William King - Shadowblood

Tamara rode through the outskirts of town. The South Road came in through the least fashionable area, where the poorer Terrarch families had their small mansions and the shops of the less expensive tradesmen catering to them were to be found. There were some factories and manufacturing concerns where coaches and saddles and guns and dresses were made. Corrals for livestock driven in from the country stank up some squares. Tanneries belched chemicals into the nearby waters as they turned hides into leather.

There wasn’t the huge slum population she so often encountered in the cities of the West. In the Empire, no humans had been driven off the land, and come to town in search of work. Most Sardean Terrarchs still measured their wealth by the number of thralls they owned.

Askander was considered backwards by the progressives of the West, but that was true only in some areas. In the study of sorcery and the occult mysteries, the Empire still led the world, and there were more scholarly bookshops, and monasteries here than in the whole of Talorea.

There was also a profusion of Temples and shrines to saints, and even at this time of the day, they were surrounded by human supplicants. Within each was an altar and hundreds of sacred ikons and above each altar was a picture of the Empress, revered by them as Madonna and goddess, the living embodiment of the greatness of Sardea.

It was an irony that Tamara’s father had always enjoyed pointing out. In Sardea, where humans were most oppressed, they loved and worshipped their ruler all the more. Many of the older generation claimed that it showed humans loved the lash, and lost respect for those who would not use it. She had heard the arguments trotted out again and again, spoken of with the certainty of religious truth but she had come to doubt them.

Something was happening in the West. The world was changing as the humans woke to the strength of their numbers. The old order would be swept away if it did not adjust to that new reality. Or unless it did something dark and deadly.

As she rode on the size of the buildings increased. Statues to famous Terrarchs stood proudly at every junction and over every fountain. Many clasped ever burning lights in their hands or had them mounted on their crowns or the blades of their swords. By daylight they were merely dull gems but by night they would emit their soft sorcerous glow.

She reached the Ring; its streets lined on the outer side by the palaces of the mighty, on the inner side by the offices of the great government departments such as the House of Gold and the Palace of War. Each of those buildings was sub-divided as a beehive into hundreds of offices where thousands of drones moved from small cells to administer the wishes of their masters who sat like queen bees in their central cells.

The main industry of Askander was government, and the maintenance of the small army of functionaries who oversaw the workings of the great bureaucratic machine. Power was the material that was dealt with here, cut and sewn by those who held it and dispensed to their representatives so that they might go and work the Empress’s will in the wider world. Every Terrarch family had their palaces here for that reason. They could not afford to be too far from the font from which all other benefits flowed.

She was getting stared at now. She had changed out of her earlier disguise but she still looked grubby from travel, dressed in male clothes, and armed. On the roads she had been one more soldier swept along by the winds of war. Here the Terrarchs were more elegant, finely dressed and spectacularly well-groomed. As she sometimes did, she felt suddenly rootless again, out of place among these glittering people, unsure of herself. It was a feeling that had swept over her since her father had begun her true education, and her training as a Shadowblood. She was apart from these people, separated from them by a terrible and holy secret, for which she could be killed if it were ever uncovered.

One or two of the high Terrarchs looked like they might like to hail her or challenge her, but that would not be polite, and it was always possible she was someone of very high status returning on some mission of great importance, so they did what was normal and ignored her.

She entered the Street of Saint Selena and was at once struck by the wealth and beauty of the mansions that fronted it, its proximity to the towering mass of the Imperial Palace that dwarfed them all. She saw the number of small private temples interspersed among the buildings, and the swarms of liveried humans going about their master’s business. She turned right and came to the gates of her father’s house, now her own, she supposed, and was gratified when the humans on guard duty recognised her and saluted her at once.

They were both huge men, flat-featured, cold eyed, with cropped blond hair and a manner that was a mix of politeness and icy menace to anyone other than Terrarchs. Her, they looked genuinely glad to see.

Other servants, and stablehands, came to greet her and soon she was at the centre of a quiet storm of activity, as they welcomed her and made her comfortable. Her horse was taken and stabled. Her rooms were prepared. Fresh clothes and a warm bath at just the right temperature were made ready. As she always did at this stage of her return, she realised how much she had taken these things for granted, how natural it seemed to be in a world where she was the centre of so much flattering attention. She was grateful for it now, but she knew that would pass, and soon it would seem like things had always been that way, until she had to leave the cocoon and make her way in the cold world again.

After she was refreshed she wandered the house. It felt huge and empty, and the fact that her father would never come back to it made it seem all the more so. She paused in the library and looked at his favourite chair where he was wont to sit with his collection of histories and grimoires and books of Al’Terran lore.

As a child he had pointed out many fascinating things to her, had seemed remote and calm and the very epitome of what a civilised Terrarch should be. Only later, as she had come to understand the world of blood and shadows he had always inhabited, did she realise that was a mask, just one of many he had layered over his inner self.

She walked through the ballroom, vast and empty save for some kitchen girls on their knees scrubbing the stone floor, and remembered the balls that had filled the place with music and light, and the intrigues, political and erotic that had taken place in the darker nooks and alcoves. She found herself touching hangings and vases as if to reassure herself of their reality, and the reality of the memories in which they had also been present.

She moved to the huge sitting room with its large bay window and fine view of the street and saw that things had not really changed for other people as they had for her. Out there, the world went on, as it always did. Soldiers marched, nobles rode, merchants sold, thieves stole. Servants came and went, supplicants presented themselves at the doors of the more powerful.

Out there, all was clamour. In here, all was silence.

She knew there were things she should be doing, letters to be written, visits to be made. Great events were taking place, and she should have a hand in their shaping, but at this moment, she found it difficult to care. She wanted to stop for a while and think, to try and put things in perspective in a way she should have done long ago and never had. She wanted time and peace and stability and she knew those were exactly the things she could not have with a great orgy of violence about to sweep through the world.

Briefly she considered what she had witnessed in the West and on the road. She thought of the refugees and the walking corpses and the stink of strange sorcery constantly in the air. She suspected that the Empress’s sorcerers had their hands in that. She could feel the foul magic hovering in the air over the city. There were plenty more like Jaderac to be found at Court, Terrarchs whose ambitions justified their using any means, no matter how loathsome to fulfil them.