Брайан Макклеллан - Wrath of Empire

He knelt next to the corpse for a few moments before looking up at Ka-poel. “Oh, stop glaring at me,” he told her. “You’re like a goddamn child playing with ants compared to these. Either let them go, or let me kill them.”

The glaring continued, and Styke stepped over the corpse and approached Ka-poel. “I know exactly what kind of a monster I am, but I don’t approve of suffering. You can find your answers from someone else. She earned herself a quick death.” He turned away, then thought better of it and swung back around to face Ka-poel. “If you have this kind of power, you should be using it to keep my men alive. You should strike first – not wait until we’ve taken such a damned battering. Figure out what you are, and be it. But don’t toy with people beneath you, and don’t waste the lives of my lancers.”

He gave her one last long look and then headed back to camp.

Michel was unable to stop thinking about how Ichtracia had the softest, most comfortable sheets he’d ever touched in his life.

He lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling, watching the late-morning light slowly inch across while he tried to focus on the Blackhats. Where was je Tura hiding? How had he arrested so many Blackhats without a single soul knowing where to find that asshole? How did je Tura keep conducting these bombings?

The questions kept running through his head, but he kept coming back to Ichtracia’s sheets. She said they were some sort of rare silk from Dynize. Michel had slept on silk sheets once or twice, and he didn’t remember them feeling anything like this. Even when he rubbed them between his fingers, it was like touching gossamer – ethereal, lacking any kind of substance. Like sleeping on the steam from a kettle in that split second after it had cooled enough to touch but before it had evaporated.

He glanced over at Ichtracia. She, apparently, had no problem sleeping until noon. She was still snoring softly, her face looking peaceful and pleased in that way of a child dreaming of something nice. She was, he’d decided, a genuinely pleasant person who happened to be a Privileged. Maybe not a good person. She spoke of killing and torture with the offhanded manner of someone who is well acquainted with both. But she was quietly charming in a way that almost made Michel forget about the pair of runed gloves in her breast pocket or next to the bed.

Michel slipped out of bed and headed to the window to watch the afternoon traffic. “You’re letting yourself get distracted because you can’t find the girl,” he muttered to himself, glancing over his shoulder at Ichtracia’s sleeping form.

“I’m protecting myself,” he answered.

“And damn well enjoying it in the meantime.”

“I can mix work and play,” he insisted under his breath. “I’ve done it before.”

“Not when there was this much on the line. You went off the road the moment you decided that punching Forgula in public was a good idea. You’ve become too exposed here – too known.”

Michel sucked on his teeth, trying to come up with a rebuttal to his own accusations. Nothing came to mind. Back when he worked his way up through the Blackhats as an informant, he’d gone deep into enemy territory by joining separatist movements and rubbing shoulders with propagandists and gangs. He’d never infiltrated a damned government.

“Yes, you have.” He laughed at himself quietly. “You’re confusing Blackhat Michel with real Michel again. Your whole damn life is an infiltration. Do you think that the Dynize are any more dangerous than the Blackhats?” He briefly considered Taniel’s warnings about the bone-eyes, but his thoughts were broken by a soft moan behind him.

He turned to find Ichtracia stretching languidly, giving him that cat-in-a-sunbeam smile that she seemed to use so often.

“What are you muttering about over there?” she asked.

“Work,” he answered truthfully. He continued. “I’m trying to figure out where je Tura has gone.”

“You’re very focused.”

“It’s my job. I’m not allowed to not think about these things.”

Ichtracia sat up, the sheets pooling around her stomach. She reached into the drawer of her nightstand and produced a mala pipe, lighting it expertly with a match and taking a long drag before holding it toward him.

“This early in the day?” he asked.

She let smoke curl out her nostrils. “One advantage to being a tool of the state is that I don’t think about work. Once in a while I am pointed at something that needs to be destroyed or people who need to die and …” She made a “poof” gesture with one hand, then took another drag of the mala and set the pipe aside. Her tone was careless, but Michel thought he saw a tightness in the corner of her eyes.

“I’m taking your advice to heart,” Michel said. “I’m going to ignore Sedial and focus on making myself useful to your government.”

“ Our government,” Ichtracia corrected. “Or have you already forgotten your place, Devin-Michel?”

“Our government,” Michel agreed. “Sorry, it takes some getting used to.”

Ichtracia watched him with a soft smile, eyes half-lidded, and for a moment Michel harbored a fear that she could see through him into his secrets – that she’d caught all his tiny verbal mistakes and considered ulterior motives and already suspected him of being something more than either a Blackhat or a turncoat.

Ichtracia patted the bed beside her, and Michel took two involuntary steps forward before his ears caught the sound of a carriage coming to a stop in front of the townhouse. He backpedaled to the window and looked down to find a carriage with the red and black curtains of a Dynize dignitary. There were a dozen soldiers on horseback surrounding the carriage, and it didn’t take long for Michel to find out why: A footman opened the door, and Ka-Sedial stepped out, knuckling his back while the footman ran to Ichtracia’s door.

“Ka-Sedial is here,” Michel warned, just two seconds before there was a hammering down below them.

“Shit.” Ichtracia stashed the mala pipe and leapt from bed, snatching a silk robe from the floor. She threw it over her shoulders as she joined him at the window, looking down on her grandfather, and Michel was surprised to hear real venom in her voice. “I sent the damned servants away so I could enjoy you.” The pounding continued, and she swore again. “Stay here, and don’t you dare get dressed.”

Barefoot and in just a robe, Ichtracia ran from the room. Michel listened to her footsteps down the hall and then the stairs. A moment later, he heard the door open underneath the bedroom.

He pressed himself against the wall, watching the group in the street outside. Sedial’s bodyguard remained in their saddles while the footman returned to Sedial and gave a half bow. Sedial seemed to hesitate, and Michel couldn’t help but think that if he had a rifle in hand, he could do more damage to the Dynize with a single bullet from this angle than all the work he could possibly do for Taniel for the rest of his life.

To his surprise, a second carriage pulled up behind Ka-Sedial’s. There were no bodyguards, but Sedial gestured to the carriage as if it was expected. A Palo woman emerged, perhaps nineteen or twenty, and joined Sedial in the street. Taking her arm, cane in the other hand, Sedial walked toward Ichtracia’s door.

Curious, Michel slipped on his pants and crept into the hallway, eyeballing the distance between the joists beneath the floorboards in an effort to avoid the creakiest parts of the floor. He could hear Sedial and Ichtracia speaking, but it wasn’t until he was nearly at the top of the stairs that he could hear their conversation well. They spoke in quick-fire Dynize, making it a little hard for Michel to follow.