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“Amani,” I say.

“Excuse me?”

“Ophion is in the pocket of the Syndicate. You go there with a contract for me, we have a problem. Use Amani.” It’s a very strange thing telling the most powerful woman in the worlds something she doesn’t know. “And I want Volga to be pardoned on the event of my death.”

“No.”

“We both know how much you like handing out pardons. I know I’m not a Gold rapist or mass murderer, but in the spirit of the Amnesty, surely you can find it in your heart to forgive.”

“Do you want to die, Mr. Horn?”

“Irrelevant. Volga deserves life.”

She’s not pleased by my intransigence. Tough shit. “The man she shot was like a father to me. He’s still fighting for his life.”

“Then I certainly hope you don’t lose a father and a child on the same day.”

She doesn’t react. Her Gold calm is so perfectly preserved and haughty that I want to reach through the holo and throttle her. “Very well,” she says. “Holiday will fit you with a transponder. When you locate the Syndicate base, you will signal with this transponder, and a strike team will arrive at your coordinates.”

“The Syndicate will check for a transponder.”

“It will be hidden.”

“And they’ll find it. Subdermal, isotope, they?

??ll find it. These aren’t street thugs. You might have noticed.”

“Then what do you propose?”

“Give me a pad number, and I’ll call it. Then your killsquad can track its GPS and fly in and murder everyone in whatever way gets you off.”

She doesn’t like it, but neither of us has much of a choice. “Very well, Mr. Horn. You have a deal. But I would like you to know one thing. If you attempt to escape, or if you defect to the Syndicate, know this as a certain fact: your friend will die. And be it on Mars, Luna, Earth, the Rim, or Venus itself, one night you will wake in the middle of the dark and find a shadow standing over you. If you are lucky, it will be me. If you are unlucky, it will be Sevro or my husband, and you will die shitting yourself in a foreign bed.”

IT WAS NOT LONG AGO that a Gray could boast of his allegiance to the Minotaur in a bar and expect his drinks to be paid for wherever the pyramid flag flew. But that was at the fevered height of Apollonius’s warlord ascendance, before his betrayal and decline.

Now, a mere 911 men remain of a host that once numbered 250,000. The rest have found employ with House Carthii or House Grimmus. These men stay because they could not serve the betrayers of their master or because they have nowhere to go. Orphaned by duty. Severed from all ties of family by their service to their house. Devoid of any underlying patriotism, they float along through life, like the stubborn jetsam of a once-great ship that refuses to sink under the waves.

Once it might have seemed a dream to live out their pension days in peace on a Venusian island. But these men were not made for peace. The novelty of bedding local sun-browned Pinks from the coastal cities and swimming amongst the coral shoals of the Guinevere Sea is gone and they hunger for something more. I thought there would be several thousand, at least to assist us once we gained our audience with the Ash Lord. But there will be no audience, and this paltry remnant is all that we have.

Sevro, Thraxa, and I watch via holo from Tharsus’s library as Apollonius addresses them. He looks out to his soldiers. They stand assembled on the ill-kept tarmac on the south side of his island. Tiny azure-shelled crabs skitter between the weeds in the cracked concrete. The uniforms of the soldiers are untidy. Their necks wreathed in hued shells, hair long in local braids. Apollonius spits on the ground.

“I fear a dread illness has fallen upon the house of my father and mother,” he says, pacing before them with his proud shoulders hunched, his mane tied tight to the back of his head. Tharsus stands behind him like a scolded child. “An illness that has leeched the glory from our veins, the color from our banner. It was not brought by you.” He looks at his brother. “That blame lies upon the shoulders of another. But it was nurtured by you. Sustained by your torpor. I look at you, and do you know what I see?” He scans the crowd of them with wild eyes. “Do you?” The wind gusts mildly from the early morning sea, rippling their uniforms. “I see…Venusians.”

They shift in shame.

“I see clameaters. Men of war made into simpering sprites and disporting coxcombs. Where is the honor for your fathers and mothers?” he cries. “Where is the fury for your fallen brothers and sisters? The Ash Lord and his simpering allies, the Carthii, sent them to their deaths on Luna. Served us up to the Reaper like a Trimalchian feast. I watched as men and women you knew went to dark death. The Ash Lord betrayed us. It was no secret to you that I languished in the belly of the sea. No. It was known from our homeworld to Mercury.”

He paces in venomous silence.

“Yet you let me rot. You let your brothers and sisters perish. And here I find you fattening yourselves like mulling kine, as if Calypso herself had besotted you with wine from her tits. Was your idleness worth the price of your shame? What would your fathers say? What would your mothers think?”

He hangs his head and I find myself admiring the drama of the man. He knows how to play a crowd.

“I look at you and I weep. Such shame is upon me that only Lucifer himself would know the depths of my pain. We have lost our halos, my children, fallen from the grace of heaven through the fabled clouds and landed here in a boiling hell of debauchery and defilement while our enemies laugh at what we have let ourselves become.

“But all is not lost. The unconquerable will, the need for revenge, the immortal hate, and the courage never to submit or yield are strong in my heart.” He beats his chest so hard with his fist I feel it through the holo. “I will not rest till vengeance is mine, for I am Apollonius au Valii-Rath. Imperator of the Minotaur Legions. Man of Mars. Iron Gold. Today I ride forth on the wings of battle from this island prison to settle a debt and free myself from this foul affliction of shame. I ride to war. To glory. I ride for the head of the Ash Lord.” He lunges forward and lifts his razor. “I would not ride alone. So I say to you, my darkest devils, awake, arise, and reclaim your glory!”

A roar answers him that chills the deeper part of me. I turn off the holo and stand quiet in the echoing silence of the library as an ancient clock ticks on the wall. Sevro runs a hand along his fresh-shaven mohawk. “That’s our army?” he mutters. “They’re the scraps you leave behind when you eat a rack of ribs.”