‘Thais?’ Elements, it was. Her smile was the same, with the humour he remembered from all those years ago. One of the few Exiles he’d ever met with a sense of humour.
‘You remember me after all,’ she said. ‘I was afraid you’d forgotten me.’
‘It was a long time ago,’ he said abruptly, too many bad memories crowding into his head of his time at Sarthes. The discipline and the rigidity, the instructors’ unquestioning acceptance of their own view of the world – and it wasn’t a view confined to religion. Silvanos had taught him to question, to challenge, and Sarthes had tried to silence his challenges.
‘You haven’t changed,’ Thais said, her green eyes resting on him for a moment. ‘Still a mind of metal and wheels, still the one who sits on the temple steps trying to work out what magic actually is. Did you ever find the answer?’
‘I’ve had other things to think about.’ It had been fourteen years since he’d fled Sarthes, not in itself a difficult task because the Exiles never expected any of their pupils to run away, not if they wanted a future in the Empire. What had she become, in her Exile order? She wore the same dark sea-green robes as Aesonia’s acolytes, not the sea-blue of Sarthes itself.
‘You never found somewhere you were happy?’ she asked.
‘For a time.’
‘You don’t need to be afraid of me, Raphael,’ she said. ‘Shall I show you the lower gallery?’
‘Lower gallery?’ he said, not thinking for the second time in less than a day. ‘Below this?’
Thais nodded. ‘Underwater.’
He turned, looked back into the pool, and realised, a moment later, that what he’d taken for a slightly distorted reflection in the water was, in fact, a second colonnade running round below water level.
‘Be quiet.’ Thais touched her finger to her lips, still smiling.
She led him out of the main colonnade and through the edge of the domed sanctuary to a broad flight of spiral stairs. As he followed her down, the blue-filtered white sunlight gave way to entirely blue, and then they came out in a colonnade even more hauntingly beautiful than the one above it, lit entirely through the sea. Three or four other people were there, standing and staring into the clear water with its rippled, sandy floor.
Raphael had no idea how long he stood there beside Thais, staring into the water and following the lines of the arches, the intricate pattern formed by the intersection of the same two lines over and over, a network of tracery above and below each arch. The other people went, and more came, and at last Thais tapped his shoulder, looking regretful, and indicated that they needed to leave.
‘There’s nowhere like it anywhere in the world,’ Thais said, when they emerged again into the main sanctuary, which for all the grace of its more conventional arches and domes, the rippled floor like a calm sea, couldn’t compare.
He should have asked her if she’d been sent by Aesonia, but couldn’t bring himself to break the moment by mentioning the Empress, letting back in all the concerns that had fled in the peace of the colonnade, and was now being held at bay. Thais solved the problem for him a moment later.
‘Aesonia is engaged at the moment, but she’ll see you soon. I’m to look after you while you’re waiting, which might give us a chance to talk to each other. Unless I’m a threat to you, of course, which would stop you associating with me.’
The humour was still there, suppressed laughter in her face and the green eyes. She seemed so much the girl he’d known at Sarthes, who’d tried – and failed, in the end – to break through the layers of stone he’d built around himself as protection from Silvanos. But she must have changed after all these years of Exile conditioning.
‘Everyone is a potential threat,’ he said, returning her comment in kind.
‘Doesn’t that make for a bleak life? You should hardly be talking to me, if I’m a potential threat.’
Her gentle teasing was too close for comfort, no matter how well-intentioned.
‘I’m beginning to sound like an empty-headed courtier,’ Thais said, before Raphael could reply. ‘I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.’
Her apology gave him the opportunity he needed, even as his eye caught the telltale shift in tension, the very slight readjustment of her posture, as she drew away.
‘Intelligencers aren’t supposed to feel comfortable,’ he said, more coldly than he’d intended.
‘There speaks your uncle,’ Thais said, standing her ground.
‘Perhaps, but he speaks sense. Are your vows intended to make you feel comfortable? Or happy, or even relaxed?’ This time the sting was deliberate.
‘They aren’t intended to kill all such feelings,’ Thais said. ‘How does one serve the Goddess by taking no joy in life?’
‘How can one serve the Empire by being susceptible to every fleeting impulse of the moment?’
‘Coming to see that lower gallery was a fleeting impulse of the moment, as you so dismissively put it. Shouldn’t you have been looking for traitors meeting there? Weren’t you a little too comfortable?’ Thais said, angry but keeping her voice down because they were still in the Sanctuary. ‘Imagine I were a traitor, seeking to weaken you and the Empire. Which of us has the advantage now?’
Entirely inadvertently, she’d caught him, trapped him between an admission that Raphael’s level of control might be excessive, or that on the Emperor’s service he didn’t have the luxury of even stopping to admire the architecture. It was a corner he’d backed himself into, but there was no way she would know that.
He stared at her with cold fury for a very long moment, knowing very well what the answer was. To admit it would be more than his pride could bear.
‘I don’t want you to answer,’ Thais said. ‘Just to think, since it seems this is all you’ll accept from me. Come, the Empress will be waiting for you.’
Aesonia’s suite, looking past the Sanctuary to the Hall of the Ocean, could have been part of Sarthes but for the great dome and the bustling Star Deep visible through the outside windows. Filigree screens, gauzy drapes, a devotional stool in the corner, the sound of lapping water from somewhere nearby, a view out over a contemplative garden on the inside – an Exile’s apartment more than an Empress’s.
‘Welcome to the Sanctuary, Raphael,’ Aesonia said, turning as they came in, and her expression was warmer than he’d ever seen it, her manner more relaxed if as commanding as ever. ‘Come in. Thais, I’ll join you shortly in the garden.’
Thais nodded and left, closing the doors behind her.
‘I came to explain my actions last night, Majesty,’ he said, but Aesonia only smiled.
‘I’ve heard what happened. You were right to act as you did, given the situation. I won’t have our visit marred by rioting.’
Expecting a rebuke, Raphael tried to conceal his surprise. Why so gracious, if he’d robbed her of an opportunity to prove Iolani’s guilt?
A servant came in with drinks on a tray. Raphael took one, flinching at the cold even though he was prepared for it. He’d never had any problems in the north with Odeinath, but then he’d become accustomed to the cold during the long voyage up to Ralentis.
‘How is the mage?’
Aesonia’s expression became darker. ‘We’ve had to put magic-suppressors on her, and keep her in a trance. My healers are doing their best, but I don’t know that she’ll ever recover.’
‘Have your mages found any more evidence?’
‘Not even with the vigiles’ help. Whatever trace there was, it is gone.’ The High Priestess sipped at her drink, and Raphael followed suit – a heavy Thetian blue wine, rich and very dark indeed. ‘I can tell you that a herb called silphium was used to drug the mage, restrict her magical abilities. It’s very rare and very, very unpleasant for mages. Forbidden throughout the Empire’s dominions.’
‘But not in Vespera?’
‘Anything can be bought here, for the right price,’ she said. ‘Why else would the Jharissa prosper?’
‘They�
�ve done nothing against the interests of Vespera.’
‘They seek to destroy the Empire!’ Aesonia snapped. ‘Only a fool could fail to see that. You’ve heard Plautius’s report on the warehouse?’
Raphael nodded. Matteozzo and his men had escaped unscathed, without a shred of evidence other than their account of what they’d seen. Weapons, strange devices, aether shield generators, an entire section of the horrea closed off and guarded by Ice Runners, even in the middle of the night.
‘Majesty,’ Raphael said, ‘is it possible that someone else is trying to provoke open war with the Jharissa, to the detriment of the Empire?’
‘The Lost Souls want open war with us.’ Was she assuming Silvanos had told him, or did she know for certain?
‘But why? Why, if they’re still building up their strength, would they kill your husband now?’
‘Because they’re traitors and renegades, and without honour! You haven’t fought them, Raphael. You don’t even know them.’
‘I know they’re not as strong as they look,’ he said, meeting the Empress’s furious gaze, and cursing his too-forward tongue. ‘They’re as afraid of you as you are of them.’
‘They hate us,’ Aesonia said. ‘Nothing more. They’ve hated us from the beginning, because all they seek is destruction?’
‘Then why not wait until they’re stronger? Until they can build up their forces and obliterate us as we did to them?’
‘They deserved what we did to them,’ Aesonia said, an icy calm settling over her. ‘They betrayed us, and then they tried to destroy everything Thetia is or was, grind our future and our past into dust. You’ve read your histories.’
Raphael had, and unlike Aesonia he’d seen the Tuonetar ruins. He could even speak their language, or their language as it had been preserved in Ralentis. They had been allies of the Republic, foes of the Empire as it expanded northwards, but towards the end they had become something very different. A tyranny which sought to enslave its people’s very souls, to make them love it and surrender themselves to it, because it was all that mattered.
The Dream Twisters in Thetia had been an echo of it, the creation of the insane Emperor Orosius in an effort to control his subjects’ minds, but they had failed. The Tuonetar had come within a whisker of success.
‘That was two and a half centuries ago,’ he objected.
‘They haven’t forgotten,’ she said. ‘Hate is all they know, but now for the first time they have a chance to strike at us. And they will.’
‘But why now?’
‘Because if they wait another twenty years we’ll be stronger.’ She stood up abruptly and beckoned him over to the outer windows, with the view of the dome of the Hall, the chaotic brilliance of Vespera beyond, stretching for miles in both directions. The Heart of the World. ‘Because we’ll own Vespera, and there’ll be no place for them here. No place for them to harbour their malice in the very heart of Thetia. No place for them anywhere in these seas where they never belonged. No place for traitors, no place for Tuonetar.’
Raphael shivered, despite the warm wind. Fergho’s bigotry was simply aggression and ignorance stirred up by propaganda, but the Empress hated with a far more personal passion. But why be so open with someone she hardly knew?
And then, quite suddenly, he realised what she was talking about, as her brother’s voice echoed in his head.
Prince of a shard of broken Thetia, fighting forty years of civil war?
Jharissa stood to undo everything she’d built, to bring it crashing down from within just as Ruthelo’s pride and eventual treachery had blighted her youth, turned the promise of Palatine’s reign into ashes on the wind.
‘You didn’t live through it,’ Aesonia said a moment later, more calmly, confirming his guess. ‘Ruthelo deposed Thetis’s anointed Emperor to found a Republic he could control himself, and when he discovered that wasn’t so easy, he built a hidden army to overthrow it. If we hadn’t acted when we did, he’d have been too strong for us. For all of us put together.’
‘Jharissa may not have the same plan,’ Raphael said, unwisely as it turned out.
‘They do,’ Aesonia said. ‘There’s information you don’t have access to. We’ve been given a chance to stop them, before they grow too strong. We have to take it.’
There was no point arguing further; the Empress was adamant. Which meant Valentine and, quite probably, Silvanos would be too.
But the Empire hadn’t been given a chance, it had been dealt a blow. Jharissa had killed Catiline, and Raphael was almost certain that was only the first step in their plan. Not entirely, because he didn’t put it past Iolani to have acted on impulse. But if they had a plan, it would depend on the Empire reacting with righteous fury – and then what?
‘You will,’ she said, meeting his gaze, ‘find the evidence we need to convince the Council of the Seas of Iolani’s treachery.’
‘And if the Council doesn’t act?’
‘They will act,’ Aesonia said. ‘That’s my affair. All I require from you is the evidence. And your unconditional loyalty.’
Raphael felt a sudden stab of fear as her sea-blue mage’s eyes settled on him.
‘I expect nothing less of you,’ the Empress continued. ‘And if you break faith with us, you break faith with Thetia. You know the penalty for high treason.’
‘You have my loyalty,’ Raphael said.
‘That wasn’t what I asked for,’ Aesonia said, suddenly still.
‘It’s as much as I will give,’ Raphael said. ‘If I said you had my unconditional loyalty, I’d be lying. You have to earn it, as I have to earn your trust. And when I give it, I give it freely, not because you demand it.’
He was taking an enormous risk, when he’d come here to convince her of his loyalty, but this wasn’t a woman to trifle with. And nor would he promise her something he couldn’t give. To follow no matter the orders – that was something for the Navy, and not a thing Raphael would ever do. It was the demand of a would-be tyrant.
‘We must earn your loyalty?’ the Empress said, one hand clenching the window-ledge.
‘A promise easily given is most easily broken. Would you trust one willing to swear so readily?’
Her lips thinned, and for a long moment she said nothing, eyes searching his face.
‘You are presumptuous. The Empire deserves nothing less than your full loyalty.’
‘And that I won’t give until the Empire earns it. Which I have every reason to expect it will.’
‘You choose a strange way to impress me, Raphael Quiridion,’ she said finally. ‘But I suspect my son would appreciate your honesty, if not your reluctance. You may continue to investigate as long as your uncle concurs. Now go.’
She turned back to the window in a very clear dismissal, and Raphael bowed and left without another word.
CHAPTER VIII
If Raphael thought he’d had enough surprises for the day, his first visit to Estarrin Palace proved very quickly how wrong he’d been.
He’d learnt what he could from Silvanos’ intelligence files, which of course his uncle kept on all the clans. By the standards of Vesperan clans, Estarrin were fairly young. According to the files, they’d only formed as a clan a hundred and ten years ago, and had remained a small clan of botanical prospectors and oceanographical suppliers until the Revolt. Leonata seemed mostly responsible for their prosperity – she’d successfully expanded their operations into spice trading, medicines, plant nurseries and coffee.
And, recently, they’d funded the shipwright Clan Aruwe’s efforts to develop new uses for manta polyp, and launched their own effort to find new crossbreeds of flamewood.
That was interesting, but there was frustratingly little information there. The last note said only Project ongoing under tight secrecy. More infiltrators in shipwright clans urgently needed!
Then there was the information that Leonata had two daughters. The elder was listed curtly Absent; location unknown. Believed estranged. It probably didn’t m
atter, though he’d have liked to know. Of more immediate relevance, the younger, Anthemia, was a shipwright in the service of Clan Aruwe.
Leonata had never married, but this wasn’t uncommon in matrilineal Thetia, the City in particular. Heirs might be conceived for political purposes, or for those who wished to continue their family when both parties were sworn to different clans, but neither could or would transfer their allegiance, which was a tricky thing. For someone of Leonata’s status, there would have been formal agreements, and records filed away in the clan archives.
The palace of such a young clan would normally be on the edge of the City, but after the Revolt Estarrin had moved into a half-ruined shell on Triton Island, only a few streets from the Palace of the Seas in the heart of the pre-Imperial City. There must have been bigger palaces around – that was something else to find out. And he hardly knew Triton – it hadn’t been a childhood haunt, and he’d seen little enough of it on his way to Orfeo’s.
Raphael took a vaporetto, rather than commandeering another boat. It would be slower, and noisier, but he wanted time to think, and a chance to get a feel for the City without dignitaries present.
There were stares, of course, and whispers, because not many agents of the Empire travelled that way, but even as he ignored the other passengers he could feel the point at which some bright spark nearby worked out who he was. Word travelled swiftly around the boat, people going to farcical lengths to try and pass on the information without Raphael’s noticing.
He watched them, and the changing waterfront of Vespera as the vaporetto moved from landing stage to landing stage, each named on a large piece of canvas stretched between two poles – Hall of the Ocean, Exchange, Bank of Mons Ferranis, Aetius Bridge, Clothmarket. At Aetius Bridge, the boat speeded up noticeably as a vaporetto from a rival company pulled out of the Processional Way stop, resulting in a race to Clothmarket that Raphael’s boat narrowly lost, to a chorus of dismay from the other passengers.
He alighted at Charis Opera, the penultimate stop on Triton, after catching sight of the unruly crowd of scholars packing the next landing stage, under the shadow of the Museion on its hill.
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