He was now almost certain where Jala was bound.
‘Get back to your cots, all of you, and rest. If I need anything else, we’ll call on you individually. And remember: tell no one of this until you hear from me. Not even your mate when you’re playing dice. Ice-cold border outposts surrounded by cannibal mountain men await those with flapping tongues.’
As the men dispersed, Titus took a deep, steadying breath. At least, unlike Quintillian, the empress seemed to have left a trail.
Chapter X
Of Departures
Titus pushed open the door to his apartment. Unmarried and with a strange status that hovered somewhere between courtier and soldier, he had a suite of rooms in the palace, but had made sure they were away from the emperor’s private quarters and close to the offices and headquarters of the guard. The rooms lacked what others would probably call a ‘womanly touch’. Used clothing was scattered in heaps. Swords lay on the cupboards. His bed was unmade. Old wine jars and cups and platters were stacked here and there. Servants did not clean Titus’s rooms. He didn’t let them. It was a matter of principle. To accept the palace skivvies picking up after him would state that he was a courtier, not a soldier, and that was a step he was unwilling to take. And it wasn’t that he didn’t tidy up every now and then. It was just that there never seemed to be time. He was only in his rooms to sleep and occasionally to eat. Other than that, duty kept him busy at almost all times, and when he wasn’t required to work, the emperor or his brother always needed his presence for one reason or another.
It was an organized mess, though. He knew where everything was.
Crossing the room, he began to strip off his uniform tunic. The medals and torcs he’d earned throughout his time hung on the wall. Not only was he not one for ostentatious displays of superiority, but they were also unnecessarily bulky and heavy. He habitually wore his officer’s tunic and breeches, with high quality boots and a nice belt. His one concession to rank had been the wolf blazon on the tunic and the gold-threaded stripes around the hems that denoted between them his rank (the stripes) and his unit (the wolf of the imperial guard.)
He peeled the tunic over his head and slung it across the bed. This was not the time for Titus Tythianus, Commander of the Guard. His breeches were utilitarian, but he quickly pulled on his riding boots that were more work-a-day. Crossing to his wardrobe he selected a plain grey tunic and slipped it on. His next job was one that required a little subtlety.
He had drilled into the guard the need to keep quiet about the empress’s disappearance. The same message had now been passed to the chamberlain and the major domo, who would make sure the servants and various staff who might have noted her absence held their tongues.
The disappearance of Quintillian had alarmed the populace, and rumours of what had become of him were rife, but despite that, confidence in the court and the emperor was still high. Kiva was as popular a leader as the empire had ever had and it would take a great deal more to shake his people’s support. But if the people were to discover now that the empress had similarly disappeared, they would start to wonder and would almost certainly link the two events. The damage that could be done to the line and to governance did not bear thinking about.
So, if he went into the city to make enquiries, he could not go in the guise of imperial guard commander or courtier. He would have to be an ordinary citizen. But, given what had happened in the palace corridors, an armed and armoured one, lest he wished his skull to play host to an axe.
His hands closed on the handles of the closet that was rarely opened and he slowly pulled the doors wide. There were ordinary citizens and ordinary citizens, though.
The closet contained a panoply of armour and weapons. A cuirass with segmented shoulder plates. One arm was similarly plated all the way down. The other: not so. But then its previous owner, Titus’s father, had been missing an arm for most of his time as marshal. The sword was a soldier’s blade – utilitarian and solid with little in the way of ornamentation. Titus reached out and took the armour from the hook, struggling a little to don it without the aid of a companion.
He rolled his shoulders, letting the segmented plates settle into place. The leather padding attached to the inside rested well on his shoulders. He was of a size and shape with his late father. He contemplated the helmet for a moment but decided against it, relying on the cuirass and arm plates, belting the sword in place. Satisfied, he crossed to the mostly flat bronze mirror on the far wall. He looked oddly like his father now, barring the fact that he had thus far retained both eyes and all four limbs. One thing was certain, though: he did not look like an officer or official of the court.
Fine.
Leaving his rooms, he locked the door once more and placed the key in the pouch at his belt. He ignored the strange looks he received as he passed through the corridors of the palace and arrived at the Gold Tower postern gate. The guard there frowned as he approached, and then snapped to attention at the last moment as he realized who the armoured stranger was. Titus nodded at him.
‘Open up.’
‘Sir.’ The guard would speculate about his passing through, but Titus would not be long, and the same man would be on duty when he returned. Having seen him re-enter the palace exactly the same, the sight of the senior commander in scruffy, mercenary kit would be relegated to drunken bar conversation at most.
Titus emerged into the street. It was still early. His hand on the pommel of his sword and his eyes scanning the seething crowds of Velutio, he moved through the streets, crossing the huge market square without paying the slightest attention to the stalls or the myriad shoppers, his ears open to any suspicious warning sound he might catch over the din of hawkers and citizens.
It took perhaps a quarter of an hour for the marshal to descend to the city’s commercial port, which was one of the busiest in the world. With berthing for 50 ships of good size, over a hundred warehouses, six administrative buildings, its own guard and an endless sea of people of many nations loading, unloading, transporting, storing, arguing, shouting and singing, it was chaos on the grandest scale imaginable. Usually, if Titus had cause to come here, he would be in uniform with a military escort. The general populace would normally peel back like the tide to make room for the soldiers.
He was not used to having to fight his way through the crowd.
Beginning to get rather huffy with the whole situation, he pushed and shoved his way through the melee until he caught sight of the tall, red-brick offices of the port authorities. Not just any office, but the one he specifically sought: the shipping records office.
After taking an errant elbow to the gut and with a throbbing foot from where someone in the crowd had accidentally stamped on it, he reached the steps of the building. A queue of merchants and sailors stood impatiently waiting their turn to speak to the administrator. Acutely aware of the importance of the time that was passing, Titus marched past them all, pushed through the doorway to the main office and peered at the front of the queue. There were three desks in a small room filled with documents all in neat cubby holes. The queue was waiting for the first free desk and then filtering forward. Titus, ignoring the angry shouts as he pushed past people, spotted the clerk on the left furling closed a document and, the very moment his visitor turned and left the desk, Titus leapt in.
The big, dark-skinned man with the golden earring who was currently at the front of the queue barked an angry demand that he step back. Titus turned, tapping the pommel of his sword meaningfully.
‘I am having the worst day in the history of bad days. I highly recommend you overlook my rudeness this once.’
The big man, who was entirely unarmed, frowned at the fingers pounding the top of the sword, and subsided with an irritated nod. Titus gave him a smile with the warmth of a dead lizard and turned back to the desk. The clerk cleared his throat, glancing nervously at the scarred and armoured man, rather incongruous in a queue of richly attired merchants or dirty, ragged seamen.
&nbs
p; ‘How can I help?’
‘I need to know about Pelasian ships that departed this morning. The vessel would have to have sailed…’ he paused for a mental calculation of the time it had taken him to travel from his room to the dock, ‘…sometime after half past the ninth hour of the night. Probably after the tenth, but let’s be thorough.’
The clerk pursed his lips, scratched his temple, and then collected four documents from the shelves, spreading them across the desk and pinning them down with small lead weights designed for the purpose.
‘Eight vessels meet your criteria.’
‘It would have taken on passengers. You keep a note of that, yes?’
‘If they declare them. There are a surprising number of captains who take illegal passengers without documenting them.’
Titus frowned and nodded. He’d not thought of that. All life was a gamble, but he knew his odds and he knew what he was about. He’d not considered the possibility of such a subtle move, but Jala was Pelasian, and while they were a subtle people, she was cleverer than most. He would be willing to place money on the fact that she would be aboard a ship that officially carried no passengers. If she wished to travel unimpeded and feared that she might be followed, that would be her way.
‘All right. Let’s allow for the “clever bastard” quotient. How many were passenger-free?’
‘Four, sir.’
‘Hmm. How many were bound for Pelasia?’
‘Three, sir. The other was moving on to Germalla from here.’
‘How many of those three were heading for Akkad itself?’ She was going home. He was certain of it. And Akkad was the home of the Pelasian god-king, her brother.
‘Two, sir.’
On board one of those two ships were the Empress Jala and her servant girls. Could he catch up with them?
‘When did they sail?’
‘One at the tenth hour, one half an hour later.’
Neither was far ahead, then. Of course, Pelasian ships were built to be fast, and the one in question would be moving at top speed, for he was certain Jala would have paid her captain extraordinarily well to get her home in record time. The imperial fleet had some pretty fast ships, too, though he would have to report to the emperor first. That would be an unpleasant conversation. Perhaps he could keep the worst of the reasoning secret?
Nodding his thanks to the clerk, he left the counter and smiled alarmingly at the big, dark man, who glowered in return and then moved to the desk.
Titus pushed back through the corridors and out into the busy port.
The crowds were immediately around him again and he fought the frustration that threatened to take hold of him. He felt the irresistible urge to start kicking and punching to make some space, but he could see two of the harbour guard standing on a low dais nearby, keeping an eye on the crowd. He didn’t want to attract their attention.
Speed was of the essence. He had to get back to the emperor, explain as little as possible while laying out the salient points in the kindest conceivable manner. Then, as soon as the emperor gave him permission, he would take a unit of the guard, commandeer the fastest vessel in the military port on the other side of the headland, and chase the empress down. He felt certain he could persuade her to come back and face Kiva. She was far from stupid, after all. He was convinced, now, that she had fled for the same reason as the prince: to avoid an unpleasant confrontation that they all could feel coming. But if the truth was out in the open, then she had no more reason to run. All could be sorted and maybe they could then even manage to find Quintillian and bring him back, too.
All he had to do…
Titus’s world went swimmy and the din of the port was suddenly overwhelmed by the strange combination of an ear-splitting whistle that seemed to emanate from his own ears and the deep pulsing throb of his own blood. His eyesight went black then shattered into a thousand shards like broken glass.
He had been hit over the head. It had happened a few times in his life so he knew the feel of it well. This had been a particularly hard blow, too. His hand went up and after a few failed attempts touched the top of his head. It came away wet and sticky. The world was dark now, and it gradually filtered through the wool in his brain that that was because he was on the ground, surrounded by the legs of a thousand people.
He faintly heard the shouting of an official-sounding man, and suddenly he was being helped up. He caught a brief, wobbly glimpse of the uniform of the harbour guard, and then his eyesight went completely as he threw up copiously over the poor soldier. His last thought before unconsciousness claimed him was that he should have worn his father’s damned helmet after all.
A faint light insisted itself on Titus’s consciousness.
For some time he fought against its intrusiveness, but it seemed he couldn’t drive it away, and in the end he surrendered to it. Then it went dark for a moment, then light again.
He blinked.
Sound came bubbling up like some kind of oozing lava spout, flooding into the world.
Every noise hurt, hitting him like a hammer to the centre of the brain.
‘Should… full recovery…real damage… lucky… harbour guard… port.’
‘Fagh,’ was all he could he manage.
‘You’re awake?’
His eyes opened properly now. A blurred, grey shape against the white slowly resolved into the shape of a man. Kiva?
‘Gnurgh.’
‘Thank you, Doctor. Now all of you out, please. I need to speak to the patient alone.’
The shapes were starting to resolve into real forms all round now, and Titus could see the various features on the emperor’s face. He heard the footsteps as the room’s other occupants left, and then the click of the shutting door.
‘Can you hear me, Titus?’
‘Yerr.’
‘You gave us a fright. The harbour guards who brought you in thought you would die. The doctor, though, tells me that you are fast on the road to recovery. Your head will be delicate for a few days, mind.’
‘Port. I…hit in head.’
‘Yes. Sadly, in the press the guards lost sight of the man who hit you. They can tell us nothing other than that he was wearing a brown hooded cloak. You were on the trail of Jala?’
Titus felt the memories come rushing back in. He felt cold all of a sudden.
‘Kiva…’
‘It’s all right, Titus. I know. I read the documents in your bag. Forgive me for prying, but I thought they might be important and didn’t know whether we could wait for your full recovery.’
‘I…so sorry.’
His head felt as though it had been driven over by an iron-wheeled cart.
‘That’s not important right now. In fact, I am faintly relieved to at least know why things have become so difficult recently. But the matter of prime concern remains bringing back my wife and my brother.’
‘Sure…want them back?’
The emperor gave him a sad, indulgent smile. ‘Of course I do. How small you must think me if you believe I would be driven to such rage. The human heart is a strange thing, Titus, and cannot be guided by logic of the mind. There is much to discuss and resolve, but none of it can be done when I am here alone. I need Quintillian and Jala back here with me. My brother remains problematic in his ability to remain hidden, but Jala? We know where she is, don’t we?’
‘I can still catch her if I leave now.’
Kiva frowned at him, and then chuckled. ‘I think that boat, to pun rather poorly, might have sailed, Titus. You have been unconscious for three days. Jala’s ship will likely be almost at Akkad by now. Thus, timing is now less of an issue. I need you hale and hearty. The doctor wants you bed-bound for another week before he will even contemplate your departure from this room.’
‘No… I… three days? Really?’
‘Yes. And do not try to sit up. I am reliably informed that will probably make you vomit and faint, and not necessarily in that order.’
Titus sagged. Three days. Madne
ss.
‘I can’t believe… this probably wasn’t accident,’ he said, gesturing at his head and only missing by a foot or so.
‘No. I doubt it, too. The palace and the city are on high alert. I have informed the council that the empress is visiting her family, which will account for her absence, and your subaltern has made it known that we have received some vague threat, which is the official reason for heightened security across the city. In fact, with assassins in the streets and in the palace corridors, that’s not stretching the truth very far!’
‘A week is too long, Kiva. A day and I’ll be ready to go.’
‘And the moment a feather lands on your head you’ll be out for the count, throwing up and passing out. No. You will do what the doctor tells you. And as soon as he clears you, you can take a unit of guards and go to Akkad. Bring Jala home so that we can repair this mess. But for now, I must attend to business. And you must sleep and heal.’
‘But…’
‘Sleep,’ the emperor said, crossing to the door and opening it.
‘And heal,’ he added with a smile, slipping out of the room and closing the door behind him.
Titus stared at the closed portal for a moment and felt as though he were starting to spin gently in slow circles. With little preamble, he rolled painfully onto his side and threw up over the edge of the bed. Empty and feeling slightly better, he passed out.
Chapter XI
Of Deepening Trouble and Dangerous Waters
Titus Tythianus moved to the bow of the ship at the captain’s gesture. On the fighting platform in the vessel’s stern his unit of 24 hand-picked veteran guards gathered their kit ready for disembarkation. The great seething metropolis of Akkad, capital city of Pelasia, loomed ahead on the high promontory, made oddly unreal by the shimmering waves of heat radiating off the land. Pelasia was, it was said, the birthplace of the sun.
Insurgency (Tales of the Empire Book 4) Page 14