His Conquering Sword (61 page)

“And seeing how close he can come to getting himself killed, without ever quite managing it.” Suzanne snorted and wiped her hands together briskly, brushing them off. “I wash my hands of trying to improve him and his miserable life.”

Charles and David burst out laughing together, and Suzanne set her hands on her hips, glared at them, and then stalked out of the room. It wasn’t a particularly effective exit, if only because it took so long for her to cross the tiled floor that the drama of her affronted expression had long since expired by the time she reached the far door. When she glanced back at them, David saw that she was smiling.

“Only twenty-seven apprentices? That’s not very many,” David said to Charles.

“David, I have three yachts in my private fleet, which are allowed to ferry on the shipping lanes between human regions and Paladia Minor and Major. Each one is manned by a crew of twenty-four, more or less. Of these twenty-four, two of each crew, the captain and the purser, are allowed to disembark at either port. As well, Tess’s old friend Sojourner and her husband Rene are in residence on the Keinaba flagship. And I have one human representative who sits as my shadow in the Hall of the Nobles, in the outermost circle of the emperor’s palace, just as all the other dukes have such shadow markers—well, only theirs are Chapalii, of course. Then again, that one representative changes every three months so the poor soul doesn’t go stark raving mad.”

Charles walked over to the field that separated the inside air from the outside air and set his hands, palms out and open, against it, and regarded the luxuriant growth within the greenhouse. David could not tell whether he was a nobleman surveying his domain, or a prisoner staring out from his cell.

“That’s it. That is the entire sum of the human presence within Imperial space. Twenty-seven apprentices is a big jump, compared to that. I don’t want to move too fast.”

He peeled his hands away from the field and sniffed, dabbing at his nose with a handkerchief. “My hay fever is acting up again. I don’t know how it carries from there into the main building.”

David chuckled. “That’s the thing about weeds. No matter how hard you try, you can never get rid of them.”

Charles grinned. “It’s good to have you back, David. I hope this time you’ll stay longer. Oh. Hell. Let’s go.”

David had deduced one thing about the Chapalii. They loved grandeur. They loved huge, towering spaces and masses of intricate and floridly-overwhelming decoration. So Charles had built a new reception room, a small, intimate reception chamber set into one of the corner towers and furnished to his own taste.

It was David’s favorite room in the entire palace.

Two walls were windows, opening out onto a balcony that looked out over the tule flats and the far green glint of the greenhouse wing. David sat on one of the two sofas while Charles went to the bureau and rummaged for drinks.

“Canadian or Martian?” Charles asked, setting out two bottles of whiskey.

“Three of those pieces are new,” said David, nodding toward the white wall above the bureau, where Charles displayed his favorite art. He stood up and walked diagonally across the room, skirting the cartograph-lectern, to the opposite corner and stared at the full suit of lamellar armor that stood out on the balcony. The lacquered leather strips and polished iron segments gleamed in the long light of the setting sun. “This is new, too. That’s jaran armor.”

“Yes, it is.” Charles handed him his whiskey.

Suzanne came in. “He’s here.”

Charles walked back to sit down on the other sofa, so that he could look both out the window and at the plain teak double doors that opened into the room. David remained where he was.

Suzanne opened both doors, and Tai-en Naroshi entered, followed by one of his ubiquitous stewards. The duke held a crystal wand in his right hand.

“Tai-en,” said Charles.

“Tai-en,” said Naroshi.

The room itself was pale, lit by the two walls of windows and by the two white walls and by the furniture, all of it a light teak. Even the accents, the throw rug and the linen cushions on the sofas, were white. Even so, Naroshi’s skin was paler still.

He examined the room, and Charles allowed him silence in which to do so. He paced slowly along the wall against which the bureau stood, looking at each piece of art in turn: the tapestry of birds; the woven doormat of green and red stripes; a saber sheathed in a gold case studded with pearls and emeralds; a silk robe embroidered with the lion and the moon of the Habakar royal house; the embossed bronze teapot and the enameled vase set on the bureau; a painting of Jeds, seen from the harbor, which was in fact the only piece of art along the wall. The other things functioned, on Rhui, as utilitarian objects, however beautiful they might appear displayed here.

Naroshi circled back, paused beside the tilted podium which was Charles’s cartographer’s table, and crossed the room to sit on the other sofa. Suzanne and the steward stood silently on either side of the open doors.

“I received your summons,” Naroshi said. He placed the wand carefully across both knees.

“I am distressed, Tai-en,” said Charles, “by these charges which the Protocol Office has brought against members of my house.”

“It would sadden the emperor, indeed,” replied Naroshi, “to have this matter brought to his attention. If only I could be assured that such a transgression had not occurred.”

Which it had, of course. David glanced at Suzanne, but she was watching the two dukes.

Charles placed a hand on each knee, echoing the placement of Naroshi’s hands. “My people would never have gone down to Rhui of their own volition because they know the strength of the interdiction, and, indeed, the only reason they would ever have been forced to go down there would be because another house, other Chapalii under another lord, had violated the interdiction and thus forced these, my own people, to investigate.”

Naroshi’s pallor did not alter. But David waited, breathless, to see how he would respond. It was a classic gambit, of course: I know you sent your people down; yes, but I know you sent
your
people down.

“I am certain,” said Naroshi finally, “that it would take considerable provocation for any lord to break an interdiction approved by the emperor himself. I must be mistaken. I will inform the Protocol Office that they must erase all charges on their list.”

“We are agreed, then,” said Charles. Now they knew exactly where each of them stood—more or less. Did Naroshi know that Tess was still alive? Did he guess? Did he know that Tess had transferred to her brother the cylinder from the Mushai’s banks? Did Naroshi have such a copy himself? David hid a cough behind his hand. He decided that less had the advantage over more.

“But that is not the only reason I requested your presence here, Tai-en,” added Charles.

Naroshi lifted his chin, acknowledging the comment. “I am honored beyond measure that you would allow my sister to design the mausoleum for your departed heir. I have brought her design with me, for you to view.”

“You are generous, Tai-en. May I hope that we can view it now?”

The two sofas sat perpendicular to each other, one with its back to a windowed wall, one with its back to the bookshelves that lined the rest of the wall out from the doors. Up from the rug that lay between them, an edifice rose.

David caught a gasp back in his throat. It was a clever insult. Or perhaps not an insult at all, but a tacit acknowledgment of their shared crime. It was the palace of Morava, clearly, in its essential design, but twisted and turned in on itself, crossed with the starker classical lines of the Parthenon and made feminine by a profusion of bright frescos of elegant ladies in belled skirts and fitted jackets surrounded by flowers, and by the tiers of columns surrounding the central dome. The design was a clear reminder of the rebel duke, the Tai-en Mushai, and yet it was also uniquely itself. It was stunning.

Charles rose and paced once around the edifice and sat back down again.

“What site have you procured?” he asked.

Naroshi inclined his head. “We have received a dispensation from the emperor’s Chamberlain of the Avenue of the Red Blossom to build the mausoleum along the Field of Empty Hands.”

David had not a clue what or where the Field of Empty Hands was, and he wondered if Charles did, either, but Charles certainly did not show any uncertainty in his reply.

“That would be well, Tai-en. I am honored by your interest, and by your sister’s skill.”

“We all mourn, when a member of one of the great families dies, whether by the cessation of breath or the act of extinction, of leaving, that forever separates them from their kin.”

Charles bowed his head, perhaps the better to shadow his expression. It was true that, by Chapalii law, now that Charles had acknowledged Tess’s marriage to Bakhtiian, Tess did indeed lose her position as Charles’s heir. So ran the Chapalii inheritance laws, and laws of marriage: a female upon marriage takes her husband’s status exclusively. Presumably Naroshi’s own sister was unmarried, else she would not still remain in his house. Naroshi might believe Tess was dead—Bakhtiian had told his agent that. But Cara had also told David that Tess’s original marriage had taken place at Morava; did Naroshi know about that? Or was his comment not about Tess at all but simply a reference to the emperor, who severed all ties of kinship, all ties with his past, on the day he stepped up to the imperial throne? There were a hundred other possibilities, all of them too damned convoluted for David’s taste.

“Tai-en,” said Charles into the silence. “I have a proposition for you.”

Naroshi regarded him steadily.

“Just as you have brought this to me—” He gestured toward the edifice, now curling into mist at the edges as it faded away. “—I propose to bring a human art to you. We humans create an art form that is transitory, played out each night once in a way that can never be duplicated, and yet, played out the next night in the same way that is, still, different from what it was before. It is called theater. I would bring this theater into Imperial space, if you would be willing to sponsor its travel.”

“Theater,”
said Naroshi. The human word sounded strange and ominous on his lips. “I know what this art is.” He inclined his head. “I would be pleased to sponsor a—ah, I know the word. The
tour.”

Charles inclined his head in reply. David could not imagine how Charles could keep his face so straight as he recruited a Chapalii duke, all unknowing, to start the wheel spinning, to start the first corruption, the first step, the first wedge into the edifice of diamond and steel that was the Empire. To introduce the first tendrils of the saboteur network into the heart of Chapalii space.

Or did Naroshi know? Did he suspect? Knowing that his own agents had been in Charles’s territory—knowing that Charles knew—did Naroshi then accept Charles’s agents into his? Like any great dance, whirling along in brilliant colors across a ballroom floor, the movement and countermovement that flowed naturally from the interaction of the dancers seemed merely bewildering to an inexperienced bystander. On neither duke could David read the slightest expression or color.

“I will send the Bharentous Repertory Company to your palace, Tai-en,” said Charles.

“I will receive it,” said Naroshi.

He rose. Charles rose. The edifice dissolved into steam and vanished into air between them, where they stood at either end of their respective sofas. They made polite farewells. Naroshi left, with his steward trailing behind. David and Suzanne stared at each other. Charles sat down and drained his whiskey in one shot.

“Well,” said Suzanne. “I wasn’t expecting that. Getting him to sponsor the tour.” She walked over and sat down where Naroshi had just been sitting.

“Neither was I,” admitted Charles. “It just came to me.” He grinned. “Did you see that design? It practically shouted my link to Rhui and to the Mushai and from there, I suppose, to all rebels.”

“Or Tess’s link,” said Suzanne, “since Naroshi must know that she was last seen alive there.”

“How can you risk it?” David demanded. He thought of Diana as he said it. Of Diana and her husband, who must surely end up following her wherever she went. “Putting the actors into Naroshi’s hands?”

“‘I’ll deliver all,’” said Charles. He leaned back into the cushions. “How can I not risk it?”

David sighed and went to lean on the lectern, but he watched the sun sink down over the horizon. The polished black surface of the table stared blankly at him.

“Earth,” said Charles, and a flat map of Earth and her continents flowered into being on the table. He went on, through the planets bound together by the League covenant, by their human heritage, by the many space stations and mining colonies and frozen outposts linking them along the shipping lanes. “Ophiuchi-Sei. Sirin Five. Tau Ceti Tierce. Eridanaia. Hydra. Cassie. The unpronounceable one. Three Rings.” He did not say Odys. Odys was not a human planet, only the seat of his ducal authority.

Maggie strode in, poured herself a drink at the bureau, and walked across the room to sprawl out on the sofa next to Charles. “I got rid of Marco,” she said. “What a relief. He needs a vacation. But you know—” She sipped from her glass and set it down on the end table. “I almost asked him to greet Ursula from me. It’s still hard to believe that she’s dead. What a terrible way to die.”

“She wasn’t the first. She won’t be the last,” said Charles.

Maggie had evidently come through the greenhouse, because David could smell the perfume of newly-mown grass on her. Suzanne sighed. Under David’s elbows, the screen shifted again, to show the ongoing design and work index for Concord, the great space station that housed the League offices and the League Parliament. The Chapalii Protocol Office allowed the work to continue, as long as it did not interfere with whatever quotas and taxes their human subjects must pay to the emperor. David ran a finger along a hatched grid. Nadine would have loved this, this table, with its cornucopia of maps stored within, each one available at the touch of a finger or with a single spoken word, each one a discovery, a new journey, a fresh path to explore.