she might need herself. Still it was something worth considering.
A maid brought in some more tea and placed it on the table in front of her. Tamara dismissed her and took a sip. Many of the coven were first rate mages and would carry talismans of protection against poison or know spells to neutralise it. Xephan himself almost certainly would. A deadly drug might slow them but it would not kill them. She needed something swift and certain, and sure to work even against strong protective magic. That meant either a dire blade or truesilver.
They would be suspicious of either. A dire blade would register on wards or divinatory enchantments, and if she was searched a truesilver blade was sure to excite suspicion. They were not the sort of things that you brought to a ritual. The eddy currents caused by the presence of truesilver could disrupt sorcery or cause spells to go awry. These were things that might have catastrophic consequences when powerful magic was involved. And she would not be able to shadow-walk bearing a true silver weapon which might be a fatal disadvantage.
Poison might be useless and truesilver or magic weapons would tip off her targets. They would be shielded against most forms of inimical sorcery. Indeed most of them were better at it than she was. That left main force. She could kill Xephan, with her bare hands if need be. The question was whether she could overcome the rest of the coven and any guards they might have present. She doubted that they would use a Nerghul or a demon but you never knew.
And the whole process raised other questions. Killing Xephan would have consequences. Xephan’s followers would not forgive her for it, if they discovered she had done it, and they were powerful enemies with a very long reach. And Xephan would simply be replaced by someone most likely just as bad, and the Empress would be removed or cowed as before.
In reality Arachne was asking her to destroy the organisation her father had spent so long creating. She did not have much choice in the matter if the Brotherhood were serious about this scheme of killing all the humans. It was the sort of thing her father would have considered in the final days of his madness, and if for no other reason than that, Tamara would oppose it. Perhaps this was one of her father’s schemes and Xephan was merely implementing it. Just thinking about it made her flesh crawl.
She was a killer, pure and simple, but she killed quickly and cleanly and for a reason. The notion of indiscriminate slaughter on so massive a scale not only sickened her, it offended her. It was unworthy of the sophisticated Terrarch intellect. There was no art to it. It was a brutal, brute force solution, the sort of thing that her father would have expected from humans, not his peers, at least back when he had still been sane. She thought of the humans she had known, of her servants, and her lovers, and tried to imagine them as the walking dead. Even if Xephan could protect them, others just like them would die.
And for what — to keep alive the Terrarch dream of dominating a world? The cost was too high. It would break her own people in the end, the knowledge of what they had done, or what had been done in their name. It was one thing to cow a population into submission. It was another to slaughter them in their entirety.
The plan did have merits. She was prepared to admit that. No doubt the human survivors would gain a new respect for the potency of Terrarch sorcery, and another thousand years of Terrarch rule would be guaranteed. But so much could go wrong. Maybe Xephan could not control the walking dead. Maybe the plague would cause the collapse of both nations, and the entire Terrarchy. The whole economy was based on human labour. They tilled the fields. They made the beds, and the clothes and the weapons. It was madness to think that animated corpses could be used as a substitute for skilled labour. If the plague ran out of control, Xephan was unleashing an age of barbarism for the Terrarchs as well as the humans. Surely he could see that?
Maybe Xephan was completely aware of what he was doing. Perhaps it was all part of his plan. In an age of chaos, the whole structure of Terrarch society could be overturned. They would be back in the days of the Conquest when it was the Terrarchs against the world. Maybe that was what he wanted, a rebirth, a renewal of the old ways, an end to decadence. She knew enough of him and his faction to know that such a thing might be possible. They were that ruthless, and wanted to see a return to the ancient martial virtues of the Terrarchy.
There was the Black Mirror to consider — what if the Brotherhood had found a way to open the Gates to Al’Terra? It would not be long before the Princes of Shadow were among them once more. If they weren’t already. It was not a thought that bore considering. Perhaps all of this was merely to pave the way for the Enlightened Ones.
In any case, she had decided to oppose Xephan, as much because he was her rival, as because she considered his plan insane. If she wanted to take on her father’s mantle and stake out a place for herself in the hierarchy of the Empire, Xephan would need to be removed. The only question remained was how she was going to do it.
The best time to strike would be tonight. He had summoned her to his office. It was the place where he would feel most secure. There would be guards outside but she doubted that there would be anyone with him. He would want to discuss Brotherhood business with her in private — she was probably never going to get another chance like this. She did not want to look into the Black Mirror and if she refused, she would instantly come under suspicion.
She considered the advantages. If she did the thing right she would have the advantage of surprise. She doubted that Xephan had any idea of her true capabilities. Of course, she could say the same thing about him. He had changed and doubtless possessed great sorcerous power. Perhaps she would be unable to kill him. On the other hand, it was not going to get any easier if she gave him time to prepare.
She did not like rushing things, haste breeds mistakes, but she could see she was going to have to. She also needed to have a contingency plan in place, in case things went wrong.
She laughed softly. If things went wrong the most likely outcome was her death, but such thinking was neither constructive nor helpful. She needed to have an escape route in place, and a method of getting beyond Xephan’s vengeance. The more she considered it, the more it occurred to her that there really was only one option, the place where she had just come from, the West. She would need to hide herself in the shadow of the only person powerful enough to protect her from the revenge of a cabal of sorcerers, Asea of the Selari.
Tamara lay flat on the roof of Lord Lichtenhau’s mansion and stared at the Palace. She was garbed in tight- fitting black. Soot smudged her face. She checked her gear one last time to be sure everything was in place; poisoned shortsword, throwing knives smeared with magebane, dagger, a garrotte wound around her waist. In the small carryall on her back she had a spidersilk rope and a silence enspelled grapnel, along with a full collection of combat drugs and medications.
Doubts nagged at her. She was not at all sure that killing Xephan would change anything. Another member of the Brotherhood would step up and take his place. There were any number of ambitious politicians and mages among them. Killing one and thinking the matter was over was like stamping on an ant and thinking you had wiped out a whole nest.
But she had to start somewhere. She would kill Xephan, and if need be she would kill his successor, and any successor after that, until eventually they got the message. The slaughter would unbalance the Brotherhood, slow their plans while they investigated, keep them off-balance and nervous. If things worked out right she could implicate other members in the assassination and perhaps trigger an internal war.
As long as they did not suspect what she was about, she could get away with it. Of course, they might work out what she was up to and take steps to eliminate her. She wondered if any of them had known what her father really was, and what she had turned into. She had to trust to the fact that Malkior had been a very secretive Terrarch, and very good at keeping his secrets. Many had died to make certain of them.
She was only putting things off. Procrastination never solved anything. She opened the shadow-path. Reality split in front of her and she stepped forward into the gap. Cold enveloped her. Chill presences surrounded her and she felt as she sometimes did in dreams, as if she were falling endlessly with no hope of being bumped into wakefulness.
A moment later she was on the walls of the Palace, looking back and down over the cliffs onto the slate-tiled roofs where she had been heartbeats before. She breathed hard and took a mouthful of sorcerer’s cordial from her flask to rid herself of the feeling of being drained that shadow-walking always gave her.
She moved along the side of the building, till she was above and just to the right of the window of Xephan’s apartments and looked around for sentries. There were none.
Slipping the grapnel into place, she paid out the line, and then abseiled down, like a spider dropping on a thread of web. It was cold, and the ground was a long way below her. One slip would send her to her death.
