Vespera

by Anselm Audley

  ‘Iolani, you’re safe for now,’ Leonata said again. Had Aesonia’s cruelty tipped Iolani over the edge?

  ‘I’m here, Leonata,’ Iolani said, but her voice was lifeless, without even the brusque bite Leonata was used to. Iolani raised the glass to her lips and sipped. ‘I have a place in my mind, a refuge. They can’t break into it, not yet. It protects me a little from what she did tonight. It won’t when they let the Dream Twisters loose on me, I know what that feels like.’

  ‘They captured you?’ Leonata said. It wasn’t something she wanted to talk about, but she needed to get Iolani out of her shell, at least for the time being. ‘When?’

  ‘I was born in captivity,’ Iolani said. ‘When I was seven, some people in my section escaped. The guards took the rest of us and staked us out in the snow, on the mountainside, and when half of us died without talking, they brought in a Dream Twister. I was the first one she came to, and I didn’t know anything. She ripped my mind apart all the same, and then when she didn’t find anything, she found my memories of my mother and turned them into nightmares.’

  What? Leonata sat absolutely frozen, her fingers clenched convulsively, trying to deal with the enormity of what Iolani had just told her, and what Iolani had assumed. And the sheer, primal horror of what had been done to her.

  ‘So, you see, I swore that if we ever rule in Vespera, there will be no mages in the City,’ Iolani said. ‘And no Dream Twisters.’

  ‘Guards? Dream Twisters?’ Leonata managed to say. ‘Iolani, what happened?’

  ‘You know, don’t you?’

  ‘I know you and your people were the survivors of the Republic,’ Leonata said. ‘I found a report of a fleet heading northwards after Corala fell, I thought they’d managed to escape.’

  Iolani went, if anything, even paler.

  ‘Escape? I thought you knew, Leonata. Nobody escaped.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  Iolani put the glass down and began massaging her wrists, deeply etched with the imprint of the thongs.

  ‘They loaded Ruthelo’s followers, and their families, and the people of Corala, on to that fleet and they took them north, all the way to Thure. There were fifteen or twenty thousand of them that first time, and they brought other fleets later. We were on the second – my family, I mean, though I wasn’t born yet. They made them build a port, and then they marched them into the interior to the mines, and they worked them for metal until they died. Someone had already been using the mines, maybe the Old Empire, and they had descendants of the Tuonetar working there; my mother was one of them.

  ‘You can’t imagine what the north is like until you’ve been there. You’re never free of the cold, not even in your sleep. Nothing lives, there, nothing breathes, there are only the mountains and the ice. Half the year the sun never sets, and the other half it never rises, but I didn’t see the sky until the night they took us outside, and not again after that for another six years.

  ‘They didn’t chain us, because there was nowhere to run, they simply worked us to death, and took the metal south, to fund the New Empire. They must have had more than half their forces up there for a while, but of course we didn’t know. We just worked, hacking at the rock and putting the metal into carts. The lucky ones got to man the furnaces where they refined it, because the furnaces were warm.

  ‘And they let us have children, because so many died, and they needed more slaves, they wanted us to atone for ever and ever for what we’d done, an entire people living in the darkness of the mines for all time. They had Dream Twisters among the guards, to trawl through our minds for any escape plans, to punish us when they decided we ought to be punished. It didn’t leave a mark, you see, and we were still fit for work.

  ‘And then the mines began to run dry. They were old Tuonetar mines, and they’d been worked almost to exhaustion. They began marching people away in columns to other mines, we didn’t know where. Eventually they took my father and me as well, but my father died on the march, and I nearly did.

  ‘But some of my people had escaped, earlier, west to Eridan, and they found the descendants of the Tuonetar and made an alliance, and they raided the last three columns and the mine itself, rescued everyone they could. They made the Empire think we’d all died in the ice, and then they took us away to Eridan, where we were safe. And, eventually, we came south.’

  Iolani finished her account, delivered in that saw flat, lifeless voice without a trace of self-pity, and Leonata forced herself to breathe. She felt sick, but she hadn’t eaten in too long. Images, words crowded her mind, the horrors Iolani had conjured up, and all the worse for the utter lack of emotion in her voice as she told Leonata what had, truly, become of Ruthelo’s clans.

  Azrian, Theleris, Eirillia, Aphraon . . . all that brightness, everything they had been, obliterated in a revenge so monstrous it beggared description. Too much to take in, now and for a long time.

  Iolani was still sitting there, her eyes fixed on Leonata. She’d drawn herself up tighter and tighter as she was talking, wrapping her arms around her knees until she could become no smaller, and her hands trembled at the effort of keeping herself wrapped up so tightly.

  Lost soul.

  It’s a wonder she’s sane at all, Leonata thought, meeting those ice-blue eyes, and reaching out to gently pry Iolani’s hands loose from her knees; her right hand was bleeding again. For a moment Iolani resisted, but Leonata smiled, and she relaxed.

  ‘This is the first time you’ve told anyone, isn’t it?’

  ‘All of my people know. I told Corsina some of it, Anthemia less.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ Leonata asked. The water outside was sunlit blue-green now, and the trunks of a kelp forest waved gently in the middle distance.

  ‘I didn’t know what you’d think.’

  ‘Did you imagine I’d condemn you and your clan if I knew the full story?’

  ‘You say that now we’ve been allies for so long,’ Iolani said. ‘What would you have said when I first approached you?’

  Leonata held her gaze for a long moment, and Iolani nodded reluctantly. ‘The same,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t know you then, or Arria, or Hasdrubal, or any of the others. I didn’t think you’d want to risk the City’s neutrality for the chance of something more.’

  ‘How did you think the City worked?’ Leonata asked, genuinely amazed. But then, Leonata had grown up in the City where commerce and risk and the complexities of the Exchange were absorbed with mothers’ milk. Iolani’s world had been very different.

  ‘I know, I know. But when I came here, all I knew was how to dream, and how to hate.’

  ‘Why you, to found the clan?’

  ‘It was my idea. I volunteered to come south to spy, but then I realised a clan would be the perfect cover. We have more ice than the City could ever need.’

  And a great deal of it was embedded in the soul of this pale, angry young woman only a little older than Anthemia, who had served the Empire with its notice of revenge. And who faced yet more unimaginable suffering for having tried.

  ‘They say a great many things about the City, in the Empire,’ Iolani said, unprompted. ‘They say it’s weak, because we never dared to do what Ruthelo did. That it’s decadent, because we honour our artists and musicians so, and because our bodies are our own. That it’s corrupt, because with so much money around, who would not be?’

  ‘Decadent means anyone who’s more civilized than you are, corrupt means anyone who’s richer than you are,’ said Leonata.

  Iolani almost smiled. ‘And weak?’

  ‘We’ve been weak,’ Leonata said, after a moment. ‘Republic is only a word. There are others that could do just as well.’

  ‘Will we be cowed into calling ourselves something we’re not, because Aesonia will use it to spread more lies about us? Hardly worthy of us.’

  Of us. Whatever Iolani might have been once, whatever she still was, she had become a Vesperan at heart.

  ‘You think we should
have taken the plunge and declared ourselves long ago?’ Iolani went on.

  ‘We were always waiting. Just a few more ships, a few more clans on our side. Waiting for Catiline to grow old and feeble.’

  ‘He won’t get any older now,’ said Iolani, savage for a second, as Leonata’s fingers probed the wound on her hand, but she didn’t resist when Leonata turned her head to examine the wound Aesonia’s ring had made in her cheek, a jagged, ugly tear.

  ‘Would you mind if I treated these?’ Leonata asked.

  Iolani nodded. ‘I didn’t realise you had so many talents.’

  ‘My aunt Khalia was a physician. She insisted her nieces learn some basic medicine. I even went through a phase of wanting to be one, before my chymist phase, I think. She was very glamorous, physician to an Empress, quite an exotic thing for a minor merchant family.’

  Leonata soaked the strip of cloth and began cleaning the wounds thoroughly; Iolani didn’t even wince. No wonder, after all the things she’d endured.

  ‘My family were gardeners,’ Iolani said, after a moment’s silence, looking up at the trees above them. ‘They looked after the formal gardens on the Theleris estate at Endrema. My father said it was a villa, built on a series of terraces above the sea, with a cascade down the central courtyard, and a terrace where you could watch the sun rise over the sea. My family lived in a house above the kitchen garden. It’s in Imperial territory now, so I doubt I’ll ever see it.’

  There was suppressed pain in Iolani’s eyes again, and Leonata remembered the exquisite garden in her house on Saphir Island, now drowned by the sea.

  ‘Apholos taught me how to garden,’ Iolani said, close to tears at last. Something she had not done for a long time, and needed to do very badly. Leonata kept on cleaning the wound, poured a little more of the water over it. ‘He’d been a gardener too, with my father. I didn’t know one end of a plant from the other, but he was so patient. And he survived two decades in the mines, but tonight . . .’

  Then Leonata put the cloth down and held Iolani’s shoulders as the Jharissa High Thalassarch finally gave way to her grief at what had happened tonight, and perhaps even for a small part of all the things that had happened to her in those appalling years in the Thurian mines.

  No human being should have to endure such things.

  What kind of mind could countenance such an atrocity? Not simply the defeated marines and sailors, though that would have been no better. But the Empire had taken everyone, down to the gardeners on the Theleris summer villa. All because they were sworn to the wrong side, because they had followed Ruthelo’s golden promise, because they had believed in the Republic he tried to build.

  Damnatio memoriae. Aesonia had tried to erase Ruthelo’s clans from history, and build the New Empire, quite literally, on their bones. Gian, Rainardo and Catiline must have known, and been involved, and so must hundreds of others more junior.

  How many had that blood on their hands?

  Iolani was still weeping, her breath coming in racking sobs, and Leonata instinctively reached out a hand to stroke Iolani’s hair, just as she had Anthemia’s when her own daughter was small. She held Iolani until finally the tears stopped. Iolani took a cloth and dried her face before she sat up again, looking at Leonata, her face looking oddly young and open for the first time Leonata could remember.

  Iolani was only a little older than Anthemia, after all.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I should have told you earlier.’

  ‘You had your reasons.’

  ‘Bad ones,’ Iolani said, with a grimace. ‘I should have trusted you. It’s too late now.’

  ‘Not quite,’ Leonata said, looking around the room, wondering if anyone would be listening. Petroz would still be in Vespera, and perhaps there was still a chance he’d be able to act against the Emperor. But he had only one warship, if a new one, and he would be terribly outnumbered.

  ‘No, don’t tell me,’ Iolani said. ‘Aesonia will send a Dream Twister when I’m asleep, but she might spare you for now.’

  ‘Then how have you kept the spy’s name safe all this time?’ Leonata asked.

  ‘Conditioning. I can shield some of my mind when I’m asleep. Aesonia will break it, in time, but it’s enough for now.’ Iolani swallowed, and a note of fear entered her voice. ‘Leonata, would you try to do something for me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Would you ask Valentine to execute me? I don’t care how slow or humiliating or agonising it is, or if he’d want me to beg vainly for mercy in front of the whole City. He can do anything he likes to me, as long as he kills me.’

  ‘What’s Aesonia planning to do?’ Leonata asked, her heart broken by the raw pain in Iolani’s face, the fact that she even had to make such a plea. Such a terribly, terribly bleak universe Iolani had escaped from, and now it had swallowed her up again.

  ‘She’ll keep me in a cold dark place like the mines, where I can never see the sky or the stars, and she’ll turn all the things I’ve ever done – every word of kindness, every hug from my father, every evening with my Ice Runners, every clear night, every lover’s touch, everything – she’ll turn all of them into nightmares. Slowly, so I have time to fear what comes next. And when there’s nothing left and I’m ready to go mad, she’ll make me a Dream Twister.’

  ‘But the Dream Twisters are mages, aren’t they?’ Leonata said, taking Iolani’s hand again. Thetis, what could she say?

  ‘No. The power’s there in all of us. They break your mind with torture and nightmares, and in the end either you go mad or you unlock the ability. But for the rest of your life, the person who did it to you has a hold on your mind. Once she’s twisted me, Aesonia will make sure all the people I care about are still alive, and then she’ll force me to destroy them, one by one.’

  ‘But why you? You’re a gardener’s daughter, why not one of Claudia’s children?’

  ‘They’re beyond her reach,’ Iolani said. ‘And so is Ruthelo. He died in battle, so she never got to take her slow revenge. I’m her substitute for Ruthelo. If there were any of his blood for her to get her hands on, even if they turned out by some freak of chance to have served her faithfully all their life, she’d do it to them as well.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ Leonata promised, and couldn’t believe in the space of one night she had come to a place where she had to offer an ally the hope of death. ‘I hope it won’t be necessary.’

  ‘Stars, Leonata, so do I,’ Iolani said, angrily wiping her eye again, and almost re-opening the wound on her cheek. ‘Life is precious, and I know just how precious because of Thure. I wanted to grow old in the City, and build myself a summer villa, like Endrema, with a formal garden, see the sun set in one and rise in the other. I wanted to be a Vesperan, just as you are, and not a northerner at all. To spend evenings in coffee-houses, maybe learn an instrument.’

  ‘You could sing.’

  ‘Sing? Leonata, I have a singing voice like a foghorn.’

  ‘You have a very strong soprano. It needs training, and you’d have to ask Anthemia how to fix your lung capacity, but you could hold your own on the stages at any of the Operas.’

  ‘Really?’ Iolani smiled, and it was like the sun coming out. She should smile more often, it transformed her.

  ‘You have the voice, what you need is the control.’

  ‘I have too much control,’ Iolani said wryly.

  ‘Then use it on your voice,’ Leonata said, and got up long enough to shut the door into the main cabin. ‘Now, you have to sing from your chest, not your throat . . .’

  In the water outside, they both saw the smallest and fastest of the Imperial mantas pulling ahead, speeding past Sovereign to take Valentine’s despatches to Vespera.

  ‘Raphael? Raphael?’

  He came awake in a second, alert for danger, and saw harsh, charred matting against his face. Where was he? That was Thais’s voice. His mouth was terribly dry.

  He sat upright, abruptly, to find the ruined
observation deck flooded with light, and the waving fronds of a kelp forest over to port, a school of silver fish darting through its outer edge, forming themselves into a ball, then a cone, twisting and turning as if a single mind guided them.

  He’d fallen asleep. It had been dawn, and he remembered . . . he remembered Saphir Island.

  Thais had come through the door and was standing at the top, hesitantly, with a flask and some sea-biscuits, naval rations, in her hand. Raphael scrambled to his feet, only to find his head spinning, and he steadied himself against a wrecked aether table. A stab of pain shot up his arm; he’d used the wrong wrist.

  ‘You haven’t eaten or drunk in hours,’ Thais said, closing the door behind her and picking her way over to him. Her hair was loose, for once, and he stared into her face, looking, hoping, for some condemnation, but saw only sympathy and concern. If she were steeped in Aesonia’s malice too . . .

  ‘I couldn’t find you.’

  ‘Why did you bother?’ Raphael demanded. He had dreamed of Thais, or had that been the night before? Of Thais and a small domed temple above the sea, high on the slopes of a mountain somewhere. An odd place to build a temple, but so serene, peaceful, and remote from the horrors of Saphir Island.

  ‘I was worried about you.’

  What could he say? What could he possibly say to her? No, you needn’t be. I have no problem with the Empire demanding my soul. I don’t mind that your mistress killed a great many innocent people, maliciously destroyed an entire village and reduced its people to the level of animals, took their children from them, and tormented their leader, and clearly enjoyed every moment of it. That’s all fine.

  ‘I think there are a great many others who need your concern more than I do,’ Raphael said. They were probably being kept in stalls in the hold while the Empress got to work with her own monogrammed branding iron.

  ‘Raphael, don’t try to hide. I know you too well.’ She handed him the water-flask, and he took a long swig, and another, moistening his parched throat.