Vespera Read online

  V E S P E R A

  A N S E L M A U D L E Y

  @ttica

  Vespera

  First published 2011 by Attica Books

  www.atticabooks.com

  Copyright © Holt Aston Ltd, 2011

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual people living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  PROLOGUE

  HUBRIS

  The Empire ended in light.

  Light from the luminous waterglobes illuminating the streets of the City, the tens of thousands waiting in the Agora and the Octagon at the end of a night of fire and chaos. Light from the palaces where clanspeople had gathered under the dubious protection of token garrisons while the marines fought and died on the Ninth Hill. Light reflected from the lowering clouds above the City, a baleful reddish glow in a sky where not a single star shone.

  Light from the inferno on the Ninth Hill, where the Imperial Palace was ablaze from one end to the other. Vast columns of flame shot up into the night sky, and palls of smoke drifted out into the lagoon past the smouldering ruins on Admiralty Island. Even four hours after the fires had taken hold, they showed no signs of abating, and the stone shell of the Palace itself was beginning to warp and crumble in the heat.

  Half a millennium of Imperial splendour, of glory and memories, had been reduced to ash. Everything from the priceless art of centuries of Thetian masters to the secret intelligence files in the labyrinthine basements, the greatest and the worst of what the Empire had been, burned together.

  No-one had wanted it to end this way. Few of those hundreds of thousands in the streets of the Heart of the World had wanted the Empire to end at all. They wanted it saved.

  It was too late.

  It had always been too late for Ruthelo Azrian, architect of the Empire’s defeat. It had been too late on the night Emperor Orosius’s men came for his father, black-clad soldiers knocking down the door in the dead of night, masked and booted. He had been seventeen, his brother eleven. They had never seen their parents again, and for half his lifetime Ruthelo had fought the Empire. He had given it one last chance when his friend Palatine came to the throne seven years ago, and she had thrown that chance away.

  And now, at the end of a night of fire and blood in the Heart of the World, the City that was his home, he was about to take the step no-one had dared to take in four and a half centuries. The step no-one had ever been powerful enough to take, not even powerful families like his wife’s, who traced their line back almost a thousand years. He, Ruthelo Azrian, would bring the Empire itself to an end. The Thetian Republic would be reborn, and it would be his doing.

  They would try to stop him, of course. He could already hear footsteps coming along the hallway outside, and he knew who it was. They wouldn’t be up here, in a deserted part of the ancient Palace of the Seas above the crowded Agora, unless they were coming to see him.

  Claudia adjusted the chain of office about his neck, a gesture rather than anything else; she didn’t need to be here; she could have been with his allies and the Azrian marines, but she had come up here to let him know she was as committed as ever. His eyes met hers for a moment, and he saw his own fierce pride at what they had done reflected back at him.

  ‘They can’t stop us now,’ Claudia said. With her at his side, there was nothing he couldn’t do, as the last few hours had demonstrated. They had prevented the Empress of Thetia’s bid for supreme power, and even if nearly a thousand clan marines and over two thousand Imperial legionaries lay dead, it was a fraction of those who would have died in another purge or a full-scale civil war.

  And among the dead were the advisers whose whispers had led Palatine down tyranny’s path, who had been ready to plunge Thetia into darkness again.

  Ruthelo nodded. ‘It’s over.’

  The steps grew louder, and a knock sounded on the door. Even now, he started, and felt Claudia’s hand tighten on his arm. The old fears had never left them.

  ‘Never again,’ he whispered, too quietly for those outside to hear, and kissed Claudia quickly before she turned and made her way out through the side door to join their allies in the courtyard below.

  ‘Come in,’ he said, after a moment. The yellow flamewood lights flickered for a moment, and he willed them not to go out. The power was erratic tonight; there had been fighting at the generators, and parts of the aether grid had been damaged by the fires in the Palace.

  Just let them hold here on Triton, where he needed them. If the Assembly were plunged into darkness it would be seen as an omen.

  It wasn’t too late for Rainardo Canteni, but as he and the others stepped into the high, echoing chamber with its shrouded furniture and faint golden lights, he knew the Empire was lost.

  It was lost because Ruthelo Morias Azrian, High Thalassarch of Clan Azrian, Leader of the Assembly, Prefect of the City, wished it to be lost.

  Ruthelo would have defeated the Empress without them; he might even have won if they’d taken the Empress’s side; Rainardo could say, honestly, that Azrian and its allies were that strong. But they had sided with him, and fought alongside him, and now they came to ask him not to depose Palatine II. To reverse the decision the Assembly had made at his urging, less than an hour ago.

  The Assembly’s power was a fiction, tonight, and they all knew it. Ruthelo was the only one who mattered.

  Ruthelo knew he had won. It was clear in the way he stood, the light turning his hair, oddly fair for a Thetian, into something close to a halo around his head, setting off the deep red and amber of his robes. It was clear because he was Ruthelo Azrian, and there was nothing he couldn’t do, and Rainardo admired and hated him for it.

  Why did I have to be born in his generation? Rainardo wondered. What fate had condemned him, and Aesonia, and Gian, and Petroz – and even Claudia, Ruthelo’s beloved wife – to a life in this brilliant man’s shadow? Now that he had toppled Palatine, Ruthelo’s name would become immortal, and all of the rest of them, the clan leaders who were supposed to be his equals, would be remembered forever as his allies, his companions, his enemies. And even if they outlived him, they would be weighed against him and found wanting.

  It wasn’t so very bad for Rainardo, because as an admiral, if not in any other way, he was Ruthelo’s equal, and he intended to be an admiral, to command the fleets of whatever state Ruthelo created. His victories would be his own, and he’d be able to escape the City and Ruthelo’s shadow.

  How the others would deal with it he had no idea.

  Ruthelo waited for one of them to speak.

  They bowed as they entered, resplendent in official finery, and looking terribly young. Rainardo, as ever, had managed to make his formal green robes appear to be battle dress, and wore – alone among the four of them – a weapon, a plain, antique Canteni sword. He couldn’t have made more of a contrast with dapper, urbane Gian, apparently the best-dressed man in the City, or with Ruthelo’s sister-in-law Aesonia in her sheer blue robes, barely twenty-two, and already a rising power in her order.

  She was the hardest to gauge, cool green eyes unreadable. He knew the other two, what they were and how to beat them.

  He returned the greeting, t
hen waited. They were the petitioners, not him.

  Gian and Rainardo exchanged a glance, but it was the younger, Gian, who spoke.

  ‘Don’t do this, Ruthelo,’ he said simply. ‘Censure her, strip her of her powers, Thetis knows, we’ll accept it. But don’t depose her.’

  The other two said nothing, their eyes fixed on Ruthelo’s face.

  ‘You know why I’m doing it,’ Ruthelo said. ‘If I don’t, we leave our children to fight this battle all over again.’

  ‘It’s over, finished,’ Gian said. ‘There’s no battle left to fight.’

  ‘Our parents probably said that thirty years ago,’ Ruthelo said.

  How could they be so blind? How could they fail to see what would happen if he hesitated now? ‘They’d still be alive if they’d had the courage to depose Perseus.’

  Instead, they were dead. Dragged away in the night, to vanish as if they’d never lived, or hunted down with ropes and nets like animals for public execution in the Agora. Claudia and Aesonia’s mother had died that way at the hands of the Tyrant’s men, eleven years ago.

  ‘Don’t bring our parents into this,’ Gian said. ‘I wish they were here as much as you do, but we can’t let their ghosts push us into this. We have the power, Ruthelo! We rule the Empire, you and I and the others. For pity’s sake, let it rest!’

  ‘You think just because we have the power, we’ll keep it? You think another man of the Tyrant’s calibre couldn’t take it from us?’

  Images of his parents floated in front of his eyes. His father the trickster, the poet and librettist, always surrounded by artists and musicians. His mother the director, so very unassuming until she walked into a rehearsal room, and her casts somehow fell silent. It had been years before he understood how she did that.

  ‘You don’t understand. We can prevent that. We can . . .’

  ‘Can we?’ Ruthelo interrupted, his anger rising. Had they nothing more to say, or were they too scared to come out with the truth? ‘Can you give me your solemn oath that no Emperor would ever hunger after his ancestors’ power? That no Empress would have the ability to take it back from us? Can you look into the future and tell me that?’

  ‘Will we be any better?’ Rainardo said.

  ‘Could we be worse? Is there any depth of infamy we could plumb deeper than the Empire has managed?’

  ‘That happened because the Emperors ruled without us.’

  ‘Ah,’ Ruthelo said mockingly, ‘now I see where we went wrong. We should have joined them. Why didn’t I think of that?’

  Rainardo stiffened. He was a man of deeds, not of words, and he didn’t appreciate irony. He was a respected commander and a fine sailor, but his military training had clouded his mind.

  ‘We come as allies, Ruthelo,’ Gian said. ‘Don’t insult us.’

  ‘You haven’t given me a single good reason why I shouldn’t do this,’ Ruthelo said. ‘The City’s waiting for us. They’re waiting for us to tell them the Empire is over. That there will be no more purges, no more political executions, no more knocks on the door in the night.’

  ‘It’s not for us to decide,’ Aesonia said finally. ‘We shoudn’t lay hands on Thetia’s anointed Empress and banish her from her own land.’

  Ruthelo saw swift looks of relief cross the faces of the other two. Aesonia had said it when neither of her older and more experienced companions had been able to.

  ‘And if she’d been anointed to Ranthas, as so many of her predecessors were?’ Ruthelo asked quietly, his heart pounding. It always came round to this, which was why they’d sent Aesonia. Because she was a priestess of Thetis, for whom these islands had been named, goddess of the Ocean.

  Ruthelo Azrian, who loved these islands and this City as much as anything in the world, worshipped Ranthas, the god whose servants had created the Domain with its ambitions to theocracy, its Inquisition and the heresy trials. He had shown a hundred times over that it didn’t matter, that the faith and its followers weren’t the same thing, but it would take a lifetime to prove it.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Aesonia said. ‘They were Thetis’s chosen, whether they knew it or not. It isn’t about who blessed them, in what rite, or in whose name. The Emperors are different. They have to be different, set apart, because otherwise there’s nothing to hold these islands together. And maybe reason convinces you otherwise, but how many of those millions out there see things the same way?’

  She held his gaze, and he inclined his head, wondering what the imperceptible flicker of her eyes meant. Satisfaction, triumph?

  For a long moment he said nothing, looking at the three of them, then finally shook his head.

  ‘The price is too high,’ he said. ‘What’s the point of holding Thetia together if its best and brightest are dead?’

  He remembered even now how quiet it had been when the soldiers came to their house. He and his brother, terrified, had watched as they clinically and methodically ransacked his father’s desk, then broke the silence with the curt order to his parents to put on clothes and pack a night-bag. No violence, no shouting.

  And then the door had closed behind them and they were gone, never to be seen again, and Ruthelo had been left in a darkened house with a brother too young to understand why his parents had disappeared.

  ‘You want to go too far, Ruthelo,’ Gian said. ‘I can’t stop you.’

  ‘No,’ Ruthelo said. ‘You can’t.’

  ‘We tried. I hope your faith is justified, for all our sakes.’

  He walked past Ruthelo. Aesonia followed him a moment later, with only the briefest glance at Ruthelo.

  Rainardo lingered, one hand resting on his sword. Not an aggressive gesture, Ruthelo knew, but one that gave Rainardo comfort.

  ‘I don’t agree,’ he said abruptly, ‘but I understand.’

  He nodded curtly and went after the others, leaving Ruthelo alone in the antechamber. They were helpless, they couldn’t stop him, and were well aware that the tide of opinion was with him. They couldn’t afford not to be part of his new order. They would see, in time, that he’d been right. And be glad that his children, and theirs when they were born, would grow up never hearing that midnight knock on the door.

  Ruthelo and Claudia had lived in the shadows for almost half their lives, all those years under mad Orosius and despotic Aetius. Palatine had been a friend to both of them, a former republican who’d taken the throne only to defeat the Crusade, but the Empire had consumed her as well.

  Never again.

  He heard a swell of sound in the Chamber below. Aesonia and the others had returned to their seats. It was time.

  The Praesidium, home of the Thetian Clan Assembly, had been the heart of the City once, long ago. The building that housed it now was only two hundred years old, but far grander than any of its predecessors. The Emperor of the time had built it, of course, making its splendour a façade to disguise how powerless the Assembly had become.

  It dominated the old core of the city at the south end of Triton Island, an imposing circular building with a copper-clad dome towering above the Agora, connected by a bridge to the Palace of the Seas. It was dressed stone, as almost everything here was, and tonight it was surrounded by a sea of humanity, people packed into the open spaces around it, the ceremonial plazas and the law courts and the basilicas. Even the fountains and fountain basins were full, people enduring the jets of water and the drenching so they could be here. They were Thetians, after all, and water was Thetia’s element.

  Leonata Mezzarro was fourteen years old, and soaking wet, and hardly believing she was seeing this. She was perched on the shoulders of a muscled merman in the great fountain in the centre of the Octagon, watching the Praesidium for the slightest sign of movement, for a glimpse of Ruthelo or Claudia or any of their allies. Her parents were somewhere down in the crush at the edge of the fountain, probably relieved that she was in plain sight, somewhere they could keep an eye on her, but she had no eyes for them, only the Praesidium.

  She�
�d never seen so many people, and she thought she had seen a lot, in fourteen years of life in the Heart of the World. She had, by the standards of any other city. Nobody knew how big the City was; the census figures were out of date as soon as they were collected these days, but there were perhaps half a million people crammed into the squares around her waiting in hushed silence for those at the front to report what was being said in the Chamber. Every so often a whisper would run back through the crowd like a wave, and she could see it as well as hear it, though it took longer to cross the fountain basin and climb up to her.

  Ruthelo was about to depose the Empress, and Leonata, who wanted to be a chymist, or a physician, or possibly – and this was growing on her by the second – Doge of the Republic, like Ruthelo, was watching it. She was here, in the heart of the world, and she wanted never to be anywhere else.

  The Assembly Chamber itself was packed. Every clan leader and deputy, anyone who had the slightest claim to be here, was packed into the domed room with its circles of benches and the ornate scissor chairs on the marble floor. The galleries were packed as well, people squeezed against the iron railings, enduring the heat from so many people and the shielded flamewood lights all around the walls. Many had come straight from the fighting and still wore armour, though weapons had been confiscated by the marines outside. Blood had been shed too often in this room.

  But they endured it, because tonight this place mattered again, and the resonances of a thousand years of the Assembly’s history were almost tangible. Echoes of all the drama and the glory and the conflict, the speeches of the great orators and the heartbreaking fall of the Republic filled the air, and no-one remembered, or cared, that this was not the same building. It was what it stood for that mattered, and that they were here to witness the dissolution of the Thetian Empire.