The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(78)

Who was delighted. “I am found out!” he exclaimed. “And so early. Your dear Lord Marce never suspected.”

“He doesn’t know what I know,” Grayland said.

Chenevert turned to Marce. “I can see why you like her,” he said. “I very much like her already.”

“Uh … what?” Marce said, to both of them.

“Your friend here—” Grayland turned back to Chenevert. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Tomas Reynauld Chenevert.”

“Your friend Tomas Reynauld Chenevert is royalty. A king? Emperor? Grand Duke?”

“Merely a king, Your Majesty.”

“That’s all,” Grayland mocked lightly.

“I’m not an empress like some. But it’s not ‘empress’ here, is it?”

“Emperox. Not gender-specific.”

Chenevert pointed to Marce. “And yet this one is a lord and his father a count.”

“You’re expecting logic from royal titles?”

“Point.”

“You’re a king?” Marce said, to Chenevert.

“Yes. Well.” Chenevert made a motion with his hand. “Was a king. I’m dead now, and the executive power of the throne traditionally ceases on demise. Also, I was overthrown. So there was some argument whether I was still a king even when I was alive. I say yes, but then I would.”

“I have some people here who would very much like to do that to me,” Grayland said. “Overthrow me, I mean.”

“I would recommend against it,” Chenevert advised.

“Not a great career move?”

“It frees up your schedule, which is honestly fantastic. But the people who removed you then usually want to kill you too. And that’s inconvenient. Any assassination attempts against you yet?”

“A couple.”

“Aw. You’re just a baby at this,” Chenevert said.

“If I could jump in here,” Marce said, and turned to Grayland. “How did you know he’s a king? Was a king?”

Grayland waved at Chenevert. “Because he’s this.”

“What does this have to do with him being a king?”

“You have a something like this too,” Chenevert said to Grayland. “Equally impressive. Equally expensive. Equally invasive.”

Grayland nodded. “I have something called a Memory Room. All of the previous emperoxs are there. Their memories are there, at least. But you’re different. They have the memories and can tell you what the emperox was thinking or feeling at the time, but they don’t have the emotions themselves. But you seem all there.”

“I am all there. Or at least it feels that way on the inside. My family made improvements to the software over time. You may be running a very early build of it.”

“I always assumed it was ordered made by Rachela. The first of our emperoxs.”

Chenevert shook his head. “If it’s the same as what we had, it’s from much earlier than that. It originally dates back to Earth. Your people and my people got it just before the Rupture.”

“The what?” Marce asked.

“The Rupture. It’s what we called the event that isolated us from Earth and its network of Flow stream systems, and from you.” He looked at Marce and Grayland, who were staring at him blankly. “Why? What do you call it?”

“We don’t call it anything,” Marce said. “We know we lost contact with Earth about fifteen hundred years ago, but we didn’t know it had its own network of Flow streams.”

“Or that there was another entirely separate group of systems, with its own set of Flow streams,” Grayland said.

Chenevert looked at both of them, a dawning smile on his face. “How interesting,” he said. “You had an actual dark age. You lost everything about it. About the Rupture. And about us. And Earth and its systems, too.”

“You knew about us?” Marce asked.

“Of course I did,” Chenevert said. “That’s how I got into your space in the first place. Technically it’s a treaty violation that I’m here at all, but given that the option back home was being hanged, I was willing to take that chance. And I suppose if you don’t remember you had a treaty with us, and with Earth, then I shouldn’t worry about violating it.”

“We have a treaty with you.”

“Yes. Well, obviously not me specifically. But with the Assembly, of which my planet Ponthieu is part. Twenty systems in all. And then Earth’s empire, of another fifteen systems. Your collection of systems, what you now called the Interdependency, was the Free Systems. More systems but fewer people than either the Assembly or Earth, because most of our systems had livable planets in them and yours mostly … didn’t.”

Marce and Grayland looked at each other again, dumbfounded.

“You really don’t know, do you?” Chenevert said.

“This is entirely new to me,” Grayland said. Marce nodded as well.

“There’s irony to this, you know,” Chenevert said. “Or actually, you don’t.”

“What’s the irony?”

“It was the Free Systems that pushed for the treaty that broke up the systems into three partitions. And then created the Rupture when that wasn’t enough isolation for it.”