The throne room in Entropy was too empty. Silence had already deployed her troops.
“That’s why she didn’t attack us earlier,” he realized aloud. “To satisfy the letter of the law, she needed us to dissolve the alliance first—”
“And she already had a way in,” Dred finished in a tight voice. Her green eyes glittered as Silence’s men glanced at Wills for their orders. The soothsayer doubtless felt confident—only two of them against a hundred and one killers.
Even I can’t beat those odds.
Dred demanded, “Why? I thought you were loyal.”
“I am. But examine my history,” Wills said coldly. “Ultimately, whom do I serve?”
Jael remembered the story Einar had told him about how Wills blew up an office building with five hundred people inside because it was going to happen anyway. He ran recent events in his head, and every move Wills had made led to more dead bodies, more corpses for the pile. A shudder worked through him.
“Death. You serve Death.”
“You’re a clever one despite such a pretty face. I have always belonged to Silence. Who do you think suggested the alliance to Tam?” Wills laughed then; and it was a raucous, awful sound, like the call of carrion-eating birds.
Dred squared her shoulders, but Jael glimpsed the despair in her eyes. “You set up all our defenses. You know all the codes.”
“That was a master stroke, I must admit. I’m a little surprised you didn’t work it out sooner, my queen.” His tone became ironic. “I did warn you with my reading, some time ago.”
“You said, ‘He’ll cost you everything.’ I thought you were talking about Jael, then we found Niles . . .” That was the man who’d tried to assassinate Dred.
That made us think we’d rooted out the last traitor.
Jael wondered if his former crewmates had felt like this when he betrayed them. Not fond of the flip side of this. Now come on, love. We’ve come too far. Produce the trick up your sleeve.
Yet she only stood, clicking something in her palm, a nervous gesture. That was when he got worried. “Run. I’ll hold them off.”
She flashed him a cryptic look, smiled, and shook her head.
45
All Fall Down
Dred wished she could explain since Jael looked like he was ready to fight a hundred men to give her a chance to get away. She had the remote Ike had given her earlier, just in case Silence betrayed them; it made sense to have a backup plan . . . and to expect the worst. Despite the cold tightness in her chest, she wanted to smile. I called for help sixty seconds ago. Hopefully, the cavalry would arrive before Wills lost patience. Then she heard it.
Finally.
The thumping tread and whir of gears behind them made Silence’s death squad whirl as one. Wills froze, apparently recognizing the unit without even looking. The feeling that came over her was a cross between jubilation and triumph. Somehow, she schooled her expression to one more suitable to the Dread Queen.
Dred gestured with a mocking smile. “Don’t you want to turn around?”
She enjoyed the moment more than she had any in a long time. Satisfaction exploded like a heavy missile, filling her head with color. She savored the despair that flickered across his face when Wills realized he was beaten. Then he snarled, both hands clenching into fists.
“How?” he demanded.
“Peacemaker unit 1574 reporting to distress call. Please state your emergency.”
She ignored his question and spoke the first command. “Hostiles in Queensland territory. Neutralize threat immediately.”
The Peacemaker unit intoned, “Acknowledged. Noncombatants please stand clear.”
Wills tried to run as the rounds tore through Silence’s killers like so much meat. Their skills lay in slitting throats, the silent blade in the back. Against such a mechanical juggernaut, they were all but helpless. Gamely, they charged the machine, but without Einar’s raw strength—now lost forever—and Jael’s resilience, they had no hope of damaging it. Her former bone-reader crawled underneath a corpse and didn’t move, though if he thought escape from her judgment would be so simple, he was entirely mistaken. Her stomach turned at the raw carnage, but as the Dread Queen, she couldn’t look away. Drawn by the din, her men gathered at her back, cheering the bot on. She couldn’t waver, couldn’t show how weary she was, or how disgusted with the waste, with death itself.
It’s endless. It won’t stop as long as I live.
She watched until the last of Silence’s assassination squad dropped. Then she gestured Jael forward. “Pull him out of the pile.”
Wills looked like a ghoul when her champion hauled him out from under the bodies, so covered in blood that the whites of his eyes gleamed in comparison. His whole bearing radiated thwarted malice. As Jael dragged him forward, he spat at Dred’s feet. She backhanded him with calm brutality, earning a cheer from the assembled audience at her back.
“You’ve succeeded in weakening Silence considerably. Thank you for that.”
A cunning light entered the bone-reader’s eyes. “Yes, that was all part of my plan. I knew you would foresee—”
“Kill him,” she told Jael.
“With pleasure.” Most likely in honor of Einar’s execution style, he snapped the traitor’s neck and dumped him in the pile with the rest, then kicked it for good measure.
Queenslanders howled in vicious approval behind her. Maybe she should have made the execution more entertaining, but she lacked the heart to make an arena spectacle out of a traitor’s death. That was more attention than Wills deserved. That bastard thought he was so clever, taunting me with false readings with real warnings layered in. She thought about kicking his corpse but decided it went against the ice-cold persona Tam had created for her, one that felt more real than her own soul at this point.
I would give so much, she thought, just to feel the sun again. But it took a special kind of insanity—Jael’s brand—to believe that was possible. Dred was pretty sure she would die here.
“Now get a cleaning crew going. We have a lot of material to be recycled.” Speaking of the corpses so impersonally didn’t help with the stink or the knowledge that she’d nurtured a viper in her bosom. For a bit longer, she watched Tam organize the men, then she turned to the Peacemaker, now standing like a giant armored paperweight.
“Resume patrol pattern Alpha Zeta 24.”
“Acknowledged.”
The only way we’ll be safe is if we kill everyone who doesn’t swear to Queensland. Though the idea of being the supreme leader of Perdition held no appeal, Dred understood that she’d changed things irrevocably. With Grigor and Priest’s territories annexed and Silence weakened so drastically, it wouldn’t be long before Mungo responded. Nature abhors a vacuum. With any luck, he’d go after Death’s Handmaiden, smelling an easy kill. There was no doubt Queensland was as strong as it had ever been, though she wasn’t sure if she could count on the men she’d acquired from Grigor.