The Tears of the Sun tc-5

by S. M. Stirling

  The building was a block-square pile in the Victorian era’s idea of Italian Renaissance style right down to the terra-cotta up on the fourth-floor roofs and the Doric columns. The nineteenth-century stone-and-brick construction was why it had been a natural for post-Change conversion once Portland settled down, with a hundred thousand square feet of office space that didn’t absolutely depend on powered ventilation to remain habitable. She flung up a hand to halt a rush of paper-waving bureaucrats trying to get her attention as she came through the doors and into the marble splendors of the lobby, grunting thankfully when a pair of her military secretaries showed up and started running interference.

  The situation room on the left occupied one of the flanking tower chambers with an overhead skylight; it was in purposeful movement when she stuck her head in, under the management of Lord Rigobert, Baron Forest Grove, Marchwarden of the South and currently her number two.

  He gave her a quick nod that said: under control. Tiphaine could see several Bearkillers and some Corvallans with him, all gesturing at the same great square map table. Aides moved unit markers with rods like pool cues, and the technical conversation stopped now and then for quick lessons in various groups’ military terminology.

  We’re trying to keep a lid on the news of the Great Pendleton Cluster-Fuck; a panic would be a bad thing. But it’ll break soon. News still moves.

  She’d never been able to really understand the impulse to run in circles and squeal when faced with a problem; she knew it existed and had to be dealt with, but she couldn’t imagine how it felt. Even as a child she’d always been able to put danger out of mind with a simple effort of will and go on with what needed doing. Otherwise she couldn’t have been a gymnast and spent hours every day stressing her body to ten-tenths of capacity.

  Fortunately the heliograph net is the fastest way to move information and we control it, so we can get ahead of the curve, if we’re sharp, and Sandra most certainly is. She’ll have a version that’s spun our way and have it out so widely and thoroughly that it’ll be the one most people accept, the more so as it’ll be true enough that the actual news reinforces our subsidized troubadours and newsletters and Sunday sermons.

  Up through arched doorways, marble-clad piers, beams with classical plaster moldings, murals and groined vaults, a grand cast-iron stairway extended from the center of the first floor to the fourth floor, with marble treads, double balusters with spiral and acanthus ornamentation. Tiphaine took the stairs three at a time, dodging the steady stream of pages who charged up and down with a sublime disregard for any obstacles and packets of messages in their hands.

  It’s a minor miracle this didn’t end up as the Lord Protector’s City Palace, she thought. Though the Central Library’s about as good.

  She strode through her outer office, where what she privately dubbed the widow brigade was busily keeping up with the constant flow of paper reports; male nobles dodged this sort of job when they could, and the clerics who swarmed over the ordinary civil administration of the PPA weren’t considered suitable. Typewriters clacked, adding machines clattered and rang their bells; abacuses made rattling sounds and pages ran back and forth on soft-soled shoes, yelping:

  “Excuse me-”

  “My lady!”

  “Not there, you nit!”

  While carrying completed reports, paper and ink supplies, food, and drinks…

  Maps flapped back and forth on swinging panel poster display racks as the clerks pushed in pins updating troop positions, enemy sightings and resource allocation.

  Color-coded file bins crowded the aisle to her office; more hung around inside, packed with information, sorted in any order she might need. Carefully stacked piles of dockets, folders and accordion files covered the long tables that ran around the outer wall of the antechamber. As she entered her own office and racked her sword she could see a neat pile of dispatch wallets on the desk sorted into levels of urgency as indicated by the knot codes, right beside the Seal and the tray of red wax disks.

  Rigobert brought six packets in, according to Lioncel; that’s nine there. They breed the way coat hangers used to do in closets. I’d better process them.

  A map table, much smaller than Rigobert’s downstairs, tried to make sense of troop dispositions and the strategic situation.

  What a cluster-fuck, she repeated to herself after a quick look to check for major developments.

  “They have humbugged me, by God” as Wellington put it. At least we had contingency plans in place. And thank heavens for Sandra’s habit of collecting valuable people!

  Meticulous notes on her desk flagged the most urgent files in order of priority. Which important task was done by…

  “Dame Lilianth, if you would,” Tiphaine called, raising her voice slightly.

  Dame Lilianth of Kalama did not look like a spy as she came in and firmly closed the glass door behind her; she hardly even looked like an office manager. Five foot four, plump going on fat, rosy cheeks, her silvering hair hidden under a light blue wimple that picked up the lighter color on her brocaded cote-hardie. She looked like a happy matronly woman whose primary concern was spoiling her grandchildren and perhaps puttering around her garden bossing the workmen.

  Tiphaine suddenly grinned sardonically at her and Dame Lilianth matched her expression with an equal savagery.

  I look pretty much like what I am. She doesn’t. Both useful, Tiphaine thought.

  Lilianth Oppenhier had been an Office Administrator in the days when light traveled along wires rather than coming from oil-soaked wicks, and a member of the Society. Sandra had taken her and her three daughters into the household when her husband was killed in the opening moves of the Protector’s War and her lack of a male heir lost her a land claim in a legal mud-wrestling match with House Gutierrez. Since then she’d been extremely useful and had prospered accordingly. Sandra Arminger knew how to reward good service, and in more ways than simple largesse.

  “There’s a little nuisance to get out of the way first, my lady Grand Constable,” Lilianth said. “Herluin Smith’s widow is asking for a page placement for their son, Henriot. This is the third letter in three months, she’s using the squeaky-wheel principle, but she does have a claim.”

  “That’s Mary Smith we’re talking about… why is every other woman in the Association named Mary?”

  Lilianth grinned at her. “Including me. Mary Oppenhier. Sandra was very firm that I needed to use my Society name forevermore… for the reason you just stated.”

  “She renamed me out of a book, when I made Associate, and I never even liked the character-a pathetic little dweeb. I should have gotten Yolande or Heuradys.”

  “Oh, those books. What were you called, my lady? I’ve never heard.”

  “Collette. Collette Rutherston; strange, I haven’t thought of that in years. At Binnsmeade Middle School they used to call me Collie and go woof-woof at me in the corridors.”

  Back before we reinstated the Code Duello. Nothing like the prospect of dying with six inches of steel through the brisket to keep people polite.

  “The mind boggles. Do you want me to hint that Mary Smith should remember that squeaky wheels make good firewood?” Lilianth said.

  “No, no. We’re feudalists.”

  Which means you can’t separate the personal and the political and everything is family and patronage.

  “Have a polite letter sent to her saying that after the crisis is past, meaning if we’re still alive, say between Michaelmas and Christmas, I will find a place for the boy. By the way, how’s Ysolde? I see that she’s going to pop, probably a month after Delia?”

  Lilianth turned her head towards the door for a moment. Her eldest daughter was outside, updating some of the graphs posted on the far wall. She’d made an extremely advantageous marriage with the Betancourt family’s eldest, not least because Sandra worked the network behind the scenes. As a bonus the two young people liked each other.

  “That’s all working out very well, my
lady,” she said, with satisfaction in her voice.

  Tiphaine nodded and looked at her desk. “Where shall I begin, Mistress Lilianth?”

  “The Lady Regent sent a very urgent and confidential dispatch box yesterday, quite late. I have it under lock and key.”

  Right, Sandra doesn’t joggle my elbow for trivia, Tiphaine thought.

  One of the nicer things about working for the Spider of the Silver Tower was that she gave you a job and the resources and information you needed and then left you to get on with it.

  Though God have mercy if you screw the pooch, for she won’t.

  “I’d suggest that you start your day with that. You can continue with the dispatches from the hospital and the death letters.”

  She plucked two wallets out of the pile. Tiphaine took them and waited for Lilianth to bring Sandra’s dispatch.

  No need to guess what it’s about. Mathilda’s letter is quite clear; Alex Vinton finked her out to the Cutters off there in the wilds of Idaho, and did it with Mary Liu’s knowledge and approbation. The only upside is that Odard Liu wasn’t involved; he got screwed over too, and saved Matti’s life. And he’s Baron Gervais now, so since the head of the family is loyal and can be shown to be loyal we needn’t proscribe the lot of them and attaint the estates. That would drop the horse apple in the bobbing bucket right along with the Golden Delicious just now, the way the nobility are antsy about things in general.

  But Mary Liu would have to go, one way or another. Which probably meant her brother Guelf Mortimer had to go, too, he was a notorious grudge bearer and was almost certainly involved in anything she was. Her other brother Sir Jason had been a serious loose cannon, and Tiphaine had had to deal with him back fifteen years ago. There wouldn’t be any need to cook a trial for Mary, the evidence was right there, but Guelf might be awkward if he didn’t fuck up in dramatic fashion or show what a skank he was politically.

  The problem was that so far he’d been performing far better than she’d expected. Killing a competent leader just because had a serious potential for blowback down the road these days. It wasn’t like Norman’s time, when nobody knew in the morning if their head would be attached to a spike over the gate at sundown.

  Will the Lady Regent prefer a large public trial for the Dowager Baroness Liu or a nice private referral to the Court of Star-Chamber, which is to say, herself? A large, very emotionally charged trial, against a woman who has proclaimed her ill-usage since before the Field of the Cloth of Gold will not go over well with the Associates with this war getting going and so far not going well at all. On the other hand, just having her mysteriously drop dead… we’ve been trying to cut back on stuff that raw, getting ready for the transition when Mathilda turns twenty-six and becomes Lady Protector. On the third hand, Mathilda ran away with Rudi and they’re off looking for a magic sword in the Death Zones of the east, and along the way she just handed us this can of worms. Damn it, I love the girl like a kid sister but smart as she is she’s a pain in the ass sometimes.

  She was still thinking hard when Lilianth came back with a small steel box. It had the Lady Regent’s personal sigil on it, an etching of the Virgin subduing the Dragon of Sin, which was one of Sandra’s private jokes. The same was stamped onto a paper-and-wax seal over the lock.

  “I witness that the seal is unbroken,” Tiphaine said, then flicked it off with the point of her dagger.

  “I witness that you have broken the seal and unlocked the dispatch box,” Lilianth said as Tiphaine turned the key.

  The Grand Constable gestured to the door. Lilianth closed it as she left. The carrick bend knot wound with copper wire was one used only by Sandra Arminger and only to Tiphaine or Conrad Renfrew. She drummed her fingers on the disk, still turning over the implications of Mary’s treason and the way the Associates would react to any public news of her complicity. Then she neatly snipped the copper coils and undid the knot and unfolded her instructions.

  Hmmm, she wrote this with her own hand; and she was upset. Unusual for Sandra, but then Mathilda is the focus of everything for her. Her latest amanuensis… Lady Jehane, of House Jones… is what, seventeen? Why didn’t she entrust it to her? She’s old enough and she’ll have to deal with the grittier aspects of life, soon enough.

  Tiphaine read the directions again.

  Oh! Tricky, very tricky. How are we going to do this? Glad I stuck Guelf with Viscount Chenoweth at Hermiston, he’s nicely out of the way for now and young Renfrew can keep an eye on him.

  Tiphaine closed her eyes, used a mnemonic trick to make sure she’d memorized the Regent’s missive and then set it alight in the room’s empty fireplace. A few strokes of the poker made sure that nobody could reconstruct anything from the ashes as well. She sat for a moment in silence, then looked up as the door opened.

  “The condolence letters, my lady,” Lilianth said.

  An unpleasantly long casualty list was attached, and the allies had suffered badly while breaking loose too. Tiphaine took the letters and began to sign them carefully; it was her job to take care of the noblemen, just as each lord would do the same by letter or in person for his subordinates. No dashing off her signature in the pre-Change fashion. Each one was a work of art, and much treasured by many of the recipients.

  They gave their lives for the Association, the least the Association can give them back is a duly formal letter of thanks. And for once it’s not the most unpleasant duty in prospect.

  She shook her hand out when she’d finished and plunged into the data in the rest of the files and reports. It was even soothing, in a way; when you were in the thick of things any battle felt like a defeat and an actual defeat felt like unmitigated disaster.

  But according to this it’s more of a mitigated disaster.

  Meanwhile she could feel her subconscious chewing over Sandra’s orders and the information she had and coming up with a way to reach the desired outcome. A page came in with a list of provisional unit movement orders from Rigobert de Stafford; she glanced at it, went over to the map, thought for a moment and scribbled approved, d’Ath on the bottom and set him running back to the situation room. The door opened at ten, just as she was about to call for a stenographer, and Lioncel came in with a cup of hot coffee. She gave a slight jerk of her head towards the desk.

  “Good, I’ll have an errand for you soon. Put it there. Did you get Delia home?”

  “Yes, my lady, at your orders, my lady. Lady Phillipa had to help me, but we sent her home an hour ago. Lady Phillipa asked me to help with the records and said she’d make it good with you.”

  Tiphaine nodded. “I’m fine with that. Does she need any more help? I can probably send over a few of the widow brigade.”

  Lioncel grinned. “She says no. I say yes, my lady. She doesn’t want to interfere with the war ministry’s needs.”

  Tiphaine scribbled some names on a scrap of paper and waved her hand in dismissal. “Notify these that they’re seconded. And send Dame Lilianth in on your way,” she said as she took a quick swallow of the acrid brew.

  Better watch it or I’ll be peeing all afternoon, she thought. And remember what the headaches were like the last time you had to cold-turkey, the stuff’s too expensive and the supply’s too unreliable to get really dependent on it.

  “Sit, Dame Lilianth. I am going to make you the possessor of a secret and part of a conspiracy. I have instructions from the Lady Regent and wide latitude on how to carry them out.”

  The older woman sat, her plain brown eyes deliberately and annoyingly bland. “By your word,” she said, an ironic twist to her voice. “What can I do for my lady the Spider?”

  Tiphaine leaned back in her swivel chair and put her hands behind her head, staring thoughtfully at the coffered ceiling.

  “It’s complicated and it will need us to be very quiet and sneaky. As a start, I want you to have a fainting fit-people actually believe in those again, so useful-and call for your son-in-law’s brother’s help. He’s on garrison duty with the city cast
ellan, isn’t he?”

  “Garrick? Certainly… what next?”

  “It’s enough like my special-ops days to make me feel nostalgic. We-”

  As the door closed on Dame Lilianth, Tiphaine broke open the next dispatch. My head hurts again… but not as much as Astrid’s does!

  Alone, she let a sudden sharp grin split her face. She relished the second of pure, unadulterated joy contemplating Astrid Loring’s concussion gave her. The thought of how the fact that Tiphaine had rescued her from the wreck of her covert ops mission gave a more subtle pleasure; it would be grit under the Hiril Dunedain’s eyelids for the rest of her life.

  Or it would be for me, in her position, and I can hope we’re enough alike for that to be so for her as well.

  She worked her way through the day’s stack of wallets and made a good start on the stack of allocation files. The Association’s military system was largely self-financing, but only as long as you didn’t need to use it for anything but routine. Once vassals had done more than their regulation forty days of service in the field, they had to be paid. And of course all the allied contingents were trying to shift as much of their costs as possible onto the Portland treasury.

  Lioncel brought her lunch. And his brother, two years younger and as dark as Lioncel was fair, but otherwise much like his brother. The three made their usual quick meal in the office on the pork-loin sandwiches and potato salad and fruit. Dame Lilianth scolded as Diomede tried to avoid getting a huge yellow mustard blot on his hose-and succeeded in getting it all over the floor. After he had cleaned it up, she sent him out with Dame Lilianth and Ysolde to work on organizing the kitchens to cope with the influx of temporary workers; that was good training in logistics.

  She was deep into a plan submitted by the Count Palantine of Walla Walla to reinforce Castle Campscapell and wondering if it could, just possibly, be a scheme to get his own troops inside that Crown fortress when a quick tap on the door broke into her concentration.