'Understand me. I said I would never help a thing like you, but you tricked me into doing so and almost got away with it. That's why I have done this. That's why I have expended the considerable time and effort involved in raising you, snaring you and binding you. This is a lesson. I will never, ever allow my actions or my life to benefit the Archenemy. You said that from the outset, you knew I was the one who would free you from Quixos's service. It's a shame for you that you failed to see what I might do to you instead.'
'Damn you!' the voice was louder.
There will be a time, Cherubael, daemon-thing, when you will wish with all your putrid soul to be Quixos's plaything again.'
Cherubael threw itself at me as far as it could before the chains went taut and snapped it back. Its scream of rage and malice shook the cell and blew every last one of the candles out.
I sealed the vacuum hatch, engaged the warp dampers and the void shield, and turned the thirteen locks one by one.
From far away in the house, Jarat was ringing the bell for dinner. I was bone- weary from my exertions, but food and wine and good company would refresh me.
I climbed the screwstair from the deep basement stronghold, code-locked the door and wandered to my study. Outside, the snows had come early to Gudran. Light flakes were blowing in through the twilight, across the woods and paddocks, and settling across the lawns of my estate.
In the study, I returned the items I had been carrying to their places. I put the bottles of chrism back on the shelf, and the ritual athame, mirror and lamens in the casket. The Imperial amulet went back on its velvet pad in the locking draw, and I slid the tube-scrolls back into their catalogue rack.
Then I placed the ranestaff on its hooks in the lit alcove above the glass case containing the broken pieces of proud Barbarisater.
Finally, I opened the void safe in the floor behind my bureau, and gently laid the
Jarat was ringing the bell again.
I sealed the safe and went down to dinner.
BACKCLOTH
FOR A CROWN
ADDITIONAL
Lord Froigre, much to everyone's dismay including, I'm sure, his own, was dead.
It was a dry, summer morning in 355.M41 and I was taking breakfast with Alizebeth Bequin on the terrace of Spaeton House when I received the news. The sky was a blurry blue, the colour of Sameterware porcelain, and down in the bay the water was a pale lilac, shot through with glittering frills of silver. Sand doves warbled from the drowsy shade of the estate orchards.
Jubal Kircher, my craggy, dependable chief of household security, came out into the day's heat from the garden room, apologised courteously for interrupting our private meal, and handed me a folded square of thin transmission paper.
Trouble?' asked Bequin, pushing aside her dish of ploin crepes.
'Froigre's dead,' I replied, studying the missive.
'Froigre who?'
'Lord Froigre of House Froigre.'
'You knew him?'
Very well. I would count him as a friend. Well, how very miserable. Dead at eighty-two. That's no age.'
'Was he ill?' Bequin asked.
'No. Aen Froigre was, if anything, maddeningly robust and healthy. Not a scrap of augmetics about him. You know the sort.' I made this remark pointedly. My career had not been kind to my body. I had been repaired, rebuilt, augmented and generally sewn back together more times than I cared to remember. I was a walking testimonial to Imperial Medicae reconstruction sur-gery. Alizebeth, on the other hand, still looked like a
woman in her prime, a beautiful woman at that, and only the barest minimum of juvenat work had preserved her so.
'According to this, he died following a seizure at his home last night. His family are conducting thorough investigations, of course, but…' I drummed my fingers on the table-top.
'Foul play?'
'He was an influential man/
'Such men have enemies/
'And friends/ I said. I handed her the communique. That's why his widow has requested my assistance/
But for my friendship with Aen, I'd have turned the matter down. Alizebeth had only just arrived on Gudrun after an absence of almost eighteen months, and would be gone again in a week, so I had resolved to spend as much time with her as possible. The operational demands of the Distaff, based on Messina, kept her away from my side far more than I would have liked.
But this was important, and Lady Froigre's plea too distraught to ignore.
'I'll come with you/ Alizebeth suggested. 'I feel like a jaunt in the country/ She called for a staff car to be brought round from the stable block and we were on our way in under an hour.
Felippe Gabon, one of Kircher's security detail, acted as our driver. He guided the car up from Spaeton on a whisper of thrust and laid in a course for Menizerre. Soon we were cruising south-west over the forest tracts and the verdant cultivated belt outside Dorsay and leaving the Insume headland behind.
In the comfortable, climate-controlled rear cabin of the staff car, I told Alizebeth about Froigre.
There have been Froigres on Gudrun since the days of the first colonies. Their house is one of the Twenty-Six Venerables, that is to say one of the twenty-six original noble fiefs, and as such has an hereditary seat in the Upper Legislature of the planetary government. Other, newer houses have considerably more power and land these days, but nothing can quite eclipse the prestige of the Venerables. Houses like Froigre, Sangral, Meiss-ian. And Glaw/
She smiled impishly at my inclusion of that last name.
'So… power, land, prestige… a honeytrap for rivals and enemies. Did your friend have any?'
I shrugged. I'd brought with me several data-slates Psullus had looked out for me from the library. They contained heraldic ledgers, family histories, biographies and memoirs. And very little that seemed pertinent.
'House Froigre vied with House Athensae and House Brudish in the early years of Gudrun, but that's literally ancient history. Besides, House Brudish became extinct after another feud with House Pariti eight hundred years ago. Aen's grandfather famously clashed with Lord Sangral and the then Governor Lord Dougray over the introduction of
Founding Levy in the one-nineties, but that was just political, though Dougray never forgave him and later snubbed him by making Richtien chancellor. In recent times, House Froigre has been very much a quiet, solid, traditional seat in the Legislature. No feuds, that I know of. In fact, there hasn't been an inter-house war on Gudrun for seven generations.
'They all play nicely together, these days, do they?' she asked.
'Pretty much. One of the things I like about Gudrun is that it is so damned civilised.'
'Too damned civilised/ she admonished. 'One day, Gregor, one day this place will lull you into such a deep sense of tranquil seclusion that you'll be caught with your pants down.'
'I hardly think so. It's not complacency, before you jump down my throat. Gudrun – Spaeton House itself – is just a safe place. A sanctuary, given my line of work.'
