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‘Send the child away. His blood is doing nothing for me.’ The words were tight, said almost reluctantly, and the old woman’s strength leaked a little in the saying of them.
‘Perhaps, another few minutes, majesty?’
Aggerron flapped a weary hand in the robot’s direction and dragged herself around to face the wall. She’d had enough. Three long winters suffering the indignity of being intravenously fed the blood of children was, to her exhausted mind, three years too many. It wasn’t as if the blood was doing anything to help stave off the inevitable. Despite its wondrous - almost magical – properties, she was still dying. She was still slipping away, her body finally betraying her, and – blood, or no blood – death had eased over her and was slowly devouring her from the inside.
It was ironic that the same death, that visited upon friends and enemies alike, now stalked and fed off the last of her life’s force. Over many years, she had watched the masses die of this wasting disease and, now that it had found her, she had very little stamina and power to stop it. She didn’t know how much longer she would have the will to go on fighting, to go on living this half-life. She had been betrayed many times over the years, but it was her body’s betrayal that would be the end of her.
The low murmur of the courtiers who filled her bedchamber with their sweaty bodies and eager, avaricious eyes – assaulted her ears. She could no longer bear the sight or the sound of any of them. They filled the room, waiting and watching like vultures, and the stink of them made her nauseous. She knew what every one of them thought. She knew what was swirling and ricocheting around their tiny little minds. Her brain wasn’t that addled that she didn’t know what they thought. She knew full well that they hoped she would die and that they prayed to the Sun God to be present in that very room to witness her passing. They thought that it would give them a kind of Kudos to bear witness to the last breath of one of the great queens - something to tell their friends around the dinner table – and, they believed in the omens that foretold that she would die before the new moon finally set below the horizon.
But, the omens were wrong. Death might have Aggerron in its steely grip, but she would die in her own good time, and not a second before. She had dictated her whole life, and she was determined to also dictate her death.
Fools, she thought. Did they imagine that she couldn’t hear their whispers? Did they believe that her hearing was as impaired as the rest of her feeble body? Those Lords and Ladies of her court – did they think that she would die and leave them to their own damnable devices? Leave them to destroy and obliterate her legacy? Fools, bloody fools the lot of them. They were nothing without her.
She sighed and closed her eyes tight against the light. When she caught her breath, she would tell the robot to close the drapes.
The whispers around the bed intensified, but she was content to allow them to talk amongst themselves in the knowledge – false though it was – that their words were safe from her ears. Let them whisper and conspire. Let them plan their futures without her. The lessons they would learn made her almost wish that death would hurry up and take her, so she could look down on them from that great afterlife and laugh at how their great plans had all but turned to dust.
Nothing ever escaped her. From a girl, she knew far more than she could ever begin to understand, and she had spent her life unravelling the many mysteries that were presented to her. She had learned to see the meaning behind every word and every gesture, and her magnificent hearing had given her access to many secrets. The great Lords and their ladies should have known that of her. She had never made a secret of her ability to know them intimately. They should have learned to keep their opinions to themselves, but she had long given up trying to teach fools a little wisdom.
Her court was awash with idiots, itching to start a war that would undo generations of peace, and all because she hadn’t named her heir. But - as long as she lived and breathed - there would be no war. What did it matter that she was confined to bed and was wholly dependent on the blood of children to eke out another hour, another day, of life? She was empress and she was queen. She was the most powerful person on the planet, and she was determined to remain alive, to continue breathing, until the matter of her heir was settled. Only that would guarantee peace... if peace could ever be guaranteed.
She had lived through many terrible wars – wars that had stripped the world of all hope and all but destroyed the very existence of the Icarrion way of life; wars that had robbed them of the very best of their children, deprived them of their rightful place in the universe, and made them poor and vulnerable. And, here were her Lords, her subjects, scheming and plotting to plunge the planet back into the darkest of times. Each belonged to a faction – to a coalition of pretenders to her throne, who were hell bent on seizing power and living off the spoils of her success. No wonder they made her stomach roil.
If only the best of them had shared her survivor’s horror of war. Most had been children when the last great battles had been fought, so they had no memory of the hunger, the pain of loss, or the devastation to lives and land. They may have grown up and lived in a world that still bore the timeless ravages of the great battles, but that didn’t prevent them from imagining that war was a noble undertaking – a means to an end with no dire consequence. Sadly, they had neither the imagination nor the foresight to see it for what it was – the harbinger of utter disaster. History had taught them no lessons and she would be damned if her death would be the cause of yet another such war. She would not go into the ground with that on her conscience.
She felt a tug on her arm and then the sharp pain as the robot removed the cannula. She knew that the child would also have his removed, and be none the worse for his ordeal, but it didn’t stop the bite of guilt in her chest. The child had the unfortunate fate of being born a Platton, and, being a Platton, he was blessed with curative blood and an uncanny resilience to disease. His bloodline ensured that he was born to be used and, though well compensated, in Aggerron’s mind, it was an abuse of power to take the lifeblood from one to enhance the other. But, when you were dying, and fearful of leaving devastation in your wake, what choice did a queen have but to play the vampire?
The robot made to move off with the child.
‘Give him food and then pay his mother,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Tell her that I won’t need the boy again. I’m done with Platton blood.’
The robot halted in mid-stride, turned an expressionless
face to the bed, and made a growling sound in the back of his throat.
Aggerron knew what that sound meant. It was the only way
he could express his displeasure. It had always amused her to hear it, but she wasn’t amused this time. She knew that he was getting set to argue with her, and she was much too tired for argument.
‘Majesty,’ the robot said, his voice carrying across the room. ‘I won’t obey such a ridiculous order. You are being foolish.’
Of course, there were horrified gasps around the room. She may be withered and corpse-like, but she was still the queen. Not even the robot should dare to speak to the queen with such insolence or with such impunity. It was a horrifying thing to be forced to witness. For her majesty to be berated so wantonly by a thing - by a heartless, soulless monstrosity – was beyond tolerance and someone - surely someone - would speak out about it?
Apparently not.
If the robot heard the reverberating gasps, he gave no sign of it. He was immune to their rancour and to their horror of him. He knew that he could speak to the queen any way he chose to. He couldn’t recall a time when he didn’t have her permission or her blessing to treat her any way he saw fit. She had given that permission and that blessing because she knew that he was without guile, without ambition, and that he was loyal. He had been put at her side primarily to protect her, but to also support and advise her as she grew into her queenship. Therefore, the shock and the indignant sounds made by the insignificant bags of water surrounding the bed did not touch him. Their opinions and their feelings of outrage meant nothing to him.
‘I will bring the child back tomorrow,’ he said. ‘And the day
after that, and the day after that. You will take his blood, my queen... there is no doubt about that... and you will live.’
She merely grunted and buried her face in the pillows. She knew that he would have his way. The robot always had his way.
*
A PLUTONIAN AND TWO Icarrion soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder and watched as the human was dragged screaming from the hole in the ground. They weren’t moved by his distress. Hardened, as they were by many acts of brutality, the soldiers felt nothing but contempt for the human and there was no softness, and no pity, in their eyes as they watched him fall to his knees and weep like a baby.
He was a scrawny excuse for a man and the three months he’d spent as their prisoner had done nothing to improve his appearance. Dressed in filthy rags, his body emaciated, his eyes wild, he looked utterly defeated. It was going to be a boring execution, the tall Plutonian thought to himself – hardly worth the time to witness it.
Like most humans, the man had many faults – the biggest of which had caught the attention of his three captors. Unfortunately for them – and for the human – the man had discovered that he had a conscience and it turned out that he was too stupid to realise that there was a price to pay for being a man of principle.
Plutonian soldiers weren’t renowned for their loyalty, but Icarrions were usually a different breed, so it was unusual to see such a partnership. They had two things in common – the agreement that the Lord Damanacree should be the next sovereign of Icarrion, and the agreement that the Earth girl should not. Those two things were enough to unite them.
The human’s betrayal had almost obliterated their plans, and it was only sheer luck that his disloyalty had been discovered before any harm had been done. Everything had almost fully unravelled and all because of a tiny little nub of integrity nestling somewhere inside the man’s stupid little brain.
Humans rarely worked with Plutonians. Neither the human nor the Plutonian had cause to trust one another. This particular human had gone out of his way to find Damanacree’s lieutenant with information he was prepared to barter for gold. The Plutonians called such a man a Vashnok, an apostate, and, although such a man was always reviled, they were tolerated as long as the information they sold was useful.
His information was worth double what he asked. He took the gold and then reneged on the deal.
The hapless human knew that he was going to die – that was what all the screaming was about. His captors knew that – given the chance to live – he would now gladly denounce his conscience and spit on his integrity. A conscience was not always partnered with courage, but it was too late to beg. It was too late for anything but the sword.