Chilled Gorgano white.
A sea of lost souls . . .
He wrapped his arms around himself, trying to stave off the terrible cold, lost in his mind, seeing the bones again.
There had been bones outside the mine, picked clean by the white wolves who managed to survive, somehow. Skulls, living people he had known.
A presence in his mind, mocking laughter, waking sobbing in the night, only to fall asleep again and have the white wolves close in.
‘Raphael!’
‘No!’ he shouted, hands clutching his arms, digging in like claws. ‘Don’t.’
‘Orange groves,’ said another voice, deep, reassuring. ‘Remember the orange groves outside Vectis. There was a fountain, and a stone pavilion, and we all sat and looked out over the desert. In the shade, because it was too hot.’
Orange groves. Raphael remembered now, and where he was. He let go, opened his eyes again. The image had gone, and there was light again. Not daylight, only the sullen golden glow of flamewood lights warming up. Bahram was there, in a yellow robe, and Raphael fixed his eyes on the robe, the brightest thing in the room.
He was supposed to be planning his revenge, and instead he was hunched in a chair like a terrified child, in a room below the Mons Ferratan embassy where there was an aether table, a chill room with only green wall-hangings to offset the bare stone and the cold blue light.
Raphael had been old enough to remember the north, which meant even his age was probably a lie. His entire life had been, in a way, because it had been Silvanos’s darkness which had driven him to leave Thetia after he ran away from Sarthes.
He’d thought it was defiance, but Silvanos had planned it, sent Raphael to Sarthes knowing what would happen. Silvanos had driven him away, to spend all those years free of Thetia and what it had become, had forced him to find his own path.
Silvanos was a Lost Soul, just as Raphael was. And Raphael had lived his life exactly as Silvanos wanted, because it was the best thing Silvanos could do for him.
It was a bitter, galling thing to acknowledge.
‘Why didn’t he tell me?’ Raphael said, at last. They were all looking at him now.
‘Ask him,’ Daena said.
‘Before it’s too late,’ Bahram added.
Silvanos was the traitor, the spy in Valentine’s counsels. The ruthless, feared servant of the New Empire who had lived a double life for a quarter of a century, serving and helping the Empire he was sworn to destroy.
For Thetis’s sake, why? So many questions. And tomorrow Silvanos would make his move against Valentine, the last hope for the Lost Souls and for Vespera itself. Silvanos and, almost certainly, ever-present, bustling, efficient Plautius, the man one turned to if one wanted anything done. The man who could be anything, who seemed to have no life except his work.
‘Bahram, could I beg paper and envelope again,’ said Raphael, sitting upright. ‘Best if it’s not a Mons Ferratan watermark, I think.’
‘I thought I’d let you write your seditious orders over paper with our name on it, actually,’ Bahram said, with a faint smile. He went over to a small chest in the corner and extracted some paper, flimsier and less imposing than his beautiful writing paper, but it would do.
‘Our orders have changed?’ Odeinath said, only half-seriously. Raphael forced himself to concentrate, pushing all those questions to the back of his mind.
‘Bahram, find a Mons Ferratan manta and get the four of you on it tomorrow morning. Don’t sleep until you’re on board and an hour or so out from the City.’
‘And the recording?’
‘Take it to Salassa Palace. If it doesn’t convince Petroz to do what I ask, nothing Silvanos and I can do will be enough.’
Silvanos and I. Raphael didn’t think he’d ever said that before. He finished the letter and handed it to Bahram to seal.
Odeinath gave Raphael another bear-hug as he turned to go. ‘Good luck, Raphael.’
‘If you should hear that Silvanos . . . that we failed, name something for him,’ Raphael said. ‘And for Iolani.’
Odeinath nodded, and then Raphael turned, and ran up the stairs, wondering if he’d ever see them again.
An hour before midnight. Valentine felt as if he’d been in this great domed room in the Compass Tower for hours, high above Ulithi Palace, giving orders, conferring with his captains, his tribesmen, the leaders of the clans who supported him.
Laying his plans until everything was settled, and everyone was in position. He’d made sure they were ready tonight – Navy officers and tribesmen dispersed in his and his allies’ palaces all over the City, ready to collect each of the High Thalassarchs when the signal was given; other troops ready to occupy the Palace of the Seas and quell any disturbances on Triton.
All it awaited was the signal, and a few final arrangements.
‘Lord Emperor, please!’ Thais said, eyes glistening with tears. ‘Let me try, for Thetis’s sake. I almost got there on the way back, I know I can bring him over.’
‘But you haven’t,’ Valentine snapped. Even a room as big as this, with its full circle of windows and the high domed ceiling, fans whirring on the walls, was too small a place to spend so long. ‘I’m still not certain of his loyalty.’
‘Didn’t he almost kill a man at your command?’ Thais said. ‘Wasn’t that enough?’
‘It would be enough, but not with so much at stake,’ Aesonia said. ‘Thais, we need to know if we can be sure of Raphael tomorrow.’
‘And if you’re not, what will you do to him?’
‘We’ll give him a task tomorrow that doesn’t matter,’ Aesonia said gently. ‘He’s one of our best, but he’s too new to our service for us to be sure. Find out what he plans, if he is truly loyal, and if you have the slightest doubt, tell us, and we’ll keep him out of the way. It’ll be the best for him not to have a chance to make any decisions he’ll regret.’
‘If he tries to move against us, I’ll have no choice but to arrest him,’ Valentine added. He knew his mother was fond of Thais, saw her as something like a wayward daughter, but they were too close to risk a maverick bringing them down now.
‘But how am I going to get through his barriers?’ Thais asked, her voice tailing off at the end. Aesonia gave her an arch look.
‘No!’ Thais said. ‘Don’t ask me to do that! It’s difficult enough getting him to trust me as it is.’
‘I can put him with the other prisoners, if you’d rather,’ Valentine said, but Thais looked only to Aesonia.
‘You promised me you wouldn’t use this.’
Aesonia went over and took Thais’ hands. ‘I know it’s not the way you want this to happen, and I wish for your sake we could have been sure of him. But now, tonight, I need you to do this. Not many of us get to do our duty in quite such an enjoyable way; I can guarantee you most of your fellow acolytes will be green with envy.’
Thais shook her head. ‘He’ll know. Tomorrow, if not tonight, he’ll realise what I’ve done.’
‘Then find a way.’
‘Why not just give him the unimportant task and be done with it?’
Valentine hadn’t expected so much argument from her. She was his mother’s acolyte, sworn to Exile obedience, and she would do as they asked. Valentine met his mother’s eyes, and nodded. Aesonia turned back to Thais, her expression hard.
‘I’ve given you enough latitude, Thais. I asked you, because I prefer you to follow willingly. But you will obey, because you have no choice.’
Thais went rigid, her breath coming in short gasps. She stared mutely at Aesonia and Valentine could see her trying, and failing, to resist.
He walked out onto the balcony, with its view high over the empty Fountain Court, and walked a quarter-circle, then another, east to west, then back into the room on the opposite side. Neither of them had moved, but Thais’s brow was beaded, and her fingers were curled like claws. He didn’t like this, but he was beginning to realise there wouldn’t even be a New Empire without it. The
Navy alone couldn’t rule Thetia, not any more. And if there was suffering involved, it was a small price to pay for the Empire he would build. An Empire where justice would be perfect because nothing would be hidden, no wrong would go unpunished.
The territories he controlled now were already coming close. There had been no rebellions or attempted assassinations for ten years; it was said of Azure that the most beautiful woman in the world could walk naked through the darkest street, in the middle of the night, carrying a fortune in gold, and not be touched. A great deal of effort must have gone into thinking that one up, and he’d always wondered if it had been a committee of bureaucrats or some sailors in a taberna.
Either way, it was the Dream Twisters who had secured that perfect safety under which his people lived, just as the Navy protected it from outside attack.
Thais took a ragged breath and fell to her knees with a quiet, anguished moan, pulling herself into a novice’s pose, sitting back on her heels, hands crossed in her lap, head bowed.
‘Forgive me,’ she whispered.
‘When you’ve succeeded,’ Aesonia said, and gave an indulgent smile, reaching down to put a hand under Thais’s chin, tilting her face up. ‘He loves you, Thais, he’ll forgive you. You can find a way.’
Thais nodded.
‘Now go,’ Aesonia said. ‘This is your part for tonight. Find Chymist-Mage Laelithia and tell her I’ve authorised you to use whatever from her selection she thinks will be most useful. Thetis go with you.’
Thais bowed, and left the room down the central staircase with as much dignity as she could muster, the door at the bottom closing behind her. Valentine counted her footsteps, waited until she’d passed the guard. One of the tribesmen, conveniently out of earshot.
‘She’ll do it?’
‘Raphael will be out of the way,’ Aesonia said. ‘But once this is over, we’re going to have to break him.’
‘You’re sure he isn’t loyal?’
‘He’s hiding something, and what else would he have to hide, if not disloyalty? Thais is desperate not to let me see his dreams, because she thinks he’ll come round in the end.’
‘If you want to break him, why not do it now, and save Thais the bother?’ Valentine said. ‘I can’t run the risk. Have him drugged and taken to the Sanctuary.’
‘We can’t alienate Silvanos. He doesn’t like my Dreamers.’
‘That’s because they’re putting him out of a job.’
‘I’m having them watched,’ Aesonia said. ‘If Thais fails tonight, Raphael will be taken, and we’ll buy Silvanos off later. He’ll have other things to worry about for the time being.’
‘Like keeping my prisoners safe.’
Valentine went back outside and looked down into the empty courtyard, seeing nothing but the waters of the fountain glittering in the moonlight. Everyone who mattered was here in the Palace, and all of them were waiting for tomorrow. His enemies would be laying plans, and soon they’d be sending their troops and advisers off for a few hours’ rest while the City slept or lost itself in debauchery.
And while half his opponents’ troops were fighting street by street to restore order in the Portanis. If they’d had the sense to stay out of it and let the Ice Runners deal with the brotherhoods alone, their marines would have had a night’s rest, and been fresh for tomorrow – and in the palaces for tonight. But they weren’t, and the last reports he’d had were that they were still fighting, slowly pushing the brotherhoods back.
And while they were doing so, he would take their palaces from them.
CHAPTER XIX
The house was deserted.
Raphael called out in the courtyard, but there was no answer, only an affectionate greeting from two of the cats, who wove around his ankles as he crossed into the house.
No-one there. Only darkness and silence. The main room was deserted, but when he activated the lights he saw the lid over the piano was up, which Silvanos only did when he played it.
And there was no music, which meant one of a few pieces, the ones Silvanos played with demonic intensity when the black moods took him, pounding away at the keyboard like a man possessed.
Possessed of a dreadful secret.
How could anyone live like that? Not simply to conceal a secret for decades, but to serve the Empire which had sent him to die in the mines, and quite probably killed his family. To serve the Empire, and kill for it, knowing it sent its victims to the living hell of Thure.
Death’s kingdom in Life, Odeinath had called it.
Raphael shivered, as if the house were too cold. He knew now why nothing ever changed here. It was Silvanos’s way of reminding himself what he was here to do.
He went upstairs, but there was nothing in any of the rooms. Raphael had spent the nights here since his return, little more. There was always somewhere better to be, and of course he’d never looked long enough to see clues that might have told him.
Why should he ever have guessed he was a Lost Soul?
He went into Silvanos’ bedroom – it was unlocked, for once – and found the drawer where the remedy was kept, took one of the flasks and the spray-bottles and slipped them inside his clothes, into the various convenient pockets he always had built in where they’d be least noticeable.
He would need them tonight.
There was no message in his own, temporary room, and the intelligence room was deserted, moonlight streaming through the windows onto the tables of maps and plans and reports. The rooms off it were equally deserted – not even a trace of Plautius, who usually worked late. Only an hour after midnight, and the whole Palace was eerily quiet.
Raphael moved over to the windows. Only the gardens, rising steeply up the side of the hill, lush tropical foliage basking in the hot breath of the Erythra.
And, at the top, in the shadow of the cliff, nestling in the trees and almost hidden from the Palace, the top of a green dome, crowned with a bronze sphere.
It seemed familiar, and oddly compulsive, as if he needed to go there, but why? What was it?
There was no sign of Silvanos. The Emperor might have sent him to prepare the way for tomorrow. Raphael would come back once he’d been up the hill. A climb would keep him awake better than waiting in his room. He’d hardly slept the previous night, only a couple of uncomfortable hours on the observation deck of Sovereign.
And he needed to be alert tomorrow, yet how? How could he stop the Dream Twisters invading his mind?
You have a guardian angel. What had Plautius actually meant?
He made his way back downstairs again and out through a little dark passageway smelling of clematis, into the edge of the gardens. The sound of cicadas, falling water, and the hoots of night birds were a backdrop, but he filtered them out, listening for any other sound, but there was nothing. No footsteps, no whispered words.
The gardens were very formal at the bottom, with high hedges and geometrically laid fountains and flowerbeds, but once he made his way through an arch in the hedge, he was in a different world. The hill had been deliberately cut into cliffs and terraces, with paths winding their way up between closely packed palms and ferns, and everywhere there were streams and waterfalls, flowing over and along each level in silver cascades, burbling along the sides of the paths.
He climbed. The trees were all around him now, and with the hot breath of the Erythra the air underneath the trees was close, stifling. The leaves rustled slightly in the wind, a constant backdrop oddly like the sound of surf. He looked down, but he could only see the hedge, blank and impenetrable; he’d come along the hill from the entrance.
A sound above his head, and two birds erupted into flight, out through the canopy and into the night air. Raphael breathed again, making his way up the switchbacked path beside a fountain pool. The path seemed to be narrowing, the plants on either side growing higher, and finally they met above his head, trained over an archway so they enclosed him in a tunnel, and Raphael felt himself relax.
And then the tunnel crested
the hill and turned, abruptly, and Raphael saw a temple high above the sea, a colonnade with a pool, overlaid by a dome, and a small closed sanctuary leading off on the landward side, set in a square grass clearing with trees on all sides.
There was no path; Raphael walked out over the grass, cut short enough to be almost a carpet, up the two outer steps into to the colonnade. The trees formed into an opening to the west to frame the sea, glittering silver in the moonlight. As long as he stayed inside the colonnade, he couldn’t see a single building. Only the waters of Star Deep and the sea far beyond, and green hills, and the silver moon Ithiri high in the west.
A place of peace, a haven in the City above a wild garden. There were thousands of such places; to create them in Vespera was every master-gardener’s task. The garden of Ulithi Palace, and the temple, were masterpieces of the art.
The smell of flowers still hung in the air, and Raphael closed his eyes. He had almost dreamed this place, he was sure, a temple above the sea surrounded by forest, though the temple in his dream had been on a deserted hillside.
But it was close enough.
He sat down on the top step, at the edge of a colonnade, and leaned against a column. Even the Erythra was welcome to him, warm and dry. He wanted peace, just for a little while, for the memories crowding his head to go away. To forget the touch of glass, the knife in his hand, the Ice Runners on the beach, the force of the wave.
And the ice and the cold seeping into his bones, being lost in the white of the snowstorm.
Just a few moments’ peace.
Valentine turned the handle, very slowly and quietly, and stepped into the room beyond, a small, bare servant’s room.
The blanket on the floor was empty, the man who’d been sleeping there already on his feet with a sword levelled at Valentine’s chest.
‘Don’t do that,’ Zhubodai said.
‘I’m still alive?’ Valentine said. ‘You’re getting slow.’
‘And you shouldn’t do that.’ Zhubodai sheathed his sword. ‘What is it?’
‘Time to go.’ Only Valentine and Aesonia had known they would move tonight. Zhubodai wasn’t a traitor, they were sure of that, but he was more than adaptable enough to cope with being woken up, so they hadn’t told him.
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