Songmaster by Orson Scott Card

am alone?” Riktors asked mildly.
    Talaso looked irritated; this, Riktors knew, was his first realization that he just might have been too confident. “You are the only passenger who debarked from a registered passenger ship.”
    “The emperor’s soldiers have already won complete control of the port, Talaso.”
    “It’s a passenger ship!” Talaso said angrily. “You can’t fool me. The sealed identifier declares it to be a passenger ship! The identifiers are absolutely tamperproof—”
    “By the emperor’s own decree,” Riktors said.
    “Shoot him,” Talaso said to the guards, who stood with their lasers in hand. But they were already collapsing from the drug Riktors had released by clamping the muscles of his buttocks tightly while scuffing his boot along the floor. Talaso’s terror suddenly won out, and he was trembling and shouting for help as he fumbled for a weapon in his desk.
    “Talaso, you are guilty of treason, sentenced to death; look at me.”
    Talaso tried to hide behind the desk; but he did look at Riktors, just for a moment. Just long enough for Riktors’s dart to strike him in the eye.
    Talaso clutched at his face; then the poison struck. He vomited violently, so violently that his jaw dislocated. He sprawled on the desk until the spasms began. His muscles contracted sharply. He jerked and flopped over like a fish drowning in air, until one of the spasms struck with such force that his neck broke. Then he lay still, his hair matted with his own vomit, his face turned at an angle from his shoulders that it could never have assumed in life.
    Riktors grimaced. It was an unpleasant business, serving as Mikal’s emissary. Still, he had done it well enough these past years, and at last he had been promoted to the palace guard. He could have been moved into the job of assassin, an ugly business of stealth and well-contrived natural deaths, a dead-end assignment. Riktors was sure he would have been a good assassin, and he had good friends among that most private group—but much better to govern. That was the part of his job that Riktors actually liked, and thank God the emperor had chosen to let him follow that path instead of the other.
    He turned and opened the door. More guards had just arrived. Riktors killed them all, along with Talaso’s receptionist and the official whore and the confused official who had led him here.
    Then he called in other bureaucrats from nearby rooms. He brought them into Talaso’s office and showed them the corpse. “I assume there was holographic recording equipment running,” he said. There was. “Duplicate it and broadcast it immediately throughout Scale and all over the world.” The official he looked at was confused. “My friend,” Riktors said, “I don’t care much what your job has been before. I am the government of Scale now, in the name of the emperor Mikal, and you will do what I say or you will die.”
    The corpses around him were proof enough of power. The official left quickly, and Riktors continued giving orders, already setting in motion the changes that had to be complete in a week for him to stay on schedule, that had to be so thorough that no new dictator could spring up on Garibali for centuries. He picked up the phone and called the port. His second-in-command had been waiting for his call.
    “Proceed,” Riktors said. “I have Talaso here, dead of course, and we’re moving well.”
    “And I have a message for you from the emperor. His agents on Clike have found that the rumors were unfounded and your visit there has been canceled. He orders you to proceed to Tew when this work is accomplished.”
    Tew. The Songhouse, and Mikal’s Songbird. “Then would you please inform the Songhouse we will be arriving a week earlier than we anticipated.” Courtesy could not be forgotten, not if the machinery of government were to run smoothly. The Songhouse. That frozen, frightening woman, Esste, and the beautiful child who would not sing for