It shows Haith at nearly its greatest extent, covering almost half the map. These days, Haith’s just a smear: the heartland, Varinth, a few outposts. Still a great power, but no longer unassailable.
If the map were accurate, it would show Guerdon in brilliant silver, with silver trade routes spiralling out to all four corners and off the map to the Archipelago, carrying wonders of the alchemical renaissance. The dead of Haith might stand vigilant in their endless ranks until the end of time, but the living folk of Guerdon don’t have time to wait. There’s always another deal to be made.
And if the map were accurate, she reflects, it would be on fire and screaming.
She hears footsteps approaching. It’s one of the embassy’s Vigilant guards. She’s seen the walking dead before, but never unmasked. The creatures aren’t allowed out onto the streets of Guerdon without prior permission from the watch, and they aren’t allowed to go out without masks. Apparently, the watch once thought that the common folk of Guerdon would be terrified at the sight of ambulatory skeletons. An old law, as out of date as the map–there are far more unsettling things in the city these days.
Still, she suppresses a shudder as the skeleton approaches her. His jaw drops open. Forgive me, but you cannot be in here. Go back to the reception, he says in a voice from the grave. Firmly but respectfully, he places a dead hand on her arm and lifts her off the bench, escorting her to the door.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
The skull doesn’t look at her. There’s been an incident. Return to the reception, you’ll be safe there.
Down the corridor, one of the guards shouts in alarm, she hears more uproar and running feet, Olthic’s booming voice, but the dead man closes the door in her face, and she’s left alone in that mausoleum.
The next morning, Kelkin’s office is bedlam. Eladora wonders where all these people came from, this fevered host summoned by the magic word ‘election’. After being ignored for a few minutes, she tackles one running clerk and learns that Kelkin is breakfasting in the Vulcan. The coffee shop was Kelkin’s regular haunt and de facto office when he was just a lonely voice in opposition in a parliament dominated by the Hawkers. After he took over the city through the emergency committee, he needed an actual office with luxuries like doors. Going to the Vulcan now is, Eladora suspects, more about showing his face in the city than getting any actual work done.
She has work to do, but she needs to talk to Kelkin first.
When she arrives at the Vulcan, Eladora finds that Kelkin’s retinue has taken over the entire coffee shop and spilled into the street outside. Junior clerks and attachés juggle papers as drovers herd pigs past them, up to the market in Venture Square. A line of supplicants snakes around the block. There’s a watchman at the door, turning regular customers away, but another of Kelkin’s senior aides spots Eladora at the entrance and waves her in.
“He’s in the back,” she’s told. “Go on. Ten minutes.”
She passes Dr Ramegos on her way in. Eladora nods at her and pushes past, but Ramegos calls her back.
“Did you finish those exercises I assigned you?”
“I had to go to the Haithi reception.”
Ramegos snorts. “A true adept has perfect focus, and commits wholly to the act. There is no distinction between spell and sorcerer–the two become one entity, one single timeless monad ’tween earth and sky. Is there room for any extraneous thought?”
“Uh, no.”
“Well, then.” The older woman smiles, wrinkling her dark skin. “Get to work.”
Inside, Kelkin’s at the same table he’s reserved in the coffee shop for half a century. As usual, it’s covered in papers, used plates and stained coffee mugs. The papers at the bottom of the largest piles haven’t been referred to for decades, and Eladora shudders to think about the oldest coffee mugs. She slides into the seat opposite the old man.
Kelkin has no time for pleasantries. “The new parliament will have two hundred and eighty-two seats, or thereabouts, up forty-eight from the last election–and all those new seats bar two are in the New City and the lower town. We need to win every bloody one of them, and hold most of our vote in the city proper, and that’s just to get enough to go into coalition.”
“You’d work with the Keepers over the alchemists?” she asks in amazement. Kelkin spent half his life breaking the power of the Keeper’s church in the city.
“I’d go into coalition with the Crawling Ones if I get to set the agenda. The church has no damn business being in politics, not any more. Their support is rotten as old timber, but people still vote for them out of—” He waves a hand, as if unwilling to contemplate why anyone would do such a thing. “No, the church is done as a political entity in this city, but it’ll last one more election, especially with the alchemists on the run.”
“At the embassy party last night,” begins Eladora, then she catches herself. She decides that she doesn’t want to mention Voller’s offer, not until she knows enough to have a considered opinion of it.
“What about the embassy?” snaps Kelkin, irritated by the delay.
“Th-th-the Hawkers crowed that you’d made a mistake by calling a snap election. They said that you’d be punished for not tackling the city’s problems while you had the emergency committee’s powers at your c-command.” She chooses her words and tone carefully–her place in Kelkin’s organisation is an unusual one. She’s young and inexperienced but she’s one of the few people who knows most of what went on during the Crisis, and that makes her valuable.
“Punished for not cleaning up their mess, more like.” Kelkin shrugs. “They’re right. If we have another horror show like the Crisis, it’ll all be on me, and we’ll lose. But the election’s only six weeks away. We make it through six weeks without the city burning down around our ears, and we win.” He snaps his fingers at her. “Enough. I want you to work with Absalom Spyke. He’s run things down in the Wash for us before, and he’ll be making sure we win the New City.”
“Working with?” she echoes. “Doing what?”
“Identifying the bastards in the New City who can reliably deliver voters to the polls, and finding out how much we have to pay for ’em. Campaigning, girl. Honest graft.”
“I thought I’d be preparing a brief on the Free City case.” The Free City Act, passed by Kelkin nearly forty years ago, ensured near-universal suffrage within the city of Guerdon. It’s the cornerstone of any plan to win new voters in the New City, so the other parties are likely to make a legal challenge and argue that the New City is not actually part of Guerdon. The case is almost certain to fail, but if the challenge were to be upheld, then Kelkin and the Industrial Liberals would be utterly routed. Eladora doesn’t want to risk that, and it’s a rare opportunity for her to use her academic knowledge in the service of politics.
Kelkin snorts. “We’ll give it to Perik. Wait, no, he’s fucked off, and good riddance to that walking snot. Give it to”–he waves his hand vaguely–“the carrot-headed one with the bad beard. Give it to him, then go and find Spyke.”
She nods.
“By the by, the Derling chair in History in the university is to be filled by the start of the college year.”
She freezes. That was Professor Ongent’s chair, vacant since his death. “That’s to be expected,” she says, carefully.
“Don’t be coy. If you want your arse in that chair instead of this one”–he shoves the battered coffee-shop chair she’s sitting on with his good leg–“then it can be arranged. Get me those ivory towers, and you can have yours.”
As she leaves, a half-dozen people push past her, trying to get Kelkin’s attention. The square outside the Vulcan is crowded with criers, hawkers and protestors. Overnight, the streets have blossomed like a meadow in spring: every wall and lamp-post has sprouted posters. People shout at her; someone presses a flyer into her hand, and then another and another.
Feverish, pugnacious, the city is alive in a way she hasn’t seen since before the Crisis.
She can almost forget that, less than a year ago, this square was besieged by monsters.
When the gutters ran with blood, and the sky filled with vengeful gods.
CHAPTER 6
Terevant Erevesic–Lieutenant Erevesic of the Ninth Rifles of Haith–stares at the page. He can’t think of a good rhyme for “slaughterhouse”.
Obviously, “mouse”, “louse” and “grouse” can work, and, while they all neatly describe different facets of himself right now, he wants to write about that day on the shores of Eskalind. About the soldiers who died–and rose and died again–under his command.
Terevant writes down the word “spouse”, stares at it for a moment, then crosses it out heavily. He flips the page over and tries to apply himself to what he should be doing. Another letter from the Office of Supply, addressed to his father; more demands for the war effort. Beef and grain and timber and hide, all from the sprawling Erevesic estates. And more soldiers, ditto. More peasant levies.
Terevant volunteered, once, but that was half the world away. And before Eskalind.
He scratches his wrist, takes another sip of wine and tries to read the letter again. The archaic script–written by some long-Vigilant clerk–is hard to parse. “The eternal Crown, in the person of the 117th Laird, does command and require—”
A bell rings, signalling the arrival of a visitor. Grateful for the interruption, Terevant hurries out of his father’s office, striding down the marbled corridors of the mansion, down to the entrance hall. Expecting some corpse up from Old Haith, some Bureau factotum from one Office or another.
Two living people wait for him at the foot of the stairs. One of them Terevant doesn’t know–a little man, blinking at the grandeur of the hall, with unruly hair and a face that looks like it stretched to fit his huge pointy nose. Civilian clothing. The other, though, Terevant knows instantly.
Lyssada.
The stranger, the servants, the mansion, the sunlit lawns and the great estates beyond them, the sky and the sea and the land all shrink away. In his eyes, Lyssada is the only real, meaningful thing in the universe. Terevant finds himself suddenly at her side, and he’s not entirely sure if he ran down the stairs or fell down them, and it doesn’t matter. Her hair is tightly bound; she wears a heavy military greatcoat that looks to be several sizes too big for her, although they probably don’t make them for her small frame. Borrowed from Olthic, he guesses; his brother, her husband. One hand’s buried in the pocket of her coat; the other swings free, carrying an envelope. His stomach sinks at the sight of that even as his heart leaps at the sight of her. He worries he might rupture something, tear open some old war wound.
“Lys, I—” Lady Erevesic, he should say.
“Let’s walk outside,” she says quickly, gesturing to the still-open door, to the sunlit grounds.
“Aren’t you tired? It’s a long ride from the capital.”
“I want to see the old place again. Come on, Ter.”
Terevant falls in beside her, stepping back a dozen years as he does so. In his memory, summer sunshine again fills the lawn, and she runs ahead of him, barefoot on the grass, her light dress billowing as she races for the safety of the trees. He often thinks of that moment. On the battlefield, it was one of his talismans, something to remind him of what he fought for, just as the lower-caste soldiers held little cardboard tokens of the Crown. They had their vision of heaven; Terevant’s vision is still, despite everything, that sun-drenched lawn. Now, just like then, they’re not alone. Back then, it was his brother Olthic, striding ahead; now, it’s the strange little man who pauses at the threshold, a bemused expression on his face.
“I’ll only be a few moments,” says Lyssada. The man nods, and Lyssada leads Terevant across the lawn, into the grove of trees where they once played.
Out of earshot, he realises, of the servants.
The little man watches them from the shadow of the doorway. “Who’s he?” asks Terevant. Something about the man marks him as a foreigner. Not Haithi, at least not from Old Haith. Maybe one of the Empire’s few remaining territories.
“My assistant,” replies Lyssada absently. She glances around the grove. “This place hasn’t changed at all.”
“Father keeps it that way.” Lys had been fostered for a few years here in the mansion, after Terevant’s mother and sisters drowned in a shipwreck off Mattaur. The day Lys arrived was the day his grief started to lift; those few years were happy years, carrying him away from sorrow.
“How is the Erevesic?”
Terevant shrugs. “Still hanging on. Still hoping for Enshrinement.” The highest of death-castes. His mother’s death was sudden; by contrast, Terevant’s been preparing for his father’s death for many years. It’s an inevitable fact of his mental landscape, as solid and familiar as the grey mansion beyond the trees.
Other feelings are less certain. He pushes at his emotions, scratches the scabs over his heart. “I presume Olthic is here?”
“No, he’s still in Guerdon. I’m heading back there tomorrow night.” She rubs her thumb over the seal of the cream envelope, as if suddenly hesitant to give it to him. “And so are you.” She holds out the letter to him. “I came here to fetch Lieutenant Terevant of House Erevesic, formerly of the Ninth Rifles.”
A scion of an Enshrined House like the Erevesics wouldn’t normally be assigned to a regiment like the Ninth, but they were his comrades, and the “formerly” hurts.
“How come you’re the one bringing this?” he asks in excitement. In surprise. In apprehension. Shame that she knows what he did. A little flash of anger at Olthic for not being here. In a roil of emotion he can’t name. The letter’s from the military. Lys is part of the Bureau, the civil service. There’s supposed to be a strict division between them. She could get into trouble for handling a letter like this.
She shrugs. “I knew it was in the offing. I was in Old Haith anyway. I thought you’d appreciate seeing a friendly face.”
Three half-truths, maybe, none of which add up to honesty, but he can’t worry about that now. He breaks the seal and reads the letter inside. Skims the description of the battle on Eskalind, of the fighting with Ishmere forces. How Cloud Mother manifested on the battlefield, snatching up soldiers and hurling them into the sky, ripping them apart so that blood came down like rain. The seas draining away, replaced like something like liquid glass that cut and burned you at the same time.
They ordered him to take the guns on the shore. He’d done that, pushed ahead to the temple, charged right into the maw of the gods. Reading the cold description on the page, it’s like they’re describing the actions of someone else, someone long dead and far away. He cannot recall giving those orders, can’t recall that mad rush for the temple.
Did he squander the lives of his troops on a foolish quest for glory? Did he draw the wrath of enemy gods, and lead the survivors out of the maelstrom? Terevant doesn’t know, and if he doesn’t know, how the hell can a bunch of dead generals in Haith decide?
Two hundred Haithi soldiers landed on that beach at Eskalind. Only seventy-two sailed away. And only a dozen of those still live.
“You fought bravely,” says Lyssada quietly.
“Opinions differ.” There’s nothing exonerating here. No mercy from the review board. No reason for them to spare him, but he reads to the end. His jaw drops.
“I’m to keep my commission, then?”
She says nothing, just smiles knowingly.
He quotes from his new orders. “‘You are hereby temporarily attached to the diplomatic security corps, and are to review the guards assigned to the embassy at Guerdon.’ Olthic stepped in, didn’t he? He told the committee to exonerate me. Is this his way of making sure his little brother doesn’t embarrass him again? He wants me down in Guerdon where he can keep an eye on me. Hells, Lys, I’m not a child. I can stand on my own.” He puts as much conviction into his voice as he can muster, but he suspects he comes off sounding petulant. Everyone knows the truth: where T
erevant struggles to stand still, Olthic strides ahead. But he can’t help but be excited and relieved, too, by the news of his exoneration. He might prefer to have prevailed on his own merits, instead of Olthic’s intervention, but it’s still another chance to prove himself.
“The Crown commands, not your brother,” says Lys.
“Did he step in?” he demands again. This time, it’s going to be different.
“I don’t know.”
“I thought you were omniscient down at the Bureau,” he mutters, sullenly.
“Oh, we are.” She laughs, and he can’t help but be lifted by her amusement. “I read your poetry, you know. I pulled a few strings with the Sedition office.”
“Death,” he curses. Years before, he’d applied to and been rejected by the Bureau. He followed Lys there, throwing away his place as the second son of House Erevesic to chase her into the onyx labyrinth of the Bureau–only to have the very first door slammed shut in his face. He couldn’t go home after that ignominy; he’d fled overseas to one of the Empire’s far-flung outposts in Paravos. Spent a few months living in a dissident commune, drinking with other poets, actors and revolutionaries, publishing awful poetry under a pseudonym–it was fun for a few months. At least no one there ever compared him to Olthic and found him wanting.
Then the Sacred Realm of Ishmere conquered the outpost, and he was forced to flee. When he reached Haith he got blind drunk, and signed up with the army.
“It was really bad poetry,” says Lys. “Atrocious.”
“Some of it was about you.”
She mockingly presses a hand to her forehead, as if about to faint. “Oh, if only I had seen through your cunning literary devices. Oh, wait, I did, and it was still bad.” A flash of a smile, to soften the blow. “Now, are you ready to serve the Crown?”
“By watching some soldiers strut around a yard in Guerdon? I think I can manage that.” He’s Haithi; he’ll do his duty. Struggling against what they expect of him has brought him only sorrow; why not try to do what’s right for once? Live up to his family name.
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