Vespera

by Anselm Audley

  Did Valentine or Aesonia understand that this was the true heart of Vespera, the key to what it was? Or were they so blinded by the Hall of the Ocean and the magnificence around the Marmora that they’d failed to see the realities?

  They were very close in now, moving under the Hub itself, below what might have been a central dome before an observation deck was built around it, high enough to see the mantas manoeuvring underwater, at least close to the Hub. At intervals up the Spur, purpose-built towers soared above the rooftops, a safeguard in case the incredibly complicated aether communications network failed.

  Which it did, on an irregular basis.

  Finally Manatee glided in against the fenders of the pontoon, and sailors made her fast. Two men in Harbour Service dress uniform waited with a crowd of attendants. A welcome distraction from their normal duties, or a tedious waste of time? Raphael couldn’t tell.

  Leonata was the first to disembark, followed by her leading advisers. Raphael didn’t hear the formal greeting she exchanged with them, but then Flavia tugged at his arm and pulled him into position a little way back, ten or so places behind Leonata as she set off in what was almost a procession, into the bowels of the building, followed by her splendidly dressed but distinctly disorderly clanspeople.

  Their voices fell to a hush as they entered the main building, down a surprisingly grand corridor. He thought they’d go through into the main atrium with its flamewood lifts and ramps leading down, the point of entry and exit for this whole section of the undersea harbour. All the clan offices were here, representatives of Tanethan Great Houses, other shippping concerns, consular officials, messengers, expectant families – he could hear the din in the atrium from the other end of the corridor.

  Instead, they turned down a grand staircase, passing below sea-level and down into a gallery lit by water-filtered sunlight, and an unparalleled view of the undersea harbour. Spidery gantries, some filled with men and cargo, others empty, waiting for mantas to dock there or being serviced by divers. Searays darting between the larger ships.

  But it was the mantas that caught and fascinated, the great, eerie shapes visible everywhere, their wings stilled as they lay in docks. He caught a glimpse of one moving, heading out towards the lagoon and the open sea, looking for all the world like its living namesake.

  The waters of the Deep, like all the Vesperan waters, were clear, clearer than they’d have been naturally. Filtration systems and magic swept the silt out from the rivers flowing into the Deep, draconian regulations and the City’s sewage system ensured it stayed clean. Murky or dirty water would damage the mantas, cloud the sensors, wreak havoc with the equipment and take a terrible toll of the skilled engineers who had to work on repairing the gantries day in, day out.

  They curved all the way round to the other side of the Hub and then stopped in a hall opposite an empty gantry, where the Estarrin clanspeople arranged themselves according to some unwritten rule. Once again, Raphael followed Flavia, and ended up standing right at one side, careful not to block the views of those behind him with his height.

  Already waiting were three other Thalassarchs and their escorts, Bahram, two white-clad notaries, and two Exiles in midnight-blue robes, yet another order Raphael didn’t recognise. Most of the larger Exile foundations belonged to one of four or five orders, the Sarthien chief among them, but there were dozens of smaller.

  ‘They’re Contareans,’ Flavia whispered. ‘They run coastguard and rescue priories.’

  ‘I thought she’d have asked a more powerful order.’

  ‘She doesn’t like any of them enough. The Contareans don’t meddle in politics, and they do a lot of good.’

  ‘So her children weren’t Exile-educated?’

  Flavia gave him a look which implied very clearly what she thought of his intellect after that question.

  ‘Hardly any of the clans do, these days.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I have no idea. Ask.’

  Before the formal greetings could finish and the conversation die down, Raphael risked another question.

  ‘Why the Thalassarchs, and who’s the third one?’

  ‘The third one . . . Oh, Shirin Rapai. Leonata invites her closest allies, it’s a way of saying she trusts them as if they were her own clan.’

  ‘And Bahram?’

  ‘The Clan’s banker, also a friend. She . . .’

  Flavia cut off abruptly, and the noise in the room died. The party of honour at the front turned to look out at the gantry, a long polyp tube. It was divided in half horizontally, the top half on their level, tall enough for a big man to walk down, the lower half underneath with tracks for the movement of cargo.

  Beyond it, a manta had appeared out of the gloom, seeming to float in for its rendezvous with the gantry. A manta whose skin, both the dark blue on top and the grey-white underneath, was flawless and unmarked by age or scars of battle, her wings and tail terminating in perfect points. Her horns were covered by white cloth.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ Flavia said, so quietly Raphael realised he hadn’t been meant to hear, but others were saying the same, and they were right. He’d never seen a brand-new manta before, and for the Estarrin it was their new manta, still more so because it had been built by one of their own. Almost one of their own.

  The manta came to a stop, and Raphael heard the distant impact as the docking bolts latched on, the corona of white water being expelled from the junction.

  Silence descended. Raphael could see people moving down the tube, closer and closer, and then the inner hatch opened and several people in sea-green and orange livery stepped out, as well as four Estarrin engineers, one bearing an ornate scroll, the type still used for formal occasions.

  ‘Is High Thalassarch Leonata, of the Clan Estarrin, present?’ asked the central newcomer, a woman in her sixties with white curled hair. Clearly a formal question, after bows had been exchanged.

  ‘I am,’ Leonata said.

  ‘Your engineers have confirmed this ship seaworthy and fit for service in your clan. Will you accept her?’

  Leonata looked to the engineers, who nodded one after the other. An Aruwe attendant unrolled the scroll, and she and the others scanned the document.

  ‘Thalassarch Corsina, I will accept her,’ Leonata said, and the scroll was held out while an Estarrin attendant carefully dripped wax onto it, before Leonata pressed the heavy signet into it.

  ‘Then we surrender this ship from Aruwe service into Estarrin service,’ the Aruwe leader said. Did the Thalassarch of the Aruwe do this for every ship, or was Leonata special? And which one was the daughter? None looked particularly like Leonata, and they were all studiously professional. One was a man, one too fair to be a relative of Leonata’s, another was virtually an Amazon. Perhaps the last, with long straight brown hair? ‘May she serve you well and in prosperity.’

  The Aruwe people stepped aside, their part apparently done, and the two Exiles came forward.

  ‘Is it your wish to dedicate this ship to Thetis’s protection?’ asked the taller, a distinguished-looking man of Leonata’s age.

  ‘It is,’ Leonata said.

  ‘And by what name shall she be known?’

  The Estarrin clanspeople surreptitiously leaned forward, and Raphael realised she hadn’t told them. A quick smile flitted across her face, echoed a moment later on the Exile’s, as she strung them out before replying.

  ‘She shall be known as Umbera, in honour of the last Doge of the Republic, and a true heroine of Thetia,’ Leonata said, and the Exile’s reply was drowned out by applause. A Sarthien might have been put out, but this man only smiled again, waited until the noise had died down.

  ‘A worthy name,’ he said, and turned towards the sea. The others did likewise, and from somewhere nearby a bell rang.

  Raphael had expected him to say the prayer, but instead he began to chant, a chant joined a moment later by the second man in perfect unison. The words were so archaic he could barely follow them, and it
was in a mode rather than a key, a method of composition extinct for centuries.

  There was utter silence. Even the noises of the Hub seemed to subside slightly as the chanting echoed through the passageways, a chant as old as Thetia, and Raphael felt his skin prickle simply from hearing it, listening to the hypnotic melody rise and fall, the mellifulous words of Old High Thetian flowing over him.

  Then, finally, they brought the invocation to an end, and intoned a short blessing on the first crew. Outside in the sea, divers swam down and placed a wreath of star kelp over each of the horns, and then removed the white cloths to reveal Estarrin patterns in bright new markings.

  ‘May Thetis watch over you and your people, High Thalassarch,’ the priest finished, and then his face split into a broad grin. ‘Estarrin!’ he shouted. The echoes of the chant were drowned in the resulting cheer – and, by the hatch, the Amazon stepped forward to lift up Leonata in a hug, an ectastic smile on her face. That was Anthemia?

  The ceremony was over, and the Estarrin rushed over to the windows to get a closer looked, as Anthemia swept her mother, Corsina, the guests and their closest advisers off up the tunnel for an inspection tour of the ship, followed by the Exiles. Legate Orando barred the way to the rest.

  ‘You’ll get a look in a minute! Give the mistress a chance, how’s she supposed to see any of it with you in the way?’

  Lost in the excitement, Raphael stood back against the wall to wait – and thus managed to keep himself out of sight when, less than two minutes after Leonata and the others had concluded their tour, Iolani Jharissa stepped out of the corridor to one side.

  ‘Aether chamber failure,’ Aesonia said slowly, handing the engineers’ report back to Silvanos. ‘Sabotage,’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Valentine. ‘In theory, one could induce a catastrophic failure by pouring power into the system. A concentrated aether burst. It’s the equivalent of a flash-flood, too much in too little time for the defences to cope with.’

  The others looked at him with interest. Silvanos had cleared his main office of agents and secretaries while they spoke, and they had the big palace upper room, with its panelled walls and the enormous map of the City, to themselves.

  ‘You learn a lot of things at the Academy,’ Valentine said. The Naval Academy his father had founded in Azure was a new creation, and far inferior in facilities to the old, destroyed by Ruthelo during the Anarchy, but it was based on the same principles. Its instructors taught their charges how to sail everything from small boats to galleasses, every possible duty on a manta, and all the technical and engineering side they could cope with. It was a three-year ordeal, but the officers it produced were the best in the world.

  Valentine had hated the technical side, but he’d applied himself, knowing neither his father nor Rainardo would tolerate slacking, and well aware he had to stand head and shoulders above his fellow cadets to deserve his command.

  ‘If Jharissa has a weapon capable of destroying a battle cruiser in one surge, we have to know about it!’ Aesonia snapped. ‘My mages can deal with it, but not if they don’t expect it or know how it works.’

  ‘Our technical intelligence on the Jharissa is limited,’ Silvanos said apologetically. ‘We don’t have any agents inside the clan, so we can’t get on board their ships.’

  ‘No,’ Aesonia said, moving over to the map. ‘I’m tired of this. We’ve been tiptoeing around them ever since we arrived. Silvanos, I want one of them taken. Preferably a senior one. Who have you been tracking?’

  ‘It could blow up in our faces,’ Silvanos warned.

  ‘If we have one of their key people, it won’t matter,’ Aesonia said. ‘We can get all the information we need out of him.’

  Valentine tried to hide his distaste. He knew such methods were necessary, but, as Rainardo had said, it was no part of a naval officer’s duty.

  Except he was Emperor now, and such things were, ultimately, his responsibility. If they would save his peoples’ lives, stop hundreds more sailors dying at the hands of these cowards, these assassins who hid themselves under a cloak of respectability, then he would order them done.

  ‘And if he proves able to resist?’ Valentine asked. It was something to consider, that their target might be strong and fanatical enough to die without talking.

  ‘No need for that,’ Aesonia said. ‘I shall use my mages to obtain the information more directly. Silvanos, have you pinpointed all the Ice Runners’ homes?’

  Valentine glanced over at the map. A masterful demonstration of the intelligence Silvanos had collected, it was covered with pins, tokens and symbols in tense shorthand, marked with all the clan palaces and major buildings and routes: an almanac of Silvanos’s spy network across the City. Or that part of it which he made public.

  ‘Most of the Ice Runners live along the Avern’s north side, here,’ Silvanos said, running his pointer along the top of the map. ‘Near Jharissa Palace, for the most part, but there are a few who for whatever reason have chosen to live all the way along here, in Avern Falls.’

  ‘What’s that knot in High Avern?’ Valentine asked. It marked a break in what he now realised were the homes of Ice Runners thickly dotted along the Avern.

  ‘That’s where the Ralentians live,’ he answered. ‘To the best of our intelligence, they’re not involved with the Lost Souls.’

  ‘They’re still northerners,’ said Aesonia thinly.

  ‘Only in the sense that we and the Mons Ferratans are both equatorial peoples,’ Silvanos said equably. ‘They’re neither as poor, nor as desperate, nor as vengeful as the rest of the north.’

  ‘But they don’t mix,’ Valentine said, studying the pattern of pins. ‘The Ice Runners east of the Ralentians are isolated.’

  Silvanos’s black eyes met his gaze, faintly troubled in some way Valentine couldn’t define. He was concerned about the consequences, should they be caught, and Valentine was inclined to agree with him. This operation had to go perfectly, or they would lose a great deal of the support they’d gained over the last few days.

  ‘Do any of the senior Ice Runners live in that area?’ Aesonia asked.

  Silvanos reached down for a piece of paper on a shelf below the map, and ran his eyes down it.

  ‘Yes,’ he said after a moment. ‘Our friend Captain Glaucio, of the Allecto.’

  ‘We take him, then,’ Aesonia said.

  ‘Only if we can deny responsibility,’ Valentine said.

  ‘I have the very men for the job,’ said Aesonia. ‘If it goes wrong, there will be no link to us at all. Now, here is what we do . . .’

  ‘Leonata, my congratulations,’ Iolani said, crossing to Leonata in three lithe steps, her face split by an unaccustomed smile. ‘They’re so beautiful when they’re new.’

  For a second, Leonata was caught off-balance, but she recovered in a flash. Such amity on Iolani’s part was rare, and she didn’t want to spoil it.

  ‘I didn’t know you were here, or I’d have invited you to join us.’

  ‘That’s an honour for your allies,’ Iolani said. ‘I had business with the harbourmaster, I was on my way back, and I saw all the turquoise.’

  She turned and gazed out at Umbera, one fist resting on her hip. ‘I can see you’ve been seduced into making all sorts of changes by Aruwe and their smooth-talking shipwrights.’

  ‘You can tell from here?’ Leonata asked, amazed. She certainly couldn’t, though she could tell a few things had been moved here and there, like the after torpedo tubes.

  ‘You forget I’ve had nine ships from them, I know what they’re like.’

  ‘We are the best,’ said Anthemia, still beaming with pride. To think her daughter had helped create this – Anthemia had been dreaming for years of the day she presented her own ship to her mother. She hadn’t been responsible for all of Umbera, but the next purpose-built Estarrin ship, due in about two years, was being built entirely under her supervision.

  ‘That you are,’ said Iolani, and she seemed almost
relaxed, as if here, for a moment, she could let some of her shields down. Please, let Raphael have had the sense to make himself scarce; all this could go horribly wrong if Iolani saw him and stiffened up.

  ‘Does that mean you’re here to nag us about the double-hull warping?’ Corsina said.

  ‘No, I’ll save that for later. I just wanted to see your latest creation in her virgin splendour.’

  Corsina’s only response was to raise her eyebrows.

  ‘Interesting choice of name, Leonata,’ Iolani went on, slyly. ‘A heroine of the Republic. Didn’t you call your last one Lavinia?’

  She had, as a matter of fact, but Iolani was the only one who’d commented on the pattern outside her own circle. Leonata wasn’t going to admit to Iolani that she’d hero-worshipped Umbera as a girl, and never lost her admiration for the last Doge of the Republic, who’d tried to hold it together for twenty years and saved it twice, only to see it fall to the treachery of her own brother, at the end.

  The brother who had gone on to become Aetius the Founder, first Emperor. Six emperors called Aetius, and three of them were among the best-known figures in Thetian history. Usually for the wrong reasons, but still impressive.

  Lavinia had perhaps been a more obvious choice for hero-worship, since she had died in her bed, honoured as Lavinia the Great, with a reputation not even the early Emperors dared tarnish. They’d co-opted her, instead, as an example of the virtues of the Republic they wanted to restore, supposedly lacking by the end. But Lavinia had never been truly tested, had never faced crises one-tenth as severe as those Umbera dealt with.

  Odd the way she always thought of that as the Republic, ignoring the one she’d lived through, proclaimed with such bright hope the day Ruthelo deposed Palatine II. What the fourteen-year-old Leonata had thought of that would remain forever locked in her heart.