Rebel's Honor(26)

"No." Lukan turned his back on Tao and stalked down the passage toward  his apartment. As much as it stung, he needed to mentally rehash his  first meeting with Lynx.

Nothing had changed since summer. She was as distant and disdainful as  she'd been then. That was a problem, because he still wanted her.  Passionately. He had spent much of the evening imagining running his  hands through her hair, over her lithe body, kissing  her-everywhere-making love to her until she cried out, begging him for  more.

And that was where his fantasy faltered and reality bit.

Lynx hadn't been interested in him last summer, and she sure as hell wasn't interested in him now.

As for her comments about the Dragon, well . . . they bordered on the  seditious. He had no belief in the Dragon as a god, but he knew the  value of the icon in governing the masses. To worship the Dragon was to  worship the emperor. Lynx's contempt was abundantly concerning, coming  from a woman who could very well be the mother of the son foreordained  to destroy him and his empire.                       
       
           



       

"She's quite the girl, isn't she?" a disembodied voice asked in his head, like a probing finger.

As much as he hated the intrusion, Lukan's footsteps didn't falter. What do you want, Thurban?

"An unprecedented challenge faces you, Crown Prince. Are you equal to it?"

Lukan guessed Thurban referred to Lynx. He bristled at the suggestion  that anyone, dead or alive, would dare question his abilities. Of course  I am.

"Lynx is no ordinary girl, Lukan. She's a Norin of the most rabid kind."

That doesn't mean I can't control her, Lukan shot back. Refusing to  engage further in a conversation he didn't want, he focused his thoughts  on other, more pleasant things: the provocative sway of Lynx's hips as  she walked, the curve of her breasts, her legs, long and shapely,  wrapped around him.

It was the only way he knew how to dislodge Thurban.

The day Thurban's voice had appeared in his head, Lukan had almost  choked on his soup. It had happened some weeks before his father had  announced the wedding. It had taken all his acting skills to cover up  his shock when, after he had caught his breath, the voice introduced  itself as Thurban, Chenaya's first emperor.

Telling anyone at the dining table was out of the question. They would  have called him mad, insane, unfit to rule. He would quickly share his  father's well-deserved epithet: Mad Lukan.

Unable to endure such a humiliation, he had shot to his feet and rushed  to the palace archive, the only place in the empire where books were  permitted. Many of the manuscripts, printouts, and blueprints, all  scientific and technical in nature, had survived the Burning.

When just a lad, Lukan had discovered the original copy of the Treaty of  Hope signed after the Burning. Like all books, he had devoured it,  discovering that the nations had agreed to destroy all printed  matter-mankind's desperate attempt to prevent a future annihilation.

Young as he was, it had shocked Lukan rigid that anyone would consider  burning books. They were his lifeline, the only things that kept him  sane in a palace where warfare, games of strategy, and jousting were  everything.

Thankfully, despite proclaiming allegiance to the Treaty of Hope,  Thurban had used the chaos after the Burning to order scholars to comb  through the ruined cities and towns of the world. They had assembled all  the books they could find. Those works formed the basis of the  archives.

Over the last four hundred years, successive emperors had added to it as  chemists, engineers, and scientists-hidden away from the public eye in  far reaches of the empire-expanded the old technologies.

The day Lukan first heard Thurban's voice, he knew that if it had been  generated by the living-anything was possible in Chenaya-he would find  evidence of the technology in one of the books in the archives.

But, after hours of fruitless searching through titles in the archives'  catalogue, Lukan had been forced to admit defeat. There were no tomes  explaining the technology needed to create voices in the head. The only  reference at all to voices was contained in the journal of Prince  Maksim, a long-forgotten crown prince. Settled in his usual leather  chair, he had read the book from cover to cover.

From the cryptic writing-apparently Maksim had also been reluctant to  admit to insanity-Lukan gleaned that other crown princes had also been  harassed by unseen beings, even appearances by the ghosts themselves.  They had provided the inspiration for the Dreaded.

All of these visitors from beyond the grave either supported or railed against Dmitri and his curse.

Lukan had left the archives in an even greater panic than when he had  entered it. In the ensuing weeks, he became inured to Thurban's voice.

And, he admitted, one good thing had come out of hearing Thurban: it  explained generations of emperors' obsession with perpetuating the  Dreaded. If ghosts tormented crown princes, calling on them to support  the overthrow of the empire, what happened in everyone else's heads?

Deep in thought, Lukan jumped the steps to his apartment two at a time.  Once in the privacy of his room, he would give some thought to a  strategy to handle Lynx's frosty welcome.

His apartment door loomed. He stepped inside, closed it behind him-and  frowned. A Chenayan flag hung limply on a staff in the middle of the  room, the black Dragon dull against faded red and gold silk. It wasn't  there when he and Tao had left the room. More offended by its ragged  appearance than the oddity of its presence, he darted over to take it  down.

He never made it.

In a blur of light, the walls of his room vanished. His first thought  was that Felix had set up a display of Dreaded, but then the wood  paneling and tapestries were replaced by an army so vast, it blotted out  all traces of the landscape. An endless patchwork of skin tones, the  army's only unifying feature was the firmament of blue banners, spangled  with stars, under which it camped.                       
       
           



       

He recognized the constellation: Nicholas the Light-Bearer.

Too elaborate to be Dreaded. What the hell is it?

His eyes widened as his own flag unfurled. Flexing black wings, the  Dragon soared out of the tattered silk, growing to a monstrous size as  it took to the air. It glided down in front of him, enveloping him in  its shadow, transfixing him with its red eyes.

Heart threatening to explode, Lukan fell back. But the Dragon clearly  had things other than attack on its mind. Its huge body bulged, and its  head writhed. Screeching, it tore at its own scales and flesh. Lukan  watched spellbound as the Dragon's inner enemy emerged with each bite.

It was a young man.

Brushing sable-dark hair from his jet-black eyes, the man stepped away  from the tattered remains, looking down at it briefly with a hero's  sneer of contempt. He strode to the blue army, grabbed a flag, and held  it high for everyone to see.

"It's me," Lukan whispered in disbelief.

"Lukan, Crown Prince of Chenaya," a voice he didn't recognize said, "see  what awaits you. A son who will torment and plague you all the days of  your life."

Lightning zigzagged from the cloudless sky, striking his doppelganger in  the face. The young man's image flickered and then re-ignited. He now  looked at Lukan through glacial blue eyes.

Lynx's eyes.

With a derisive smile, he fixed those blue icicles on something behind  Lukan. Following his gaze, Lukan saw great plumes of smoke billowing  from the roof of the Avanov palace. He watched as the inferno devoured  his home, the seat of his government, the heart of his empire.

Lightning sparked again and struck the man in the face. As he crumbled  to ash, the smoke from the palace was sucked back into the roof, and the  flames guttered and died.

The image flashed and then vanished.

Lukan sank to the floor, trying to make sense of what he'd seen. He had  lived all his life with the Dreaded, designed to terrify and control his  subjects. What he'd seen here was nothing like any of those.

It had to be a vision. The kind he had read about in Maksim's journal. He writhed, a thousand phantom ants crawling over him.

Did it confirm that he would be the emperor cursed to be murdered by his  own son? But if so, then why did the Dragon rise again to destroy his  enemy? Nothing made sense.

But whatever it meant, surely even his father must see that marrying  Lynx was impossible if this would result? How to communicate that to Mad  Mott was the biggest challenge.

Lukan had no answers that wouldn't get him beaten to a pulp. Desperate  for company to counter his fear, he slammed his apartment door shut and  raced to the gambling room he knew Tao-and unfortunately,  Axel-frequented. With each step he took, anger mounted in his chest.

A high-born man turned the corner and almost bumped in to Lukan.