‘You’re cold.’
‘No one loves life more than me, Teal. No one’s lost more, either. You lost a ship, and that’s bad, but I lost a whole world. And regardless of which side they’re on, these people will all die if I don’t act.’ He returned to the papers, with their sketchy ideas about Mundar’s reinforcements, but whatever focus he’d had was gone now. ‘They owe you nothing, Teal, and you owe them nothing in return. The fact that you were here all those years ago… it doesn’t matter. Nothing came of it.’
Teal was silent. He thought that was going to be the end of it, that his words had found their mark, but after a few moments she said: ‘Something isn’t right. The man in the portrait – the one they call King Curtal. I knew him. But that wasn’t his name.’
As they made their approach to Havergal, slipping through cordon after cordon of patrols and defence stations, between armoured moons and belts of anti-ship mines, dodging patrol zones and battle fronts, Merlin felt a sickness building in him. He had seen worse things done to worlds in his travels. Much worse, in many cases: seen worlds reduced to molten slag or tumbling rubble piles or clouds of hot, chemically complex dust. But with few exceptions those horrors had been perpetrated not by people but by forces utterly beyond their control or comprehension. Not so here. The boiled oceans, the cratered landmasses, the dead and ashen forests, the poisoned, choking remnants of what had once been a life-giving atmosphere – these brutalities had been perpetrated by human action, people against people. It was an unnecessary and wanton crime, a cruel and injudicious act in a galaxy that already knew more than its share.
‘Is Gaffurius like this?’ Merlin asked, as Renouncer cleaved its way to ground, Tyrant matching its course with an effortless insouciance.
‘Gaffurius?’ Baskin asked, a fan of wrinkles appearing at the corner of his eyes. ‘No, much, much worse. At least we still have a few surface settlements, a few areas where the atmosphere is still breathable.’
‘I wouldn’t count that as too much of a triumph.’ Merlin’s mind was flashing back to the last days of Lecythus, the tainted rubble of its shattered cities, the grey heave of its restless cold ocean, waiting to reclaim what humans had left to ruin. He remembered Minla taking him to the huge whetstone monument, the edifice upon which she had embossed the version of events she wished to be codified as historical truth, long after she and her government were dust.
‘Don’t judge us too harshly, Merlin,’ Baskin said. ‘We don’t choose to be enmeshed in this war.’
‘Then end it.’
‘I intend to. But would you opt for any ceasefire with the Huskers, irrespective of the terms?’ He looked at Merlin, then at Teal, the three of them in Renouncer’s sweeping command bridge, standing before its wide arc of windows, shuttered for the moment against the glare of re-entry. Of course you wouldn’t. War is a terrible thing. But there are kinds of peace that are worse.’
‘I haven’t seen much evidence of that,’ Merlin said.
‘Oh, come now. Two men don’t have to spend too much time in each other’s company to know each other for what they are. We’re not so different, Merlin. We disdain war, affect a revulsion for it, but deep down it’ll always be in our blood. Without it, we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.’
Teal spoke up. ‘When we first met, Prince Baskin, you mentioned that you hadn’t always had this interest in languages. What was it you said? Toy soldiers and campaigns will only get you so far? That you used to play at war?’
‘In your language – in Main,’ Baskin said, ‘the word for school is “warcreche”. You learn war from the moment you can toddle.’
‘But we don’t play at it,’ Teal said.
The two ships shook off their cocoons of plasma and bellied into the thicker airs near the surface. They levelled into horizontal flight, and the windows de-shuttered themselves, Merlin blinking against the sudden silvery brightness of day. They were overflying a ravaged landscape, pressed beneath a low, oppressive cloud ceiling. Merlin searched the rolling terrain for evidence of a single living thing, but all he saw was desolation. Here and there was the faint scratch of what might once have been a road, or the gridded thumbprint of some former town, but it was clear that no one now lived among these ruins. Ravines, deep and ominous, sliced their way through the abandoned roads. There were so many craters, their walls interlacing, that it was as if rain had begun to fall on some dull grey lake, creating a momentary pattern of interlinked ripples.
‘If I need a planet looking after,’ Merlin mumbled, ‘remind me not to trust it to any of you lot.’
‘We’ll rebuild,’ Baskin said, setting his hands on the rail that ran under the sweep of windows. ‘Reclaim. Cleanse and resettle. Even now our genetic engineers are designing the hardy plant species that will re-blanket these lands in green and start making our atmosphere fit for human lungs.’ He caught himself, offering a self-critical smile. ‘You’ll forgive me. Too easy to forget that I’m not making some morale-boosting speech at one of our armaments complexes.’
‘Where do you all live now?’ Teal asked. ‘There were surface cities here once… weren’t there?’
‘We abandoned the last of those cities, Lurga, when I was just out of boyhood,’ Baskin said. ‘Now we live in underground communities, impervious to nuclear assault.’
‘I bet the views are just splendid,’ Merlin said.
Baskin met his sarcasm with a grim absence of humour. ‘We endure, Merlin – as the Cohort endures. Here. We’re approaching the entry duct to one of the sub-cities. Do you see that sloping hole?’ He was nodding at an angled mouth, jutting from the ground like a python buried up to its eyes. ‘The Gaffurians are good at destruction, but less good at precision. They can impair our moons and asteroids, but their weapons haven’t the accuracy to strike across space and find a target that small. We’ll return, a little later, and you’ll be made very welcome. But first I’d like to settle any doubts you might have about the syrinx. We’ll continue a little way north, into the highlands. I promise it won’t take long.’
Baskin was true to his word, and they had only flown for a few more minutes when the terrain began to buckle and wrinkle into the beginnings of a barren, treeless mountain range, rising in a series of forbidding steps until even the high-flying spacecraft were forced to increase their altitude. ‘Most of our military production takes place in these upland sectors,’ Baskin said. ‘We have ready access to metallic ores, heavy isotopes, geothermal energy and so on. Of course it’s well guarded. Missile and particle beams will be locking onto us routinely, both our ships. The only thing preventing either of them being shot down is our imperial authorisation.’
‘That and the countermeasures on my ship,’ Merlin said. ‘Which could peel back these mountains like a scab, if they detected a threat worth bothering with.’
But in truth he felt vulnerable and was prepared to admit it, if only to himself. He could feel the nervous, bristling presence of all that unseen weaponry, like a migraine under the skin of Havergal.