‘So naturally Gregory sends his witch along,’ quipped another.
Suthinia’s glance cut the laughter short, but even in her eyes there was a flicker of amusement. ‘Nobody sends me anywhere, as you people know well,’ she said, ‘but if Old Lumpy has any crab cakes left, tell him to send them to our chambers, with some bread and ale.’
‘Lots of ale, lots of bread!’ bellowed their guides. ‘And cheese, and butter, and marmalade!’
It was all arranged by shouting, here, apparently. The paddlers shouted to their sweethearts; the children shouted questions about the murths; the old women shouted to Suthinia, complaining of their toothaches and gout. Pure anarchy, thought the admiral. Maisa can’t possibly be here.
When they docked, the mob pressed close around them, and Isiq feared they would be trapped and chattering until dawn. But somehow in short order he found himself in a damp, plain, utterly delightful cabin on the east side of the enclosure, slicing bread with his dagger while Suthinia bathed in the washroom at the end of the hall.
The bird pecked at fallen crumbs. ‘Bread is good,’ he said, ‘but insects are better. I will go to the roof and feed properly.’
‘Go then, but be careful,’ said Isiq. ‘I will leave the window open.’
The bird vanished into the night. When Suthinia returned they pounced on the food, and talked easily of their children. They even laughed a bit – though surely that was a mask for fear. Isiq was flabbergasted when she told him that Neda had become a sfvantskor. But Suthinia only shrugged.
‘It makes a kind of sense. Neda used to scorn me for not committing. “You’re half-mage, half-mother. Who wins, if you’re living half a life?” Well, she’s found something to commit to, that’s certain.’
She looked at him very seriously. ‘You must stay close, Eberzam. These are good people overall. As Gregory’s friend you’ll not be harmed or robbed. But they are wild, and not always wise. They will try to sell you ten thousand things, and to borrow money; they will offer services you don’t need. They will send girls to your bedchamber, and failing that, boys. They will try to sell you deathsmoke.’
He nodded. ‘I expected that. But the drug is everywhere, Suthinia. I can’t avoid it unless you keep me in a cage.’
‘Turn to me when the craving starts. I may be able to stop you in time.’
‘A bull elephant could not stop me, if I am ever brought so low as to reach for deathsmoke again.’
‘Will you let me try?’
He sat there, trembling with the memory of pain. ‘I will,’ he said at last.
She smiled and squeezed his hand. Then a strange look came over her face.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
She blinked at him. ‘In the South, there is a thing called the nuhzat. A kind of dream-state in which we lose our minds a little, but gain something else – insight, second-sight, other powers now and again. Few humans experience the nuhzat, but I used to. It happened even after I came north, even after Neda and Pazel were born. They were frightened of me. It can be terrifying, the nuhzat. In my case it usually was.
‘But in one of those nuhzat-visions I saw this moment. A strange, hard man, a former enemy, alone with me in a small room, eating crab cakes, laughing with me about our children. I knew that I had long hated him; that I blamed him for the course of my latter life – at least for all the parts that went wrong. And I knew that just the night before I had refused him as a lover.’
Isiq dropped his eyes, colouring.
‘I knew also,’ she said, ‘that I would have to hurry to tell him, even before the meal was over, that he must believe in himself as never before. That he must trust not only in his wisdom and martial skills, but in his heart. Trust your own heart, Eberzam, remember. I am glad the memory came back to me in time.’
‘In time for what?’
She turned and looked at the door. Isiq put down his plate. There were footsteps, then a loud, impatient knock.
When Suthinia opened the door Isiq thought for a moment that he had lost his mind. Before him stood a man slightly older than the admiral himself, with a face that was intensely, eerily familiar. Two younger men with light halberds stood behind him.
‘Leave your weapons,’ said the older man. ‘Wipe the crumbs from your beard. Close your mouth. Leave the hat.’
Military.
‘Stand up; you’re expected at once.’ The man glanced briefly at Suthinia. ‘He’s to go alone, Mrs Pathkendle.’
Not just a soldier, but an Arquali soldier. His Dremland accent was a giveaway.
‘Don’t I know you?’ asked Isiq.
The man hesitated, biting back some retort. ‘Irrelevant,’ he said at last, and turned on his heel.
Isiq looked at Suthinia; she nodded. Impulsively he took her hand and kissed it. Then he followed the old soldier down the corridor, with the guards walking behind. They passed the washroom, a busy kitchen, open doorways where cards and wrestling matches were underway, a little booth where a cobbler sat hammering nails into a well-worn sole. The old soldier rocked a little to the left as he walked, and that too was somehow familiar. Who in the Nine Pits is he?
At last they came to a temple chamber where a few elders were bent at evening prayers. They slipped around the dais into the sacristy, and a young monk stood up from his desk and welcomed them, smiling. He shut the door, then turned to a heavy rack of vestments and parted them like curtains. Beyond it was a plain wooden wall, but when the monk pressed the wall it swung inward. The old soldier stepped through the gap without a word.
Now they were climbing a staircase, very narrow and dark. Isiq was perplexed by the heavy carpet. Then he thought: To deaden our footfalls. Good, very good.
After three flights the staircase ended before another door, this one heavily padded. The old soldier gave a precise series of taps, and Isiq heard the sliding of bolts.
They stepped directly into a barracks. Forty soldiers in varying states of dress turned and stared at Isiq. ‘That’s him!’ they murmured. ‘By the hairy devils below, that’s him!’
Isiq was looking at a medley of Imperial faces. There were some Etherhorders and other men of inner Arqual, but many more Ipulians, Opaltines, and folk of the Outer Isles. All of them decades his junior. There were also a great number of Tholjassans – their slender features were unmistakable. All of them stared in fascination.
The old soldier shut the door. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This is Admiral Isiq. Now stop staring like a gopher pack.’
But the one who was staring now was Isiq. A gopher pack. The phrase unlocked his memory at last. This old man, incredibly, had been his drill sergeant on his first deployment. Gods of death, that was fifty years ago! When he has just a midshipman, not yet eighteen.
When Maisa was still on the throne.
‘Bachari!’ he cried, astonished. ‘Sergeant Bachari! You went with her into exile!’
‘And you,’ said the old man, unsmiling, ‘did not.’
The complex occupied the entire northern third of the Hermitage: a great warren sealed off from the freebooter’s floating village, except for a few well-hidden passages like the one they had just used. ‘Of course they all know something strange is afoot here,’ said Bachari gruffly, ‘and a few have perhaps guessed its nature. But only a very few. It is the best compromise we have been able to manage, but I do not like it, not at all. I am in charge of her personal security.’
The men looked fit and well fed, but their bearing worried Isiq: the salutes they gave Bachari came too slowly for his liking. They wore uniforms of a sort – plain trousers and ill-fitting shirts, canvas jackets stained at the wrists, patched at the elbows. Only the officers wore proper Arquali attire, and even theirs was faded.
‘We have three hundred men within these walls,’ Bachari told him, ‘and twice that many on vessels secreted about the lake’s periphery.’
‘Nine hundred?’ asked Isiq, his heart sinking to his shoes.
Bachari looked at him sharply. ‘That is twic
e the force we had a year ago. But I did not say that was all Her Majesty could call upon. Do you think I should tell you everything, Isiq? By what merit, pray? Thus far you have only proven your need of a refuge from the Secret Fist.’
His words stung – what words did not, from a man’s first drill sergeant? – but Isiq could not refute them. ‘Turachs?’ he asked dubiously.
Bachari was growing irritated. ‘Why ask such a question? You know as well as I do that the Turach Legion never splintered when Her Majesty fled. As it happens we have one Turach, a recent addition to our number. But I do not have full confidence in the man. He admits to having fled his unit on the eve of a deployment.’
Isiq sighed. ‘Just take me to the Empress,’ he said.
They passed through the rest of the meagre barracks, a gymnasium, a humble officers’ club. Isiq felt despair circling him like a tiger, hidden but inexorable, waiting for its moment to pounce. Nine hundred men at arms! Less than the complement on four Arquali warships! And the navy boasted some five hundred vessels. They’ll be mucking exterminated. Unless this man truly is hiding much from me. Gods, let it be so.
They came at last to a heavy wooden door, guarded by six more halberd-wielders, who stood aside for Bachari. As he opened the door the old man put a finger to his lips.
The room they entered was the largest he had yet seen in the complex. It was also profoundly elegant – but no, that word did not suffice. The walls were draped in rich red tapestries: Arquali tapestries, clearly of ancient workmanship, depicting hunts in primeval forests. The furnishings too were splendid relics. A table on doe’s legs, its surface a mosaic of ivory and rosewood and mother-of-pearl. A small golden harp on a marble pedestal. Twin bronze statues of the Martyrs of Etherhorde.10 Portraits in gilded frames, men whose faces swam up dimly from the murk of memory: the first kings, the heroes of Unification.
The word you’re seeking, Isiq told himself, is Imperial.
At the back of the chamber, an Arquali flag hung from the ceiling. It was huge: the golden fish was nearly man-sized, and the golden dagger pointed straight down at the one plain object in the room: a wooden chair. It stood alone upon a dais. Other chairs, far more sumptuous, were arranged beneath it in a semicircle.
Upon that simple chair sat Maisa, Empress of Arqual. She was straight and proud and bright of eye. And old, very old. Isiq felt stabbed to the heart. She was not yet thirty when you saw her last.
She had visitors seated before her, and did not glance up at Isiq. Bachari stabbed a finger at the spot where they stood: Do not move. He was to wait on her pleasure. Fair enough; he only wished that he’d bathed.
Bachari left without a sound. Isiq could hear Maisa’s voice but did not recognize it. How could he? Only once in his life had he stood this close to her, and on that occasion she had not said a word.
The image returned with arresting force: a hooded figure exiting the Keep of Five Domes, holding the hands of two small and frightened boys. The mass of soldiers around them, looking fearfully over their shoulders, urging them on. The harsh wind as they rounded the fountain, its spray blowing out over the Plaza of the Palmeries, striking the cobbles like a hard rain. Striking the dead bodies that lay at her feet.
There were four of them, slain at a distance by archers dispatched by Sandor Ott: the first casualties among Maisa’s loyalists. Isiq had watched her from the edge of the Plaza, standing with a group of astonished, off-duty navy men who had just wandered in from the port. He was nineteen, which meant he was a man – childhood ended when one left for the Junior Academy at thirteen. He came from wealth; he was officer material. He thought he knew something of the politics of the Imperial family. But he could make no show of comprehending this. Staring, abashed and mute, he wondered if his Empress would walk left or right around the bodies. She had done neither; she had stopped and knelt before each one, studying their faces, touching their hands. Then she had thrown back her hood and swept her eyes across the gawkers in the Plaza; and Isiq, thirty feet away, had marvelled at her striking intelligence, her magnificent calm.
Thundering hooves: a cortège of nine carriages swept into the Plaza, almost at a gallop, and Maisa and her sons climbed into one of them, and the cortège raced out of the square. Isiq had never seen the monarch again.
Until tonight. Look at her. Fifty years in the shadows. Fifty years hunted by the ones who stole her crown. And yet if anything she looked prouder than before.
The conversation at the dais concluded with a peal of laughter from the Empress. The guests stood and bowed, and the old woman rose to her feet and raised her voice: ‘You must dine with us, gentlemen, and forgive the menu’s shortcomings, this once. They will be amended when we receive you at Castle Maag.’
An escort appeared and led the visitors out by another door. Isiq studied them as they passed: two black men, young and lithe and wary, and behind them a much older man wearing a monk’s round travelling cap. Isiq straightened his jacket. Empress Maisa was descending the dais. Still she did not look at him, but walked instead to an ornate secretary desk near the statue of the martyrs, and scribbled something. Two servants approached her, and she glanced distractedly at the men.
‘White goose, I think. And the doors, Hectyr. That is all.’
The servants withdrew, and Maisa went on scribbling. Isiq glanced about the chamber and saw that they were entirely alone.
His eyes snapped forward, she was approaching quickly. Trying to hide his pain, he sank to one knee.
She slapped him, hard. ‘That is for your unwavering loyalty to the usurper, Admiral Isiq. Not as a young naval cadet half a century ago. As a decorated officer, a hero, who has surely known for the past several decades that his Empress was alive and well. Oh get up, will you, and look me in the eye.’
Isiq rose stiffly to his feet. And slapped her with equal force.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is for embroiling a young girl in your deadly plan without ever informing her father. I do not yet know how Thasha factors in your schemes, but I know that you have been elaborating them with Ramachni and Hercól Stanapeth since her infancy, if not her birth. As for my loyalties, of course I knew you were still alive. All Etherhorde knew it. Stanapeth himself spoke of you, as did Chadfallow. They praised you often – but they never breathed a word about your activities. Restoration! The idea never crossed my mind! I thought you’d found sanctuary in Tholjassa and would remain there until you died. If you wanted me to join this campaign, you might have started by letting me know it existed.’
Empress Maisa’s hand was on her cheek. She was gaping at him, speechless with rage. Isiq met her eyes, unflinching. There was no hope without perfect honesty. Not at this hour. Not in this life.
Then Maisa laughed. ‘I will benefit from this exchange. No one has dared lay a hand on me since my mother passed, when I was twelve. It is a very long time since I was twelve.’
‘I did not come here to serve you,’ said Isiq.
‘What then? To strangle me? You had better do it now, don’t you think? I have made it very easy for you.’
‘I will never be your pawn, Empress. Never your unthinking tool. I was long a tool for Magad the Fourth, and even longer for his son. I committed atrocities because I did not let myself think. My beloved wife was killed, murdered by Sandor Ott, because I could not imagine that I was merely a device, a puppet worked by unseen hands.’
‘Neither could they,’ she said. ‘I mean our enemies, yours and mine. That is the greater tragedy. Ott has been the unwitting tool of Arunis, and worked tirelessly to undermine the very Empire he thinks he defends. Magad agreed to a war conspiracy centred on the Shaggat Ness and your daughter, never dreaming that he too was dancing on a string. A failure of imagination, partly. And yes, you were guilty of the same.’
She laughed again, turned away, ran her fingers over the exquisite table. ‘So was I, Admiral. Fifty years ago. The barons and the warlords and the great men of Arqual – they were jackals, hyenas. Next to them you’re a cultu
red philosopher. They only let my father crown me because we were losing the war. That was still a great secret. We were going to lose, we were going to be routed, our children would all speak Mzithrini. But soon, they knew, it would burst out onto the streets of Etherhorde. And when it did the hyenas did not want the blame. Let the street think it was a woman’s incompetence. Let them hang her when the Black Rags close in for the kill.’
‘But you did not lose the war.’
‘No, the Shaggat saved us then. His rise crippled the Mzithrin when they could least afford it, and gave us time to rebuild our forces. I did not fail – how they hated me for that! And even more so for not wishing to stab the wounded Mzithrin Empire through the heart when it was down. My peace emissaries were real, Isiq. Chadfallow’s mission to Babqri City was real. This half-century of madness need not have happened, this world need not today be so blighted and burned – if only thinking had been valued over tribalism and blind allegiances. Over unthinking service, as you say.’
She gazed up at the great flag over her chair. ‘I accept your declaration, Admiral. It is what I hoped for. But I could not possibly have let you know about my enterprise.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because if you had not joined that enterprise I would have fallen. One word from you to the Emperor would have sealed my fate. Magad has never ignored your warnings, Eberzam Isiq.’
‘And now that I am disgraced?’
‘But you are not disgraced,’ said Maisa. ‘You are presumed dead, and that is altogether different. As everyone in Alifros knows, you were last seen following the bearers of your daughter’s corpse through the streets of Simjalla, on Treaty Day. All was terror and confusion. Perhaps you were picked up and tortured by the Mzithrinis.’
‘I was tortured by Ott.’
‘Ah, but that is no tale to warm the hearts of Magad’s subjects. No, yours was a tragic death. If the Black Rags did not get you, then surely you collapsed of a broken heart, and were stripped of your wedding finery by a mob, and buried with the many beggars and tramps who perished that day. Or you returned to the Chathrand in secret, to accompany your beloved daughter to her final rest in Etherhorde, only to go down with the ship off Talturi. Such are the rumours in the capital.’
The Night of the Swarm (Chathrand Voyage 4) Page 28
