Empress Game: The Empress Game Trilogy Book 1 (31 page)

Sovein came across with a swing that should have landed square on the center of Kayla’s staff. Instead Kayla’s weapon dipped against her will and the strike cracked across her abused knuckles. She clung to the staff with a numb hand as the air turned gelatinous around her. She couldn’t raise her arms fast enough or dodge quickly enough. A blow glanced off her block and Sovein’s staff slid along Kayla’s until it crashed into her chin.

“Ya’ all right?” Sovein drew back, concern overshadowing the bloodlust for a second. Kayla pressed a hand to her throbbing chin and it came back scarlet. One didn’t expect to get bloodied in a match with staves.

“I’m fin—”

Sovein hooked her staff under Kayla’s ankle and flipped her onto her ass. She loomed over her with a stylized head-smashing pose and claimed her point.

Kayla spat blood from the bite she’d given her tongue.

::It’s too much, too much…:: Corinth’s voice trailed off and he passed into unconsciousness. Vid scooped him up and carried him from the arena.

Rage surged through Kayla, roared from the depths at the sight of her
il’haar
falling victim to anyone. These Ilmenans, Wyrds who should have been her allies, had done this. They’d forced Kayla to use Corinth like a tool.

They could not be allowed to triumph.

Her body trembled with the force of her hatred. She climbed to her feet, determination providing its own sort of certainty. Ilmenans or no, she
would
win this.

Just then psi energy hummed around her, stroked like a finger down her cheek.
Dolan
. The air’s unnatural thickness vanished.

Holy shit, he was shielding her, and doing a much better job of it than Corinth could. He freed her from the Ilmenans’ interference, protected her.

She had no time to consider further as the chime sounded to start the next point. The fight narrowed to a single technique at a time. She no longer saw points or series or combinations. She saw a strike. A twist. A shift in position. Only one motion mattered at a time, one after the other. She was focus, she was precision. Sweep, twist, strike. Dodge, drop to a knee, upward hanging block. Vault, ox kick, swing.

Point.

Point.

Point.

Sovein snapped her staff over her knee with the roar of an enraged bear. The crack of wood splintering fractured the cocoon around Kayla and reality caught her in its rush once more. The world swelled, sights and sounds and everywhere the cheering of the crowd that crowned her in victory.

She had won, but she hadn’t done it alone.

She glimpsed Dolan haunting the edge of the crowd. He caught her eye and smiled, a secret between the two of them.

* * *

Late that afternoon, Malkor stared down at Isonde in her medical pod. He wrapped his hand gently around her wrist, wanting to let her know he was there but unwilling to do more for fear of hurting her.

Stars, he felt powerless.

“You’ll be okay,” he murmured. To her, or himself? The muted beeping of the console at the foot of the pod told him that—for the moment—she was stable. How long would that last? Her body couldn’t maintain this state for long without deteriorating. Toble had been able to reduce the strain on her heart and lungs but not alleviate the rigor entirely. Janeen’s poison, or what had to have been Isonde’s allergic reaction to it, still held her in a stony, comatose grip.

He gave her wrist a slight squeeze. “I’ll find her.”

Janeen had been his responsibility, his agent. He should have seen her plans taking shape and neutralized her before they had come to a head. She never should have been allowed near Isonde—or Kayla.

Malkor withdrew his hand from Isonde’s arm, swallowing the bitterness of his failure. He couldn’t do anything for her here—time to get back to work.

A table full of datapads greeted him when he entered his room. His complink bleated notifications and his mobile comm, once he turned it back on, chirped with a slew of incoming messages. He scrolled through the headers on each, skimming and mentally organizing, then tossed it on the bed. The complink promised better intel. Rigger had cracked a deep level of encryption on Janeen’s complink and sent over the data packets retrieved from her secured storage—real private stuff, data it would have taken a tech team months to ferret out. Thank space for Rigger. Malkor dialed up a serving of water from the food synthesizer and settled at his table with his stack of datapads.

Malkor reviewed his notes. He’d done an in-depth reconstruction of Janeen’s schedule since they’d arrived on Falanar, a rougher sketch of her engagements during their trip to Altair Tri, and pulled together a list of her official activities on Falanar before that.

The timeline had more gaps than he would have liked. Had he been monitoring her moves it would have raised his suspicions, but he had had no reason to watch over his own octet, not when he trusted them and knew them to be responsible and good at their jobs.

Everyone had been pulled in a million directions since they had arrived for the Game and his own reports were spotty, considering he usually had two to four things going at any one time. But here—Janeen had nothing written during the fighting on the second day. No reconnaissance done, no issues logged, no event attended… nothing. Same for dinner that night. She’d had the Inquini Gala on her assignment sheet but he didn’t remember seeing her there. Plus the affair had broken up before too long due to political tensions and she had nothing else on her schedule after that. How had she been spending her time?

He pushed that aside and accessed the files Rigger had sent him. They looked like mission reports, going back at least seven years. Wait— He grabbed another datapad and pulled up her service record. Seven years ago she’d still been in the academy, and for two years after that she had been a junior agent working other agents’ cases. Why did she have mission reports for that time?

He opened up the oldest batch, definitely during her time at the academy. The first one he skimmed wasn’t a mission file at all, it was a profile. It was a full report on one of her fellow classmates, and not just the public details. She had notes on his schedule, associates, love interests, family background, grades in the academy, vices, political affiliations, public—and not so public—society associations. The profile was followed by notes on observed behaviors and a discussion of possible strengths and weaknesses.

The subject wasn’t an ordinary classmate. He belonged to the ruling cartel in the Protectorate Planets’ Trade Federation. Malkor opened other reports. All similarly detailed, all persons of influence.

It was the kind of file an agent would set up for an assignment involving a tense politico-military-economic situation where leverage made all the difference.

He flipped ahead a year, once Janeen was out of the academy, curious what he would find. Her reports continued. She had mission reports now, the standard kind he’d been receiving from her for the last three years they’d been working together. Then she had secondary, unofficial reports. The same situations covered in much greater detail. Contacts she had made outside of IDC channels, unofficial assignments completed outside of the mission scopes, the kind of back-room, under the table dealings the IDC was infamous for, and exactly the kind of behavior he wouldn’t tolerate.

So whom did she work for? Who pulled the strings on these black-op missions completed while on valid IDC assignments?

And what the void had she done while she had been working for him?

He called up her files from the last year. There they were, profiles on the entire octet, including him. His file was embarrassingly detailed, full of observations of his character based on every command decision. It even included a timeline of his brief, bitter, and—he’d thought—ultra-secret affair with Isonde. The one even Ardin didn’t know about.

Leverage.

He started going through her files more seriously, searching her most recent reports for indicators. These reports had definitely been written for someone specific, not just for general note taking. She favored a conversational style in these reports and clues popped up here and there. He couldn’t underline them all directly, but he saw hints. Enough to learn that whoever orchestrated her clandestine assignments was themselves IDC.

Someone very powerful. Someone who had to have been less than pleased by the failure of her mission to neutralize Kayla. No wonder Janeen had gone into hiding.

He had to bring this to Commander Parrel.

Kayla commed his door, catching him by surprise. She entered his rooms and stripped off the Isonde hologram almost before the doors shut behind her.

“We can’t shield my fights from the Ilmenans,” she said without preamble.

He set the datapads aside, shifting gears after a look at the seriousness of her expression. “It worked today,” he said. Thankfully. They had no other weapon against the Wyrds.

“You saw it yourself, they overwhelmed Corinth and I wasn’t even fighting Tia’tan. Imagine how much more intense their pressure will be in that final series.”

“He’s overtired. You’ll both have a day to rest, tomorrow’s an off day for the combatants to prepare for the final round. Surely that’s enough time.”

She shook her head. “Not for him. And even at full potential, he couldn’t be expected to hold off that many trained psionics when he’s only a boy.”

“But what of you?” he asked, as she sank into the chair opposite his desk. “You must have almost a decade’s worth of training he hasn’t had.”

“It won’t be enough,” was all she said.

“You managed it today. Corinth passed out before the end of the fight.”

She sighed. “I didn’t manage anything.” A cloud crossed her face.

“What?”

“I—” She hesitated. Wrestled with something.

“Kayla, just tell me.”

“You won’t like it.”

“I don’t like any of this. What are you avoiding?”

“It’s Dolan.” She spilled the story of him contacting her psionically, and his apparent willingness to help her.

“He must have helped me today,” she said. “Once Corinth was carried off, the Ilmenans didn’t interfere again. I don’t think he touched the Clanesta, but I think he shielded me.”

“I thought he was powerless. Isn’t that the definition of being
kin’shaa
?”

“He is. Or, he was. Now…” Her voice drifted off, her thoughts turning inward.

She came back to herself slowly, a slight shake of her head, a frown, then her flame-bright eyes focused on him.

“I think we have to deal with Dolan.”

“As in…?” He had images of her sneaking through an air duct in the
kin’shaa
’s room to stab him straight through his ruined eye.

“As in take the deal he offered. His help for the throne.” She sounded more willing to kill him.

“Absolutely not.”

“I have more reason to hate the idea than you do, but I can’t win otherwise. Corinth can’t protect me.” She glanced away, her voice falling into disgust. “I can’t even protect myself.”

“What do you mean?”

She seemed to wilt in on herself. “Not that way. Not anymore.”

She had no psi powers? The pressure of holding a million forbidden thoughts behind mental shields at all times nearly burst his eyeballs and she couldn’t read his mind?

Something deep within him relaxed. She couldn’t mind-control him, couldn’t compel him. He didn’t have to defend his thoughts or his very soul from her.

He let his shields drop, feeling strangely naked and relieved.

“How long?”

“Not since the attack on Ordoch. Since… Vayne.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She snorted. “Would you tell me if you didn’t have all your faculties? That you’d lost one of your senses?”

He understood the rest of it. She’d let him think she could control him to regain some power in their relationship, to push back on him for blackmailing her to remain as Isonde.

“I’m not whole,” she said. “Corinth deserves better than a handicapped, psionically dead
ro’haar
.”

“He’s lucky to have you.”

She took the words in as if hungry to believe them.

“We need to ally with Dolan,” she said.

“Not happening.”

She pushed her fingers through her dye-blackened hair, disheveling the loose strands. “I just don’t see any other way out of this.”

“I refuse to meet his terms.”

“He wants power, so what. He wants to give the Ilmenans power, big deal. As long as we have the empress-apparent’s seat on the Council of Seven, it’ll be worth it.”

“He wants
you
, Kayla. He doesn’t just want power or influence, he wants you, and I refuse to make that trade.”

“What does the bastard want with me?”

Malkor could imagine more than a few things. “He didn’t say. He only made it clear that his required payment would be you.”

“We could always agree, and then—”

“No.”

“Damnit, Malkor. My people
need
Isonde on the throne. I’ve seen enough to know that’s the only way a bid to end the Ordochian occupation can be successful.”

“What about the other Wyrds. The Ilmenans?”

“What about them?”

“Can we approach them directly?”

Kayla looked away. “They won’t help us.”

“Why not? If they’re willing to deal through Dolan, maybe they’ll deal with us directly. They can still get what they want.”

“Assuming we even know what they want.”

That brought him up short. He paused, waiting for more, watching her in silence until she continued.

“I spoke to them. They… I don’t think Dolan knows the whole story. They have their own agenda.”

“Damnit, Kayla! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“The conversation was… somewhat personal.”

“Frutt personal. These are things I need to know.” He wanted to reach across the space between them and shake the shit out of her.

She sighed. “The Ilmenans won’t deal with us.”

“We don’t have a better option.” He held up his hand, ticking off points on his fingers. “You can’t shield, Corinth isn’t strong enough to shield you, Dolan will only help us if he gets you as a prized who-knows-what, and I’m useless to you in this situation.” He marked off that last point with frustration. “They’re all we’ve got, Kayla.”