by Patty Jansen
The book of Foundation Law told her that any Mirani of adult age regardless of family status could stand for the public section of the council, which made up a third of the general assembly. Membership of the public section was determined by vote. Voting wasn’t compulsory, and most Endri didn’t bother, because they felt that the public section was not about them.
This was also how Nemedor Satarin had come in, because back then many Endri had a thing or two to say about his rise in popularity and might have bothered turning up to vote against him had they known how long he was going to stay and how powerful he was going to be.
Since coming to power through the Nikala vote, he had unified people behind him. The fact that he’d made a solid stand against outrageous accusations against Miran by foreign interests had been a huge help. Miran was proud. Rather than comply with invasive investigations, they’d put up with boycotts. No one dictated to Miran what to do. And predictably gamra had reacted with its own boycott, so that no one could buy any of Miran’s produce either.
The trouble was that the mutual boycott had hurt Miran much worse than it had hurt the rest of gamra. And that over the years information had come out that some of those accusations hadn’t been so outrageous after all.
So, considering all the facts, she supposed that proposing the removal of the boycotts meant . . .
Standing against Nemedor Satarin.
Damn it. That thought scared the hell out of her. Go out there and publicly nominate herself? Run campaigns for next year’s election? That was too much right now. She had the play to organise, Father to look after, a wedding to get ready for. She’d reconsider going into the council later . . . when she was married.
As if Jaeron would let her do anything of the sort. Who was she kidding?
No, the best time to declare, and run a campaign, would be when she’d finished the play and had properly upset the entire council with her interpretation of it, and if the people showed any sign of understanding the message behind her interpretation. If they wanted change. If they were ready for a fight.
That was a big if.
If she stepped into the role, there would be no easy solutions and no second chances. There might be no easy life and no marriage either.
That was just way too scary to contemplate.
But she owed it to Miran to do something, because she’d hate herself for the rest of her life if the council made a bad decision and she’d had the opportunity to try and stop them, but had done nothing.
It was still dark when she rose, got dressed and went to eat breakfast in the kitchen. Riana was already up, re-kneading the bread she had been working on yesterday.
“You’re up early, mistress.”
“Big day at the theatre. A lot of work to be done.” She tried to be matter-of-fact about it, but was unsure if she came off convincing. Riana tended to have a pretty good sense for when something was up.
A layer of snow had fallen thick enough to create a small measure of chaos, even in a place where water only fell as snow, and where big snow mounds were a fact of life.
As he usually did on big snow days, Kalit had risen early to shovel a path to the gate, but so much of it had fallen that he was still hacking with the snow pick to make enough room for the gate to open. While he jiggled and pushed the gate, Ellisandra took the snow shovel and shoved as much of it as she could away from the entrance.
“You shouldn’t be doing that, mistress. Go back inside where it’s warm.”
“I need to get out, and I’m a healthy girl, so let me just do this for you while you sort out the gate.”
Both of them shovelled and chipped in amicable silence. Ellisandra got nice and warm from the work and it helped her take her mind off her troubles.
While she was working, a lot of people came past. A path one sled wide would have been cleared by snowploughs on tiyuk sleds before dawn. It seemed unusually busy in the street, even when accounting for further clearing sleds going up and down to widen the cleared path. Each time, the scoop at the front pushed more snow aside. This, of course, got progressively harder the more snow had been removed off the central part of the street, so a few tiyuk nomad men had come with a snow press and were busily working the mounds into neat compressed blocks. These were piled along the sides of the street to be picked up later. The joke went that moving snow around was a major business in Miran.
In addition to this, it looked like there was some to-do at the Andrahar house. A group of builders stood around in the street talking to each other and someone with a sled full of materials had stopped at the gate, presumably because the snow hadn’t been cleared enough for him to get into the yard, but by the looks of things, people were working on it.
It was amazing how many people this one man employed. There were even some guards chatting with all of them. Good. The guards would give the council the information they wanted, and she wouldn’t have to spy anymore, much less confront Nemedor Satarin about not wanting to do that.
By the time she arrived at the theatre, the morning sun had just cleared the horizon. It was later than she had wanted to come in, but fortunately still before anyone else turned up for work. She opened the back door—why had she never noticed how much it creaked?—and changed her shoes in the foyer. It was cold and empty here without anyone around. Her footsteps echoed in the empty halls, and the mannequins with the old costumes looked like they might come alive, as if they were spies that would tell everyone about the thing that she was about to do.
She went to the corner of the library, to the little desk from where she had sent the requests to the printer, and turned on the reader. The screen lit up with soft greenish light that was characteristic of light pearls.
She sat down at the desk. In the drawer she kept a small book with instructions on how to access all of the theatre’s different administration systems. To find each section, she had stuck in little tags that indicated where a new section started. She opened it at the Financial System tag.
Normally she would access this system at the end of every month. She guessed that checking funds available for buying materials was a valid reason for looking in the system at this time, and it wouldn’t arouse suspicion, she hoped—though she normally wouldn’t do it.
When she finished looking at the theatre accounts, she hesitated. On the screen was a list of other accounts in the Accountkeepers’ credit system, the ones she had sworn to keep confidential.
With her head turned to the door, she held her breath, listening out for footsteps. There were none, so she typed Ilendar.
A list of accounts came up, mostly of minor Ilendar families.
The least active accounts were usually at the bottom, and she didn’t find the Ilendar Traders account there. She scrolled back to the top, and there it was. Last accessed three days ago.
She checked over her shoulder again. Her hand hovered over the screen. This was not right. She shouldn’t be here. When she had made the confidentiality agreement, she had signed that she would respect the privacy of others.
It was still respecting privacy if she told no one about this, right?
She selected the Ilendar Traders account.
A wall of figures came up. Ellisandra stared at the page while her mind worked out what she was seeing.
Money. Staggering amounts of it. Transfers of huge sums. From Tussamar Traders for the sale of a house, about ten years ago. So Enzo had been right about that.
Also for other things, less clearly specified. There was no amount less than a hundred thousand, most vastly more than that. And to think that Loret and his men considered two tirans a day a very good pay. Heck, she considered it a good pay. Her entire yearly theatre budget was only about two thousand, and that was plenty, because most things were cheap.
Wow, she had no idea that Traders were this rich. Even richer than she thought because when they left Miran, they had abandoned this money.
It was very clear from the account when they had departed Miran, too, because
transfers had stopped abruptly.
And then, three days ago, someone had taken out a smaller amount. The description of the transfer said maintenance, the account where it had gone was that of a business in Miran that sold building materials. This was followed the next day by another withdrawal entry called rentals, with a company name she didn’t recognise. The next line was for a domestic supplies store for plates, cups, pans, cutlery and a hefty payment to a supplier of food, as well as a generous payment to the animal markets, presumably to pay for the use of sleds or pack animals.
By now, she was almost certain that this was Vayra using the account.
Well, that was one problem solved.
She couldn’t see what business this was of anyone’s, certainly not the council’s. The privacy of Endri families was to be upheld. If the Ilendar Traders had wanted to sell their house and the Tussamar Traders wanted it, then no one needed to know how much money had changed hands. She gathered the council wanted to know the amount so that they had an idea of the market value of property that expatriate Mirani Endri had to be compensated for, but that was no reason to break trust. Without a better explanation, she certainly wasn’t going to give them that information.
While she had been in the library, people had arrived for work. The foyer inside the door was a mess of outdoor boots and molten snow, and someone had taken off with the pair of house shoes that she usually wore. The only pair left was much too big and the heels dragged on the ground when she walked. That earned her some raised eyebrows from the members of the orchestra as she crossed the downstairs hall.
Tolaki and the actors had ensconced themselves in the upstairs hallway, because It’s not as cold in here as on that stage, but the room was cramped and the group was in the way, especially since they had to speak loudly in loud projecting voices, and because they had to be able to hear each other over the sound of the orchestra which was rehearsing downstairs. Was she imagining things or was the orchestra missing players? If they didn’t start to improve quickly, this was going to be a problem. Where could they find a couple of good players, especially since the state orchestra had their own very busy winter programme?
“Hey, Elli, what was all the to-do at the Andrahar house?” Tolaki asked.
“I don’t know. Was anything going on?” It had been very busy, but she’d seen nothing unusual.
“There were a lot of people standing in the street. I walked past and someone said people had stolen things from the site last night.”
“Had they? I noticed all the people, but no one said anything about what they were doing there. I don’t walk in that direction, and I was already running late so didn’t have time to go for a chat.”
Tolaki chuckled. “Isn’t that typical. You have the best seat in the house, and you still miss it. You can see everything from that window of yours. I bet you could even have seen who had done it.”
“Well, I sleep at night. The house next door is not that interesting.” Besides, she had looked, and had seen nothing that warranted further attention.
Ellisandra went into her office, threw a firebrick onto the fire for all the good that would do in this draughty building, drew her cloak and scarf close around her and then sat down at her desk. She started sketching the stage designs so that Loret and his team could start to work on them when they arrived. She shut out the noise from the actors in the corridor and the music from downstairs. Having grown up in a household with two brothers, noise didn’t bother her overly much. Her pile of drawings grew steadily, and it wasn’t until mid-morning when Tolaki came in to warm herself by the fire that she realised someone was missing.
“Have you seen Sariandra?”
“No.” Tolaki said, and then frowned. “I thought she’d gone to market.”
“She would have asked me for the accounts if she had.” And her father might not have approved of her going to the markets alone.
Ellisandra went into the drawing room. Sariandra’s workbook lay open on the table. Across the pages were sketches of men and women in old costumes in exquisite detail. “Have you seen this?”
Tolaki came into the room and looked over Ellisandra’s shoulder. “Oh, wow. This is really amazing. Did she do these?”
Ellisandra nodded. “Apparently she used to work for merchant Ranuddin.”
“Really? I’ve never seen her around here.” And Tolaki knew almost everyone in the commercial quarter, either through her family’s business, or because she spent a good amount of time outside with the actors, rehearsing and advertising the plays.
“She said the merchant used to feed his workshop workers and she never went outside at midday.”
Tolaki frowned. “That doesn’t sound like merchant Ranuddin. He’s a pinchpenny and would be all too happy to let his workers pay for their own meals. In fact I know they used to go out.”
Ellisandra felt sick. She had more or less told Sariandra to come with her yesterday. Sariandra had gone upstairs and deliberately left her reader thing on the table. She had been nervous and jumpy, not because of anything Ellisandra said, but because she was afraid that someone would report it back to her father that his daughter had done something as silly as go out for a meal at midday.
Everyone said Asitho Bisumar was a control freak. Why had she not seen the signs?
She stared at the beautiful drawings, her heart pounding.
Could it be that someone had reported that Sariandra had gone outside and mingled with strangers, and now her father kept her at home?
That was just awful.
Deep in her heart, she desperately didn’t want to see Asitho Bisumar again, but there was only one way to solve this: she had to talk to Sariandra’s family.
The Bisumar family was not one of those considered the core Endri families of Miran. They lived on the very high side of town, in the quiet area between Ellisandra’s house and the old city walls. It was a nice area in which the houses were more modern, but smaller and closer together than where she lived.
Today everything was covered under a thick layer of snow. The main Endri families employed groundsmen whose task it was to clear snow, stamp it into blocks and leave it in the street for the sleds to collect. In the minor Endri quarter, yards were too small to justify a groundsman, and because the houses were closer together, the spaces between them acted as snow traps. There were huge mounds, most as yet uncleared.
Asitho Bisumar’s house looked very tidy in comparison, with snow swept out of the yard down to the tiles. Someone had spent a lot of time doing this. Where had they put the snow?
Lights burned in the rooms to the side door. When Ellisandra knocked, there were footsteps and the door was opened by a very old and very bow-legged man. She hoped he wasn’t the one having to clear the yard.
He gave a quaint little bow. “How can I help the lady?” He used old-fashioned language that acknowledged her status as a member of a Foundation family. Funny, that, coming from a servant to someone who wanted to abolish that special status.
“I’d like to see Sariandra and talk to her father, if he’s at home.”
“Certainly. Come with me.”
He preceded her across the hall into a door directly opposite, which turned out to lead to the dining room. It was warm in here, and the family sat at the table for the midday meal, Asitho at the head, his wife to his right and daughter to his left.
“Master, there is someone to see you.”
As soon as Ellisandra entered, Sariandra’s eyes grew wide.
“Lady,” Asitho Bisumar said. “Do sit down. Do you want some tea?”
Ellisandra had just drunk tea at the theatre, but it would be impolite to refuse.
The bow-legged servant bustled with a cup and the teapot, making just enough noise to dispel the uneasy silence.
Asitho’s wife looked young enough to be Sariandra’s sister. Her name was Ielandra. If Ellisandra remembered correctly, she was from a minor branch of the Ilendar family who had dissociated themselves from the Ilendar Trader
s, one of the first Traders to leave Miran.
There were all sorts of rumours surrounding the marriage, including that because Asitho’s first two daughters were infertile, he’d arranged that she would share his bed on agreed nights and he would only marry her if she fell pregnant. At the time, she’d been an adolescent, and had been very slight. The birth had damaged her so much that she had never fallen pregnant again.
The woman had a thin and narrow face, in which her eyes looked unnaturally large. The only time Ellisandra had seen her was when Asitho brought her to the theatre for performances. Sariandra looked more like her mother than her father: thin, large-eyed and shy.
“I missed you at the theatre today,” Ellisandra said, feeling the penetrating gaze of Asitho on her and doing her best to ignore it.
Sariandra’s cheeks had gone bright red. She looked at her hands which she held folded in her lap under the table.
Asitho said, in a definitive tone, “My daughter needed some time to think.”
What was that supposed to mean? Ellisandra continued to talk to Sariandra. “I was concerned about you. I looked at your drawings and they are really good. I’d like you to make those costumes.”
“My daughter has some important decisions to make,” Asitho continued as if Ellisandra had said nothing.
She turned to him. “Any decisions that are so important that she cannot take part in the theatre production?”
“My daughter has a wedding to plan.”
Sariandra let her head hang further. A tear ran down her nose and hung there at the very tip.
Wedding? What sort of odd situation had she walked into? “Please. I don’t need to know any of the details. I just want your daughter to come back and help us in the theatre, because we’ll be stuck otherwise.”