Vespera Read online

  She’d followed what she could of the conversation, but it was taking Raphael to dark places. What was he suggesting? There were so many implications, and she wasn’t sure how open he’d be. For all he knew, she might be a confederate of the Jharissa in this, though she trusted he’d have the common sense to rule that out as a possibility.

  Even if the evidence might come to suggest otherwise.

  ‘We’re fairly sure the Empire started this fight, not the Jharissa,’ she offered, wondering how best to deal with this. She didn’t like Tiziano’s music any more than she liked Tiziano, but Raphael clearly loved it, and it would be a shame for the man himself to spoil that.

  ‘I’d guessed,’ he said testily. ‘But why? And what merits commissioning and funding an opera apparently directed against the Jharissa? This isn’t some quarrel over trade routes or territory.’

  No, it was a matter of hatred, and hatred breeding more hatred. Was he wondering if Jharissa were justified in their hostility? After what had happened at Saphir, it would do him good to see that there might be two sides to the story. But for the life of her she had no idea what that story might be.

  There had been a revival of Matharanos’s Aetius three or four years ago, at about the time Aesonia must have commissioned Tiziano’s.

  ‘I wonder if she’s done anything else?’

  Raphael raised a single eyebrow, a gesture that made him look exactly like his uncle; did he realize that, or was it quite unconscious?

  ‘Opera won’t touch everyone,’ she said slowly. ‘But there are also the theatre, street plays, songs, the broadsheets and the pamphlets – a whole host of other ways to reach people. If you’re right, we should find something suspicious in those as well.’

  ‘You have the resources to look.’

  It would be easy for her, with her contacts and the resources of a great clan, but she would have to be quiet about it, and she’d need to entrust the work to someone both clever and streetwise – Flavia might do.

  ‘Give me a day or two,’ she said. ‘Are you coming back inside?’

  ‘No, I think I’ve had enough of that for tonight,’ Raphael said. ‘Besides, I don’t even know where I’m sleeping.’

  ‘Your uncle has a house in Naiad, doesn’t he? I thought that was home.’

  ‘I ran away, remember. For all I know, he burnt everything I ever owned,’ Raphael said matter-of-factly, closing the shell about himself again. ‘Goodnight.’

  He strode off before Leonata could reply, a dark figure among the revellers in the Street of Chantries. She waited until she was sure the people she’d assigned to follow him were on his tail, and then turned to Flavia. ‘How many are watching him?’

  ‘Four that I could see,’ her aide said. Flavia had grown up in the dusty, twisting streets and endless harbours of the Portanis, and she’d had great potential even before Leonata handed her over to the Estarrin intelligencers for training. ‘Maybe one more, but he hasn’t moved, I think he’s trailing Petroz. Just one of the usuals.’

  ‘Petroz wants a chance to tell me something,’ Leonata said. ‘If you see an opportunity, keep the others away for a while, will you? If not, tell him I’ll be available tomorrow morning.’

  ‘He might have changed his mind about telling you by then,’ Flavia said.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ He knew he could trust Leonata in a way he couldn’t count on anyone back in Imbria. ‘My new quartet will be on soon. I want to see how they’re doing.’

  The streets on Raphael’s way home were packed; Vesperans slept in the afternoon, when it was too hot to do anything else, and made up for it by staying up late and rising early. Particularly on the evening of an impromptu festival – Valentine’s name seemed to be on everyone’s lips.

  Lights blazed from the windows of the clan palaces ahead, girdling the inlet of the sea known as the Marmora. These were, for the most part, the palaces of the oldest and most ancient of the Vesperan clans, the ones who could trace their origin back a thousand years to the early days of the original Republic, whose names resonated through Thetian history – Canteni, Decaris, Salassa, Scartaris. The latter two weren’t even clans any more, since their leaders had elevated themselves to princes in the Anarchy and seized vast tracts of territory. Decaris and Canteni, though, still remained clans.

  The warrior Canteni, they’d always called themselves, and been proud of it; but Raphael had, belatedly, realised that the ancient on the Council of the Seas had been Rainardo Canteni, little more than skin stretched over bones now. He was only a few years older than Petroz and Gian, but the fire had gone out of him, and he looked on the verge of death.

  Raphael banished the memory of the big, booming man Rainardo had been, and was glad when he emerged out from the palaces into more populated streets, dotted with restaurants and coffee-houses full of people sitting out, drinking coffee or wine under the dark Vesperan sky. Groups of friends, at ease with each other, their laughter defying whatever shadows might be cast over the City. Dancing, in another café, in a style many would have called decadent, and tried to ban even as they watched in horrified fascination. Not in Vespera.

  The strains of an Andrieli quartet floated out from a restaurant terrace as he neared the waterfront, and his mind flickered back to memories of his years in Taneth, Vespera’s great rival on the far side of the world. The last place he had felt at home, among the cosmopolitan Merchant Lords and the musical circles he soon found his way into. The friendship of the musicians and scholars and adventurers, drawn to golden Taneth and its Great Library like moths to a flame. Madrigals and quartets in his spacious apartments on Thepsis Island, and the nights with one of the musicians which often followed.

  Taneth was virtually Vespera’s twin, so alike in politics and atmosphere, but in the end it wasn’t the same. Vespera was the heart of the world, a city like no other on Aquasilva, with not simply the energy of the present but the resonances of more than a thousand years of power and history, of orators and poets and inventors and architects. Of all the musicians who’d been born here or worked here – Damazo, Arelli, Verision, Kodalar, Andrieli and so many more, back into the mists of time.

  Three young clan marines staggered past, on their way back to the Portanis, tipsy but still upright, saluting passers-by with exaggerated solemnity. A couple strolling past returned the salute, much to the marines’ delight, and then they stopped and wandered over to lean against the wall, resuming what was apparently an earlier argument on the indivisibility of the Elements. The religious ferment caused by the Crusade’s failure and the alternative religions which had sprung up had reached Vespera, it seemed, and taken on its own unique form.

  The rest of the world didn’t always believe that Vesperans argued about such things. It did seem a little implausible, to everyone except Tanethans. They were a far more solid-minded people than Vesperans, their religion very different, yet Raphael had listened to a pair of drunken Tanethans who weren’t even devout argue about the theological positions of two candidates for the Primacy until one of them fell into the harbour.

  Vesperans took argument to extremes. It was the pleasure of quarrelling as much as anything else, and the subject – whether the merits of rival boats in the Festival Regatta or the doctrine of the Divided Will – really didn’t matter.

  Raphael was moving up away from the people again now, further uphill, catching occasional glimpses of the Deep below him, of the glittering ring of lights which was Vespera, and then finally he reached a tiny square close to the summit and saw for the first time in fourteen years the house tucked away beyond the far corner, butting up against the hill on its southern side. The ground floor facing the street was whitewashed, blank, high walls hiding the courtyard beyond. Like thousands of others in Vespera, a courtyard house with an interior colonnade, and a fountain, and a few windows facing towards the sea.

  Alone of the houses around the little square, no lights shone from its windows. Not even a chink through closed shutters. The doors were in
darkness, the defaced crest above them hidden by shadows. The waxing moon hadn’t risen above the mountains yet, while the other two were invisible at the moment.

  He reached into the pocket of his robe and brought out the ring of keys he’d kept with him all these years. He wondered if they would still work, or whether the house was as empty as it looked. Silvanos had had servants when Raphael had left, a taciturn pair suited to his silence and gloom, but Raphael had no idea if they were still here.

  The sound of metal on metal was painfully loud when he fitted the key into the lock, felt it turn and the door give, creak inwards into the courtyard. Of course the door creaked; Silvanos had tuned them all and forbidden the servants to oil them, so that he could hear and recognise every door in the house.

  The courtyard was empty, silent except for the soft plashing of the fountain, the windows as dark as they’d seemed from the street. It shouldn’t have been a sinister house – it was airy and light and must once have been full of music and laughter, of guests and quarrels and comfortable chaos as houses ought to be. Not a place of deathly silence and stillness, a monument to whatever had killed Silvanos inside all those years ago. If he had ever been any different; Raphael was beginning to wonder, as the years went by, whether he’d been born that way. There was certainly no-one alive who remembered him otherwise.

  The windows on to the courtyard weren’t shuttered, and the plants which grew around them were well-tended, the fountain clean. The plants looked identical to those which had been here so long ago. Some of them had even been cut back to keep them from growing too much.

  He had to unlock the main doors into the house, called out again in the darkened atrium in the moment before he found the lights, controlled by a shielded aether pad just behind the door. They flickered into life, small and cold, casting a faint yellow-white glow over the stone staircase.

  And over the crest above the main archway, a crest defaced to erase the name and memory of the family who had once lived here, and taken the wrong side in the Anarchy. Fitting, in a way – a man with no past, living in a house with no past. Silvanos had been an orphan of the Anarchy, like so many others, had returned to Vespera in his late teens with little money and no connections to begin his rapid rise to power. In the New Empire’s service, oddly, but that explained his success. The Empire had been more preoccupied with survival then, and when Silvanos had offered to build them a spy network at the cost of a living wage for him and a few others, they’d jumped at the chance. And been repaid a hundredfold by the intelligence his network gave them.

  Raphael had come to Vespera when he was three, already weakened by the disease which had killed his parents and nearly claimed Silvanos’s life. And he had been promptly abandoned, handed over into the care of servants and tutors, until Silvanos judged his nephew was old enough to look after himself.

  Raphael felt like a frightened child again, in these darkened, echoing rooms, but running away wasn’t going to do him any good. He made his way slowly upstairs, navigating by memory as much as by sight, paused and called out again on the first-floor landing even though he knew Silvanos wasn’t there, and then went on again, up the stairs to the small range of rooms at the top which had been his.

  He stopped at the top step, looking ahead at the narrow door with its pointed arch, before he mustered the courage to activate the lights inside and turn the iron handle. For a second he didn’t think it would budge, and then it gave, with an agonised shriek, opening outwards to let him through and into the pair of long, narrow rooms beyond.

  He began to cough as a whirlwind of dust rushed up at him, coughed and wheezed until his lungs began to hurt and he reached for his black handkerchief. The scars of that unnamed lung disease were never far away.

  Nothing had been moved. Nothing. Silvanos had trained him to notice details, and the memory of the day he’d last seen this room, the day he sailed for Sarthes, was crystal-clear. It had been morning then, as dark as the house ever got in day-time, and in his attempt to pack enough of the books, Raphael had knocked some off the shelves.

  They still lay there, on the floor, covered in fourteen years of dust. The paper and pens on the desk were as he’d left them, the hanging on the wall slightly askew. He remembered touching it glancingly, but hadn’t noticed he’d put it out of kilter.

  Something brushed his legs and he nearly cried out, so much was the shock, but he didn’t even need to look to know that it was one of Silvanos’s cats.

  But then he looked down and saw a silver tabby looking up at him with bright, watchful eyes, the very image of Emnon who must have been dead these seven or eight years. Leaving the cats behind had been the hardest thing, knowing he’d never see them again, for they were far the friendliest and most human inhabitants of Silvanos’s domain.

  Raphael couldn’t take any more. He slammed the door and fled back downstairs, the cat trailing in his wake, and only stopped when he was out in the courtyard, where the lights had come on.

  Silvanos was waiting in the shadow of the colonnade where, Raphael now saw, his baggage and his cello had been left by the Navy porters who’d brought them up. There was another cat beside him, a huge grey shape almost the size of a jaguar with golden eyes. A fishing cat, one of the legendary poison-tasters of Thetia. Silvanos’ symbol.

  ‘What is this?’ Raphael demanded. ‘What have you done here?’

  ‘I preserve,’ Silvanos said, walking out into the light. The silver tabby jumped up on to the side of the fountain and curled its paws underneath it, watching while the fishing cat advanced towards Raphael, stopped and sniffed his hand for a moment before rubbing its head against him.

  ‘Hades?’ Raphael asked, and knelt down to run his hand along the cat’s back, feeling the warmth, the aliveness of him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They live a long time, you know. Thirty or forty years.’

  ‘Has no-one been up there since I left?’ Raphael asked, knowing his voice was shaking, but totally without defences in this place.

  ‘Of course not. You never did like having your room disturbed.’

  ‘You’re mad. This place is a mausoleum.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Silvanos said. ‘It’s a reminder of what happens when we drop our guard, when we believe we’re safe.’

  ‘You can’t live your entire life like that!’

  Why? Why, still, after more than forty years, did Silvanos still live with this?

  Silvanos looked around. ‘This isn’t my life,’ he said. ‘This is where I sleep. And not always that, even. I have a room in Ulithi Palace as well, should I need it.’

  ‘So why bother?’

  ‘I told you. Memory. One day you’ll understand.’

  ‘I live my own life, not the one you’ve set out for me.’

  Silvanos crossed over to the fountain and lifted the silver cat on to his shoulder, rubbing its chin affectionately. There were two or three other cats sleeping in the shadows, Raphael saw now, though he didn’t have the heart to look and see which beloved childhood cats they were successors to.

  ‘I live this life so that no-one else has to,’ Silvanos said. ‘This . . . all of this is to stop me ever dropping my guard, forgetting to watch those I should be watching. To remind me what the dreams of great men and women really mean.’

  ‘You live the Anarchy over and over again so that no-one else has to? Can one man do that?’

  ‘I can,’ Silvanos said. The tabby began to purr, and a smile briefly lit the corners of his mouth. ‘If that’s the price for it never happening again, I’ll pay it.’

  ‘But do you need to?’

  ‘I think it’s a little late to be asking that question,’ he said.

  Raphael stood up again, much to Hades’ disappointment, and crossed over to the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Silvanos asked, turning, but not so sharply that the cat would slip from his shoulder.

  ‘Anywhere but here.’ There might still be bars and cafés open where Raphael could find mu
sic, and life, and musicians. He knew it wasn’t worthy of him, but he needed to feel alive after being in this place.

  ‘I didn’t expect you,’ Silvanos said, as Raphael reached out for the handle. ‘You know I didn’t expect Valentine to bring you. I would have had them clean your rooms otherwise.’

  ‘But you tried to dissuade him?’ Raphael guessed.

  ‘I didn’t want you in Vespera when all of this broke,’ he said, at last. ‘I wanted you away, somewhere you could have nothing to do with it, where you could come back after it was all over and begin again. So that you could have the life I never did.’

  Raphael let his hand drop to his side again, wondering if that was, actually, the truth. Realised a moment later that it was, because it wasn’t at all the kind of lie Silvanos told. It could mean so many things, but almost certainly it was true.

  ‘I keep the guest room ready, still. And the grand piano.’ Silvanos looked over at the cello in its case and webbing, standing by a pillar in the far corner. ‘You may have played duets in Taneth, but this house hasn’t heard a cello in far too long.’

  A truce, then. Perhaps even a change, though that was too much to hope for. Raphael nodded, and then Silvanos, quite abruptly, doubled over with a hacking cough that was painful even to hear, and Raphael stopped dead, realising his uncle had been oddly still for a few minutes, as if he were desperately trying to retain control and normality.

  The cello forgotten, Raphael ran over to his uncle as Silvanos coughed again, and saw blood on his uncle’s chin.

  He’d had to cope with this alone sometimes, when he was little, because Silvanos trusted no-one else except Plautius. Silvanos tried to stand, but almost collapsed. Raphael felt him start to buckle and propped him up, pulled his uncle’s arm over his shoulders and walked him into the house.

  CHAPTER V