The Thrones of Kronos

by Sherwood Smith

  Barrodagh, uncertain what to say, let time pass unaware until he was startled by Eusabian’s voice. “There have been no more incidents in the Throne Room?”

  “No, Lord,” Barrodagh said, almost heady with relief at being able to impart this modicum of good news. “Ferrasin has identified the relevant circuits and modified them appropriately.”

  Of course, the computer grew them back immediately. But just the same, there had been no more incidents in that awful room, the center of the Mandala. For no one, not even the bravest Tarkans, who ranged elsewhere in the Palace Major, went there anymore.

  Barrodagh judged the time right to bring up another small success. “We have restored another artwork to the Ivory Antechamber—”

  “And the rest will be destroyed with Ares and Rifthaven,” the Avatar said, anger in his voice. “Have the chamber entirely renovated. I will bring the ancestors from Dol’jhar and it will be their abode. Whatever has been recovered will be their tribute.”

  From museum to mausoleum. “It shall be done as you command,” said Barrodagh, longing to be dismissed.

  “What else?” For the first time, Eusabian showed real interest. The tang of the unexpected.

  There was no avoiding it. “Rifthaven is pressing its demands for reparations for the raid and the ships they lost in action, despite our disavowal.”

  Eusabian showed his teeth in the barest motion of his lips. “You did not expect them to be so fractious, following Houmanopoulis’ death.”

  Barrodagh’s guts churned. At the time, the report of the triumvir’s poisoning had seemed a blessing, but deprived of Houmanopoulis’ cunning sense of political balance, the other two leaders were becoming intractable.

  “Promise whatever you like. The heir will deal with them.”

  The Avatar turned back to the screen, and Barrodagh withdrew. The heir. And Morrighon.

  THREE

  ARES

  Nik Cormoran slapped the door control, impatient at the micro-hesitation in the controls. The newsroom smelled sour with sweat, old food, stale tea, and inadequately vented EM fields.

  “We got one,” Derith Y’Madoc said. “Big one.”

  Nik rubbed his hands, the smell forgotten. “Who?”

  “I’m gonna make you guess,” Derith gloated, her dark eyes narrowed with fun as she swiveled in her pod.

  Nik sighed as he dropped heavily into his own pod. “I hate guessing games. Faseult. Koestler! The Panarch!” He deliberately made the guesses wild as impatience began to make him edgy.

  “Close,” Derith said. “Close enough for kissing.”

  Nik’s irritation evaporated. “Not Vannis Scefi-Cartano?”

  Derith nodded, her smile grim. “So you see why I had to call you down.”

  “I’m not facing her!” Liet exclaimed from across the room. “She’d fillet me for breakfast, cook me over a slow flame, and make a fashionable new art form in criticizing the taste.”

  Nik looked around. Everyone grimaced and made gestures of avoidance. When he turned back to Derith, she said acidly, “And you won’t get me over there, not for a ninety-share of the points.”

  Nik sighed. “What’s the catch? Show me her letter.”

  “Oh, superficially it tells nothing—of course,” Derith said, tapping her console.

  Nik looked up at the big screen.

  With respect to your recent feature, I highly recommend a stroll through the Whispering Gallery at the hour of five.

  Nik squinted at the console, as if he could see through it into the sender’s brain.

  “Five is the time of that new fad, isn’t it?” Tovi asked.

  “You have to talk about love,” someone said from behind her.

  “Chatzing game player,” Jumec grumbled.

  “We’re all game players,” Nik said. “And it’s all the same game. Only the rules change. Genz Scefi-Cartano is playing high stakes, and there’s a message in this fifth-hour biznai.”

  Derith nodded soberly. “She knows what we’re holding back, which means she must know why. So she either wants to help us—”

  “Or muzzle us,” Jumec put in, frowning.

  “Or muzzle us,” Derith agreed, “but either way, she’ll want something in return. But this much is clear: this is important to her, or she wouldn’t have responded to us.”

  “And,” Nik said, thinking fast, “she’s got to have something worth forcing us onto her territory.”

  “Something concerning Rifters?” Liet asked. “I mean, aren’t they the subject?”

  “Mmmm.” Nik thrust his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels.

  Tovi’s slanted brows rose. “And love is the context.”

  “Hah.” Nik rocked again. “Hum! Yeah, I’m on it.”

  Nik returned to the crowded domicile he shared with a variety of other mid-level techs. A part of his attention was, as always, on the chatter in the common room and in the hallways. Most of the talk was war speculation, complaint about conditions, stitched together with the eons-old thread of personal gossip.

  It was habit. He had always chosen the busiest concourse through which to walk, the most populous area in which to live. As he paused before the door of his tiny cubicle, he realized he had, in a sense, been living in a Polloi form of the Whispering Gallery all his life.

  Isn’t it just a prettified place to go and hear random gossip—and throw one’s own barbs into the air? Except they hide their identities, don’t they? he thought with disgust. Typical Douloi!

  At least the people around him had the courage of their convictions; if they were overheard, they could be called on to explain or defend their words.

  He shrugged. Right now he needed to concentrate on Rifters, politics, and former Aerenarch-Consort Vannis Scefi-Cartano, leader of the old Mandalic Court and of the newly forming court of the remains of the Tetrad Centrum Douloi, who were desperate to retain their power and privilege.

  He showered, held his ajna, then decided against it. He dressed in an outfit carefully chosen for its blandness. Each act was a kind of armoring; the effect he sought was not danger, or wealth, or even influence. He wanted anonymity. The biggest mistake a Polloi could make, he’d always felt, was to try to ape Douloi fashions and modes of speech. At best it put one at the disadvantage any army faced on unfamiliar territory, and at worst it made one an object of easy ridicule.

  As he boarded the transtube, Nik reflected with grim humor—and the anticipation of a duel that one expects to win—that he wanted very much for the sophisticated Vannis Scefi-Cartano to see him as a Polloi cypher.

  Late afternoon in the areas frequented by the Douloi meant few people and lots of space. No signs forbade Polloi to use the transtube, but somehow within a few stops Nik discovered he was almost the only person still in the tube not either Douloi or one of their support personnel.

  He was the only Polloi who got off at the Jehan Gardens. None of the other four Douloi who also disembarked so much as spared him a glance; he could have been alone for all the attention they paid him.

  So it was with the few people he encountered on the pathways. Still, he made himself walk slowly, observing everything and everyone. The shrubs and flowers he scarcely noticed. He knew the Douloi conveyed hidden meanings in such things. The placement of each plant, the blends of colors and scents, each held a message, perhaps several messages. But that did not engage his attention. He was on the watch for crypto in human form.

  No sign marked the building, but he knew it immediately. Interesting that its dimensions were not easily discerned, nor its shape.

  He checked his chrono: five.

  As he approached the plain doors, he made certain his boswell recorder was already on. He didn’t trust her not to muscle-read a recording command.

  The doors slid silently open and he crossed the threshold, then blinked. He knew the place was a maze, which had suggested twisty tunnels and shadowy corners. Instead it seemed he had walked into the center of a huge diamond, each facet a verti
ginous combination of geometric lines of crystalline light, running water, and delicate breeze-stirred fronds.

  It was fascinating, but it was also disorienting. Despite his determination to mark his pathway, he was soon totally lost.

  Voices drifted on the currents, like disembodied ghosts. Some were barely discernible over the fluid hiss of fountains, others seemed to come from right next to him, the sounds refracted coldly by shining glass.

  “. . . endeavor to create a facsimile of her home, as a gift . . .”

  “. . . if you will honor me with permission—for the sake of discussion—to contradict . . .”

  A female laugh, close by, musical as the fountain. “Charm is of the mind, not the face, which is mere beauty—obvious from the start, but unchanging. Charm reveals itself little by little. It can conceal itself in order to appear later and thus provide the kind of surprise that is the essence of charm.”

  “You imply, my dear, that charm is merely another word for wit,” a man drawled.

  “Wit,” another man said, “is merely another word for weapon.”

  The gentle laughter that greeted this seemed to come from right behind Nik. He whirled around—and saw a waterfall before glass.

  “Wit is charming only when it appears spontaneous,” the woman said, “and not rehearsed. Charm cannot be acquired. In order to have it one must be naive. But how can one make an effort to become naive? We find the naive especially pleasing but no style is more difficult to master.”

  “And thus with air and grace she conquers your heart,” the second man said to the third, amid the murmurs of approbation.

  Nik took two more steps and the voices vanished.

  He plunged down a pathway into a coolly scented air current. And from behind a mirror-doubled waterfall—it almost seemed she walked through it—emerged a woman instantly recognizable. Vannis Scefi-Cartano was even more beautiful in person than she was on the vids, but what sent a spurt of amusement through Nik was the fact that she was short. Even shorter than he.

  She moved with a gliding walk. The tiny chain of gems threaded through her rich brown hair matched those at her smooth throat and around her wrists. Her exquisitely fitted gown flowed, made of some kind of green material that seemed transparent but wasn’t, and the air trailing her smelled delicious.

  Nik squashed down his reaction, diverted by how these Douloi in their fabulous clothes and fancy gestures were pretty on the vids but curiously sexless. In person, though, the subtle scents, the hint of well-toned muscles moving smoothly beneath sensual fabrics, even the timbre of the pleasing voices, heightened one’s physical awareness.

  To use against me, since it certainly isn’t an invitation, he thought as she fell in step beside him.

  Her smile was one of greeting, and of recognition. He grinned back, thinking: I recognize her, she recognizes me. We’re both famous; she as the art object, me as its medium.

  “Discretion,” she said, “is an integral part of a relationship that one wishes to be sustained.”

  All right, got that. No names, promise of future dealings—and she wants me as off balance as possible. “For the Douloi,” he said. “We Polloi like noise in our relationships. After all, the more everyone knows, the less we have to hide.”

  “And you walk away when it has ended, free of the consequences,” she said, “your pockets filled with the riches of notoriety. Supposing, though, that you had something of your own at risk?”

  “There’s risk in every relationship,” he said, then winced. The platitude only set them back to the start. Well, let her think I’m an idiot. Maybe it’ll get her to the point faster.

  “With us,” she said, “it is frequently a question of degree.”

  “Now, that’s something I’ve always wanted to ask,” Nik said, smacking his chest. “You have your mates, just like us, legal and non-legal, life-oaths and non.”

  He stopped, and Vannis made a graceful gesture of concurrence, turning her hand out to invite him to continue.

  “You also have marriage, which involves families, property, and adoption.”

  Again the gesture, this time more hesitant. “A simplification which could lead to disinformation—”

  “Different planets have different traditions, I know, but right now I mean what obtains among the High Douloi,” Nik said.

  She gestured concurrence.

  “Well, then there are those people who aren’t mates, who have no official standing, but who everyone knows about . . .”

  “For example,” Vannis murmured, “the former Aerenarch Semion’s companion, Sara Darmara Tarathen. And my own friend from the time before the attack, Colm Vishnevsky?”

  “You mentioned the names,” Nik said, grinning. “I didn’t.”

  “‘Naïveté,’” Vannis said in the voice one uses when quoting, “‘is an affectation which falls between the high and the low style, and is so close to the latter that one has difficulty continually skirting the danger of vulgarity—’”

  “‘—which is the essence of surprise and suspense,’” Nik finished.

  Vannis laughed and clapped her hands lightly. The fountain behind her looked just like molten light; Nik wondered, if he put his hand into it, if it would be near the point of freezing.

  “These individuals were not our mates,” Vannis said. “Do you really believe most of the range of human experience is not common to us all—Douloi, Polloi—”

  “—Rifter and Dol’jharian?” Nik added.

  “Exactly,” Vannis said, her eyes reflecting the green of a sheltering fern as she turned about and chose another direction. “I kept Colm with me because he was amusing, and he stayed because I paid his expenses. Sara Darmara remained with Semion . . . for different reasons, none of which have to do with the subject of our discourse.”

  “Which is love,” Nik said, making a gamble.

  Her eyes narrowed to pinpoints of reflected light as cold and diamond-brilliant as the fountain she stepped past. “To consider your initial question,” she said, “there is an additional complication to the variety of relationships—what might be termed an orthogonal division. It is a question,” she gestured, “of degree.”

  “Or in plodding Polloi terms,” he said, “social and political.”

  And, startling Nik, a whisper came from somewhere behind them, “. . . Polloi and their predilection for riot . . .”

  Whatever I say can be heard, and misconstrued. Why had she picked this place? A jet of water struck some hidden chimes. In a weird sense they were equals, in being forced to talk obliquely, but he wondered if his boswell was recording—he strongly suspected that this place was a dead zone.

  Vannis turned her hands over, palms up, in a gesture of studied grace. “Always,” she said, “within our shared context.”

  Now we’re to it, he thought. So if some of them do know about the Panarch and Captain Vi’ya, it’s been considered a social thing, meaningless. And since she’s assuming I know, she’s as much as telling me that there’s a political angle.

  She said, “When individuals also function as symbols for groups of people, personal decisions affect not only those groups but actions that might be taken for the good of the groups. This makes questions of marriage, mates, and love . . . problematical.”

  Nik took a deep breath; his palms were sweating. Which is about the Rifters and the Suneater, or I’ll eat my ajna. But does she mean the Panarch wants to go after them?

  “Such as chasing a lover straight to the mouth of hell,” he said, then added, “Only works in the vids.”

  “Sometimes it does not work at all,” she observed, trailing her fingers in a shallow pool rilling at waist height.

  “A threat?” Nik said, watching the water plunge into a deep fall out of sight, and when she did not answer, he faced her, biting hard on the desire to demand she drop the game. Talk like an adult. At least she is talking. And if I threaten her, she simply walks away.

  Vannis regarded him for several seconds beyond wha
t at best was an uncomfortable pause, then said gently, “Permit me, genz Cormoran, to quote the same source you recognized earlier: ‘Let us consider antithesis; antithesis of expressions is not concealed, as is the antithesis of ideas. The latter is always clothed in the same manner, the former changes at will; one is varied, the other is not.’”

  He swallowed, heeding the warning. Whatever was behind this weird conversation, he was not going to find out by coercion.

  “Antithesis as in opportunity?” he said.

  Her hand opened, as if offering a gift. “There is also surprise.” She smiled. “As you found once, did you not?”

  Is this reminder of the bombshell she dropped on us the day of the trial merely that, or a hint of something of equal magnitude?

  “I love surprises,” he said hopefully.

  “I invite you,” she responded, “to view our putative relationship through the Douloi perspective.”

  Discretion: she means for us to sit on the story. He swallowed again. “For how long?”

  “Until we meet again, and discuss its . . . antithesis.”

  “The Polloi way is openness,” he said. “It is a great equalizer.”

  She gestured again, the open palms. “When the subject is love,” she said, “and one contemplates its antithesis, what is concomitant with equalization?”

  A row of mirrors opened before them. Light refracted and refracted into infinity, nearly making him dizzy. War. Destruction. She means if we talk too soon . . . it has something to do with the war.

  He had to get out.

  “Destruction,” he said, his voice sounding husky. He cleared his throat, then said, “I prefer surprises.”

  “Each better than the last.” She dipped her chin in a graceful nod, almost a bow, of agreement—promise.

  His heart began to slam. They paced two steps, three, and he risked a glance to meet her steady gaze: she was waiting for him to promise, without words, his cooperation.

  He jerked his head in agreement.

  She touched his hand, and turned down a side corridor. He heard the whisper of her skirts on the tile path. He stood where he was, trying to still his heart, then plunged after—and the whisper became the hush of a fountain into a wide pool.