“Don’t!” he whimpered. “Don’t! Don’t!” He screwed his eyes closed.
He was dressed silk and cloth-of-gold. So were most of the thirty or forty others, men and women alike, who’d gathered in the building before the enemy arrived. More battlesuits, generally of good quality but covered with rococo decorations, winked in the royal army’s weapons. All the suits were open, empty.
The Syndics and their hangers-on had surged for the back door when Hansen’s arc blew open the front. They rushed back as abruptly. Hansen raised his weapon, his mouth open in amazement to think that they were about to attack him barehanded when they wouldn’t face him with armor.
Another party of warriors burst in through the back door. Maharg’s all-crimson suit was in the lead.
“All right!” Maharg thundered. “Who’s the boss here?”
“I am, Marshal,” Hansen boomed back.
“Oh, sorry sir,” his abashed junior said on the command channel. “I didn’t know—Malcolm, you made it too?”
Malcolm touched the warchief’s shoulder. “I’ve got my Thraseys ringing the building,” he said. “That gives us an organized reserve if we need one—which I doubt.”
“Right,” said Hansen.
He pointed his index finger at the Syndic quivering in his armor like a clam half-drawn from its shell by a crow.
“You,” Hansen said. “Are you the Chief Syndic or whatever?”
The fat man opened his eyes, closed them again, and said, “There’s no chief. I’m, I’m Bennet.”
Something shook in the air. Hansen thought it must be the shock of buildings falling, but no one else seemed to notice the vibration.
“Do you have authority to surrender the city?” Hansen demanded. “Does anyone here have the authority?”
A man from the group Maharg herded back into the room threw himself at Hansen’s feet. He was young but already fat and as bald as Shill the day he died.
“We do, we surrender, Lord Golsingh!” he babbled. “We’re a quorum! We surrender! Oh gracious king—”
Hansen had an urge to kick the scut away. He repressed it to a shake of his armored boot—which had the desired effect of making the fellow scuttle back with a squeal.
“The king’s not here,” Hansen said, raising his voice to be heard over the increasingly loud clatter from all around him, even the stone floor. . . . “As the Warchief of Peace Rock, I accept your surrender on behalf—”
“The king’s here!” a man shouted from the doorway. “He’s here!”
Hansen turned. Golsingh’s splendid blue armor was silhouetted in the arched opening. Underlings, no matter how respected, do not give commands to monarchs.
“Your Excellence—” Hansen said, but the sound of the black pinions enveloping him was too loud even for his own ears.
The old woman in the arms of his battlesuit began to scream and point upward. Hansen’s viewpoint hung suspended among the chandeliers and quivering stone vaulting.
He could see the empty interior of his armor—and the crypts beneath the building where a score of servants hid among the stored regalia and wine casks for public banquets. The white heart of the planet blazed up at him—
And was gone in weltering images of ice and beasts and huge red sun, which ended in a view of a light-struck hall infinitely greater than the one from which he’d been plucked a timeless moment before.
Hansen’s feet were on a black floor as smooth and flawless as polished diamond. Twenty-odd curtains of light ringed the walls.
“Welcome, Hansen, once Commissioner,” said the blur at the further end of the hall. “We have a task for you.”
Chapter Thirty
It reminded Hansen of the place, the plane, where the lords of the Consensus briefed him.
The resemblance wasn’t physical. He stood in a hall of such purity that the walls and roofbeams bent the light without dimming it. The floor beneath him was black but so smooth that Hansen felt he was standing on the soul of nothingness, the ancient ether which science had long denied even as an ideal.
The Palace of Trade had vanished. The Syndics, the conquering warriors in their battlesuits . . . everything except Hansen himself was gone.
The lords of the Consensus had been vast bulks, hinting of whale shapes but vaster even than fluid oceans could support. Here there were dazzles of light along the sides of the hall’s empyrean perfection . . . and Hansen knew at an instinctive level that it was the same.