Conventions of War

by Walter Jon Williams

  Once the Naxid officials had been located, Sula sent out units to take them prisoner and add them to the growing collection of enemies in the courtyard of the Convocation. A few escaped capture, but when confronted, none resisted.

  Far-eyn also managed to locate the official who had been ordering the suicidal assaults up the funicular. He was the assistant commander general of the police, and he was holed up in the Imperial Hotel.

  “Let’s not cut his communications,” Sula said. “I like the orders he’s giving.”

  Macnamara returned to report that he’d succeeded in swapping out the remaining antimatter guns. Two were now mounted on trucks, to use as a reserve, and two were emplaced in palaces overlooking the funicular and the Gates of the Exalted.

  “I’ve hidden them well, my lady,” he reported. “The Naxids shouldn’t be able to see them the way they can spot the turrets.”

  Which didn’t mean they couldn’t be destroyed, just that the Naxids would have to go to greater effort.

  “Is the coleopter still scouting us?” Sula asked.

  “It flew away.”

  “If it comes back, try to knock it down with the antimatter guns.”

  “My lady!” One of the staff, a young Torminel with sharp, fierce fangs, looked up from the comm display in the room’s large table. “It’s the Commandery! They say the Naxid fleet has begun to accelerate!”

  The Naxids, Sula found, were piling on the gees, heading for Zanshaa at a bruising speed. Since they didn’t need to change velocity in order to fire missiles at Zanshaa, Sula suspected they were in fact fleeing the system.

  “That’s what we’ll tell the world, anyway,” she decided.

  The announcement was duly made on every video and audio network. Sula wondered how many of the announcements were getting through to the outside world, how many relays the Naxids had succeeded in shutting down. It might be that only the city of Zanshaa was receiving the broadcasts by now.

  She didn’t sleep that night, instead making inspections of her units and shuffling reserves around. A good thing, she thought. Any sleep would be filled with Casimir and Caro and blood.

  Lord Tork’s reply to her greeting arrived two hours before dawn, and Sula considered the Supreme Commander’s terse order to execute her prisoners. The hostages were her only guarantee of good Naxid behavior—not that it seemed to be working—and she’d hoped to interrogate them, a task for which up till now she had no time, and for that matter no interrogators but her own amateur army.

  “Right,” she said. “Pick three minor functionaries out of that pack and chuck them off the rock at first light. Make sure it gets video coverage. We’ll point out on the broadcast that if the Naxids are naughty, more members of their government are going to get a chance to find out whether or not they can fly.”

  First light, however, provided other distractions. The Naxids had been planning another major attack up the funicular, the plans for which were overheard by Far-eyn in the Office of the Censor; and this attack was supposed to be preceded by an attack by the “air element.” Sula alerted her reserves and moved the two mobile antimatter guns to cover the funicular.

  The air element arrived first, cargo craft with machine guns mounted in the cargo doors. These made slow passes over the south cliff of the acropolis, the guns hammering the area around the funicular. After a number of misses, antimatter guns shot down two of the craft and the rest withdrew.

  The attack itself was the usual bloody failure.

  After the firing died away, Sula summoned a camera crew and walked to the Convocation, where two Naxid convocates and a captain of the Naxid fleet, previously chosen by Macnamara, were bound and thrown over the terrace to shatter on the stones below.

  “Executions will continue as long as the rebels refuse to honor the instrument of surrender signed by Lady Kushdai,” Sula told the camera, and then dismissed the camera crew and took a walk along the terrace. The metal furniture was adapted to the Naxid physique, and the umbrellas were bright against the gray stone of the Great Refuge. The air was crisp and cool, and the sky had turned its usual deep green. Most of the columns of smoke that had been rising from the city the previous afternoon were gone. The city was very still.

  Sula put a hand on the smooth, cool surface of the granite terrace wall and looked out over the rooftops. The streets between the buildings were deep, shadowed canyons, and as far as she could see, were absolutely empty. People were keeping their heads down, or watching their video walls for the latest bulletin, or both.

  If there were Naxids keeping watch on this part of the cliff, they were hidden.

  She knew they had to be down there somewhere. Naxid police were probably arriving by the thousand at the train stations, and sooner or later they were going to think of something more imaginative to do than charge up the funicular.

  She considered this and decided that it probably didn’t matter. Her forces and reserves were sufficient to contain any threat to her perimeter. All she had to do was hold out long enough for the Naxid fleet to flee the system, and she suspected the High City contained enough food to keep the army eating for that length of time.

  She would have liked to stay on the terrace awhile, perhaps with a sweetened, syrupy tea and a cream-filled brioche, but the Convocation’s food service seemed to have been disrupted. She returned to the Ministry of Wisdom and was told that she’d just had a call from the Commissioner of Kaidabal, who wanted to negotiate his surrender.

  “He said that the rebels appointed him to the position against his will,” Macnamara said. “He said he’s a loyal subject of the empire.”

  “What did you tell him?” Sula asked.

  “We said you’d call him back.”

  “Ah. Hah,” she said, and felt a slow smile break out on her face.

  She’d won.

  THIRTY

  Sula had thought fighting a war was hard. She discovered that running a planet was harder.

  Worse, she had to be Lady Sula all the time. As Gredel, she’d been able to follow her own instincts, to fall into old patterns. Caroline Sula’s skin was more difficult to inhabit. It was artificial rather than natural, a personality she had deliberately created, an artifice she had to carefully assemble every day.

  She wore Lady’s Sula’s uniform. She kept the High City accent on her lips and held her spine straight and military, and she kept her head rigidly erect and looked levelly at others from beneath the brim of her uniform cap.

  Lady Sula was born to run planets. She kept telling herself that.

  She called as many old civil servants to the colors as she could, to staff the ministries and keep services running. Naxid security forces were disarmed and either sent to the barracks or to their homes, if they had any. Naxid police were permitted to patrol their own neighborhoods, though without firearms. The Naxids in the Imperial Hotel surrendered, and about a third were arrested and the rest told to find lodging off the High City and report their whereabouts to the local police.

  An advisory council was formed, with people from the ministries, with Macnamara and Spence as representatives of the secret army, and with Julien and Sergius Bakshi to add a dose of grim realism.

  She ordered no more arrests, except for a few of the more spectacularly brutal officers of the security services. She wasn’t surprised to hear that most of them didn’t survive the trip to the jails.

  Nor was she surprised to hear of a spasm of revenge killings as people settled old scores. She ordered the members of the secret army to have nothing to do with it, but had her doubts about whether the orders were obeyed.

  Tork kept urging her to greater bloodshed.

  “All who served the enemy deserve death!” he said. “Let their heads be mounted on every street corner!”

  All who served the enemy? she wondered. Every tram conductor, every sewer worker, every usher in the Convocation?

  She settled for tossing a few more bureaucrats off the High City.

  The city’s profes
sional interrogators had reported to work after the surrender, the same professionals who for the last months had been flaying and murdering members of the secret army. Now they were set to work on the senior members of the rebel government. Computer passwords were disgorged, and the records of the Naxid administration were laid bare.

  All of them.

  Sula discovered the disposition of the Naxid fleet, the five ships at Magaria, the two guarding Naxas, the eighteen under construction in one corner or another of the Naxid dominions. She sent the information to Tork, and received more harassment in return.

  “You have failed to conduct the executions that I ordered!” he said. “I want lists of those who cooperated with the Naxids forwarded to my staff, and arrests made at once!”

  By then, contact between her office and the Supreme Commander had been regularized. With the passwords to the powerful communications centers of the Commandery, Sula had been able to use the dedicated lasers mounted on the roof to send Tork a code through which they could communicate. It didn’t make his demands any less aggravating.

  “I fully intend that those responsible for the rebellion should die for their crimes,” she responded. The Supreme Commander was on the other side of Shaamah at present, and the message wouldn’t reach him for eleven hours or thereabouts. “But I intend in the meantime to serve the empire by extracting every bit of information from the prisoners before throwing them off the rock. I wouldn’t have been able to send you the enemy order of battle unless I had pried it out of their Fleet personnel first.”

  She began assembling lists. Lists of Bogo Boys and other cliquemen, so she could grant the amnesties she’d promised; and a list of the secret army, with real names replacing the code names used till now. She wanted to know who had enlisted and who didn’t, because after the war, many would falsely claim to have been on the High City on the day of the battle, and she would have the evidence to refute that. She also wanted to recommend awards and medals to the Fleet and to the Convocation, and for that she needed documentation.

  She also demobilized certain elements of the secret army—certainly those who raced up and down the boulevards of the High City in stolen vehicles, firing guns into the air and looting palaces. They were sent home, and as much of their loot confiscated as possible. Julien acted as her enforcer. The rest of the secret army were put on the government payroll.

  She slept a few hours each night, but badly.

  Her more immediate problem had to do with food rationing. Most of the foodstuffs on the planet was in the hands of the ration authority. The population assumed that rationing would end along with the Naxid occupation. Sula was tempted to simply abolish the authority, but Sergius Bakshi warned her against it.

  “You abolish rationing,” he said, “and food will disappear from every market on Zanshaa. The ration authority was run as a private concern, and if you abolish the bureaucracy, that still leaves all the food in the hands of the Naxid clans who were put in charge. They’ll keep food off the market till prices go sky-high—or they’ll sell it to speculators who will do the same thing—and you’ll get the blame.”

  He turned his dead-fish eyes to her. “It’s what I’d do in their place,” he said.

  Sula considered this. “Perhaps we could limit prices,” she said.

  Sergius flapped his listless hands. “That won’t make them sell,” he said. “They’ll just hang onto the food and sell illegally, to people like me.”

  Sula chose her words carefully. “You could make a lot of money yourself off this scenario. I have to commend your sense of public spirit.”

  Sergius’s expression didn’t so much as flicker. “I’ve already made money off this situation,” he said. “The best way of preserving what I’ve made is to make certain that once we’re in power, things improve for the ordinary population.”

  Sula suspected that Sergius had an angle, that whatever happened, he was going to make himself a vast profit, but on reflection she didn’t care.

  There was probably a very sophisticated macroeconomic solution to the problem, but she couldn’t think of one, and neither could anyone else. She abolished rationing for ordinary citizens, and imposed price controls on basic staples like grains, legumes, and the types of meat that the Torminel preferred for their carnivore diet. The prices were slightly below the prewar market levels, and Sula took pleasure in the thought of the Ushgays, Kulukrafs, Ummirs, and the others seeing a slight loss on every sale.

  There was no point in controlling vegetables and fruit because if anyone tried to hoard them, they would spoil. Luxuries she simply didn’t care about.

  Those clan heads in her custody were released, though ordered to remain on the High City. Then, to make certain they got the point, Sula called each and told them the new arrangement.

  “As long as staples are plentiful in the markets,” she said, “I will take no action against you, and I will note your civic spirit. If there are any shortages, then I’ll have you killed and appoint a new clan head.”

  She probably would have to kill a number of them, she thought.

  In the end she had to kill only one, Lady Jagirin, whom she ordered arrested and beheaded following the appearance of spot shortages in the southern hemisphere. Since the Naxid head contained no vital organs and only sensory apparatus, the body staggered around, arms and legs flailing, for quite some time before Jagirin finally died of shock and blood loss.

  Sula made certain the video of the execution was sent to the other clans on the ration board. There was no further trouble. The new Lord Jagirin was particularly cooperative.

  “We’ll continue price controls until the harvest from the southern hemisphere is in,” she told the council. “After that, we’ll remove controls from certain items and see what happens. If the results are positive, we’ll lift controls gradually from then on.”

  It was difficult to be certain, but she thought, as she spoke, that she caught a glint of approval in Sergius Bakshi’s cold eye.

  Casimir got the extravagant funeral that Sula had promised him. It took place six days after the surrender, in one of the cemeteries on the fringes of the city. In one of the gestures that seemed natural to the absolute ruler of a world, she confiscated an elaborate marble tomb that had originally belonged to a family of Daimong who had either become extinct or left Zanshaa. The original inhabitants of the tomb were removed to one of the city’s ossuaries and the memorial plaque outside replaced with one that featured Casimir’s name, dates, and engraved image.

  He was buried wearing one of his Chesko outfits, strips of leather and velvet ornamented with beads and mirrors, and polished boots. His long pale hands were folded over his crystal-topped walking stick. The cliquemen had emptied half the flower shops in the city: the coffin was carried between tombs along a lane made of fragrant blossoms that wafted gusts of perfume to the mourners.

  Sula led the procession in formal parade dress, with the cloak that fell to her ankles, the heavy shako with its silver plate, the polished jackboots, the curved knife at her waist. Winter had clamped down firmly on the city: the skies were a mass of gray, and wind kept whipping the cloak off her shoulders. Occasional drizzle moistened her face. Behind her, Julien and Sergius and other cliquemen carried the coffin; and behind them the Masquers of Sorrow performed their ritual dance.

  Cameras were present—anything the lady governor did was news—but had been told to keep their distance.

  A Daimong chorus chanted Ornarak’s arrangement of the Fleet burial service, ending with the deep bass rumble, “Take comfort in the fact that all that is important is known.” As the harmonies faded among the tombs, Sula bent to kiss the polished surface of the coffin, and looked down to see her own distorted, reflected face, its expression carefully painted on that morning lest the features beneath dissolve into turmoil and grief.

  She was expected to say something, and could think of no words. Casimir had thrived in a life of crime and glamour and violence, a happy, amoral carnivore, and die
d, with many others, fighting to replace a vicious tyranny with another tyranny that at least possessed the grace of being inept. He and Gredel, as Lord and Lady Sula, could have burrowed into the darker corners of the High City and emerged gorged with loot, content and sleek as a pair of handsome young animals. The House of Sula would have been built on a foundation of plunder.

  Casimir’s lack of compunction was a part of his dangerous glamour. He took what he wanted and simply didn’t care what happened later. Sula had taught him that patience, at least occasionally, paid; but it was only out of his strange sense of courtesy that he deferred to her—courtesy, and perhaps love, and perhaps curiosity to find out what she would do next. Perhaps she and Casimir had been more in love with adrenaline and their own mortality than with each other. Whatever the case, she knew that each had taken from the other what they wanted.

  None of this was anything Lady Sula could say in public, or anywhere else.

  She stood by the coffin and looked out over the crowd—the fighters, the cliquemen, Spence and Macnamara in viridian green, the Masquers in their strange white costumes with their tufted ears. A gust of wind brought an overwhelming waft of the flowers’ scent, and she felt her stomach turn. She moistened her lips and began.

  “Casimir Massoud was one of my commanders, and a friend,” she said. “He died in the act of bringing the Naxid dominion to an end.

  “Like everyone else in the secret army, Casimir had other choices—he didn’t have to be a fighter. He was very successful at his work, and he could have kept his head down for the remainder of the war and come out of it with wealth and credit and”—for a moment her tongue stumbled—“and his life,” she finished.

  She looked at the coffin, at the expectant faces ranked behind it, and felt a tremor in her knees. She anchored herself on the concrete beneath her feet and spoke over the heads of the people in front of her, into the wet cold sky.