by Jo Zebedee
Trailing a hand along the edge of display cabinet, Finesz strolled its length, peering at the daggers artfully arranged within. Some were impressively ornate, with complex designs etched onto the blades and hilts made from wire-work in precious metals. She saw a dirk bearing the crest of the Imperial Skirmishers—it appeared several hundred years old.
The squeak of leather sounded from a pair of wing-back armchairs sitting in a bay window. Startled, Finesz glanced up. A figure, hidden in one of the chairs, moved a second time. A rustle of paper. Finesz wandered across, wondering who she had disturbed. Or rather, not disturbed, since they did not appear to have registered her presence.
“Afi,” she said in delight on identifying the reader.
The Duke of Kunta looked up from his book and scowled. “Sliva. What are you doing here?”
“Exploring,” she replied with a smile and vague shrug of one shoulder. “Quite a collection.” She bent forward. “What are you reading?”
“Pisasz’s Cities on Flame.” He held up the book the better for her to see the cover, and on her expression of shock, added, “It’s a facsimile copy. No more than three hundred years old.”
The book Kunta held, a literary treatment of the Devils’ Revolt, might be three centuries old, but Pisasz had written it one thousand years ago, during the flowering of art, literature and drama known as the Intolerance. The story on which it was based—two men and a woman ascribed supernatural powers had incited the proles to revolt on pre-interstellar Geneza… That was so old, it was legend.
Finesz gestured airily. “I tried reading it once but couldn’t get past the first chapter.”
Kunta chuckled. “I’m surprised you even tried. Never were much for reading, were you?”
Refusing to be insulted, Finesz walked away from the duke and returned to wandering about the collection of weaponry. “I read plenty now,” she said, loud enough for the duke to hear her. “Reports, mostly. Post mortems, legal dockets, financial accounts, that sort of thing.”
The duke rose to his feet. He placed the book carefully on an occasional table beside his armchair and put his hand to the chair’s back. “You should leaven your reading with some fiction, Sliva. A bit of fantasy never did anyone harm. Keeps it where it belongs, too: between the covers of a book.”
“And not in the sadly deluded brain of some poor by-blow, eh, Afi?” Finesz grinned across the room at Kunta.
“Humph. Quite,” the duke muttered. “How is your little fantasist, anyway?”
“Busy. Sword lessons. Etiquette. He’s come remarkably far since I first met him.” She circled back around the armoury to the duke. “When he came aboard Lantern on Kapuluan— well, scratch him, and there was prole under a thin layer of gilt—”
“Guilt? I should think so. It is arrogation, you know, no matter what his parentage.”
“Not ‘guilt’, Afi. Gilt. As in a thin layer of gold.” She stepped up to Kunta and slapped him playfully on the arm. “Anyway, he looked the part but he didn’t sound it. And he didn’t carry himself like a young lord. But—” She cocked her head and smiled at the duke. “Tell me the truth, Afi: when you first saw him, you thought he was exactly what he said he was, didn’t you?”
“Yes. So?”
“Seven weeks, Afi. Seven weeks aboard Lantern and he turns into a proper little lord. When you see him now, you’d almost think he was born to it.”
“If he watches his language. And there are great gaps in his education.”
Finesz stepped closer. She stroked a finger down Kunta’s chest flirtatiously. The “dalliance” might be long over but the duke had always been one of her favourite lovers. “I think his occasional lapses into prole Swovo give him a little colour,” she murmured.
Kunta grabbed her wrist—not painfully but with enough pressure to make clear his intent—and slowly pulled her hand from his chest. “No, Sliva. I won’t have you impose on my hospitality.” Showing no hard feelings, he smiled warmly.
Finesz turned away. She crossed to the nearest display-cabinet. Perhaps a change of subject was needed. “How old are these?” she asked. “All these knives and swords and shields?”
The duke’s smile abruptly vanished at the new topic. “Most date from the reigns of the early emperors but there are a few from the Old Empire.” He pointed across the room at an upright display-case containing two swords. “Those two are even older. Before Geneza even discovered the topologic drive.”
Finesz raised an eyebrow. That made the two blades more than 4,400 years old. She strolled across for a closer look. She bent forward to peer at the swords— Dear Lords. Finesz felt cold sluice through her from crown to booted feet
. Details on the sword to the left sprang into sharp focus: the tang, quillons, lockets, knuckle guard, pommel… Etched into the tang was a heraldic device, a pair of intricately intertwined flowers with long thorny stems forming an arch. She had seen it before. On the escutcheon she had taken from the body of the Housecarl murdered on Darrus. Despite extensive searching of the OPI’s heraldic data-pool, she had not identified the family to which it belonged.
“Afi?” she said. She cleared her throat, and repeated, “Afi?” in a stronger voice.
“Uhm?”
“This sword, there’s a coat of arms on the blade: whose is it?”
Kunta crossed the armoury to her side. “Which sword— Ah, that one. You still have an eye for value, Sliva. That blade is worth as much as the rest put together. The coat of arms belongs to the Potruzhian family. They died out millennia ago but they founded the Grey Princes.”
“The sword belonged to a Grey Prince?” Finesz asked in a strangled voice. “But they’re myth, legend. They never existed.”
The duke shook his head. “They were real enough. Edkar I had them murdered ten years into his reign. Not that you’ll find that incident in the history books. Doesn’t reflect well on the Emperor’s glorious ancestors.”
“So what happened to the Potruzhians?”
“According to Koralik in his Grey Princes: The Shadows Behind The Throne, they were executed after trying to seize power. About 4,500 years ago.”
“So there’s unlikely to be any of them left around now?”
Kunta snorted in amusement. “Impossible, Sliva. There’s no more than two hundred families around today who can trace their lineage back to a noble ancestor on Geneza. And less than a dozen who can even claim descent from the tribes who began civilisation there. The Imperial Family’s one, of course.”
Finesz glanced up at him. “History never was my strong point.”
“No.” Kunta smiled. “You had other… talents.”
The comment prompted a peal of laughter. “Who was it seduced who, Afi? I seem to have forgotten.”
“You seduced me. But you wanted me to think I’d seduced you. Mind you, it was a couple of years before I realised that.”
The Vankila Room was empty: Ormuz was evidently taking advantage of his freedom of the palace. There were no guards in the corridor outside the room, since Captain Vartoi had assigned them elsewhere on the duke’s orders. Finesz peered into the room—so neat after the ministrations of servants, it could be unoccupied—and dithered. She glanced one way up the hallway, then the other. Where would the boy go? The chapel in the central courtyard? But no, Ormuz had never struck her as religious. If anything, he was at that age where he felt the Church was as much an oppressor as the Imperial Throne. Hardly surprising, given his abrupt rise from prole to noble.
Her gaze fastened on the large window to one side of the bed and she thought: outside. Ormuz had been cooped up inside at his lessons for the last few days: he would feel a need for the open air.
Convinced of the rightness of her supposition, Finesz strode towards the main gallery, where a bank of elevators could be found. Turning a corner, she found herself confronted by a figure in pale blue and green and narrowly avoided a collision. It was Varä.
“Is Casimir in his room
?” the marquess asked.
“No; no, he’s not.” She peered at the young noble, not liking the smile on his face. It was almost a smirk. In fact, she was not entirely sure she liked Varä. There was something… suspicious about him, about the way he had insinuated himself into Ormuz’s confidence. She had thought as much when they had left Kapuluan and the weeks aboard Lantern had only deepened those suspicions.
“Where is he, do you think?” Varä asked.
“I don’t know.” Perhaps the marquess’ outfit had something to do with Finesz’s distrust. Varä had been quick, too quick, to adopt the Duke of Kunta’s colours. And there was something vaguely clownish about the doublet and hose, as if the marquess were trying hard to appear harmless. “Outside, at a guess,” she added.
“You were looking for him?”
“I was, yes.”
“Then perhaps I shall join you.” Varä stepped to one side and gestured for Finesz to lead the way. “You don’t mind, do you?”
He was too polite around her, Finesz realised.
They strolled along the corridor without speaking, Varä humming under his breath and gazing at the ancestral portraits lining the walls. When they reached the elevators, Finesz came to an abrupt halt. “Assaun,” she said. “I need to tell him something.”
“Yes?” asked Varä, poised in the entrance to an elevator shaft, one hand to the jamb.
“You go ahead. I’ll see Casimir later. It was nothing important, anyway.” She waved the marquess on ahead.
With a shrug, he stepped forward. A shelf extended faster than the eye could follow from beneath the threshold. Once Varä was within the gold line about its edge, it began to descend. Finesz watched him disappear from view. Something had just occurred to her: she had a shrewd idea where she could find Ormuz and she didn’t want Varä tagging along. She turned and headed back the way she had come. At a corner of the building, she found a staircase heading both up and down. She climbed, past the next few floors, right to the very roof. Ormuz, she felt, would want to be somewhere high, somewhere he could look over what his destiny had brought him.
Finesz stepped out of the corner-turret and found herself in a garden. The roof of the palace was flat and some two hundred yards wide, marching round in a great square. Between chest-high crenellated walls of red stone were beds of pale winter flora, no shrub more than knee-high. Buried in the middle of these, along the centre-line of the roof, a row of glass tent-shaped skylights allowed the sun into the top-floor corridor. She looked both left and right but saw no sign of Ormuz. Above the main entrance to the palace building, almost halfway around the square, sat a small fort some two storeys high: the gate-tower, its roof surmounted by a white onion dome. An open staircase zigzagged up the innermost wall. And standing atop the gate-tower, leaning against the embrasures, was a fur-coated figure.
She followed a path through the garden to the fort and climbed the stair. It was only vertiginous if she gazed across the roof and saw that she was actually fifteen floors above ground. Warily, she kept a hand to the wall as she ascended.
Ormuz turned as she stepped onto the gate-tower’s battlements. He didn’t seem surprised to see her. She crossed to him and wished she’d thought to wear a coat herself.
“Sliva,” Ormuz said absently, once she was at his side.
She acknowledged his greeting with a curt, “Casimir,” but turned from him and looked out over the wall. And drew in a breath. “Quite a view,” she said.
From their vantage point, the full extent of Rusko Palace was laid out before them. A bailey half a mile deep surrounded the central keep, landscaped and boasting ornamental lakes, gazebos, geometrical gardens, small copses and parkland of a strangely colourless green. Then the inner wall, fully one hundred yards thick and within which were barracks, quarters, stores, garages… Beyond that, another bailey, five hundred yards deep, of flat dressed stone. And finally, the outer wall, thirty yards high with onion-domed towers space every two hundred feet. Outside the palace was nothing but steppe.
“I need to talk to you,” Finesz said.
“If you want my gratitude for bringing the duke round, you have it.”
“No, not that. It’s about… Varä.”
Ormuz chuckled, an oddly mature sound. “What’s he done now?”
“Nothing. It’s what he is that bothers me.”
“Ah.” Ormuz turned about and settled his rear against the embrasures. He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his fur-coat. A breeze lifted his hair and played it about his face. “So tell me.”
Finesz’s hands were beginning to chill, so she crossed her arms and buried her hands in her arm-pits. “I don’t trust him, Casimir.”
“And you think I do?”
“The pair of you have been thick as thieves since Kapuluan,” she pointed out.
Ormuz shrugged. “I like him.”
“Who is he?”
There was a moment of silence. Ormuz’s gaze drifted from Finesz’s face to look past her. “A knight sinister,” he said at length.
“You know that and yet still you keep him with you?”
“I need the knights sinister, Sliva. I need all the allies I can find.”
“Oh, Casimir.” She turned to face him and leant against the wall. The stone was cold. “How long have you known?”
“When they kidnapped me from the San Gusto and took Varä as well, I guessed he was one of them. They never batted an eye when they saw him at that meeting.”
“And?” prompted Finesz.
“He’s useful. Plus, while the knights sinister know they have someone close to me, they’re not going to interfere with my plans.”
“But he’ll tell them your plans,” she protested. “This is a dangerous game you’re playing, Casimir. And I have to say they’ve played it for much longer than you.”
She saw that her remark had provoked a smile.
“Yes. They’re very good, you know,” Ormuz said, frowning in thought. “They use code-names for everything and compartmentalise knowledge. It’s impossible to piece it all together. I wonder if in the past they knew what the Serpent can do but have forgotten. A thousand years can do that. Or perhaps it’s simply so they need not fear being overheard or having their communications intercepted. Whatever the reason, the precaution has stood them in good stead.”
“I don’t understand. Just what is it the Serpent can do?”
“Exactly the same as I can.”
Finesz growled. “You’re being obtuse, Casimir.”
“Because I’m not willing to reveal my secret just yet. Not to you, anyway.”
“Then to whom? The Admiral?”
Ormuz nodded.
“You know who she is?”
“I figured it out.”
“And you still want to meet her?”
He grinned boyishly. “Very much so. I’m quite looking forward to it.”
“What if she refuses you?”
“She won’t.” He was very certain, Finesz noted.
“But she could, you know.”
“She won’t,” he repeated.
Finesz sighed. There was no getting through to him when he was in this mood. He had fixed upon his path and could not see that it might fail. There were… too many variables, too many people he was forced to rely on who could let him down. An army such as the one Ormuz was convinced he needed was built of alliances and yet he seemed to feel that these various factions would enlist in his crusade without question. He was either sadly deluded… or he knew something Finesz did not. The latter, she reflected ruefully, was more likely. This young man had come a long way in the weeks since Darrus. He had mapped out his role and reached for the responsibility with both hands. And seemed determined to hang on tight. She could only admire him, albeit grudgingly, for that.
“What about Varä?” she asked. A shiver shook her—she could definitely feel the cold now.
“What about him?”
; “What do you plan to do about him?”
Another chuckle. “Nothing, Sliva.” He stretched out a hand, palm down, and clenched and opened his fist a number of times. “The sword lessons are very useful.” He swept an imaginary blade through a figure of eight. “He says I’ll make scholar very soon. There must be something in the blood, the reflexes already wired in.”
“You plan to fight the Serpent in single combat?”
Ormuz was shocked. “Dear Lords, no! This is no duel between champions, like in the history books. It’ll be a big and bloody battle: my regiments against his.”
“You don’t know how to fight battles, Casimir.”
“That’s what I have generals for.”
“You don’t have any generals.”
“Not yet.”
“In fact,” continued Finesz, “you don’t have much of anything. Only Varä… who’s a knight sinister spy.”
“And you, Sliva.”
“Yes, and me,” she said, sighing. She was not sure when it happened but she was firmly part of his faction now, small though it was, powerless though it seemed.
“By the end of next week—” Ormuz spoke slowly, as if breaching a confidence and unsure he should be doing so— “things will be very different. I’ll have the Admiral by my side and she’ll bring a couple of squadrons with her. Perhaps even a small flotilla. And there’ll be perhaps a dozen regiments too.”
Finesz laughed. It was beyond belief. “From where? The Admiral? Maybe you will persuade her to throw in her lot with you. It’s possible. But regiments? Where do you propose to get them from? Afi has agreed to humour you, nothing more. He certainly won’t hand over his household troops.”
“He will. You’ll see.”
Finesz sighed. “What happened to you, Casimir? What happened to the young man I met on Darrus?”
Ormuz did not reply. Perhaps the naïve provincial of all those weeks ago would have made some remark. This self-assured young noble simply raised an eyebrow and smiled enigmatically. Finesz had liked that ingenuous data-freighter cabin-boy; she had yet to decide if she liked this lordling.
