Vespera Read online

  His mother. Aesonia was a water-mage herself, of considerable power, and she had two of her crowd of acolytes with her, young Exile women in the deep sea-green robes of Sarthes. Were they Valentine’s protection? Not the tribesmen at all?

  It was too late to ask, of course.

  ‘Unless you care to beg a favour from me, in which case I might be able to find some space where I and a few of my people, perhaps a dozen, will be able to ensure proper procedures are followed. We are bound by the laws of Vespera, after all, not those of the New Empire.’

  She put enough of an emphasis on beg that Raphael looked to Valentine, but the Emperor shook his head.

  ‘Have done, Raphael. I’ll not ask you to humiliate yourself for the sake of some shade.’ But for something more important, perhaps. It was part of serving an Emperor. The greater the power and influence to be won, the more that could be asked . . . or lost. As chief ministers throughout history had discovered.

  ‘Is that what my requests are to you? A humiliation?’ Iolani asked, dangerously quietly, and a murmur went through the silent crowd of Ice Runners. ‘Or does it gall you to be subject to the same laws as everyone else?’

  ‘What laws?’ Aesonia demanded. ‘I see no laws here. We come as diplomatic envoys to investigate the murder of my husband, Thetia’s anointed Emperor, and you bar our way. Your Council in Vespera,’ her tone made it quite clear what she thought of the Council of the Seas, ‘of which you are a member, has given us guarantees of assistance and safe passage, which you’re flouting with every word and deed.’

  ‘Haven’t I offered you assistance?’ Iolani said, pointing to the benches. ‘And safe passage?’ She swept her hand out to point behind them. ‘There’s the way back to your ship. You can leave any time you like. We won’t stop you.’

  She had a flair for the dramatic, Raphael had to give her that. This was pure theatre, but in deadly earnest. She was playing with them – but was it simply to humble Valentine and his mother, or did she mean not to let them leave here alive?

  To humble an Emperor and then release him was madness, but then so was killing the man who commanded, and was adored by, Thetia’s most powerful navy. They would take their revenge, no matter what.

  If Raphael had been in Iolani’s place, he would have killed them by now.

  ‘You came all this way to ask your questions,’ Iolani said. ‘Don’t leave us so soon.’

  The few Ice Runners in the way moved to give them a clear path to the benches – but once they were sitting down there would be no way to escape. At the moment they had a chance, if they could break away.

  ‘What do you want?’ Raphael asked suddenly.

  ‘The truth,’ Iolani said, her face hard. ‘So sit down, and find out.’

  But even as she spoke, Raphael saw the big Ice Runner beside her – Glaucio – make a small gesture, and Iolani glanced round behind them as footsteps and the ring of metal sounded on the path between the Emperor’s party and the sea.

  CHAPTER III

  ‘Am I disturbing you?’ said an incongruously cheerful voice.

  There was no platoon of soldiers, no more Ice Runners, no reinforcements from Sovereign. Only a silver-haired Vesperan patrician in her fifties, with olive skin and laughter lines around her eyes, flanked by a pair of marines in fish-scale armour and turquoise plumes. Her flowing dress wasn’t at all splendid, and her lack of any of the customary Vesperan diplomatic splendour suggested she’d been in a hurry to get here. With good reason.

  ‘Leonata,’ said Iolani, her upraised hand shaking slightly. ‘I didn’t expect you here.’

  ‘No, I see you didn’t,’ said the newcomer. ‘But, you see, I had a feeling this would happen.’

  ‘Our guests expressed a desire to question my people,’ Iolani said.

  Leonata glanced meaningfully up at the rooftops, and Raphael was the only one, he thought, who turned quickly enough to see a black-clad figure cradling an odd, heavy device duck out of sight. ‘In which case, they can do so with my blessing,’ she said, in a voice suddenly as hard as Iolani’s, before turning to bow to Valentine, holding out a sealed pouch to him. ‘Lord Emperor, my condolences on your father’s death. I am High Thalassarch Leonata Mezzarro Estarrin, envoy of the Council of the Seas and charged with solving his murder.’

  Valentine returned her a fractional bow. ‘My thanks, High Thalassarch,’ he said formally.

  She’d saved his life, Raphael realised. All their lives, because for whatever reason, Iolani wouldn’t dare harm Leonata, or do anything with her as a witness. He could tell it from the Sea Peoples’ frustration, the way they’d relaxed slightly.

  Valentine must be furious, even more so when, hard on Leonata’s heels, another group of legionaries and tribesmen came racing up the path, brushing past the grim-faced Ice Runners.

  ‘We didn’t receive your signal, Admiral, so we came as ordered,’ the tribune in charge said, flushed with embarrassment. Raphael let himself breathe fully again.

  ‘Thank you,’ Valentine said absently.

  ‘You still wish to question Clan Jharissa’s people?’ Leonata asked, stepping adroitly past the tribune to address the Emperor.

  ‘Yes,’ Valentine said. ‘Raphael, see to it.’

  ‘Let me do that,’ Leonata said, ‘Iolani, I’m afraid this won’t do. We’ll need a more private space, and some desks for secretaries – you do have secretaries with you, Raphael? Yes? Good – and I’ll need to take them in order, there’s no point questioning everybody. I’d like to think I can trust you to bring us the best possible witnesses first.’ There was a rebuke there, but hidden behind a smile and a manner so inoffensive not even Iolani could object.

  ‘As you wish,’ Iolani said, and rattled off some more orders to Glaucio, too quietly for Raphael to catch the words, except to realise that she wasn’t speaking Thetian.

  Leonata gathered up the sheets of notes the secretaries had left scattered over the desk and pinned them together. Their investigations concluded, the Imperial party had lost no time returning to their ship, leaving only a few legionaries in the square to guard Raphael. Leonata looked at him, but his face gave nothing away. He was Silvanos’s nephew, after all.

  ‘Nothing,’ Raphael said. ‘It’s like questioning a stone wall. “Where were you on the night of the assassination? Here. Did you see anything? No. Did you go anywhere near the channel? No. Did any other ships arrive here? No.” ’

  They were in front of the plain, whitewashed council house, deserted now. Approaching darkness and the sheer intransigence of the witnesses had brought an end to the questioning, despite Raphael and Silvanos’s best efforts; Silvanos had taken over from his nephew after an hour or two, but had no more luck, which seemed to have cheered Raphael up a little.

  ‘They’re not going to tell you,’ said Leonata. Raphael held his temper well, but like so many brilliant men, he didn’t like being thwarted.

  ‘I know they’re not,’ Raphael said. ‘We just wasted four hours proving that.’

  ‘Not entirely a waste of time. We know that all their stories are exactly the same . . .’

  ‘Which is usually an indication they’re guilty as hell,’ he said, interrupting.

  So like his uncle, and not only in looks.

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘We worked it out when they were about to kill us.’

  She didn’t reply to that. Thetis, if she’d delayed only a few moments back in Vespera, stopped to give a few more instructions or find some clothes more suitable for an envoy, Iolani might have had time to do something truly stupid. Except it was difficult to tell with Iolani, the younger woman wore a stone mask with everybody except her Ice Runners, and they were no more willing to talk than she was.

  ‘Who are these people?’ Raphael demanded. ‘Who are Clan Jharissa, that they behave as lords of all they survey, and assassinate Emperors on a regular basis?’

  Now there was an intelligent question, even if he felt the need to be flippant about it. He w
as angry because they’d trapped him, and she could tell that he hated being at the mercy of others. Even the Emperor – Valentine didn’t seem to notice the way Raphael always stood slightly apart from the rest of the Imperial group, as if to emphasise his independence. Aesonia probably had, and she was much the most dangerous of the Imperials.

  ‘We don’t know they assassinated the Emperor,’ she pointed out, as much to see his reaction as anything else.

  He raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘So these people who hate the New Empire, in whose territory Catiline died, who were just about to murder us as well, have something completely different to hide. Not Catiline’s death at all.’

  ‘There are plenty of other things to hide,’ Leonata said. Heavens knew she wanted to find out what it was the Jharissa were hiding. ‘And Vesperan law still works on presumption of innocence.’

  ‘Everyone’s guilty of something,’ Raphael said mildly, walking towards the door. ‘It’s just a question of finding out what it is.’

  ‘Spoken like a true secret policeman,’ she replied, before he looked back and she caught his expression.

  He was playing with her, damn him! That slight curve of his mouth, the edge of sarcasm in his voice, all spoke of a man who was used to playing the cat, not the mouse. He was even more feline than Silvanos, his arrogance more open, and right now he needed to prove he wasn’t the prey.

  Well, let him. He would tell her all she needed to know about him, sooner or later.

  The marines – four legionaries and her own two guards, a necessary evil in these times – fell in around them as they emerged into the late afternoon sunlight. Ice Runners stood around still, though there were children to be seen now, under the watchful and worried gaze of their mothers. They were waiting for the intruders to leave, their nerves fraying after hours of waiting. There was fear mixed with the hostility, a great deal of it, but she could no more fathom the Ice Runners now than she’d ever been able to.

  ‘That’ll be all, I believe,’ she said to the waiting Glaucio, as they reached the edge of the square. ‘My apologies for the inconvenience.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Glaucio said. He had the air of a man whose revenge had been thwarted. Would he have fired on his own initiative, if Iolani hadn’t given the order?

  She felt his eyes boring into her back as she walked on, down the main street and out through the trap-wall and the line of palm trees.

  They crested the small ridge where the path divided, and down in the lagoon below her Leonata saw the remains of Monarch, and shivered despite the heat. Not simply for the eighty-odd officers, crew and attendants who’d died with the Emperor, but because of what those few fragments of shattered hull signified. Raphael stopped for a moment, his gaze moving from Monarch along to the headland to where three distant figures, one in black, one in blue and one in white, had left the attendants and mages behind and were deep in conversation.

  Silvanos, Aesonia, and Valentine. Leonata looked back to the remains again, to the silver water shimmering in the heat-haze. An engineer surfaced next to a small boat, where two more naval officers were crouched with pads and pencils. They were surveying the wreckage, which was sensible. They wouldn’t find anything, but they weren’t to know that.

  ‘Clan Jharissa?’ Raphael reminded her, after checking no-one else was in earshot.

  Leonata told him what she was willing to reveal, what any well-informed Vesperan would know. She knew more, of course, but still far less than she ought to.

  As a young woman from the Portanis, Vespera’s teeming harbour district, Iolani, a penniless immigrant from some city destroyed in the Anarchy, had assembled a crew of tough loners and somehow found and outfitted a single ship, before disappearing from Vespera. No-one had noticed at the time, and it was only when she returned almost a year later with two ships, holds bulging with ice, that the other Vesperan clans bothered to work out what had happened. After paying through the nose for her cargo.

  With such a market opening up, the bankers had fallen over themselves to advance her the capital for an entire fleet of ships, and after her second voyage Iolani had been able to found her own clan. After her fourth, little more than five years after she’d started, she’d been able to buy the necessary two mantas to qualify for Great Clan status, even though it apparently took her another three years to work out how to keep them alive in the high arctic. There had been rivals, but they seemed to lack the necessary contacts in the far north, and not all of their ships even returned.

  Iolani seemed to have a knack for recruiting northerners. They’d begun appearing among the Ice Runners after the first voyage, and subsequently in the City itself, but they still kept to themselves. Which would have been fine, had they been from anywhere else on Aquasilva; Thetians were touchy about the north.

  Two years ago, and far earlier than was customary, Iolani had been elected to the Council of the Seas. It was her decision – she’d long had the clout and the wealth to stand. There had been ugly rumours circling by then of a war in the shadows between Jharissa and the New Empire, but Leonata knew it had begun long before that.

  ‘They fight?’ Raphael asked, surprised.

  ‘Not where anyone can see,’ Leonata said, glad she’d got a reaction from him at last. ‘From what we know, the Empire uses its bases in the Windward Islands to try to intercept Jharissa ships on their way home.’

  ‘That’s why they’re so heavily armed.’

  ‘Possibly,’ she said. There were a great many reasons why Iolani would have armed her merchant mantas to the teeth, and a threat from the New Empire was only the best of them.

  ‘But why?’ Raphael asked. ‘Why are the Jharissa fighting the Empire?’

  In truth, it was more the other way round. She was fairly certain the Empire had started it, because they were the ones with the overwhelming advantage in force, and Iolani, while inclined to be impulsive, was not a fool. As for why . . .

  ‘Nobody knows,’ Leonata said.

  ‘So the great clans of Vespera, with their world-famous intelligencers and their informers throughout the City, actually don’t know the first thing about who Iolani or her people are, or why they’re fighting their own private war. Even though you’ve been living alongside them for fifteen years?’

  ‘Why don’t you see if you can crack them open?’ she suggested, half in jest.

  ‘I’m going to,’ he said, in perfect earnest.

  ‘Where all our world-famous intelligencers – isn’t that an oxymoron, by the way? – have failed? A great ambition.’

  ‘Is there any other ambition worth the effort?’ he said, still serious, turning those black eyes on her, and for a moment it was as if she were hearing another man, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember who.

  ‘No-one’s ever infiltrated them,’ Leonata said.

  ‘And you tolerate this state of affairs?’

  What did he think Vespera was? Iolani and her people worried Leonata, worried all of the City’s leaders, because there was something about them that didn’t fit. But as long as the Jharissa obeyed the City’s laws, and didn’t stir up trouble, what could the Council do?

  ‘Jharissa pay their dues, they bring money into the City, and they’re honest. They’re not much liked, but then they’re northerners.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s why they’re disliked, based on today’s experience,’ Raphael said. He glanced round, as if alerted by some sixth sense. ‘I’ll pass on another conversation with Iolani today.’ He bowed curtly and strode away, back towards Sovereign, leaving Leonata to wait for her fellow High Thalassarch.

  Iolani stood beside her, keeping her distance, for a long while before either of them spoke.

  ‘Would you really have killed them?’ Leonata asked, abruptly. She wanted to see the other woman’s reaction.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Iolani said. ‘I hadn’t intended to. But I had them there, in all their arrogance and hypocrisy, at my mercy.’

  ‘And you didn’t trouble yourself with wh
at would happen to the City if you killed them?’

  ‘Just see what happens to the City if they live,’ Iolani said.

  Valentine walked with Silvanos and Aesonia along the headland, away from the lagoon with its sad wreckage, yet also out of sight of Sovereign and the village. They stopped at the headland’s end, where it diminished to little more than a spit of white sand and a few scrub bushes, and stared out over the lagoon to the south. At the landward end, a line of marines had moved to seal off access, though his mother’s magic would be more than sufficient to protect them here.

  ‘They’re guilty,’ he said flatly. He’d walked straight into a trap, because he’d never dreamed that even the Jharissa would be so perfidious as to try to kill him under diplomatic immunity, with no chance of denying their guilt. But only Leonata’s arrival had stayed Iolani’s hand.

  ‘Of course they’re guilty,’ Aesonia said. ‘We knew that before we came here.’

  ‘But we have no way to prove it,’ said Silvanos. ‘They’ll temporise, obstruct, we’ll go back to Azure and they’ll have a chance to destroy what remains of the evidence.’

  ‘We can leave a guard here,’ Valentine suggested.

  ‘And have them killed by traitors in the night, as your father was?’ Aesonia said. Valentine had never seen his mother so angry in all his thirty-eight years, but now he shared her fury.

  ‘They’ll hide behind Vesperan law,’ Silvanos said.

  ‘Even with your nephew on the case?’

  Silvanos paused, no doubt wondering whether to put his nephew down or give some straight advice. There was no love lost between those two, but there was respect, which was enough.

  Advice won. ‘Raphael has the ability but not the means. My informants can probably find proof of their guilt, come to that. But we have no way to make the Council of the Seas act against them.’

  ‘Then we act against them ourselves,’ Valentine said, glancing to his mother. He longed to reverse the roles and have Iolani and her too-arrogant northerners at his mercy. He hadn’t forgotten the dead man at Sertina – had he, too, been an agent of the Jharissa, attempting to stir up trouble?