Vespera

by Anselm Audley

  ‘They’re also noble, kingly creatures,’ he said, with mock pomposity.

  ‘Only from a distance,’ Thais said. ‘Would you rather lose your lustre close up?’

  ‘I’m not going to win, am I?’ he asked.

  She appeared to think for a minute. ‘No,’ she said, a note of finality in her voice. ‘You’re not.’

  ‘Saying that to me is just asking for trouble.’

  ‘What makes you think I don’t want it?’ Thais asked. ‘Did I ever refuse to go along with your schemes?’

  ‘You tried to talk me out of them.’ The sisters and instructors at Sarthes had hoped Raphael’s association with Thais would soften him, make him see their point of view. Unfortunately, Thais was too different from her fellow novices, and more particularly the instructors, for that plan to work.

  ‘That’s because mine were better, and more subtle. Now, I claim a dance.’

  ‘Exiles can dance?’

  Thais’s mouth quirked. ‘I can dance,’ she clarified. ‘The novice-mistresses did not approve. They said it was unseemly.’

  She’d chosen her moment well, as a dance came to an end then, and they made their way out onto the floor as the next one was announced. Thais seemed to attract almost as much attention as Anthemia had done, because to see an Exile of Sarthes dancing at such an occasion was probably unprecedented. But then, Thais wasn’t exactly an ordinary Exile.

  ‘There must be at least one of them watching,’ Raphael said, as they slipped into the dancing hold, and he caught his breath for a moment, realising he hadn’t been watching anyone else for the last few minutes, and had no intention of doing so now. Which was not what he was supposed to be doing, not at all.

  And, also, that this was a very different matter from the formal, and even the less formal, dances of Taneth.

  ‘They wouldn’t come here,’ Thais said. ‘No-one to chastise.’

  ‘Not even you?’ Raphael asked.

  ‘I’m not a novice any more,’ Thais said. ‘They can only disapprove in stony silence.’

  ‘We’d be the ones in stony silence,’ Raphael said. ‘Some of them had a glare that could turn you to stone.’

  ‘They never quite managed with you,’ Thais said. ‘Maybe your mind is already made of stone?’

  ‘I thought it was metal and wheels,’ Raphael said. ‘And while we’re on the subject of compliments, what sort of a compliment was that?’

  Then the dance began, another waltz, more stately and measured than the whirlwind of the Imbrian waltz. Not a contest of strength and wills, this time, it was something quite different, something Raphael was still trying to cope with when silence fell.

  Silence fell so abruptly the musicians played on for a few seconds as the couples on the dance-floor came to a confused, abrupt halt, looking around them. Eyes turned to the door, people at the far end of the Octagon Gallery moved in for a better view, where the walls wouldn’t hide whatever was happening.

  Thais stiffened, twisted round slightly to see what was happening, and Raphael instinctively let go of her as his sense of danger took over.

  Valentine appeared in a corner, from what must have been a hidden doorway; Gian was talking to Aesonia, seemed on the verge of leaving to consult with her in private, but they all froze.

  The newcomers weren’t coming only through the door, they had appeared in every open window to the courtyard and the balcony, terrible figures out of legend come to life.

  They wore layer upon layer of black cloth, torn and shredded to resemble rags while concealing the women underneath – they were all women, he could tell that from here. Their forearms had been painted a ghastly white, their fingers turned into claws, and each carried a scourge in one hand and a snake in the other. Snakes to match their masks and hair, made up in a frighteningly lifelike resemblance of shrieking harpies.

  Three stepped forward, robed and masked with greater care than the rest, out into the silent, appalled throng of guests.

  ‘Pray continue,’ the first, on the left, said, into the dead silence.

  ‘Those whose open hands are pure, anger of ours shall not pursue.’

  Then the second, on the right. Another near-quote, words no-one dared interrupt.

  ‘Our chosen part is torment

  And great ones’ overthrow

  When War turns home, and family

  Makes family’s life-blood flow

  Then in their strength we hunt them

  And lay their glory low.’

  And finally, as Raphael felt the world closing in around them all, the one in the middle spoke, slowly and deliberately, omitting two lines and slowing further at the end.

  ‘And so men’s glories, towering to the sky

  Fade under earth, and in dishonour die.’

  The Furies shook their scourges as one, and then on an unspoken signal they turned and left, tattered figures running out among the guests in the Fountain Court, weaving between the columns like scenes from a nightmare, until they came together by the Great Gate through which they had entered, and left as one. Except . . . was there a man running after them, a man Raphael recognised? He was on the wrong side of the room, and too far away.

  The musicians dared not play. Nobody dared speak, not after those final words, lest they find themselves tainted with the Furies’ brush. Thais looked at Raphael, as lost as everyone else.

  Clan Jharissa’s, Raphael tried to tell himself, but the images were too raw, too real. Too true.

  He saw Silvanos appear by one of the windows on the courtyard side, gesturing sharply to a man who had to be Plautius. An otter mask, Raphael would have to remember that. A few whispered words, a sharp gesture, and Plautius ran off into the courtyard.

  Then, with a great crash, one of the servants, either terrified or gifted with a superb instinct for human nature, dropped a tray of glasses, and the spell was broken. People began talking all at once, a din which reached to the rafters as the relieved musicians began playing again.

  The gathered company suddenly moved almost as one in a great rush out towards the courtyard, as if they could catch the Furies in their flight, spilling out into the open under the Vesperan stars. A stampede, pure instinct, as if the hall were about to collapse on their heads. Thais went too, heading for her fellow acolytes and Aesonia by the entrance.

  Raphael stayed in the suddenly almost empty hall, the frightened musicians, and Rainardo Canteni in his chair. There was something odd about the way the old man was sitting, something Gian, over by the door, noticed a split-second before Raphael.

  Raphael was younger and fitter, but Gian beat him to Rainardo’s chair by an instant, knelt down beside his old friend with a look of horror on his face.

  Rainardo suddenly fell forward, almost catching Gian off-balance, and as Raphael moved to support the Ulithi High Thalassarch, he saw the tiny dart protruding from Rainardo’s neck.

  ‘No!’ Gian shouted, a sound of utter loss. ‘No!’

  Raphael closed his eyes, allowing himself a second of despair as Gian’s heartbroken cry echoed on the vaulting of an empty hall.

  ‘And so men’s glories, towering to the sky

  Fade under earth, and in dishonour die.’

  INTERLUDE II

  THE RUINS OF ERIDAN

  NINE MONTHS AGO

  It was uncharted territory for Navigator, and after the next settlement, for Windsoar as well. The notes they’d collected when the two ships met ran out, and Odeinath fell back on the more cursory, bare-bones information supplied by the Xelestis ships that regularly served the north, and who disliked competition because there was hardly enough for them to make a living off as it was. Trading on arctic routes tended to be a sign of desperation, a weak or financially incompetent ship which had failed to make it in the more lucrative but also more competitive tropics. Sailing up here was easier on the ship, but considerably harder on crews who were drawn from warmer climes.

  The weather, predictably, worsened as they headed into the norther
n seas, day after day of driving rain and endless swells under a leaden sky which sapped everyone’s morale. Hours on watch were a form of purgatory, endured only with the help of flasks of coffee from the ship’s thankfully well-stocked supply.

  Nine days out from Lamorra, they found ice. A lone berg, drifting slowly southwards with the current, lashed by the same savage northern gales. It was the first most of the crew had ever seen, but it was only a blurry white form glimpsed through the grey curtain of rain, soon vanishing into the gloom behind them.

  They saw dozens, and then hundreds more as the days wore on and Navigator pressed further and further into the arctic seas, into the edge of the cone of devastation created by the Thetian armies and the storms nearly three centuries ago.

  And they were, apart from the sea-mammals and the birds, entirely alone as they threaded their way ever further northwest. Even fifty years after the storms which had originally caused this devastation had ended, no-one had returned to these islands with their black, forbidding cliffs and their stark mountains. Only gulls lived there now, roosting in their millions on the side of white-spattered cliffs or, once, in the ruins of another Tuonetar city.

  Odeinath spent his off-watch hours in the ship’s library, maps and charts spread over the table. The north had never been mapped by modern technology – what was the point? – and never surveyed in the old days, while the alliance still held. The ships of Thetia, even under the Empire, had stayed in the tropics where wealth was to be had, wars to be fought, ships to be captured, islands to be colonised. Where it was warm.

  He should have gone south first, to provision, Odeinath thought tiredly one evening, hunched over the table in the library as Navigator battled upwind against the same heaving, monotonous seas. Or find one of the Jharissa ice stations to ask for what maps they had, or at least a look. Jharissa were jealous of their ice monopoly, no wonder given the amount of money it must make them, and paranoid because of their hidden war with the Empire. He could forgive a great many sins, in a clan persecuted by the Empire.

  Instead, he was here, trying to map the south coast of Thure using what charts he had, Bostra’s Geography and Carausius’s History of the Tuonetar War. None of them were that much help, for the usual reasons. Carausius had been to Thure twice, once on a diplomatic mission when it seemed the Great War might have ended in peace rather than obliteration, and the second time with the army of his brother the Emperor, on the strike that had destroyed Eridan and ended the war. But he’d been a mage, not a geographer.

  At least on the second visit he could have been more helpful, even if the first time the Tuonetar had made sure he knew as little as possible about the geography of their continent.

  There was definitely an opening, a water-filled chasm in the coast almost directly above Thetia that ran deep into the interior as far as Eridan. Which wasn't even close to the north pole, damn the Empire and their propaganda maps. The Tuonetar capital couldn’t be more than two hundred miles from the coast, where the chasm emerged with a huge and bulbous peninsula to the east.

  The chasm had certainly been the heart of the Tuonetar dominions, with its warm-water vents and geysers. Carausius had speculated that possibly, just possibly, the chasm ran down through the crust and into the core of the planet, which would explain its heat.

  Odeinath heard footsteps on the companionway, two sets of them, but didn’t turn round. A moment later, Daena slipped a flask of coffee into its holder, and he saw Cassini move round to look at the maps. They’d decided he’d been alone with the maps long enough and were coming to be sociable, damn them.

  ‘Don’t complain,’ Daena said. ‘You’ve been in here for hours, and with so little light it’s not good for you.’

  ‘You nag like an old woman,’ he said grumpily.

  ‘I’m the doctor, it’s my duty.’

  ‘That’s what you call it.’ Still, he was grateful for the coffee’s extra warmth. None of them were ever warm up here. Odeinath had tried piling every cover and blanket he could find onto his bed, but it never seemed to make any difference, he still felt as if the ice had penetrated to his bones.

  ‘What are you actually looking for?’ Cassini asked, settling down in another of the chairs.

  ‘Right now, where we should be heading,’ Odeinath said. ‘We’re sailing blind into the darkness, and I don’t like it. Particularly not after Massilio warned us away.’

  ‘That wasn’t what you said after Lamorra,’ Daena pointed out.

  ‘That wasn't what I thought after Lamorra, but it turns out to be the case. I thought we had a much better idea of the geography of the far north.’

  ‘But once we get there, what are we looking for?’

  ‘Massilio’s people, the ones he tried to keep us away from,’ Odeinath said. ‘Or Clan Jharissa. They may not like it, but if we turn up at one of their ice stations they’re not going to sink us, or turn us away without helping.’

  ‘Even though we’re trespassing in their beloved arctic?’

  ‘It isn’t their beloved arctic, they’re just the only people who want to be up here.’

  ‘Aside from us,’ said Cassini cheerfully. ‘But what makes you think Massilio’s people are up here? Surely they’d be on one of the more civilized islands outside this devastation zone.’

  ‘Massilio saw the ruins of Eridan,’ Odeinath said, tapping the spot where he guessed Eridan was with his pencil. By my reckoning, the nearest settlement of any size to Eridan, is, in fact, Lamorra, which is . . .’ he took up his dividers to plot the distance ‘ . . . nearly three thousand miles to the southeast. Amna is more or less due south, but another five hundred miles further away. If you want to get from Lamorra to Amna, you have to make a huge sweep south, and it’s not much when you get there anyway. Bigger than Lamorra, but lacking even the rudiments of civilization.’

  He looked from one of them to the other as Daena, too, sat down and took a swig from the coffee flask before passing it to him.

  ‘So why are we going three thousand miles on the strength of what Massilio said?’ Cassini asked. ‘He didn’t even tell us where he was from.’

  ‘He lied to us about a lot,’ Odeinath said patiently. ‘But he had no reason to lie about having seen Eridan – in fact, he had every reason to pretend he hadn’t been there, because it was bound to raise so many questions. Which leave us with a man who is half Thetian and belongs to a rather strange order that requires him to wear a black uniform, wandering around three thousand miles from the nearest civilization. The nearest civilization, that is, if one doesn’t include the Jharissa ice stations.’

  ‘But why didn’t Massilio mention the ice stations, if he were Jharissan?’ Daena said. ‘And why would any Thetian clan spend hard-earned money providing plumbing to barbaric northerners who are of no commercial use to them whatsoever?’

  ‘Jharissa could be building up their own empire out here,’ Cassini suggested. ‘We’ve been hearing odd reports of things going on further west ever since we got out of the tropics.’

  ‘But why would anyone want an empire up here?’

  ‘Interesting question,’ Odeinath said. ‘The other possibility is that Massilio belongs to something else entirely. Jharissa have a huge area of the north to play with, and their only interest is in extracting some of the infinite supply of ice to be found up there. Moreover, if you were trying to build up influence, you’d probably want to use the Jharissa colours and name.’

  ‘Not always,’ Daena said, ‘But whether Massilio is linked to Jharissa or not, we’re looking for a single fish in a very big ocean.’

  ‘What we’re looking for is the ruins of Eridan,’ Odeinath said, with a straight face, ‘which I’ve always wanted to visit.’

  ‘You truly want to go all the way there?’ Daena said, a little incredulous. ‘I thought Massilio . . .’

  ‘It’s an excuse as well as an objective,’ Odeinath said. ‘I’m fifty-three, Daena, I’m not going to have another shot at this unless things change very r
apidly. Now it should take another four to five weeks to reach this peninsula. I don’t know how big it is, but rather than miss the entrance entirely and sail on into the open sea, we’ll head too far north, then follow the edge of the ice shelves.’

  Carausius had mentioned that the chasm was ice-free for part of the year, and they should reach it a week or two before northern midsummer, have a few weeks to investigate and be able to head south again before the weather closed in . . . They’d miss their scheduled meetings with two other ships, but that couldn’t be helped. The captains would understand when he told them eventually – a chance such as this wasn't to be passed up, and most of his fellow Xelestis knew him for an oddball who’d leap at the chance to visit a place most Thetians believed to be cursed.

  ‘But do you have any idea what we’ll find?’ Daena asked.

  ‘I can’t say I do,’ Odeinath admitted, and remembered Massilio’s frozen eyes. It was a gut instinct, but he’d learned to trust those for all he played the rational architect and man of science.

  The days lengthened dramtically as they sailed northwards, and after another two weeks of misery the weather cleared, and they found themselves sailing through a field of broken ice under a clear blue sky, though it lacked the colour and intensity of a Thetian blue – the light simply wasn't as strong.

  By the time they reached Thure, the sun was barely dipping below the horizon, and so the lookout was able to see quite clearly when, at the end of the night watch, Navigator came into sight of the mountains of Thure. Two days earlier, Navigator had reached, by his own calculation, the furthest away from Thetia she had ever been. Vespera lay over thirteen thousand miles to the south of them, a quarter of the way round the world.

  He called an impromptu holiday, because the crew needed one, and they gathered in the cabin to sing, mostly, and drink a measure of the spiced Thetian brandy he kept for special occasions.