Cities and Thrones

by Carrie Patel

  He blinked back at her and finally uttered a dry, humorless chuckle, shaking his head. “No. Not even close. They–”

  A shadow fell across the small round tabletop. Jane turned to see a rising hand and a glint of metal. Her body was still rigid with fear when the waiter placed the silver teapot on the middle of the table and set two short glasses beside it. Roman nodded his thanks, and the waiter’s eyes lingered on him a moment longer before he faded back into the teahouse crowd.

  Was it Roman’s distinctly foreign attire or his run-down look? Maybe an unconscious faux pas? Or just an innocently curious glance?

  She turned her attention back to Roman, who had also fixated on the waiter’s quick glance and sudden disappearance.

  Jane poured the tea, if only to busy her hands.

  At the sound of the liquid trickling into his cup, Roman turned his attention back to Jane. He clasped his hands, chapped and edged with grime, on the table and seemed to think deliberately on what to say. “Sato burned it,” he finally said, holding Jane’s gaze. “The train and every man and woman on it.”

  Speechless, Jane waited for him to continue. The news was too shocking and grotesque for her to feel gratitude that the battle she’d feared had evidently been avoided.

  “I told him about the invasion,” Roman said. “I thought he’d rip up the train tracks. Close off the city. But he wanted to make a statement.”

  “How...?”

  Roman ran his fingertips through the mess of his hair. “I don’t know. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a normal fire. He stationed troops–”

  “No, how did you make it here?”

  “Oh. That.” His eyes fell on the full tea glass. He raised it and took a drink. “Luck and quick action. As soon as I heard what was happening, I got to the train yard. It was just a hunch. The train station fell apart in a riot – getting in or out of there was useless. But I was able to slip outside the city before the perimeter tightened. There were only a dozen cars there and a few engines to pull them, but a crowd had already gathered. One of the engineering crews was there, too, ready to get out of town before something happened to the rest of the rails.” He tossed back the rest of his tea and looked back at her with a wry smile. “Not my usual travel experience. But hardly more grueling than yours, I should admit.”

  Jane found herself inexplicably cold. She wrapped her fingers around the base of her own still-warm glass, watching the oblivious masses around her chatter and laugh over pots of tea and piled cakes. “You came all the way here to tell me this?”

  He laughed again. “No, Jane. To get you away from here.”

  “You what?”

  “I’m sorry. I–”

  “Again?” she said. “I left my home once after getting tangled up in your schemes. But I’ve made something for myself here.” She heard her own laughter, high and feverish. “People respect me. I earn as much here in a week as I did in three back in Recoletta. And you know what? When the Qadi hired me, she didn’t ask who my family was.” Her voice scraped and rang against her throat. Other patrons and passersby were starting to stare at her, and she didn’t care. She knew it was imprudent, but the last thing she wanted was to silently slink away as she had from Recoletta. Let them look. Let him try to pry her away. “I like it here, Roman.”

  He winced, though it wasn’t clear if it was a response to the scene she was making, sympathy with her frustration, or the expression of some private and deeply buried emotion. “I really am sorry, Jane. But the Qadi’s going to suspect a leak. That suspicion’s going to turn on you.”

  Jane knew he was right. But she also surmised there was more to it.

  “You didn’t just come here to warn me,” she said. “You fled, too.”

  “Sato’s mad, Jane,” he said. But for the briefest of moments, he glanced away and into his empty glass. “Of course I ran.”

  What began as a hunch was taking on the substance and form of certainty. “You knew what he was like from the beginning, yet you stayed. You helped him. Something changed.”

  “He burned hundreds of men and women alive in a train today. That changed a lot of things.”

  Jane believed him, but something in his hurried monotone told her there was more to it. There always was with Roman.

  She was tired of guessing.

  As she rose, she fished a few coins out of her pocket and left them next to the teapot.

  “Where are you going?” Roman asked.

  “Away from here. Away from you.”

  “Please, not like this. We’ll be safer leaving together.”

  She whirled on him. “Will we really? Because it seems that almost all of my trouble has come thanks to my association with you.”

  He stifled a grimace. “I know. But you’ve got to move carefully. If the Qadi’s people are watching you–”

  “Then being caught with you is the last thing I’d want, isn’t it?”

  His mouth snapped closed in defeat. As much as she would have liked to, Jane couldn’t enjoy his momentary speechlessness, tinged as it was with sorrow. So she turned away again before either of them could regret anything more.

  The crowd flowed and meandered just outside the tea shop with movements that seemed strangely hypnotic. Jane wanted to dive into the stream and let it carry her away – to the false comforts of home, to the borders of the city, to some other corner where she could disappear. Anywhere but here.

  As she passed out of the teahouse, the throng seemed to part around her.

  No, she realized as people crowded again behind her. Not around her. Around someone moving toward her.

  Two armed guards shed the crowd like a winter coat. “Jane Lin?” they said, looking at her. “Come with us, please.”

  “What’s this about?” Jane said, trying to ask the question as though she didn’t already know the answer.

  “We can explain that along the way,” one of the guards said, taking her arm.

  Jane kept her neck rigid and forced herself not to look back toward the teahouse and Roman. Yet even as she willed the two guards to bear her forward, she saw four more slip past her out of the corners of her eyes.

  Even as she considered running, the woman holding her bicep tightened her grip as if sensing Jane’s intentions in the rising hairs on her arm. The other guard took hold of her just above the elbow.

  The crowd seemed to break apart much more readily in the presence of Jane’s captors. After half a minute, a waiting carriage loomed like an island above the stream of people. Unlike most of the conveyances in Madina, it was dark with closed, windowless walls and a top.

  She could hear Roman struggling behind her by the time the carriage door swung open a few short feet away. She allowed herself to be led into it.

  It was larger than it had looked from the street. While her eyes adjusted to the relative darkness, one of her captors cuffed her hands behind her. Seconds later, Roman followed her inside, subdued but furious.

  For a moment, she heard only the rattle and clink of cuffs and Roman’s shallow, rasping breaths.

  As they began moving, a voice rose from the darkened end of the carriage. “So sorry about this unpleasantness, my dear. Try to think of it as an uncomfortable formality.”

  Jane knew that refined voice. And as a long-nailed hand adjusted the gas lamps in the carriage, she realized she knew the face, too.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked Lady Lachesse.

  The whitenail arched her chiseled eyebrows. “Really, I should ask you the same.” She looked at Roman. “Consorting with the enemy. Providing aid and comfort.” She cocked her head at Jane. “And I thought his regime had forced you to flee Recoletta.”

  “And I thought you were keeping your distance from the regime here,” Jane said.

  Roman’s head turned toward her.

  Lady Lachesse chuckled. “I hate to think I might have misled you in this. As a matter of fact, the Qadi and I have had some splendid chats of late. I did, however, need your help to hear ab
out the ones she was having without me.”

  Jane felt as though the floor were rushing toward her. Her body seemed to float and bob as the carriage jostled around her. “You mean...”

  “Old friends,” Lady Lachesse said. “Whose company did you think was responsible for the railways running between Madina and Recoletta?” She laid a clawed hand on her chest. “I don’t mean to take credit for all of them, mind you. But these are the kind of links that a person in my position will take great pains to maintain.” She paused again. “I truly am sorry, Jane. I thought you’d have figured that out.”

  Jane could almost believe the woman meant it.

  “What,” Roman panted, “is going on?”

  “And how nice it is to see you again, Mr Arnault. You are going to visit the Qadi and some of her present acquaintances. There are matters they wish to discuss with you, issues that concern Madina’s immediate security, so you will understand if these individuals are impatient. I suggest that you answer them quickly.”

  “How did you find us here?” Roman asked. His voice was low and quiet.

  “That is a rather long story,” Lady Lachesse said. She turned over one shoulder and peered behind a curtain at her back before returning her attention to Arnault. “On the other hand, it appears as though we still have a little ways to go in this traffic. And, as Jane can tell you, I’m a soft sell when it comes to storytelling.” She smiled.

  “As you must have surmised, I came here after Sato’s rebellion. I reconnected with the Qadi and have managed to carve a niche for myself here. Of course, I’ve been keeping my eye on Recoletta. I’d be a fool not to, especially after such an instructive example of how quickly things can change.

  “I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, when the Qadi let slip mention of a certain young Recolettan emigrée she’d brought on as a jurist. When she told me your name, Jane, I didn’t mention that I knew you, but I did suggest that such a person might make for a welcoming face in any unofficial discussions with Recoletta’s representatives.” She paused, smiling again. “I’ve known the Qadi long enough to tell when she likes an idea even if she doesn’t say so.”

  Lady Lachesse’s mysterious approach and her seeming prescience days before her introduction to Bailey and her first meeting with Arnault now made sense. She told herself she might have guessed it before were it not for the sense of frustration and displacement she’d observed in most of her fellow exiles, especially the whitenails she came across in her proceedings as a jurist.

  But she felt some further explanation lurking beneath all of this. She thought back to another conversation with Lady Lachesse in another carriage. “You’ve done all of this – manipulating the Qadi and working through me – to get to the Library?”

  Lady Lachesse laughed. “You say that as if it’s a simple feat, Jane. A gambit like this requires planning and foresight. One must predict how others will act and react. Strategy is not about making a decisive, finishing move, but rather about setting the board so that others make those moves for you.”

  Evening traffic was a benign murmur outside the carriage. It sounded so distant even though only a thin carriage wall separated them from bustling normalcy.

  Jane looked over at Roman, who had remained silent since Lady Lachesse’s story. She wanted to believe that he was working out an escape for the both of them, or perhaps waiting for the right chance to enact some already-developed plan, but it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

  “But you got the information you wanted. What do you want with us now?”

  “In the matter of that ghastly incident with the train, Sato has demonstrated that he’s a force to be reckoned with. As is the Library he protects.” She scratched her cheek with the back of one long fingernail. “It has significantly eased my burden of convincing the Qadi and her fellows that the Library must be preserved rather than destroyed, but it has also made them eager for collateral.” Her gaze swiveled directly and deliberately to Roman.

  “If you think Sato will bargain with you over me, you understand him even less than I thought,” Roman said. “My loss will be little more than a minor setback. He’s certainly sacrificed more for lesser goals.”

  “Mr Arnault, that is not at all what I intended,” Lady Lachesse said. “And you know that perfectly well.”

  Roman said nothing more, but when Jane looked over at him, his face was unnaturally pale in the lamplight. A bead of sweat left a shining snail’s trail down his temple.

  “And as for you,” Lady Lachesse said, looking back at Jane, “I am sincerely sorry that you’ve gotten mixed up in this. The Qadi will, however, want to know who’s been handing her secrets over to the other side.”

  The bumps in the road seemed to mark long, uneven seconds as Jane considered this. “If the Qadi wasn’t telling you about the meetings, just how did you know that Recoletta had sent Roman? Or that I’d met with him... unofficially?”

  “That,” Lady Lachesse said, “will become clear once we return to the Majlis.” She sat back with a finality that suggested that she’d have little more to say on the subject – or any other – for the rest of their journey.

  Jane kept quiet and shifted to ease the pain in her knees as the din outside grew quiet and as the motion of the carriage grew steady over the wide, flat tiles leading to the Majlis.

  The carriage finally stopped, and Jane’s escorts let her and Roman out at the edge of the glass-smooth plaza just before the steps of the Majlis. The building’s wide, windowed arms were already wrapped around them.

  A few ambitious administrators and overworked clerks were still trickling down the steps, and they turned to stare at Jane and Roman’s armed guard with unabashed curiosity. Those were not the surreptitious glances they would have received in Recoletta, and Jane felt herself look down with reflexive embarrassment.

  She counted the steps as they continued upward. They reached the plinth where the yawning mouths of the Majlis waited to swallow them. Roman was still silent and withdrawn beside her, his gaze downcast and his face even paler than it had been in the carriage.

  As they passed through the doors and into the Majlis, Jane relinquished the hope that he was biding his time with some elaborate ruse to escape their captors. He looked like he’d already given up.

  The twisting and winding halls in the Majlis emptied out as Lady Lachesse and her guard escorted them deeper into the structure. Feeling the now-familiar rhythms of the place in the ebb and flow of its people and the shifting shape of its halls, she intuited their progress toward one of the dim, quiet lounges where she’d had tea with the Qadi on earlier occasions.

  Sure enough, a robed attendant was waiting at tall, carved double doors as they approached. He swung them open as if inviting Jane and her strange assembly to yet another cordial gathering.

  As expected, chairs and settees were arranged around the wide, low table. But the person who sat waiting for them was not the Qadi.

  It took Jane a moment to place him, crawling split seconds that felt longer than they were. But when he smiled, his teeth as radiantly white as his cottony hair and long goatee, she knew him.

  “Hello, nephew,” Councilor Ruthers said to Roman.

  One guard knelt discreetly behind Roman and fastened his cuffs to the chair.

  The guards waited outside while Lady Lachesse followed Jane and Roman into the room. Stunned, Jane felt the older woman’s hard, sharp nails on her arm as she guided her to a chair.

  Roman said nothing, but in his eyes bulged with fury.

  “Nothing to say after these long months,” Ruthers said. “You’ve always preferred the silent roles. Then again, I suppose that’s why the code was entrusted to me, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Damn you,” Roman said, jerking forward and tugging at his cuffs. The chains rattled mightily, but the chair held them in place.

  “Watch your language, my boy,” Ruthers said, pointing a four-inch fingernail at Roman. “And your temper. Those guards are only waiting outside as
a courtesy, but they’ll dispatch you readily enough.” He fussed with the lapels on his jacket, but Jane saw fear in his eyes and nervousness in the twitching movements of his hands.

  “Then you’d better hope they’re fast,” Roman said. “And good shots.”

  Ruthers laughed, but his voice sounded high and mechanical. “Just remember, we don’t actually need you alive.”

  “Then why bother?”

  “We are still blood, Roman. And I know that even you are not immune to a certain degree of sentimentality,” Ruthers said, looking over at Jane for the first time.

  Up until Sato’s revolution, Councilor Augustus Ruthers had been the most powerful man in Recoletta. It was surreal to be so close to this man a second time – the first was when Roman had been instructed to assassinate him.

  She’d taken Roman’s gun and set Ruthers free.

  Now, Jane was beginning to question the wisdom of that decision.

  “You’re making a mistake,” Roman said, his teeth clenched.

  “I’m making do,” Ruthers said. “Believe me, I wouldn’t have chosen these circumstances, but we’re all stuck with them now. Circumstances which you helped bring into being.”

  “Just what did they offer you for all of this?”

  Ruthers’s back straightened, and he raised his chin. Even as a dethroned exile, he looked as haughty as Jane remembered. “This isn’t some paltry power play. They’re putting me back in charge of Recoletta after Sato is taken care of. Someone capable needs to clean up the mess Sato has made.”

  “How altruistic of you,” Roman sneered.

  Jane felt dark amusement at watching the two men argue, their complex history rising around the as-yet unclear bounds of their argument. As discreet and detached as he normally was, Roman sounded as though he were voicing opinions and objections he’d left unsaid for years.