Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  “Lady Vivienne, we are honored!” a lady gushed. “One had heard you might not attend the opening … a prior engagement …?”

  “I changed my mind.”

  She was meant to be elsewhere right now. Specifically, at a meeting with Tristan to negotiate for Piers’s release. Her lawyers had pleaded with her, they’d even wept, but she had refused to go through the charade of meeting the king. She knew something the lawyers did not. She knew what Tristan wanted from her.

  And I do not have it anymore.

  A band arranged their instruments and amplifiers next to the bar, looping cables around crates of empties, and began to play. Rock, this noise was called. Everyone in the gallery raised the volume of their conversation by twenty decibels. Two young men started to dance, hands on each other’s shoulders, the tops of their heads touching, jogging in place. They had short hair but that did not mean they were commoners, not nowadays. When Vivienne was young, the lowborn had aspired to the fashions and manners of the nobility. Now the highborn aped the poor. She snagged a fresh drink from a passing tray, newly aware of the generation gap between herself and most of the other people in the room

  “They’re enshrining Harry’s relics at the Tower of London this evening,” someone shouted a few feet away.

  “Busy, busy,” Vivienne murmured under her breath. So Tristan had only been going to fit her in between his other appointments. It would have been pointless. Neither of them was willing to give the other an inch.

  “The penitents will be queuing up as far as London Bridge, I’m sure.”

  Laughter. No one believed Harry was a saint. His grandfather, King Harold the war hero, was a puissant saint, but House Wessex had not produced a single saint since then. Even their subsidiaries—lesser Houses contracted to vassalage—had ceased to produce saints. That was the root cause of the nobility’s growing contempt for Tristan.

  “What a shame that ‘a crown does not a monarch make, nor a shrine a saint.’”

  “They say the little fellow is quite saintly for his age.”

  “Michael? Day’s son?”

  “The new Crown Prince, darling. So there may be hope yet.”

  More laughter.

  The collapse of House Wessex’s sanctity ratio mattered to the country not so much because of what it said about the king’s morals, but because it played havoc with House Wessex’s credit rating, and by extension, Great Britain’s. Despite the IMF’s jiggery-pokery, the Crown was losing its ability to raise money on the bond markets.

  Three billion pounds, interest-free.

  That was the sum she and Piers had agreed to offer for his freedom. It ought to have sounded like a lot to a king who was selling off his toll roads to raise cash. But Vivienne had suspected all along that the money was a side issue for Tristan. And the silence of the beeper on her belt confirmed she was right. It wasn’t money he wanted from her.

  11

  Oswald

  At The Same Time. London

  ROCK outriders on motorcycles cleared a path for the royal limousine. The limo was the next closest thing to a tank, five inches of steel plating increasing its weight to four tons. Its windows were transparent armor, a new type of polymer that muted the noise of the traffic. In this soundproof cocoon, Oswald Day sat thinking deeply.

  Talks with House Sauvage had already dragged on for a month, hobbled by the interference of other noble Houses and complicated by the flotillas of lawyers that both sides had summoned to the fray, as well as the unfavorable risk/reward prognosis of an intensifying feud between Great Britain’s two largest corporations. It had taken this long just to set up a face-to-face meeting among the principals. Oswald had done that. He’d won everyone’s consent, drawn up a non-violence agreement, and found a location acceptable to all parties: Bard’s Hotel, a venerable inn run by one of Great Britain’s few unaffiliated Houses, the dwarf companies that belonged to no major conglomerate. He’d reserved a entire floor of the hotel and equipped separate retiring rooms with the flowers, multiple telephone lines, and gourmet refreshments each side required. The lawyers had arrived. The secretaries had arrived. The media had arrived, in their hordes.

  And then …

  Separately, King Tristan and Vivienne Sauvage had both decided at the last minute not to show up.

  Guy Sauvage had appeared to make his mother’s excuses for her. She had a gallery opening today, it appeared.

  The excuse was a blatant insult.

  So now they were heading back to the Tower of London, Guy having accepted Oswald’s offer of a lift—he wanted to break the news to Piers in person.

  Oswald muttered into the car mic, keeping it cryptic since Guy was watching him from the opposite corner of the back seat.

  “You’re no true knight,” Guy drawled.

  It was an empty tourney insult but the hostility was real. Oswald replaced the mic and glanced at Guy, slouched against the door, his overcoat open on a jeweled baldric with not one but two P&K 9mm pistols holstered in it. Pushing the definition of non-violence there.

  Guy was physically prepossessing, and as thick as two short planks, in the opinion of Oswald, who was increasingly turning towards the view that the Sauvages were their own worst enemy.

  “Believe me,” he said, not expecting to be believed. “I’m the best friend your brother has in London.”

  “With friends like these!”

  “Shall I tell you who your false friends are? Stuart. Lancashire. Llywelyn. Norfolk.”

  “They’ve all rallied round.”

  “Yes, well,” Oswald said patiently, “they’re clever, you see.”

  “Clever enough to get in line for a share of the loot,” Guy muttered. The great irony was that Guy was a bastard. Unlike most second sons, he had nothing to gain, no matter what happened to Piers. “It all comes down to the money, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “There is only one way of looking at it, my lord! My brother has been interned without trial like a common terrorist! Either let him go or let us prove his innocence in Parliament!”

  “Parliament is not the solution,” Oswald said shortly.

  Parliament had not met in 28 years. But if the Crown pressed charges against Piers Sauvage, Parliament would have to meet: as the heir to an earldom, Piers could only be tried by a full jury of his peers.

  How Oswald wished Tristan had thought about that before he clapped his nephew in chains.

  “What, then?” Guy said. “I suppose you’ll tell me to just trust you?”

  “You could do worse.”

  Guy simmered, sneered, and produced a ponderously courtly circumlocution. “And yet I find myself weighing again the mystery of poor Harry’s death. Who gained the most thereby?”

  Oswald shrugged. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard the implied accusation. “If you think I’d have sought a throne for my son, you don’t know much about thrones.” He was being disingenuous, of course. No one had ever accused him of lacking ambition. But he had planned to fulfill his ambitions through NatChiv, with Harry, not without him. “I’d set all the rest at naught if Harry could have chosen to patrol a different road that night,” he said flatly.

  “He was killed in action,” Guy said, suddenly unguarded. “I’ve got friends in the ROCK, I know that much. Why does anyone pretend otherwise? Why deny him his glory?”

  It was a good question but unfortunately, not one that Oswald could answer without breaching national security.

  “I am doing everything I can to win your brother’s freedom,” Oswald said with complete honesty. “The difficulty is the king himself. Yesterday he seemed eager to negotiate. Today he changed his mind. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “So much for your influence,” Guy sneered.

  “Oh, shut up,” Oswald said, losing patience with him.

  The limo accelerated under the clattering el lines, onto Thames Street. They circled Tower Park, the extensive public greensward that buffered
the Tower of London from the city. Bare treetops exposed the tangle of quickstone tendrils that had been allowed to grow over the Tower’s curtain wall. People fished in the moat. Ladies and children on horseback trotted along the paths. Entire working-class families were taking advantage of the fine autumn weather, brewing up beneath the trees on portable gas stoves. This picture-postcard scene betrayed no hint of the dangerous forces of discontent building up under the mantle of the realm.

  Traffic tailed back in a zigzag between the crash barriers outside the ‘new’ Traitor’s Gate, an unimpressive structure that resembled an old ferry terminal. Beyond the building, a double-arched bridge led to the barbican on the far side of the moat. Oswald stared bleakly at the plastinated heads on spikes above the gate. Common thieves and murderers. Not a terrorist among them. Much less any of Alyx MacConn’s knaves. He realized he was losing faith in the king’s ability to do something—anything.

  “You’d better take that shank off. And your firearms,” he said to Guy.

  “I’m surprised they let you in here armed,” Guy said nastily. The windows did not open; he cracked the door to pass his weapons out to the guards.

  The little convoy proceeded through the outer ward, which was landscaped with stretches of woodland, rolling lawns, and even a small lake where herons waded. The spires of the Ivory Towers—more dark grey, actually—loomed over the trees. From motte-and-bailey origins lost in the mists of time, the Tower of London had grown into a complex of buildings housing the key functions of government and employing thousands of people. It also held the barracks of the Household division of the Wessex Lions.

  Whoomp, whoomp, the limo wallowed over the speed bumps and pulled into the Coldharbor Gate.

  Within the bailey of the old castle, all was peace and sunlight. The limo halted in front of the White Tower. They got out.

  Without a word, Guy walked off towards the Waterloo Block.

  Oswald sighed, stretched, and searched his pockets for cigarettes. Jem Northumberland and Malcolm Stuart swung off their motorcycles and walked back to him.

  “Fortunes of war, sir,” Malcolm said.

  Malcolm was the grandson of Lord Stuart, the Minister of Defense, but he was Oswald’s man to the core. He’d played a key role in bringing Oswald and his grandfather together on a long weekend last month at a Stuart hunting lodge in the Highlands. It was a shame that Oswald and Lord Stuart still did not see eye to eye.

  “Our time is coming,” Oswald assured him. “But we may have to do without the Sauvages.”

  “That’s an obstinate woman,” Malcolm said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll tell you who else didn’t show up,” Jem said. Ten years younger than his half-brother Alec, he was compact, dark, and watchful. His mother was Spanish, the reclusive Lord Northumberland’s second wife. “Colin Argent. There was an IBC crew outside the hotel, but they’d sent someone else. As if they knew the Countess wasn’t going to come.”

  “Right,” Oswald said. “Or perhaps Vivienne Sauvage has had sense enough to put extra daylight between herself and the IRA at the present time.”

  He exchanged a few more words with his brother knights, taking comfort in their support.

  12

  Guy

  At The Same Time

  Guy stomped down into the dungeons of the Tower of London, escorted by Wessex men-at-arms. The dungeons were a realm apart from the rest of the castle, dank and icy, mostly disused. Passages twisted like the intestines of a stone dragon. When Guy brushed against the walls, slime besmirched the shoulders of his suit. Rusted bars jutted like stalagmites in the mouths of cells that seemed too small to ever have confined human beings … but the odd heap of hundred-year-old straw proved they had.

  As children, Guy and Piers used to play ogres-and-outlaws down here with their Wessex cousins, Harry and Madelaine. The two older Sauvage boys had had a large part of their schooling at the Tower of London, at the behest of their father, William, who’d never stopped trying to repair the breach between his wife and his brother.

  Now Guy was ‘it,’ blundering through the dark, and Uncle Tristan had turned into an ogre.

  Well, this was growing up. Seeing through the sunny façade to the grim realities of politics. Realizing that you would have to exchange your blunt sword for a real one.

  The men-at-arms admitted Guy to Piers’s cell and locked the door behind him. Piers sat on his cot, wearing a business suit with one of the freshly laundered shirts Guy brought on his regular visits. He started to speak, and broke out coughing.

  “Still hacking? You sound like a sixty-year-old miner. I’ve brought you some more holy dust.” The cell was damp, seeps of water glistening on the walls, a paradise for moistie-feelies and other small fey that caused respiratory disease. Piers proudly refused to pray to any of the Wessex saints, so Guy had been shaving holy dust off the older saints at Dublin Castle, taking it from the backs of their heads where you couldn’t see the damage—a trick their mother had suggested, in fact her only useful suggestion so far. He took the vial of brown grit out of his breast pocket.

  Piers wheezed, “Not right now! Isn’t there anything on the radio?”

  Many of the older Wessex men-at-arms had known the Sauvages since they were children. Guy had persuaded them to look the other way while he smuggled in what comforts he could … such as a battery-powered wireless. Guy switched the set on. It was already tuned to RBC Classical. Guy knew nothing about classical music, but that didn’t matter. The music faded in and out of a storm of static, and that didn’t matter, either. The point was defeating the bugs. There were certain to be transmitters somewhere in the room, although neither Piers nor Guy had been able to find them.

  “He didn’t even bother to show up,” Guy said. “Neither did Mother.”

  “I had a feeling it wouldn’t pan out,” Piers said. Digesting the shock, he seemed to physically crumple. “Shit. This is not good.”

  “Colin asked me to tell you his father is sorry.”

  “Sorry. Yes, I know they’re sorry. Tell them it’s not their fault. We made the choice to lend money to them, and we knew where it was going.” Piers sighed. “Why pick on the Argents? So many of our bondsknights are IRA sympathizers.”

  “I could bloody strangle the lot of them.”

  “It’s the cost of doing business, Guy. Every lord has to buy off the peasants in one way or another. It’s simply unfortunate that some of our peasants happen to be enemies of the regime.”

  “They went too far when they killed Harry. Give me the word and I’ll hunt them down like animals.”

  Piers shook his head. “The movement’s organized by cells. None of the cell leaders know what the others are up to. That said, yes: they’ve crossed the line, absolutely. When I get out of here, we’ll track down whoever was responsible. The Argents can help with that.” He rested his temple on the heel of his hand.

  Guy saw a lonely, helpless man, stubbled, unwashed, and shackled. He saw the heir of House Sauvage, the Lord Protector of Ireland, whom people called the most gifted executive of his generation. And he saw the half-brother he loved above all men. If they had been full brothers he could not have loved Piers more.

  Now it was time for him to prove it.

  “Piers?” Guy sat down on the other end of the cot to look Piers in the eye. “We have to go to war. It’ll be a gamble, but I just don’t see any other way to get you out of here. He won’t call Parliament, and you’re in danger here …”

  That was the conclusion he’d reached on the way here. War. That’s what knights were made for. Pass the pep pills! Who cared about winning a tourney, when you could win an honest-to-God battle?

  War is intrinsic to the human condition. It follows that attempts to abolish it will warp our condition into something other than human. Guy wasn’t much of a reader but he knew his Chronicles of the Worldcracker. Colin had given him no peace until he at least read the chapter summaries. He knew how Harold Wessex’s genocide had marked not
only the end of the Second World War, but the end of war in general, and the beginning of the decay of morality. That was one thing knights and terrorists could agree on. They lived in a world of black ops, dirty deeds and tainted motives. No wonder there was a sanctity crisis.

  “War,” Piers said. “War! What a brilliant idea, Guy! Let’s massacre our assets, and leave Ran a paper corporation to inherit! The reason people stopped going to war was because it destroys wealth. Well, it would be one thing if we could win. But even allowing for your pride in the Overwhelm, absolutely justifiable mind you, the bookies would laugh you out of town. Do you think Tristan would agree to fight you with one hand tied behind his back? Don’t be silly. I think we know now that he can be ruthless enough, when he cares to be. Oh, but what a larky idea; Guy, I do love you for thinking of it.” He started to laugh, which made him cough again.

  “The Lions are shit,” Guy said sulkily.

  “Tristan doesn’t need to rely on his own regiment. He’s got the Crown Army.”

  “The Crown Army is shit, too.”

  “I know. But there are twenty divisions of them. Anyway it’s mostly mismanagement, not asset quality.” Piers lit a cigarette, his eyes darkening. “That insufferable old fossil, Duncan Stuart, thinks he’s still fighting the Russians. He just doesn’t get small-unit tactics. But put someone in Defense who knows what he’s doing, and the Crown would be formidable again. That should be me. It will be me.”

  “Piers—”

  “Besides, remember the part in my oath of fealty where I swore to protect and cherish our people like my own blood?”

  “Yes,” Guy said sullenly.

  His gaze came to rest on Piers’s right hand. On his first finger Piers wore his own signet ring, set with an emerald. Rings could come off but ring tattoos could not. The crimson tattoo encircling Piers’s middle finger bound him to the service of Tristan Wessex, the very king who was persecuting him.