Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun

by S. M. Stirling

  This neighborhood at their foot was reserved for the town house complexes of noble families, prestigious because of the greenery and open space but not too far from the City Palace downtown and the social-political whirl of Court. Each had a central residence, and several other structures taken over and modified for the trail of servants and followers. Their retainers made sure the hoi polloi didn’t intrude, so the usual urban chorus of street vendors and would-be troubadours and the roar of hooves and wheels were lacking, only pedicabs and an occasional rider or horse carriage moving along the curving, tree-lined streets.

  It was all very pleasant, and by no coincidence at all kept the nobility’s household troops outside the walls of the Crown City. She swung up into the cab and Lioncel got in beside her.

  “Customs House,” she said to the man on the pedals. Then: “Odd,” to Lioncel.

  The driver-rider pedaled hard down Vista to Everett through the brightening day, then turned east on the thoroughfare, sounding an imperious bell with his thumb and occasionally shouting for way. Most of the passersby scattered at the sight of the arms on the pedicab or simply because it certainly held someone influential.

  “Odd, my lady?”

  “The word cab used to mean a public vehicle for hire. They were everywhere and people flagged them down and were taken to where they needed to go. There was enough business that several hundred could work all day long. In the downtown and on docksides, where the streets were really narrow, pedicabs like this were used. We still call these things cabs but they’re private vehicles and only nobles and a few guildmasters and such have them.”

  The boy nodded, polite but slightly baffled, and Tiphaine stifled a sigh.

  They just don’t have the background. Best to live in the present as much as you can, Tiphaine, like a Changeling which you almost are anyway. The oldsters get tiresome when they go on about the old world and I don’t want to end up like that. Of course, everybody thinks about the past more as they get older. I’m just starting to realize that’s because you’ve got more past as you get older. And Portland sets me off because I was born here. Forget it. That Portland died at the Change, this place just has the same name and some of the geography. It’s like a new person wearing a dead man’s shoes.

  The trip from the de Stafford residence to the South Park blocks and the old Customs House was quick, less than a mile and a half. Most of the buildings outside the city wall had been systematically torn down to leave clear fields of fire for the monstrous throwing-engines on Portland’s walls, except for the Civic Stadium to the south of Everett, still used for soccer, baseball and jousting tournaments. Tented camps with troops from all over the Protectorate and the other realms of the Meeting sprawled over the open space usually used for turnout pasture and truck gardens and livery stables, and there was a thick mist of woodsmoke as cooks started their morning fires.

  As always, she felt a prickle of unease as she approached the city wall.

  You do, if you remember how Norman used the labor camps as a horrible example of what could happen to you. People sobbed with joy when they got picked to be peasants on the manors instead. That’s a long time ago now, but the memory sticks.

  The defenses ran along the eastern edge of what had been Interstate 405, which neatly enclosed the old core of Portland, the original city along the west bank of the Willamette before the twentieth century and sprawl. The broad roadway was sunken well below the surface most of the way too, which had made it a perfect dry moat; apart from narrow laneways left for workmen it was a continuous bristle of outward-slanting angle iron posts now, set deep and then ground to vicious points and edges like a forest of swords.

  The wall itself was poured mass concrete sixty feet high and thirty thick, around a frame of steel girders ripped out of old skyscrapers. Round towers stood at hundred-yard intervals, rearing twice as high and thick enough to seem squat, each a miniature fortress in its own right that could be cut off from the outside by raising footways and slamming thick steel doors. The towers had steep metal roofs like witches’ hats, steel plated with copper; a hoarding of the same material made a sloping roof over the crenellations of the wall. Wall and towers both were machicolated, the fighting platforms on top protruding over the walls on arches so that trapdoors could be opened to drop things straight down.

  “Say what you like about Norman, he didn’t think small,” Tiphaine said, looking at the curiously graceful massiveness of it, glistening in the dawn light with the white stucco that covered the whole surface.

  “My lady?”

  “Nothing, boy.”

  Most of the bridges that had crossed Interstate 405 had been destroyed. The others had been fortified with Norman Arminger’s usual combination of brutal functionalism, paranoid thoroughness and deliberately soul-crushing use of intimidation-architecture. Everett Street Gate was typical. They crossed a drawbridge that could be raised instantly by giant counterweights, then a great squat castle of four towers on the western bank of the 405, with the roadway running past massive gates of solid steel and under a high arched ceiling pierced with murder-holes and slots for portcullis after portcullis to drop, more gates, the bridge with sections that could be dropped at the pull of levers or flooded with burning napalm or both, then another castle as strong as the first in the city wall proper.

  The guard commander gave her a swift but genuine once-over before passing her through; despite the early hour the traffic was heavy, but the crossbowmen were still searching wagons and pulling random or suspicious travelers aside for more thorough searches. Tiphaine nodded sober approval; she’d signed off on those orders herself, and damn the inconvenience. Being dead was more inconvenient still.

  Lioncel looked at the fortifications with innocent pride; they’d been finished before he was born.

  “They say Des Moines in Iowa is bigger, my lady, but I doubt there’s a city anywhere that’s stronger!”

  “Probably not,” Tiphaine said, and the page rested silently; he knew better than to try to chat.

  She swung down from the pedicab outside the building that housed the War Ministry, across from a small square of greenery and trees. Other pedicabs came and went along Park, and horses clip-clopped; churls and varlets pulled handcarts, led long teams of oxen that dragged heavy wagons, hurried about errands. A streetcar rumbled by behind its six-mule hitch down tracks completed just last year, and there was a scattering of private carriages as well.

  Farther north and closer to the river-wall the Main Post Office building was serving as a hospital and relocation depot, since it was amply large and was conveniently across the street from Union train station. A trickle of ambulances passed, taking the recovering elsewhere, and everyone tried to make way for them.

  “Lioncel,” she said. “Go down to the hospital and make sure your lady mother isn’t overdoing it. If she is tired or looks tired, tell her I said to go get some rest and to remind her she’s seven months pregnant. If she won’t, go find the Dowager Molalla and get Phillipa to help you chase her home. Don’t take no for an answer. Once you’ve done that, get one of the housemaids to sit with her while she rests and come back to my office.”

  “Yes, my lady!”

  He smiled, ducked his bright head with its black brimless page’s hat, and dashed away.

  The guards in front of the five-arched granite loggia of the War Ministry were a platoon in three-quarter armor with glaives, seven-foot pole arms topped with a wicked head like a giant single-edged butcher’s knife with a thick hook on the reverse. They were at parade rest—feet apart, left hand tucked behind the back, extended right hand holding the weapon with the butt against the right foot and the rest slanted out. As she came up they went to attention and rapped the steel-shod butts of the glaives against the pavement, and Tiphaine returned the salute gravely.

  Their gear was not quite the kind the Association used, and the sigil on their breastplates was the snarling red bear’s-head of the Bearkillers. They weren’t A-listers, the Be
arkiller equivalent of knights; things were too fraught to waste elite troops on duty like this, though even Bearkiller militia had a precise snap to the way they did things.

  But they’re doing something useful here, not just propping up their glaives. They’re showing for everyone to see that this is an alliance and we’re all in the war together. Armed Bearkillers in Portland, the people founded by Mike Havel, the man who killed Norman Arminger. Now if we had more than a talking-shop to coordinate things at the top, we’d be . . . not fine, you can’t be fine when you’re outnumbered two to one . . . we’d be a lot better off. The problem is none of the existing rulers will bow to one of their own.

  The legend along the top of the loggia had been switched from US Customs House to War Ministry of the Portland Protective Association long ago. Now that was tactfully obscured by staffs bearing a dozen flags, covering all the more important realms of the Meeting. The Lidless Eye in gold and crimson on black wasn’t even in the center.

  Sandra really knows how to handle this sort of thing, Tiphaine thought. Considering that this is where we plotted and planned and schemed to conquer everyone and divide their land up into fiefs. What a magnificent bitch that woman is!

  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 Ru
therston; 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.