by Patty Jansen
“I didn’t ask about politics. I want to know about what is causing this rise in sonorics.”
“I told you: the touch of the royal heir has woken the Heart of the City up again. A time of justice and glory is coming.”
“You call that glory? My whole country is under threat of this thing!” He spread his hands in a gesture of frustration.
“Tut, tut, tut.” She gave him a sharp look. “Do you think we would not consider you, our valued neighbours?”
Sady hadn’t meant to shout in an esteemed lady’s presence. This was not a doga session. He let his hands fall back to his sides. “Sorry.” Then he sighed. “I care a lot about Chevakia. I’m sure you understand why this doesn’t make me happy.”
“I see no reason for you to be unhappy. Once the Eagle Knight are gone from the City of Glass, Chevakia will gain a very wealthy trading partner. Relationships between the City of Glass and Chevakia are already much better than those we have with Arania. It would be wise to capitalise on that, once the City of Glass starts exporting—”
“But sonorics are dangerous to us!” How many times did he have to say this?
She cocked her head. “At high levels, yes, but no one is suggesting that any Chevakians move to the City of Glass, although, with medication being developed now, I would not rule that out in the future.”
“Medication?” There was nothing other than salt pills, and they were not particularly effective; they merely helped restore any damage from low-level exposure. They did nothing about long-term effects.
“Yes, you should ask your academics about it.”
Alius. A piece of the puzzle fell into place. That was why the Most Learned cared so little about sonorics. But why keep such an important discovery secret?
He started to wish he’d come here much earlier.
Also, how long had these revolution plans in the City of Glass been going? Who was involved? Obviously the old royal family and the Eagle Knights, but what side did the citizens support?
“Who is currently the ruler of the City of Glass?”
“The Queen, as normal.”
“This is not Maraithe, but her daughter?” He remembered being made to kneel for the fragile wisp of a woman, wearing gauze-thin garments and seated on a throne made of carved glass. He remembered how hot it was in the room—and inside his suit. He remembered that she barely spoke a word, but that a Knight did all the talking.
“Mar-ay-the,” she corrected him. “The daughter’s name is Jevaithi.”
It was the first time that Sady heard that name. “She is—how old?” He remembered a toddler girl with golden hair being snatched away from him by her minders. He had only been told that she was the crown princess much later.
“Sixteen.”
“You cannot be serious about a girl that age having any influence.”
“No, she doesn’t have any influence at all. The regent is an Eagle Knight by the name of Rider Cornatan. Jevaithi is a puppet queen, a prisoner of the Knights. Her birthday has passed, and she should by rights have ascended the throne, but the Knights are holding on to power. To the people of the City of Glass, the royal family is sacred, even the old king, twisted a man as he was. They will not be happy to see the Knights continue to rule the country. And now, thanks to the books, they understand how the Knights are denying them prosperity. The citizens are more and more angry. They are getting ready to fight and take back what is theirs.”
The last southern king was said to have been a figure of unspeakable evil, and the Chevakian government at the time had been glad to see him gone. Sady remembered his parents talking about it at dinner. They saw the royal family of the City of Glass as a threat.
“This development worries me.” He could already see the reaction of panic in the doga. “If the doga hears about this, the senators will ask for all army units to be mobilised, in case the conflict spills over into Chevakia. If history is anything to go by, that is highly likely.”
“It won’t happen this time. Unlike the old kings or the Aranians, we’re not interested in war, or expansion of territory.”
“And when . . . do we get to know about this change in regime?”
“The revolution is being taken care of as we speak. With as little violence as possible. My son will have more information once he returns.”
“All right. I’ll speak to your son.” Mercy, that would be an exercise in cringing. “Meanwhile, and until we have this medicine, do you have anything I could tell the Chevakians about the situation? The south has increased sonorics so they can have a civil war doesn’t quite do it.”
She gave him a sharp glance. “You don’t believe a word I say, and are making fun out of me.”
“I reserve the right not to believe anything until I can verify it.”
Another hard stare.
“All right.” She pulled a little book across the desk and picked up a pen.
Sady watched her veined, paper-skinned hands as she scribbled something on a page that looked like . . .
She ripped the page out of the book and handed it to him. “Here, maybe that will convince you of my sincerity.”
Yes, a bank draft indeed.
Sady put it back on the desk. “Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly accept this.”
“So, you don’t want to visit the southern regions to measure sonorics and map weather systems and to reassure the people?”
How did she know about his request? “It would be seen as a political bribe.”
“From whom to whom? I’m an old woman, and I can spend my inheritance any way I like. See it as a gift to those who worry about the effects of struggles in my country.”
“But . . .” She was right; senators often received donations from rich patrons for projects that the doga wouldn’t fund.
“I know the rules. We will ask nothing in return. There are no secret deals. It’s simply a sign of goodwill.”
Sady opened his mouth to protest, but she continued, “While you’re there, in the south, of course . . . I agree that this current Proctor is an indecisive incompetent ignoramus. So, with our blessing, visit whom you intended to visit and if you find him amenable, return to Tiverius with someone who is not too scared to make the hard decisions. It is my guess that it was already your plan to visit such a person.”
She gave him a long stare over the rim of her glasses. Those blue eyes penetrated into the depth of his soul. Mercy, how could she guess that he had been thinking about asking Milleus to come back?
“One other thing, senator. Let’s do away with this nameless southern land thing. The Knights banned the land’s true name, and no one could ever think of a suitable alternative. My country will no longer be The Country That Shall Not Be Named. Its true name is Peria.”
* * *
Seated behind his desk opposite Sady, the most Learned Alius raised his bristly grey eyebrows and folded his hands, while regarding Sady with a calculated expression. “She told you that?”
“Yes. Is it true, are you working on such a medicine?”
He sighed. “I would really have preferred her to have kept quiet about this.”
“But such a medicine would be a great breakthough.” Sady recalled Alius saying, many years ago when he had been a student himself, that such a medicine would be impossible.
“Yes,” Alius said, and he folded his hands on the table.
Sady glanced at the table against the far wall, filled with equipment and trays of glass cylinders each exactly one cube in volume, that would be sealed with a glass lid on one side and a gel-covered paper on the other. When placed in a heat chamber, the gel absorbed any sonorics-charged motes, which showed up as brightly-lit spots in a string beam of light.
“The
n why not tell the doga about this medicine? Why involve southerners, and no Chevakians?”
“There are Chevakians involved, from a range of backgrounds. Also southerners, for obvious reasons. Every participant was asked to keep it quiet.”
“But why?” Sady was almost screaming with frustration.
“Academics do not work well in the public eye. The ideas behind the project are . . . pretty controversial. The financial backers of the project didn’t want to cause a storm unless we were certain that it would work.”
“And does it? Work, I mean?” He had an uncomfortable thought about that report on sonorics studies on people.
“Yes.”
“Then why not make it public?”
“We’re not ready yet. There are tests still to be done.”
“How long? We could really use this medicine right now.”
“I understand completely. We will do our best to get it ready as soon as possible.”
Sady rose to leave.
He had not specifically asked Alius about the Lady Armaine’s implication that he had received southern money, but it seemed that it had been used to fund good work, and Alius obviously had no problems accepting it.
Still, the bank draft burned in Sady’s pocket.
On the way out, he wandered through the Scriptorium library, but the books about the south were in a special section which he could easily access as senator, save that his visit would be recorded and he wasn’t sure what signal that would send. Foreign relations were not his responsibility; the senator in question might object to his invasion of his turf and Sady already felt the pressure of general opinion on him.
* * *
“What do you mean—what’s wrong?” Sady asked.
“You’ve been really grumpy the last few days,” Lana said.
Sady faced other across the wooden table in the kitchen, in the manner they ate their meals every night, Sady in his work shirt and Lana still wearing her apron.
“Have I?” Sady asked, rubbing his hand over his face.
“Yes. It wasn’t Serran’s fault that the neighbour’s ducks got into the garden.”
“He is the guard.” Mercy, he hated to see the mess the birds had made in his pretty private space where he often sat to read and enjoy the sunshine. And he was more annoyed that it had been kitchen staff who first noticed the birds.
“Guarding the gate. For people. The ducks flew over the wall.”
“He’s the guard and should have noticed. And if he’s too busy at the gate, he should have organised someone else to do it.”
“Still, he’s upset that you got angry at him.” Lana got up from the table carrying both their empty plates. “You want more soup?”
“No, thank you.”
“See, there you go. You’re grumpy. You never refuse my soup, and I’ve made soup for you since your father gave me this job.”
“Oh, don’t you go like that on me. You’re starting to sound like my mother.” But she was right. Lana was always right when it came to judging people.
Sady sighed and let a silence lapse. “Suppose I am grumpy. I just don’t know what to do about this sonorics situation. It isn’t bad enough for an emergency, but I want the doga to prepare. Instead, it’s like no one wants to make any decisions. I don’t have anything to back up decisions I’d want them to make.”
“No additional data?”
“No. Sonorics have been stable.”
“But that is a good thing.”
“It would be, if I didn’t suspect it’s only temporary, and if the level wasn’t so high. After I spoke to Lady Armaine, I don’t think anything about the south is random anymore. We’re getting a reprieve, but no one can take advantage of it. And I can’t tell anyone that I got my information from her.” They’d laugh in his face. “Seriously, Lana, there is only so much I can make of this low depression and building storm. I can make it sound as bad as I can, but in the end, it’s only weather, never mind that it usually goes hand in hand with high sonorics.”
He sighed again and stared at the table.
“No one takes meteorologists seriously. They’ll only hear the predictions they like to hear. I can predict disasters, but all they want to know about is their crops and whether the neighbouring district gets a higher cropping allocation.”
“Poor, poor Sady.” She ruffled his hair.
He smiled at her. She’d been his housekeeper for as long as he could remember, but she was more like his friend. She knew everything about him.
* * *
Destran pushed through approval for another road-building scheme. Viki fumbled through another presentation which showed no significant increase or decrease in sonorics levels. People started to get angry with Sady for ordering resources be put into distributing the tablets and suits. If stored in suboptimal conditions, the tablets had to be replaced yearly to great cost to the doga.
No one made any moves towards appointing southern informants. Lady Armaine’s son did not return.
A strange kind of tension built in the doga. Sady wasn’t sure what caused it. Maybe Viki’s rather emotion-less reports of relentless higher-than-usual sonorics started to grate on people, the levels just short of twenty motes per cube. Whenever any issue remotely related to the border regions or the south, or cropping was raised, senators expected Sady to speak up, but when he didn’t, and said that he couldn’t, because he had no reliable data or the particular subject wasn’t his field of expertise, one or two suggested he go on a trip to the border regions. Most notable was that one of those was a northern senator, who was also the first to mention the big V-word: vote of confidence. In Destran, that was. Destran, who kept side-stepping the issue of sonorics by saying there was no problem, which there wasn’t—yet. Destran, who continued to claim lack of money.
By the end of the fifth day of these antics, with no sign of the low pressure cell evaporating or sonorics going down, Sady went to see the northern faction leaders. He really wanted that southern trip, so that he could assess how feasible it would be to strengthen the barriers, and failing that—because there was no way such a major undertaking could be done quickly—how quickly they could evacuate the region in the case that might prove necessary. And he was determined not to use the Lady Armaine’s money to fund the trip. That meant he needed northern money.
He disliked doing regional deals for favours, and knew this had the potential to blow up into his face, but without their support, the doga would kill itself debating roads and train lines and the fairness of allocations for education, and whether northern children should get special allowance when coming into Tiverius to study . . . Vote of no confidence indeed.
* * *
“We are sick of Destran’s paralysis,” the northern senator Shara said in the comfort of her top floor office. Firelight played tricks with the folds of her northern region dress and on the gloss of her skin, black as obsidian. She fiddled with her glass, not meeting Sady’s eyes while she went on a rant about all that was ill in politics, which included things Sady agreed with, and things he did not.
Here, under the roof of the building, they should feel the heat radiated through the roof, a sign of the fury of summer to come, but the weather had turned unseasonably cold.
“If we are to challenge Destran, now seems a good time to do it.”
“Who is we? Who do you propose in his place?” Sady asked, feeling slightly uncomfortable. This regional voting was exactly what he had always agitated against, and he didn’t like using it to his advantage. Then, the meteorologist position was not bound to any region, and the positions of power were usually held by central region delegates. Like himself, like— “Milleus?”
She shook her head. “We want you to stand.”
> “Me?” They had to be kidding. “I don’t have any support. I don’t want the job.”
“I don’t think anyone ever wanted that job, Sady. It’s not much of a job, but someone has to do it.”
What she said was certainly true. Most Proctors had the job thrust upon them through circumstances. But most of them had been flamboyant, outspoken, strong characters. Everything he was not. He shook his head. “I wouldn’t be any good at it.”
“I think you will be.”
Mercy, no. “I’m not standing and that is definite. It will be Milleus or no one.”
Shara met Sady’s eyes, intense. The northern senators knew they didn’t have the numbers to field a candidate of their own. They were too divided for that.
“I don’t know, Sady,” she said.
Sady said, “We both know the doga can’t go on like this. We’re paralysed with indecision. Not just about this issue, but every time someone has a good plan, the group of doubters scuttle it with committees and requirements to draw up plans and have them approved. The only thing that happens is that the stacks of paper grow ever higher, but nothing is ever decided. And if something by chance does make it through, there is never any money to implement it.”
“But by asking Milleus to return, you are also asking the senators to vote against every step forward the doga has made in the last ten years.”
“Like what? All the doga has achieved in the last ten years is a division between the northern and southern provinces. So the provinces have more autonomy. What has that achieved except more political bickering over roads and trains? More indecision and building projects caught up in endless streams of bureaucracy. We need the unity more than ever.” That was not quite true. Destran had put Milleus’ rampantly negative budgets back into line, but he seemed to have taken that a bit too seriously recently.