Vespera Page 21

  ‘Actually, I’m sorry you stole the names, or I might have used them,’ Iolani admitted. ‘They’re City names, a good thing. Counterbalance to all those admirals and legates the Empire insists on naming its ships after.’

  Was Iolani trying to put her at ease? Heavens, she hated this sudden suspicion which seemed to be falling across her world. A few days ago Iolani had been an enigmatic colleague, now she might be the deadliest threat to Thetia since Ruthelo Azrian; Petroz Salassa had gone from a firm friend to a suspected murderer. Raphael . . . if only she could remember who Raphael reminded her of, and why the resemblance filled her with such foreboding.

  ‘I didn’t know you were a student of history,’ Leonata said, on impulse, and was rewarded a moment later.

  ‘Knowing the past is important, it stops you making unnecessary mistakes. But only if you’ve made sure what you know is really the truth.’

  ‘Isn’t that what scholars are for?’ Leonata countered.

  ‘Then be a scholar,’ Iolani said. ‘Again, my congratulations.’

  She bowed again, spun on her heel and strode off, back into the labyrinthine passages of the Hub. The Jharissan leader had come to deliver a message, now Leonata had to work out what she meant.

  Then be a scholar.

  Raphael made sure the Jharissan leader had left before he emerged from the ranks of Estarrin clanspeople, all heading towards the access tube. So Aruwe made Jharissa’s ships, did they?

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ Leonata said. She was clearly glad he’d made himself scarce, though he’d managed to overhear most of her very interesting conversation with Iolani – interesting for what it revealed about both women.

  ‘Do shipwright clans have palaces like everyone else?’ he asked, apparently innocently, glancing over at where Corsina was conferring with her shipwrights – about the Jharissa?

  ‘Of course they do,’ said Leonata. ‘And seats on the Council, if they want. But then the Thalassarchs would have to spend most of their time here.’

  ‘They don’t?’

  ‘What would be the point? They’re not merchants, they’re master shipwrights.’

  ‘So Corsina isn’t here very often.’

  ‘She has to come here for business, and to sign new contracts,’ Leonata said, more guarded now – she’d realised this wasn’t innocent curiosity after all. Her daughter Anthemia was watching them, too.

  ‘And clans stay with the same shipwrights?’

  ‘Yes. Sometimes for centuries.’

  And the five Vesperan shipwright clans between them made more than three-quarters of the Archipelago’s ships, as well as a fair proportion of the Continents’. Even the Imperial Navy had only one shipyard of its own, a new creation with only a fraction of the expertise of the Vesperan clans. An accident of geography – while the locations of the shipyards were jealously guarded secrets, it was known they were all in the Sea of Stars, and all well within the territory now administered by Vespera. The Empire had never had a chance to get its hands on one.

  ‘How long has Estarrin been with Aruwe?’ he asked.

  As if warned, Anthemia and Corsina broke away from the group of Aruwe dignitaries and came over to join them, in time to overhear his question.

  ‘Ever since the Clan was founded,’ said Anthemia proudly. ‘The first Thalassarch’s mother was an Aruwe shipwright.’

  ‘And we’ve been allies ever since,’ Corsina said, though her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.

  ‘Eight mantas Aruwe built for the Estarrin,’ Anthemia said. ‘Though this is the first . . .’

  ‘The first supervised by an Estarrin,’ Leonata said, too quickly.

  ‘She’s one of ours now,’ said Corsina.

  ‘Estarrin-born,’ said Anthemia, looking Raphael in the eyes – which wasn’t difficult, because she was barely a finger’s breadth shorter than him, almost a head taller than the other two women. ‘You must be Night’s Apprentice.’

  Every mental alarm bell Raphael possessed was ringing now, and from the tension in Corsina’s face, he wasn’t the only one. Remarkable, how a nickname Iolani Jharissa had given him had spread so quickly – even to a secret shipyard rarely visited by outsiders.

  ‘Anthemia!’ Leonata said. ‘That’s no way to greet a guest of the Clan.’

  ‘I’ve been called less flattering things,’ Raphael said, trying to fathom the odd look in Anthemia’s eyes. She was either very outspoken or utterly lacking in tact or discretion, and he wasn’t sure which.

  ‘Did you deserve them?’

  ‘Probably,’ Raphael said, smiling now. Some of them had not, in truth, been a laughing matter at the time, and more than one had indeed been true.

  ‘You’re confusing,’ she said.

  ‘Is that a good thing?’

  ‘You’re also far too arrogant and an Imperial agent,’ Anthemia said. ‘Do something about those two first.’ She spun on her heel with astonishing grace and went back to rejoin her fellows.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse her,’ Corsina murmured. ‘We live a very isolated life, and while most of our people have strong views, very few of them have any appreciation of how the world works.’

  ‘Of course,’ Raphael said.

  The Aruwe Thalassarch drifted off again – she’d been doing nothing more than riding herd on Anthemia, Raphael realised.

  ‘Are you quite finished?’ said Leonata, a little coldly. Damn. If only he’d had a chance to talk to the daughter without the others present, but they were never going to allow it now.

  ‘Almost,’ Raphael said. ‘I have a lead from the Empress you might be better able than me to follow up.’

  ‘Silphium? Why do you want to know about silphium?’

  Maleska’s office was far smaller than most other clan beauticians could have boasted, a room tucked away in the labyrinthine lower levels of the Palace, looking on to the fountain in a green courtyard with a mosaic of geometrically arranged tiles. But the thin, slightly diffident chymist with guarded features and tightly bound hair had been a friend of Leonata since they were children, and no-one in Estarrin Palace, not even Leonata herself, had space to play with.

  ‘Who would use it?’ Leonata said, as Maleska extracted a folding chair from behind her meticulously tidy workbench. Her eyes wandered along the rows and rows of bottles and phials on the shelves, the complicated distillation apparatus fitted into a blind arch in the stone walls. ‘How they’d get hold of it?’

  She was surprised that Raphael had asked her for assistance in following Aesonia’s lead – almost as surprised as she’d been that Raphael had refrained from trailing Iolani the other night and creating a major headache for all of them. Her own spies had done so, but reported only that Iolani appeared to have been negotiating, successfully, for the use of warehouse space. They’d even found the precise reference number of the warehouses.

  Odd, since Iolani had a lot of space under her palace.

  ‘I take it you mean its illegal use,’ Maleska said, opening a book cabinet she’d tucked into a spare corner, behind the door that led to her wardrobe.

  ‘It has a legal use?’

  ‘It used to be a medicine. Very effective, actually, but it’s a difficult plant to grow. It’s only found on the south coast of Esca, about two hundred miles of desert from Mons Ferranis. It was gathered nearly to extinction by the beginning of the last century; since then the physicians have had to use substitutes.’ She opened the book, careful to set it on a stand so the spine didn’t break, and flicked through the pages. ‘Yes, here it is. Its magic-suppressant properties were discovered by the Dream Twisters less than sixty years ago.’

  Leonata felt a shiver run across her skin. That wasn’t something she wanted to hear, or think about. She brushed her hair away, concentrated on gathering unruly strands back into the clips. A way of taking her mind off the thoughts that were crowding in. The Dream Twisters had been a very real fear in her childhood, for she was just old enough to remember Emperor Orosius, who had created
them as an instrument of his tyranny. Mind-mages who could control others or steal their thoughts without the victim even noticing, who walked in and influenced others’ dreams.

  ‘So they had chymists working for them?’

  ‘Yes, they did,’ Maleska said. ‘Not, it should be said, of their own accord.’

  Leonata wondered how much that was true and how much the Chymists’ Guild trying to excuse its actions. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if her own clan had behaved any more honourably.

  ‘How much does it cost, these days?’

  ‘You can only get it on special commission, with extra payment if you have to smuggle it through Mons Ferranis. Possible, of course, for the right price, but you’d be looking at more than two thousand corons for a dose large enough to block a mage’s abilities.’

  ‘How long would it last?’

  ‘Just a moment, I’ll have to look it up.’

  Leonata sat in silence while Maleska pulled down two more books and looked through them, her eyes wandering back to the rows and rows of bottles. She remembered this room with its heavy, slightly dreamy smell of perfume, from her childhood. She’d wanted to be a chymist for a year or two, had constantly badgered Maleska’s predecessor with questions on disguises and make-ups and perfumes, had even learnt a few of the basic compounds and reactions.

  Business had been slow for the chymists and their close cousins the beauticians back then, after the Anarchy when subterfuge was thrown to the winds; both were products of a more subtle age. Even when it was over, money had gone into restoring the City, rebuilding fleets and trade routes shattered by the fighting, not into potions and adornments and disguises.

  ‘It’s only a rough guess, because I’ve never been near it, and it’s not the kind of thing these books write about. I’d guess you’d need to top it up every two or three days.’

  ‘So for two weeks, how much?’

  ‘I don’t know whether you’d need less or more after the initial dose. Drugs and magic aren’t usually mixed, for obvious reasons. Silphium is a way for someone without magic to even the odds. But it comes in such small quantities that doubling or tripling the amount would make less difference. Say five, six thousand corons total, including bribes?’

  A fortune, then. Not small money for anyone. ‘What else is in the drug?’

  ‘I’ve never looked into it, so I’m not sure. It’s complicated, especially if one wanted to mask it, say by serving it in food. Silphium has quite a distinctive taste on its own.’

  So it could be administered that way? She’d never thought of that, only in terms of a group of assailants catching the mage off-guard somehow, in the streets, stunning her before she had a chance to use her magic. Where had the mage eaten that evening? She still didn’t know the woman’s name – Raphael hadn’t asked, but it bothered her.

  ‘Would one order that much through a supplier?’

  ‘Not a chance. They’re usually careful to keep on the right side of the authorities; Mons Ferranis is too big a market to lose. You’d use an agent, someone with botanical and medicinal training, willing to go all that way for a special commission. Probably a botanical prospector, but you’d have to pay him handsomely.’

  That narrowed it down, because only a few clans ran the explorer vessels the prospectors used. Estarrin had some, but they went south-east, not west. What other clans ran prospectors that way? Decaris, of course, but Corian Decaris would sooner cut his arm off than help her. ‘Who would be able to make a potion like this?’

  Maleska shook her head as she returned the books to their shelves. ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Guild loyalty? This isn’t some clan squabble, Maleska.’

  The chymist looked at her levelly. ‘I know, and I’d like to help you. But I can’t give information that would endanger the life of a fellow guildswoman.’

  ‘She’s an accomplice to assassination.’

  Maleska’s expression softened a little. ‘Leonata, you need to find the assassins, I know that. But she’s not your culprit. All she did was mix an illegal potion, not even a poison, but if I help you find her, she’ll be handed over to the Empire, and I wouldn’t do that to anyone. Would you?’

  Leonata paused for a moment.

  ‘I’m sorry to have pressed you,’ Leonata said finally. ‘Is there anything you can give me?’

  Maleska turned away for a moment, dusted off the worn, pitted surface of a workbench which was already spotlessly clean.

  ‘Clan Xelestis,’ she said, without turning round. ‘One of them will know who obtained it.’

  ‘I made a few discreet inquiries in the shipping offices and the archives in the Palace of the Seas,’ Raphael went on, aware of both the Emperor’s and Silvanos’s eyes on him. It had been sheer good luck he’d found the Emperor closeted with Silvanos when he came to deliver his report – no danger of Silvanos passing it on in such a way as to imply Raphael had had very little to do with any of it. And given that it had been Raphael who’d spent the entire afternoon and into the evening piecing together the puzzle he’d been given at the Dedication, he was glad his uncle didn’t have a chance to belittle him.

  ‘Estarrin,’ he said, ‘have received eight mantas from Aruwe in a hundred and ten years. Four of those were in the last twenty years, since Leonata took over and made the Clan wealthy. Also, it seems from your intelligence files that she offsets the cost of her new mantas by funding Aruwe’s research projects.

  ‘Jharissa have received nine mantas in eight years. All of them are bigger than the Estarrin ones, and according to rumour all better armed. I expect the Navy can back me up on this.’

  ‘We haven’t managed to defeat a Jharissa manta yet,’ Valentine admitted. He was sitting in front of the enormous wall-map, and Raphael was trying to take in as much of it as he could without seeming too obvious about it.

  ‘They’re an extremely wealthy clan,’ Silvanos said thinly, from his perch on the corner of another desk. Good. Let him raise the objections to this, it was exactly what Raphael wanted. ‘Particularly given the resources they can draw on in the north.’

  What resources? The north was devastated, which was why the Lost Souls were supposedly so desperate for revenge. There was a great deal of metal up there, but the conditions were so awful no Thetian would work there, not for an Emperor’s ransom.

  ‘I took the liberty of asking one of your officers for a rough estimate of the cost of a war-manta,’ Raphael said. ‘Even given that merchant mantas mount fewer weapons, which may not be true in Jharissa’s case, even the Empire could barely afford such a construction rate.’

  ‘You think they’re offsetting the cost with Tuonetar technology, the way Leonata does with her research funding,’ Valentine said, taking Raphael’s conclusion right out of his mouth. Gods, he was quick, quicker than Raphael had ever expected.

  ‘Yes, they are,’ Raphael said. ‘I think they’ve given Tuonetar technology to Clan Aruwe in part exchange for those nine mantas.’

  ‘You have no proof of this theory,’ Silvanos said, black eyes resting on Raphael.

  ‘Except that orders for Aruwe mantas have soared in the last four years,’ Raphael said, pulling two sheets of densely written notes out of his robes. ‘Normally, clans don’t change their allegiance to one particular shipyard. I managed to find a partial list. Two established Great Clans have abandoned their old shipyards for Aruwe, at great expense in pay-offs to their old partners. Three new Great Clans, which are new enough never to have ordered mantas themselves before, have ordered their first mantas. All three with Aruwe. And Petroz Salassa has ordered two new Aruwe mantas.’

  Only there was more. Valentine was leaning forward in his chair now, and even Silvanos didn’t interrupt at the natural pause.

  ‘All of those clans, and Petroz, are linked to Estarrin or Jharissa. That’s one thing. The other is that, as far as I can tell, they only use this Tuonetar technology for clans who’ve sent children to be shipwrights there, and thus know what’s
going on. In other words, only when they can’t avoid it.’

  Raphael passed the notes over; he still had his own copy, in shorthand.

  ‘Impressive,’ Valentine said. ‘Very impressive.’

  ‘A distinctly thin connection,’ Silvanos said.

  ‘Give credit where credit is due, Silvanos, and save your family feuds for later,’ said Valentine. It was almost a reprimand. ‘Is there any way we can get a look-in at Aruwe?’

  Silvanos shook his head, but Raphael could see from his expression he didn’t truly think it was a weak connection. There was something going on, and Leonata’s invitation had inadvertently let it slip. No doubt a few more days and Silvanos and Plautius’s investigators would have found it, but now it was to Raphael’s credit. And perhaps, Raphael thought, it might convince Valentine that he wasn’t a traitor, whatever Aesonia might say.

  ‘They only allow trusted outsiders to visit their shipyard,’ Silvanos said. ‘And even Leonata and Iolani won’t know exactly where Aruwe is.’

  ‘Even an official investigator?’

  ‘All Raphael’s uncovered is proof that Aruwe is prospering,’ Silvanos said, then added, grudgingly, ‘And a fairly strong case that it’s building Tuonetar technology into some of its new ships. Nothing that we could convince the Council with. If we could prove that Sovereign was destroyed by a new weapon on a Jharissa ship . . . but even then, actually, I doubt we’d make a case for the Council violating clan privacy.’

  Valentine drummed his fingers on the table, before looking up at Raphael. ‘Good work,’ he said, in a clear tone of dismissal. ‘Keep following your nose.’

  Oh, I will, Lord Emperor, Raphael thought. Pray that I like where it takes me.

  CHAPTER IX

  Bahram’s offices were located in the elegant districts above Clothmarket where most of the Mons Ferratan bankers were based, an area of boutiques, expensive restaurants and discreet copper plates. If one had to ask for the offices of a Mons Ferratan banker, one was not a suitable client.