Vespera Page 8

  And then the ceremony became a triumphal procession. On land, of course. Not even for Valentine did the Vesperans bring out their state and clan barges, kept for the great festivals and regattas on the Deep. But tonight, the Vesperans had combined the Emperor’s return and the evening passeggiata into an impromptu carnival. As the cheer died down and Valentine walked forward, even the Council’s solemnity dissipated, and its members broke off into small knots or moved forward to greet the visiting Emperor. One of them was so old he was leaning on a subordinate’s shoulder, his robes hanging around his shrunken body. Who was that? He seemed familiar.

  Even Iolani paid her respects to Valentine, with a face that could have been carved from a block of her own ice, but where the others remained around the Emperor, greeting other members of the entourage, she stayed only as long as etiquette demanded. And when she threaded her way out, Raphael marked which way she went.

  He turned away and slipped round behind the Imperial party, through the cordon of blue-cloaked Imperial Guards and into the crowd of Vesperans beyond, a sea of peacocks and birds of paradise. Silk and dye, like coffee and spices and hardwood, were Thetian staples, the foundation of Vespera’s commercial power, and it showed in the colour and the sophistication of Vesperan clothes. They weren’t all tasteful or elegant by any means, but it was a world better than the drab greys and browns and dark greens of the far north where he’d spent almost two years.

  And Iolani in her black and grey, with her fair hair, was instantly recognisble.

  He followed her under the triumphal Arch of Lavinia through the crowd, trying not to bump in any of the children chasing each other between the Agora columns with wild shrieks, heading round the edge of the official delegations to reach the Processional Way before Valentine’s procession was organized enough to move off.

  Where was she heading? It was difficult to tell in such a throng, and Raphael had to be careful. He wasn’t inconspicuous himself, as his clothes were almost as dark and sober as Iolani’s. Popinjay was a part he didn’t play well, even when dressed for the occasion. Bahram Ostanes had told him once that few people could believe that a face so sinister wasn’t concealing dark and devious designs.

  Raphael was, he had to admit, a little too conspicuous to be a good undercover intelligencer in Vespera. Still, there were ways of getting round that.

  He caught sight of Iolani again in the far colonnade, by a small side-door of the Council’s building, the Palace of the Seas. Even as he watched, she unlocked it and slipped through into the building, closing it again behind her – and locking it, if she had any sense.

  Raphael glanced up at the loggia of the Palace, a long, continuous gallery of delicate interlacing arches, with a further storey of a few huge windows above it, and the filigree stonework of the roof. All were darkened now, though he fancied he could see figures in the shadows of the loggia.

  To follow Iolani now would be unwise – Silvanos would have agents to do that, agents with a better knowledge of the City than Raphael, better able to blend into the background. But to make use of the agents he needed at least some control over his uncle’s network, and that might be difficult.

  The Emperor’s party were still beyond the Arch – by the sounds of it, heading in the opposite direction, for the Emperor to present himself to the crowds packing the Octagon. The greatest of Vespera’s plazas lay right at the southern tip of Triton Island, the enormous fountains at its centre now running at their lowest ebb to give a better view. Valentine would be some time there before he came back to the processional litters waiting for him by the Arch, and Silvanos would certainly to be with him.

  Raphael wove his way back to the crowd of dignitaries under the Arch, looking for the smallest and most anonymous of them. He might not even be with the dignitaries, but instead be dressed as a servant, or a messenger . . . where was he?

  There. A small, slightly chubby man with the most unremarkable face imaginable, in the plain cambric robe of a secretary. He looked every inch the minor functionary, and unless things had changed greatly since Raphael left, that was what he’d still be. He stood by the litter-bearers with the Ulithi chamberlain, apparently instructing them in the route to be taken.

  Plautius, Silvanos’s lifelong secretary, assistant, assassin, the closest his uncle had to a friend. The man who looked after the day-to-day business of his enormous spy network, ever since Silvanos had become too senior and too conspicuous to go out in the field himself.

  Raphael marked the positions of Leonata and any other Councillors who’d recognise him, and walked as casually as he dared over to the litters, placing himself where Plautius would see him and the chamberlain wouldn’t. It took only a moment or two, Plautius’s eyes missed nothing, and the little man excused himself to the chamberlain and made his way over to Raphael.

  ‘I assume you’ve come to find out if you’ve a place in the procession,’ Plautius said, fussily, delving into the sheaf of notes he always held. Raphael had never worked out if they said anything, or if they were merely for show – surely the danger of losing them was too great to record sensitive information, even in shorthand?

  ‘I was wondering,’ Raphael said.

  ‘Good to have you back,’ Plautius said, more quietly, even as he fiddled with the notes. ‘Your uncle kept me updated on your progress, but he didn’t tell me you’d decided to come back.’

  ‘The Emperor can be forceful when he sets his mind to it.’

  ‘Oh, you’re on the Emperor’s staff, are you?’ Plautius said. ‘Well, that’s different. Of course, if anyone ever bothered to tell me these things, I would know to make allowance, but do they? Now I have to tell some captain or bureaucrat he’ll have to walk behind, and he won’t like that at all. Oh, dear!’ Several sheets slipped out of his hands and on to the worn stones of the Maritime Agora. The man’s act was superb; even Raphael was inclined to believe him at times.

  ‘Valentine’s made me point-man in this,’ Raphael said, bending to pick them up. Plautius had even contrived to drop them in all directions – and while they were bending to pick them up, any lip-readers who happened to be observing them would be out of luck. ‘I need some access to your network.’

  ‘Silvanos will kill me.’

  ‘Silvanos doesn’t have to know.’

  Plautius gave Raphael a look which spoke more eloquently than words.

  ‘All right, Silvanos will find out. I still need it. The Emperor will be after me for results, and he’s not going to be impressed if I’m too busy trying to squeeze blood out of Silvanos’s stone to do any investigating.’

  ‘And what of your co-investigator? Will you trust her with our secrets?’

  ‘Iolani almost killed us at Saphir. This is an investigation, not a political stratagem we have to keep secret. She doesn’t need to know how I got the information.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Plautius said. They were running out of sheets to pick up, even talking as fast as they could.

  ‘How many people have you got tailing Iolani?’

  ‘Three, right now. I’d go after the Council tonight, if I were you. See what their attitudes to her are.’

  It made sense, Raphael thought, bending to pick the last sheet up.

  Plautius prattled a little more while he fiddled with the notes, and then frowned. ‘I’m afraid there’s no-one I can move, you know. The Empress Mother was most insistent that all the senior Exiles ride with the Emperor, and since Abbess Hesphaere is here at the moment with her people, I can’t spare the space.’ He looked terribly apologetic.

  ‘Find out which of the Emperor’s secretaries didn’t bother to mention me, will you?’ Raphael said, in an aggrieved tone.

  ‘Of course,’ Plautius said. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .?’

  He bustled away, back to the Chamberlain, and Raphael let his expression set into faint annoyance, as if he’d been thwarted of his wish to ride in the procession. He didn’t want to, as a matter of fact. Not as a new staffer in th
e first carriage, and most specifically not when anonymity would be so useful.

  Raphael glanced over at the remaining High Thalassarchs, noting which ones apart from Iolani had left, which ones had gone with Valentine. Word would be spreading that Silvanos’s nephew was back in the City, and entrusted with investigating the murder, no less. For the moment Raphael was a wild card. They’d want to sound him out, gauge how much influence he wielded, whether he’d be worth cultivating.

  And one of the High Thalassarchs, Vaedros Xelestis, knew far too much about him.

  ‘There you are,’ Leonata said, appearing as if from nowhere. ‘Are you riding with the Emperor?’

  Raphael shook his head regretfully, but let the annoyed expression disappear. It would do for those watching from a distance, but Leonata was too clever for that sort of game. ‘They didn’t know I was coming.’

  Leonata gave him a look he knew meant, I can see right through you, but shrugged cheerfully. ‘You want to sit in a litter while crowds throw flowers at someone a hundred feet behind you, who you can’t even see?’ The most senior in any procession always travelled at the back, by Thetian custom.

  She took his arm and led him back towards the cluster of High Thalassarchs, who were slowly dispersing as they found friends and clanspeople to talk to, no doubt preferable to their colleagues. ‘If you have no other engagements, you must join us. You’re back home, it’s a festival night, and you’ll learn just as much in a few hours of good company as if you skulk in the shadows watching someone’s palace all evening. You shouldn’t skulk too much, by the way, it’s bad for the complexion.’

  ‘And what does that mean for those of us without skin like yours?’ A cultured tenor voice from behind them, one Raphael knew distantly, though he’d last heard it singing a Demarchos aria at a private gathering fifteen years ago.

  ‘Why,’ said Leonata, turning, ‘distinguished maturity is a different matter.’

  Petroz Salassa, Prince of Imbria, had skin like old leather after forty solid years of fighting, intriguing, and consolidating his scattered princedom in the Sea of Rains, hard against the New Empire’s southern border. Not a life he’d have chosen, if Raphael was any judge, but one at which he’d shown formidable ability. He was still a commanding figure, with a leonine mane of white hair and an ivory cane, and there was genuine affection in his gaze as he greeted Leonata in formal, courtly fashion. He was known for being old-fashioned, and the stiff, inflexible moral code he followed belonged to a time long before his birth, if it had ever existed at all.

  ‘Decrepitude, I call it,’ Petroz said, and his eyes flickered to Raphael.

  ‘Allow me to introduce Raphael Quiridion, nephew of Silvanos,’ Leonata said, with equal formality, and Raphael bowed in greeting to Petroz. Probably not correctly, but then there was no courtly etiquette for dealing with a Thetian territorial prince. Petroz and his rivals were the first such rulers since the unification of Thetia by the fleets of the Old Republic, over six hundred years ago.

  ‘I’m honoured,’ said Petroz, with a precise bow. Raphael wondered if that ivory cane, gorgeously carved with a writhing serpent, was a sword-stick, and decided after a moment that it almost certainly was. Petroz had survived six or seven assassination attempts in thirty years. ‘I thought you were sworn to perpetual exile with the Ancient Mariner.’

  Raphael cursed, once again revising upwards the amount that everyone else seemed to know about him. He’d hoped his years as a Xelestis clansman would be buried by now, but apparently not.

  ‘You mustn’t imagine you can keep anything secret,’ Leonata said amiably. ‘This is Vespera, it’s our business to know everyone else’s business.’

  ‘In other cities, they’d call it shameless gossiping,’ Petroz remarked. He was, Raphael recalled, the reason Catiline had been in Vespera – to settle a border dispute of some kind. Did Petroz have anything to gain by Catiline’s death?

  ‘Nonsense, cities are like this the world over,’ Leonata said. ‘Now, gentlemen, once our part in the Emperor’s welcome is over, will you join me for music and food at Orfeo’s?’

  ‘Orfeo’s?’ Raphael asked, intrigued. ‘The musicians’ coffee house?’

  ‘The grander of the two,’ Leonata said. ‘The one they let mere patrons into. You’re a musician yourself, aren’t you?’

  ‘Cellist,’ Raphael said.

  ‘Then you shall join us. No argument. Petroz?’

  ‘How can I resist?’ the aged Prince said. ‘I must go back to Imbria once this fuss has died down. My time here is too short.’

  Raphael caught a flash of pain in Petroz’s expression as he glanced round at the towering colonnades and the water of the City. Like his rivals, and from a deeper passion, he’d done his best to establish Imbria as a place for artists, musicians and scholars, with some success. There was more lustre at the court of Imbria than Sommur or even Azure, but the truth remained that Vespera had the lion’s share of Thetia’s beauty and its culture, and nothing Petroz could do would alter that.

  ‘Then we should find a place to watch the pomp and mummery, and I’ll send Flavia on ahead to find a table. Oh, where is the girl? Valentine will be back before long.’

  It took them ten minutes or so of greetings, orders to Leonata’s aides and polite introductions to the other High Thalassarchs to make their way to the Agora proper. Thankfully, Vaedros was nowhere to be seen, so Raphael had a little while longer before he met the Xelestis leader – but then, if everyone else knew about his time with Odeinath, there was little else Vaedros could reveal.

  Leonata took them across to the Palace of the Seas, which was guarded by a pair of Council guards in gilded scallop-helms. There were only a couple of hundred of them; the Council of the Seas was in too precarious a position to begin building up armies of its own. In the event of a threat to all Vespera, clan marines would be called into service; otherwise, the guards and the vigiles, Vespera’s watchmen, were all the forces the Council commanded.

  The guards waved Leonata through into the inner courtyard with its more ornate windows and the enormous staircase on one side, leading up to the chamber of the defunct Assembly. It was an ancient building, still essentially as it had been when the first Republic fell four hundred and fifty years ago, a warren of meeting rooms and offices of state, with the law courts housed on the ground floor. It would have been thronged in day-time, but they saw nobody else as Leonata led them up a staircase and out on to the first-floor loggia Raphael had watched earlier, lit only by the rings of waterglobes above the Processional Way.

  Council guards and clan troops were beginning to clear a path, gently pushing the crowds back on either side. Flower-sellers, temporarily relocated from their normal station further up the Processional Way, were doing a brisk trade in garlands and bunches. Raphael felt a sudden urge to walk down the Way again, early in the morning as soon as the flower-sellers had set up their stalls in the colonnades, filling the air with the overpowering scent of flowers, to breathe in the astonishing richness of the City.

  ‘You can leave the City, but the City never leaves you,’ said Petroz shrewdly, catching his expression.

  ‘I thought Taneth might be close enough,’ Raphael admitted, ‘and it’s every bit as big and lively, but it simply isn’t home.’

  ‘I always wanted to see Taneth,’ Petroz said. ‘When Palatine came to the throne we all hoped things would change, that after we’d defeated the Domain the world would be ours to explore. On campaign, we’d sit round in the wardroom, eating the usual terrible field rations, and think of the places we’d be able to go – Taneth, Cambress, Pharassa, the ruins in Galdaea, the Tiberian Islands.’

  Leonata gave the Prince a concerned glance Raphael was convinced he hadn’t been meant to see.

  ‘In the end, I never even left Thetia.’

  ‘And that was too high a price for a princedom?’ Raphael asked.

  ‘I should never have been a Prince,’ Petroz snapped. ‘Prince of a shard of broken Thetia, fightin
g forty years of civil war? I became Prince to survive, I kill Thetians to survive. Life isn’t supposed to be about survival. I thought we were better than that. I could have stopped it, if only I’d realised . . .’

  His voice trailed off as horns sounded from behind the Arch, and the Prince of Imbria scowled at Raphael briefly.

  ‘Don’t take it out on him,’ said Leonata quietly, but Petroz didn’t answer, only stared out across the Processional Way to the dark water of the Deep and the lights beyond.

  The litters were forming up beyond the arch, and a more or less straight avenue had been cleared down the centre of the Processional way. More enterprising Vesperans had clambered up the waterglobe pillars and were perched precariously at the top, watched with mixed envy and worry by their earthbound friends.

  The horns ended their fanfare, and the band launched into what Raphael recognised as a Tiziano march – one he hadn’t heard before.

  ‘Is that from his newest opera?’ he asked, since there litters hadn’t appeared yet.

  ‘You like Tiziano?’ Leonata inquired.

  ‘Of course,’ Raphael said lightly. ‘Why wouldn’t anyone?’

  ‘If they’d met him, perhaps,’ Petroz said, without looking round.

  ‘The man is a pain,’ Leonata admitted, ‘but . . .’

  This time Petroz did look at them, still glowering. ‘Leonata, the man’s a monster. And all his operas are five-hour epics about the manifest destiny of Thetia, or rather of the New Empire, to rule the world.’

  ‘It’s still wonderful music,’ Raphael said, meeting the old Prince’s gaze.

  ‘Yes, until you listen to what they’re singing about.’ Petroz turned away again.

  ‘This is from his new opera, Aetius,’ Leonata said. ‘His first new work in five years, and it had a lavish premiere at the Imperial Opera. Stunning, I imagine, if you can sit through it.’