Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

I’ve made a choice. The right choice.

I move so Seraphina can replace me in front of the safe. She carefully sets my ivory box and Cassius’s oak vessel atop the safe. The sigils of our houses stand out in the dim light on the wood and ivory. “It’s in my box,” I say.

Seraphina reverently opens the lid. Inside she finds my grandmother’s House Lune ring. She shows it to her mother before moving aside my mother’s book of poetry. Her fingers glide over the worn green leather edges of the poem book as though she can feel what’s inside before lifting up Karnus’s razor. She produces a small tool, unfastens the screws smoothly on the bottom of the hilt, and pops open the mechanism. The holodrop is stuck to the chemical impulse unit like a lone drop of morning dew. She deposits it in the receiver plate of the holoprojector Dido’s men have brought into the room and steps aside to make room for her mother. Something makes her look back at the box and the crescent moon there.

I hate her eyes lingering on it. It feels somehow shameful that my family’s last relics are held in so small a box, bare now for the world to see.

“I did not want this path to be taken,” Dido says to the Moon Lords in a grand, sweeping voice. The sort great statesmen and tyrants all seem to possess. “This violence. This coup against my own husband…” She shakes her head wearily. “It is a travesty.” There are whispers of agreement there. “You all know I have labored for years to convince Romulus that the Pax Ilium was made under false pretenses. I have been ridiculed. Mocked that this obsession is a madness born of my foreign birth. Perhaps the hot blood of Venus is not gone from my veins entirely. But I am a child of the Dust now. I know I am not above the law.” The Golds frown down at her. “The actions taken by me and my men are not above the law. In fact, they were enacted to ensure that the law is followed. Which is why, when I have finished speaking, I will set myself at your mercy. Like my husband, I will set myself before an Olympic Trial and you may judge if I am mad, if you like. And if my actions are found treasonous, I will meet the dust. But until then, I ask you for your ears….”

Greeted by silence, and a nod from Helios, ArchKnight of the Olympics, she continues.

“Ten years ago, the Dockyards of Ganymede were destroyed. A hundred thousand died on the station. Ten million Ganymedi died when the rubble fell upon New Troy. It was a calamity not seen in the Rim since the coming of the Ash Lord. We blamed Roque au Fabii and his Sovereign.” She looks at me. “But what if I told you there was a hidden truth? Another man responsible for the newest in the long list of crimes against our people?”

She paces along the floor.

“Four months ago, I received word from a broker in the Core, who claimed to have information that would be of interest to me. The broker, a White of the Ophion Guild, represented an unknown seller who wished to exchange the data for information in our archives. The information was purported to be sensitive; they could not risk transmitting it for fear of Repubic interception. Knowing my husband was required to uphold the Pax Ilium, and would do so regardless of the information, I acted of my own accord and sent my most trusted agent, my daughter, Seraphina, into the Interior. This is what she returned with.”

She activates the holoprojector.

The audio comes first. The sound of metal dragged upon metal. Whimpering. Metal on flesh. Then the video appears in the air in the center of the room over our heads with ghostly radiance. It shows the bloodied deck of a starship, a grand one judging by the size of the bridge. The mutilated body of a dead Gold woman is being dragged by her hair by a pair of huge pale hands covered with tribal runes. They could only belong to an Obsidian woman. The hands pry open the Gold’s mouth, pinning her teeth open with a curved wedge of ceremonial bone. Fingers jam roughly into the Gold’s mouth and pull her tongue forward with a pair of iron prongs. Then, with a hooked knife, the hands saw at the base of the tongue till it comes free with a grisly sucking sound. The hands pierce the tongue with an iron barb and push it along to join the dozen others already hanging there on the Obsidian’s belt. Racial indignation rises in me. The Peerless at our sides watch without flinching.

This is the true face of the world. The darkness beneath civilization that my grandmother warned me about. I have known it, felt it, and, in absence of her guidance, watched it leak through her fallen empire.

The Obsidian leaves the corpse behind and walks past the body of a second fallen Gold. At her feet, the epaulets of an ArchPraetor are flecked with blood but the body is seemingly unmolested. The face of Roque au Fabii is pale and bloodless. The Obsidian joins a coterie of battle-scarred women in spoilt armor who form a crescent around the forward viewport of the bridge. White hair stained with blood and soot hangs down their backs. In front of them kneels the dread woman Sefi, the powerful sister of Ragnar Volarus. She clutches a battle-axe and gazes out the viewport as the ship slides across space toward a mottled blue and green moon. Two armored Golds stand beside her along with a stocky Asiatic Gray looking out at the pride of Ilium—the Dockyards of Ganymede. Two hundred eleven kilometers of metal, bolts, dry docks, engineers, refineries, assembly lines, ingenuity, and dreams and labor. One of the two great dockyards of humanity, before the Republic’s fledgling shipyards over Phobos. All suspended above the pale splendor of Ganymede’s equatorial seas and at the mercy of her enemies. Not of Fabii and his Sovereign as the worlds have believed for more than a decade, but of the Rising. Of the despised Slave King.

“Men built this?” Sefi asks in awkward Common.

“It took two hundred fifty years…it’s how old the first dock there is,” says the Gold woman at her side, the traitor, Julii. The Gray comes forward to whisper something to the second Gold, a man. He stands with his back to us, but I would know him by his shadow or even the faint whisper of his hoarse voice.

His helmet is off. His armor was once white, but now it is scored with pulseblasts, razor marks, and viscera. He’s slouched, his weight leaning on the rigid slingBlade at his side. He seems an old man, but the side profile of his face is scarcely older than mine is now. How could he do all this before his twenty-third year? Even Alexander of Macedon would mar

vel at the Slave King of Mars, a creature as grand as the empire he broke. His image glitters in the eyes of the hundred Moon Lords.

The Reaper turns to look back with stony eyes at someone in the bridge pits, but the Julii sets a hand on his shoulder. “Share the load, darling,” she says. “This one’s on me.” She raises her voice. “Helmsman, open fire with all port batteries. Launch tubes twenty-one through fifty at their center line.”

The Peerless around the Bleeding Place stand in silence, their faces illuminated by the pale fire that tears into their lost dockyards.

The docks were never meant for war. Her ships were to defend her. What horror that her greatest child, the Colossus, would return upon the brink of independence to destroy her.

Tungsten iron rounds shear through metal bulkheads like hail careening into wet bread. The dockyards die in silence. Oxygen vents. Spheres of fire gasp and drown in space. And dead metal drifts off, pulled inexorably to Ganymede’s bosom.

As the destruction rains, the Reaper turns from the viewport, his face a death mask of grief and pain, and I feel as if I hear his heart beat across the years, across the space, and know how far he’s come from the man he wanted to be.

He reminds me of my godfather.

While the room disintegrates into fury, I marvel at the boldness of Darrow’s charade, even at the shrewdness of his cruelty. In the last moment of his victory, he saw an opportunity to win a war against the Rim that had not even begun, and he took it with as bold a maneuver as I’ve ever seen. But it is certainty I feel, not respect or horror. This is the man I once idolized. An unpredictable gambler of savage intellect with a limitless capacity for violence. I respect his capabilities, but I do not respect the man. And here, in the wake of his destruction, I understand beyond a shadow of a doubt that to protect mankind, the Reaper must die.

Dido, it seems, was not mad after all.

“The Slave King betrayed us,” Dido says, lifting her razor high till the bitter blade trembles in the air through the projection of the dying docks, the metal shiny and opalescent, like a strand of tears frozen in time. “The Pax Ilium is broken! When his tattooed, mechanized horde is finished with the Core, they will come for us. Your families. Your homes. You see it! You know it. So now, my noble friends, I call for war.”

The Moon Lords look to old Helios, who sits with Diomedes. The old man stands slowly to his dignified height, the picture of dignity and cold resolve. He pulls his razor from his hip and extends it into the air. “War!” cries their Truth Knight.

“War!” thunder the eleven others, unsheathing their blades. While they thrust them into the air, Diomedes barely lifts his hand.

With the Olympics having spoken, a fever spreads through the assembled Moon Lords. A host of razors unfurl and shine in the dim light, the teeth of so many dragons. Seraphina looks at me. Finally she has what she’s sought. With a look of religious satisfaction, she unravels her razor and, like her mother, like her brother and generations of kin, she lifts it into the air.

“War,” she says softly, as if declaring it only against me.