by Kate Elliott
Ilyana bit down on a smile, liking Maggie O’Neill even more; she was being so obviously sardonic with the stiff, nosy old M. Pandit, not caring about Pandit’s ominously authoritarian curiosity. Ilyana wished she had such confidence.
“Ah, there you are, Jazir,” said M. Pandit abruptly in an altered tone. She almost purred. “M. O’Neill, have you met my husband?”
There was a strange, brief silence, like a skip of breath. “No, I haven’t,” said Maggie finally. “How do you do?”
Ilyana suddenly caught sight of her father, standing at the end of the row of panels, staring, staring, at a still three-dee portrait of a black-haired, bearded man dressed in the simple red and black of a jaran soldier, one hand resting casually on his saber hilt, his glance thrown to one side. The jaran man looked intensely severe. But Ilyana knew, seeing him, recognizing him with a stab that ran right down through her and flooded her with prickles, that he was caught forever in the moment just before he smiled at someone unseen, beyond the range of the camera.
How could she not know? She bore his name. The extraordinary fervor of her father’s concentration as he stared at the image of Ilya Bakhtiian troubled her. Vasil never showed this kind of emotion outside of his acting; it might give other people power over him. She knew, as she knew when the air changes, heralding storm, that something was about to happen. With a jolt, she uprooted herself and hurried over to him.
In time to see him lift his eyes and focus on a group of three people on the other side of the panel. One was Maggie O’Neill. At first Ilyana didn’t recognize M. Pandit because the emerald uniform disguised her, overwhelmed her. A quisling uniform. M. Pandit was one of the human officers in the Protocol Office—oh, they didn’t call themselves quislings, of course. Everyone else called them that behind their backs. M. Pandit wore three platinum bars on the lapel of her uniform, and Ilyana gulped down a sudden lump in her throat. Three bars. It was the highest rank a human officer could attain in the service of the Chapalii—the highest rank, that is, except for the ennobling that Charles Soerensen had inadvertently achieved.
Between the two women stood a young man, one arm folded passively around M. Pandit’s elbow. He was a good-looking young man, as befitted a trophy husband, with short dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard, deep brown eyes and a narrow, defined face. His expression was serious. But then he glanced up at Vasil Veselov, smiled brilliantly and briefly, and looked down again.
In that brief gesture Ilyana clearly saw the resemblance. He looked enough like Ilyakoria Bakhtiian that anyone might laugh good-naturedly over the odd coincidence. Anybody but her father, who gazed with unnerving steadiness at the other man. Anyone but M. Pandit, who skewered the famous actor with an aggressive stare.
Anyone but Ilyana, who had long ago learned to recognize trouble coming. And she had a very, very bad feeling about this.
CHAPTER SIX
Spider’s Web
THE JARAN CAMP DROWSED under the afternoon sun. The dusty air hung in a heat haze over the tents, and the cloudless sky seemed to breathe in and out with the pulse of the sun.
Tess liked these lazy afternoon days. Time suspended; there was no past or future, nothing but an endless present with her children playing nearby, her husband sitting beside her under the awning, usually in quiet council with one or another of his commanders, her sister twenty steps away weaving, her tribe—for that was what the jaran were to her, now—surrounding her. On these long afternoons she could easily sit motionless for an hour at a time without anyone thinking it strange.
So she sat now, scrolling through information about Chapalii shipping schedules recently sent to her by her brother. The screen, which didn’t exist physically, seemed to float in the air about an arm’s length in front of her, and periodically she blinked twice to move the information on. The implant in her cranium produced these images and processed the information, and she used her eyes as the interface, processing visually.
“All encryption is cyclic,” she said aloud.
“Hmm?” murmured Hya. He was reading, or dozing, beside her, sprawled comfortably on pillows. They weren’t quite touching—it was too warm for that—but she felt the length of his body all along hers, his back to her side.
“Encryption. Ciphers, also called codes. They’re cyclic, so they can eventually be decoded, be broken and deciphered, but a cycle could be so long that by our standards it’s essentially unbreakable….”
He shifted around to look at her. “You think about the oddest things.”
She made the mistake of glancing at him. The two sights, her screen of numbers and linked spatial codes and his face, blurred together and made her head hurt. She blinked four times hard and the implant switched off. “Ouch,” she said reflexively. Even after years of living with the implant, it still caught her out at times.
“Staring at the sun again?” he asked lightly.
“No.”
He watched her for a little while in silence. For a moment, he seemed on the brink of asking her a question. But he didn’t.
“I’m just thinking about why merchants use encryption,” she continued, and he let her go on, knowing she liked to talk things out. “To conceal their manifest of cargo, or to avoid a prince’s tax they don’t want to pay. Plotting treason. Or if their cargo is particularly valuable, they might want to discuss and plan out the route of travel in secret, so that no bandit or competing house would know where to lie in wait for an ambush.”
“You’ve been talking to too many merchants.”
“Actually, I was thinking about something my brother said to me in his last letter.” She hesitated. Charles sent information embedded in the tiny cylinders used to seal the handwritten parchment and paper letters that were his overt communications. Even these handwritten letters, although not the main part of the information he continually fed to Tess, were themselves partially encrypted so that Ilya could read them without suspecting that he was seeing only part of the message. But seeing Ilya’s expression now, Tess wondered if he knew that he was being served only part of the truth. “About Chapalii merchants. He thinks they may be using ciphers, but he wonders why they would use them. Especially since the emperor controls all the shipping routes with an iron hand.”
“You know that the emperor controls these routes? Or only believe that he does? We watch the merchants travel from one city to the next, from Hamrat to Parkilnous to Jeds, and we may think they travel on a set pattern fixed by years of tradition or by a king’s will, but then if you speak with these merchants you see that the truth is not so simple. Sands shift and cover old roads and watering holes. Alliances shift and turn two princes into enemies where they had once been friends. A grandson may choose to rebel against his grandfather’s set ways, and he may try a new road and find that it leads to disaster, or to riches. And yet again one family may have trodden the same paths for generations, never changing. By walking the same road, each girl after her mother, each boy after his father, so does that road become their family and each of them lives on forever in the ones who come after.”
Insects droned in the quiet. Harness jingled and stilled. “Are you going to give up conquest for philosophy, my love?”
A smile tipped his, lips. “Your own brother once told me that knowledge is power. Is philosophy not a form of conquest?”
“I thought it was more like a search.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
Tess touched his cheek, but it was so damned hot that even that contact was too sweaty to prolong. “Only for you, my heart. Ilya—?”
“Yes?” He smiled now, a real smile. He looked so youthful that it was uncanny, even though she knew why he wasn’t aging at a normal rate. Still, at forty-five, he wasn’t quite yet old enough that the few strands of gray sprinkling his hair weren’t enough; that the gray hadn’t increased in eight years had not yet excited suspicion. But it would. Soon enough, seeing time somehow suspended in him, people would begin to wonder how he stayed so young.
“A wise ruler,” added Ilya after a few moments, “maintains stability so that merchants may trade and increase his wealth through taxes as well as their own through profit. If these same merchants follow the rule of law, then it is in any emperor’s interest to let them carry on their trade, which they understand best just as he understands how best to rule, without his interference.”
“True,” mused Tess. She examined him, where he lay so close: the coarse black hairs of his mustache which curved down around his lips to meld into his beard; the lines on his forehead, wrinkles brought on by frowning. Ilya had never developed laugh lines. An odd light dwelt in his eyes, as it had always done. He had never bothered to conceal it; thus had the gods marked him as one of their own. He could not have concealed it in any case. He lived in the world differently. For Ilya the world was one great long vision illuminated by the gods’ touch and through it he walked according to some hierophantic time.
“Is there something wrong with me?” he asked suddenly, touching his face with his right hand.
“Nothing cooler weather and a little privacy couldn’t cure,” she said with a grin.
“Mmmm,” he replied. He sat up. “Here comes Niko.”
Tess jumped to her feet and hurried out into the sun to give her arm to Niko. Even that short movement made her break into a sweat. “It’s too hot to walk around, Niko,” she scolded.
“I’m bored,” said Niko, “and there are twelve children singing loudly in my wife’s tent. Including yours. So I have come here to play a game of khot with your husband.”
He moved slowly, and although for years she had stood eye to eye with him, now he stooped enough that she could look down on his head. Ilya set out pillows. Tess helped Niko ease down to sit and then filled a cup with lukewarm tea for him and arranged a plate with sweetcakes and fruit. Carefully, stiffly, glancing once at Tess to make sure she did not interfere with the labored movements of his hands, Niko untied a leather pouch from his belt and set it on the carpet. Although khot could be played on a grid drawn in the dirt with sticks, Ilya had a gracefully carved wooden board which he brought out from the tent along with his own stones. Then the two men settled down to play. Tess reclined back on her pillows, blinked, and set up her program again. The quiet snap of stones being placed on the board serenaded her.
Twelve years ago, Charles had obtained the allegiance of a Chapalii merchant house. Eight years ago, Tess’s old friend Sojourner King Bakundi and her husband Rene Oljaitu had managed to talk Charles and the Keinaba house elders into letting the two humans apprentice to the Keinaba family. Bit by bit, information trickled in. Charles—or, that is, a consortium of people who worked with him—had collected it and other stray strands of information, packed it on a cylinder, and sent it to Tess. She had loaded the packet into her implant and now she picked her way through. It was rather like cutting a path through a dense jungle. The vegetation obscured the landmarks.
First and foremost, any great empire thrives on movement: stable lines of supply, of trade, of information. This movement must be unobstructed for officials on imperial business, and monitored and restricted for others on a scale that varied depending on the necessity of these functions to imperial strength and the likelihood of such restrictions causing dangerous levels of dissent.
In order to effectively sabotage the movement of ships and information in the Chapalii Empire, Charles had to figure out the logic of their transportation and communications web.
“Damn,” muttered Ilya suddenly, jolting Tess back to the real world. “Why do you always beat me, Niko?”
“Because you still try to use force and the weight of numbers to take territory, rather than building a spider’s web which looks fragile but in the end spreads its tendrils everywhere and takes over the board.” Niko chuckled. “Shall we try again?”
Ilya grunted. Tess heard the sweep of stones being collected, a cascade as stones were poured back into their pouches, and then, starting again, the taps at uneven intervals as the two men took turns setting their stones on the board.
In the twenty-first century, humanity had braved the stars with a sublight drive. Soon after this momentous occurrence, the Chapalii had appeared and given the humans and their fledgling League the key to the vector drive, which allowed them to travel through space rather as ships had once sailed the seas between the continents of Earth. It reminded Tess all at once of the game of khot, if one warped the board so that the grid had a three-dimensional curve rather than a two-dimensional flat expanse. Relay stations (the stones) created the windows (the lines of the grid), the singularity in the time-space continuum through which ships traveled. The velocity and angle of entry—the vector—determined where and how far the ship would then travel in that “window” between two points in normal space. Thus, with this network of relay stations, the Chapalii Empire controlled a system of movement that encompassed navigable space.
That much humans knew for sure about the vector drive, that, and that their routes of passage were strictly controlled by the Protocol Office. Tess could not help but wonder, though, if the relay stations created the windows or merely allowed them to be accessed. As far as human scientists had discovered, the windows existed naturally somehow, since it was remotely possible—if terribly dangerous—to navigate with the vector drive without the aid of relay stations, devising calculations by instinct, skill and sheer good luck. Perhaps in a long, slow outward expansion the Chapalii had mapped the network of windows and marked them for their own, creating a web on which they could traverse the stars. Like a spider’s web. The thought triggered a series of connections deep in her implant, and abruptly an old Machine Age flat poem wavered onto the screen:
A noiseless, patient spider,
I marked where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
“Better,” said Niko, breaking the silence. His voice was still lucid, but heavy with age. “But you’ve still let me encircle you. Shall we try again?”
Ilya grunted, too irritated, too intent, to reply in words. Stones poured.
Tess flickered her attention back to the screen and the spider.
… Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be formed, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere—
Only Walt Whitman was talking about the soul, which wound her around to that days-ago conversation with Ilya, in which a woven pattern had seemed to her to express as much about her own and little Lara Orzhekov’s personalities as any straightforward listing of attributes might.
Unless one thought of the web of windows linking planets and stations each to the other across the “measureless oceans of space” as the soul, the breath, of the Empire. Like a great net, pulsing with the inspiration and expiration of its own being.
Ilya chuckled suddenly, distracting her. Like an echo ringing faintly after his laugh, she heard bells. She blinked hard four times and the screen snapped into oblivion, leaving her with a lingering aftervision that dissipated as a belled messenger rode through it, pulled up, and dismounted, handing his reins over to one of the day guard.
Without looking up from the game, Ilya lifted a hand, and the soldier approached. He was a young man, his black hair twisted into three braids, his cheeks ruddy from the heat. He knelt just under the shade of the awning, bells chiming softly, and sat back on his heels, resting his palms on his thighs. He looked content enough to wait; out of the sun. Tess poured him some tea, and he thanked her prettily and sipped at it with commendable restraint.
Ilya and Niko finished the game, which, naturally, Niko won. As far as Tess knew, Ilya had only ever bested Niko at khot two times in his life.
Niko shook his head. “Ilyakoria, I despair of ever teaching you the serenity that will allow you to master the game. Yet somehow the lesson you cannot learn on the board you have learned to apply in war, so I have not utterly failed.”
Ilya glanced up sharply at the old man. “You have not failed at all, Niko,” he said harshly, and then subsided when he saw the smile on Niko’s face. “You will stay here, of course, and listen to the report.”
“Of course,” murmured Niko, still looking amused, although Tess also saw that he was beginning to look tired.
Ilya turned to the messenger. “Your name?”
“Daniil Obolensky, of Zvertkov’s army,” said the young man promptly. “I bring two pieces of news. The first is of a revolt in Salkh, led by a bricklayer dressed in rags who claims to have heard the word of their God through a fog that set upon him in the night—”
“And no doubt gained the backing of their discontented noblemen as well,” muttered Ilya.
“That is so,” agreed the soldier, “according to the messenger who got through to us. The jaran garrison was set upon, although some tens are still barricaded in the citadel and others escaped to the ruins in the sands which the khaja will not visit for fear of demons.”
Tess sighed, though she said nothing. Ilya listened intently. For eight years Salkh had remained a sore point in the southern Habakar district of the growing jaran empire, under jaran suzerainty but never quite yielding.
“What action has Zvertkov taken?” asked Niko.
“He has called back the advance troops from the Heaven Mountains to throw a perimeter around the city. But he has only just established himself in the city of Kalita, which lies thirty days’ ride across the wastelands from Khoyan, which itself lies twenty days’ ride across desert from Salkh, so he does not wish to withdraw any significant portion of his army back across these wastelands. By his order, I delivered these tidings as well to Prince Mitya as I passed through Hamrat in Habakar. The prince has sent two thousands south to help establish the perimeter. Otherwise he awaits your word.”