“Mmm?” She spoke through her nose as she drank. “On Emesh?”
My hair, darker than hers, fell across my face as I shook my head. “In Borosevo. In the castle.” I patted the arm of the couch as I spoke, emphasizing its material presence.
The woman took a long draught from her water glass, golden eyes darting to the side. “Things are very different from my home.”
“Mine as well,” I said, not knowing if it was completely true. “Do you want to go back?”
Valka grinned. “Gods, no. The xenobites are all out here.”
“None in Tavros?” I asked.
“Only a few,” Valka said, setting her glass on the sill beside her. “Some the Extrasolarians brought in before the clans drove them out, but they’re . . . socialized. They’re as unalien as aliens can be, and there’s nothing like Calagah in the Demarchy. Nothing . . . old. ’Tis like . . . ’tis like . . .” She broke off, massaging her eyes. “You have to be there to understand. The ruins are so old, older than anything we’ve built. It makes you feel . . . small. It makes all of us small.”
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. It was that contextualizing, the way she placed humanity in among the creatures of the stars and not above them that called down the Chantry’s ire. Valka was Tavrosi—a diplomatic nightmare, as in the Demarchy all persons of adult age controlled weighted shares in their electorate. She was both private citizen and foreign dignitary. Accusing her of heresy would be tantamount to declaring war on her nation, a war the County of Emesh did not want and could not afford. Perhaps that was why I thought of her as lonely. A person made into a state, that state embodied in her person. She was rather like a palatine, though she would never admit it.
Contorting my answer into something for the cameras took a measure of doing, but I said, “I know what you mean. It’s a big universe. Even our great accomplishments feel humble sometimes. Not so humble as the Umandh, of course, but humble all the same.”
“The Umandh?” she repeated, brows knitting, then shooting up. “Oh, yes.”
“Strange that they’ve not accomplished more in all their thousands of years,” I noted, seeing a way to say the truth without saying it. “It’s like Philemon of Neruda said. Language is necessary to the development of civilization. If what you say is true, the Umandh’s . . . songs are little better than what the ancient dolphins had.”
The Tavrosi doctor surveyed me for a long moment. I knew she would recall our earlier unrecorded conversation about Tor Philemon. A thin light shone in those gilded eyes, alight with wan sorrow. “The dolphins?” She considered this a moment, reflecting on the long extinct species. “That’s a fair comparison. They’re cleverer than dolphins, but perhaps only because they can use tools. Do you know . . .”
Have you ever seen someone speak of something that consumes them? That lights them up from the foundations of their soul? Valka spoke with such fervency that I forgot myself for a time. Whatever animosity she had felt toward me upon our first meeting seemed to have mostly evaporated, vanished into a hesitant respect for me and for my situation. And I? I feared her. I feared what she represented, and that I cared what she thought of me. I feared the secrets I was made to carry. My name, my blood. I feared that she would think me false, my respect for her work feigned, when it was the thing I’d shown her that was most true. Thus we are all destroyed by those things that matter to us, as she mattered to me in my loneliness.
At length I broke into her dissertation—too abruptly, I still can hear my pitchy tone—and asked, “Doctor, have you eaten?”
She brightened. “No, would you like to?”
* * *
That was the first of many meals we shared, in Borosevo and after. I could sense Valka’s attitude toward me changing. I was no longer only the barbarian, the butcher of the fighting pits. I cannot say when the change began—whether it was at Ulakiel or after—but when we returned to her rooms that night, she left me with a smile and a soft word, a promise that we would speak again on the morrow.
CHAPTER 53
A GAME OF SNAKE AND MONGOOSE
THE COUNT’S TABLE POSITIVELY dripped with food. Even in my father’s house I had rarely seen such riches. Emesh boasted no royal forests in which to raise game for the high table. The meat there was vat-grown and placed as far from the palatine family as possible, to be shared amongst the artisans and lesser functionaries of the court at the low end. The natural food was of all pelagic stock, some terranic, some native-form. Platters of grilled salmon and sautéed scallops bestrode boats of white sauce and plates of roast potatoes and stuffed peppers. The main course, arranged in neat slices like geologic time, was a native congrid ten meters long, the alien eel-like creature roasted and swimming in a sauce of blue wine.
Static fields on the outer arches gave the hall the appearance of open space. Soft music played not through speakers but from an actual string quartet and harp in a far corner.
“What a lovely recipe,” said one guild factionarius to her wife. “Wouldn’t you agree?” The woman’s companion nodded demurely, smiling all the while. The great hall was given over entirely to the one long table, as was customary on the occasion of such formal state banquets. There are such occasions at the court of every lord in the Imperium, as if it were food that truly held our society together. As the count’s nominal ward, I’d earned myself a somewhat exalted position nearly a dozen places from the head of the table, the least of Lord Mataro’s personal guests, sandwiched between a perfumed merchanter from the green moon and a Legion lieutenant called Bassander Lin.
Valka was near at hand, seated beside her patron, Sir Elomas Redgrave. Further to my right and up the table, past a smattering of logothetes and scholiasts, were arranged the greats of Emesh System. Archon Perun Veisi was there with his wife, seated to the count’s left at the head of the table, and Lord Luthor and the children. And there was Liada Ogir, the patrician chancellor, seated beside a hard-faced woman in Legion dress blacks with the stars and oak cluster of an Armada tribune on her collar tabs. She was the Knight-Tribune Smythe who had marched in Dorian’s Ephebeia.
The Chantry contingent was present as well, just next to the Veisi couple, as close to the throne as propriety would allow. I was glad only that Gilliam and I were seated on the same side of the table, separated by several scholiasts and the leaders of the Whitehorse Mercenary Company.
“Have you been on Emesh long?” asked Bassander—Lieutenant Lin, I should say. He smiled thinly, his clean-shaven face relaxed but with an underlying dignity bordering on the formal. There was a leathered tiredness in him, as if the banquet were some trench he’d found himself dug into, and he’d spoken not at all until that moment, focusing on the fine food as though it were some chore he’d been set. He did not belong at table, despite the polish of his immaculate ebony uniform.
You have heard, no doubt, that we met as rivals and fought a duel for the command of our army. It is not so. No, I met the Phoenix at table one quiet evening in Borosevo. Bassander Lin. My last friend, my enemy. Hero of the rout at Perfugium, where Hadrian Halfmortal failed. Veteran of a hundred battles, knight, captain, traitor. He would be all of those things, but not yet. That night he was only a dinner guest, as was I.
Not knowing any of this, I set my wine down, mindful of the formal gray suit I’d been loaned for the occasion. “A few years—not too long. I’m only recently in the count’s service. I’m . . .” A prisoner? A ward? A translator? “A tutor.” Pausing a moment to tear a piece from the communal loaf of white bread, I asked, “What of yourself? You’ve been long in the Legions?”
Lieutenant Lin pulled a face, scratched at the shaved side of his head just above his ear. “Well, that depends on how you measure. I’m nearly at eighteen years’ active ship time, but . . .” He trailed off, seizing the moment to take a long draught from his water cup. He was not drinking alcohol. “But if you factor in the ice time . . . gods of my fathers,
it’s going on two centuries.”
“Two centuries?” Across the table, Valka nearly choked on a bite of pepper and imported goat’s cheese. “You can’t be serious.” For my part, I thought she’d focused on the wrong number—on two hundred and not eighteen. He was palatine then, or so patrician as to make no difference. Careful observation of his face revealed no signs of the scarring that marred Chancellor Ogir’s, or Gilliam’s, or that of the hard-eyed Dame Camilla, who sat behind the count and his lord husband. What hair he had was precisely the color of burned wood, untouched by gray, and his steely black eyes smiled far more than they cut. He might have had a hundred living years in truth, but his bones carried no more than twenty of them.
Bassander inclined his side-shaven head deferentially. “Yes, ma’am.”
The guild factionarius beside Valka, a big bulldog of a woman, laid a ringed hand on the doctor’s arm. “Imperial officers typically undergo long periods between thaws.” She leaned forward, hand lingering on Valka’s arm—a fact not unnoticed by the factionarius’s pale slip of a wife—and said, “The good lieutenant should be glad he’s not a conscript. Our legionnaires serve twenty-year terms, you know. And that’s active duty time, not counting fugue.”
Bassander Lin allowed that this was quite correct. “I knew a centurion once who enlisted during the reign of Emperor Aurelian III.”
“That was twelve hundred years ago!” the factionarius said, aghast.
At the same time, Valka hissed a word through her teeth in Panthai: “Anaryoch.” Barbarians. She did not see me, but I smiled at her in sympathy. The change to lifetime service had occurred only recently. Before that soldiers had served twenty-year terms, some as many as four. Many of the houses palatine had opposed the change. I would have, had it been my choice.
Valka came by her outrage honestly, I later learned. Her own people eschewed standing armies as a rule, preferring to rely on their technological terrors to ensure a shaky peace. The threat of planetary annihilation—of mutually assured destruction—held their clans in line. To Valka it was preferable that all men might die than that any man did. I supposed I could respect that, barbarous as it was.
The factionarius tittered, removing her hand from Valka’s arm to pat the other woman on the knee. “Well, I think soldiering is more properly men’s work. Wouldn’t you agree, Lieutenant?”
Lieutenant Lin appeared to consider, dabbing his forehead with his napkin. “In my experience, ma’am, soldiering is soldiers’ work.” He took another swig of water to punctuate his statement with what struck me as the grace of long practice. He emerged from his pause with a neat turn to Valka. “If I may ask, ma’am, your accent—you are Tavrosi?”
Valka slid a fan of hair back behind one small ear. “I am.”
Seizing hold of this escape from the factionarius and her awkward questions, the lieutenant said, “My whole ship was loaned to a Tavrosi company once. For the Mathuran Campaigns. I wish I could have spent my time there better.” This reference to Tavrosi history went over my head, and I ducked over my plate, not seeing a way to apply myself to the conversation with grace. Bassander asked, “What brings you to Emesh, my lady?”
“Doctor,” Valka corrected smoothly, wiping her mouth with her white napkin, golden eyes narrowing on the lieutenant. “The coloni, in point of fact.”
The keyword commanded Sir Elomas’s attention from Valka’s far side, and he broke off a conversation with a Welfare Ministry logothete. “Talking about the Umandh, are we?” He combed back his mop of white hair, set down his knife with a perfunctory clink. The old knight moved with spiderlike precision—no wasted energy, each little motion minutely calibrated. It was the hallmark carefulness of a lifelong duelist. “Have you had a chance to examine the natives, um . . .”—he squinted sea-foam eyes at Bassander’s collar tabs—“Lieutenant?”
From there the conversation turned to the Umandh for the next few minutes, and I seized the moment to finish my food, signaling a server to recharge my wine cup and place another slice of the congrid on the rosy china.
This conversation topic exhausted or else played through to its natural terminus, the lieutenant—starved for conversation and apparently unwilling to engage the scholiasts on his right—turned back to me. “And what is your role here, messer? As tutor, you say?”
“Hadrian.” I extended a hand as I’d learned in my coliseum days, an awkward gesture at such close range. “Hadrian Gibson.”
“Bassander Lin.” He shook my hand.
“The lad speaks the Cielcin tongue,” said Sir Elomas with a strange glint in his eye.
“Truly?” Lieutenant Lin raised his brows, eyes nearly all whites.
I licked my lips, conscious of Grand Prior Vas and Gilliam a few places further along the table, and pitched my voice low. “Yes.”
The big factionarius leaned in. “Why in Earth’s holy name would you learn that?”
I felt tempted to repeat the answer I had given Gilliam in the courtyard days earlier: To see with eyes unclouded. But something told me my sense for the melodramatic would not be appreciated in that moment. Instead I fell on Hadrian Gibson’s line. “My father—we were very fortunate for merchanters, you understand—took on a scholiast to tutor my brother and me. He was meant to be teaching us Jaddian, but I had something of a knack, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“For languages, you mean?” Bassander asked, signaling another of the servers for more to drink. The mousy woman brought wine. Lieutenant Lin politely declined and waited as water was brought for him instead.
I nodded. “They just sort of stick up here.” I tapped the side of my head. “Even Cielcin. I’d hoped to learn to communicate with the coloni here, but Doctor Onderra tells me their language is thoroughly impossible.”
“But the Cielcin,” the factionarius’s small wife said, looking even paler than her usual sallowness. “Such . . . horrible creatures. Demons . . .” I half expected her to make the sign of the sun disc.
Pointedly I looked at Valka; some part of me was still trying to overturn her initial impression of me. “They aren’t demons, madame.” She did make the sign of the sun disc then, pressing circled thumb and forefinger to her brow. “You know, when I was a child, I—”
The factionarius laughed, cutting me off. “You must forgive my wife, messer. She’s very pious.”
I offered the two women my most encouraging smile, feeling somehow reduced, like a biological sample on its slide. “I’m sure the Empire needs all the piety it can get, madame.” Carefully I took a sip of the dry Kandarene wine. “But as to my small ability, I’ve always considered it an investment in the future.”
“What do you mean?” Bassander Lin shifted in his seat to get a better look at me, and something in the movement communicated to me that he was far closer to the twenty years he appeared to have than he was to the hundred or so that were outwardly possible. Forty, perhaps? I could not stop thinking of him as the junior lieutenant.
I spread my hands. “Well, we can hardly fight forever, can we?” I asked, having said much the same to Adaeze Feng at table so long ago. “When the fighting is done, someone will have to speak to them.” When the factionarius’s wife was on the verge of commenting with doubtless more pieties, I raised a hand. “If only to secure their surrender.”
“Surrender?” At the sound of that voice behind me, I knew the woman across from me had not been about to argue but to warn me. Ligeia Vas stood, a witch-shadow stooped by time, resplendent in robes of Terran black, her thick white braid twice wrapped about her shoulders. In her face I saw echoes of Gilliam—those two blue eyes, frozen as distant stars, were identical to Gilliam’s one. Whence his black eye came I never learned, nor did I care to. The features that were in him a twisted parody of humankind looked finely chiseled, as if from marble, in the grand prior’s time-folded features. “We do not want their surrender.” That said, she addressed the entire
segment of the high table, speaking loudly enough to reach Lords Balian and Luthor in their matching high-backed chairs. “The Cielcin must be wiped from the face of our galaxy. Purged.” She slipped then into the guise of a preacher, total and absolute. “In the Cantos it is written, ‘Go out into the Dark and subdue it, and make for your dominion all that is there and will bend to you.’ So too it is written, ‘Thou shalt not suffer demons to live.’”
I turned my back on the priestess, brows raised. The factionarius and her wife both bowed their heads, and the smaller of the two women murmured something into her barely touched plate. Inanely I thought that anyone who would so pick at the finest food on the planet must be a madwoman or a fool. “That last was borrowed from an ancient cult’s writings,” I said. “The original quote refers to witches, I believe.” I braced my shoulders like a man half expecting a knife to plunge between the blades. Turning my back was a dangerous play, but it was worth it for no greater reason than the brief, bright smile in Valka’s eyes.
I heard the leather groan as Ligeia Vas’s hands tightened on the back of my seat, and I swear even the copper-skinned Bassander went white as death beside me. “You’re the one my Gilliam warned me about—the demon-tongued boy.” Demon-tongued: Ligeia was the first to call me such. She would not be the last. I heard the factionarius’s wife murmur the words in echo of her priestess. The seed was planted to flower as it may. The priestess spoke in Classical English—the language both of the scholiasts and of high Chantry ritual—quoting directly from the source I referenced, an ancient religious text belonging to one of the adorator cults endemic in the older parts of the Empire. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Returning to standard Galstani, she began, “It means—”
“I know what it means,” I said, replying in English and drawing stares as far up the table as the high lords.
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