Gregory Watershed strode into the Pharaoh’s massage chamber and slammed the report down on the wooden counter beside her massage table, knocking the crystal fruit basket off the edge with the force, shattering it against the black marble floor. Gregory didn’t look.
“You,” he snapped, “are a fucking idiot.”
The Pharaoh tensed on her table and, lifting her head to give the report a sour look, waved at the two naked male masseuses oiling her back to leave. Their exquisitely muscled bodies bowed deep, faces hidden by black masks, and their grotesquely large genitalia flopped like dead octopi as they hurried from the room.
Very slowly, Sankhotepre sat up from the padded table, revealing her small, pert breasts. The breasts of a girl, not a woman. Breasts that had never held the nourishment for her children, breasts that had never been suckled by any infant, despite her great age. Intentionally so. For over fifteen centuries now. Damn her.
“Careful, governor,” the Pharaoh said, pulling her silken gown over herself to cover her pink nipples. “It’s been a couple decades, but I’m sure you remember what happened last time you grew too confident in your station.”
Gregory had lost his balls…and had still refused to share her bed ever again. “I remember,” he growled, the old rage bubbling up from within for just a moment before he crushed it. Refusing to be cowed, he jammed a finger at the scroll. “Did you even read this?!”
She made a face at the long, rolled paper. “I hate reading. That’s what you’re for.”
“It sat on your desk for six days before someone thought to bring it to me,” Gregory snapped. “Do you even know what it says?”
Sankhotepre yawned and reached for a grape from the table opposite where he stood. “I don’t care about the Wastes.” She chewed on one thoughtfully, her sky-blue eyes catching on him. “Filled with thieves and brigands. No one cares if a few of them die.” But she was listening.
“It says,” Gregory snapped, “that two weeks ago, all the people in a twenty-mile section of Wasteland were transported into ‘flying machines’ and all the ones that weren’t a hundred percent human were dropped into the Great Divide at six thousand feet. The five that were fullblood were released unharmed and told to keep the blood pure or die, and to tell their mistress a war was coming in retaliation for her latest forays into Alliance territory.”
She examined a grape held between delicately manicured fingernails. “I was wondering if they’d notice.”
“You didn’t tell me you sent a team over there,” Gregory snapped, slapping his hand against the scroll, crushing it.
“You didn’t ask.” She nonchalantly grabbed another grape.
“How long ago?” he demanded.
“How long ago did I send them, or how long ago did they manage to traverse the Divide and send back intel on Alliance strongholds?”
Gregory glanced at the stone ceiling, completely unable to believe how stupid she had been. “They have ships, Sankhotepre. If they can’t just go full atmo and bombard us from space, they certainly can jump across the Divide and destroy everything we own in a matter of ten seconds before hopping back to their side. It would take us weeks to mount a counter-attack, if we could even make it up over the Far Bank before they caught us and shot us down.”
“I own,” Sankhotepre said with a yawn.
Gregory blinked at her. “What?”
“Destroy everything I own. You’re just an appointed official serving at my pleasure. Something,” she added with a pointed look at him, “that can be remedied, should you continue to barge in on me without an invitation.” She began smoothing the elegant white silk, frowning when she saw a small imperfection in the finely detailed weave of two feathered serpents twining in the sky.
At Gregory’s narrow look, she went on uncaringly, “And the Eastlanders won’t dare raid anything bigger than a couple Wastelander villages. They saw what happened last time they tried that. I destroyed how many of their ships? Ten? Eleven?”
“It was eight,” Gregory gritted. “And we had come over here to talk peace. The commandant wasn’t even trying to wage war. It was exploratory. Our orders were to just see if there was anyone else alive over here. We thought we were the only ones that survived Yellowstone.”
“Yes, well, I’d say you figured it out quickly enough.” Sankhotepre said, completely unconcerned. She wiped her hands on a towel and reached for her mead goblet.
Gregory slapped the mead goblet aside, showering the golden liquid across the priceless collection of artifacts from before the Fall that lined the stone walls of her chamber. “Listen to me very carefully,” Gregory said, as her cerulean eyes came back to lock on him, dark with warning. Gregory knew he was making a mistake, that he was blundering down the same stupid path as the last time that had gotten his nuts cut out and fed to a pit of lava, but he couldn’t stop himself. He knew this woman was about to get millions of people killed. His people, not her brainwashed masses. “If they decide to fight,” he went on, biting out each word, “you are going to lose. They will destroy you. They have the tech.”
“I’m sure that’s what you thought the last time your people invaded my home,” Sankhotepre said with a laugh.
“We weren’t invading,” Gregory said, for the millionth time. “It was an exploratory mission. Nobody back home even thought any Tuliin still survived.”
“Well, now they do.” She still clearly didn’t care. “And I know where their strongholds are.”
“Fine,” Gregory said, gesturing at her massage table and her alcohol. “You continue lounging around here with your slaves and your fancy wines, pining over me, wishing you could grow my balls back. I’m going to go deal with this before you get both our countries wiped out.”
“Governor?” Sankhotepre said, her voice too pleasant.
Gregory snorted. “What?”
“Get on your knees. Address me as Pharaoh.”
Gregory felt a little surge of rage rise within him, remembering the last time she’d forced him to his knees. He still bore the golden collar with its single titanium ring, a reminder of his station as her personal slave.
“Pharaoh,” he amended, but he didn’t get to his knees. “You kept me alive to advise you. I’ve done so faithfully for seventy-six years, spending a good portion of it wishing for death, yet every night you send slaves to my room to force me to swallow that repulsive swill to force me to keep my youth despite the fact I haven’t fucked you since you took my balls. For some reason, you still value my opinion.” He waited, cocking his head at her.
She inclined her head slightly.
“Then allow me to put all that expense you wasted on keeping me alive to good use and advise you. My advice is that you’re gambling more than you can afford to lose in a very dangerous game, and if you bet everything, you will lose it all.”
Sankhotepre met his gaze for a long moment, then, with as much casual ease as if they’d been talking about the weather, she shrugged and plucked another goblet from the tray, then waited as a slave hurried to fill it. “You’ve told me for decades you think they actually pose a threat. I wanted to find out if there was any truth to that.”
“You sacked one of their towns,” Gregory snapped, careful not to say, ‘our’. He had long ago learned that her most vicious punishments came from referring to the people across the Divide as ‘his’ people. To the Pharaoh, for those poor, cursed fools she for some reason grew attached to and decided to favor, there could only be her, her kingdom, and the people who worshipped her, with no other allegiance allowed. “They’re not going to just overlook that, Sankhotepre!”
“They attacked my men,” Sankhotepre said.
“Your men were encroaching on their territory,” Gregory said.
She gave him a sharp look, and too late, he realized that the Pharaoh probably considered the land beyond the Divide to be her territory, too. For the woman who had lived for sixteen hundred years, fourteen hundred of which had been in absolute power, he had long ago realized that nothing seemed to be too far-fetched for her imagination. “They attacked my men,” she said, again completely unconcerned. “We retaliated.”
“On horses and camels!” Gregory cried. “They have tourino weapons and spaceships bigger than this pyramid!”
“And yet,” she said, delicately taking a sip of mead, “a handful of my men were able to lay waste to an entire town. Forgive me if I’m not impressed.” She looked…eager.
She’s excited by the idea of a war, Gregory realized, stunned. He felt his breath leave him in horror. “You did it on purpose,” he blurted.
Sankhotepre’s lip quirked in a slight smile.
“You want a war,” he breathed.
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“I want one of those ships,” she said, swirling her mead and peering down at it. “Then I want a war.”
He blinked. “You’re provoking them…so they invade…so this time you don’t just blow them out of the sky and you have a chance take one of their ships.”
“What good is being a god if the next door neighbors have better transportation?” she asked. “I want to see the stars, Gregory.”
“You could maybe barter for one,” Gregory said, though he knew that she’d destroyed all chances of that the moment she’d ordered an incursion into Alliance territory.
She gave a wry smile. “Oh, I think we both know it’s too late for that. But humor me. What did you think to propose? Me sending you across the Divide to bargain some sort of truce on my behalf?” Her list took on a cynical twist. “Leaving you the chance to, oh, disappear amongst your former brethren, never to be seen from again?”
Gregory kept his face completely schooled. “Everyone I knew back then is dead. I have no reason to care about them anymore.”
“But you do!” Sankhotepre slammed the goblet down on its platter, sloshing mead everywhere. Her blue eyes were livid. “As many luxuries as I have afforded you, as many boons as I’ve given you, as much lenience…and you still crave those heathens instead of a living deity.”
He knew the fact he hadn’t returned her advances of late rankled her, and he didn’t care. He had hoped it would spur her to kill him, but as of yet, he’d had no such luck.
“Last I heard,” Gregory bit out, fighting his anger, “chaining a man to a wall and chopping off his nuts wasn’t exactly considered a boon.” Why the Pharaoh had taken such a liking to him, he still didn’t understand, but he knew it had saved him more than once. Any other man in his situation would have been executed before the masses and tossed into a volcano in the first week.
“That particular case was lenience, and you know it,” Sankhotepre said, gingerly dabbing a towel at some mead she had gotten on her elbow. “Your act of defiance had been public. I needed to remove the demon from your body with a sacrifice.” She gave him a smug smile before she retrieved her goblet once more and watched him over the rim, satisfaction oozing from her demeanor.
They both knew damn well there wasn’t a fucking demon. “And you wonder why I won’t fuck you anymore,” Gregory whispered, his fists tightening despite themselves, remembering the humiliation, the exorcisms, the sacrifice, the priests cutting open his balls and bathing in his blood as he screamed himself hoarse.
Her blue eyes grew cold, but she sipped her mead.
“We’ve already established I don’t care if you kill me,” Gregory said, tired of her games. “Do it. Get this over with. You want my advice? You’ve never taken it, so why do you even keep me alive?”
“Aside from the fact you amuse me?” Sankhotepre asked. She seemed pleased at the way he’d allowed his simmering anger for what she’d done to him to temporarily shine through. “Honestly?” She downed the drink and set it aside. “I find your mindset…refreshing…after having lived in this place so long. Everyone else fears me.”
“Believe me,” Gregory said, “a lot fewer people are going to fear you once you start losing whole cities to tourino blasts.”
She waved a manicured hand like that didn’t matter. “I can stand to lose a few cities. All I need is one ship. Then they will have no cities and I will own it all.”
Gregory frowned at her, something about the way she had said that making him realize there was more to her plan than simply confiscating a few ships… He blinked. “You want to go over there. You. Personally.”
This time, her smile was vicious. “They’re using technology that doesn’t belong to them. It’s my duty to liberate it.”
Gregory felt a cold sweat ripple through him at the look of sheer, unadulterated lust emblazoned upon her face as she turned to examine the ‘sacred’ artifacts from before the Fall. Mostly old comm boxes, appliances, and other junk, but there had been a couple dangerous ones in there that Gregory had been careful not to tell her what they were really for, namely the remote ship controller. He didn’t know if the controller worked, or which ship it had been hooked up to, or if that ship even existed anymore, but the last thing he was going to do was let her know what it did.
But the desire in her face—the longing—was as potent as if she had spoken it aloud. She may as well have been an open book, and that book bespoke of another war, the likes of which had already ripped the world in half once before.
“Look, you have the symbiotes, you don’t need the tech,” Gregory began slowly.
Sankhotepre’s head snapped back with sudden alertness, her blue eyes glittering with barely concealed violence. When she spoke, her words were filled with the sharp acuity of a cobra. “That tech belongs to me, just like your fucking body, Greg, and if I hear you utter one more word suggesting otherwise, I will take your hands. And your feet. And then I’ll have you thrown into Yellowstone and forget about you entirely.”
Her words were spoken with such vehemence, such passion, that Gregory realized with startlement that she meant every syllable. Deciding to defuse the situation before it could escalate into another stay in the basement or a new piece of jewelry, he said, “I’m your governor. I need to know if you’re doing things that’s going to get us attacked.”
“Why? Military affairs are Henshark’s domain. You’re simply a civil servant.”
“Henshark is a moronic zealot with no ability to think outside the box.”
“Still. He’s loyal.”
The way she said it, the conversation was over.
Gregory refused to be set aside so easily. Listen. Sankho.” He softened his voice in a desperate bid to get his once-lover to listen to reason. “You’re getting in over your head. You can fight with the power of the ancients…” He hesitated, trying to figure out how to tell her she was outclassed without triggering her pride. He settled on, “But there is only one of you, and you have twenty-one cities that would need your attention in a battle. You can’t be in all places at once.”
She glanced at him, running her fingertips along the grooves in the wooden tabletop. As he watched, her fingers shimmered with a golden light, and the mead simply vanished as if it hadn’t been. A moment later, her cup refilled on its own.
Gregory, long since used to her casual displays of power, just waited.
Sankhotepre looked him over consideringly, then sighed. “My scouting party went dark eight days ago. Henshark insists they’re still alive, that he sent his best men, but I have my doubts.”
“Eight days… Around the same time they sent the message.”
“Hours before,” she confirmed.
He nodded, grateful that she was at least talking with him. “They went from capturing your men to raiding your territory in two hours. How long did it take you to get your guys across the Divide?”
“Seven weeks,” she muttered.
Longer than he’d imagined. He let the breath out that he’d been holding, feeling punched. “Surely you realize how dangerous it is to provoke them.”
Her breathtaking blue eyes flickered to him and he saw the vulnerability there before she hid it again with a mask of disinterest. “I need one of those ships, Gregory.”
Her only real advantage in this is that the Alliance no doubt knew that, too. Keeping her on the West side of the Divide would keep her so hobbled as to be impotent. If their new commandant running things was halfway intelligent, he’d simply kill the interlopers, throw their corpses over the Edge, and set up better defenses… Not risk sending a ship over her territory again.
Because if Sankhotepre ever got hold of a ship, the world would get very dark, very fast. Gregory, who had shared her bed for over four decades, knew that better than anyone else.
She traced her fingers across the silver mead carafe. “They weren’t supposed to get caught.” She said it with a flash of anger and…fear? She glanced up at him again. “They were told to stay out of sight. Not to engage the enemy.” There was frustration in her words as she batted the grapes aside, where they went bouncing across the gleaming black floor and slaves scrambled to pick them up. Sankhotepre watched them distantly, mouth tight.
She knows she just stirred up a hornet’s nest and she’s terrified, Gregory realized, feeling a sudden pang of sympathy for her.
“This Commandant Belkin is not likely to follow up the threat,” Gregory assured her. “The Alliance would stand to lose everything if they lost one of those ships. It’s not worth the risk, when you’re trapped over here and they’re over there.”
The relief in her eyes was painful.
She still trusts me, he thought, both befuddled and amazed by that. It was a small, bittersweet memory of what they’d had before. Somehow, after everything she had done to him, she still looked at him as the closest thing to a friend that she had. Gregory felt a wave of pity for her before that, too, he crushed. She didn’t deserve his pity.
The people of this city, however, did. “What has Henshark said about defenses?”
Sankhotepre snorted. “He says we should send everyone we have into their territory and exterminate the heretics.”
“Do not do that.”
She gave him a sharp look. “Have I ever struck you as stupid, Gregory?”
“When I was hanging from your dungeon, balls leaking down my leg because I’d refused to fuck you for a night, it had crossed my mind a time or two, yes.”
Her face reddened and she looked away. He saw her pluck at a grape twig as if it held the answer to the world’s problems. Then she seemed to collect herself. “I’m not sending a war party. I’m going to force them to come to us.”
Gregory took a deep breath and let it out, trying not to let his relief show. If any of her zealots had survived the incursion and continued to wreak destruction—or if she’d given in to Henshark’s assertions that her divine army could crush the heretics with the grace of the volcano gods at their backs—he knew that there was no hope of the city he’d come to love surviving the next couple of months.
“That’s what I would do,” Gregory said. “And issue an apology. Immediately. Explain that it was supposed to be an ambassadorial mission and your men were given instructions not to attack. Disavow all ties with the men. Say they went rogue. Send a block of platinum as a gesture of your goodwill.”
She made a face like she’d told him to drink pisswater.
“I’ll have a scribe write it up,” Gregory said. “You sign it.”
Her brow creased slightly, but she gave a slight nod.
Gregory felt some of the tension in his body release. “Thank you.”
“There’s another thing,” she muttered, and it sounded like she were dragging the words forward against her own better judgement?
“What’s that?” Gregory asked.
“The belligerent Skymancer that escaped. He…was in the area of the attack.”
Gregory froze, suddenly fully aware of just how much danger they were all in. “And?”
“And Henshark’s men have not located him yet.”
“Sankho, I don’t need to tell you how bad it would be if he fell into their—”
“I told them to kill him,” Sankhotepre snapped. “He wasn’t useful and I’m tired of his crap.”
Gregory relaxed slightly, feeling almost jealous that Ptahmohtep had earned his freedom, either by escape or by bullet. “Have they confirmed his death?”
Sankhotepre lifted her head in the picture of Pharaohly arrogance. “Henshark has assured me it’s as good as done. He sent six Ibis.”
“But they haven’t confirmed it,” Gregory pressed.
Sankhotepre looked away, almost like she would ignore him, then shook her head slightly.
“Fuck.” Gregory took a deep breath, then let it out through his teeth. “Tell him to send Jackals. Four of them. Get the job done.”
She gave him a sharp look at the idea of sending some of her personal guard away, but eventually just nodded.
“Just hope they kill him before the Alliance realizes he’s out there, or things are about to get really, really ugly.”
“I know,” Sankhotepre whispered.
Gregory grunted. “I know we haven’t spoken in a while, but I still care about you,” he admitted. “Not as much as before, obviously, but it’s hard to shake the memories.” At her slightly narrowed eyes, he said, “Maybe I’m weak, but despite what you did to me, I stopped wanting to see you get hurt a decade ago. Now I just want peace. A good book, a glass of mead, a quiet place to watch the river at night.” He took a deep breath, debating as he watched her, then let it out in a rush of defeat. “Next time you’re planning on doing something stupid, at least talk to me about it first.” Then, without waiting for her response, he turned and left.
“Gregory.” The word came at his back, just as his hand touched the door. Gregory turned to look at her over his shoulder.
She lifted her chin, and he thought he saw the flash of tears in her eyes. “I’d take it back if I could,” she said. “I was angry. I’d never had anyone…spurn…me…” She bit out the last words in a croak.
Gregory turned back to the door and pushed his way through it in silence.