A Prospect of War (An Age of Discord Novel Book 1)

by Ian Sales

  The tramp of feet on the stairs caused Ormuz to swing his attention from the captain. Marla Dai, ship’s engineer. She smiled brightly at Ormuz and came to a halt beside Plessant. “Ready?” she asked the captain breathlessly.

  “Yes,” Plessant said. “Tell Adril we’re heading into Amwadina,” she told Ormuz. “Once the inspection’s over, get the ship battened down. Lex will know where to find us.”

  “Can’t I come with you?” asked Ormuz.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I say so.” Plessant nodded at Dai, and set off towards the terminal-building.

  Dai smiled apologetically at Ormuz. She hurried after the captain. When she reached Plessant’s side, she looked back and lifted a hand in farewell.

  The captain and engineer strode towards the proletarian terminal-building. Their dark clothing outlined them against its peach-stained front, their shadows attenuated and alien behind them on the apron.

  Ormuz was fond of Dai, but he liked the captain more.

  Tovar, Ormuz and ship’s pilot Lexander Lotsman showed the escutcheons pinned to their collars to a bored sheriff and gave their names. There was a moment’s wait as the sheriff consulted her heraldic data-pool and verified the coat of arms of their bond-holder. Ormuz glanced up at the two official portraits on the wall. One, spade-beard and grave mien, he recognised as the emperor, Willim IX; the other, he guessed, was the noble who owned Darrus. Ormuz did not know his rank or his name.

  The barrier across the corridor swung aside: the crew of Divine Providence had been permitted entry. Proletarians, the lowest rank of society and the most numerous, were forbidden to leave their home fief. However, since their occupation necessitated travel to other worlds, Divine Providence’s crew were permitted to do so by their bond-holder, Sir Borodisz demar Lewy, a wealthy yeoman on Antyde. A note to that effect was attached to Lewy’s record in the heraldic data-pool.

  While Ormuz occasionally worried that the permission might one day be revoked, or the data-pool record mistaken, Lotsman and Tovar never showed any such qualms. Privately, Ormuz felt their confidence foolish—as proles, they lived at the whim of the yeomanry and nobility. And whims had a habit of changing for no reason at a moment’s notice…

  The thought prompted another:

  “Why are we here?” asked Ormuz.

  Lotsman shrugged. “We’re going to meet the captain.”

  “Not that. I mean, why are we on Darrus?”

  Divine Providence’s usual route took it on a circuit of eight worlds further out on the rim of the Empire.

  “Couldn’t tell you,” said Lotsman. “The captain said plot a course to Darrus. So I did.”

  “But Divine Providence doesn’t normally come here,” insisted Ormuz.

  Lotsman shrugged again. “Ours,” he said, “is not to wonder why. Orders from Sir Borodisz, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Who?” Lotsman glanced at Ormuz. “Sir Borodisz? No idea. Never met him.”

  “Have you, Adril?”

  Tovar shook his head. “Me? Oh no, never.”

  “Has Captain Plessant?”

  “Probably. I should think so.” Lotsman grunted. “What brought this on? You’re always asking bloody questions, Cas. Can’t you just learn to accept things?”

  “Why?”

  Lotsman shook his head in exasperation, but did not hide his grin.

  Passing through the exit from the terminal, the three descended a gentle ramp into a tunnel, and found themselves in an underground chamber. Line after line of square pillars made it impossible to judge the size of the space. Every surface was tiled in a bright mosaic, green at the floor, shading to dark blue across the ceiling. It was, thought Ormuz, a little like walking through a child’s painting of a forest beneath a night sky. Perhaps that had been the intention.

  “It’s not very busy here, is it?” he remarked. The chamber was virtually empty: he could see less than a dozen people between the pillars.

  “You should see this place at the start of semester,” said Lotsman absently.

  Tovar turned to the youth. “Darrus is Makarta Province’s largest learning centre. The technum’s student body is something like three million. It’s the planet’s biggest source of income.”

  “It’s the planet’s only source of income,” added Lotsman with a snort.

  “Not true, Lex,” corrected Tovar. “Darrus also exports foodstuffs—”

  “The sutler barge,” Ormuz said.

  “Uhm?” Tovar frowned: he had plainly not spotted the huge starship on the apron. “Barge, yes. They visit here regularly. But the university and the technum are no more than a few centuries old…”

  According to the cargo-master, war had swept through Makarta Province, and hence across Darrus, twice in its long history. First during the province’s creation by the Old Empire four thousand years ago; and again a millennium past, when Edkar I’s navy “pacified” the planetary fiefs of the Old Empire and persuaded them to accept his rule. Ormuz sometimes wished he had been born in more interesting times. As a noble, of course. A proletarian’s life one thousand years ago during the Pacification Campaigns would have been little different to Ormuz’s today.

  The three wove their way between the green-to-blue pillars, and passed beneath a pointed archway onto a train platform. In contrast to the chamber they had left, the walls here were of the same pale stone as the terminal-building above.

  A breeze whispered across the platform, and a bright red train slid into the station and glided to a halt. Doors hissed open along its length. Lotsman bounded aboard and dropped into a wooden seat facing forward. Ormuz and Tovar settled opposite him.

  “I do hope you know where we need to disembark,” Tovar said to Lotsman.

  The pilot nodded. “The captain’s directions were pretty exact.”

  Ormuz slouched back in his seat and gazed out of the window. A brief sensation of acceleration and the train drew clear of the Minadar station. Dark walls flashed past, blurred by their speed. After some five minutes, the train shot above-ground, following a track some fifteen yards above a carpet of grass deepening in shade to a nondescript grey as night fell.

  As the sun disappeared below the horizon—although a bank of clouds on the horizon continued to glow like a vast hearth—a faint radiance appeared across the land before the train. The light spread arms to either side, forming a heavenly nimbus above the castellated silhouette of Amwadina. Ormuz glanced at Tovar and saw him peer back over his shoulder at the shadow of the starport framed in one window. The cargo-master didn’t like leaving Divine Providence unguarded. Starports were not short of those with light fingers, and even officials were not above bribery and corruption. It was impossible to remotely copy a data-freighter’s cargo—her data-vats were independent of her internal data-pool. But a thief could breech the main airlock and, once aboard, siphon off a sample of the vats’ contents. Information theft was an occupational hazard of data-trading.

  The trio exited the train at the fifth station within Amwadina’s precincts. Ormuz and Tovar followed Lotsman’s confident lope from the platform and onto the street. The road they travelled soon narrowed, twisted and turned, becoming one alley amongst a labyrinth of alleyways. Domiciles, shops, cafeterias and bars were jumbled together along each constricted thoroughfare. Although twilight was wrapping its cloth of velvet about the city, many were still open. Ormuz saw women—some cloaked head to foot in black—rifling through racks of garments in boutiques crammed floor-to-ceiling with brightly-coloured apparel. Old men sat about low tables in cafeterias, drinking some steaming dark liquid from glass cups, and smoking. The nose-tingling reeks of unfamiliar spices drifted from the doorways of food shops. This, he realised happily, was nothing like provincial Rasamra.

  Ormuz turned to gaze back in the direction of Minadar. Dark clouds continued to gather there, a mountainous wall of billowing cumuli, dyed he
llish reds and oranges by the light of the sun below the horizon. “Looks like a storm coming,” he remarked. He breathed in deeply through his nose. The air was electric. He missed air like this, with this particular… tang. Storms had been frequent on Rasamra.

  Ormuz, Lotsman and Tovar increased their pace. Night had now fallen and the stink of ozone suffusing the air warned of an incipient downpour. They reached the Amwadina bar Captain Plessant had nominated as their rendezvous, the Sikkir. Lotsman opened the door, and flinched as a wall of noise washed over him.

  Plessant glanced across at the barman as she entered the Sidiqi. He saw her and gave a short nod in the direction of a door at the back of the room. Plessant led Dai to an empty table, but did not sit. The engineer signalled for a beer. A waiter sauntered towards Dai with a bottle on a tray. The waiter slid the beer across the table with a leer. She scowled at him, and waved him away peremptorily. He left, muttering under his breath, his confidence unshaken.

  Once Dai was settled, Plessant crossed to the door pointed out by the barman and pushed it open. She found herself confronting a wiry man in nondescript clothing. “My lady,” he said quietly, and stepped aside. Behind him, a flight of stairs led down. Plessant descended. At the first landing, the smooth, fitted stone of the walls gave way to crudely carved rock. The stairs doubled back three times, and the passageway at the foot had no discernible end. On the arched ceiling, a line of square light-panels, humming faintly as their flexors warped them faster than the eye could see, stretched away to infinity. Every five yards or so, openings gaped on alternating sides. The tunnel looked to have been chiselled out millennia before the Old Empire had arrived on Darrus.

  Plessant counted the openings she passed. At the twelfth, she stopped, and peered at the gap in the tunnel-wall. The opening swallowed the feeble light cast by the panels on the passage’s ceiling. It was a moment before she realised that a black curtain screened it. She stepped forward and pushed the cloth aside.

  The small, square chamber behind the curtain was well-lit and contained only a table and two chairs. A bottle of wine and two glasses sat on the table, and a man in plain but well-cut trousers and shirt occupied one chair. His clothes, and the sword hanging from his belt, proclaimed him a yeoman or noble, but he seemed too austere to be typical of the breed. His bearing was not military, but he held himself like a man used to action. His features were severe and ascetic.

  The man rose to his feet as Plessant entered, and sketched a short bow. “My lady,” he said.

  “Sir Marit,” she replied.

  “A drink? Wine. From Stiletto’s cellar, not the rot-gut they sell upstairs.”

  Plessant nodded. She settled on the free chair, crossed her arms, and stared across the table. “I don’t like this,” she said.

  Sir Marit demar Hukom poured out two glasses of red wine. “Not the most congenial of surroundings, is it?” he remarked. “But it has the advantage of privacy.”

  In secret rooms, mused Plessant, secret people gather to make secret plans.

  “I mean, I don’t like being on Darrus,” she said. “Couldn’t you have arranged a meeting further out? On our usual route?” She accepted a glass from Hukom.

  He shook his head. “No, the Serpent draws closer to the boy each day. It’s likely he has already staked out one of the worlds on your route.” He grimaced. “It’s dangerous enough having Stiletto and Divine Providence on-planet at the same time.”

  Hukom’s explanation did not mollify Plessant. For more than two years, they had hidden young Casimir Ormuz aboard Divine Providence. Why the Serpent wanted him Plessant had never been told. She knew only that the Serpent was a high noble and the head of a conspiracy bent on overthrowing the Imperial Throne.

  “Why not use Sirje?” she asked.

  “Time.” Hukom sipped his wine, and smiled appreciatively. “A good vintage.” He put down his glass and leaned forward, hands clasped on the table-top. “Divine Wind would be at least two weeks getting here. We can’t afford to wait. Events are coming to a head. The Procurator Imperial has pulled in Malis.” He shrugged. “A mistake but—”

  “Wasn’t that what we wanted?”

  Hukom scowled. “No. We had not thought the Office of the Procurator Imperial would make so precipitous a move. The conspiracy is there to be unravelled in the funds siphoned from the Military Bank by the Paymaster General and forwarded on to Viscount Malis. We expected the OPI to do no more than investigate. Carefully.” He gestured dismissively. “But you know nothing of this, and I probably shouldn’t be telling you.”

  Plessant harrumphed. In every conversation with her superiors, ‘need to know’ always reared its ugly head.

  “So the Serpent no longer has access to the Military Bank?” she asked.

  “He still has other conduits. I find it odd the OPI did not track Malis’ money back to its source. Perhaps they’re not so lily-white as we’d believed.” He paused, and gave a distant smile. “For three thousand years, the Old Empire had peace. Of sorts. Then Edkar I took the Throne and declared a new Empire, our Empire. The thirteen hundred years since then have been… troubled, at best. The peace and stability we seem to enjoy? The consequence of our work—and many others too, of course!—behind the scenes. Nothing must threaten the Throne, Murily. It is our bounden duty to ensure that.”

  “I’m well aware of that, Marit,” Plessant said dryly.

  “Forgive me. But I find myself peeved when those we use make a situation much the worse. They arrested Regimental-Captain Advezer, you know.” He shook his head sadly. “If the OPI are going to bungle their investigation…”

  “They’ve done our job for us, Marit. The Emperor has never trusted the Imperial Regiments: they’re not under the direct control of the Throne. The Electorate of Peers commands them. Now that the OPI have shown there’s subversion in the ranks, the Emperor’ll trust them even less. Without the regiments, the Serpent is powerless.”

  Hukom disagreed: “Never powerless, Murily. We’ve been battling this conspiracy for centuries. We still don’t know how wide it spreads. That should tell you something.” He paused as if weighing his words. “The boy’s our best hope,” he said.

  “He’s too young,” Plessant said flatly.

  “If time weren’t pressing, I’d agree with you, but…”

  Plessant took a sip from her glass. She was unsurprised to discover the wine was excellent. It had been a long time since she’d last been in a chapterhouse but she hadn’t forgotten the quality of the food and drink they served. Years of eating galley meals aboard Divine Providence had not ruined her palate.

  “So?” she asked.

  “Kapuluan,” said Hukom. “Take the boy there. The Involutes are waiting. They’ll take the boy off your hands. It’s time we put him to use.”

  “Do I tell him?”

  Hukom was shocked. “Dear Lords, no! This has to be done carefully.”

  Plessant grimaced.

  “What in heavens made you ask that?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t think it’s fair to keep him in the dark. I like the boy. Sooner or later, he has to be told what we have planned for him.”

  “And so we shall, Murily. When the time is right. Everything has to be done in a certain way. You know that.”

  Plessant gazed at the wine remaining in her glass. It was a dark ruby-red, the colour as rich as its taste. Even in a rudely-furnished room carved out of the rock beneath Amwadina, the privileged members of Imperial society took their comforts with them. The wine was a better vintage than any served in the city.

  “I can’t get to Kapuluan direct from Darrus,” Plessant said. “I have to go via Ophold.”

  Hukom frowned. “Is there no other route?”

  “It’s the quickest.”

  “Then there’s little choice: time is of the essence. But be careful. I’m for Shuto, so I won’t see you there.”

  “Should I ask what takes you there?”

  “No.
” Hukom reached for his wineglass and cupped his hands about it as if warming them. “There’s still danger in this, Murily,” he said. “This could finally be the end, the end of everything we’ve worked for, but…” He dropped his gaze to the glass he held.

  “We’re that close?” Plessant asked, surprised.

  “With the boy? Yes, we’re that close. Without him—”

  “He’s no messiah, Marit. He’s just a young man with a patchy education.”

  “He may be more. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

  “More?”

  Hukom rose to his feet. “I’ve said too much, Murily. Forgive me.” He leant forward, his hands flat on the table and his weight resting on them. “Just get the boy to Kapuluan. Don’t keep the Involutes waiting.”

  Plessant pushed back her chair. It scraped loudly. She nodded brusquely. “My lord.”

  Dai was still alone at her table. She looked as unwilling to accept company as she had when Plessant left her. The captain dropped onto an empty chair. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.

  “Well?” asked the engineer.

  “Ophold.”

  “We have to fly to Ophold?”

  “No, we have to fly to Kapuluan.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  Plessant dropped her hands. She gazed at the engineer with regret. “Need to know, Marla.”

  Dai’s features twisted in a scowl. “‘Need to know’,” she parroted bitterly. “I don’t bloody know anything. I don’t know why we had to come to Darrus. I don’t know why you hired Casimir. I don’t know why we’ve spent the last two years doing nothing but pretending to be a real data-freighter.”

  “And you never will,” snapped Plessant. She could rue the need to keep her crew, her serjeants, in the dark, but she refused to have her orders questioned. She had, perhaps, allowed Dai and the others too much freedom. The paradigm which governed relations between nobility, yeomanry and the proletariat was the bedrock of Imperial society. Plessant’s role as captain of Divine Providence had forced her to play the part of a prole. But she was a yeoman, and it pained her to think her crew might have forgotten that fact.