Vespera

by Anselm Audley

  ‘Willingly?’ Valentine asked. He’d never quite got used to his mother’s casual eavesdropping. Even his father hadn’t, though Catiline must have known about it before they married.

  ‘Look at her,’ Aesonia said. ‘You think that isn’t genuine?’

  ‘With one of your agents, I can’t always tell.’

  ‘That’s as it should be,’ Aesonia said, letting the curtain fall and turning back to the rest of the room. ‘But no, in her case it’s genuine. If it weren’t, one or both would end up resenting me and the cause I’d asked them to do it for. It’s sheer luck I had Thais with me this time.’

  Valentine walked over to the table, bathed in sunlight from the three bay windows. The room itself was otherwise sparsely furnished; the building that had once been Azrian Palace was enormous, too big for the needs of Clan Ulithi except when an entire Imperial entourage descended. It did have the advantage of privacy, and it wasn’t overlooked.

  Valentine took a pen and tapped the map, measuring the distances again. He needed to send a courier manta off within the hour, if all his ships were to be in place at the right time. With any luck, the reinforcements would be in place tonight, and he’d ordered a substantial portion of the fleet from the central Sea of Clouds up to the Gorgano bases, with two legions following on transports.

  The legions were a backup. The threat of force should be far more effective than force itself, particularly against the Vesperans who by and large didn’t have the stomach for bloodshed. Naval combat took place at a distance, each commander safely insulated by the sea from the enemies he was trying to kill. How many of the Vesperan commanders would have the stomach for a more brutal, face-to-face confrontation? He was betting that none of them did, but the legions would be close. Just in case.

  ‘Is your mage-courier ready?’ he asked, after a final look at the map.

  ‘Ready and waiting.’

  Valentine scanned the orders one last time, then closed and sealed them. It was done.

  CHAPTER XII

  Raphael was allowed on to the bridge only for the final approach to Aruwe, to prevent him seeing the secret path through the kelp.

  The manta was close to the surface, and the combination of filtered sunlight and the Aruwe colours washed the entire bridge in blue-green light, flickering with the motion of the waves and the strands of kelp in the current. Every now and then the light shifted as Cerulean twisted round, weaving her way between trunks through a kelp forest which had seemed impenetrable. The clearances were tiny, and Cerulean was only a frigate-manta, perhaps half the size of a merchant manta. How did Aruwe get their larger ships out?

  The kelp was finally falling away as the bottom shelved up on either side, the trunks becoming smaller and then giving way to sandbanks and the edge of a reef. At its summit, just under the surface, thousands of fragments of spike coral had been jammed into it, ready to eviscerate any boats or men who attempted to land on the island.

  The channel was still slightly deeper, and as they approached the island Raphael saw stone on either side, huge cyclopean blocks forming a wall that extended the barrier islands, leaving only a space large enough for a normal manta to pass through. Provided it was travelling very slowly, and didn’t get caught in the nets and booms that hung on either side.

  Or the gates.

  He’d never imagined such things could exist, even underwater. They were just opening now, two huge wooden doors faced and banded with the same kind of polyp used for the armour of mantas. Their tops broke the surface, though he couldn’t see how far above they went. Shipyards were never approached on the surface – even casual visitors shouldn’t be able to identify the island by its appearance.

  Grilles were set in the stone walls on either side – those broke the surface as well, he realised a moment later – and in front of them were two emplacements of flamewood cannon, too heavy and bulky to be fitted on a ship but perfect here. No doubt there were half a dozen more defences he couldn’t see.

  Even the defences of Vespera, mostly broken during the Anarchy, hadn’t been this impressive – the only place remotely similar was the forbidding island fortress that guarded the approaches to Mons Ferranis, bristling with weaponry above and below the waves. But that was to protect an entire city. This . . .

  . . . was to protect mantas. Between them, the five Thetian yards, even now, produced virtually all the mantas for the clans, the Navy, and most of the rest of the Archipelago. Without them, Vespera and Mons Ferranis would be shadows of their present glory, separated from each other by months of sailing. The Continents would never even have been settled.

  Cerulean sailed on through the doors, which began to shut behind them, into a narrow channel between stone walls, bristling with more nets and booms. Rather than widening out into the lagoon as Raphael had expected, the channel curved round, following what he guessed was the side of one of the islands, but with more cyclopean masonry barring any view of the lagoon.

  Eventually the manta emerged from the channel, the walls giving way to a plain of sand and, stretching away into the distance, the half-formed skeletons of mantas. The sargassum surrounded them, growing up and through them, along the ribs and stretching over the wings, but these were newborns, and it hadn’t covered the skeleton yet. The basin was shallow enough for the seafloor to be dappled with sunlight, endless wave patterns between the shadows of the ships overhead. Thetis, they were beautiful!

  He saw two figures swimming around one, training the sargassum on to the manta skeleton with the grace of people who spent their entire lives in the water. They were strangely elongated, and it took him a moment to realise that they were wearing flippers.

  ‘Only a few people not of the Clan ever see this,’ said the Aruwe captain, Theodoros, a gaunt, drawn man with iron-grey hair. From his age and his tense, watchful demeanour, he was another of the children of the rebel clans. Not a shipwright by temperament, but he’d found himself a place in Aruwe’s small fleet instead. ‘You’re luckier than you know.’

  Raphael kept staring at the mantas, trying to imagine them as the ships he knew, the merchantmen of Vespera and the warships of the Navy, these empty frames floating in the warm waters of Aruwe. ‘How old are these ones?’ he asked the captain.

  ‘Five years,’ Theodoros said.

  ‘And until they’re finished?’

  ‘Nine or ten more years for most of them. Those two over on the right, the bigger ones, will be bulk carriers. They’ll have taken seventeen years by the time they’re ready.’

  He it so casually, if if seventeen years were the blink of an eye, but there was no way he’d still be on active service by the time those bulk carriers were ready. Raphael could well believe the shipwrights had a strange outlook on life, when their work was measured in such spans of time.

  ‘When do they become more than frames? When do you start fitting them to the specifications?’ War-mantas and merchant mantas weren’t so very different, particularly not with the modifications Aruwe were making, but they had different priorities, different systems, which would need to be allowed for when the manta’s internal frame was being developed.

  ‘We tend to separate them early,’ Theodoros said. ‘But for the last two years or so of growth we have to know exactly what we’re doing.’

  ‘Longer if it’s a prototype?’

  ‘Depends how odd. If we’re asked for something very innovative, like heat-lances were when they were first introduced, maybe four or five years.’

  ‘And have you developed any such innovations?’ Raphael asked.

  ‘Nothing on that scale. It’s more a question of many smaller innovations.’

  Of course it was. Except that the ‘innovations’ had been in use by the Tuonetar centuries ago, and only now that someone had bothered to pick through the ruins with an open mind, instead of blasting everything to shreds, would Thetia gain the benefits.

  Cerulean began to turn, and Raphael’s view of the mantas out through the bridge windows was repl
aced by a headland and the gantries of an undersea harbour, interspersed with searay bays cut into the rock. There was already an Aruwe frigate on one of the other gantries, and Raphael wondered just how many ships each shipyard had. Armed frigates, fast and highly manoeuvrable, would be much more potent than battle cruisers in the shallow expanses of the Sea of Stars. They also took far less time to build, so it was entirely possible that Cerulean and her consorts had been designed for Tuonetar technology from their inception.

  Cerulean nudged into the gantry, and a shudder rang through the hull as we connected, silence for a moment or two as water was drained from the connection.

  ‘As we warned you, the Thalassarch is away at the testing range until tomorrow morning,’ Theodoros said. ‘She arranged for one of the shipwrights to give you a guided tour this afternoon.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Raphael said.

  ‘I hope you appreciate how unusual this is.’ The Captain’s expression was cold, hostile. ‘We only invite trusted partners to visit.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Raphael said, with an equally cold expression, well aware that he was now surrounded by enemies. Even with the threat of Valentine’s actions against the Aruwe people in Vespera should he fail to return, his situation was precarious. Leonata was the only person here who’d ever been sympathetic, and she hadn’t spoken a word to him during the voyage.

  Once they’d docked, Theodoros delivered him to one of the shipwrights, while the more favoured Leonata was whisked off somewhere else, presumably to see her daughter.

  The white-painted main complex was ahead – living quarters, communal rooms, a library with distinctive hooded windows, storehouses, boathouses, equipment sheds – it was far larger than Raphael had imagined, but then there were over a thousand people working here.

  The path led down and across a bridge – stone, even out here – and along into the heart of the main complex, a courtyard with a fountain and tables, like a square in any city across Thetia, and surrounded by an ancient colonnade. It was all scrupulously kempt, like a country villa, down to the smell of ground coffee that wafted out across the courtyard.

  The shipwright Corsina had assigned must surely be the most taciturn, uncommunicative clanswoman Aruwe possessed, giving all her explanations and answering all questions in terse, clipped sentences that gave nothing away.

  She took him through plan rooms and testing rooms where the quality of the sargassum and water was evaluated, through engineering workshops where individual aether systems were tested, and others where engineers were developing new systems, and a dozen more they passed through too quickly for Raphael’s mind to take it all in. Besides, most of it was aether, and while basic flamewood systems were easy to understand, aether and its myriad of uses was beyond the mind of any but engineers, while building aether systems was something quite else, the province of engineers who were very skilled indeed.

  And a little odd, everyone acknowledged. Raphael had known some, better than most; their minds simply moved in a different world from everyone else’s, and to be born with such a gift was to be valued for life. There were never enough of them.

  Beyond those were studios where draftsmen were drawing up detailed plans with every single aether connection specified, or templates for internal parts of the ship – building mantas was an enormous undertaking, and Aruwe produced something on the order of a dozen a year.

  The first part of the tour took most of the afternoon, and then after the heat of the day his guide took him out along one of the walkways to where divers worked inside near-grown mantas, fitting plugs and wooden duplicates for systems in some, and threading aether connections and conduits through in others.

  Wherever he went, the shipwrights and engineers simply fell silent, barely acknowledging his presence even when he asked a question, and even then they usually left it to his escort to answer.

  He ate the evening meal alone in his room, by choice; an afternoon of blank silence was bad enough, he didn’t want an evening of it, and no doubt the shipwrights would be happier without him there. He could tell how on edge they were; they must have had some idea of why he was here, that Corsina had been forced to allow him entrance. And that he was an agent of the Empire which intended to destroy them.

  How many here had been members of the rebel clans? They’d all be over fifty by now, which meant they were in positions of authority, but had no-one coming after them. So how attached were the younger shipwrights to the Lost Souls’ cause? Would Aruwe remain a stronghold of the cause even if Jharissa were defeated?

  Did he even want Jharissa to be defeated? He wasn’t sure any more. But it would do no harm to know as much as he could about Aruwe while he was here.

  He waited until the complex was quiet and the shipyards were asleep, watching the patterns of the Aruwe sentries outside for the moment to move. They were marines and sailors from Theodoros’s ship, at least those he recognised, and they were armed, but they weren’t used to keeping watch on their own island.

  He climbed out of the window, dropping down onto the sand below, and crawled a few paces into the shadow of an outhouse, waiting for the next patrol to pass, their patterns regular as clockwork. Then another short dash across to a cluster of kilns, a wait, and from there into the forest.

  The forest was easiest to hide himself in, but hardest to move in, and it was agonisingly slow going for the first hundred paces or so, until the sounds of the night-birds drowned out any noise he might have been making, and he could move a little more quickly, cutting through the forest until a low rise hid the main complex and he could pick his way along a few paces from the edge of the beach.

  It felt as warm here as in Vespera, far quieter, and without the closeness of the City’s air. One of the moons was full overhead, another a thin, reddish sliver rising behind the hills to the east.

  The moons bathed the lagoon of Aruwe in a pale silver light, miles of stippled water with a tracery of platforms and buildings, and the hills beyond, covered in dark forest. It wasn't completely silent, because the islands never were. The ever-present chorus of cicadas and night birds was a constant background hum.

  And behind him, in the white compound of buildings, hundreds of shipwrights, engineers, support staff, people who had dedicated their lives to building the mantas that made Thetia what it was.

  People who had built the mantas Ruthelo used to spark the Anarchy all those years ago, but had found something in the man’s cause to remain loyal to for decades after his defeat. Simply the memory of what they’d lost? Or was there more to it? The very word ‘Republic’ had been blackened by what had happened, and Vespera, though it was a republic in all but name, had never dared to proclaim itself one. There had been talk of using another name for it, perhaps ‘Commonwealth’, but too many were afraid that history would repeat itself, that anyone ambitious and capable enough to proclaim a republic would then find themselves too constrained by it, and attempt to overthrow it and establish a tyranny.

  As Ruthelo had done.

  He looked back along the shoreline, seeing no trace of anyone, but still moved a little way back behind a large rock before he brought out something he should never have been allowed to bring. They had searched his luggage, but the sextant Raphael had brought to fix the island’s position was designed to be taken apart and hidden. It was possible to buy anything one wanted in Vespera, after all.

  He had wondered about bringing his own telescope, had gone so far as to unearth it from among his possessions and slip it into his robes. Even touching the worn leather brought memories of Odeinath’s weathered, prematurely aged face, the creaking of Navigator’s hull and rigging, the squeeing of dolphins riding her bow-wave.

  And the strange kinship of the Xelestis, the true exiles, misfits and outsiders thrown in with the ships of a lost time, still wandering the seas.

  Odeinath had been so patient, even in that last year or so when Raphael had become more spy than explorer, when his interest in the intrigues of the Archipelago had fi
nally conquered the part of him that enjoyed roaming the ocean, the part of him that had learnt so much from a maverick architect-turned explorer.

  In the end, though, he’d decided not to take it, and had bought an even smaller telescope in a small, discreet shop above a ship’s chandlers close to Silvanos’s safe-house.

  The sky was clear here, without the City’s faint haze, and it was easy to take Aruwe’s latitude, add it to the longitude he’d taken his room an hour ago, when the last bell rang.

  Aruwe’s secrecy belonged to another time – or perhaps Raphael’s method belonged to another time. Either way, he had Aruwe’s location to within a dozen miles. They were north-east of Vespera, at a guess no more than a hundred miles from Saphir Island. He could check the location on a navigational chart back in Vespera, there was no hurry now. He was fairly sure most of the Vesperan clans knew the shipyards’ locations, but he hadn’t been able to get it out of them. And, in any case, the key was how to navigate here through the morass of kelp forest, with passages that slowly shifted over time and were known only to Aruwe’s navigators.

  Who, inevitably, encouraged the kelp to grow as thick and impassable as possible, so that any ship attempting to blast its way through would lose a great deal of time and announce its presence long before it arrived.

  He folded the sextant, put it back in its box again and slipped it inside his robes.

  He walked on, along a thinning beach and then struck into the forest, following a path he was fairly sure led to a vantage point he’d glimpsed earlier, two hundred or so feet up on the side of the hill. The air inside the forest was close and clammy, moisture trickling uncomfortably down the back of his neck and insects whining around his face. He’d bought a potion to protect his skin from bites, and he’d had chymists treat all the clothes he was bringing. Which was expensive, because it required a lot of skill to remove the smell, but worth it for avoiding jungle diseases.