After these came the bodies of those who had decided to follow the Great Master in death, first among them the Lady Senior of the Convocation, the highest-ranking individual in the empire not to have been born a Shaa. She moved past slowly on her catafalque, the wind whipping the scant feathery hair atop her hollow-boned body. Following the Lady Senior and other convocates came the biers of high-ranking civil servants. Each had taken massive doses of poison, and presumably died with their loyal family members worshipfully clustered about them—possibly to make certain they went through with it, or to pour the poison down their throats if they balked.
For the first time in his life Martinez felt grateful that the Martinez clan wasn’t of the first rank. If his family were expected to offer up one of their own, he couldn’t help but wonder whether they wouldn’t have handed the cup to him. His brother Roland was the presumed heir to Laredo and too important to die, and his sisters were—for the most part, anyway—a united front against all adversity. Perhaps a family council would have decided that the unfortunate Gareth, employed uselessly with the Fleet and with few prospects for aiding the others in their projects, would have been the most expendable.
Martinez was saved from further morbid thoughts by the sight of someone he knew—PJ Ngeni, dressed all in white, walking slowly in the procession with an unusually solemn look on his insipid face. He marched with other Ngenis behind the bier of one of their clan members, an elderly man with a distinguished white mustache who wore the uniform of a retired senior civil servant. Strange to think that the Ngenis would spare this one sooner than PJ.
PJ’s sojourn in the Shelley Palace garden with Sempronia had proved successful—certainly more successful than his own boat ride with Sula—and now that he and Sempronia had paid their obligatory visit to the Peers’ Gene Bank, Martinez was now obliged to treat PJ as a future brother-in-law. Had he not known that the whole thing was a sham, he would have been deeply offended, but as it was, he found himself almost genial around PJ.
Which was more than could be said for Sempronia, who was clearly keeping her fiancé at arm’s length. What PJ thought about being engaged to a girl who was doing her best to avoid his presence had not, so far, come to Martinez’s ears.
After the civil servants came the biers of the Fleet. Fleet Commander Enderby, without the fierce rigidity that animated him in life, looked shrunken and mournful in death. Martinez felt a surge of sadness at the sight.
He should have followed my advice, Martinez thought.
Enderby’s daughter, looking trim in the white and brown of the Civil Service, stepped from her place near Martinez and walked to the tail of her father’s bier. She held her own daughter, a child of nine or ten, by the hand.
The famous wife was nowhere in evidence.
“Party—forward!” called the senior captain on Martinez’s right, and he stepped out with the others of Enderby’s family and staff. The small formation, Enderby’s official family, performed a left wheel and placed themselves into the procession behind Enderby’s daughter and granddaughter, his chief mourners.
Other formations placed themselves in the procession. Among them, Martinez saw Cadet Foote. Apparently the Footes had sacrificed one of their own to the glory of their clan, though the solemnity of the occasion had done nothing to tame Foote’s cowlick.
Martinez was pleased to be moving, even if it was at this glacial pace. The solemnity of the death march meant that each foot had to hang in the air for a beat or two before it could be placed on the ground. The polished jackboots looked dashing and romantic, but were very heavy when suspended that way. The rest of the uniform had its disadvantages as welclass="underline" when the procession moved into gaps between the palaces that lined the road, the wind caught at his tall hat and whipped the cape of the next in line into his face.
He blinked and adjusted his hat, which earned a frown from the captain on his right.
The procession crept on. The scabbard of the curved knife banged against his right thigh with every step. Formations of cadets lined the road to keep order, and Martinez found himself searching for the bright hair and brilliant eyes of Cadet Sula. He failed to find her, and then reprimanded himself for looking for her in the first place.
He had been angry enough when she bolted and left him standing foolishly in the excursion boat. His temper hadn’t improved when he returned to his apartment and found the cold supper that Alikhan had left for two, and which Martinez unceremoniously shoved into the fridge on his way to bed.
His anger had faded to annoyance by morning, and faded yet again when he received a message from Sula. It was written on her datapad in a precise, uniform hand, and sent without being recorded on video. Perhaps she was embarrassed to be seen by him, even on a screen.
It’s entirely my fault, she’d written.Since I’m not fit company for man nor beast, I’m going to spend the rest of my furlough away from the capital, studying for my exams.
It had been a few hours before his ire faded to the point where he returned her message, scrawling her a note—this handwriting was contagious—to the effect that he’d be happy to speak with her whenever she felt like talking.
Apparently, she didn’t feel much like conversation, because he hadn’t heard from her again. He’d managed to console himself somewhat with Amanda Taen, who by this point he was finding refreshingly uncomplicated.
He didn’t see Sula at any point during the long, slow march, but that wasn’t surprising. Every cadet, every officer, every warrant and petty officer, and every recruit was on duty at this hour, and only a minority of them in the High City. Also on alert was every member of the Legion, every member of every police force, and even the few remaining members of the Exploration Service. All public areas were guarded, and a platoon of armed troops kept watch at each skyhook terminal. They were all as ready as they could be for…well, forsomething.
As Martinez saw it, no one knew what to expect after the death of the last member of the order that had ruled with such terror and absolute unquestioning certainty for the last ten thousand years. Despair and panic were widely predicted. Projections included mass suicides, riots, and insurrections. Lord Commander Enderby and the other senior officers had redeployed half the Fleet to make sure that warships were available to intervene anywhere in the empire at short notice.
Martinez himself suspected that little or nothing would happen. Yes, there would be hysterics who would try to kill themselves, though most of them wouldn’t succeed; and perhaps there would be a few individuals who ran out of control while under the impression that, with the last Shaa dead, life would turn into some kind of fair. But while these people doubtless existed, those he encountered appeared to be merelywaiting. They hadn’t worked out what the death of Anticipation of Victory meant, and neither had anyone else.
And then he remembered standing in the foyer of the Commandery, looking at the map of the empire’s wormhole systems and thinking that there was no escaping the Shaa.
Perhaps, he thought, hehad just escaped. Perhaps everyone had. Perhaps some of the weight of history had been taken off everyone’s shoulders.
This idea sufficiently intrigued him that he barely noticed the long, slow parade until it finally came to an end at the Couch of Eternity, the long, rectangular mausoleum, sheathed in marble of a brilliant cake-icing white, where the Great Masters were cremated and shelved for infinity. The mausoleum was built at the base of a series of long white steps, an artificial amphitheater, with a ramp descending to the entrance, with its peculiar two-tier arch. The catafalque rolled slowly down the ramp and beneath the arch, and the mourners following it wheeled off and took their places in rank on either side of the tall wide steps.