin and returned it the table. He was grinning now, and, as he looked upon the girl again, it was as though he suddenly saw a different person. His attention lingered on her skinny body beneath her green dress, the breasts pouting with youth, the long swan-like neck curving up to a face, that was soft-skinned, proud, both whitened and blushed with make-up, and framed with a great tumult of red hair.
'I want her,' he said to the room, and his quiet and fierce demand caught the attention of all.
'What, dear?' inquired his grandmother from the far end of the table, the old bitch pretending to be deaf.
He pointed a finger at Rianna.
'I want her,' he repeated.
The girl's plump mother broke her silence at last. She giggled into her fist as though she had suddenly found herself in the presence of the insane. The other diners, however, seemed far removed from laughter. They were still hooked on his words, their mouths open in shock, perfectly poised.
'Are you quite serious?' asked his grandmother, in a tone that implied he had better be sure of himself before he next spoke.
Kirkus knew what he was asking of her. Back in Q'os, she might well refuse such a thing; she had done so with Lara, when he had demanded her as his own after the night of the ball, too fearful of upsetting the delicate balances of power that his mother had contrived, as always, to maintain her position. But here? With this provincial fool of a high priest? The report she had been given earlier in the day was correct. Belias was obviously playing at his role of Mann, not fulfilling it.
'You know as well as I do what these people are. Yes, grandmother. I want her – for my Cull.'
The young redhead held a hand to her throat and turned to her father for reassurance. Her fiance placed a hand against her arm and stood up in protest, though he said nothing. The mother continued to giggle.
The old priestess Kira sighed. What was passing through her mind in the next few moments no one in the room could guess at, not even Kirkus, but she stared long and hard at him down the length of the table, and he at her, till the silence grew into a hanging presence.
Turning to Belias, Kira studied him carefully, his face suddenly drawn tight and white with fear. It seemed to prompt her in her decision. Her smile, when it came, appeared merely for politeness.
'High Priest Belias,' she said deliberately, placing her cutlery down beside her plate, 'I would ask of you a question.'
The man cleared his throat. 'Mistress?'
'What is the greatest threat to our order, would you say?'
He opened and closed his mouth a few times before the words gained voice. 'I… I don't know. We rule most of the known world. We are dominant everywhere. I… see no threat to our order.'
Her eyes closed for a moment, as if the lids were heavy. 'The greatest threat,' she intoned, 'will always come from within. Always we must guard against our own weaknesses – of becoming soft, of allowing those into our order who are not truly of the faith. This is how religions become hollow in the end, and meaningless. You must surely appreciate this.'
'Mistress, I…'
She opened her eyes again, and the high priest fell silent. His hands, poised above the tablecloth, trembled visibly.
'Thank you for your hospitality this evening,' she told him, dabbing at her mouth with her napkin before setting it down.
The old priestess raised a skeletal hand into the air and snapped her fingers once, with a sound like the breaking of bone. As one, the four Acolytes stationed around the room began to move.
The girl shrieked as they fell upon her.
Her fiance swung a fist, desperate and panicked enough for it to catch an approaching Acolyte on the jaw.
In the next instant another Acolyte drew his sword and raised it to strike – the fiance, by instinct, raised his forearm to block the blow, and with a butcher's mindless simplicity the Acolyte hacked clean through it, then raised the sword again and hacked down through the wounded man's collarbone. The severed hand had already dropped to the floor. The arm flopped heavy and awkward next to it, where it rolled to settle on the open palm, while its owner fell screaming, blood spurting everywhere.
The mother stood up and vomited a shower of barely digested shrimps over her embroidered tablecloth.
The father mouthed words of inconsequence and stumbled around the table towards his daughter, his voice rising. But he slipped on the spreading pool of blood on the floor and, as he regained his footing, clutched at his chest, his face tightly pinched.
The doors at the far end of the room burst open and the mansion's guards tumbled in, weapons already drawn, anticipating trouble. They took in the scene: their master reeling as though drunk at the far end of the room, the bloody mess of a man still screaming on the floor, the daughter struggling in the arms of the Acolytes: and there, seated calmly at either end of the table and sipping wine, the two white-robed visitors from Q'os.
The men backed slowly from the room, closing the doors gently as they left.
The high priest groaned, then fell to his knees as Kira rose above him.
'Please,' he barely managed as he clutched at his chest. A small blade appeared in her hand. With the smallest of motions she swept it across his throat.
'Take the mother, too,' she commanded, as she stood over the dying man.
The Acolytes seized the mother and dragged both her and her shrieking daughter from the room. Kira paused to look down at Belias. She stared into his rolling eyes.
'Do not be bitter,' she told him, though it was doubtful if he even heard her words. 'You did well enough out of us – while it lasted.'
Kira stepped over the high priest, rather than around him, leaving a trail of dainty bloody footprints in her wake.
Kirkus finished his wine with one swallow and stood.
In the great hall of the mansion, the guards waited with expressions of poorly concealed fear. Egan, the high priest's chancellor, stood before them, his hands hidden within the sleeves of his white robe. His silver hair contrasted sharply with the flush of his face, and Kirkus assumed it to be anger until he observed an interested gleam in the man's eyes, which now followed both mother and daughter as they were pulled outside into the rain. He wondered if he was the one who had penned the note earlier that day.
'We have need of a new high priest, Chancellor Egan,' Kira announced.
'Indeed,' the man purred.
'I hope you prove a more dedicated follower of the faith than your predecessor ever was.'
Egan bowed his head. 'He was weak, Mistress. I am not.'
Kira appraised the man for a moment longer, then with a sniff she whirled about and swept through the front doorway.
Kirkus dutifully followed his grandmother outside.
CHAPTER FIVE
In Flight The cabin stank of mould and dampness and vomit. Nothing moved in the room, yet the gentle motion of the skyship could be detected through the occasional creak of timbers, a rattle of the lantern hanging from the
