by Simon Brown
Galys was counting on that. Kydan was counting on it.
*
Lannel Thorey watched Galys very carefully, almost protectively. He owed her his life, but now it was more than that. He was sensible enough to realise it was not love, at least not the kind of love a man normally felt for a woman. It was more that he recognised in Galys a way to serve Kydan. Even when he had been the enemy of the strategos it had been because, deep down, he wanted to serve his people. His mistake back then was not to realise Galys had that in her heart as well. He was going to learn from her, and all the other new Kydans, how to defend his city. Over the last several tendays he had already learned so much, about organising and training militia, about weapons practice, about marching and drill. His head was filled with different battlefield manoeuvres, such as the right wheel, the enfilading crescent with the weakened centre, the pike and firegon square, the bracketed retreat, the bracketed cover, the advance in echelon. And all the variations. Lannel could picture them in his mind as he had seen them in training, and went over them again and again. When the time came to fight for Kydan’s defence, he would be ready. Wholeheartedly.
Lannel saw Galys nod to herself. She turned to him, her expression serious, and said, ‘We have to get ready.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘How much time do we have?’
‘Enough. I think we have enough.’
There was a cry from one of the guards on the Citadel. Lannel heard, even from here, the excitement in the guard’s voice, and clearly heard the name he cried out.
‘So, Commander Gos Linsedd returns home,’ he said.
‘Good timing,’ Galys said, and almost smiled.
*
Commodore Avier made himself comfortable in the visitor’s chair and said to the Governor of Somah, ‘It is good to see you again. I hope you disposed profitably of the gift of hardwood General Third Prince Maddyn Kevleren asked me to give you on my last visit.’
The Governor of Somah nodded. She looked considerably more harassed than the last time Avier had seen her.
‘It enabled me to buy into a merchant business working out of Bowtell. My family will be well looked after should something happen to me.’
Avier was worried by her tone. ‘Do you have reason to be concerned for your safety?’
The governor waved her hand wearily. ‘The pressure of administration, that’s all. And the constant demands of the government in Omeralt. And the suspicion from the empress’s agents that one is not doing all one can to provide her with more Axkevlerens.’
‘More Axkevlerens? She has the largest number of Axkevlerens of anyone in her family.’
‘Lerena has her family’s Axkevlerens as well, for the most part, since she –’ The governor stopped talking, stood up from behind her desk and went to the door of her office to check that no one was close enough to overhear. Then she returned to her own seat, leaned across her desk and said in a low and urgent voice, ‘You have heard nothing of events here since your last visit? No one from Hamilay has visited the colony?’
‘No. Indeed, the changes I discovered here last time I visited shocked me deeply.’
‘What changes?’
‘The slaying of all the Beloveds!’ Avier said.
‘Oh, that!’ the governor said, waving her hand dismissively. ‘Well, now the empress has sacrificed almost her entire family!’
‘Her family? By the Sefid, why?’
‘Exactly,’ the governor said. ‘The Sefid. She used the Sefid to destroy Beferen and take over Rivald.’
Avier was too shocked to speak. This news was unimaginable! And then it occurred to him that if Lerena had taken over Rivald, would she consider Sayenna to be hers as well? He was overwhelmed by the urgent feeling he should finish his business here and return to Kydan as soon as possible. But there was so much to be done, such a list of things for him to collect, including people.
‘Now she has ordered her governors to send her vagrants and orphans, people from debtor prisons, anyone considered to be of loose moral character – whatever that is! – convicted murderers and bankrupts. There’s no end to the demands, and now she is sending out her commissioners to make sure quotas are filled.’
‘What does Empress Lerena do with them all?’
The governor sat back in her chair. ‘Well may you ask. If you want my advice, Captain . . .’ she saw the extra stripe on his sleeve, ‘ . . . sorry, Commodore, we will pick up where we left off. I’ll do my best to keep your visit secret if you carry out your business through my office.’
Avier considered the governor. He was going to ask her the same thing anyway, but her urgent tone gave added weight to the proposal. But what if she should come under suspicion? Would she blurt to Lerena’s cronies about the Annglaf being in harbour?
‘It is not my way to ask for more than my fair share,’ the governor hurried on. ‘But I am eager to establish some small fortune for myself and my family as soon as possible so I can leave Somah and live somewhere else. Bowtell, perhaps, or even Castell on the other side of the continent.’
Avier was not sure greed and desperation made for a good mix, but neither did he think he really had any choice.
‘I have brought you more hardwood,’ he said carefully. ‘And some skins from the interior of the New Land. Quite beautiful and rare skins. A gift.’
‘From the prince again?’ the governor asked.
Avier shrugged. ‘Who else?’ Who knew when word about Maddyn Kevleren’s death would eventually reach the general population of the empire? But until then he thought it would ease his way if the governor believed there was a Kevleren behind his trading expedition.
The governor seemed to relax a little then.
‘In exchange, however, I will need more from you than protection. I need people, too. Teachers, miners, professionals of all sorts. Can I get them through your office?’
The governor seemed uneasy about it, but in the end agreed. ‘I will make inquiries personally. The fewer others we involve, the better for both of us.’
And the more profit for you, Avier thought, but merely said, ‘Then we have a deal.’
*
The third night they made love, Heriot held Poloma’s head against her breast and wondered if he could hear her heartbeat.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.
‘Nothing I have thought before. Or felt. Need. Desire. Contentment. All of them, and all at the same time.’
‘Is that love?’ Outside the moon shone high and bright. There was a tree outside the window, and it cast a moonshadow across the bed, and when a breeze moved the tree it was as if the sheets on the bed rippled with a life of their own. A nightjar sounded nearby. ‘Poloma?’
‘I do not know. What do you feel?’
‘Loss. Joy. Confusion too.’
‘Are you sorry you are here?’
She ran her fingers through his hair. ‘No. I do not believe in fate, in things being inevitable, but I do think this was right. It is what needed to happen, for both of us. Do you think that might be love?’
Poloma shifted his weight, lay beside her so they could see each other. ‘I do love you, Heriot Fleetwood, and I think in your way you also love me. But what we did tonight, what we do in this bed, is not for love.’
They were quiet for a long time, but neither fell asleep. They were perfectly at ease side by side, perfectly vulnerable.
‘It was very nice, though,’ Poloma said eventually.
244th YEAR
AFTER THE
DESCENT
14
Lerena had breakfast – water, and small pieces of fruit and cooked meat – before first light, and then when dawn came carried out a sacrifice, a youth whose name she asked but forgot as soon as the Sefid flooded through her. It was a good sacrifice, because she loved this one more than some (he had been quite beautiful under the grime), which meant there would be no others that day.
Using the Sefid like a paintbrush, she made more adjustments to her avi
ary, her world, but not so much that she did not have some left over to work on behalf of the family and empire.
Sunlight streamed through the glass dome, yellow and full, while the metal tracery, now made from silver, shone blue against it. The aviary hummed with power. Birds flittered, skated across the sky. There were fewer of them now, but still enough for some quite sizeable flocks, and their songs filled the air.
The hardest time for Lerena was the daily council with her officials, reduced to just Mycom and Rodin these days. She knew their responsibility was terrible, but knew, too, they always kept in mind how much greater was the burden she bore on her own shoulders. Still, it was hard listening to their trite complaints, their meaningless minutiae, their constant requests for signatures and guidance. Sometimes she grew quite short with them, but always managed to forgive them by the time they returned the next day for more of the same.
Then, when she dismissed them, she would talk and play with Yunara, who was her best friend and, in a way Lerena did not quite understand, her greatest enemy. Yunara had to be watched constantly, humoured and loved, caressed, flattered and stood up to. In many ways she was exactly like Lerena had imagined the real Yunara to be before her death, but stripped of any pretence of her sister’s rare and reluctant deference to courtesy and humanity. This Yunara was all whim, all need, and if Lerena was not careful Yunara would take everything from her.
Other than Yunara, there were two main concerns in her life. Well, irritants really, two specks of dirt under her eyelid, two pebbles in her shoes. The first was the constant knowledge that all civilisation was under her sway except for one remote outpost that by all rights should be hers. Kydan, her recalcitrant, wayward child. And day by day the city increasingly itched, and now she had allowed herself a little scratch, courtesy of her navy. She would see what came of it.
The other problem resided less in her conscious mind than in her Sefid-induced view of the world. When she swam the sea of magic she could go almost as far as the New Land, and as high as the stars, and as deep as the great caverns beneath Hamilay. But there was one tiny spot, a black spot she had first felt three years before, where she could not go and where she could not see. A remote corner of her own land, her own Hamilay, far to the northeast, wild and windswept by sea and storm, sparsely populated. And as unknown to her as . . . well, there was not much else that was unknown to her, except the future. Perhaps that is what lay there, the future. As time went on, the need to know what it was evolved from a mild curiosity into an urgent need.
The next time she talked with Mycom and Rodin she would ask them to send someone there. Perhaps a mere human, someone not of her family, could get to the heart of it. Certainly, for the moment, it was beyond her ability.
*
The creature understood that in some way its periods of activity and hibernation were set by conditions beyond its control. There were nights when it felt it could have stridden the whole continent or swum the Deepening Sea looking for prey, and others when it barely felt its own skin or heard its own breathing. Things were best when the blue glow came, shining off anything made from metal, humming in its ears. Then almost anything was possible, even with its growing family to feed.
The creature looked with a mixture of pride and repulsion at its brood. Nearly thirty of them now. The great house they had invaded, the largest in these parts, had had enough inhabitants to feed them all, but they would have to go much further to find more places like this. As well, the larger the family, the harder it was to avoid hibernation, as if their number more quickly drained whatever it was that filled them with vitality. Indeed, some were already finding crevices and niches and cupboards to fall into their long slumber, and the creature itself was finding it harder to stay awake. It found a space between a box seat and a window, a slice of shadow deeper than the night, and lay down in it, its stomach full and its mind quickly emptying.
*
It was the tenth day of spring, and Paimer’s life was about to change direction once more.
Up to now he had kept to the same routine every day since establishing himself good and proper as Lord Protector of Rivald. When he first woke he dressed quickly and went to the second-floor gallery with its wooden shutters. In winter the shutters were always closed and he had to open one; in summer they were always kept open. For the first two years he had done this he was seeing how well Beferen was recovering from the conquest, but in the last year he was seeing how much it had grown. Things went slowly, Beferen really was a long way from anywhere, but things were happening. The city had revived, trade had returned, each day more people returned to abandoned homes or migrated in from the country to start a new life. New buildings were being erected, and from different-coloured stone than the traditional basalt and granite. Paimer had found sources of limestone and sandstone and instructed that new government buildings be built from those. He ordered old government buildings to be painted in bright colours. He reconstructed the lighthouses on either side of Beferen’s harbour so they were wider and taller, and arranged for their beacons to be manned day and night. He set aside an area of the worst devastation near the old walls not for housing or industry but for a park, a park with twisting trails, ponds, garden beds and a nursery. He brought physics from Omeralt’s university and started a hospital. He made sure everyone who wanted a job had one.
Paimer built a city, and from his gallery he looked over it to see how it was growing and to remind himself of how far he and the people of Beferen had come.
Then he went to the office, the palace’s old throne room, and had breakfast with Montranto and Avenel while going over the day’s schedule. Both men worked as hard as he did but never complained, at least not to his face. When most of the reconstruction had been finished, Montranto became his marshal, in charge of policing and protecting the city. By now Paimer had sent back to Omeralt those forces Lerena had left behind, and every soldier was now Rivald born and raised, and Paimer trusted them implicitly and completely because he had learned to trust Montranto implicitly and completely.
For his part, Secretary Avenel Kendy was a bureaucratic whirlwind. Nothing seemed to escape his attention, and the city was immensely better off because of it. He was not loved by anyone in the administration, he was a hard taskmaster, but not was he hated, for he was ever fair.
After breakfast the morning was spent in the office. At midday, Paimer would go for a long walk, seeing at ground level how the city was changing, talking with locals, seeing for himself what still needed to be done.
In the afternoon he held interviews. He was visited by those seeking justice and warrants and monopolies and tariffs and sometimes just favours.
But on this particular day, he was visited by a ghost from the past. A ghost of flesh and blood.
*
Englay had taken to haunting the governor’s home in Hamewald. Although no one but Chierma could see her, she made her presence known by swishing curtains when there was no wind, tipping over mugs of beer, kicking cats and blowing soot backwards through the chimneys. To a large extent this was not a problem for Chierma, since in his eyes she had been reduced to nothing more than a nuisance, and sometimes her antics were even funny in a cruel way, which he tried not to acknowledge so she would not be encouraged. The only time he had to steel himself was when, if he was working late at night, she would appear in front of him with cuts and bruises and bleeding sores. He would be shaken then, but again struggled to hide it; obviously she saw through his attempted indifference, which is why she did it.
The worst part of it all, however, was that the governor’s home became a place most people avoided, and certainly did not visit without business. Chierma’s secretary, Feruna, demonstrated his courage every day by returning, despite his papers being mysteriously flung in the air, despite the ink spills across his best pants, despite once catching his hand in a drawer, but he did not tarry after work if he could avoid it.
Chierma was lonely. He had always to some extent been alon
e, but this was different. Now the house he lived in had become a prison. Now at night there was just him and Englay – none of the servants would stay overnight and had all moved out – and Englay was not company he wanted or needed. He once thought of moving himself, but dismissed it: Englay would just follow him.
Every night, alone and lonely, he walked the halls of the house, trying to keep his mind on his duties because Englay would pick up any stray thought and appear to discuss it. Then one night early in spring, his concentration slipped and he wondered how the duke was going, the only person in the world he could remotely consider something like a friend. Over the last three years they had developed a correspondence; it had started meanly enough, with instructions and requests from a lord protector to a governor, but over time something of the relationship they had almost enjoyed in those few brief days before the assault on Beferen started to emerge, and then developed as they passed obscure references to one another about each other’s uninvited companion. It would seem that Paimer was dealing with Idalgo much better than he was dealing with Englay, perhaps because the palace in Beferen was just that, the palace, and must always have people in it whether they believed it haunted or not. In rustic Hamewald, where people enjoyed country pragmatism and country superstitions, a haunting was dealt with expediently and directly, by deserting its locus. Unfortunately, Chierma did not have that choice.
‘Choice,’ Englay said, musing. ‘You were not born to it, of course. An Axkevleren’s choice is his master’s.’ She smiled at him. ‘Or in our case, his mistress’s.’
Chierma increased his stride, but Englay somehow kept up without increasing her own. ‘I am my own master.’