The Tears of the Sun (32 page)

That was a heraldic joke, if you knew how to read it, rather like her own but a bit less blatant and, she had to admit, more witty.

She glanced up at the white-pillared portico of the residence, then looked east towards the heart of present Portland, squinting a little into the sunrise. This was an extramural suburb, literally so these days—better than half a mile outside the city walls. Behind her rose the densely wooded West Hills, green and purple shadows in the light of dawn. Those had been parks and exclusive residential neighborhoods before the Change, and it was all part of the New Forest now; you could smell the fresh greenness of it, and the sky was thick with birdsong. That was Crown demesne under special forest law, and permission to hunt there or an invitation to parties at the royal retreat in the Japanese Gardens was a mark of great favor.

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 Bearkiller 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.

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.

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.

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—”