Vespera

by Anselm Audley

  ‘Unwise, at the moment,’ Aesonia said. He’d never known her political judgement fail his father, although he himself much preferred the straightforward world of the Navy to the murky intrigues of his mother and sister. Yet their schemes and counter-schemes were necessary, he had to admit as much. ‘The princes and the Council will believe what’s most convenient for them. If we strike openly against the Jharissa, they’ll say we’re making them scapegoats in an ongoing feud.’

  ‘Even if we prove their guilt?’

  ‘Even if we do, we can’t easily touch them,’ Silvanos said.

  Jharissa were a nightmare, in military terms. Not as strong as one of the princes, but their bases of operations – Vespera and the arctic – were both out of reach to the New Empire. And he couldn’t very well blockade Vespera without provoking an alliance of every other power in Thetia against him. At such an overt move, even the Mons Ferratans and the Qalatharis, the other great Archipelagan powers, might side with the Vesperans.

  ‘We have to isolate them first,’ Aesonia said. ‘Make them pariahs.’

  ‘We’ve been trying to do that it for years,’ Silvanos said thoughtfully. ‘The Vesperans won’t act against them, come what may.’

  Valentine could never tell what the man was thinking, but over the last few years he’d come to trust the spymaster. It wasn’t something he could put his finger on, but he knew that Silvanos shared his sense of wrongness, of a world out of balance. Perhaps at how far Thetia had fallen, perhaps at the chaos he saw around him.

  Besides, Valentine’s respect for him had grown enormously when Silvanos brought the news of Catiline’s death himself. It would have been so easy to leave the news to an underling, to associate someone else with the misfortune, but he’d had the courage to come in person.

  And Raphael had shown resolution in accepting his offer so quickly . . . yes, the Quiridii were valuable assets, and Raphael was yet a young man. Silvanos was in his late forties, but not always in the best of health. If Raphael continued as he’d begun, he’d be a worthy successor to his uncle as chief intelligencer.

  ‘Then how do we do it?’ he asked, guessing that Silvanos had a plan.

  ‘You have an idea?’ Aesonia asked. Whatever Silvanos suggested would stand or fall on her verdict. For all that he was the senior Imperial permanently resident in Vespera, Silvanos was first and foremost a spymaster, not a politician.

  ‘Be bold,’ Silvanos said, with the ghost of a smile. ‘Leave Azure in your sister’s capable hands. Aventine could use the experience. Go to Vespera.’

  Aesonia’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re suggesting, after what happened today, that we take ourselves to the heart of Jharissan power?’

  ‘To the most public place in all Thetia,’ Silvanos said. ‘The Vesperan people love a show, they love a hero, and they love to feel important. Lord Emperor, you’ve just disposed of a pirate squadron and rescued eighteen Vesperan clanspeople. Take them to Vespera yourself, as your first official act. You can do more for our standing there just by your presence than with years of diplomacy. Show them the glory and the might of the New Empire, like a triumph of the Old. After all, it’s not as if you’re planning to keep Azure as your capital forever?’

  ‘One step at a time, Silvanos,’ Aesonia said, but she was smiling now. ‘Can you guarantee our safety?’

  ‘Yes,’ Silvanos said. ‘Win the crowd’s sympathy, which should be easy, and Iolani won’t dare move. In fact, she’ll have to protect you, as she’ll be blamed if anything happens.’

  Valentine could see his mother’s mind racing ahead, exploring the possibilities, and saw her smile widen. Now, would she impose her will, as he’d feared, or would their partnership continue as planned, with the final decisions in his hands?

  ‘I’d planned this later, but you’re right. Valentine, I suggest we follow Silvanos’s plan.’

  Good. And he could see the possibilities as well as they could. Perhaps better, because Silvanos was right. Valentine didn’t intend to remain in Azure forever, and Vespera had, in its previous incarnation as Selerian Alastre, been the capital of Thetia. The Imperial capital.

  The only adequate capital for the united Thetia he intended to create. His father had laid the foundations, but Valentine would see Thetia reborn in his lifetime, an end to the chaos and anarchy which had claimed so many lives. A just memorial to his father, who had died before his time.

  Vespera’s government was an improvisation, a reaction to the desperate times of the Anarchy forty years ago, maintained with almost no armed forces by adroit diplomacy and the city’s importance as a freeport and neutral ground. Not a solution that was ever intended to last, and the City’s decadence was already showing. Perhaps Iolani in her arrogance would bring Vespera on to his side for good.

  ‘Do we have permission from the Council of the Seas?’ he asked. He had to be careful to observe all the forms they demanded.

  ‘Yes,’ Silvanos said. ‘I took the liberty of obtaining assent for an imperial visit in case you needed it. You may bring two warships and an entourage of no more than four hundred, including ships’ crews.’

  It wasn’t a spur of the moment plan, then, which heartened him. Silvanos had clearly given the matter some thought. Such a small force would cramp his military options, if it came to a confrontation with Jharissa, but it couldn’t be helped. Otherwise, this was exactly the sort of action he liked, bold and decisive. And he could show his mother he was perfectly capable of dealing with the Vesperans, no matter how corrupt and licentious the City had become.

  ‘Then inform the Council of the Seas we intend to make our first state visit, to return their missing merchants. We will arrive two days from now.’

  CHAPTER IV

  The legendary approach to Vespera, the one celebrated in frescoes and mosaics and songs across the City and the world, is to sail between the barrier islands into the lagoon at sunset, when the City’s domes and houses, and the waters surrounding them, turn gold for a few brief moments.

  Sovereign passed the outer reef into the Vesperan lagoon less than an hour before sunset on a day of turbulent, restless skies, and for long moments Raphael simply stood there, watching the City ahead of him in all its glorious, untidy splendour.

  A place of stone and water, mile after mile of galleries and domes and arcades towering above the deep bay long-ago mariners had christened the Star Deep. There was no more dramatic city in Aquasilva, and none greater. Buildings reaching up to the ridges above the bay, climbing up the slopes of the huge mountains which rose to the east and north-east, broken only by the crowns of palm or cypress trees from avenues or the tens of thousands of courtyard gardens, and the oases of the great public gardens with their glass nurseries.

  A place of stone, because for the last six centuries of its thousand-year history, no wood had been allowed. A matter of practicality at first, to prevent fires, then of pride and stubbornness. In the hands of a Thetian master mason or carver, the creamy Vesperan stone became a living thing, capable of being worked to a delicacy no-one else could match, and there were so many types and styles of arch by now that an architect could spend a lifetime trying to remember them all.

  A place of water, because Vespera was a maritime city, not simply built from the sea’s wealth but surrounded and cut through by water, by the Star Deep and the finger-like channels of the Avern and the Marmora cutting inland from it, along to where streams from the mountains cascaded down sheer drops into the sea.

  Home. A place now as familiar from the ancient authors as from Raphael’s personal experience, a place he remembered walking through thousands of times, whose landmarks and familiar quirks he could pick out in his sleep. The Hall of the Ocean rising from the water, the sinuous arcades of the Processional Way, the archaic stone tower of Canteni Palace, stark and rough against the more recent construction around it. The splendid hall and towers of Ulithi Palace, where Valentine would be staying, proud against the green hillsides and steep gardens behind it. The unti
dy grandeur of the Palace of the Seas on Triton Island, the oldest part of the City, with its interlaced colonnades and the green dome of the old Assembly Chamber towering over it and the surrounding Agora.

  And the places he actually knew, had grown up in, where he had laughed and played, as far as he could in Silvanos’s shadow. The houses of childhood friends, dotted around the upper slopes of the Naiad district. The leaping fountains of the Botanic Gardens, the ever-so-slightly alien shape of Barca Palace, with its Tanethan-style roof garden. Silvanos’s house in upper Naiad; they were close enough now that he could just about pick out the nine small arches of the loggia.

  Most of all, after three years intelligencing in the distant islands and empty places of the Archipelago, it would be good to walk the crowded streets again, feel Vespera’s energy all around him in the harbours and the Exchange and the coffee-houses. Only Taneth, of the places he’d spent his exile, matched Vespera, and for all its vitality, Taneth would never be home.

  He’d found his own corner of the flag bridge when they first passed into the lagoon, but it was filling up now, as most of Valentine’s entourage had come to watch their approach. Still, it was a huge space, curving round on the third deck forward above the bridge, equally useful as an admiral’s control room, or a base of operations for seaborne assault, or – with the aether tables carefully covered over and protected, a venue for a reception when Sovereign was simply showing the flag.

  ‘I never get tired of seeing it this way,’ Leonata said, walking over to join him. She was dressed formally now, in robes and gown like the rest of them. Only Aesonia matched her for elegance, and Leonata’s copper gown with its touch of gold tracery on the shoulders was considerably more understated than the Empress’s grey mourning splendour.

  Leonata was, Raphael realised, the only woman on the ship who wasn’t in Aesonia’s entourage, and thus an Exile – unlike the clans, and particularly the female-dominated manta shipyards, the Navy was an entirely masculine world.

  ‘How often are you away?’ Raphael asked. He didn’t know nearly enough about her or Clan Estarrin, and he wasn’t going to pass up a chance to find out. How long had she been Thalassarch, clan leader, for? What did Estarrin trade in? How powerful were they?

  ‘Very little these days, you’re tied to the City once you become a Thalassarch. I spent most of my life on the Clan’s ships, even at the height of the Anarchy. I wouldn’t be much of a Thalassarch if I didn’t know how my clan worked. Estarrin wouldn’t elect a leader who didn’t. Of course, some of the other Thalassarchs think they can do better without ever having got their hands dirty, but that’s their way.’ And foolishness, she didn’t say. ‘Of course, then I was fool enough to end up on the Council of the Seas, and now I never get a holiday, alas.’

  ‘Am I supposed to sympathise?’ Raphael asked innocently.

  ‘No, but you could be a gentleman and conduct your investigation from the comfort of a coffee-house once we’re in Vespera.’

  Valentine watched them from across the flag-bridge, asking himself whether Leonata was a potential ally or an enemy. He hadn’t been to Vespera in years, being too busy out on campaign, so the loyalties and weaknesses of its current leaders were new to him. Silvanos and Aesonia would know, of course, but he needed to master this for himself.

  Was Leonata sounding out Raphael’s loyalties, perhaps? Or simply conferring on strategy, since Valentine’s decision and the Council’s had made the pair, temporarily, co-investigators?

  He’d certainly have to give Silvanos a bigger role, and he wasn’t yet ready to trust Raphael to deal with someone as experienced as Leonata, but perhaps . . . A thought struck him, and he turned to his mother, standing beside him in the full splendour of Exile robes. She seemed to age more slowly than others of her generation, looking barely older than Leonata though there was a decade between them.

  ‘Do you have an acolyte who could keep an eye on Raphael?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps more than that, if we’re lucky?’

  Aesonia smiled. ‘You want him bound to us willingly, I assume.’

  ‘There’s no match for loyalty freely given,’ Valentine said.

  ‘Leave it to me,’ she said. ‘He has great promise.’

  They were only a few moments away now, and the light on the City’s domes and roofs had turned from white to gold, deepening to crimson even as he watched. Ahead of them, Ulithi Palace glimmered, reflecting the sun back from the its huge windows with blinding intensity. For a few brief moments the whole of Vespera was transformed, the water turned into a sheet of gold as if it were a city out of legend, the home of the gods on Aquasilva.

  The home of gods, and of Emperors. As it should be. This was too great a city, too great a land, to be ruled by merchants and the children of shopkeepers. Four and a half centuries of Imperial history were concentrated here. The ancient Republic might have explored Aquasilva’s oceans, but it had taken the Empire to make Thetia truly great, to subdue the world and bring back its splendour.

  Splendour which had dimmed forty years ago, Valentine thought, as the light deepened still further, and the windows of Ulithi Palace blazed brightly above the water of the Marmora. He looked southwards, towards the site of the old Imperial Palace, but its splendour was gone. Its courtyards had become squares, its rooms and towers simply another district of the City, clan palaces and houses for merchants. Only the Sea Gardens remained, now open to the people of Vespera.

  Ruthelo Azrian’s doing during the brief months of his Republic, a symbolic way to ensure that the Empire could never again be what it was. He’d failed in everything else, brought down by ambition and pride, and perhaps Valentine would yet thwart him in that as well.

  Then the light faded with the abruptness of a tropical sunset, the sky racing through deepening shades of blue to black. Like thousands of fireflies across the hill, the lights of Vespera came into their own as night fell, and Sovereign edged round the Octagon to the Maritime Agora. He glanced down at his immaculate white dress uniform, its silver chasing glittering in the cold cabin light, and tugged a stray fold firmly into place.

  His stomach felt oddly hollow, though it took him a second to realise he was nervous, something he’d never expected. This arrival was nothing of itself, but he liked milestones, and once he stepped on to that quay he would be returning as Emperor. What he did here, over the next few weeks, would mark the course of his life irrevocably, and that wasn’t something to treat lightly.

  ‘We should go downstairs,’ Silvanos said, his black robes rustling. ‘It’s almost time.’

  They would come in on the surface tonight, because there were no gantries in Star Deep; Vespera’s colossal undersea harbour was further out, away from the centre of the City. The manta was slowing down already, and by the time they assembled in the cavernous well, legionaries and sailors and officials mingling with armoured tribesmen and the kelp-green of Aesonia’s entourage, Sovereign had almost stopped. Long moments passed with no perceptible movement while they edged into position alongside the quay, and outside the manta shore crews handled the tricky task of attaching a secure gantry to the hull.

  At last the clanging died away, and two sailors stepped up to open the hatch, letting into the well a gust of warm, humid Vesperan air – a melange of sea and tropical vegetation and cordage with a faint edge of spices and coffee.

  On the quay, horns sounded, low and mellow, and the first of his entourage began filing out down the gangplank with slow, measured steps, out of the manta’s cool interior into the Vesperan night. For long minutes the crowd in the well hardly seemed to grow smaller, then finally the tribesmen started moving and spaces opened up.

  Eventually only three others were left – Raphael, Silvanos and Leonata, waiting behind to come down after Valentine and Aesonia. The horns paused and then broke into an extended fanfare as the four of them moved to the hatch, still hidden for a moment more. Aesonia stopped there, her eyes meeting his for the slightest moment as she nodded stiffly. The horns fell si
lent.

  And so it begins.

  Raphael’s return home was like a dream. The buildings around him, lit by hundreds of waterglobes on the pillars of arcades and galleries, their stonework exquisitely carved and lovingly maintained, were those of his childhood, the pattern and set of the stones so familiar. The scents – incense, salt, an indefinable background of flowers from the plants in ten thousand courtyard gardens across the city – and the sounds hit him like a wave.

  It was a subdued roaring, like the sounds of a jungle at night but far louder, the voices of hundreds of thousands in the streets and the houses, in restaurants and bath-houses and coffee-houses, woven in with strains of music and other noises which had no source, as if they had taken on a life of their own. Lions roar in Vespera at night, one poet had written long ago, and Raphael knew what he meant.

  And so many people! Over the strip of water where Sovereign lay, tens of thousands had gathered at the edge of the Octagon, talking even as they watched the ceremony – he could hear their voices occasionally, carried on the night breeze. Snatches of music drifted across the water of the Deep from quartets playing in the colonnade, sometimes drowned out by the din from hurdy-gurdys and sackbutts on the packed quays below the Processional Way.

  Home.

  It wasn’t simply the arrival, though, it was the reception the Vesperans gave Valentine. Perhaps he should have expected it. Valentine was the image of an Emperor from legend – in his prime, handsome and martial in his white uniform. He came to return the freed Vesperans to their homes, with news of victory over pirates, and there were few things more dangerous to Vespera than a threat to its shipping.

  Catiline had been here only a few days ago, and the people must be used to Emperors – but they still gave Valentine a rapturous welcome as he stepped out of the hatch, cheering that resounded off the hills and momentarily drowned out even the other sounds of the City, a cheer that redoubled as he presented the freed hostages to their waiting families, and was greeted by the Council of the Seas.