“What is wrong with my suit?” she said.
“It is, well... it is unfeminine,” he said. “We need to present you in a certain—”
“Damn your balls man!” she said loudly. “This is a fine suit. I’ll wear what I bloody well please, now go away. I need to shit before I talk.”
“Goodlady...” Mandofar’s whole face bulged comically at her vulgarity.
“Do you not understand ‘go away’?” said Lucinia. “My, you are as stupid as Abing says. How about this?” she placed a finger in the middle of his chest. “Fuck. Off. Ambassador. Now. Is that clear enough?”
Mandofar blanched. “I... I... I have—”
“Never been so insulted? You obviously don’t get out enough. I will be waiting in the antechamber to the speaker’s stage after I am done with my toilet. Get one of your flunkies to bring me my pipe and get a quart of wine set out for me. Believe it or not, I’m actually rather nervous.”
THE COUNTESS CHECKED her glass slides again and again while she waited, putting them back into and taking them out of their leather-clad box several times. She smoked her way through a half pouch of tobacco without noticing. The wine she put aside when she became lightheaded. The antechamber was a bar, really. A man sat behind a counter with racks of bottles. The seating was arranged around four small tables. Besides her and the server, the room was empty. A couple of pompous looking Maceriyan civil servants passed through, all made up like their lords but wearing sober black clothes. One nodded at her, another ignored her. That was the sum of activity.
She smoked, she drank and she waited. The man on before her went over by five minutes that seemed to last an age. This was not like her, she reflected ruefully. She had taken her presentation to the Royal Institute far more lightly. She came to the conclusion that she was nervous not because this was important, but because she was beginning to be accepted. Failure had never worried her before because she was outside the normal run of things. To fail on the terms of others was no failure at all. But here she was now, about to present to the assembled representatives of all the kingdoms, in a country whose people mimicked her dress, only months after a good reception from her own—exclusively male—peers. She was no longer an outsider, and failure’s risks had become very real indeed.
A muffled round of applause, quiet at the clapping of birds’ wings, shook her from her thoughts. She doused her pipe, and took one last sip of wine. Presently, a door opened and a young Karsan man came out. He smiled at her. Ordinarily she would have behaved saucily with him, but she was not feeling herself.
“Countess, if you would come with me, they are ready for you. I am Jonn Moten, I will show you to the podium and I will change your slides for you while you speak.”
“Thank you,” she said. She followed him through the door from the antechamber into a corridor. Affecting a carefree air, though her head was light with nervousness, she said, “Have you done this before?” and examined her words as she spoke them. Strike up a rapport, make friends, make them like you, be one of them. At that moment she hated herself for her artifice.
“Oh yes,” he said. “Never to so full a house, but it is among my duties to assist the Karsan representative, the ambassador usually, when they speak to the house.”
“You are not nervous, Goodman Moten?”
“No, goodlady. There is nothing to what I do. You have the difficult role. But do not be concerned, I hear your talk is favourably anticipated. We are here.”
The corridor terminated in a tastefully decorated room. Double doors opened into the hall of the Assembly, a set opposite led back into the hive of offices and meeting rooms of the Grand House’s southern wing. Two sofas and a pot plant marked a feeble attempt to bring domesticity to the room. The sofas looked like they had never been used. This was not a place to loiter, but a transitional space between nerves and terror.
“Are you ready, goodlady?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
“Then we shall begin.”
Moten took the box of slides gently from her and opened the doors. A flight of dark wooden stairs led up to a podium. Moten went first. As she reached the top a stave was banged upon the floor and a loud voice announced her.
“Lucinia Vertisa, the Countess of Mogawn speaks on behalf of the Three Houses of Karsa and Prince Alfra, sovereign lord of the isles.”
She emerged blinking into bright limelights. An octagonal space was walled in with a panelled rail, a lectern at the front. Moten showed her to the front. A magic lantern with a glimmer lamp inside was set on a table at the back, the thick lens of its eye dazzling. Morten left her and busied himself with this as she set out her papers. Did it matter that she had not told him they were numbered? She supposed not, he looked like he knew what he was doing. She would find out soon enough.
Polite applause greeted her. She squinted past the lights. She wished she had spent more time on her appearance. She felt vulnerable and too hot. The representatives were arrayed below the pregnant swelling of the Grand House’s dome in three tiers of wooden galleries. There were only one hundred representatives, but there were many others in the hall—the ambassadors, assistants, servants, advisers, specialists of countless disciplines and the one hundred men and women of the Assembly Guard. The Karsan embassy was seated in the Petitioner’s Quadrant below the podium, sharing space with the delegations from three other nations whose people were addressing the assembly that afternoon. She caught sight of Garten coming in late, the Tyn’s box in one hand. Abing tutted at him as he sat down at the far end from his fellows.
Above the Petitioner’s Quadrant was a small balcony housing the Morfaans’ thrones—they were there watching, almost enshrined their box was so heavily decorated—and next to that a much larger, if less grand, box for the Maceriyan government. In the Maceriyan box there were ten thrones, the highest and most ornate was always empty, reserved for their powerless king. Convention, and the execution of three of his predecessors in coups, discouraged him from attending. Three thrones for the comtes of Perus, five for the ducal lords of the country’s fivings, and the tenth for the primate of the Church, left vacant since before the union of the Hundred, when Res Iapetus had sent his holy lords packing from the Earth. She gave all her attention to that single chair. It was to stand against the terrors of religions, feckless gods and associated superstitions that she had agreed to appear. When she spoke, she addressed these idiocies of the past and not the dignitaries of the present.
“Goodfellows and goodladies of the Hundred Realms of Ruthnia,” she began. The lectern glowed with magister’s marks, and her voice was amplified tenfold. Her nerves jumped—she literally felt a tingling in her arms and legs—and serenity descended on her. On the lectern were her notes, her life’s work condensed into simple language. Why should she feel nervous? She was the mistress of her art. Her confidence was a shell over her insecurities, but it was thick and strong. She felt it forming around her, and her voice rose in power.
“I am here today to present to you the findings I have made through my extensive study of the Twin, also known as the Dark World, and in the most ancient of texts as the World of Form. As you are all aware, next year, 461 of the new calendar, on 32nd Takcrop, the Twin will make its closest pass to the Earth for four thousand years. This perigee has heralded great upheavals in the world in the past. The legends surrounding its approach fascinated me as a girl.” Did she imagine the sniggers there? She shut them out. “As an empiricist, I will prove to you today, that the approach of the Twin must be prepared for. But that talk of it heralding the return of the gods—as rumour upon the streets of this very city suggest—is a nonsense. The danger, however, is very real,” she paused. “We may be living in the last days of the present age.”
Raganse, Comte of Outer Perus, made a loud noise of disapproval and noisily left, as did a few other representatives.
A murmur rippled through the crowd. Conversations started up that did not die away, and so she raised her voice to be hear
d over them. “I believe, through observations of the Twin’s movements, and more importantly the tides, we might mathematically prove the existence of a strong, attractive force as fundamental to the workings of the universe as magnetism or magic. If we look to my first slide...”
Morten placed the slide in smoothly. It was the correct glass, the right way up and the right way around. Good boy.
“... we can see here the orbits of the Twin and the two moons. They are—”
There was light, bright and painful. She felt weightless, as if flying. She wondered a moment if she had dreamed all this, and she was being awakened unexpectedly. The confusion persisted for less than a second.
She slammed down. Something weighty landed on her outflung arm, pinning it in place. Ringing in her ears subdued all other sound, there was grit in her eyes. She tried to rise but could not for the weight. She shakily turned her head and saw her arm swallowed to the armpit by a splintered section of bench. A sensation of wetness spread across her leg, and she looked down her torn clothes to see a wound in her thigh spilling blood into the rubble.
Fire leapt up from the wreckage where she had been standing, and leaned hungrily toward her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Over the Wall
VARDEUCHE PERSIN STALKED through the boiler room of his flagship, the Marie Sother. Stalls full of coal ran down one side, dark iron furnaces down the other, their doors open upon their fiery hearts. Sweating godlings threw hundredweights of fuel into roaring fires by the sack full. The temperature on deck was well below freezing, but down there it was hotter than the hundredth hell. The comparison was obvious, but apt. The Torosans were black from head to foot, demonic in the orange light of the furnaces. A leaking joint hissed superheated steam, the room reeked of hot metal, the bitterness of coal and sweat.
“Stoke them higher!” he ordered the foreman. He was a short, wiry fellow from the Three Lands on the Ellosantin sea, his home a world away from the freezing mountains of Toros. But he was dirty as his workers, the whites of his eyes startling in the black of his face. It made him a silhouette; hard to see he was a real man and not some dark thing crawled out of the pits of the afterlife.
“Mesire, if we do so then we will risk rupturing the pipes. We already have a leak.”
“As the one who designed and built this ship, I think I am in a better position than you to judge its tolerances. More coal!”
“Yes Mesire Persin,” said the foreman.
Persin finished his inspection and headed up. The Marie Sother was one of three ships, all carved from single pieces of floatstone. Floatstone was a far superior material than wood to make a ship with. It was rigid, light, and practically unsinkable. A king’s fortune paid for each, and now he risked losing his prize to a man equipped with a vessel made from iron. Persin ground his teeth. He hated Arkadian Vand, and therefore he hated his protégé Trassan Kressind. The prospect of ceding the city in the ice to a young whelp with an unproven ship design made him rage, and his temper had become foul.
The decks grew colder the further away from the fires of the boiler room he went. Coal was cheaper than glimmer, and to his thinking more reliable, but despite his best efforts he had not managed to get a hold of Trassan’s designs for the Prince Alfra’s engines, and his estimation of their capabilities was woefully conservative. The iron ship had set out after his own expedition, but had soon passed them by. Only once had he caught sight of the rival vessel. For an elated moment, Persin thought he was beginning to gain on the Prince Alfra, but it had drawn away, and within two days its steam plumes had disappeared beyond the horizon.
He went up the tower at the centre of the boat, informed the captain that he was to order the other ships to full speed, then stomped off into his cabin, hoping to rest alone.
It was not to be. Adamanka Shrane sat cross-legged on a rug in the middle of the room, her staff across her knees and her eyes closed. A stove kept his quarters warm, so he shucked off his furs. He poured himself a drink. Windows around three sides of it allowed good views of the sea, the Marie Sother’sdeck, and the expedition’s other two ships, the Shadow of Perus and Maceriya’s Glory. All three of them were smooth skinned, unlike ordinary floatstone boats. He had the cavities on the outside filled in with a durable plaster of his own creation. Their drag reduced by this simple measure, at first the ships had sailed swiftly through the oceans, but then the ice had begun to embrace them, clogged rigging made them top heavy, and the stone’s inherent roughness encouraged formation of ice on the hull. They had become sluggish in the water. Mountains of ice sailed by them. Sheets of ice clogged the water, and a wall of ice blocked access to the continental interior. Seeing the black rock of the mountains poking over the rumpled pack ice sent him mad with frustration. There was nowhere to land.
Vardeuche Persin loathed ice.
He sat down, and put up his feet. “Shrane!” he said. “Shrane!”
She let out a noise of irritation. “I am engaged in a seeing. Can you not see I am busy? This is a delicate act and I cannot be interrupted.”
“You are talking to me now. Tell me what you have seen.”
“I have found the iron ship. They have made landfall upon the Sotherwinter continent.”
“Where?” said Persin, torn between exploding with annoyance and eagerness. The others had got there before him, but he had more men, and now they had shown him the way. “We shall follow them, and take what is rightfully ours.”
“We cannot. They pass under the great wall of ice that blocks access to the coast, and up into a port of the Morfaan.”
“Then let us do the same!”
Shrane sighed and opened her animal eyes. “We cannot. By the time we reach the port, the tides will not be right for another thirty days. To pass that way, we must wait until after the next Great Tide.”
“I will not let a lackey of Vand take my prize!” snarled Persin. He downed his wine. “There must be another way.” He looked at Shrane. “Is there?”
She smiled slyly. “There is.”
“THAT’S IT?” SAID Persin. He slammed his telescope closed against the palm of his gloved hand. “That is impossible.”
Four miles away, through a shifting morass of deadly icebergs, was a dip in the wall. Persin could make out a way from the shore up over the mountains fronting the ocean, he could not conceive of a way to get to it. The ice on the water was jammed in close, groaning and shrieking as it ground against itself. “We cannot get there! We will be trapped, and carried off in the current. With pressure that immense, I cannot safely conclude that the ship will not be crushed like an eggshell.”
“All will be well,” said Shrane. She wore only the thinnest coat out on deck, no hat, no gloves, for an inner heat radiated from her. Wherever she went, ice glistened with water. “You have completed the transfer?”
“All material for the expedition has been moved to the Marie Sother. The men we require are aboard. The other ships will head for the docks you described. But whether we go in one ship or three, we will not make our way through that ice.”
“We are not going through it,” she said.
She planted her staff on the top of the tower, spread her feet, closed her eyes, and began to mutter.
“What by the drunken god are you doing?” he asked.
“My magic saw us through the realm of the Drowned King without detection, it will see us through this realm of ice. Silence.”
“How will mist and obfuscation help us against that?” grumbled Persin.
“My magic is not so limited,” Shrane said. She began to chant, low, breathy, on the inhalation and exhalation. Persin watched her dubiously. Shrane’s magic was powerful, but he had had dealings with mages and magisters both. And at some point their claims always exceeded their abilities.
A green spark cracked from the iron of Shrane’s staff, scorching the low wall around the tower’s top. It was the first of many, gathering dancing threads of power that played loudly around her hands, mouth
, eyes and the tip of her staff. Clouds raced across the sky, drawn towards the Marie Sother. They boiled over the mast. The ship groaned, and tilted to one side. Persin searched for a wave, but saw none. He took in an apprehensive breath.
“Stand ready!” he shouted down to the deck, three storeys beneath him.
She smiled as she chanted. A curse on all users of magic, he thought. They never could tell a man what they intended. They were hooked on theatricality, every last one of them had a puerile need to amaze. He looked down again, hoping to whatever god still gave a shit about the world that his men wouldn’t panic.
Thunder rumbled from the Marie Sother’s private storm. Lightning of the same green hue as the sparks around Shrane’s staff threaded through the billows and curves of the cloud.
The ship tipped forward, then back. The men waiting on deck made unhappy noises. Water ran noisily off the sides as the Marie Sother lifted upwards out of the sea and flew slowy forward. Persin was afflicted with a sudden attack of nausea at the sight of Maceriya’s Glory and the Shadow of Perus shrinking behind them. The dogs in the hold bayed madly. Shrane’s jaw clenched. The ship leaned forward, and Persin got the distinct impression that Shrane was like a potboy running to catch up with a collapsing stack of dishes, trying to outrun those toppling forward before they could fall. The ship accelerated, until it hurtled forward at a great rate. Jagged icebergs whipped past, the mountains became large and clear. The space behind the dip in the ice covered in scree, close enough that he could see the individual rocks making it up. Then they were passing low over the ice wall, which gnashed and clattered beneath the keel. Rising up, they passed its upmost reaches, and approached the bare stone of the mountain.
Never had landfall been a more appropriate phrase. With sickening speed, the ship contacted black rock, shattering its prow into powder. Rigging snapped and fell, prompting alarmed yells from the crew. The stern of the boat lowered, then dropped and banged twice onto the ground, leaving the Marie Sother at a steep angle. With a terrific grinding it slipped backwards. Persin ran to the back of the tower, hitting the railing there with winding force. The sea was three hundred feet below them. The scree slope steepened, leading directly into the sharp landward edge of the ice wall. The ship bounced toward it, the floatstone crunching on the harder granite as it skidded uncontrollably backward.
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