Vespera Page 19

  There were no Great Clans without a barge, not any more.

  Legate Orando and Admiral Seganao were waiting by the gangplank, the last not to have boarded. Her clan lined the decks under the turquoise awning, fresh Estarrin flags fluttered over the silver-gilded stern house. It wasn’t the largest of the clan barges, but to her eyes it was the most graceful, and it carried with it, worn into the turquoise-lacquered wood, the memory of twenty years as Thalassarch of the Estarrin, twenty turbulent but happy years as she’d watched the Clan and the City recover and her daughters grow.

  ‘All present and correct,’ Seganao reported. Her clan admiral was a Southern Archipelagan, born five thousand miles to the south on the same small island which had produced Sagantha Karao, the greatest of Palatine II’s admirals.

  ‘Then we should be away!’ she said, and her smile was entirely genuine as she walked up the gangplank and along the deck to her chair, set under the stern house with a view all the way down the ship, the Mercantarch’s and Legate’s chairs set on either side. The Admiral, by tradition, commanded the clan barge, and would sit further forward.

  ‘Cast off! Forward one quarter!’ Seganao ordered.

  She saw Raphael board, followed by the legate, and the attendants waiting on the boardwalk scrambled to loose the moorings on Seganao’s order, throwing them back to the sailors on board. Underfoot, the low hum of the flamewood engine rose in tone, though it was hardly noticeable, nothing like the shuddering of a powered cargo barge. Clan barges still could be rowed, but finding the clanspeople to man the oars was difficult, a trouble worth taking only for the most glittering of occasions.

  Manatee slowly pulled away from the Palace watergate and on to the sunlit waters of Star Deep, trailed by cheers from those left behind at the Palace. No-one wanted to be left behind, but the business of Vespera continued, and the Palace had to be guarded. Clan marines hadn’t fought one another in two decades, but only because the Council had managed to stay one step ahead of clan disputes.

  Then they were out on the open water, one more among the thousands of vessels moving between the City’s peninsulas and islands, though quite probably the most splendid. Leonata sat back in her chair and let herself move with the motion of the boat, watching her clanspeople as they stared out across the water.

  But even there, Raphael’s words came back to haunt her, and she called for Seganao and her spymaster Tellia as soon as Manatee was safely away from the Palace. Her clanspeople remained seated on their padded benches – the was only a short journey, after all, and there was a certain degree of formality involved – and resumed their earlier conversations now that their Thalassarch had given implicit permission. She sent Flavia to divert Raphael.

  ‘Seganao, Tellia, what’s our best estimate on Clan Jharissa’s crew and ship strength?’

  The two glanced at one another, then Tellia answered for them both. Her Spymaster was a small, ample, grandmotherly woman, with a face that radiated trust, soft hands, and a mind like a steel trap. She was, as far as other clans knew, the palace quartermaster.

  ‘Eight, possibly nine new mantas, three second-hand, somewhere in the region of thirty sailing ships, though we don’t know for sure because they keep so many up in the arctic. The Ice Runner ships have heavy crews, we think they may do ice loading themselves.’

  ‘Or maybe they’re marines in case the Empire attacks.’

  ‘Not unlikely. Their crews tend to be armed.’

  ‘Their ships tend to be armed,’ Seganao said. ‘To the teeth.’

  ‘A Mandrugo spy managed to eavesdrop on a live-fire exercise two or three years ago, our agent copied the report before it reached the Thalassarch’s desk,’ Tellia said. ‘Six cannon emplacements, several torpedo tubes. They may be double-reactor.’

  ‘Definitely,’ Seganao said. ‘Anthemia let it slip.’

  Leonata gave him a long look, and he had the grace to look slightly abashed.

  ‘It’s my job to know these things,’ he protested.

  ‘It’s my daughter’s job to keep quiet,’ Leonata said. But then, Anthemia had always lacked a certain sense of reality, and particularly any notion that her beloved shipyard didn’t exist in a vacuum – that the ships she built were more than simply labours of love, they were machines capable, if so equipped, of causing massive carnage.

  ‘But at any point most of those ships would be away from port,’ Mazera said. ‘Mantas don’t earn money sitting at a gantry. They need to keep the ice coming, amount they’re spending on new ships and the like.’

  ‘Strength on land?’

  ‘Harder to tell, because most of the Ice Runners seem to be able to act as marines, and the marines don’t often wear armour. The report we had on the incident last night suggest none of the Jharissans involved were marines. Best estimate, three hundred marines. Or the equivalent of.’

  That was a big garrison, and they had many more forces a few hours away at Saphir Island. Jharissa were stronger than any other single clan in the City – but weaker, overall, than the forces commanded by any one of the three princes, and less than half the strength Clan Azrian alone had mustered at the beginning of the Anarchy. There had been a dozen or so dedicated warships in the Azrian fleet as well, not simply armed merchant mantas.

  ‘I saw something at Saphir,’ Leonata said, trying to remember. Her eyes had been on the confrontation in the street, Iolani’s upraised arm, but she’d looked to see who was being signalled, and the man on the roof nearest her had been hidden only from Valentine. ‘They were carrying devices, about an arm’s length, with a bulge in the middle, Heavy, perhaps metal, but dull, not shiny.’

  ‘We’ve had reports of these too,’ Legate Orando said. ‘Jharissa have been very cagey about them, which worries me.’

  Leonata scratched the arm of the chair, an old habit which showed itself in the slight dent in the varnish.

  ‘Say these were some new weapon,’ Leonata said slowly, ‘able to project force over a distance. How much could three or four hundred men do with such a weapon?’

  ‘I can’t tell,’ Orando said, spreading his hands, but she could tell the Legate was concerned now, and chided herself for spoiling the occasion again. ‘I’d need to know their capabilities.’

  It would be something to broach with Iolani delicately; Leonata didn’t like being kept in the dark.

  ‘Admiral!’ one of the sailors shouted from after, and Seganao stood up instantly, his head brushing the roof timbers. He really was far too tall for Thetian vessels. Leonata gestured for the others to pause as she watched.

  ‘Two points to starboard! Increase speed one mark!’ Seganao ordered. ‘If Decaris think we’re going to wait for their stone floats to waddle past, they’ve another think coming.’

  Leonata saw them now, a string of four square rafts with pallets of building stone lashed to them, pulled by a heavy-duty tug which was belching clouds of steam from its engine vents, and shepherded by two powered launches in Decaris blue. They must be transporting stone from the Decaris quarry gantries south of the City, and they were headed straight across Manatee’s path.

  ‘Grouchy bastards,’ Orando said. ‘They just want to get in our way because we’re prettier than them.’

  ‘Why, thank you, Legate,’ Leonata said. ‘Or were you talking about Manatee?’

  She watched their smiles and knew she’d defused their tension; she wouldn’t ask more of them now. All she could see in Jharissa was a clan desperate to protect itself against the threat of the New Empire, with a vendetta whose causes they kept secret. What they weren’t, though Leonata would not have told Raphael how she knew, was a fifth column for a larger invading force.

  ‘Bring me the hailer!’ Seganao said, grabbed the speaking trumpet and strode forward. Manatee was still on a collision course with the Decaris flotilla, and that was even without taking into account all the other boats around them.

  ‘Decaris boat!’ Seganao shouted, his voice echoing across the water. ‘We’ve given you th
e room. Alter course two points to starboard!’

  There was a moment of consternation, or perhaps conference, on the tug before one of the crew picked up its loud-hailer.

  ‘With this lot? Are you mad? Get that fancy brick of yours out of the way! You can wait till we’ve gone past.’

  Fancy brick? The Decaris would pay for this! She would . . .

  She stopped in time to laugh at herself. From their expressions, Tellia and Mazera knew exactly what she’d been thinking.

  ‘Full speed,’ Seganao said. ‘Another point to starboard, use your discretion.’

  The steersman acknowledged, and slowly Manatee began to gain, cutting faster and faster across the path of the oncoming Decaris tug. She was less than three lengths away now, but Manatee was too fast, and there was still a length and a half between them when she showed her stern to the other boat. Seganao didn’t put down the loudhailer, though, until he’d let fly a few choice insults.

  ‘Boneheaded architects,’ he said sourly, dropping the loudhailer back into its chest. ‘Stubborn as mules, the lot of them. Put the stone in charge of the tug, it couldn’t do any worse.’

  They were closing on their destination now, the fantastical structure of the Hub rising out of the water below the North Pharos on Proteus Head. There had been rocks there once, long ago, and a seal colony – hence the temple to the Old Man of the Sea, Proteus, whose creatures seals were. The seals had fled before the encroaching City centuries ago, and now all that remained was a bronze statue of a seal somewhere among the gargantuan complex known simply as the Hub.

  Where her guests, the allied Thalassarchs she’d invited to the ceremony, would be waiting, and where shortly her new manta would dock, the manta Anthemia had helped to grow. Few clan leaders could look on their new mantas which such pride.

  ‘Lieutenant Palladios,’ Rainardo said curtly. ‘What would you have done, had you been Ruthelo’s fleet commander?’

  The slim, dark-haired lieutenant’s eyes narrowed, and he leaned over the table. The other officers stood back, careful not to obscure his view now Rainardo had put him on the spot. There were nine of them with Valentine and Rainardo in the cool, cavernous War Room under Canteni Palace, surrounded by stones which had been laid before the days even of the old Republic.

  Valentine had always liked archaic Canteni Palace, more like a fortress than the seats of other clans. The warrior Canteni. Rainardo was only the latest in a long line of admirals and legates, leaders of genius who had kept the Canteni name alive through the centuries. Only Salassa, his mother’s former clan, were older, and now Petroz had become Prince of Imbria and absorbed the clan into his princedom, it looked as if they were in their last generation.

  ‘Remember,’ Rainardo went on, ‘you know you outnumber my main force, but you don’t know where my flanking elements are, and with those I outnumber you.’

  ‘If I split my forces and keep some in reserve to protect the transports,’ Palladios said, thinking out loud as Rainardo had been encouraging him to do, ‘I run the risk of losing my main force while my reserve looks on. And then it won’t have a chance to escape.’

  Rainardo said nothing; he wasn’t going to give the youngster any encouragement.

  ‘I don’t offer battle,’ he said, after a moment. ‘It’s more important that the convoy gets through, my fleet isn’t ready for battle.’ He traced a line on the map, leading north-east away from the battlefield, between a cluster of small islets and the mainland. ‘You’ve probably put a flanking element here. I have the force to punch through them, so I take my whole fleet up here and engage them long enough to get all the transports through. By the time your main force gets there, it’ll be too late.’

  Palladios looked anxiously up at Valentine. He was a young lieutenant, after all, still third-in-command, and the plan he’d suggested was something very like running away. That was brave of him.

  ‘Exactly right,’ said Rainardo, pleased, eyes flickering to the doorway where a blue-clad figure was waiting in the shadows. ‘That’s what Ruthelo’s admiral should have done. Warfare isn’t about honour, it’s about accomplishing your objective, and in this case Ruthelo needed those supplies at Corala more than he needed a victory.’

  ‘Did you find out why he offered battle instead?’ asked Palladios’s superior, Captain Lindos of the Unity.

  Rainardo’s smile faded. ‘There were no survivors from that fleet. But you’re right. In more civilized times it pays to ask your prisoners, see what they’ll let slip.’

  ‘Only what they’ll let slip?’

  ‘You’re a naval officer,’ Rainardo said. ‘Leave interrogation to the spies, unless you’re very desperate. Now, if I’m not mistaken, here is a message for your Emperor, so I suspect the session is at an end. We’ll recommence later on.’

  Valentine nodded. ‘You’ve done well. Captain Lindos, take care of this one. He’ll go far.’

  The officers recognised his tone of dismissal, and collected their things, filing out of the door as Aesonia came over to Valentine.

  ‘Silvanos has some new intelligence he’d like to share with us. My boat is outside. How did the tactics class go?’

  ‘You have some good people there,’ Rainardo said. ‘I couldn’t have done better with them myself. Lindos is good, if a bit cocksure; Palladios will be brilliant. Merelos is a prize as well – isn’t he a Vesperan?’

  ‘Clan Rozzini, originally,’ Valentine said, fetching Rainardo’s cane for him and giving the old man a hand up.

  ‘No wonder he left,’ Aesonia said. ‘I want to wash my hands every time I have dealings with Correlio Rozzini.’

  A venal brute of a man, Correlio. Rather like their other bought ally, the Prince of Sommur, Valentine thought, though he couldn’t voice either opinion in public. They’d need the support of both soon enough.

  Rainardo stared down at the map, spread out and weighted down on the antique table which had served the Canteni for generations. The walls were lined with map-cases, each map individually labelled and wrapped in oilcloth to protect it from the damp. Valentine doubted anyone except the Oceanographic Guild had such complete surveys of Thetia and its islands.

  He moved to roll it up, but Rainardo stopped him.

  ‘No, don’t, Berrenus will get upset if you put it away wrong. You’d think they were his maps not mine, the way he looks after them.’

  ‘Is he still your chief cartographer?’ Valentine asked, remembering a slight, diffident man who looked after and improved the collection.

  ‘Yes, though he’s getting on a bit. Like me.’ Rainardo began to leave, cane clacking on the floor, but then stopped. ‘What a waste. So many dead, and for so little.’

  ‘We stopped Ruthelo.’

  Rainardo looked at him with anger in his eyes. ‘We took Ruthelo’s united Thetia, broke it into a thousand pieces, and drenched it in blood. And for forty years we’ve been squabbling over the ruins like spoilt children refusing to admit anything is their fault.’

  ‘We rebuilt the Empire,’ said Aesonia, taken aback.

  ‘Did we?’ Rainardo said, pointing at her with a shaking hand. ‘Show me the Imperial Palace, show me the days of peace you promised once Thetia had an anointed Emperor again.’

  ‘Rainardo, you’re not yourself.’

  ‘No, I’m dying,’ Rainardo said. ‘And every night when I go to sleep, wondering if it will be my last, I swim through a sea of lost souls, all the men and women and children I killed in battle and out, and I wonder if in seventy years of life I’ve done anything but destroy and kill.’

  ‘You’d rather have lived in Ruthelo’s Republic? Watched while he made himself Tyrant?’

  ‘We all know what he was really doing. No more lies, Aesonia. You wanted the Empire back, and now you have it, and be thankful. And when you face your own mortality, like me, maybe you’ll understand.’

  ‘I’ll face my own mortality knowing I gave Thetia back its soul!’ Aesonia said. His mother looked almost afraid now. Rainardo
had been her ally all this time, and there had been harsh words on occasions. But he’d never, to Valentine’s knowledge, questioned what they’d done or why they’d done it.

  ‘Then you’ll die deluded,’ Rainardo said. ‘Go, both of you. Val, send my man down. He’ll be waiting at the top.’

  The Estarrin leaders on the aft deck drifted back to their seats, as Manatee reached the line of buoys marking the edge of the manta docking zone. Raphael tried looking down over the side for a glimpse of the great ships below him, but the sun on the water was too blinding.

  What the Hub had been originally, nobody quite knew. There was an original building somewhere in the core, but whatever it had been had vanished under centuries of accretions, until it had grown into a single enormous structure covering the whole of Proteus Head bar the lighthouse and the temple.

  It was all kept in good order, but there was no unity to it, no plan in all those centuries of additions, of buildings, galleries, equipment bays, offices, concourses, a confused structure almost half a mile from where it rose dramatically from the sea to where it petered out into buildings and horrea further up Harbour Spur. And, like an iceberg, that was only the smaller part of it. It was the nerve centre for the hundred and forty-odd gantries of the Vesperan undersea harbour, the oldest and the largest on Aquasilva, stretching for miles up the spur, across the bay to Admiralty Island via tunnels on the seabed, out to sea on the western side, down an underwater cliff a little way offshore. Harbour Spur itself was hollow now, the rock dug out to create warehouse space for the cargoes of half the world.

  Manatee slowed and turned slightly, edging in down the approach path indicated for it above a safe lane. There were boats clustered thickly around the Hub, tugs and service boats and passenger launches, no fewer than three vaporetto platforms, each serving a different company and a different route. Manatee was on official business, though, so she was being routed round to a specially cleared pontoon quay on the Hub’s eastern side.