Vespera

by Anselm Audley

  Odeinath lifted one off and rubbed it between his fingers. Sackcloth, with a scrap of something else, as if had been lined. Or worn over something else, Odeinath corrected, looking around the low, room, made poky by the partially collapsed and patched ceiling. The main room of a house, perhaps?

  ‘There’s more,’ Tilao said, ducking through the entrance. He was so swathed in furs he seemed hardly able to move, and his face was covered by as many layers of cloth as he could arrange without suffocating himself.

  He led Odeinath through more, similar rooms, through a hole in a wall to what might once have been a factory. And, in the corner, a stairway, surrounded by canvas coverings which Tilao and his people had pulled off when they found it. A stairway leading down, wrapped around an enormous lift-shaft, all oddly reminiscent of the Hub in Vespera. The lift-shaft was broken, though, and not even the cables or the machinery remained.

  ‘We went down about two flights,’ Tilao reported. ‘It seems to be intact below that, and the old lights may still work, though we couldn’t find where the power came from.’

  ‘Where are we?’ Odeinath said, pulling his copy of the city map he’d drawn out of a layer of his parka.

  ‘Here,’ said Tilao, pointing with a stray sliver of metal rather than take even one of his gloves off. Odeinath knew how he felt. Even the thrill of exploration was tempered by the cold which seemed to have settled in his bones. The others felt it too, though they wouldn’t say anything yet, still caught up in the wonder of being here and exploring. Give it another few days of huddling below decks at night, wrapped in every blanket the ship possessed, and things would change, he knew.

  Close to those intact cavern doors – could this be a way down? Could the cavern itself be intact still? A place of refuge for those who proclaimed themselves survivors of the Republic? They’d found the wherewithal to make themselves that memorial in the Senate, and that wouldn’t have been the first of their priorities.

  Thank you for your aid. Whoever these survivors had been, however they’d got here, they’d found something in the ruins, something that allowed them to escape here with their lives, which had made them grateful enough to cast a plaque to long-dead enemies.

  Not enemies, perhaps. The Republic had been undone by the Empire, just as the Tuonetar had been. Brothers in desolation.

  ‘Time to go, then,’ Odeinath said, pulling his flamewood lantern from where it hung on his pack and lighting it, as the others did the same. They were using up their flamewood supplies at a worrying rate, but then, he’d already decided they would be heading back to the tropics after this, for a long period of sailing in warm blue seas and a sojourn in a civilized port. Not in Thetia; never in Thetia. But perhaps Athandria, in the Westward Islands, and from there west to Mons Ferranis, to see Bahram? He might not still be there; his last letter, a year ago, had mentioned the possibility of a period in Vespera.

  He could decide this later. As the others were waiting their own lanterns, he measured the stair tread, and then set off downwards, counting the steps as he went. They weren’t slippery, as he’d expected; someone had cleared them of ice, and the covering over the top ensured they wouldn’t become frozen again.

  The staircase was broad, winding down with corridors leading off into the darkness on every level, part of the underground of Eridan that seemed more extensive as the city itself. From what he could tell, and Carausius’s account from when he came on his embassy here, the Tuonetar had lived only at the surface, where they could see the stars. Their farms were on the surface too, though how exactly they had farmed, when they had huge tanks of water filling the farm domes, was beyond him. Their industries were below, to take advantage of the heat coming up through the ground, and so that the heat from the industries would rise and warm the city above.

  Two levels; sixty steps. Odeinath stopped only briefly to peer into the openings; he’d explore those later, but for now, he was more intrigued to see where this stairwell led. The walls of the lift shaft were intact here, so he couldn’t hold the lantern out to see how much further there was.

  Four levels; a hundred and forty steps. The levels were bigger now, perhaps storage or larger industries, and there were doors, rusted closed, which seemed to lead out into something quite different. The ship cavern, perhaps?

  Eight levels, close to sea level by his reckoning, and the stairwell changed. One of the doors wasn’t rusted closed, and below this, the stairwell was choked with debris. Odeinath handed his lantern to Tilao and stepped forward to study the arrangement of levers on the door, until; he noticed a piece of white cloth fluttering from one of the levers, and pulled.

  The door swung open with a groan like the gates of Hell, and a blast of wind came out of the corridor beyond, which lasted only a few paces before disappearing into an immense blackness.

  ‘We’ve found a cavern intact,’ Odeinath said, and heard the faint echo of his voice as he took the lantern back and walked slowly down the corridor, out onto a platform in a space that stretched away in all directions, a space in which his lantern was nothing more than the speck of a firefly, illuminating only a small speck of the platform and the walls. He moved forward to the rails at the edge of the platform, and thought he could see a faint reflection off the ground far below.

  ‘Tilao, you go right, I’ll go left,’ Odeinath said. ‘You have whistles, use the usual signals. Keep an eye out for machinery that might have been used in the last few decades.’ . . . cades . . . cade, the echo came back.

  Tilao nodded, and set out along the platform to the right. Odeinath held his lantern up and made his own way along to the left, in what he was fairly certain was the direction of the gates. He’d given Tilao the longer trip; if he was right, and this was a ship cavern, it would be almost a mile to the far end, but if Odeinath was any judge, the important machinery would be at the seaward end.

  He looked back once or twice, saw the lanterns of Tilao’s group like a little cluster of fireflies receding into the distance, and pressed on. Here and there enormous chains or winches loomed out of the blackness, and gangways led out into nothingness. This had been an arkship construction yard, one the Imperial armies must somehow have missed when they destroyed the city.

  What a treasure! Perhaps even some traces of construction remained, and, more pertinently, somewhere in this space would be the machinery the survivors had bent to their use only a few decades ago – to what end?

  The platform ended after only a short distance at a doorway, which opened with another squeal of protest, and led Odeinath into what was, unmistakably, a control room, lined with windows looking out into the blackness.

  And, equally unmistakably, a control room used since the fall of the Tuonetar. There were scraps of knotted cloth on various levers and controls, small inscriptions in Thetian explaining functions, covering the older definitions in Tuonetar. Secondary winch control . . . pylon cranes 1-19: beware, 12 doesn’t work . . . central gangway hydraulics . . . SEA-GATE CONTROL.

  Sea-gate control?

  ‘Cassini,’ Odeinath said sharply, seeing the young botanist moving from one label to the next with clinical efficiency. ‘Have you found the lights?’

  ‘I’m just looking,’ Cassini said. ‘I think they’re here. It says, Check thermal activity first, or I’ll use you for launching grease!’

  Launching grease? This only got more and more bizarre. ‘Let’s find the generators, then. We might not get the lights unless they still work.’

  ‘I found those, here,’ Cassini said, holding up the lantern to an large clear tube running upwards, with small glass vials of various colours floating in a liquid of some kind. Down one side two long pieces of cloth had been sewn together, and someone had painstakingly written – on cloth! – how to read it.

  ‘How could the power still be going?’ Cassini asked.

  ‘If it comes up from the ground, it’ll never stop,’ Odeinath said, with only half of his mind. What intrigued him was how the Tuonetar mechanism for harness
ing that power survived, and what exactly the survivors had been doing here. It must have taken months to translate and understand all the Tuonetar, to work out what controlled what – and why bother? Why would anyone care what the sea-gate control was, unless . . .

  For the second time in three days, Odeinath felt that peculiar thrill, the numbing realisation of something he’d always believed impossible. Surely not. It was simply too incredible to believe, but otherwise why would they go to such trouble?

  Unless they had found an arkship intact in the cavern.

  ‘I think there’s enough power,’ Cassini said slowly. ‘See, that white vial is up above the three-quarter mark, and the blue one isn’t much further down.’

  Where did the surplus power go? It had to be funnelled off somewhere when it wasn’t being used – was that what kept the water in the Chasm warm?

  Odeinath insisted on making sure, but in the end he had to agree with Cassini, and the two of them stepped over to the lights. Odeinath muttered a quick prayer to any gods who might be listening, and pulled the lever.

  For a long moment nothing happened, and then something sparked in the vast cavern outside, a line of tiny yellow-white pinpricks at intervals on the upper wall, pinpricks which grew into dots, and then swelled further and further until a necklace of lights girdled the cavern.

  It took perhaps an hour for them to reach full intensity, but long before that Odeinath had seen the extent of the room, artificial or at least artifically extended, more than a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide and high, its roof supported by a system of crossing and overlapping beams whose function Odeinath couldn’t even begin to understand.

  On the sloping floor rails ran down to the gates at the end, supporting a moveable cradle on which the arkships must have rested during construction, stained orange from the minerals in the water, but still apparently in perfect order. And, as Tilao reported when he and his group finally returned, the enormous winches which moved it had been freshly oiled in the recent past.

  The others had joined them by then, all of the groups except for a few watchers at the top keeping them in contact with the skeleton crew he’d left on Navigator, who got a day off from exploring and a chance to stay in the warmth, and Odeinath organised them into survey parties to cover as much of the vast space as possible, with orders to report periodically back to the platform where they’d started.

  ‘Why were they here?’ Odeinath said, staring out over the cavern at one point, when Daena and Granius came back with news of recently operated foundries and metallurgical equipment in a smaller cavern off to one side. ‘Why come here? It must have taken them years to work out how to use this and make the ship ready for launching.’

  ‘They fled?’ Daena said.

  ‘All the way here?’ Cassini said, disbelief showing in his face. ‘Why?’

  ‘There are metals here,’ Granius said. ‘More metals than on every other continent put together, so I’ve heard. Mine enough of them, and you could finance anything.’

  ‘Surely if you’ve just lost a civil war, you have other priorities?’ said Lucchera, who was Qalathari, and knew of what had happened in Thetia only from the occasional reference to it among Navigator’s crew.

  ‘We thought they’d all died,’ Odeinath said. His own sympathies had never been a secret, which was one reason he’d left Thetia. And, to find a suggestion that some of Ruthelo’s people had survived, some vestige of the dream his Republic had been. Survived, and perhaps still existed now, somewhere up in these icy northern seas?

  Then he remembered Massilio and his haunted eyes. If anything of the Republic survived, it was transmuted into something much darker.

  ‘Survival,’ Odeinath said. But the same question kept coming back, no matter how much they talked about it. Why here?

  Two days later they found the second plaque, hung over the junction of the sea-gates on the inside, in the same style as the first, but with a starkly simple inscription.

  76 – 42 – 2 NORTH 4 – 12 – 56 EAST

  A map location, in the old Thetian coordinate system, which Odeinath guessed, in the end, lay on the eastern coast of the peninsula, perhaps four hundred miles from Eridan.

  He consulted the crew again, and once again they backed him, though Daena and Granius insisted they stay a while longer. Odeinath didn’t argue; whatever else might have happened here, he wanted the chance to explore, to know the ruins of the Tuonetar Realm as well as anyone could, a chance to walk alone in what had once been the Senate, to wander through the galleries of the Deeps below the city, to investigate the machinery and the wonders of the Cavern.

  He could have spent a lifetime there, and perhaps without that second plaque, the crew would have needed a virtual mutiny to remove him. But Odeinath, no matter how hard he tried to hide it, was a Thetian, and had once been a supporter of Ruthelo’s Republic, and he could never resist a mystery.

  Eleven days after they arrived, Odeinath watched from Navigator’s stern as the sails were hoisted and they set out again down-Chasm, leaving Eridan and its secrets to the eternal winter of Thure.

  PART III

  FOR BLOOD SHED LONG AGO

  CHAPTER XI

  It was almost dawn when Silvanos returned, the groan of the carefully tuned door cutting briefly across the sound of Raphael’s cello. Raphael went on playing, ignoring his uncle’s footsteps as Silvanos made his way through into the main room, and waited.

  Raphael deliberately closed his eyes, losing himself in the music and the faint echo from the dressed stone walls. He’d been here nearly two hours, playing his way through the Unaccompanied Suites, and his arms were growing tired. Not to mention that he’d hardly slept, but the rest the music gave him was better than anything sleep might have brought. His dreams had been nightmares since he came back here, but tonight the vague forebodings had become nightmares, driving him into wakefulness and then downstairs to the solace of the cello.

  He only opened his eyes again when the last chord of the fifth suite had died away. Silvanos hadn’t moved, though it was hard to tell in the near-darkness. Only a single night-lamp burned high on the wall, casting a faint golden glow on the room, reflected in three pairs of feline eyes.

  ‘Should I have stayed longer?’ Raphael asked, resting the bow across his lap, behind the cello. He had helped Gian’s servants and attendants scour the hall, but whoever had killed Rainardo had done so unseen by any other guest, and after four hours of fruitless questioning and searching, Valentine had ordered everyone to their beds.

  ‘Only if you wanted to cover the same ground again,’ Silvanos said, walking over to turn the lights up, enough for both of them to see properly.

  ‘Whatever the Empire is hiding, it can’t hide for ever.’

  ‘And you think that’s a good thing?’ Silvanos said. He walked over to run his hand along the polished wood of the grand piano, an oddly tender gesture.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to know why an army of Furies from the north is trying to destroy it? And don’t pretend this is revenge for the Tuonetar War. I know it isn’t.’

  ‘You’ve lived too long away,’ said Silvanos abruptly. He wasn’t in combative mood this morning, which probably meant he was exhausted.

  ‘Which means? You’re going to avoid the question again?’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Silvanos said, anger flashing in his eyes for a second. ‘Because you don’t have the sense to let ghosts stay in their tombs.’

  ‘The ghosts left their tombs long ago,’ Raphael said.

  ‘You don’t think it would suit Clan Jharissa to present themselves as avengers? A noble, if terrible, cause?’

  ‘Perhaps I might have believed that,’ Raphael countered. ‘But you wouldn’t tell me why there are so many Thetians in Iolani’s supposed army of Tuonetar. I want to know what we’re fighting.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ said Silvanos, walking over to sit down on the piano stool.

  Raphael moved his chair round slightly, its legs scrapin
g painfully against the tiled floor. He didn’t want to have to twist to see his uncle properly.

  ‘Some secrets are best kept hidden?’ he said. Of course they were, except that now lives were being lost because of hidden secrets, and he was being asked to go blindly in the dark.

  ‘Do you want another Anarchy?’ Silvanos asked bluntly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You say that without even knowing what it’s like. Imagine what a prospect it is for those of us who lived through the first one. It started as a civil war. Ruthelo against . . . well, there wasn’t a single leader at first, on the other side. Gian, Rainardo, Aesonia, Heraclian.’

  ‘Heraclian?’ It wasn’t a name Raphael remembered, though it did ring a faint bell.

  ‘Ruthelo’s younger brother. He renounced Azrian at the beginning of the Civil War, and later went on to greater things. You knew him as Catiline.’

  ‘The Emperor was Ruthelo’s brother?’ Why hadn’t he remembered that? He must have known it, but it had slipped his mind. Catiline had lived under that name for so long, and done his best to encourage people to forget who he was. ‘So two brothers married two sisters, and then one couple destroyed the other.’

  When War turns home, and family

  Makes family’s life-blood flow.

  Raphael smiled bitterly. If only he’d thought to look. Of course, if any of Ruthelo’s people had survived, Catiline and Aesonia would be targets of their vendetta.

  ‘You could put it that way,’ said Silvanos. ‘As I said, it started as a civil war, two grand alliances fighting. By the time Ruthelo was killed, the alliances were broken, and the Empire was too weak to rule Thetia. If you wanted to live, and survive, you had to do terrible things. There’s not a man or woman who fought in the Anarchy came out unscathed. Only Vespera truly escaped, by getting the fighting over at the beginning.’