The Thrones of Kronos

by Sherwood Smith

  It was time to journey to the next cusp.

  She stepped onto the trans-tube, moving around knots of laughing, talking people.

  It seemed as if everyone on Ares was either at a party, on the way to a party, or had vanished to celebrate—or commiserate—in privacy the imminent departure of the last of the Fleet.

  The Jehan Gardens were nearly deserted. Soft air currents carried the sound of distant laughter, like the cawing of seabirds. Eloatri walked down to the discreet double doors for what she knew would be the last time.

  Within was what had become a familiar and glorious geometry—a mandala of light and glass and endless water—that on her first visit she had found fractured, the use of light and illusion antithetical to the harmony and peace of Desrien.

  But she had set herself a task, and gradually had come to regard her first impression as ignorant, even wrong. For her daily visits to the Whispering Gallery had vouchsafed her an insight into Douloi consciousness that years of study could not have matched.

  Those fractures had gradually appeared to symbolize the fissures in Panarchic society. She now saw the Whispering Gallery as a gestalt on its own; there was even a kind of synchronicity to the random voices and fragmentary conversations one heard.

  One thing she knew: everyone who came here, even if only for a short time, was a pilgrim.

  But the one who had organized it was a seeker in spiritual mendicancy just as much as Eloatri had been those long years on Desrien, wandering dusty roads with bare feet, begging for meals, and seeking answers through meditation and discussions.

  For long weeks Eloatri had watched in silence as Vannis Scefi-Cartano wove a vast web around Brandon Arkad, using as threads a complicated tangle of conviction, obligation, barter, subtle innuendo, and smiling request. Eloatri was not certain how—she suspected it had to do with the novosti connection—but soon, very soon—within hours, perhaps—Vannis would activate her connection and that web would become a trap, forcing the Panarch to stay behind on Ares while others carried his war to the enemy.

  This weaving had required unceasing labor to complete, and still each day at the hour of five, Vannis had found the time—and the excuses—to come to this place and listen to the accumulated wisdom of her peers.

  Eloatri strongly suspected that Vannis had as yet to find an answer and that she would come a final time.

  And she knows that I will be here, waiting.

  Eloatri looked down the pristine glass pathway which, by a trick of the mirrors down one side, seemed to stretch into infinity. No voices whispered on the cool air currents; there was no sound but her own steps and the distant plash of fountains.

  She took a deep breath and began to sing.

  Her voice, echoing from the smooth glass, sounded scratchy and old and not particularly melodic, but this did not matter.

  The plainchant she had sung every visit since she found out the subject was love would suffice as a beacon.

  “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love,

  I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal . . .”

  Eloatri knew that Vannis would find her. She herself had come to see this complex as a gestalt, but there was a level of awareness even more encompassing than that. Anyone who could walk into a room and instantly assess all the details of hangings, furnishings, clothing, poses, and voices, had probably an internal map of the Whispering Gallery second only to the architect’s.

  “And if I have prophetic powers,

  and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,

  and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains,

  but have not love,

  I am nothing.

  If I give away all I have,

  and if I deliver my body to be burned,

  but have not love . . .”

  A blue flicker in one of the mirrors heralded the appearance of Vannis, wearing layers of sky-colored draperies, her hair bound up by a coldly gleaming diamond clasp.

  Eloatri folded her hands.

  “Why,” Vannis said in her perfectly modulated, musical voice, “are you doing this?”

  “The context here is love,” Eloatri murmured.

  Anger glowed along the molded cheekbones. “Don’t mock me.”

  Eloatri opened her hands. “It is the truth.”

  Vannis inclined her head and gestured with polite irony.

  “I am not a spy,” Eloatri said. “I observe, and if asked I share my observations.”

  Vannis made a graceful gesture of dismissal. “Either you or one of your minions has been here every day, always the hour that I am here, always singing that same piece. I know it’s aimed at me. Why?”

  “The plainchant is thousands of years old, my child,” Eloatri said, pressing her palms together. “The subject seemed appropriate to your fifth-hour discourse, and numerous interesting conversations have been fostered by its addition.”

  The jewels at Vannis’s throat glittered with her suppressed breathing.

  “There is wisdom in the words of our ancestors, don’t you think?” Eloatri went on. And, clearing her throat, she sang: ‘Love is patient and kind; Love is not jealous or boastful; It is not arrogant or rude—’”

  “Is this not an oxymoron, religion and love?” Vannis’s voice cut across the ancient melody.

  “‘Love does not insist on its own way; It is not irritable or resentful—’”

  “What,” Vannis’s voice sharpened, “‘wisdom’ could a monk offer on the subject—a monk four thousand years dead?”

  “‘It does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, Believes all things, Hopes all things, Endures all things . . .’”

  Eloatri stopped for breath. Vannis waited, her eyes narrowed, her brow tense from emotions now close to the surface.

  Eloatri said gently, “Do you really believe that sexual congress confers wisdom? Or that those who choose celibacy do not have the minds to perceive or hearts to feel?”

  Vannis said nothing.

  “The thing I cannot know,” Eloatri continued, “which is the commingling of two into a union that is wholly neither but the best of both, is a thing you will never know if you persist in mistaking possession for love.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Vannis whispered.

  “I have been watching you from a distance ever since the day we saw the Rifters arrive at the Suneater,” Eloatri said. “I have seen you fashion a net around the Panarch in order to force him into an action against his will. Into every fiber of that net is woven your intelligence, your will, and your abilities, but it is not motivated by love.”

  “It is love.” The whisper was barely audible.

  “It is not love,” Eloatri said. “And it will not be with love that he cuts himself free.”

  Vannis turned away as if to leave, then turned back, her skirts whirling softly at her feet. “Are you threatening me?”

  “Of course not, my child,” Eloatri said. “I have not spoken to him on this subject, nor will I. However, do you really believe he does not know what you have been doing? What else was all that pomp and circumstance over the welcome of the Rifter triumvir but a warning—a gesture of generosity—to you?”

  Vannis again made that dismissive gesture. “It was political expedience.”

  Eloatri shook her head. This time she abandoned the plainchant and spoke the words: “‘Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; As for tongues, they will cease; As for knowledge, it will pass away . . .’”

  “I heard that, once, when I was small.” Vannis’s hands gripped each other with white-knuckled force. “I remember what comes next: ‘When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.’ What are you telling me, that my actions are that of a child?”

  “I have a message for you,” Eloatri said, and now, despite her own control, her heart accelerated its beat.

  The jewels trembled in Vannis’s hair.

  “The
ships mustering in bring up to date various parts of the Net. I have communicated with Desrien. One of my messages was an answer to an inquiry I sent to your mother. Her answer is what you have been hearing every day for all these weeks.”

  Vannis’s lips whitened.

  “‘For now we see in a mirror dimly, But then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; But the greatest of these is love.’”

  Eloatri bowed to Vannis, and walked away.

  o0o

  The light was fading when Vannis returned from the Whispering Gallery. She had used the travel time to recover from the shock of the High Phanist’s abrupt message about her mother. Vannis’s primary reaction was anger, but she recognized that as a relatively safe vent. Rage obviously made no difference to Eloatri. It also would permit of no answers, no insight into why her mother sent that particular message—and through that particular medium.

  In the meantime, there were two facts to hold to: her mother was alive, and she had, however the form, communicated. This left open a possible future.

  But that is hers. Now I must secure mine.

  Vannis walked slowly up the flagged pathway to the Enclave. The time had come, at last, to find a way to get Brandon alone.

  No one knew his schedule better, and it would have been impossible to make some kind of appointment, no matter how innocuous the reason given, without at least half a dozen key people taking note. Vannis nodded to the Marine guards and stepped into the garden, aware that her only chance was to exert her considerable skills and contrive some kind of accident that vouchsafed Brandon and herself a certain amount of time unguarded, without eavesdroppers either physically or electronically present.

  She emerged from the sheltering trees before the glass doors that opened into the study. A few meters short of them a flicker of golden light through the trees caused her to turn.

  Candles had been lit on the terrace adjoining the gardens. Running a swift mental review of the Enclave’s social schedule, Vannis wondered if the formal dinner for the academics on the Privy Council had been moved outside for some reason—despite the fact that this change would require the kind of logistical flutter with service that ordinarily Brandon tried to avoid. Or had Brandon’s eve-of-departure function with the Navy brass been changed?

  Setting aside a lacy screen of fronds, she stepped up onto the terrace and looked for Fierin, who had offered to preside at the academic dinner, as both Omilovs were to attend.

  Fierin was nowhere in sight, nor were any staff. Vannis saw the small table—silver gleaming and the thin gold-edged chinois dishes waiting invitingly—set for two.

  Brandon stepped out onto the terrace, dressed formally in mourning white. He was alone; he carried in both hands a dusty bottle.

  Vannis stilled, confused, as he squinted at the label in the soft light of the candles, then brandished the bottle with an air of satisfaction.

  “I knew I’d seen this gold-leaf Locke down there. One of the last of the supply laid down by my grandfather. Universally maligned for his manners, morals, politics, friends, and enemies, but never for his taste in wine. Shall we?” He gestured invitation.

  “Were we not hosting a dinner in an hour?”

  “Omilov is having it at the Cloisters,” Brandon said as he eased the cork from the bottle. He poured out a splash of the wine and offered the goblet to Vannis. “Will you taste it?”

  Vannis lifted the glass and swirled the ruby liquid within. The wine’s aroma reached her nose before she sipped, a complex bouquet that made her think of molten gold.

  We’re alone, she thought. By his design.

  And, He knows.

  Her heart pumped a surge of clear fire through her, followed by the chilly calm of certainty; he had made the opening move in the endgame.

  “Delicious,” she said, holding out the goblet.

  He smiled as he poured wine for her, and for himself, then gestured for her to be seated.

  She did, and he sat across from her, and both raised their glasses in a silent toast, graceful and deliberate as a minuet.

  “We reached a temporary truce on the question of the DataNet in military hands,” he said. “The civilians on Council were all quick to point out that they had nothing against Willsones in person, it was merely the principle—the tradition . . .”

  A brief flicker of vertigo unsettled Vannis, as if the station had faltered in its spin. Brandon’s conversational tone coupled with the status report—as if they were carrying further a discussion long familiar to both—was singularly unsteadying.

  Marshaling her wits, she did her best to assume that familiarity. “For the duration of the war,” she murmured.

  His hand lifted in acknowledgment, and he said, “Have you a suggestion for a likely candidate afterward?”

  She had known of the debate, though not of the truce. Thinking rapidly, she put forward a couple of names. Brandon appeared to consider them and nodded in approval.

  And so it went; as the silent stewards appeared, served, and disappeared, in the friendliest manner Brandon gave her a status report on every department of the forming government. Most of it was known to her, though not to so immediate a degree. Her methods for uncovering some of the data were perforce labyrinthine and time-consuming.

  Then there were the things she had not known, had as yet found no way of knowing, told in that bland voice, his manner assuming a long-shared confidence.

  She listened with care, and when she spoke, it was to the point, and usually responded to with agreement, approval, or at least interest.

  The game so far was to him. His attitude of professional intimacy, the data he shared, all were an unexpected gambit. But not a defeat, not at all. He knew of her plans—and therefore he knew that at any moment she could release Nik Cormoran to make public his story about the Telvarna going to the Suneater. And that would effectively keep Brandon here where he belonged.

  She sensed that all this preliminary chatter (setting aside its pertinence to the political realities) had to be leading to some kind of final move. She had only to see it and to check it.

  And then mate.

  They finished the bottle and the dinner. As they sipped coffee, faint melodic sounds drifted through the darkness from across the lake.

  Vannis was distracted by its familiarity. For a sickening moment she thought it might be Eloatri’s religious message yet again, but the melody very soon twisted away into a minor key, still familiar, still from half-remembered childhood, but not at all the same words.

  “. . . and that brings us around again to the Council,” he said. “Have I covered everything?”

  Her heart thumped painfully. “Nearly,” she said. And because he was watching her—because she was not ready—she said, “What is that singing?”

  Louder now, in it she could distinguish many voices, all singing in unison.

  “The Vigil of the Lightbearer,” he said. “You have not had any family members in the service the eve of a planned action.” He rose, setting down his cup. “Come.” He held out his arm.

  She placed her fingertips on his sleeve, conscious of the contour of muscle beneath the fine fabric. In spite of his relaxed manner, she sensed the tautness of alert as they walked to the other end of the terrace.

  He tapped his boswell and the wall slid open. Brandon gestured invitation toward an air car.

  He did not touch her again as they took their places side by side in the air car. With a quick, familiar hand he manipulated the controls. The engines gave a muted whine. Vannis pressed back into her cushioned seat as they rose above the Enclave.

  Brandon said, “Look.”

  He swung the air car about and the engines hummed as it hovered in the air above the lake. Vannis leaned forward, and her breath caught in her throat when she saw the river of flame winding slowly around the perimeter of the lake.

  Brandon tabbed a control and they dropped severa
l hundred meters. The golden river resolved into hundreds—maybe thousands—of candles, each held by an individual. Warm halos of light lit the lifted faces: adults of both sexes, children, older people, all singing.

  Brandon keyed another control, and a window slid open. Air currents ruffled coolly through Vannis’s hair and across her flesh, carrying the pungent scent of herbs and beeswax. The song, shared by so many voices, seemed an immutable force.

  “They will continue until their candles burn out,” he said.

  Tiny threads of aromatic smoke rose to wreathe the air car like ghostly, supplicating fingers.

  The window closed, and quiet settled over them, rendering Vannis acutely aware of the man seated close by, so close she could hear his breathing.

  She turned her head to meet his direct blue gaze. She let her own gaze roam over his curling dark hair, and across his fine-boned face, to the straight-cut mouth, with its curve of humor that, she suspected, even death would not eradicate.

  He said, “Will you marry me?”

  At first the words were mere sound, without sense.

  Then a maelstrom of strong memory-infused emotion ripped through her consciousness, and she lost all sense of time and place.

  It was not a long reverie. Her mind worked swiftly to assimilate it, then identify the impetus for shock. She had been married once, though it had been negotiated from a distance, and she had thought herself experienced in every type of intimate experience: lighthearted and serious, languid and intense, with men and women of every degree.

  But she had learned recently that she had never before been in love. And here was the person she loved above all others proposing the position she had been trained for since birth, for which she had worked with increasing passion since his return to Ares.

  She said, “Why?”

  His hands drifted across the controls, his profile pensive. As the air car circled slowly down toward the Enclave, he said, “Ever since I found myself in this position, I have been forced to learn its prerogatives and pitfalls at an accelerated pace, yet there you have been, a shadow at my heels, matching my pace, and I think, mostly with the same goals in view. There is no one better equipped to take the place of Kyriarch than you.”