The Novels of the Jaran (306 page)

They exchanged formal greetings. Young Baron Santer looked over the jaran escort with a calculating gaze. He leaned to whisper something into the ear of Georgi Raevsky, his brother-in-law; Tess liked the intimacy they seemed to have developed. But the real power in this trio was clearly the woman. Isobel, Baroness Santer, had inherited her father’s cold ambition.

“We have heard no recent news of Prince Basil’s army, your highness, except that the snow still confines them in the Sagesian Pass,” Baroness Santer said now. More coolly still, she inclined her head toward Bakhtiian. “Your Majesty. We did not hear how you managed to cross the hills and get past the Filistian army.”

“Bakhtiian will do. We circled around Prince Basil’s army, my lady, and crossed by the southern pass.”

“But even in a mild winter that pass is closed by snow and ice!” Astounded, she stared at him. Several men nearby cocked their heads to listen.

“My army has yet to meet an obstacle it cannot surmount.” He nodded politely at her, walked up the dais, paced around the single throne, and waved to Vladimir. “Here,” he said. To Tess’s horror and amusement, Vladimir threw a big gold-embroidered pillow onto the floor beside the throne and Ilya promptly sat down on it. Tess almost laughed out loud at the consternation that broke out through the hall. The bastard was throwing his weight around, seeing what would come of it.

The Jedans did not know what to do: Continue to attend their prince, who stood in the middle of the hall, or pay obeisance to the man who was not just her husband but the general of the army that lay outside their gates.

“How is it fitting to address him?” whispered Baroness Santer, abandoning her pose of calm to show a less composed interior.

“Bakhtiian is itself a title.”

Tess looked around as she said it and discovered something odd, watching the five hundred or so dignitaries and noblemen and women gathered in the hall as they turned to stare at the man sitting on the floor next to the throne. He still wore his armor, boiled leather and polished strips of plate tied with ribbons, his helmet sitting on the floor to his left and his saber resting across his knees. Philosophy, celebrating her triumph, smiled benignly down on him from the huge mural painted along the inner wall of the hall.

Ilya scared them.

No, it was not Ilya who scared them. They didn’t know Ilya. It was Bakhtiian who made them nervous.

Tess caught Baroness Santer by the elbow and drew her forward to the dais. “Come, Isobel, we will be friends again, as we were before your father died.”

“When you took me to the north.”

“Your husband has not been a disappointment to you, I hope.”

Baroness Santer caught herself before she looked back over her shoulder toward her husband and her brother. “He is a good husband,” she said, clipping off the words as if she was afraid that she would reveal something incriminating, that she liked her jaran husband too little, or too much.

Tess mounted the steps and sat down in the prince’s throne without looking at Ilya. “Stand beside me, and as each person comes forward, please make sure that I remember the proper name.”

So she greeted her subjects, and Isobel, Baroness Santer, gave her names and, often, a tiny squib of information with which Tess could surprise or please each supplicant. Georgi Raevsky wandered up to Bakhtiian and crouched down beside him, and the two men launched into an intense discussion in khush, oblivious to the formalities going on before them. The rest of the guard stood here and there, examining the mural (Philosophy’s dress was, perhaps, a bit indecent by jaran standards), whispering to each other, going outside when it pleased them, stamping their feet and shaking out their armor. Katya was loudly explaining the different figures in the mural to Nikita and whomever else would listen; she was showing off, unaware that she had an audience of Jedans as well, intrigued by her armor and her weapons and her authoritative, bossy manner. In all, the jaran showed no propensity to be overawed by Jeds or its inhabitants. This was the army that had burned down Karkand, after all, and conquered at least ten cities equal to or greater than Jeds. This was really just another city. Filis had not yet capitulated. And there would be other lands.

Tess sent the presbyter of all Jeds on his way and glanced down at Ilya. He looked up at her, one hand on his saber hilt. He did not smile. He did not need to. He had Jeds. He had his empire. He had what he wanted.

But he had that same restless expression in his eyes, that odd, mad, passionate expression on his face: He wanted something else, something new. No doubt, the gods still spoke to him. No doubt, they were filling him with fresh visions.

The abbess of Jedina Cloister knelt before her, and Tess had a sudden inspiration. She, too, could use the gods. She could use them as a bridge to what she had to tell Ilya. Tomorrow, she would call Sarai and have the ke or Sonia transmit to her a facsimile of the scroll that contained the “Revelation of Elia.”

Sonia was angry.

“It is time for my daughter to be married.” She leaned forward so far that part of her passed out of the picture. She jerked and pulled back into focus. She was still angry.

“Katya doesn’t want to get married:”

“Why not?”

“Well, uh,” Tess temporized, “she’s like Ilya in that way.”

“Ilya wanted to get married. Or so I had always supposed.” Sonia rarely got mad and when she did, she fought dirty. Tess could see her gearing up for battle.

“Now, Sonia. I’m just saying that Katya is young yet and discontent…”

“Damn you,” said Sonia suddenly. It was so strange, Tess reflected, to be talking to her this way, seeing her head and torso growing up from the console as if the rest of her sat contained within. A line of static popped through the image and cleared. “I know what you’re saying. I went to Jeds when I was a girl because I was curious, because I wanted adventure, I wanted to see what lay outside the tribe. Now she wants to do the same. Let me talk to her. Tess, the others who sailed across the ocean to Erthe were told they could never come back. How can I exile my daughter like that? How can you expect me to agree to let her go, knowing I could never see her again?”

“Sonia, if what you say about Anatoly Sakhalin is true, then how can we know how much the interdiction will change? Anything could happen. There you sit talking to me across a gulf of thousands of kilometers—”

“Which reminds me,” said Sonia, the anger slipping easily from her face. “How can this image travel as fast as I can speak across a distance that would take a messenger forty days riding day and night without a break except to change horses? What is this image riding? How can it travel on the air?”

“Didn’t the ke explain that to you?”

“Well, yes, but—” She launched into such a garbled explanation of the ke’s explanation that Tess could only look toward Cara Hierakis for help. Cara shrugged.

“Sonia,” Tess broke in. “There is a tutorial encyclopedia under mathetics. Start there.”

“Is it true that Newton’s
Principia
has been superseded?” Sonia demanded. “I have been trying to discover how a person can travel in the heavens, but how can a ship sail on a road? How can a road hang in the air? What keeps it from falling? What is a
quantum
? A
singularity
? How can passing through a window take you to a different place?”

“Hold on, hold on.” Tess laughed.

“Furthermore,” added Sonia, “if you khaja could only devise a smaller tool than these stationary consoles, you could communicate this swiftly while you were anywhere! You wouldn’t be tied to a building. You could somehow wear them on your backs like a quiver. Think of how an army could use it. Merchants. A mother could converse with her child—”

“Sonia. Sonia! We have thought of such things. We just don’t have them on Rhui.”

“The interdiction again.”

Tess nodded.

“You are very arrogant to make these decisions for us,” said Sonia, finally, rebukingly.

“It’s true.”

“Hmm. Well. This all belongs to the jaran, now, so perhaps we will change all that.”

“What do you mean, belongs to the—? Wait a minute, Sonia. Perhaps I didn’t understand that correctly. Are you saying that Anatoly Sakhalin was made prince over all the systems governed by humans? Earth, the League,
and
Charles’s territory? Rhui?”

“Of course. All khaja lands now belong to the jaran.”

“Oh, my God.” Tess made a frantic signal to Cara, but Cara had heard it all before. Cara looked unimpressed. “Sonia, I will call you again. I have to…think about all this.”

“It isn’t what you expected, is it?” said Sonia astutely. “But it
is
what Ilya expected, after all.”

“I got the transcripts you sent. And the children—”

“As we agreed. I will bring them myself, when the weather changes and the ships sail again. Although Dr. Hierakis traveled a different way, did she not? Could we not travel in such a way, in a flying ship? I’ve never seen one. It would be faster, wouldn’t it? Is it dangerous?”

“Sonia, I will call you in two days. I have to think about this.”

Cheerful now, Sonia signed off and closed her end of the connection with practiced ease. How quickly she learned.

Tess sagged back into the chair, which gave beneath her and molded itself to the curve of her back, shifting as she shifted. “Oh, Lord, Cara, what have we gotten ourselves into? What did Charles say?”

Cara stood up and leaned onto the console, squinting at the symbols scrolling across the screen. “Tess, in a decade there’s a good chance we will face a doubling or tripling of the human lifespan. Perhaps more. How can I take this as seriously? It’s politics. Temporal power rises and falls in every generation. Empires explode into prominence and then collapse. Charles Soerensen becomes the most powerful human in Chapalii space, and then he is supplanted by someone else, who will no doubt experience his own period of fluorescence before fatigue or fashion or a reversal of fortune plunges him into eclipse. But longevity will be a sea of change for humanity. We can’t know how it will shape our view of life, how it will alter our philosophies. So let Anatoly Sakhalin have his moment in the sun. Let Charles put his intelligence to other work than playing duke.”

“But—”

“Don’t you trust Anatoly?”

“I don’t
know
Anatoly, not truly.”

“Don’t you trust Charles? Are you afraid he lives for ruling? For power? That this will break him? Ruin him? Corrupt him somehow by turning him into a villain out to regain all he has lost? I confess he might be a bit disappointed, but he is wise enough to let it go, to find a new—Ah. It isn’t Charles or Anatoly at all, is it?”

“Damn it. It will take me months to get through this transcript.”

“It’s Ilya. That’s it. He’s got it all. He’s finished. He’s complete. He’s won. And it leaves him nothing. What will you tell him, Tess?”

Tess shook her head, unable to talk past the lump in her throat. She palmed the console and fed all the information into the chip in her belt buckle.

“What did Sonia send you?” Cara asked.

“A complete transcript of Anatoly Sakhalin’s report on his visit to the emperor, points between, and what happened after that, including an addendum compiled by David ben Unbutu and Ilyana Arkhanov.”

“Ilyana Arkhanov? But she’s scarcely more than a child.”

“Evidently she has gotten herself apprenticed to—”

“Of course. I had heard that she had met the female. She’s broken past the veil. And? There’s something else on the screen. It’s not a transcript.”

“It’s a facsimile of the
Revelation of Elia
.”

“The heretical Hristain Gospel?”

“Not heretical here, remember. It’s only in the northern church that it’s heretical.”

“What do you want that for, Tess?”

“I don’t know what else, how else to tell Ilya the truth.”

Cara turned away from the flat screen and looked Tess straight in the eye. Her expression made Tess horribly uncomfortable, but she forced herself to face Cara, to hear what Cara had to say, not knowing whether she truly wanted to hear it.

“Have you asked him yet, my child, if he wants to know?”

Tess found Katya waiting outside Cara’s laboratory, practically hopping from one foot to the other in her impatience to talk to Tess.

“When will you talk to my mother?” she demanded. “I talked to a merchant down in the Exchange and he said that a ship is leaving for Erthe in ten days. I’ll just write a letter to my mother. You know that it could take a year, it could take a hundred days even if we sent it by official messenger and it got to Sarai and back without mishap.”

“And you can’t wait a hundred days?” Tess asked. Most of the corridors in the Jedan palace were not truly corridors but loggias looking out onto courtyards and gardens. So it was here; however curtailed access might be to Cara’s lab, even Cara liked to be able to step outside into the air. Tess had spent much of the afternoon in the lab, having spent the morning with Baroness Santer, the chamberlain of the palace, and a steady stream of visitors with legal questions. The sun had sunk below the rooftop, throwing the garden beyond into shade. A few streaks of snow patched the ground, in the lee of columns and striping the ground along the north loggia. But the weather was already turning. It was warmer now, at the end of the day, than it had been this morning.

“No, I can’t wait! Well. I went with Ilya down to the university this morning—”

“You did! What did he want there?”

“I don’t know. He went one way and I went another. But it was interesting. I thought—well, if I had to wait, I could attend classes, couldn’t I? There were some boys playing castles in one of the sitting rooms, by a fire. I watched them for a while, but they weren’t very good. They weren’t even as good as Prince Janos.” She flushed and broke off.

“Katya. You should tell your mother why you truly don’t want to marry, if what you told me is still the truth, for you.”

“No.”

“It isn’t?”

“It is still the truth. I don’t want to marry. I don’t—” She glanced furtively up and down the colonnaded walkway, but except for two jaran guards at either end of the loggia, no one was about. No one was allowed into this quarter of the palace, except those Tess or Cara had explicitly cleared. “—care for men in that way, not truly. But I won’t tell her, Aunt Tess. She won’t understand.”