A Confusion of Princes Read online

  ‘Cadet Khemri reporting, sir!’ I snapped out.

  ‘Better,’ said Huzand. ‘I see that you have a particularly capable Master of Assassins . . . have you already been offered sponsorship by a House?’

  The mutual cooperation societies commonly were called Houses, the only kind of family that a Prince could have. But I didn’t know how these Houses worked, how you joined them, or how many there were, or anything useful like that. I could have queried the Imperial Mind on the spot, but trying to sort through a mass of data while also talking to someone is difficult, and I had not yet learned how to manage it effectively.

  Later on, I did ask the Mind, and I discovered that there were more than a thousand Houses. Some were no more than mutual assistance pacts between only a dozen or so Princes, but the most important ones had tens of thousands of members and often quite rigidly defined hierarchies, customs, and duties. House Jerrazis was somewhere in the middle, with fifteen thousand members and a four-tier membership hierarchy. Huzand was effectively the second-in-command, after Prince Jerrazis himself, who was a rear admiral and commander of the Nazhiz Quadrant Fleet.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Curious,’ said Huzand. ‘You have no special sponsor at the Imperial Core? Some senior Prince who has taken you under their wing? I see it is several days since your ascension, but you have only just connected to the Mind.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Very well. Despite your slovenliness and initial foolishness, I am prepared to assist you in your career, and accordingly, you are invited to join—as a probationary member, of course— House Jerrazis. Just confirm your acceptance for the Imperial Mind to record.’

  ‘I decline, sir,’ I answered, rather too readily. If I had managed to get even a bit smarter, I would have taken my time.

  ‘You decline?’ asked Huzand. The red tide was rising up the cabbage head. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Uh, I don’t want to join a House immediately,’ I said, exercising some belated damage control. ‘I want to think about it. Sir.’

  ‘Almost all the cadets here at the Kwanantil Domain Naval Academy are proud members of House Jerrazis,’ said Huzand. ‘As are many of the officers of the academic staff.’

  Great. So by refusing the invitation, I’d made myself an outsider. But even so, the arch-priest was a lot scarier than Commandant Huzand, and she’d told me not to accept his invitation.

  ‘I still need to think about it, sir.’

  ‘As you wish. The invitation will almost certainly not be repeated.’

  He looked away from me for a moment, and I caught the edge of some mental communication. Asking about me, obviously, since he looked back and said, ‘I am informed that you travelled to the Kwanantil system aboard a ship belonging to the Kwanantil system governor, Prince Achmir. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I replied. We had indeed been on a ship belonging to Prince Achmir, but I very much doubted that he knew we were on board.

  I also took a microsecond to query the Imperial Mind about Prince Achmir’s House allegiance.

  :Prince Achmir <>. Ordinary member House Vethethezk <>:

  So Achmir wasn’t all cosied up with Huzand and House Jerrazis, which probably meant something. I inquired further. House Vethethezk had more members than House Jerrazis and was older, headed up by Prince Vethethezk XXII, who was Governor of a whole Reach and more than four hundred years old. From my brief glimpse at the data on it, nearly all its members were Imperial Governors, so it seemed unlikely that they would be enemies of a House that was concentrated in the Navy. But I didn’t know enough to be sure about this. It was bound to be more complicated.

  ‘Transported here by Achmir and assigned the legendary Master Haddad,’ muttered Huzand.

  I kept my face wooden. The legendary Master Haddad? I knew he was a senior assassin, and very good at his craft. But for Huzand to call him legendary . . . that was something else.

  The Commandant fixed me with what was obviously meant to be a penetrating gaze. I guess I was supposed to crack at this point and confess everything he wanted to know, like for example that I was secretly being sponsored by Prince Achmir and House Vethethezk, they’d set me up with Haddad, and that was why I wouldn’t join House Jerrazis.

  He took a couple of steps toward me—not too many, because that would mean leaving his nifty ramp and standing on the same level—and intensified his stare at my ooze-stained face.

  ‘You resemble someone,’ he said. ‘I can’t quite place it. . . ’

  I felt him query the Imperial Mind, I guess doing a visual match. I caught my identifier in the transmission but nothing else. This was interesting on its own account, as it was the first indication I had (other than Haddad telling me it was possible) that mindspeech could be overheard or listened in to.

  Huzand frowned a moment later, but I couldn’t tell whether it was a frown of annoyance at not finding out what he wanted or a frown because he’d found out something he didn’t like.

  ‘You are aware that body sculpting is forbidden to Princes?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I replied. I didn’t know much about body sculpting, apart from the fact that it was forbidden to Princes and that it typically took at least a few weeks, depending on what was being done. ‘Uh, I’ve only just come out of my candidate temple, sir.’

  ‘Yes, you wouldn’t have had time. Nor opportunity, if you did indeed take ship from Thorongir Three straight here. I wonder . . .’

  ‘What do you wonder, sir?’ I asked, trying to be pleasant. For some reason, Huzand didn’t appear to realise that I was being nice to him.

  ‘None of your insolence, Cadet! You are to join Class 2645, Section Seven, immediately. My aide will give you all the details. Dismissed.’

  He waved his hand at me. Since I didn’t know any drill at that point, I waved my hand back at him. As it turned out, he wasn’t saluting; it was more of a ‘get out of my sight’ dismissal, and he didn’t appreciate me returning the gesture.

  ‘Go!’ bellowed Huzand, pointing at the door.

  I got the message and left. The Bitek hound followed me till I half turned and sent a focused Psitek domination command that made it sit back on its haunches as if pulled by a spring, confirming that my earlier education hadn’t been a total waste of time. I might be ignorant about many things, but at least I could stop an engineered dog-beast in its tracks.

  Prince Lucisk was waiting in the outer office. As soon as I saw her, she mind-sent a mass of detail about this Class 2645, Section Seven I was joining, including the unwelcome fact that I was to immediately report to Cadet Duty Barracks Thanruz and would not have time to set up my own accommodations in the off-duty section of the base.

  Lucisk had also sent my initial schedule. I had one hour to settle into my barracks, then my first lesson was Naval Drill and Etiquette. There were many lessons on that topic in the schedule ahead, mixed in with a few more interesting subjects like Basic Singleship Operation and Introductory Insystem Tactics, but the first month or so was clearly mostly about ritual, ceremony, and drill. Even worse, most of the drill and the boring stuff wasn’t even rapid-learning downloads, but actual practice. I cursed when I saw that, though it is true that you never learn anything quite as well from the downloads as when you actually do it.

  ‘You have your schedule, Cadet. Welcome to the Academy,’ said Lucisk. ‘Master Haddad, you will need to see Uncle Gerekuz to have Prince Khemri’s off-duty accommodations assigned.’

  ‘I have already communicated with Gerekuz and have obtained suitable accommodations, thank you, Highness,’ replied Haddad. ‘Though I believe that as my Prince has incurred two demerits, he will not be off duty for several weeks.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lucisk without inflection. ‘You had best get moving, Cadet Khemri, if you don’t want to incur more demerits.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess so,’ I replied. ‘Thanks.’

  Out in the corridor, Haddad leaned in close.

  ‘You need to
meet your priests, Highness. I recommend a fast detour to your off-duty accommodations. It will reduce your settling-in time in the barracks, but I think meeting your priests is of more importance in order to establish more relay points to the Imperial Mind.’

  ‘Sure,’ I replied, once again channelling the insouciance of my favourite Prince from history, or perhaps legend, Garikm XXXII. ‘What can they do to me, anyway?’

  Quite a lot, as it happened.

  5

  CADET DUTY BARRACKS Thanruz, unlike the opulent suite of rooms I had just seen that would be my off-duty residence, was a bare cavern hewn from the rock. Basic beds were lined up in a row, separated by extruded Bitek storage pods. Water was dripping from the ceiling in one corner, and the whole place was very harshly illuminated by Mektek incandescent arrays that had been fixed to the rock above each bed.

  When I arrived, some species of lower cadet officer with bronze epaulettes, rather than the silver of Lucisk or Janokh, was haranguing the eight other cadets who would be my classmates for the next year. The cadets were standing in various poses of disinterest, annoyance, and anger at the feet of their beds, obviously experiencing the same disillusionment that I had gone through: the discovery that being a cadet in the Navy pretty much cancelled out all the benefits of being a Prince, at least when we were on duty.

  I picked up their projections as I walked in. My face was clear now, thanks to Uncle Krughal, one of my new household priests who had some experience in hazardous material cleanup, though as Haddad had foreseen, it was really a job for a Bitek specialist priest—which we didn’t have. Krughal’s Psitek nanobrushing had removed all the stain, so I knew that it wasn’t my dirty face that was making the cadet officer, one Prince Jesmur, snarl as she caught sight of me.

  ‘Cadet Khemri! You’re five minutes late. Take your station by your bed.’

  ‘Only five minutes!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’m improving. Uh, which one is my bed?’

  I asked because there was no overlay to show me, but of course there was only one bed that didn’t have a Prince standing in front of it. Call it an early lesson that overreliance on tek overlays is dangerous and thinking is to be preferred.

  :Khemri <> Naval Record Demerit Applied Authority Jesmur <>:

  ‘What was that for?’ I protested as I strolled over to my bed.

  ‘Insolence to a superior officer,’ said Jesmur. ‘If you keep at it, I’ll assign a group demerit to this class.’

  All the other Princes looked at me, none of them happily. There were five female and three male Princes, and we all looked quite different. There was a lot of variation in skin, hair, and eye colour, ranging from the darkest black skin, dark hair, and purple eyes of Prince Aliadh to the orange-tinted skin and yellow eyes of Prince Fyrmis, who—as was not unusual for some planets—had no hair at all. My own brown skin and black eyes were pretty much in the middle of the pack. My hair at that time was long and tied back in a queue, though later when I became more aware of Imperial fashions, which primarily consisted of the aping of old Earth customs, I had it shaved save for a strip in the middle, a hairstyle called a mohuck for reasons that had not survived the march of history.

  It did not take long to learn that in addition to looking different, we also had different abilities, and that even among Princes, no one was created equal. Though we had all been augmented in the same way, that augmentation had built on different genetic potentials. Some of the Princes in my class group were faster than me, stronger than me, and possibly smarter than me. Three were taller, two were shorter, and I guess four of them were better-looking, if you assume a classical approach to beauty, in terms of symmetry of features and so on.

  Our seniority within the class group was based on our ascension dates. Much to the annoyance of most of the others, who had come to the Academy more swiftly from their candidate temples, I was the second-most senior. A rather pig-faced Prince called Charoz was the only one senior to me, and then only by a few hours.

  Charoz had a nasty glint in his eye, and I could tell he hated my guts from the get-go, possibly because I inadvertently made a kind of snorting noise when he introduced himself, and like I said, he did somewhat resemble a pig.

  Apart from Charoz, almost all the other Princes were pretty much interchangeable, at least as far as I was concerned. For starters, with the single exception of a Prince Tyrtho, they were all members of House Jerrazis. Judging from their joining dates, they had received the same offer that Commandant Huzand had extended to me, and they had accepted.

  Tyrtho, for some reason, belonged to House Tivand. I guessed that she must have been offered the opportunity while en route to the Academy and had accepted, not knowing that this would put her at a disadvantage. Later I confirmed part of this was true; she had joined Tivand from her candidate temple. But Tyrtho had known that the Academy was dominated by the Jerrazis and had chosen Tivand anyway, because of that House’s strength in the higher ranks of the Navy. She planned a long way ahead and had started off much better informed than I was, for the simple reason that she had always asked lots of questions, something she continued to do throughout her Naval cadetship, no matter how unwelcome the questions were.

  Tyrtho was the only one who stayed out of what happened next.

  ‘You have about twenty minutes,’ said Jesmur. ‘Check the requirement for full ceremonial uniform and report in that uniform to drill hall twelve at eleven forty-five. I have to attend to some other matters; I will see you there.’

  She looked at me as she left, quite a fierce glare, and made a kind of signal with her eyebrows at the others. It didn’t take an accelerated Prince brain to work out that she was suggesting that they teach me the importance of fitting into the unit and all that kind of stuff.

  As soon as Jesmur went out the door, the whole bunch (except Tyrtho) moved toward me, their hostility evident. But they had only taken a step forward when a wide-shouldered Prince with a low forehead called Marmro said, ‘He’s connected, witnessing.’

  ‘You and Jipru block him,’ ordered Charoz. He was taking the seniority thing seriously; the order snapped out as if it was some brilliant fleet command.

  I felt a slight pain inside my head, and for a millisecond, my connection to the Imperial Mind was lost as my relaying priest, Uncle Frekwo, was blocked. I felt Uncle Aleakh join in and also immediately get blocked, but then two of my aunts joined in and connection was reestablished. All of this happened in the time that my classmates took only one more step toward me. I knew their intentions, for at that point we’d all had the same basic unarmed combat training in our candidate temples. They were moving in the posture called Cranes Advance on Single Fish, which was for advancing on a lone enemy when supported by numerous allies.

  ‘He’s still witnessing!’ burst out Marmro.

  ‘What?’ asked Charoz. He hesitated, his brilliant command mind not quite up to unexpected situations. ‘Uh, Aliadh and Fyrmis, you block as well.’

  But I’d already messaged Haddad about the situation and he was relaying too, with first nine and then all twelve of my priests online. I backed up to the door as the other seven Princes continued to move toward me. Tyrtho sat on her bed, watching.

  ‘He’s still witnessing!’ protested Marmro.

  ‘Everyone block!’ snapped Charoz.

  They all took another step and stopped.

  ‘Still witnessing,’ said Marmro. He turned around and glared at Tyrtho, which wasn’t a good look for him, considering the previously mentioned low forehead. ‘You’d better not be helping him.’

  ‘Doesn’t look like he needs my help,’ drawled Tyrtho. ‘By the way, Marmro, I think in Cranes Advance on Single Fish you’re supposed to be farther around to the left.’

  ‘Shut up!’ ordered Charoz, just as I sent a command to Haddad to block everyone else and dropped my relay to the Imperial Mind. At the same time, I drew the phage emitter from my boot.

  ‘He’s disconnected—’ crowed Marmro.

&nbs
p; ‘Maximum dispersal,’ I said to the emitter, and smiled at my new enemies. ‘Who would have thought such a nasty Bitek accident could happen to such nice people?’

  I felt all of them stop blocking and reach desperately for the Imperial Mind. But they had only one priest each, and junior Masters of Assassins. Haddad and my twelve priests blocked their efforts without too much difficulty, though I was relieved Tyrtho had not joined in on their side. I had a feeling maybe she had more than a single priest.

  There were muttered cries of confusion and alarm. Two of the Princes who had been sensibly hanging back now ostentatiously separated themselves from the pack. I marked their names. Aliadh and Calzik. This swift behaviour was typical of them both, I would learn. They were very quick to assess who would be on the winning side in any situation.

  ‘We’ve wasted some of our precious time,’ I said. ‘I suggest we do as we’re told, get dressed, and go to our lesson. Bear in mind that I’ll be keeping up my connection to the Mind at all times, or blocking yours if I need us to have some quiet time all to ourselves. But I’m a friendly soul, and disposed to think the better of all you easily led types. Remember that.’

  ‘We’ll remember, all right,’ said Charoz. ‘You can’t stay connected all the time.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked. ‘How would you know?’

  Charoz glowered at me but didn’t answer. Like me, he was too newly ascended, and he didn’t know all the ins and outs of relays to the Mind, or how many priests I had or who might be supporting me, legally or not.

  ‘You’d better not get us any group demerits,’ he said finally, and turned back toward the beds. The others slowly followed. I waited till they had started getting their ceremonial uniforms out of their lockers, then stowed the phage emitter and went toward my own small patch of ground with its bed and locker.