Vespera Page 5

  Monarch had had one, but hers was now scattered in a thousand pieces on the seabed, its information lost forever.

  ‘Lord Emperor,’ Silvanos said to Valentine, as they stood round a smaller aether table in the admiral’s ready room, waiting for the recorder to complete its work, ‘if you were organising an ambush with conventional ships, right here, what would you do?’

  Valentine paused. ‘Against a ship like Monarch, if I knew roughly what it was capable of? I’d hide my smaller craft, however many I had, to the north, and then create some reason for the quarry to turn south. I’d want their main armament facing away from me, and then I’d come in from behind them, try to knock out the engine vents and pound their reactor compartments. Fairly standard tactics, Monarch’s captain should have been ready for it.’

  ‘These weren’t hostile waters then,’ Silvanos pointed out. ‘Who would dare to ambush an Imperial warship in a major channel? Out in the deep ocean, maybe, but here?’

  ‘They’d have to be very sure of themselves before they set an ambush in the deep ocean,’ Valentine said. ‘It’s why most fleet battles are fought close to land – finding someone out there is virtually impossible unless you know their exact route. This place makes a lot more sense.’

  ‘Except that they don’t seem to have used conventional weapons.’ Silvanos said.

  ‘How else could they do it?’ The Emperor’s eyebrows rose. ‘Aesonia, could a water-mage destroy a ship like that without firing a shot?’

  Her expression was carefully neutral. ‘In theory, possibly. I might be able to do it; one or two of my colleagues, perhaps, but even we would have difficulty if there were another water-mage nearby.’

  ‘We know there was,’ Valentine said.

  ‘Do we?’ Silvanos said. ‘We know there was supposed to be a magecraft accompanying Monarch. As yet, we have no idea whether there actually was. On a routine voyage, if the mage was delayed or didn’t turn up, they might have left without her.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that one of my mages would abandon her duty?’ Aesonia said coolly.

  Her mages. Aesonia had been born to power – born a Salassa, scion of the ruling family of the oldest clan, dedicated to Sarthes at a young age, and seemingly destined to be Abbess one day. Even though she’d left Sarthes to become a commander in the Civil War, then married Catiline when he proclaimed himself Emperor – or, more accurately, she had married him on the condition that he proclaimed himself Emperor – she remained an Exile. Only Abbess Hesphaere of Sarthes wielded as much influence among the Exiles, and she didn’t have the additional benefit of an imperial crown.

  ‘Not voluntarily, perhaps.’ Silvanos gestured at the aether tank. ‘I can’t see any signs of battle, so either Monarch wasn’t destroyed by conventional weapons, or the attackers were phenomenally accurate with their torpedoes. Which to my mind leaves new technology, trickery, or magic.’

  ‘You speak as if trickery and magic were one and the same,’ Aesonia said, but Valentine interrupted before Silvanos could reply.

  ‘Trickery? You mean treason, sabotage?’ the Emperor said.

  ‘I do. ISMS concluded that Monarch was destroyed, in the physical sense, by a reactor explosion. I intend to verify that for myself, if possible, but I know of nothing else that can rip a manta apart. Correct, Admiral?’ He seemed to have slipped back into the habit of calling Valentine Admiral, as everyone else did.

  Valentine nodded, and Silvanos went on; his voice had acquired that precise, emotionless quality that Raphael knew well, a firm indicator that he was pursuing a logical chain of thought.

  ‘Thus, to verify this, we have to find the cause of the explosion. Conventional attack, magical attack, internal sabotage or system failure would all account for it.’

  ‘It would be difficult for a water-mage to destroy a ship through explosion,’ Aesonia said. ‘Easier for a fire-mage.’

  But the fire-mages were gone. It had been the fire-worshipping Domain which launched the Crusade against Thetia more than forty years ago, in an attempt to regain its religious hegemony – and lost. A few in Thetia, even now, kept to the Domain’s faith, but the practice of its magic was tacitly forbidden.

  ‘In that case, we would have a motive, and an opportunity,’ Silvanos said swiftly. ‘As for sabotage, anyone could have done that. System failure is another possibility.’

  ‘But an unlikely one,’ Valentine said. ‘A reactor couldn’t cascade so quickly that the crew had no time to get to the escape rays. And the Emperor would have been their first priority.’

  ‘Assuming discipline held,’ Silvanos said.

  Raphael tensed.

  ‘One might imagine circumstances so extreme that it was every man for himself – but,’ Silvanos went on, seeing Valentine’s expression, ‘it’s never happened before, and the evidence doesn’t fit. The nearest men to the escape rays would simply have steered themselves clear, with no thought for anyone else, and there wouldn’t be wreckage from the escape rays.’

  ‘So what do you think happened?’ the Emperor demanded, his mouth twitching – a sign of impatience, or anger?

  ‘Without having seen the wreckage myself, I’d guess sabotage,’ Silvanos said. ‘However, a fire-mage acting from a distance would produce the same effect, so that can’t be ruled out. It would leave very little trace.’

  ‘Treachery, then,’ Valentine said, with utter contempt.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Vesperan treachery,’ Aesonia corrected, and no-one on the bridge contradicted her.

  It was another two hours or so, well into the afternoon, before Silvanos was satisfied with the surveys. Sovereign conducted several more of her own, and then the magecraft searched the area thoroughly. If Allecto’s captain was unhappy, he hid his feelings well when he addressed the Emperor, but there was a discernible note of relief in his voice when he acknowledged Valentine’s order to lead them to Saphir Island.

  In single file, the flotilla followed Allecto down a narrower channel through the thinning forest to the south. The bottom soon began to shelve up, and the kelp disappeared entirely in a profusion of spire coral that made Sovereign’s approach a delicate business. At last, though, the manta coasted into the small lagoon to the north of the main island, and slowly rose to the surface.

  After three days of aether lights, the moment when they broke the surface was pure heaven, sunlight flooding in through the windows as Raphael looked out on to a vivid green island, covered with rainforest, against a cloudless blue sky. Across the water, at the base of the island’s single mountain, an untidy cluster of sandstone buildings, houses and towers and a larger building with a dome, sprawled along the shoreline, protected on the landward side by oddly archaic walls, tall and with triangular battlements. Those would never stand up to a pulse cannon attack.

  ‘The whole island belongs to Clan Jharissa,’ Silvanos was explaining to Valentine. ‘A way station for ships on their way to or from the north, we assume they keep a lot of their specialised equipment here. And some of the Ice Runner families live here, apparently.’

  Ice Runners, the other name for members of Jharissa, the clan who’d come from nowhere to power and wealth in little more than a decade, transporting ice from the far north to Vespera in its equatorial heat, to preserve food and meat and cool drinks.

  ‘We’ll need to be on our guard,’ Valentine said. ‘Captain, assemble a shore party of marines.’

  ‘We should take my temple guardsmen too,’ Aesonia said. ‘Their presence should prevent us having to take any extreme measures.’ She had her own guard, made up of tribesmen from Exile-controlled territory, utterly loyal to the Exiles and armoured in what was rumoured to be kraken skin.

  ‘Eight legionaries, four temple guardsmen,’ Valentine said, as Sovereign slowed down for docking. ‘And some of your officers, Captain.’

  There seemed to be no underwater gantries, only a network of wooden platforms with cantilevered ends which provided surface mooring for three or four mantas. Od
d, for a clan which operated mantas as well as surface ships, but other than Allecto there were no Jharissa mantas in the lagoon. Only a single ice clipper, sails furled tidily about the yards of her four masts, men busy like ants on her reinforced hull.

  Jharissa had only recently started using mantas, Raphael remembered. Mantas froze in the arctic seas, but in recent years Jharissa had apparently found a way round this, and were beginning to phase out their slower clippers.

  As the hatch opened, Raphael felt a gust of warm, humid air sweep into the ship, and breathed in deeply as he caught the scent of vegetation and salt air. The heat closed around his black robes like a blanket – but after so long in the confined space of the manta, to be out in the open air again was a joy. The vista of forest and village and blue water stretching out on either side of him was welcome enough, but the light – unfiltered daylight, the brilliance of the equatorial sun – was wonderful.

  The sense of peace lasted until they met Iolani Jharissa.

  He’d never suspected the leader of Clan Jharissa would be so young. She couldn’t have been more than a few years Raphael’s senior, thirty-five at the very outside.

  Or so old, because the look in her eyes as she faced the Emperor, arms folded in front of her, flanked by a pair of Ice Runners in the same close-fitting, practical black clothes, was of a woman who’d seen more than one life should ever throw at her.

  She was also, in a land of olive-skinned, dark-haired southerners, pale-skinned, barely touched by the sun, with straight ash-blonde hair tied back behind her head.

  And for all of these things, and none, there were alarm bells ringing in Raphael’s head. Something was wrong here, and he’d known from the instant he saw Saphir Island.

  ‘Welcome to Saphir, Lord Emperor,’ she said, in a clipped voice. ‘To what do we owe this honour?’

  She gave Valentine only a second’s glance, though, before looking beyond him to Aesonia, and then round at the others. Her eyes rested for only a second on Raphael, with a puzzled expression, before the Emperor answered.

  ‘I’m here to investigate my father’s murder, High Thalassarch,’ he said.

  Thalassarch was a clan leader’s title, but High Thalassarch meant Iolani was on the Council of the Seas as well. That was unusual, the Vesperans tended to save politics until later life, devoting their youth and maturity to the more essential business of commerce.

  The Vesperans. Why didn’t he think like one any more? Raphael was a Vesperan, he’d grown up in the enormous, ancient, cosmopolitan city which had been the heart of Thetia for a thousand years, but it felt like a different place now, another world.

  ‘To investigate? Or to blame us?’

  ‘That depends on who’s guilty,’ Silvanos said.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought such things would trouble you, my lord Quiridion,’ she said. ‘As for your request, Lord Emperor – if you come to find the truth, and not to obscure it, we can help you.’

  Raphael glanced over at the shoreline, saw clusters of black-clad Ice Runners watching from the line of trees which shielded the outpost’s buildings. He couldn’t see if they were armed or not, though they wouldn’t fire with their leader so close.

  ‘Only those with something to hide need be afraid of the truth,’ Valentine said.

  ‘One of the oldest excuses for tyranny. Good to see it’s still in use. The old ones are always the best.’ She gave him a glacial smile.

  ‘We will question your people as to what they saw on the night of the assassination,’ Aesonia said.

  ‘Not without my permission, you won’t,’ Iolani replied instantly, and Raphael stepped forward before any of the Imperial party had time to frame a response.

  ‘High Thalassarch, the Emperor has asked me to investigate on his behalf. Might I have permission to talk to those of your people who might have seen something?’

  There. He’d saved the Emperor or his mother having to ask, which they’d never do, and robbed Iolani of the chance to refuse on those grounds.

  ‘Since you had the courtesy to ask,’ Iolani said, turning her attention to Raphael, ‘yes, you may, providing you’re so kind as to tell me your name. Unless you’d rather we called you Night’s Apprentice.’

  ‘Raphael Quiridion,’ he said. ‘And if Night’s Apprentice is all you call me, I suspect I’ll be getting off lightly.’

  ‘So we have the attentions of the young raven as well as the old one,’ she said. ‘I’m flattered.’

  He didn’t reply, refusing to rise to the bait. She was searching for an insult, a point of disagreement she could build and twist into a legitimate reason for denying their request.

  ‘And who might you want to talk to?’ she said eventually.

  ‘Anyone who might have seen something the night of the assassination.’

  ‘It’ll be a short list,’ Iolani said. ‘Given that none of us were out that night.’

  ‘Then I’ll talk to all the people who didn’t see anything at all.’

  Iolani appeared to tire of the game as quickly as Raphael did, or else she had another hand to play. She turned to the Ice Runner on her right, Captain Glaucio, who out of his chair was a big, hulking man with a slight hunch, almost certainly due to a badly set broken shoulder. ‘Glaucio, go and find these people somewhere comfortable to sit while they interview the entire outpost. Maybe send Allecto up to Thure for some more ice, they could be here a while.’

  She spoke as if the insults were nothing more than light amusement, but her tone was deadly serious, as if these were all she could contain herself to. Iolani hated, and hated with passion, but who? Was it one of them in particular, or the New Empire itself?

  She led them up into the outpost, along a paved road and up into the cluster of buildings, almost a village, now that Raphael saw it up close. There was a low wall behind the trees, low enough for a man to leap over, but behind it was a web of small stakes and twine which would trip anyone attempting it. An odd defence, not one which would give much warning against an amphibious assault, if it had got this far undetected.

  The Ice Runners watched them go, a line of stone-faced men and women in much the same gear as Iolani, some with black knee-length coats of a style out of fashion a century ago, perhaps a mark of seniority, many with hats to shade their faces from the sun. Those with hats, perhaps a third, had northerner colouring – pale, almost translucent white skin and straight black or blonde hair.

  The outpost was laid out like a village, built entirely of stone, with a central square and a fountain and a domed council house – why did they need a council house? Off to the right, east of the village, Raphael caught a glimpse of a set of structures that weren’t buildings, something like a sunken theatre or hippodrome, but then it was hidden behind more buildings, and he didn’t have a chance to look further.

  More Ice Runners waited on the shady side of the square or watched from windows or balconies, hostility blazing out in their expression, but there were as many not wearing black, and the occasional child catching a glimpse of the visitors before a parent shooed it back into the house.

  By the time they reached there, a few benches had been put at one end of the square, in full sunlight. Raphael glanced up at the sky – yes, they’d even been put where the sun would remain on them until shortly before it set. Iolani wanted them gone.

  ‘Well,’ she said, gesturing to the benches. ‘Here you are, begin.’

  Valentine and Aesonia stopped dead, and the tribesmens’ hands went to their weapons.

  They could die here, Raphael suddenly realised. Before the marines and sailors in the lagoon could lift a finger to come to their aid, before the mages could move a particle of the bay’s water in their defence. Sovereign was an unwieldy behemoth in shallow water, and who knew what hidden defences Clan Jharissa had waiting in the lagoon?

  Too public, Silvanos had said. But if the Jharissans had killed Catiline – and from their hatred, they seemed to have a motive, though heavens knew what it was – they had th
e chance, right here and now, to kill both Valentine and the Empress Mother, leaving Valentine’s sister Aventine as the last surviving member of the dynasty.

  But surely they couldn’t hope to escape the Navy’s wrath? Raphael felt a dreadful cold in the pit of his stomach as he looked round at the Ice Runners surrounding them. Iolani was just waiting – but why? Why not strike now?

  And if Raphael were to ask for better treatment for his party, they’d only appear weak. It was a matter of honour now, and Valentine wouldn’t show weakness in front of these Ice Runners for a second.

  So it was Raphael’s pride that would be sacrificed. Valentine demanded more than he knew, but right now Raphael’s concern was to get them all out of here alive.

  ‘High Thalassarch, I’m afraid I should have been more detailed,’ he said, wondering if he could at least keep her standing in the sun long enough for that pale skin to burn. But almost on cue, she moved to stand in the only patch of shade anywhere near them, in front of the bole of a palm tree. ‘It’s customary in most cases to question people in private, with only an advocate present. Is there a less public space we might have the use of.’

  ‘So that you can browbeat your chosen suspects into confession?’ Iolani said. ‘Who knows what tricks your mages can use, away from prying eyes? No, I have no objection to your questioning my people; after all, we all value the truth. But it must be done under proper scrutiny.’

  Meaning, in the square where archers or aether arquebusiers on the rooftops would have clear shots at them all, as opposed to the safety of a building where they might be able to barricade themselves inside and take hostages until a force from Sovereign could arrive.

  How had he walked into such a trap? How had Valentine walked into such a trap, and with his mother present as well?