Vespera

by Anselm Audley

  They were a while coming.

  They’d left him in the main room of a house, simply furnished with more than a touch of the north about it, and a surprising number of plants. There was a door open at the back into a small formal garden packed with tropical palms and a small stone fountain, all immaculately upkept.

  He heard voices rising and falling outside as Iolani continued her deliberations and gave orders, cries of pain as more wounded were brought in, and then finally a lock turned in the key, and Iolani came in, followed by Leonata, and all the noise of the square for a second before the door closed behind them again.

  ‘So what is it you want to keep away from the light of day?’ Raphael asked, looking from one to the other.

  ‘Breaking someone’s oath before it leads to any more deaths,’ Iolani said. ‘I didn’t swear it, because I was only four years old at the time. Also, before my too-clever co-conspirator gives it away.’

  ‘If I guessed, there’ll be more than one other who did,’ Leonata said.

  ‘Are you going to tell me, or just sit there discussing the secret for a while?’ Raphael asked acidly.

  Iolani slumped down onto one of the chairs in a way that said, this is my place. So those were Iolani’s plants, and her garden.

  ‘You’re one of us,’ she said bluntly. ‘Whether you know it or not.’

  It took a second for what she was saying to actually register with Raphael.

  ‘I grew up in Vespera,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but you were born in Thure, just as I was. Your mother died when you were very young, of the same lung disease a great many of us have, and before she died she made your uncle promise not to involve you in his revenge. Even though the two Empires between them had killed both her parents and all four of her grandparents, she wanted you to grow up untouched by what had happened.’

  ‘But if I’m a Lost Soul,’ Raphael said instantly, ‘who’s Silvanos?’

  ‘That’s why we had to keep this quiet,’ Iolani said. ‘No-one would believe Silvanos wasn’t a Lost Soul as well. Which he is.’

  Raphael shook his head, more bitter disappointment filling him, followed in a flash by anger. He’d hoped for more answers than this, but instead they only gave him another story. Aesonia wove lies? She wasn’t the only one.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said flatly, standing up again. ‘If you’d tried to convince me your cause was worth fighting for, I might have believed you. Maybe it is. But to fight because you tell me I was born to it? Far too convenient. And just as weak as the Empire’s claims of the authority Thetis gives it.’

  Iolani stared at him in disbelief, and he felt a savage satisfaction at having discomfited her at last. How dare they attempt to reshape his past for their own ends? He didn’t care if it remained forever hidden in Silvanos’s half-truths. He didn’t even care if there was a grain of truth in among the chaff, and Silvanos had been a Lost Soul who made himself a new life in the service of the Empire.

  Why should we plunge Thetia into another war because the supporters of one particular cause have gathered the strength to attempt revenge?

  Yes, Raphael could understand that, and for all his uncle’s darkness and occasional cruelty, he could accept what Silvanos had done, cutting himself free from the shadows rather than continuing the blood-feud. No wonder he was so keen to see the Jharissa destroyed.

  ‘I have no family,’ Raphael said. Iolani was on her feet now, glaring back at him. ‘One day, perhaps, I will. And, like the entirely fictional mother you just decided to invent for me, I won’t drag my children into the quarrels of the past. So keep me out of yours, Iolani, even if you can think of nothing better to do than locking me in a tower until this is over.’ He swung to face Leonata, still sitting down. ‘I expected better from you, if you truly intend to make Vespera something greater. If you succeed, ask Iolani to release me, and I’ll come back to the City.’

  ‘Pride will be the death of us, you stubborn fool!’ Iolani said icily. ‘I tried to tell you, and you wouldn’t listen. Your part in this is over. Ice Runners!’

  The door opened in a second, and two of her Lost Souls came in.

  ‘Escort Raphael up to the cells, he’ll be staying there for the duration,’ she ordered, and then as the Ice Runners moved across and ushered Raphael out of the door, she added, ‘The Empire would have killed you for what you’ve done.’

  Raphael didn’t answer.

  The Ice Runners led him out of the square, where the command meeting seemed now to have broken up, and clan representatives and Ice Runners alike were heading seawards. He could just make out a curious, a familiar, roaring from somewhere, like the wind but not. Maybe he was hearing surf on the reef, and hadn’t been listening for it before.

  ‘Up,’ the first of his guards said, pointing into the jungle above the settlement.

  ‘What is that noise?’ said the other one suddenly, but then Raphael heard shouts of alarm from the waterfront, rising quickly to screams as the roaring grew louder.

  And then Raphael knew what it was, as his guards stopped, unsure what to do.

  ‘Run for higher ground!’ he shouted, catching sight of a deeper darkness beyond the houses, a stampede of running feet. Iolani and Leonata emerged from Iolani’s house, looking wildly in either direction, as Raphael shouted again. The people in the square looked around, confused, every second reducing their chance of escape. The earth began to shake and slip, as if the whole island were sinking.

  Raphael couldn’t bear it any longer. He turned and ran uphill, praying that his flight would start a panic, and that they’d follow him. With a shout, his guards took off after him, as the roaring of the Exiles’ wave grew louder, and the screams below were silenced. He could feel the wind rushing in front of it now, and when he nearly tripped over a step at the top of the street, he turned and looked back.

  The wave was impossibly high, still holding true even as flashes of aether discharged against its front, a futile attempt to hold it off. Except that, no, it was wavering, but still advancing, and would reach far inland of where he stood. The ground was shaking so badly now he could barely stand up, and he knew there wasn’t the faintest hope of escape. The crest was still three or four times his height, capping a black wall of water consuming the village of Saphir Island. Now he knew how those pirates must have felt, standing transfixed by their own destruction.

  More aether flashes, and now the wave seemed to writhe, falling back, as if that were possible, its momentum failing, but too late for Raphael. He took a deep breath, as if it mattered, and then began running again, caught a moment later by the surge of water under his feet, and then the wave engulfed him.

  INTERLUDE III

  DEATH’S KINGDOM IN LIFE

  SEVEN MONTHS AGO

  What they found, on the Thurian coast east of Eridan, would haunt them the rest of their lives.

  It was Cassini who finally saw it, oddly enough, one day when he’d decided for no apparent reason to take the masthead watch and endure hours of freezing cold and no-one to talk to, not that he minded the latter. A cloudy day, someone less interested in unknown country and more in their next meal, and they might have missed it entirely, coordinates or no.

  Odeinath clambered up to the crow’s nest to join Cassini, who passed him the telescope. He had years of practice stabilising it on a leaning ship, but what Cassini had seen was several miles away and he could barely make out the low stone buildings and what looked like jetties, and then a road snaking inland towards the mountains. Not Tuonetar, not a city at all, but what seemed to be a point of embarkation? Could that be it?

  But whose, and why?

  After all those weeks of sailing, the crew cheered when he gave the order to turn to starboard and head inland, and to switch on the aether sensors to give them a good view of the bottom as they approached an unknown shore.

  There was, unmistakably, a deep-water channel, perhaps a mile wide, cutting through the rising bedrock directly to the site of Cassini
’s discovery. Deep enough to operate mantas, not that any could survive in these waters. Although, come to think of it, Clan Jharissa did manage. Rumour had it that their solution was simply to build, at each ice station, a covered basin large enough to hold a manta, and to use the hot-water vents and flamewood reactors to warm the water up to tropical temperatures, giving the manta a warm-water bath more than sufficient to revive it for the three- or four-day journey to the next ice station.

  Clever, if true, but also expensive if there didn’t happen to be convenient vents at the right distance from each other.

  It was quite an extensive harbour, four or five stone jetties, spaced widely enough to allow full-size ships to dock between them, cargo lifts, and boxy warehouses built of dark grey stone, windowless and with huge reinforced metal doors.

  There was silence on the Navigator’s deck as they coasted in, the crew lining the rails or hanging from the rigging if they weren't directly involved. There were no gulls here, and even though it was close to midsummer it wasn’t warm, a cold wind blowing in off the sea.

  ‘I don’t like this place,’ Daena said quietly. ‘There’s something about it . . .’

  Odeinath nodded, a chill running down his spine that had nothing to do with the wind. Perhaps it was simply finding an abandoned port in the stark, empty wastelands of Thure, but perhaps not.

  Two of the crew jumped ashore as soon as they could, secured the Navigator to rusting bollards with great hawsers as telescopes were trained on the shore, searching for any kind of life. This close, he could see the stones of the jetties were poorly laid, with grass growing between them, could see the rust on the doors and gouges on the jetties where they’d simply crumbled into the sea.

  ‘Stay in pairs,’ Odeinath ordered. ‘Take weapons if you want, but I don’t think we’ll need them.’

  Steel was no use against the dead, and nothing living would remain in this place.

  Daena and Tilao were the first to follow him down the gangplank, then others. As they stopped on the stones, Cassini remained in the bow, staring landwards and blinking, as if he was watching the place unfold before his eyes.

  They walked along the jetties and across the wharf to the nearest warehouse, its doors frozen open by rust and the elements. The space inside was dark, cavernous, and empty aside from pieces of grey rubble scattered across the floor. Tilao bent to pick one up, rubbed it and looked critically at it.

  ‘Metal ore,’ he said, throwing it to Odeinath. ‘Iron, probably, but it’s too dark to tell.’ He played the beam of an aether torch across the dark recesses, but there was nothing more.

  They went outside again, back onto the shadowed wharf – it was barely past midday but already the sun had disappeared behind those great mountains to the west – and into another warehouse further along. More metal, grey and soft. Lead. Emptiness.

  They left that warehouse and headed away from the sea, up a road paved with crushed, rather than cut, stone, scored by the ruts of wagon wheels. Further in there were yet more warehouses on one side, and to the other a huge stone building like a fortress. The gates had fallen, or been ripped, from their hinges, and the compound and the building were lifeless and empty. There had been glass in the windows, once, but now it all lay in shards on the floor of empty room after empty room with thick walls and great stone fireplaces. Every trace of human habitation, even the ashes in the fireplaces, had gone.

  And then they moved on, still further from the sea. A building that might once have been a factory of some kind, the empty furnaces all that remained. A group of cylindrical, windowless buildings on stilts – grain silos? Again, nothing left except a few frozen seeds which Cassini carefully collected for examination.

  And on the right-hand side, dominated by the fortress-like building, another compound with a double stone wall, and towers at the corners. Odeinath looked up and saw, along the wall, sharp edges of stone and broken glass, and shards of metal as if broken swords had been set upwards into the mortar.

  The chill returned, colder than ever.

  They made their way along to the gate, torn from its hinges, and across the killing ground into a vast inner compound where row after row after row of wooden cabins stood, weathered with age and often open to the sky. Tiny windows that had never held glass, bare earth with thin, listless grass growing across the compound.

  Inside, the huts were long and cold, almost as cold as the outside, and lined with triple-tier bunks so crudely made it was a wonder they’d worked at all. Here and there one had collapsed.

  Odeinath looked at the door as they left, thick and with huge bolts and a keyhole on the outside, and at the double gates.

  Daena was white. Even Tilao’s copper-bronze skin was pallid.

  They left the compound in silence, turned inland still further, past another such compound on the other side and two watchtowers, grim sentinels on the road that led west to the mountains over a low rise and across a plain of stones that might, once, have been cultivated. Odeinath reached out a hand and Tilao, wordlessly, handed him the telescope. He trained it on the distant slopes, but it was too far away and too dark to see anything there.

  He began walking down the road, heedless of the icy Thurian wind whipping through the folds of his warm-weather cloak, and as he got further from the settlement, he began to find things. Scraps of thin, greyish cloth, so brittle that they crumbled to the touch like the Tuonetar pipes. Wooden staves which might once have been the handles for tools.

  Odeinath knew what he was looking for, and he, with the others trailing behind, found them after they topped the low rise and looked down on the flat plain beyond. Flashes of bleached white here and there among the grey stones, long thin shapes and rounded ones, all clustered in groups. Mechanically, he put the telescope to his eye and looked across, saw the objects springing into sharp relief. Most of them were beside the road, but some were further away, on top of the permanently frozen soil.

  Bones. Human bones, scattered in their hundreds and their thousands across the bleak permafrost, some still with pathetic fragments of rags caught on the sharp edge of a rib.

  There were no words, nothing he could say that would take this in. The others were ashen, frozen as if the winter had suddenly caught them as they stood there.

  All of them knew, now, what they would find in those mountains, where the road led. Mines. Death. This was Death’s kingdom in Life.

  The keening of the wind had become the howling agony of thousands of voices, crying out in pain too terrible to be borne, the voices of lost souls carried on the wind.

  Lost souls.

  Daena took the telescope from his nerveless hand and stood there, running it back and forth over the landscape before she stopped, abruptly, with a wordless cry. She gave the telescope back and ran down past Odeinath, along the road and then off it, picking her way through the plain of bones until she stopped, and bent down, and picked up two objects, held them up.

  Odeinath lifted the telescope to his eye, and saw. His hand gripped the instrument so hard that for a moment he thought he would crush it, shatter it into tiny pieces that would lie here with the dead. But it survived, and he held it out to the next person. Cassini. He hadn’t realised Cassini was there, and perhaps it would have been better if he hadn’t come. No-one should have to see this.

  Two skulls, one nearly twice the size of the other, lying close together. One skeleton much smaller than the other.

  Daena put the skulls down again, but couldn’t seem to stand up. The sound of her sobbing was almost drowned by the wind, the voices of the dead in chorus.

  Odeinath looked up, at those impossible white mountains against the sky, down at the emptiness of Thure and the desolation in front of him.

  Lost souls.

  How many were there? He didn’t, couldn’t, count them, but it didn’t really matter how many there were, what mattered was that they were here. And that he was here, in this forgotten darkness at the end of the world. That this had happened, and t
he world had never known.

  There is no justice in this place, no crime so great that it warrants sending an entire people to die in the frozen arctic.

  An entire people. He desperately wanted to believe they were victims of some war in the north, fought in the darkness after the Tuonetar fell, some time in those two centuries of the storms.

  He would have liked to believe it, but there were too many. No power in the north could have condemned tens of thousands to such a death, could have made this happen.

  And after Eridan, and the plaque, he knew.

  Odeinath closed his eyes.

  ‘Of the ocean are we born, from the ocean we live, to the ocean we return. By grace of Thetis we who sail Her waters and are Her people commemorate the honoured dead, whose names are present in Her thoughts for ever. We therefore commit these bodies to the abyss, in the name of all who lie unburied and far from the sea, that in their death they may give life to those yet to come. With the blessing of Thetis, Lady of the Waters, Mother of the Archipelago, Guide and Protector of Thetia and the Clan Xelestis.’

  Odeinath closed the book gently and bowed his head as the melancholy notes of the Last Rites rang out across the grey water on Tilao’s roundhorn. Four of the crew lifted each of the blue-shrouded bodies in turn from where they lay on the deck, wighted down with stones from the plain, and placed them on the gangplank, waiting for Odeinath’s nod to send them into the sea.

  From the quarterdeck, he could just about see them slipping away into the darkness – man, woman and child, one after the other. Three nameless lost souls from the bone field who would stand for all the others.

  The burial party finished the last body, and the notes of the horn died away, and there was silence for a moment except for the flapping of the wind through the shrouds.

  Then Odeinath nodded to the burial party, who came forward and bowed, folded up the Xelestis ensign on which the three bodies had lain, and the ceremony was over, the ragged lines of the crew began, slowly, to disperse.