Vespera

by Anselm Audley

  ‘He won’t be able to stop her,’ Raphael said. It was all so easy, and all he had to do was sacrifice his cursed pride and endure. ‘She’ll draw off half his tribesmen, and with any luck she’ll even take Iolani down. Petroz, I will do this. We’ll defeat her, and we’ll defeat her with perfect justice.’

  ‘Don’t get carried away,’ Petroz said. ‘If Valentine overrules her . . .’

  ‘Valentine can’t, not on this. All I have to do is let slip who I am.’

  ‘Then I come with you,’ Petroz said. ‘It’s the easiest way for her to find out. And, if you’re right, she won’t kill me either.’

  What a family they came from.

  The defending troops were banging on the door behind them, trying to force their way through.

  ‘As you choose,’ Raphael said. ‘Collect some volunteers, and we’ll fight our way in the wrong direction, and get cut off. Tell the rest where they’re going, then they can head off and catch the weapons. Put Odeinath in command if you haven’t got any officers left. And tell them not to hesitate before they fire; Valentine might kill hostages, even if Aesonia prefers to make them suffer.’

  Petroz nodded, and Raphael picked up the crossbow again. His mind was already recoiling from what was about to happen, the calm receding.

  No! He wouldn’t be afraid. He would destroy Aesonia, for the sake of all her victims over all these years, for the Ice Runners, for Ruthelo, for Thais. For Silvanos, who had lived a quarter of a century in the shadows.

  Petroz gave the orders, and Odeinath looked beyond him to Raphael, seeking confirmation. Raphael nodded. He was sorry Odeinath was here, sorrier still that he’d probably see Aesonia’s revenge, but it was too late for regrets.

  The door was buckling now, under the pounding, and Raphael could hear other troops advancing, coming to cut them off.

  ‘Go!’ Petroz said urgently, and he and Raphael led a charge eastward, or what Raphael hoped was eastward, away from the weapons, towards the legionaries and tribesmen. Some of them had those wooden swords, now; none had bows, and they died for it as the Salassa line broke into them. Then another cheer came from behind, as a group of legionaries surged from ambush into the middle of the attacking column, and Raphael caught Odeinath’s eye through the fray.

  Slowly, as if they didn’t realised it was happening they let the legionaries split them into a smaller group and a larger group, the larger group falling back, Raphael and Petroz in the smaller group.

  ‘To the stairs!’ Raphael shouted, abruptly, as he felt the air grow damper. There was a flight of stairs leading up, the the marines closest to it surged forward, pushing the tribesmen back for long enough to give them all an open to the stairs.

  They ran up, out into the moonlit Fountain Court and the pure air. Raphael blessed his fortune and angled them, as if in sheer desperation, across to the Hall. It was in darkness, but the shutters and windows onto the Fountain Court were open.

  ‘Catch them!’ a voice shouted, and a contingent of tribesmen coming through the Great Gate altered course, heading to cut them off. They had to reach the hall. Raphael felt his leg buckle, then Petroz stopped and pulled him to his feet again as the marines formed a cordon behind him.

  ‘The loggia!’ Petroz said, just loud enough to be heard. ‘We can get over into the sea.’

  Aesonia struck when the were half-way across the Hall’s polished floor. The air around them thickened, with the humidity of a coming storm, and then set.

  Raphael felt as if he’d been encased in cement, unable to move his sword or his limbs, and in that moment the tribesmen pounced, coming forward, pulling their weapons out of their hands.

  ‘Raphael, run for it!’ Petroz shouted, as they were disarmed. The magic faded, and Raphael crashed forwards, knocking two of the tribesmen off-balance, but there were two more beyond them, and they caught him, pinned him to the wooden floor, and Raphael saw the seaward windows open, moonlight streaming through, the loggia outside where he and Thais had snatched some time before he left for Aruwe, a lifetime ago. And beyond it, the Deep, and the hope of freedom.

  He would endure this, no matter what she did to him.

  ‘My brother and a traitor,’ said Aesonia, entering through a door further up. There were tribesmen and legionaries everywhere. Even if they failed, even if Valentine put a stop to Aesonia’s revenge, they’d drawn off a huge proportion of the garrison to deal with a very few people.

  The tribesman pulled Raphael up on to his knees to face her, and he faced her with all the pride and defiance he could muster. Which was a great deal, when all was said and done.

  The mind-mages and acolytes who trailed Aesonia wherever she went were streaming in behind her, and there was Hesphaere – where had she been all this time?

  ‘Find out what they’re doing,’ Aesonia ordered the mind-mage. ‘How many others there are. Raphael first – after all, I should show some respect for my dear brother.’

  ‘As you showed to your sister,’ Petroz said.

  ‘Be quiet!’ Aesonia snapped.

  Raphael concentrated on hiding, hiding, blocking them, blocking them from learning who he was. Aesonia mustn’t find out who Raphael was, she mustn’t, only think of what she’d do to him . . .

  ‘Your Majesty,’ the mind-mage said, with a gasp. Please, let him not have found the true plan. One mention of Raphael’s parentage ought to be enough.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who he is,’ the mind-mage said. ‘He’s trying to hide it, but he can’t. He’s an Azrian.’

  Aesonia froze, and looked down at Raphael, sceptically at first, then with amazement, and finally with a radiant joy.

  ‘Thetis, I thank you!’ Aesonia shouted. ‘I thank you!’

  Raphael flinched back, in fear, as if his secret had been uncovered, but the mind-mages were probing again. Petroz’s cane lay on the floor – odd how he hadn’t needed to use it. How did it work? The snake’s eye must be the release.

  ‘Majesty, he’s . . .’

  ‘Silence!’ Aesonia said, her voice ringing around the hall. The hall where Ruthelo Azrian and Aesonia’s sister Claudia had been married all those years ago.

  ‘Bind him,’ Aesonia said, in a voice like frost. ‘Move the others away. Bring Iolani here, I want her to see this. As fast as you can!’

  The tribesmen pulled Petroz and the remaining Salassa marines away, and moved to form a square around Raphael. The one who’d been holding him bound his hands and feet and left him kneeling there, facing Aesonia.

  The calm had returned, and he was grateful for that. It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. What she would do to him if she triumphed was undoubtedly far worse, but she wouldn’t.

  ‘I never broke you,’ Aesonia said. ‘Do you have any idea how much I wanted to?’

  ‘What did you do to Claudia?’ Raphael asked, realising that he wasn’t even to be himself. What use was his pride, when she wasn’t even seeing him? The man she saw bound and helpless before her was his grandfather, Ruthelo Azrian. He’d never thought she would go so far, that her vengeance ran so deep.

  ‘You want to know, don’t you?’

  Raphael nodded.

  ‘Say it?’

  ‘Please!’ Raphael said.

  ‘That’s enough for now. I captured her and the children after Faraon, after you died.’

  After you died. The others looked at her, horrified and enthralled in equal measure. ‘She thought I would pardon her. She thought she could get away unpunished. I wanted to Twist her, but I didn’t have the time, and Rainardo wouldn’t let me. So I put her and the children with all the other captives and sent them north to the mines, so they could spend the rest of their lives paying for what you’d done. For what she’d done.’

  ‘She did nothing!’

  ‘She betrayed her Order, she betrayed her country, and she betrayed me! She was sworn to Thetis, and she abandoned her oaths for you!’

  Aesonia’s face glowed with triumph.

  Her own sister, sent to d
ie in the north because she’d forsaken her oath for love.

  ‘You’d have been nothing without her!’ Aesonia raged. ‘But with her, in your pride and presumption, you raised yourself up and you dared to depose Thetis’s anointed Empress!’

  Raphael saw others at the edges of the hall – Ulithi servants, naval officers, some of Silvanos’s men, all drifting into the hall, spellbound. Above, the lights flickered on, casting a golden glow which slowly grew to drown out the silver moonlight. The captive clan representatives were brought in, put with the other prisoners.

  And then Raphael saw his chance to turn the Empress’s madness to more than her defeat, to redeem something she had tarnished for ever.

  ‘I overthrew a tyrant!’ Raphael said, saw faces looked back to him, the tribesmen bewildered, the others confused. ‘I built something better, and you never gave it a chance.’

  ‘It never deserved a chance,’ Aesonia said. ‘Your Republic deserved to be strangled at birth, and thanks to me, it was. I destroyed it, and I blackened its name until no-one will ever dare to do such a thing again. I defeated you, Ruthelo. I defeated you.’

  Her voice diminished, though it was still powerful and compelling. The glint in her eyes faded. She looked down at Raphael.

  ‘You’re dead, Ruthelo, but I have your grandson, with all your pride and all your arrogance, and he’ll pay for your crimes, and Claudia’s. I’ll break him as I’d have broken you, so that he can atone to me and to the Empire for the rest of his life. I’ll even give him his Claudia, and then she can help me destroy him.’

  Then Raphael saw Thais, among the acolytes, head bowed, flanked by two tribesmen. How had she survived? His heart jumped, but then Thais looked at him, and her eyes were those of Aesonia. The Empress continued.

  ‘Your City lies at my feet, Ruthelo, the one prize you denied me all this time. Soon it will bow willingly to me. Those of your people I choose will be the next generation of my Dreamers, and they will erase the memory of you and your wife from the minds of men. The rest will serve the Empire, as rewards to my tribesmen who’ve served me so loyally.’

  She paused. The lights were still growing brighter, and no-one else in the great hall of the Ulithi, of the Azrian, had dared to move.

  Aesonia gave a sharp gesture, and the wall of tribesmen surrounding Raphael moved back, pushing everyone else behind them, until the space in which he knelt, alone, was more than half the width of the hall. She didn’t move.

  He was still calm, amazingly so, and he knew it would infuriate her, spur on her single-minded obsession with revenge. There was no bitter taste in his mouth, no fury of resentment at what was happening, and she wanted him to feel them.

  Two more tribesmen entered, holding Iolani, bound and wearing only a white shift. Her eyes widened as she saw Raphael, and he looked over, trying to tell her that it would be all right, that this wasn’t the defeat it seemed.

  ‘Put her over there, where she can see,’ Aesonia ordered, ‘and let us begin.’

  Leonata scrambled up to the top of the steps, past the freed captives, in time to see Palladios and two legionaries stop at the bottom of the stairs, Silvanos and Plautius confronting them.

  ‘You are a traitor,’ said Palladios, his eyes taking in the open door, the dead tribesmen, Leonata in her sodden, weed-soaked robe.

  ‘No,’ Silvanos said. ‘I’m a servant of the Thetian Republic.’

  Palladios shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. You’re under arrest.’

  ‘Do you think you can fight your way through thirty Ice Runners?’ Leonata said. ‘You only have one sword each.’

  ‘I’ll do my duty to the Empire,’ Palladios said, but stopped as he saw the device in Silvanos’s hand. A dart-thrower?

  ‘This,’ Silvanos said, ‘is poisoned. The High Thalassarch here has already disposed of three tribesmen all on her own, and I have men at the top, who you can even now hear coming down the stairs. Surrender, and I won’t kill you.’

  Leonata saw the rearmost legionary’s hand move, even as something appeared the the top of the stairs, a knife flash in the light, and a sudden movement. Palladios half-drew his sword, and then with a cry like a banshee someone cannoned into the rearmost legionary, knocking him into the man in front, and him into Palladios, and for the third time in one night the agents of the Empire proved unequal to the tactical advantage provided by a flight of stairs. Leonata reversed the knife and rapped it down on Palladios’s skull, even as the black-clad newcomer – there was more than one of them, she realised – stunned the legionaries with a heavy fist.

  ‘Plautius!’ said Silvanos, as the small man wavered and slumped against the wall, a dagger embedded in his shoulder.

  The newcomer’s grin faded, and Leonata realised, belatedly, that the first newcomer was neither Demetrios nor Ascanius, but her own daughter, with Silvanos’s two agents behind her.

  Anthemia stepped over Palladios and wrapped Leonata in a bone-crushing grip. Her daughter, escaped, heavens knew how, from Aesonia’s interrogation chamber. She seemed unchanged, but it was always hard to tell. No-one could have been left unchanged by what happened.

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ Plautius said, through gritted teeth. He must have thrown himself in the knife’s way – if it had hit Silvanos, it would have killed him.

  Demetrios and Ascanius stripped Palladios and his men of armour and weapons, and then handed them over to the Ice Runners to be imprisoned in the cistern.

  In the corner, Silvanos pulled the knife out, and Plautius cried out, softly. Anthemia caught him before he could fall, as Ice Runners crowded up on the steps, and then picked him up bodily, carrying him as easily as she might a child.

  ‘Where to?’ she said.

  ‘The arsenal,’ said Silvanos grimly.

  Where were his men?

  Valentine advanced down the corridor, sword at the ready, cursing the silence. There were less than a dozen tribesmen left with him, and where there should have been entire companies harrying the Salassans through the cellars, there was nothing. Only a few dead bodies, some in white, some in blue, some in purple and green colours he didn’t recognise, a clan whose people were apparently fighting beside the Salassa.

  Zhubodai tapped two of his tribesmen on the shoulder, motioned to the corridors on either side, and they moved forward, weapons at the ready.

  Where were the enemy? So many men, such an ill-disciplined and disparate group, should have been making a great deal of noise. Where was the sound of battle, as his own men engaged them?

  The tribesmen reported all clear, and they advanced into another corridor. They were almost back below the Compass Tower again.

  This was futile. He made an upwards motion to Zhubodai, and two more scouts were dispatched ahead to search for the nearest staircase. These catacombs seemed to go on for ever – if only he’d had Gian with him.

  But Gian hadn’t been seen all evening, and Valentine knew, in his heart, that Gian Ulithi was dead. The traitor had murdered him, unseen and unremarked, before Valentine had even launched his attack.

  The first scout returned, with the same upward motion. A staircase nearby. Good. At least they were only in the first cellar. Time to go back up to his command centre and find out exactly where his troops had got to – perhaps there had been another attack.

  A door opened, somewhere nearby, and he heard shouts beyond. Not his troops, he could tell in an instant. Too noisy. He motioned to Zhubodai, and they broke into a run, up towards the staircase.

  ‘The Emperor!’ someone shouted, and two crossbow bolts whizzed across his path, taking one of the tribesmen in the chest. A dozen or more of the Salassan attack party, armed with aether crossbows, charged out of another corridor, and three more of his men fell. Zhubodai pushed him on, towards the stairs. Where were his soldiers?

  And then he was on the stairs, Zhubodai behind him, and those of his men who were left behind him. Valentine raced up three steps at a time, and on instinct turned left, out into the Fountain Court,
and saw lights on the other side, people and tribesmen in the hall.

  What were they doing there?

  ‘Send for reinforcements!’ he shouted, and one of the tribesmen raced off, leaving him with the remaining four of his twelve bodyguards.

  He ran.

  Aesonia moved her hand, and the tribesman’s knife flashed again, just shy of Raphael’s skin, opening another gaping rent in his robes. The flask and water-spray in his pocket fell to the floor, but Aesonia took no notice.

  Raphael managed not to flinch, just.

  Would he be able to hold onto his pride, when she’d stripped him completely? Iolani had managed it, at Saphir Island, heavens knew how. But Iolani had been one among many, and too wounded by what had been done to her people and her home, and it had been quick, sudden.

  But still, it was difficult to be authoritative when one was naked.

  Being sinister and intimidating would be even more demanding. . . most of all with the knowledge that everyone who was watching this would carry the image with them for good. Even if Raphael won, they’d always remember this. They’d always remember that beneath the black robes and the forbidding glances was a man like any other, one they had seen stripped of all his protection, one they knew could be captured and humiliated – and if it had been done once, it could be done again. Raphael had always tried – too hard – not to be a man like any other.

  He’d known it would be hard, but he hadn’t had time to think it through. What Aesonia was doing, in taking this so slowly, was giving him time to realise. To appreciate his position, and to remind her audience that she was Empress, secure in her power, and she had all the time in the world.

  Pride was a very difficult thing to lose, for Raphael Quiridion or Ruthelo Azrian. If he hadn’t lived by it, it would be easier to part with. He envied Leonata her ability to poke fun at herself in public.

  Another stroke of the knife, and half his sleeve fell away.

  She was doing it slowly enough that he might yet escape with his dignity, if the others arrived in time, but he couldn’t let her know that.