General Jaxx approaches a wall and spins on his heel, his timing perfect as his left boot stamps on marble, his step echoing like a rifle shot off the walls of the emperor’s audience chamber.
Twenty paces later, he turns and heads back. He marches with the iron determination of a man who remembers being whipped for marching out of step. In that memory he’s eight, his first year at the Academy.
A fire burns in the great fireplace. OctoV likes to be warm. Or maybe he just likes his generals to be uncomfortable. The emperor wears full dress, and expects his officers to do the same.
The difference is he wears his lightly.
On the wall OctoV takes salute from his victorious troops. One of them is the general’s great-grandfather. He stands behind a major in the Wolf Brigade, whose fur cloak must be vile in that heat.
General Indigo Jaxx is both younger and older than his emperor. OctoV was fourteen when the general was born. He was fourteen the year the general’s father was born. He’s been that age for as long as anyone can remember.
The general runs a hand through his cropped hair.
It comes away wet.
OctoV, the glorious and victorious, the undefeated and ruler of more worlds than any man can count, whose sweat is perfume to his subjects . . .
Some generals vomit before an audience. Others kill themselves. One gave his ADC his own rank badges and told him to pretend. Both died the death that act deserved.
‘Meeting him is like having your brains extracted, liquidized and returned by someone using a mallet and a blunt spoon.’ The officer who wrote that left his own brains across the note on which it was written.
But Indigo Jaxx is not just general of the Death’s Head, the emperor’s elite force. He is Duke of Farlight, the most powerful man in the empire after OctoV. And since OctoV is not strictly a man at all . . .
Aware his marching could be seen as nerves, General Jaxx stamps to a halt, pivots on his heel and stares out of a window. His heartbeat is steadying and his pulse slowing. When he sweeps his fingers through his hair they come away dry.
His body knows what his mind has yet to accept.
It has stood down its defences, untied the knot in his gut, dried the sweat on his ribs and replaced all three with a cold certainty that makes no sense but accepts no refusal.
OctoV is not going to show.
This afternoon’s audience between the emperor and his empire’s most loyal subject, General Indigo Jaxx, has been cancelled.
Taking a look around the audience chamber, the general nods grimly. His staff wait beyond the door, and under no circumstances must they discover the meeting never took place.
‘Sir,’ says Jaxx loudly.
This is what he always calls the emperor. The only one of OctoV’s subjects allowed that latitude.
‘Yes, sir,’ he says. ‘Certainly, sir.’
Having counted to a hundred, he bows himself out.
‘Back to HQ,’ he growls.
As General Jaxx leaves the palace without noticing a Wolf Brigade general’s amusement, he considers what the emperor’s decision to cancel the meeting might mean, and knows it is not good.