Vespera Read online

  He had taken two days to position a series of aether beacons around the harbour entrance without being seen, beacons which had picked out the harbour and its fortress from dozens of other such inlets on the wild eastern coast of the island.

  Raphael had been in the fortress only a few weeks before, had heard the agonised pleas for mercy of the last surviving captives. He was helpless to intervene without breaking his cover and leaving the pirates free to wreak their havoc and terror for another decade, but now the torturers were dead, and their surviving leaders would answer to the Empire for their crimes.

  The Sertinans might have been forgiven for piracy, in time. For the destruction of Carmonde, and for resurrecting the crimes of the darkest moments in Thetian history, there would be no pardon.

  He extinguished the bright aether light of the beacon beside him, slung it in its heavy bag on to his shoulders, and started down the track, to meet the Navy when they came in.

  He was still high enough up, scrambling down the path behind the fortress, to see the squadron enter the harbour, two war-mantas ferrying legionaries in while the others stayed on guard outside. The mantas were huge shapes under the surface, in almost every respect like manta rays grown to a colossal size, their upper skin a blue so dark as to be almost black, their white undersides only visible when their wings curled up at the end of each beat. The smaller was impressive enough, a hundred and twenty feet long from her horns to the tip of her tail, two hundred feet of wingspan, the dull surfaces of her windows breaking the polyp armour on the sides. Her larger consort, undoubtedly the squadron flagship, was a battle cruiser, half as big again with four decks rather than two - almost too big to turn in the restricted waters of the harbour.

  There were two other ships with them, impossible to see except as an occasional flicker in the water, tiny one-person Exile magecraft darting between their larger cousins, looping around them like inquisitive dolphins.

  A moment before he lost sight of them behind the fortress towers, he saw the first legionaries in the water, so elongated with their full array of flippers and paddles they seemed barely human, streaking through the water towards the quays.

  Another ripple caught his eye, beyond the harbour – could that be another manta, coming in at high speed? He stared at it for a moment, but it was indistinct, and the craft would have to be travelling very close to the surface to generate a wake. Probably just another cross-current stirred up by the mages’ tsunami.

  Raphael quickened his pace as he reached the high-water mark. He picked his way over beams and equipment strewn over the path, down on to the steps leading to the back of the fortress. It was still standing, after a fashion - a testament to the ill-gotten wealth poured into it – closely fitted blocks of smooth pale Gorgano granite, with elegant arched windows and balconies in the courtyard, now smashed beyond repair. One of the towers remained upright, but the other two were nothing more than piles of rubble, their blocks strewn over the cracked paving at the fortress base.

  There were bodies here and there, some horribly mangled and crushed beneath the stones, others simply slumped on the ground like broken puppets, drenched and pathetic. Living men, until a few minutes ago. Raphael recognised one or two, men he had met during his time as an infiltrator. Not all had been cruel, not all had liked what had happened to the mages, even if they shared their leaders’ sentiments. They’d been a tight-knit group, bound by the same dangers and something akin to the professionalism of the Navy. Unusual in a pirate navy, but then they’d been together a long time, and Thetia was a dangerous place now.

  Raphael walked down through the shattered remains of the rear wall, skirting the lee of the fortress, past broken palm trees and a soggy mess of leaves, wood and household debris deposited by the receding wave. Most of the buildings had fared even worse than the fortress, being reduced to heaps of rubble, while some closer to the harbour had been entirely levelled as stored charges or mines exploded.

  There was no sound, not a single voice in a fortress which had been home to two or three hundred people. Many had perished the day before, ambushed on their way back from their latest raid, and few, if any, of those who remained would have survived the waves, which had scoured the fortress’s rooms and courtyards. There was a shallow lake in the main courtyard, bubbling here and there and slowly sinking as it filled up nooks and crannies in the cellars and drained out into the flooded undersea harbour.

  He glanced up at the prison tower, slightly raised and fenced round with a spiked wall. Almost intact. Good. He’d given specific instructions that it was to be avoided, since it contained the latest group of merchant captives, the crews of two Vesperan clan mantas taken a few weeks before.

  Raphael kept one hand close to the stiletto in his sleeve, ready to draw it out if a survivor tried to attack him, but he saw no-one living until the first legionaries came ashore scrambling over the quay or up the ladders, exotic figures in their fish-scale armour and scallop helms, fanning out into the buildings with tridents and repeater crossbows at the ready.

  Some of the legionaries levelled their crossbows as they saw him, but quickly realised that no pirate would be walking calmly across the strand with a beacon strapped to his back. And that no pirate would bear such a close resemblance to a man whose face they all knew.

  Raphael walked forward to meet them.

  It was another quarter of an hour or so before the legionary Legate declared the fortress clear. Raphael waited on the quay, since the legate had suggested respectfully it would be better for his and everyone else’s peace of mind if Raphael stood a little further away from the fortress. Which wasn’t, he said unnecessarily, in very good shape.

  So Raphael waited and watched the legionaries at work hauling out bodies and bursting into possible hiding places, until the legate sent one of his men to give the all-clear signal. A few moments later a very small manta, an admiral’s launch with perhaps a thirty-foot wingspan, grounded on a stretch of broken quay.

  Admiral Edredha – also known, when not on duty, as Valentine Tar’Conantur, heir to the throne of the New Thetian Empire – was the first man out. He didn’t wait for the legionaries to improvise a gangway, but jumped straight out and waded ashore in his plain naval uniform with admiral’s stars at the collar.

  No-one would mistake Valentine for anything other than a leader of men, though his ability, sanity and fairness all proclaimed very loudly his complete lack of connections with the old Imperial dynasty whose name he bore. Even Valentine’s father Catiline III, a harsh man still active in his late sixties, was an improvement on the original Tar’Conanturs, as if that were any compensation to his victims.

  His son, by all accounts, was a man of very different stripe.

  Valentine was shorter than Raphael expected, but broad-shouldered and powerful. Tanned, which was unusual in a naval man. The crews of mantas rarely saw the sunlight, but Valentine was known for getting his hands dirty and fighting on land as well. Not a very Thetian activity, and certainly not at close quarters. That was what tribesmen were for.

  Tribesmen such as those who stood a few feet behind Valentine, his unofficial bodyguard, hawk-faced warriors from some godsforsaken island cluster in the western Archipelago, apparently suspicious even of the legionaries.

  ‘Welcome to Sertina, Admiral,’ Raphael said, with the slightest of bows. Valentine had refused any privileges his rank might have brought him, to the extent of adopting an assumed name when he joined. It was a formality, of course – everyone had known he’d end up in command, but it had been a pleasant surprise for the New Empire to discover how much ability he had.

  ‘You must be Raphael,’ Valentine said, grey eyes assessing him in a second. ‘Thanks to your work, the pirates have been exposed, their fleet is destroyed or captured, and we have their base. All without a single life being lost. I will see that the Navy knows what you’ve done, and that you’re rewarded. Such victories are rare enough at the best of times, and these are hardly the best of times.�
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  Raphael bowed again, heart beating slightly faster. High praise, from a man such as Valentine.

  ‘Any survivors?’ Valentine asked.

  The legionary tribune nodded. ‘Half a dozen or so, we can’t tell how senior yet.’

  ‘Bring them to me when you’ve finished,’ Valentine said. ‘We’ll have Raphael identify them for us.’

  ‘We should interrogate them,’ the tribune said. ‘They must have had contacts in the bigger cities to dispose of their goods. Useful if we want to track down Carmonde’s treasures.’

  A movement by the harbour entrance caught Raphael’s eye again and he focused on it – it was another manta, coming in dangerously fast just below the surface.

  ‘I want to see this place for myself, or what’s left of it,’ Valentine was saying. ‘Raphael, I’ll need you to identify the bodies, see how many of the leaders are left.’

  ‘We have a visitor, Admiral,’ Raphael said, and both the older men swung round in time to see the approaching ship surface, nothing more than a dark hump for a moment before the horns and the line of bridge windows between them came into view. It was a courier manta, little more than a pair of huge reactors with a tiny cabin complex at the front, built before the Crusade to carry despatches at high speed across the tens of thousands of miles of empty ocean separating the Old Empire’s scattered dominions.

  A light began blinking on and off from inside, a handheld aether telegraph.

  ‘That’s a priority code,’ Valentine said. ‘Tribune, clear the way for them. Move the launch. Now.’

  Raphael felt a chill down his spine like the touch of a cold finger, saw the sudden tension in Valentine’s stance.

  ‘It would be too much,’ Valentine said softly, ‘in this Thetia of ours, to have only good news even for a day.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Raphael, did you know that man over there?’

  He pointed towards a body by the fortress gate, one hidden from Raphael on his way down.

  ‘Tirius, his name was. The Carmonde raid was his idea,’ Raphael said. A relative newcomer, apparently, with a deeply etched face and a permanent cough, but whatever he’d brought when he joined had guaranteed Tirius a place in the pirates’ command circle.

  Raphael told the Admiral what he knew about the man, and Valentine’s frown deepened. He began walking over, and Raphael, though taller, had trouble keeping step with him.

  ‘He was lucky to die that way,’ Valentine said, stopping above the body. ‘For what he did, he deserved far worse. You say he was a newcomer?’

  ‘He wasn’t connected with them at all,’ Raphael said, wishing he’d had more time to find out about Tirius, who had intrigued him. ‘He wasn’t like most of the others, and his accent was odd, but he had a lot of influence.’

  ‘You think they had outside help?’ Valentine demanded, the courier momentarily forgotten.

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Raphael said. ‘But he could simply have been a mercenary. Or maybe they captured him and he was eager to work with them.’ He knelt down beside Tirius’s body, the face frozen more in anger and bitterness than terror, and peeled the gloves off the dead man’s hands. He’d always worn them, and Raphael had wondered why. He knew others who did, to conceal scars, but in this case it turned out to be something very different.

  The little finger on each hand and the ring finger on the right were missing, the gloves’ fingers stuffed with cloth instead. The ring finger on the left was missing its top joint.

  ‘A criminal?’ Valentine asked. There were still parts of the Archipelago where judicial amputation was practiced, all thankfully far from Thetia.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Raphael said. Tirius wore boots, odd in a climate and a place where sandals were everday wear for most. Leather was expensive in Thetia, most of it was imported from Qalathar or Mons Ferranis. Raphael reached down and, with difficulty, pulled one of the boots off. ‘Frostbite.’

  ‘Frostbite?’ Valentine said, genuinely puzzled.

  ‘In the far north, if your fingers or toes freeze, they turn black and drop off. He’s been in the high arctic at some point in his life. Probably a long time ago, these scars are as fully healed as I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Is this his?’ Valentine asked, stooping to pick up a ring which had fallen by one of the gloves. It was silver, but crudely made, emblazoned with a seven-pointed star.

  ‘I haven’t seen it before,’ Raphael said. ‘If it’s his, he never showed it.’

  Valentine handed it to Raphael. ‘Find out what it is. You’ve shown you’re capable, and I’m afraid my reward will be more work than you know what to do with. From now on you’re attached to my staff.’

  Raphael froze for a split second, caught off-guard for once.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s time to come in from the cold?’ Valentine asked, more quietly. ‘You’ve been gone from Thetia fourteen years. If you want to stay out here on the fringes, hunting pirates and putting down brush-fires, then do. If you want to face whatever it is you’ve been running from, if you want to do something that really matters, I’m offering you the chance. Come with me. Help rebuild Thetia so this,’ he gestured at the ruined buildings around them, ‘doesn’t happen any more.’

  Intelligencer on the staff of the Emperor-in-waiting. Back, at a stroke, to the centre of power in Thetia, even if not back home. To a future which was his to make, against opponents who would be a challenge – the clans of Vespera, the Lady of Aroth. To fractured, brilliant Thetia.

  No more independence. Except that wasn’t true. His uncle had plenty, and his uncle was the reason Valentine trusted Raphael so quickly.

  ‘As you wish, Admiral,’ Raphael said, after only another second’s hesitation. ‘You honour me.’

  ‘Good,’ Valentine smiled, and then looked round.

  The courier was close now, moving through the gap between the battle cruiser and her consort. She nudged up against the quay, moving on thrusters alone as her wingbeats stilled, the water too shallow for them to work.

  They walked back, the silence punctuated only by occasional shouts from the legionaries behind them and the wind whipping at Raphael’s robes, until the courier manta came to a stop.

  A figure in grey-trimmed black ducked out of the courier’s hatch, and made his way across an improvised gangway to join Valentine. It could have been anyone with a sombre dress sense, and for a second or two he was able to hope it was, but then the other man looked up, and Raphael saw a mirror of his own face, distorted by age but otherwise too similar for comfort. A harsh face, angular and forbidding, with hooded eyes so dark grey they were almost black, robes like spun night. He wore gloves, even in the equatorial heat.

  Silvanos Quiridion, Imperial representative in Vespera and eminence grise of the New Empire’s civil intelligence service. All the family Raphael had ever known.

  Silvanos stopped at the top and looked around, more slowly than Valentine, but Raphael knew his eyes wouldn’t miss a detail of the place or the people. Eyes that seemed to strip away every defence until the mind was left defenceless and alone, eyes like those of the legendary soul-eating jaguars of Tehama.

  His face was bleak, and Raphael felt that cold touch on his back again, the dreadful anticipation of bad news.

  It took only his gesture, and two words.

  ‘Lord Emperor,’ he said, bowing very deeply, and Raphael saw Valentine’s fist suddenly clench. ‘Your father, the Emperor Catiline is dead. Your mother requests your presence immediately.’

  ‘What happened?’ Valentine said. ‘He was in good health last I heard.’

  ‘He was in Vespera, concluding border negotiations with the Prince of Imbria and the Council of the Seas,’ Silvanos said evenly. ‘They were concluded, satisfactorily, and he set out to continue our campaign in the Windward Islands, but his ship was destroyed in the Corala Channel with no survivors.’

  The tribune had gone white.

  ‘He was assassinated, Lord Emperor.’

  CHAPTER II
/>   On either side towering cliffs rose out of the seabed, sheer walls of coral and rock tens of thousands of years old with jagged peaks and outcrops, running into the distance as if enclosing some inhumanly massive fortress. The Emperor’s battle cruiser Sovereign and her escorts were leaving the Ocean, passing through the mountains of the northern Rim into the Sea of Stars. Into the Thetia Raphael had last seen fourteen years before, with its hot jungled islands and its white stone cities around shallow seas. And at its centre, hundreds of miles further ahead, there was Vespera, the City. The Heart of the World.

  Thetia had been called the Summer Isles and the Coral Empire once, among many other names. Most were less complimentary, given by those across the world who had clashed with her fleets or her Emperors over the centuries of her power, had turned eyes covetously on her riches only to find she could not be conquered. Could not be conquered except by her own people: her arrogant, argumentative, stubborn race of merchants, seafarers and explorers who had dominated the oceans, the commerce and the history of Aquasilva for seven hundred years.

  Until they had destroyed themselves, forty years ago.

  They were heading for a deep crack in the Rim, lit from the top by blue-green sunlight and leading upwards and inwards to the expanses of the Sea of Stars. It had been three days flat-out from Sertina, the giant manta and her two escorting Exile magecraft beating on through empty ocean, leaving the rest of Valentine’s former squadron to return to base to guard against uprisings in newly-won territories. No-one knew what happened when a ruler of the New Empire died; Catiline had been the first.