Vespera

by Anselm Audley

  ‘Someone who should know,’ Raphael said. ‘It seems a great many people have been having nightmares recently.’

  Bahram nodded. ‘He’s right.’

  ‘You know something prejudicial to the Empire?’ Raphael asked carefully. ‘How prejudicial? I don’t want to know, but I need to find a way to protect you. The Emperor and his mother are preoccupied with the surrender of Vespera right now, so you may have a chance.’

  ‘We have evidence of something the Empire did, something terrible,’ Odeinath said, and hoped his trust in Raphael was still well-founded, even as he tried to take in the damage that the mere mention of Dream Twisters could do, even in a roomful of old friends.

  ‘More terrible than Saphir Island?’ Raphael asked.

  ‘Who the Ice Runners are,’ Odeinath said. ‘Why they hate so much.’

  ‘They hate because the Empire defeated them.’

  ‘I wish that were all,’ Odeinath said. ‘It’s a great deal worse than that.’

  Raphael sat back in his chair for a moment, fingers tapping the carved lions’ head at the end of the arm.

  It seemed so incongruous to be having this conversation, in a place Odeinath had never expected to come, and a room which could have been straight out of any house in Mons Ferranis. Except for the distant noise of shouting and the faint smell of smoke from the burning Portanis.

  ‘I must go,’ Raphael said, after a moment. ‘As soon as possible. The less you know of me, the better for you. Bahram, have Dariush bring pen, paper and an envelope I can seal.’

  ‘You should leave the City,’ Bahram said, nodding to Dariush.

  ‘But you can’t,’ Odeinath replied. ‘And with what you know, if the Empire finds out, not even being an Ostanes will help you. Accidents are easy to arrange at such times.’

  Bahram flinched, and Odeinath realised that for all his intelligence experience, Bahram had never truly been in danger, because he played the game from a position of such advantage, with loyal retainers and the services of his ‘mercenaries’ who had been in Ostanes service all their lives. Not to mention that killing a Mons Ferratan banker of stature was something very few people could even hope to get away with.

  But they were beyond money now, and Bahram was right. Mons Ferranis wasn’t a big enough power to deal with a victorious Empire, and certainly not to effect revenge for such a thing as this.

  Dariush returned, set the pen and paper and envelope carefully in front of Raphael, automatically lining the edges up with the table. Odeinath suppressed a smile – no wonder Bahram’s house was immaculate.

  ‘Don’t leave tonight,’ Raphael said levelly. ‘There’s something I need you to do in the morning, and I know I’m putting you in danger by doing this. Please believe me when I say it’s our best hope. I won’t let who I serve interfere with helping my friends, am I clear?’

  Raphael’s meaning was clear, Odeinath realised a moment later, even if he sounded more like a stranger now.

  ‘Will you do this?’ Raphael said, writing very fast and pressing the paper so hard Odeinath thought he would tear it.

  ‘Yes,’ Odeinath said. Bahram nodded; so did the other two, a moment later.

  ‘First thing, and this is not related, Bahram – I need a boatman who can keep his mouth shut, to come to Ulithi Palace an hour before dawn. Can you arrange that?’

  ‘Will it harm my people for me to arrange this?’

  ‘Not in the slightest. It won’t be linked back to you.’

  ‘Then I’ll do it.’

  ‘Second, I’ll write in this envelope what you need to do, where you need to go. Take your evidence with you. Don’t open it until the morning, but make sure you wake up early. Even if the Dream Twisters find you – and it’s only a possibility, I don’t even know how many of them there are in the City – the Empire will need time to act. The Twisters will have to wake up, and report, and then they’ll have to plan any inconvenient accidents. Not to mention they won’t know where you’re going, because it’s here in this envelope.’

  ‘You will,’ Odeinath said. Raphael folded the paper and the envelope and passed it to Bahram, who had had wax and the Ostanes seal ready.

  ‘I have some protection,’ Raphael said, standing up, and Odeinath wondered what the sudden, brief change in his expression meant. Maybe Daena would have picked it up, she was always better with faces. ‘Goodbye, and I hope we meet in better days. Oh, and one more thing.’ He looked at Bahram.

  ‘There’s always one more thing, with you,’ Bahram said, but nobody smiled.

  ‘There’s a Ralentian enclave in High Avern. They’re not involved with Clan Jharissa, and the Empire knows that. The mob won’t. If you can spare any of your mercenaries, or borrow any clan troops, they deserve protection.’

  He waved and turned for the stairs so rapidly that Dariush had to run after him, and a moment later they heard the door slam again.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come back,’ Odeinath said, and sent a prayer to Thetis for Navigator, at anchor in a port beyond his power to help her.

  Raphael would have gone straight to Orfeo’s, but first he made himself turn north, up to the watershed on the south side of the Avern, to look down into the Portanis, to burn the image into his mind.

  As if, after what had just happened, he needed any more.

  It was a scene from a nightmare, worse than anything the Dream Twisters sent, simply because it was real. Thick black smoke was rising from a score of houses, others were blackened ruins, and the blue flashes of aether weapons lit up the night sky, in places of waterglobes shattered by the violence. He heard shouts, screams echoing across the water, past the stream of ships pulling loose from their berths and heading towards the open sea, so many of them that they jammed the channel.

  On the far side, dark running figures were everywhere, and there were three or four fights in the streets, the flare of aether weapons, still bodies in lying in corners. There were no mobs, only brotherhoods on the loose, and terrified Jharissa families barricaded inside their houses while detachments of armed Ice Runners from Jharissa Palace forced their way through the streets to help them.

  And not simply Ice Runners either, Raphael realised. He saw blue armour, a detachment of Xelestis marines with shields and staves charging a knot of rioters, pushing them into the water of the Avern, and more clan details arriving, Seithen and Barca and Estarrin and Decaris. The violence must have erupted as soon as news of Saphir reached the City, almost certainly deliberately, but it seemed as if the clans of Vespera, without orders from the Council or in some cases their own imprisoned leaders, had taken matters into their own hands, and were pouring their energies into an attempt to restore order.

  No matter what happened tomorrow, Vespera was still the clans’ city, and Raphael began to believe Leonata as he watched the clan marines grimly holding their ground. He even caught sight of the birdlike figure of High Thalassarch Corian Decaris, in over-large armour, directing his troops, and, a few moments later, Hasdrubal Barca charging a group of rioters with a few marines at his back, putting them to flight. Just before he turned for home, he heard the jingle of mail below and saw a company of Mons Ferratan mercenaries in full armour racing towards the Avern.

  There was hope, but only a little.

  South of the Portanis, though, the less aggressive members of the brotherhoods patrolled the half-empty streets, walking past shuttered shops and closed coffee-houses and tabernae. Only once he reached Aetius Bridge, guarded by an entire century of Rapai marines in yellow and silver, did normality return.

  He arrived at Orfeo’s, the sounds from inside, if anything, noisier than usual, and paused for a moment outside the door, listening to a lone violinist play a tarantella at incredible speed. The smell of coffee still hung in the street, but there were no courting couples on the balcony, not any more.

  Orfeo’s was packed.

  It seemed as if every musician in Triton had crowded into the coffee house, and the noise was deafening. The stamp of
feet echoed from the ceiling, and every table was packed to capacity. There were patrons sitting on the plants, perched against columns, sitting two to a chair, talking at the tops of their voices. The air filters were having a hard time, and every screen had been removed, every fan was going in a desperate effort to move the air. Orfeo’s would normally get the wind blowing across from the east, to make it bearable, but at least it was protected from the red dust and the hot blast of the wind by the flank of Triton.

  It should have been a recipe for disaster, so many people packed together in the maddening Erythra, and Raphael heard three men engaged in a furious argument as he squeezed past, trying to get to the bar. But these were musicians, and while their rivalries and hatreds were every bit as vicious and heart-felt as everyone else’s, violence wasn’t their way of settling arguments.

  The air was stifling, and Raphael pushed his way through tight-packed knots of musicians, listening as best he could to gauge the mood.

  The tables had been cleared from the centre of Orfeo’s, hastily pushed aside to create a dance-floor below the stage, for people who were dancing with frantic, remorseless energy, faster than Raphael had ever seen even trained dancers moved, as the violinist moved faster and faster, sweat streaming down his face, teeth clenched like a man possessed. His fingers were moving so fast Raphael could barely see them.

  The music ended as Raphael finally fought his way to the bar, and an enormous cheer went up, shouting and applause and stamping that deafened Raphael for a second, until he joined in as loudly as the rest of them, and the violinist uncurled his fingers from his bow for a moment and bowed. Below his platform, more than one of the dancers, gasping for breath, fell on one another in embraces that had nothing to do with passion and everything to do with a desperate desire to lose themselves.

  The roar died as others copied them, but the stamping of feet still remained, and Raphael narrowly avoided being seized by the musician closest to him at the counter. She was, he saw when she disengaged from someone else a second later, brown-haired and undeniably attractive, with dimples and a scattering of freckles across her nose. Her eyes were wild, distant.

  She caught his eye and smiled, reached one hand out to his face, but Raphael caught it, kissed her palm lightly, and gave her hand back with a smile and a gentle shake of his head. She nodded, holding his gaze for a second, perhaps even understanding, slipped off her stool and disappeared into the crowd.

  On any other evening, Raphael wouldn’t have refused her, and they would almost certainly have ended the night in bed together, in her garret somewhere on Triton. He could see the appeal tonight, the release and the spiralling away into a place where the world could be forgotten, where dreams and fears alike would vanish for a while, followed by exhausted sleep.

  Tonight was different. That had been another man, another time, and Raphael wouldn’t give in to oblivion tonight.

  He grabbed the first barman who came within reach, almost making him drop a bottle of wine. The man started to protest, but he must have seen the look on Raphael’s face.

  ‘Do you have barrels of Gorgano white on ice?’

  ‘Of course,’ the man said, his eyes locked on Raphael’s as if hypnotically.

  ‘Enough for everyone here?’

  The man stared, as if Raphael were mad. ‘But that would cost a fortune!’

  ‘I know,’ Raphael said, but the people around him had heard, and suddenly the sound died, absolutely, even the musician paused as he put down his glass of wine and picked up his bow, ready for another dance.

  Raphael flicked the side of the wine-glass, and the last of the noise, in the far corner, died away. He motioned for the musicians around him to move, to create a space.

  ‘Enough Gorgano white for anyone who wants it,’ he said, into the silence, ‘to toast Hycano Seithen.’

  A small, elegantly dressed man of sixty or so appeared as if from nowhere, grey-haired and with a no-nonsense air of authority that shouted Conductor! ‘Why?’ he demanded. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Hycano was taken at Saphir Island,’ Raphael said, pitching his voice to carry over the crowd, ‘because he alone dared to call the Emperor tyrant. His courage should be remembered, and our shame. Leonata Estarrin asked me to do this. I am Raphael Quiridion, and I gambled his life on the Emperor’s mercy. You’ll know, tomorrow, who and what I am. Drink to Hycano, and remember him.’

  Noise erupted again, questions and demands, and for a second the look on the faces of those nearby was so dark Raphael thought they would tear him to pieces. They had recognised him, now for a servant of the Empire, even if they didn’t understand his last words.

  ‘Bring the barrels out,’ the barman ordered. ‘Put them over at the edges of the platform, there’s nowhere else they’ll go. Boot the Marmora Quartet off, they haven’t paid their tab in a week, they don’t deserve to sit down.’

  ‘A glass for me, please,’ Raphael said, and waited in an empty circle until the barrels had been brought out and mounted, and the musicians were thronging, with the same impetuous heedlessness, to fill their glasses. He gave the proprietor of Orfeo’s a draft on the Ostanes Bank, which Bahram or Bahram’s people would honour. It would leave Raphael almost penniless, but then, after tomorrow that probably wouldn’t be a problem.

  Would he ever come back here? Once the story of Saphir Island got out, nobody would ever quite believe he hadn’t meant to kill Hycano, and nothing would change that. Raphael had marked himself the moment he made the easier choice – Thais had been right.

  Maybe it hadn’t been the easier choice, after all. Was it better to be a slave with one’s soul unstained, than embrace darkness and damnation in the hope of a greater light? Or was this nothing more than revenge?

  Revenge for the Furies, he realised a moment later. There was no name in Thetian mythology for such a thing, because no-one had dreamed Furies could be overcome.

  Eventually everyone, or almost everyone had their glass, the din of Orfeo’s fell silent again, all eyes turning to Raphael. There was a single fresh glass on the counter, frosted from where it had been in the ice-house, waiting for him.

  He reached over to pick it up, and in the second his fingers closed around the glass, he felt the shock and the terrible cold and the nameless fear flood back into him, and shivered as if he’d plunged into the high arctic, jerking his fingers away.

  Why? What was he afraid of?

  They had seen him, but he steeled himself and took the glass again, refusing an explanation.

  ‘To Hycano Seithen, who dreamed of a Vesperan Republic. Poet, musician, man of letters, Orfean, citizen of Vespera, a braver man than any of us. I promise to you now, I will do all I can to bring him home. I drink to Hycano.’

  There was a second’s pause, and Raphael thought he saw a grudging respect in the conductor’s eyes before the man raised his glass and shouted, ‘Hycano!’

  Others took up the cry, some lifting their glasses so violently that the wine spilled out, then they drank, and then turned away, the noise rising again, the normal chaos of Orfeo’s returning. The musician struck up again, and the dancers surged out onto the floor in singles or in pairs, the frenzy beginning again.

  Raphael finished his glass, the cold digging into his hand like needles, and then left it on the counter and made his way out. A path opened for him, almost miraculously, but he neither stopped nor looked back, even once he came out into the quiet night air of Vespera.

  It hadn’t been Leonata’s revenge. It had been her way of proving to him that Iolani had been telling him the truth about his origins.

  He turned back uphill, all the way through Clothmarket to the edge of Stone Basin, to hammer on Bahram’s door again,

  ‘Show me,’ he said. ‘Show me what happened.’

  Raphael sat back in the chair, struggling to breathe. Bahram was utterly still.

  In the darkness of the Mons Ferratan embassy’s aether room, the last image of the recording was frozen above the aether table.
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  A plain of bones, stretching away into the distance, thousands upon thousands of them. Raphael closed his eyes, but there was no release. He saw the sheds, the towers, the barracks with their tiers upon tiers of bunks, the road.

  The bones.

  His flesh felt like ice.

  He remembered.

  Only very distantly, fragments of memory. He had been very young, and very cold, and very frightened. Looking up and seeing bare rock above him. Tools piled in a corner. Rags fluttering in the wind. Hands torn and bleeding. Coughing, everyone coughing.

  The mountainside – he remembered that more clearly, the stark whiteness of it, the sudden emptiness when he went outside, his first sight of the sky, and being terrified of it. Then the cold, biting worse than it had ever done, the wind biting into his flesh, the agony of it. He had cried, and someone had been carrying him, had wrapped him in something warm and rough, and the pain had subsided a little.

  Had it been his mother? Her face had been swathed in rags, he could only see her eyes, dark, he thought. Not her face. He couldn’t remember her face.

  The snowstorm, being lost in the endless white, a world without bearings, where even up and down ceased to mean anything, lying beside someone in the snow. Hands picking him up? A girl, a few years older, so thin she was almost a skeleton, wisps of ash-blonde hair, leading him along, calling out for the others.

  A man, so much taller than either of them, picking them both up, holding them as he forced his way through a snowdrift, and then people in the distance, on strange white beasts, all around them, lifting them up. The man hadn’t let go of them. His face had been covered, but he had black irises.

  A twisted black city on the horizon.

  And then playing with a silver kitten in the courtyard of Silvanos’s house in Vespera. His first memory, so he’d always thought.

  Iolani had been right. It had been true.

  He felt himself double over, a racking cough, a sharp pain in his lungs. Always, when he was cold.

  His fingers around a glass, a nameless fear.