Broken Empire: Aftermath

Chapter 2

Senator Waval Clovis stepped out onto the balcony of his villa in the nude to watch the sun rising in the sky, red and swollen like a teat. Some called Senjele's capital, Nebarius, the city of the sun because of how whitewashed buildings drank in the color. The nobility ought to have soaked up more color nestled so close to the solar system's bosom. Every morning, the senator would step outside, press his ear to the railing of his balcony and listen to the city's heart flutter at his touch. Listening to the offbeat murmur of the market below was always the sweetest part of his day.

One can never buy love, the senator thought. He uncorked his wine bottle and poured the first few drops over the railing, a libation to the gods of quick thieves and deep pockets. Everything else is fair game.

He sat down on the deep, mahogany chair, a goose feather pillow softening the plop. With his feet swung up on the table, he tilted his head back and took a long drink of the wine.

Everything except the damn crown. No amount of gold would ever make it flow down off Ludus' head and onto Prince Annon's. The emperor's steel crown did not know the touch of gold or the whisper of flesh in the dead of night. It knew only the firm fist of honor, the bite of duty and the firm grasp of tradition. Why would anyone in their right mind want the bloody thing?

The empress, gods bless her, was still a sight. Clovis might have given his right eye for the honor of a grope. She was young, less than half the age of the emperor. Ludus had taken her to his bed just after the rebellion on Illion, a girl of nineteen, all chestnut curls and curtsies. Ludus put Rebos in her the same year and Annon just a year later. Twenty long years of being mother and wife to royalty had changed her heart but not her vixen face. At least those boys had the sense to take her looks and not Ludus'. For all his charms, the emperor would make an ugly corpse.

The balcony doors swung open behind him and he set down the bottle as a young woman in a faded brown dress stepped out. She carried his breakfast on a polished silver tray: a single poached egg, two bits of toast with jam and a fat, greasy sausage. His good pants hung folded over her arm and she carried a data pad in her hand tuned to the morning news. "Chaunstance, my dear, smile for me. Sit with me. Drink with me!"

"Wine already senator?" Chaunstance placed his breakfast before him. "You have matters of state today."

"Wine, women and song are matters of state as well, dear lady."

She folded her hands over her apron. "Should I draw up a check for mistress Danayla or did you pay her in advance? I told her to dress and wait by the back entrance. It does your reputation no good for whores to go out the front."

"I was a man long before I was a senator. Men have needs. The voters of Senjele remember that."

"They remember you buy drinks for them and extort their extortionists." She held his pants out to him. "Your dignity, senator."

"Dignity be damned," he mumbled as he fought to get them on. The waistband was getting too tight again. "I'll deal with the lady myself." He glanced at the front page headlines. "So they did it, did they?" He seized the data pad from her before plopping back down. "Executor bastards. He'll be a publicity mess for them."

"Who?"

"Timothy Val. He's the last of a dying breed of Senjelian men, the kind that gives a damn about this crumbling old empire. A brave man might call him a patriot. A stupid patriot, perhaps, but one nonetheless."

He glanced through the story, even though he could already guess at what it had to say. The press had been following the rebellion on Toria since the beginning. A poor farming world, Senjele had swallowed it up fifty years ago, the last prize of the late emperor before Ludus ascended.