Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [88]
Banks lunged forward for the killing strike, but Granger managed to break away, more by luck than design. He jogged backwards. Briana Marks had by now reached the podium. The emperor bowed and then waved away one of the administrators to offer her a seat. She glanced over at Granger and shook her head.
What did that mean?
Granger ran towards the corral wall. ‘Sister Marks?’
She lowered her gaze.
‘Sister Marks?’
Still she refused to acknowledge him. Emperor Hu glanced between Granger and the witch and then frowned. He spoke quietly to Marks, but she ignored him completely and simply continued to stare at her hands.
Granger heard Banks approaching from behind and turned to find the private with his sword already raised to strike. In that moment he saw the pain and despair in his young opponent’s eyes. Granger lifted his own blade in a desperate attempt to fend off the blow, but he already knew it was too late. Banks had the advantage.
But he didn’t take it.
He stopped, and just stood there for a heartbeat with his sword raised, staring down at Granger. Then he threw his weapon away. It clattered off the flagstones and came to rest several yards away, gleaming like a mirror. Silence settled over the plaza.
A third shot rang out.
Private Merrad Banks remained standing for a moment longer as his life blood surged from a hole in the centre of his forehead. He started to lift a hand up towards the wound and then he paused and sat down on the ground. His body slumped forward.
Granger rushed to him and held him. He could smell Banks’s sweat and blood, feel the heat from the other man’s sun-warmed steel epaulettes, but there was no life left in that body. Everything Banks had been had come to an end here in this rotten corner of the empire. He heard the corral gate scrape open behind him.
‘Finish him off,’ Hu said. ‘But do it slowly. No less than fifty cuts.’
Grech took to the podium again. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, ‘jailers of Ethugra, protectors of the Imperial law. For the final trial, our gracious ruler has chosen, for your pleasure, to pit against the traitor the strongest, the fastest, and the most merciless of all combatants!’ He raised his hand to quell the excited chatter from the crowd. ‘Three score years in the training! His mortal flesh empowered by Unmer sorcery, his eyes scorched from his own skull from gazing into the furious reaches of infinity. Ladies and gentlemen . . . the emperor presents to you, his very own . . . Samarol!’
The crowd went wild.
The bodyguard who had fired the shots now detached his seeing knife from his rifle for the final time and held it lightly in one mailed fist. Despite his great size he moved with the grace of a wolf. His helmet grinned fiercely, but its silver eyes evinced a rage that did not belong to its wearer. It was the fury of the empire carried by a surrogate. It was an executioner’s mask. And was it possible to think of the Samarol in any other way? What mortal man could hope to prevail in a fight against one?
The Samarol stepped into the corral, and the gate closed behind him.
Granger glanced at Briana Marks, and, for an instant, their eyes met.
She stood up and called out to the emperor, ‘Wait.’ And then she hurried over to the corral gate and beckoned Granger to approach.
‘Maskelyne wasn’t at Scythe Island,’ she said. ‘He’s out at sea somewhere. I couldn’t reach him.’
‘So that’s it? You’re leaving me here to die.’
‘I’ve no evidence he has a hostage with him at all, Mr Granger, let alone a psychic one. I can’t sense another seer within three hundred miles of here. And I cannot interfere with an Imperial trial on your word alone.’
‘You could,’ he replied. ‘But you choose not to.’
He could see from her expression that he’d struck upon the truth. The Haurstaf had the power to ostracize and thus bring down empires at their whim, and yet that that power could only be maintained through strict impartiality and honesty. Those emperors and warlords who paid so much for psychic communications in wartime needed