Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

“Marco—”

“He failed to order the usual precautions on the road one night, I guess thinking we were in safe territory. Or maybe smuggling in pretty boys from a nearby town was easier without a giant ditch filled with sharpened spikes in the way. In any case, while he was carousing, we got set upon by a bunch of brigands. That’s right, a Roman cohort was decimated by a bunch of local thieves, and do you know why?”

“Marco—”

“I survived because I was knocked out by an asshole on horseback wielding a mace, before I could find my shield. I woke up to a field of the dead, many of the rest fled, and our commander’s head on a pike! The army covered it up, of course, not wanting their rep to take the hit. And later showed up with a legion and wiped out the brigands. But that didn’t bring back all those dead boys, none of whom had to die if our leader wasn’t distracted!”

I drew my legs up. It allowed me to notice that my toenails were ten different shades of red, some with glitter and some not, because a couple of the younger initiates had gotten to me the other night, when I’d been too tired to care what they did. I picked at the rainbow while I laid it out for Marco.

“Okay, but again, the alternative is what? I tell the consul that Mircea is close to losing it and she’ll kill him. He’s powerful enough as it is. But with the Pythian power at his beck and call, not just through whatever influence he can exert on me but in his own right? He could challenge her. He could win.”

“He won’t. He doesn’t want the job. Never did—”

“And she’s going to believe that?”

Marco pursed his lips. “Hard to say. She plays her cards close to the chest, that one.”

“The rumor I heard is that she’s been planning to off him anyway, once the war is over and he’s no more use to her—”

“That rumor has been going around for at least a century.”

“Maybe because she’s been planning it for that long!”

“Or because she’s using it,” Marco said cynically. “If everybody assumes that she and Mircea are thick as thieves, it hampers his diplomatic work. Sometimes, you need somebody to believe that you might be willing to turn on the boss, given the right incentive. Helps them think they have a chance with you, so they spill their guts. Or give you concessions, in case they’re talking to the next consul.”

“Is that what you’ve heard?” I felt the knot in my chest loosen a little.

He shrugged. “Among about fifty other rumors. You know how it is.”

I sighed and went back to picking at my toes. “I hate politics.”

“Bad trait in a Pythia.”

“Like my hundred other bad traits?”

He grinned slightly at that. “You grow on a person.”

He did, too, but right now, that didn’t help. “Whether she kills him or not,” I pointed out, “she’ll almost certainly remove him and put someone else in his place—”

“Good!”

“No, not good. Nobody else can lead this thing.”

“You don’t know that—” Marco began, but I steamrollered on. Because I did know that. I’d been getting a thorough education in vamp politics lately, more than I wanted, frankly. And none of it was good.

“The other senates—God, you know what they’re like! They’ve spent centuries hating each other’s guts and the war didn’t change that. Even with all Mircea’s charm, and all the friends and alliances he’s built up over the years, its still like herding cats. Everybody is suspicious of everybody else, everybody is using the war as an opportunity to jockey for favor or grab for power, everybody has their eye on what comes after without worrying about the fact that there isn’t going to be an after if we don’t pull together!”

“That’s the senates for you,” Marco said, ey

eing me.

“Exactly! Mircea is the only one who has been able to sort of, kind of, keep them in line. Without him, we don’t have an army, we don’t have an invasion, we don’t have anything—except a colossal mess!”

“There’s got to be somebody else—”

I shook my head. “Nobody that enough people trust. This whole alliance was Mircea’s baby. Nobody thought he could do it, could form six squabbling senates into one, even to avoid a possibly world ending war. But he did, and now he leads it—or at least the army part of it—and he’s the only one who can. You talk about people dying? Remove Mircea from the equation and people start freaking dying, Marco.”

“So you’ve been trying to salvage this thing by giving him what he wants,” he summarized.