by Juliet Kemp
Cato really hated not knowing what was going on.
He dug his teeth into his lip, thinking about the cityangel. When it came right down to it, yes, he wanted to know what Daril was after, but whatever it was, it was going to be politics of some sort, and, tingling political senses or not, Cato didn’t care that much about politics. Marek itself would be fine whoever was in charge, and Marekhill would never care that much about the rest of the city, so why should Cato or anyone else he knew – yes, fine, other than his sister – care who was in the hot seat? But the cityangel – the cityangel mattered. Mattered, he knew in his bones, in a way that was deeper than just how it affected sorcerers. And he wasn’t at all sure how the new cityangel was going to settle into the city.
Cato didn’t care about politics. He did care about Marek.
If he’d been involved earlier – well, he wouldn’t have been involved earlier. He wouldn’t have been part of removing the old cityangel. He could admit that, even if it was slightly discomfiting to acknowledge the limits of his moral flexibility. But they’d done that already when they brought him in. Too late. Might as well get paid for fixing their fuckup, and no reason to believe that any other spirit couldn’t do the same job.
He hoped.
He heard footsteps in the corridor outside. Daril, unless he missed his guess. Roberts didn’t stride that way. The lock rattled with the insertion of a key, and Cato experienced his customary pulse of irritation that Daril never knocked. Prison cell. Just like being a teenager again, before he’d left.
He didn’t bother to get off the windowsill.
“Cato?” Daril said. “Are you asleep?”
“No.”
“Why have you not lit the lamp?”
Cato ignored this in favour of watching while Daril found and lit the lamp. Daril had just been out, and he was visibly tense. Was this where Daril was going to let him in on what happened next?
“So,” Daril said. “The cityangel isn’t as powerful as we need.”
“Need? Now there’s an interesting word.”
Daril ignored him. “Urso has a fix. It requires your help.”
“Well, let us discuss that, and then we can discuss my fee,” Cato said, and settled himself more comfortably to listen.
He interrupted only once, while Daril was speaking. “But the cityangel can’t interfere in the Chamber. In politics at all.”
“The old one couldn’t,” Daril agreed. “This one isn’t bound by the old contract. That’s the point.”
Cato blinked, slowly, then nodded. “I see. A smart move, yes.”
He slumped down even further onto the windowsill, propping his feet against the other side of the frame, while Daril continued.
“This will avoid war, then?” he asked, once Daril had finished.
Daril shrugged. “Should do. Which is probably better, as it happens.”
Cato clenched his teeth so hard his jaw spasmed. Of course, why should Daril care about the impacts of war? It wouldn’t be his house that’d be fired if the Salinas came sweeping into the Marek docks to get their revenge. It wouldn’t be him being conscripted to wave weapons around. Of course, it wouldn’t be Cato either, but it most certainly would be his friends and neighbours.
He took a slow breath, until he was able to reply with some semblance of his customary lazy disinterest. “Yes, in general I prefer my home city in its more peaceful times.”
“Well, then,” Daril said. “Urso is working on the details. If we wish to do this tomorrow, we haven’t much time to delay.”
Once Daril had left, Cato put out the lamp, and let the expression of sardonic half-interest slide off his face as the darkness wrapped itself back around him. He took another look out of the window at Marek, then padded over to the bed and lay down on his back, staring up as if he could see straight through the stone to the starry sky above. His face was bleak. What now, then?
He hadn’t thought about the political part of the contract. Which was a real fucking oversight on his part, and he could kick himself for it. It seemed obvious now why his political sense had been bothering him. Fine, he didn’t care about politics, but he cared about stability, and keeping magic out of politics was pretty necessary for that stability. That was sufficiently obvious that it hadn’t occurred to him to worry about it, and it should have occurred to him, because fuck knew you could never overestimate the ability of people to totally screw something over in pursuit of their own selfish interests.
This was going to be a total bloody disaster. If Daril and Urso could do it, so could someone else, in a year or five years or ten years.
On the other hand, if he just ran, right now, to avoid helping them with their stupid plan, they’d come after him, and he wouldn’t be that hard to find. Unless he left Marek, which was just as unthinkable. Blood magic wasn’t his style. Also, if he ran, he wouldn’t get paid. And it wasn’t even as if there was another option, any more. The old cityangel was gone. The new one was in place. Surely there wasn’t anything more to be done about that? In which case, well, perhaps the political situation had changed already, and it was too late to do anything other than go along with it, and learn to deal with the new arrangements. Even if they were inferior to the old arrangements.
It wasn’t as if he was particularly in favour of the Thirteen Houses or any of the Marekhill swamp-slime. If Daril was knocking them over – well, so be it. Maybe. Especially if Daril’s alternative was this war that Urso was trying to set up.
What would Marcia think of all this? Cato felt his shoulders tense, and dismissed the thought. He and Marcia didn’t see eye to eye on everything, anyway.
The old cityangel was gone. Was it, though? It was evicted, not killed, from what Urso had said. Could it, maybe, be out there somewhere? Was there a way of finding it?
Mid-Year. Tomorrow. He had until tomorrow to decide whether there was anything he could – and would – do about all of this.
k k
There were doubtless things that Marcia could – should – have been doing. Working on this absurd project of her mother’s, for example, though the thought brought bile to her mouth. She wouldn’t do that – and she couldn’t settle to anything else despite her best efforts. Instead, she took herself out of the house, down to the baths on Third Street.
She fumed as she walked. She was supposed to be Heir. If it weren’t for that change ten years back, she would be about to be Head, not waiting on Madeleine’s pleasure. She remembered being named Heir, the ceremony in the Chamber. She remembered feeling proud, and ready to take on responsibility.
During the Heir-ceremony, she’d kept thinking of Daril, despite her best efforts. Partly it had been that Gavin Leandra was, of course, present in the Chamber, scowling down at her and Madeleine and the Speaker in the centre of the room. Marcia hadn’t taken it personally; Gavin Leandra rarely did anything but scowl. But she knew, of course, as everyone knew, that Daril still hadn’t been named Heir. Everyone knew, too, how much at odds he and Gavin were, and that Daril was by all accounts pursuing a dissipation that his father abhorred as hard as he could go.
She remembered looking around at the other Heads and Heirs arrayed around the Chamber. The Guild members hadn’t been present; the Heir-ceremony was for the Houses alone. One of the ways in which the Houses indicated to the Guild that they were subordinate.
As Marcia turned the corner onto Third Street, her steps slowed a little. She’d been thinking, back then, of the Inner Council, too. Thinking about the fact that it had been meeting more often than it once did. At the time she’d decided that she must be wrong, that she was just misremembering from a time when she was less involved in politics, although Madeleine had been encouraging her to take an interest for some time before her Heir-ceremony. But now, four years since that day, she was certain that much of Madeleine’s Council business time was spent at the Inner Council; which was made up only of the thirteen Heads, excluding both Heirs and Guild. Back then she’d wondered just how much sway sh
e would have over the Council’s, and the House’s business, even once she was formally Heir.
Well. Ha. Now she knew.
And how much say, then, did the Guilds have?
Did Daril still think that way, as he had when he was twenty-one and she was sixteen? Perhaps not. Perhaps he no longer cared.
Did she care?
She reached the bathhouse and paid her way in. Inside, the atmosphere was warm from the hot water pipes that ran under the floor from the furnace towards the steam pool. Marcia accepted a wrap from the attendant, stripped her clothes off, and handed them over to the attendant in exchange for a ceramic token. She hung the token round her neck, threw the wrap around her shoulders, and left the changing room.
The cold showers were between her and the baths, and she rubbed herself briskly down under them, shivering. The patrons up here, unlike, say, those at the baths on the north of the city, were unlikely to truly need that first wash to remove surface dirt, but it was still part of the bathing ritual. And the shock of the cold water felt good, almost calming. It took her out of her head, just a little, and she badly needed that.
Once through the showers, she put the wrap back on, and stepped gratefully into the steam room. She let herself sink into peaceful quiet in the damp heat. A couple of people over the other side of the small room, shadows in the steam, were gossiping about a mutual friend, but Marcia didn’t recognise either them or the name they mentioned. She let herself drift for a while, deliberately blanking her mind, pushing away thoughts of Madeleine and politics every time they intruded.
She roused herself after a while, stepped outside, and asked one of the attendants to scrape her down, before going into the big soaking pool.
“Marcia!” someone hailed her.
It was Nisha, soaking in the pool with Aden.
Marcia hesitated for just a moment – she hadn’t intended to be sociable, today. But nor did she want to beg off, and she was remembering, now, what Nisha had said at the party, about Daril. Perhaps now was a good time to talk about it. Despite the openness of the soaking pool, it was possible to have a surprisingly private conversation. The slight echo of the tiled walls and floor, and the size of the pool, amplified voices but also confused them, as soon as more than a couple of groups were present. It was next to impossible to overhear someone unless you were right next to them.
Aden and Nisha had a pot of tea on the side of the pool next to them, and Marcia signalled for another cup. They sipped at their tea as they chatted idly for a few minutes. Marcia was fairly sure that Aden had spotted that she wasn’t entirely calm, but he had evidently chosen not to bring it up.
“Oh hey,” Marcia said, “what happened about when you were going to join the Embroiderers Guild, Aden? Didn’t you say you thought you could join as a journeyman, if they let you?”
“Well,” Aden said, after a moment. “That didn’t happen.” His tone was repressive.
Marcia deliberated for a moment, then decided to ignore his signals.
“What, did they want you to do the full apprenticeship?”
Aden narrowed his eyes at her for a moment, then shook his head and turned away slightly. “Nothing like that,” he said. “They agreed that my work was entirely up to standard, and I had the fee needed. They just – made it clear that I wouldn’t be voted in.”
“But why on earth not?” Marcia asked. She’d seen Aden’s work, and it was excellent. It had seemed like a fine idea, to actually use his skills, and he’d seemed keen about it, and she’d been surprised when nothing had seemed to materialise.
“Because he’s of a House, Marcia,” Nisha said impatiently. “It’s not official, of course not, but they won’t allow anyone with a verifiable House lineage into any of the Guilds.”
“But that went out ten years ago,” Marcia objected. “That was part of the negotiations when the Guilder seats on the Council were finally approved, that junior House members would be allowed into the Guilds again.”
“Indeed, the rule is no longer there,” Aden said, sounding so supremely bored that Marcia knew he must be faking it. “And yet, you still cannot get voted in.”
“Ten seats,” Nisha said. “They’re still annoyed. And what with the way the Inner Council works now – one could say, who could blame them.”
“And thus you have it. I remain in blissful sloth,” Aden said. “Arguably I got the better of it. Journeymen do work tremendously hard, you know, Marcia. Now the initial excitement of the idea has worn off, I’m far from sure that I would have suited the job.”
“He’s lying,” Nisha said. “He’s bored as hell, just like I am. But I haven’t bothered trying to join one of the Guilds, because I had already spotted how there aren’t any junior House members in any Guild, rule or not. And I’m not cut out for trading on my own cognisance, and unlike your brother I don’t fancy the squats nor yet have sorcerous talent, so…” She shrugged. “Living on someone else’s money it is. At least Kilzan-Head is happy to support us. Kilzan-Heir is an idiot, but even if I bumped the wretched woman off I wouldn’t be in line for Heir, so…”
Marcia looked at her curiously. “Would you care to be in politics?”
“Gods yes,” Nisha said with feeling. “So interesting. But there are only so many places, aren’t there? And I have no access to any of them. So it goes.” She didn’t sound resigned, the way her words pretended to be.
“Unless Daril achieves his brave new world,” Aden said.
“Daril is all mouth and no breeches,” Nisha said. “He talks a good talk, but if you get right down to it, he’s talking revolution. Not just that, a revolution that would, I suspect, leave him in charge.” She shrugged. “Although I agree it is superficially appealing.”
“What is?” Marcia asked, feeling slightly cold.
“Bring down the Council, install a better system, one which doesn’t rely on inheritance nor yet on the microscopic voting pool of the Guild masters,” Aden said. “Blah blah revolution. He might be right, but like Nisha, I don’t see it happening and I don’t fancy Daril as Head of Heads, either. At least we don’t have a single anyone in charge, at the moment. I don’t fancy the setup they have in the Allied Cities, with a single governor making all the decisions.”
“Much more scope for coming up through the ranks, there, though,” Nisha said.
The conversation turned aside into a discussion of life in the Allied Cities, and Marcia let it go. But that cold feeling remained in her stomach. Were Daril’s plans more realistic than Aden or Nisha realised? And she couldn’t help but notice that, whatever they’d said, both of them were tempted by his vision. If he acted, would they follow? She couldn’t rule it out.
Worse: was he right? Had he always been right?
She kept thinking of it once she’d taken her leave of Aden and Nisha. Thinking of it, and remembering conversations she’d had with Daril, ten years ago when he had that catastrophic row with Gavin; and with Cato, when he was recovering from the plague.
She kept coming to the same conclusion: that Daril was right. The current system didn’t work.
But he was talking about not just replacing it – with anything better? Anything that set Daril up as Governor in place of the Council couldn’t possibly be an improvement. But it wasn’t just that. He would be using sorcery, and the cityangel, to replace it. That was… a box she couldn’t possibly want to see opened. There were very good reasons for the provisions against using sorcery or involving the cityangel in politics. Breaking that covenant, and allowing thereby for it to be broken in the future – that would be a disaster.
She had to stop Daril. But she couldn’t pretend that she was doing so to defend a system that worked, for itself.
If she was going to stop Daril, she had to do something else herself. Maybe not immediately; but she had to accept that responsibility. She was stopping Daril’s revolution; but that meant she had to commit to one of her own.
The terror was tinged with just an edge of a bubbling inner joy
she hadn’t felt since she was sixteen.
THIRTEEN
Jonas woke up just after sunrise the next morning, feeling better than he ought to have for an afternoon running messages back-to-back, a couple of evening hours of his usual nighttime-folk run, and drinking with Asa. But it had felt good to forget all this nonsense for a while.
He rolled over onto his back and stared at the ceiling. What of today, then? Reb and Beckett were a dead end, as far as his flickers went. They might, he supposed, be expecting him back again; but it wasn’t like he’d promised to help. This Marek business wasn’t any affair of his. His business was to get on with the matter of his flickers.
His spine tingled, and he was looking at Urso, saying something to him, Urso listening intently and nodding, nodding like he understood, turning away towards a bookshelf…
His head was pounding, and it took him a moment to remember where he was. He could feel his pulse pounding in his ears. Well. If he’d been in any doubt, that settled it. He needed to get on with the flickers, which meant visiting the trader-or-maybe-sorcerer, Urso; and since that was what the flicker had shown him, that went double. It was too early for the usual Marekhill type to be about, but Urso was a trader, and they rose early. He’d run a couple of early messages, and then he’d go along, see if the man was about.
He wanted like a physical ache to be on a ship, out in the middle of the sea, with nothing around but water and sky. Soon. Urso would, surely, be the person he needed. Soon, he could go home, with the fleet at New Year. A few days more. Urso’s library would make it all work out. There would be, there must be, something there.