by Kate Elliott
Suddenly, Janos drained his cup in one gulp and set it down, hard, on the table. He looked troubled. As well he might.
“Why tell me this?” Vasha repeated.
“You owe allegiance to neither side. Therefore, your counsel on this matter might be unimpeded by the prospect of personal gain.”
“But that isn’t true. I am part of the jaran army.”
“What did you learn from your father? Enough to judge the strength of a position, if you had a good look at it?”
“Perhaps.”
“Then judge the strength of my position, Prince Vasil’ii.”
Vasha revised his estimate of Janos’s condition. The prince was drunk, not sloppily, not overbearingly, but touched enough by the drink to confide in a man whom he knew to be his enemy, if only because he did not truly know if he could trust his allies. What worth an enemy’s counsel? What was it worth risking to attempt to convince an enemy to become an ally?
“Yet you still lack something. You want something from me, Prince Janos.”
Janos smiled, somewhat ironically, and Vasha knew he had spoken the truth. “I want an alliance with the Prince of Jeds.”
“She will never give you one,” said Vasha instantly, knowing full well how Tess would feel about the man who had supposedly killed her husband. Except he hadn’t. Tess was pragmatic. If Vasha could make sure that Ilya was restored to her, if he could convince her that Janos would make a strong ally, because he would make a valuable ally. Vasha felt that he understood Janos, casting here for a way to further his ambitions, as any prince would, given the opportunity. As Vasha was, seeking to improve his own place… and not just, perhaps, with his captor.
It would make sense for the jaran to ally with Janos.
At that moment, watching Janos’s sharp, intelligent face in the bright glare of the lanterns and the slow stir of the tent wall behind him in the rising wind, Vasha knew that Ilya would never forgive Janos. That Ilya himself would remain the greatest obstacle to an alliance with Janos. And it was a good alliance. It was a brilliant alliance. No need for the jaran army to expend itself on Mircassia if it was a friendly kingdom. With the proper treaties, the army could pass through the fringe of the kingdom and drive straight into Filis while the Jedan army, led jointly by the young Baron Santer and his sister’s husband Georgi Raevsky, hit the Filistian princedom from the rear. Crushed by these pincers, virtually the whole of the north from Jeds to the northern plains would be under the control of the jaran.
The thought of an empire of such immense size took Vasha’s breath away. He could see it in his mind, the map they all learned so well from the great copy nailed to a wooden board propped up by steadying legs, under the awning that served as the school for the children of the Orzhekov tribe. It was the empire of his father’s vision, so vast that even a messenger riding at breakneck speed, not that any man could endure such a pace for more than ten days, would take sixty days to traverse it.
And accomplished, here at the end, without the threat of the powerful Mircassian kingdom, against which the jaran army might, conceivably, break its strength. Even an army as mighty as the jaran could stretch itself too thin. As the empire grew, the wisest course was the one that Ilya himself was slowly cobbling together: client kingdoms and marriage alliances balanced against outright conquest. He had married into such an alliance himself, even if he might try to deny, now and again, the reasons behind his marriage. However madly in love his father might have been with Tess, twelve years past, he would never have married her if she hadn’t been the sister of the Prince of Jeds.
Then, with a chill, Vasha recalled his father pacing round the tower chamber, muttering under his breath. Perhaps he would have. Perhaps Ilya was not quite as pragmatic as Vasha always assumed he was.
Ilya would never make an alliance with the man who had taken him captive and killed half his guard. Never. Not even if it meant sparing his army a brutal campaign against a powerful adversary. He would not do it.
So it was up to his son to do it in his place.
Because Vasha knew, with that same instinct that told him when he had placed a pebble correctly on the khot grid, that this was the right choice to make.
“The jaran would rather greet Mircassia as our friend than as our enemy, Prince Janos,” he said, and by so doing, made the first move in a new and more complicated game.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The Lake of Mirrors
THEY SAT DOCKED AT Crossover Station, taking in their last consignment of human-made goods and foods, as well as five casks of Bass Ale, enough for the long haul to Chapal and back. Beyond Crossover Station lay the mysterious reaches of Chapalii space.
“And while it’s true,” Branwen was explaining over a supper of what Benjamin, the quartermaster, called “stir-fry,” “that all known space is Chapalii space, or at least controlled by their empire, still we mark the boundaries of League space because it’s familiar space, it’s our space, human space.”
Just as, Anatoly thought, the plains would always be the true home of the jaran no matter how far their empire extended.
“Past Crossover,” she added, “as the old joke goes, you’re skating on pretty thin ice.” Anatoly shook his head, not understanding the analogy. “I guess that wouldn’t make any sense to you,” she said with a smile, thoughtfully, without the self-satisfied air of superiority so many people in the League used when explaining things to Anatoly. “We League humans have been sunk in the same cultural milieu for such a long time now, over a century, that we forget what it’s like to have people come in who don’t have the same markers. In the old days, even the tribe just over the hill might be wholly alien. Maybe we’ve lost a little of our ability to adapt to that.”
“But surely you must adapt to the alien, if there are so many zayinu—so many aliens—in the universe.”
“Not as many as you might expect.”
“Or more than you’d expect,” interposed Summer Hennessy, the big pilot. “If you take into account the probability of a solar system forming around a star, and a planet falling into an orbit that is within the zone of life, and life itself arising, and intelligent life—”
“Define intelligence,” snapped Rachelle, the other pilot, the testy one.
“—and all of that coincidentally happening within the same time frame as human life developed,” finished Summer, ignoring Rachelle’s comment. “It’s more likely civilizations, alien, intelligent, or otherwise, would be separated by gulfs of time as well as space.”
“Begging your pardon,” said Anatoly politely, not wanting to seem as if he was interrupting the other woman, “Captain, but then do I understand you to mean that within League space you have a variety of routes on which you can travel, but once beyond this station, you must follow the old trade routes laid out by the Chapalii?”
“Exactly. I don’t know how much you know about how we actually travel in space, and how we navigate…?” Branwen kindly trailed off to leave room for him to stop her.
He just shook his head. He had traveled with the Gray Raven and its crew for seven days now, and he had quickly felt comfortable with being ignorant. Especially after the third day, when they had had a free-for-all fencing match in the passageways and he had not only won handily but been feted with great good nature afterward by the others. He had actually gotten rather drunk. The crew of the Gray Raven were good people to get drunk with, like his old comrades back in the army; he had never felt comfortable getting drunk with the actors.
“Stop me if I start lecturing,” said Branwen with a grin.
“Yes, do please stop her,” said Rachelle, but she always said things like that, and Anatoly was learning not to take her comments seriously.
“But I’ll try to make this short. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to you, Anatoly, but I’ve always preferred to, ah, scout out my ground in advance, so to speak.” She half turned in her seat to face the one wall in the galley that was not wood-paneled. “Screen, pull out
a hologram. Display standard singularity simulation. If you take a stream of photons, the particles which make up light, they’ll move through space at the speed of light and continue in the same direction unless some force causes them to change direction. Before we met the Chapalii, we traveled in ships that could approach but never attain the speed of light, so obviously travel time between the stars was glacial and feasible only in the time frame of years and generations. But the Chapalli gave us relay stations.”
In the three-dimensional image that seemed to extend from the wall, a stream of particles which Anatoly supposed represented a stream of photons struck a round object and shot away at a different angle.
“These relay stations create ‘windows’ which are singularities in the time-space continuum. The navigator—that’s me—in concert with coordinates given out by the relay station, describes a velocity and an angle at which the ship enters the singularity. That’s our vector; that’s why it’s called a vector drive. It’s like entering a gravity well, which throws us to a second singularity, which has been determined by the vector at which we entered the first one. So you could enter the first window and come out in two different places depending on your vector.”
“Or you could enter a window with an innocent vector and end up never coming out,” added Rachelle cheerfully.
“So you must scout out these routes…” Anatoly hesitated. “How can you scout them, if you must know beforehand where you are going? It isn’t like trying a path up into the mountains and turning back if it ends in the heights, or riding out into a desert until half your water flasks are empty, and then returning to the last oasis to try a new route.”
“The truth is, we’re dependent on the Chapalii for that. Or at least outside of League space. Inside League space we believe we have recorded most of the routes through space, and there do seem to be a limited number, not an infinite one. Obviously, if you have a finite number of relay stations, and not all link each to the other, there would be a finite number of routes between them. But in Chapalii space proper, we have to accept the route that is chosen for us by whatever passes for their navigational staff. For instance, the run to Paladia Minor and Major and thus to Chapal: We call it the Mirror Road because on the second jump we pass through a system where there’s a mirror array in orbit, reflecting the binary star. Of course we don’t know what it’s for, but it’s a brilliant landmark. Only this ship and two others have ever been allowed to run all the way in to the Paladias, and that is the only route we’re allowed to take. We know there must be other ways to get there, since we have records from Sojourner King Bakundi and her husband, who are on the Keinaba merchant flagship, but she’s got no access to navigation. She can only look out the viewports, and there aren’t many of those on Chapalii ships apparently. There are a few other humans apprenticed on Keinaba ships, but only the flagship seems to go in to the Paladias.”
She paused. Benjamin was still eating, spearing broccoli with neat stabs, and Florien was on comm duty on the bridge. Moshe sat with chin propped on hands staring dreamily at the opposite wall, as if he could read a secret message in the swirling wood grain.
“I don’t truly understand what this means, a singularity. Is this something that exists already? Or is it created?”
“In the early days of expansion, after humans met the Chapalii and before the Chapalii coopted the League into their Empire, there was a great deal of debate on that very point. As soon as the League was subsumed in the empire, though, the Protocol Office put an end to public debate.”
“They said it was ‘unseemly,’ ” said Rachelle sarcastically.
“Which means the debate goes on in private,” added Branwen. “Which means there’s no consensus yet. Do the relay stations create the singularities? Can technology do something that massive?”
“It can’t only if we suppose that technology is limited to what we understand of it,” interposed Summer.
“Or are the relay stations just set up to take advantage of singularities that already exist, that have been mapped? If that’s the case, are there singularities out there that the Chapalii might not have mapped which we can use, to get around them? Because they control the shipping routes, with the proverbial iron hand. Well, it’s not something that any of us but Florien sit up nights worrying about.”
“Oh, I do,” said Benjamin, a forkful of sautéed onions poised just beyond his lips. “If I could figure it out, I’d be rich.”
Rachelle snorted.
“So have you scouted no other routes in Chapalii space?” Anatoly asked.
“We can’t,” replied Branwen. “We’d certainly like to. I don’t know how much you know of the history of the League and the Chapalii, but until the elevation of Charles Soerensen to the dukedom, no humans had been allowed to pass beyond the boundaries of League space at all. He was the first human to set foot on Chapal, when he went to be invested before the emperor.”
“Actually everyone thought he was being taken there to be executed, after he led the failed rebellion against the Empire,” said Rachelle. “Imagine the surprise when he returned as a duke.”
Anatoly tried to imagine this, but could not. In fact, a wise ruler knows that it is not enough just to conquer and kill; those conquered—the right ones, chosen carefully—must be given a stake in the Empire so that it becomes in their interest to help maintain the peace. That had been part of Bakhtiian’s strategy all along.
Florien’s voice leapt out of the console embedded in the center of the table. “We have clearance to cross over. Window at oh nine forty.”
“Shit!” swore Rachelle. “That’s in only thirty minutes and I wanted to take a shower.” She jumped up and raced out of the room.
“She’ll take one anyway,” groused Benjamin. “We can’t be leaving already. There’s a consignment of flower rubies I’ve been bargaining for down at Viery Market. They’ll be gone by the time we get back.”
Branwen had already stood and was efficiently clearing her utensils and plate away, stowing them in the sonic cleaner. “Summer, get the hatch cleared. Benjamin, you’re going to have to do a quick run around the ship and make sure everything is batted down. Moshe—”
“We never got this short a notice before,” said the boy, coming out of his reverie.
“Help Summer with the hatches. Anatoly, uh, probably if you’ll clean up here and then come up to the bridge, that would be the best place for you.”
He nodded and began stacking plates. It was not, truly, a man’s job, but he had long since discovered that the khaja of League space did not have as strict a sense of order as the jaran did, knowing which duties belonged to which people, which was no doubt why the Chapalii Empire had been able to absorb them so easily. Finishing, he sealed all the cabinets closed and secured the chairs to the table, and then pulled himself up two flights of ladder to the bridge. Here, at about half gravity, all his movements felt awkward, although he had seen Branwen and Rachelle take leaps and bounds and spins when the yacht was in its brief periods of freefall that left him breathless or nauseated. The other two men, like him, seemed more bound to gravity.
Six crash seats ringed the bronze access tube that ran the length of the ship, from the prow all the way down to the engines. He strapped into the seat that faced the courtesy screen, as Rachelle called it: a big screen that gave the appearance of being a window onto the outside, although of course it was merely a projection. Rachelle, hair bound back in a complicated braid, was there before him. She sealed herself into her pilot’s chair, a contraption that covered her hands, and an oversized visor curled out to cover her eyes. Branwen sat in the captain’s chair, her fingers flying over a numerical keypad, mouth lifted in a half smile that Anatoly recognized as intent concentration. Other than the faint clacking of her fingers on the pad and the hollow thrum rising up the access tube like a distant heartbeat, the bridge was silent. Florien turned, saw Anatoly, and flipped the comm onto the open speakers, another courtesy which Anatoly appreciated.
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“Hatches secured,” said Summer over the comm. As if in response the station controller said, “You are clear to detach.”
“All hands secure,” said Branwen without looking away from the keypad and whatever the screen embedded in her chair’s arm told her.
One by one, all hands reported in: Rachelle (sounding preoccupied), Florien, Summer, Benjamin (sounding irritated about his lost deal), and Moshe. Last, with a start, Anatoly remembered that he had to report in as well.
“Secure,” he said, a little embarrassed. Branwen glanced up at him and flashed him a swift, sweet smile, reassuring, before she went back to her calculations.
“Detach commenced. Accomplished.”
“Heading mark two seven eight,” said Branwen. From the depths of her chair Rachelle responded with a word that sounded more like a click, or else a word in a very strange language. They continued to trade numbers as the yacht backed away from Crossover Station, banked, and headed out to the point where they would rendezvous with the window—with the singularity, Anatoly corrected himself. It was the one element of travel across the oceans of space that he had yet to get used to: For that instant, which was not an instant, going through the window, he had a notion that he ceased to exist or that he was somehow thrown into a different time. Sometimes he would see brief visions, a memory from his childhood or from a battle, or catch a remembered scent, the stench of a spoiled water hole or the perfume of grass, or he would feel the touch of a spear biting into his thigh or the touch of his wife brushing a finger down his chest. As he considered this mystery, the Gray Raven passed imperceptibly into the singularity.
Genji walks toward him down a corridor filled with light. Her robes fill the passageway with a sound like the laughter of wind through dense leaves.