The Hawkwood War: Book Two Of Requite

By Ankaret Wells

The Hawkwood brothers want salvage rights to a fallen Spire. Ligeia Boccamera wants to rescue her sisters. Facade Blue wants to see the culmination of a plan four hundred years in the making, and no one has any idea what the alien grues want, or even how to talk to them. No one but Tzenni Boccamera...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447554530

Book preview

Prologue

From Oral Traditions of the Couriers and Carriers, collected by the First Solannan Survey

"There’s Spire folk and there’s us. Spire folk go to war over all kinds of stupid nonsense, because they’re more alike than they want to be and they can’t bear it. We ain’t gone to war yet, because all we need to be is different from them."

- Missi-Izé Unbeknownst, Courier outrider

ONE

'And she's gathered the child now 'neath her cloak

And she's whispered 'Don't you cry,

For the fate of my Spire is for rent or hire

And the price is you and I'

And she's ridden out with the stolen child

On a longnight with no star

To bring calm with a storm

And bring peace with the Swarm

For the sake of Lionvarre'

- From The Cimmenze Ballad, collected by the First Solannan Survey

6-1 to 6-4 Crystal, 432 S.F, Coronath

The Spire of Coronath crouched against the cleared surrounding ground like a malevolent cyclops.  The outer walls had been cladded in glossy gravy-coloured stone by some past Mukhtar.  Ligeia Boccamera held her hat on with one hand and looked up at the Spire, wondering whether a fondness for that particular shade of brownish orange was a sign of dementia in the Mukhtar Descent or merely of colour-blindness.

The two broad forward-thrusting bulwarks of the Spire's north and south wings hunched forward protectively around the Eye of Rancour. The Eye twitched constantly in its cradle. When Ligeia was young, she had though that the Eye would be a great red mirror that caught the sun and reflected it onto anyone foolish enough to approach unheralded.  It was not.  It was an ugly collection of squared-off batteries and launch tubes around a deadly central pupil.

Ligeia had never seen it fired.  Possibly, she thought with some amusement, that was because past Boccamera had a remarkable knack for finding exceptions to their treaty of mutual aid and defence with the Mukhtars of Coronath.

But now the Swarm had come.  Drones perched on stairs and balconies and flat redoubts, like bees around a giant hive.  Drones hovered in the air.  Drones rested in formation across the expanse of naked purple-red earth between the Spire and the growback, like a net of woven gold.

A detachment of Igalikus and Garthars soared over Ligeia's head.  They landed with neat grace on a flight of exterior steps several hundred metres up, slotting into the Swarm's telemetry with an almost audible click.  Looking up, she thought serenely that if one took away the stairs they would look precisely like the spiralling mobile that hung over her daughter Tristis' cot back at Lionvarre.

High above, someone waved their scarf to her.  She made a small namaste in return.  She honestly doubted that it would be visible from up there, but if one failed to observe Ordnance in small things there was no point in claiming to observe it at all.

The wind changed, ruffling the hairs on Ligeia's neck and the ribbons on her hat.  Sunlight swung out from behind the clouds.  Ligeia put up a hand to hold her hat on.

The sun struck glancingly across the parade-ground outside the Spire's gates, turning it from shale-grey to the colour of toasted biscuit.  It raised a nasty orange glow from the Spire's outer cladding, which clashed horribly with the red-purple earth below.  It made the Swarm shine.

Ligeia bowed her head a little.  Her ancestress Sabna Boccamera's creations did honour to the unimaginably greater creation of God.

There was another shiver in the Swarm's telemetry. The Swarm turned its golden insect-heads in eerie unison, scenting the movement of wings and displaced air.  Ligeia tied the green ribbons of her hat more snugly under her chin and set off to meet the new arrivals.

The business of readying two armies flowed on around her.  Soldiers marched.  Technicians scuttled to and fro with screens.  A scurrying bedlam of bearers and vrykols and bundles and sacks flowed out of a wide side gate in the Spire's north flank and pooled around the Mukhtar land-leviathans, First Valentin Mukhtar and Zahsha Mukhtar. The land-leviathans were as ugly as outsized grain-tanks.  As ugly, Ligeia thought, as the Swarm was beautiful.

She took note of her riders as she passed them.  There was Hsu, distinctive by the set of his bandaged shoulder under a green cloak; there was young Seteperna following him with a portable screen, equally recognisable by her air of cold-water freshness when everyone else looked grubbily rumpled; there was Athalaiah having an argument with Mukhtar Prime's eldest bastard.  They looked rather like one of those old-fashioned allegorical pictures, possibly of the Holy Counsellor debating with Death, though on this occasion the Holy Counsellor was getting the worst of it.

Ligeia had never been able to work out why Karely Mukhtar looked like such a death's-head – possibly it was the combination of overhanging browbones with an over-short nose, possibly his customary expression – but it was her firm belief that he had survived the Plague of 411 because the Angel of Death mistook him for a subordinate.  As Ligeia passed he detached himself from Athalaiah and fell into step beside her instead.

Lady Boccamera, he said with a military bow.

Lord Karely. Not Lord Mukhtar, Ligeia noted precisely.  Mukhtar Prime's only surviving legitimate son had gained his earring at thirteen and contracted meningitis in the wake of the Plague six months later.  No one had seen much of him since, nor of the one surviving daughter of the marriage, who was occasionally visible on state occasions waving palely from a balcony.  Ligeia wasn't sure what either of them did with the rest of their time, but they did it without much help from their old miser of a father or his swarms of underaged bastards.

What a life, Ligeia thought, savouring the outdoor smell of sun-warmed earth and the acrid spice-scent of the growback beyond the cleared ground.  She wouldn't have been born a Mukhtar for a Spire's ransom in scrip.

"Mukhtar Prime is concerned about the delays to loading First Valentin Mukhtar and Zahsha Mukhtar," Karely said in his usual dull, careful mutter.

Mukhtar Prime will see. Ligeia looked upward.  The turbulent air made a fractal chaos of her cloak-hem and the hat's green ribbons.  Kapellan Prime has kidnapped my sisters – both of my sisters – and holds them captive in Shainault.  We will see them safely home.  And the plunder that you desire, besides.

Some people would, she supposed, have protested at her mention of plunder.  Karely Mukhtar did not.  Nor did he raise any of the ancient quarrels he might have done.  The sky was filled with the fluted gold bellies of drones.  They shone even brighter than the others; they were fresh from the Lionvarre Retort.  Her sister Tzenni's experimentals had arrived.  They were big enough for eighteen riders to sit stacked one behind another, and they were beautiful.  Their claws gleamed like filigree gold sabres.  No army could stand against this Swarm.

Karely rotated on his feet, craning his upturned head to watch.  You went with making them look like giant wasps again, then?

Ligeia kept her temper. What would you have them look like?

It isn't efficient to waste time making machines of war look like something out of a child's picture-cube.

They're perfectly aerodynamic.

Karely gave an unconvinced but polite nod.  Even with the evidence in front of his eyes, the man wouldn't concede a point.  What's that they're towing behind them? Suncloth?

Ligeia nodded.  The sky above them was foreshortened, and turned all the milky colours of opal and pearl and water.  Beneath it, all the shadows became sharper and darker.  Suncloth.

Too much of Lionvarre's suncloth for Ligeia's comfort.  But she, more than either of her sisters, had the instincts of a gambler; and it was worth trading the possibility of having to truckle to some other Spire to buy suncloth next winter, against the glorious possibility of finally defeating Shainault.  "And also anti-drag meshes for the land-leviathans.  I do hope Mukhtar Prime gave me accurate schematics for First Valentin Mukhtar and Zahsha Mukhtar.  It would be so embarrassing if he didn't."

Anti-drag meshes?  Lady Boccamera – are you proposing to harness those things to the land-leviathans?

"Not those things, Ligeia corrected him. Those Calinda-class drones.  God willing, we will be within striking distance of the Spire that Walks within two longdays."

The shadows shifted.  The pattern of the wingbeats above changed.  The drones retracted their claws, making ready to land.  Riders ran towards them to catch and roll up the suncloth.

Is Mukhtar Prime aware of this? asked Mukhtar Prime's bastard.

I couldn't say, said Ligeia sweetly.  "He appeared to be awake when I informed him.  Or does he often bellow for brandy in his sleep?"

I see you're still offended with him.

I am not offended with my ally, said Ligeia with cut-glass correctness. 

I wish I could believe that.  What do you want, Lady Boccamera?

I want peace, and an end to the Feud.

Karely clasped his hands behind his back as he strolled beside her.  With respect, my lady, I believe that will happen when the last Boccamera lights candles and ties up memory-streamers on the anniversary of the death of the last Kapellan.

It's an outcome I've contemplated, said Ligeia.

The first of the Calindas landed, slotting into place with a click in Ligeia's head.  The suncloth shed light as it rippled downwards to settle on the grass.  The riders shouted orders to each other.  Ligeia found herself uncomfortably trying to keep track of who was doing what, and made a firm effort to force her attention back to Karely.  It was hard to do.  The man shrugged off attention like the anti-drag meshes shrugged off gravity.

Two longdays to reach the Kapellans, he said thoughtfully.  I suppose it will save on provisioning.

What generations of Boccamera had tinkered about with the designs for and dreamed of and signally failed at, Ligeia's genius sister Tzenni had brewed up in the Retort and made real.  And all Karely could say was that he supposed it would save on provisioning.  As they approached the Calindas, he didn't even look impressed; though she wasn't sure what impressed would look like on that skull-face of his in any case.

The Calindas looked even larger close up.  One of them rotated its great head towards them, the facets of its eyes glinting diamond-sharp in the sunlight, and raised one delicately barbed foreleg to sniff the air with its sensors.  Ligeia lifted her arm and ran a hand over the bulges of the drone's golden head.  It was outsized, to be sure, but it was just the same.  Trusting, in the way that even the most simple-minded grel could not match.  Loyal.  Uncomplicated. 

She only wished the same could be said of her ally.  Karely shook his head again, staring up and down the Calinda from antennae to tailtip.  It's the size of a land-barge.

Only a small one, Ligeia reassured him.

And these were assembled from your sister Tzenni's designs without her supervising presence? For some reason, that made him look impressed; Ligeia supposed he admired precision.  For that matter, so did she.

Indeed they were, she said, not pressing the point that her genius sister Tzenni - her idiot genius sister Tzenni - was locked up in Shainault at the mercy of the Kapellans and their sinister allies the Malabranca, and therefore couldn't be expected to supervise anything.

Except, possibly their youngest sister Catha, who had caused all the trouble by getting herself captured by the Kapellans in the first place; and Tzenni had never been able to control Catha, because, Ligeia thought, she never troubled to exert herself.  My father Tristyn Andaluz was the supervising Maker.

My compliments to him, said Karely Mukhtar, and turned away from the Calindas as if utterly annihilating them from his attention.  "Would you care to inspect Zahsha Mukhtar's grain silo?"

Ligeia wondered if that was his idea of a treat.  But they were allies after all; and the last thing she needed was for the Mukhtar soldiers who were supposed to be providing the Swarm with ground support to go down with an attack of ergot poisoning because of problems with the grain silo.

She took Karely's arm. "And the floors shall be full of wheat, and the vats shall overflow with wine and oil," she quoted mischievously from Scripture.

The vats won't overflow, said Karely.  "They were designed to exceed First Valentin Mukhtar and Zahsha Mukhtar's specifications.  Though if your sister Tzenni cared to overhaul the system, I'd be grateful for her advice."

Ligeia pressed her hand in more closely around the muscles of his arm, and gave him her sunniest smile. Then let's be about the business of rescuing her, shall we?

The longday wore on.  The land-leviathans were fitted with meshes and suncloth sails.  The Calindas reposted in front of them like huge saddled locusts.  By the time all was ready, evening cookfires scented the air, and the stars were out.

Ligeia nodded to her assembled riders, and took her place beside her own Igaliku-class drone, with its carefully folded white saddle-blanket and leather saddle smelling of soap. She realised with a small pang that she didn't know who had folded the blanket for her and saddled the drone.  Her mother would have known.  Catha would have known. The Swarm was Catha's, far more than it had ever been Ligeia's.

Ligeia closed her eyes, and asked God for help.  The Swarm waited.  The Mukhtars waited too, she supposed, aboard First Valentin Mukhtar and Zahsha Mukhtar, packed amongst vrykol-harnesses and soap and tents.  She could see Karely Mukhtar, standing at a parade-ground rest on First Valentin's castle with his hands clasped behind him.

Ligeia opened her eyes.  Prayer helped, when nothing else did. Athalaiah boosted her up into the saddle with a push around her white-booted foot.  Ligeia leaned forward and settled herself into position.  Her drone rose.

Her mother Lucastine had always had a sister or daughter in the Maker's Tower to perform calculations as necessary on the Retort when the Swarm flew.  Ligeia had neither.  Her daughter still counted her age in longdays, and her sisters were captive among the sun-cursed Kapellans.  But she would save them all.

She lifted her hand.  The Calindas' huge wings whirred, working to take the strain.  Ligeia hoped that Tzenni's calculations and the work that she had bullied out of cousin Zahar and the technicians had been right after all.  These creations had been birthed without their mother.

The Calindas lifted.  The meshes engaged.  The land-leviathans were jolted upward, with crunches and jolts and sounds of straining metal that chilled Ligeia's heart.

Then the giant drones were away, skimming low over the darkened ground, eager as vrykols after a long penned winter, and the land-leviathans racing after them towing their skirts of suncloth.  The meshes reflected silver on the grass.  The riders shouted with a joy that was more than half relief.

Far above, a glassy door opened onto a balcony, spilling out light from the indoor to the outdoor world.  Ligeia looked up.  She saw small figures, foreshortened and pale.  She thought they were Mukhtar Prime's legitimate son  and daughter.  Lord Mukhtar looked to be slumping sideways in his hoverchair more than the last time Ligeia had seen him.

The daughter tied a long prayer-streamer gravely to the balcony, then took another from her brother's hunched lap and did likewise.  Mukhtar Prime himself was nowhere to be seen; which was not, Ligeia thought, surprising.  He was probably drunk, or else off somewhere creating yet another bastard.

Swarm rise! she shouted, and heard the echo of it in the headset a fraction of a second later.  Fortune favour Lionvarre! Shainault shall fall!

All around her, the Swarm rose.

Shainault shall fall! Shainault shall fall! shouted the voices in her ears.

Ligeia stared westward.  Shainault, she whispered to herself like a promise, "shall fall."

The room that Ligeia had been assigned aboard First Valentin Mukhtar was over-large and imperfectly aired.  However, it had a bed, a Retort-station and space for Ligeia to set up a dressing-table and a portable altar, and that was all that mattered.  Ligeia allowed herself the luxury of relaxing her neck and shoulders as Aveza, one of her riders, combed the dust out of her hair.

I thought the Mukhtar soldiers would be dirty brutes, but they're as spit and polish as anyone, said Aveza, sounding astonished about it. Oh, and if it's all right by you, Athalaiah will bodyguard you this evening at dinner, because Cempaka's got an upset stomach.  You don't think...

"No, I do not think a Gentileschi agent has crept aboard the land-barge and poisoned her.  Cempaka always has a fit of nerves before she sets out.  As long as she isn't indisposed into Karely Mukhtar's soup-bowl, I don't suppose anyone at all will care."

We did leave on bad terms with the Gentileschi.

By the Gentileschi she meant Dio Gentileschi, Ligeia's daughter's father.  Ligeia's neck and shoulders tensed up again.  She really hoped that the child didn't take after Dio.  It would be so embarrassing to have one's child grow up into an inefficient villain.

Gentileschi Prime's about to die and hasn't named an heir.  I imagine the possible candidates have more important things to do than come after me for offending one of their cousins, she said coolly.  And as for Dio, from what I know of his finances, I doubt he can afford to send assassins after me or anyone else.  We have more important matters at hand.

He was conspiring with the Malabranca, said Aveza with a theatrical shiver.  Everyone knows they don't keep Ordnance.

"He was conspiring with one Malabranca. Ligeia gave a frosty little smile.  Fortunately, one is all I need for my purposes."

"But then you'd be conspiring with the Malabranca, my lady, and everyone knows..."

They don't keep Ordnance, I know, said Ligeia, wondering whether this was how her sister Tzenni felt when conversing with everybody.  But do you doubt that I do?

Aveza thought it best not to answer that.  She got on with the business of braiding Ligeia's long blonde hair. "Aren't you ever nervous, Lady Boccamera?" she asked finally.

Yes, said Ligeia.  And then I work out what I'm doing wrong, and I stop it.  Nerves are just like hunger or pain, Aveza.  They're a tap on the shoulder from God.

Aveza looked overawed.  She coiled up Ligeia's plaited hair and started pinning it.  Do you really think God talks to you, Lady Boccamera?

Ligeia picked up a circlet with a drifting translucent veil from the dresser and handed it over her shoulder for Aveza to pin into her blonde hair. God talks to everyone.  It's our choice whether or not we listen.

There was a knock at the door.  It was Karely Mukhtar in a trim purple uniform.  The overhead light in the corridor made it absolutely impossible to tell where his receding blond hair ended and his skull began.

Ligeia found herself wondering whether he had got his looks from his mother, and if so whether Mukhtar Prime had loved her for her personality.  From what she'd seen of Mukhtar Prime she didn't think the feeling could possibly have been mutual.

He bowed and clicked his heels.  "Lady Boccamera.  Nyonya Medinacelli."

Ligeia wouldn't have remembered the surname of any of his subordinates.  She stood and adjusted the fit of the long panelled sleeveless green tunic she wore over her soft white leather coveralls, returned the bow without heel-clicking, which she'd always thought looked stupid on a female, and took his arm.

Karely said nothing.  Ligeia, who never felt the temptation to fill silences, was quite content.  The corridors were wide and eerily silent, and smelt of oil and dust.  They passed a squad of technicians in Mukhtar uniform, who saluted.

Some officers were clustered around a bay in the wall that seemed to be serving tea and eel-broth, a technician crouched beside a small but perfectly serviceable-looking Retort-station recessed into a wall.  Other than that the place looked deserted.  She supposed that the soldiers were all packed down on the lower levels.

Ligeia grew used to the silence, and was almost surprised when Karely turned to her as he offered to jump her down a short flight of steps and said, without preamble, I received a message this shortday morning enquiring whether I wished to abandon this mission and make haste urgently to Ailebroc, in order that I might be married to the epicon Blaise Gentileschi, whose dowry is, I am asked to believe, considerable.

I didn't know you were betrothed to them, said Ligeia neutrally.

I am not. His hands clasped around her waist and assisted her capably down the steps, then retracted as unemotionally as drone-parts.  I told them that I was honoured, but that because of a routine delay in transmission between Retorts I'd received the message on an inauspicious day in the eyes of the Church, and I'd have to forward their message to my religious advisor Prince Considine for his approval. He clasped his hands behind his back again, looking at the corridor ahead.  And then I did.

Ligeia made a noise halfway between a laugh and a gasp.  That was lovely.  The Gentileschi had tried to bribe the Bastard of Mukhtar, and the bastard in question had behaved with absolute perfection of manners under Ordnance and still embarrassed them thoroughly.  The Considine princesses would be gossiping about this for weeks.  Someone would probably write an opera about it and hire the Courtesan General to speak the epilogue.

She looked up curiously at Karely.  Why did you do it? she asked.  If you were a Gentileschi princelet's consort, no one would dare call you bastard again.

Karely gave the closest thing she'd ever seen in him to a smile: one corner of his thin mouth jerked up and then down again, like a twitch in a dead man's leg on a battlefield.  I'll always be a bastard.  I'm not a bastard for sale.

She waited to see whether he would say any more.  Finally, he did.  "The Gentileschi quoted a price that would have swallowed up five years' rents, just to attempt to cure my brother Leontius.  And then on the last day of the negotiations they said Coronath scrip wasn't good enough and they wanted Haut Desert, or Prémontré at a five per cent premium."

Ligeia had always thought the Bastard as mercenary and stubborn as his old rusalk of a father.  It had never occurred to her that he might care about his brother the way she cared about her sisters. I'm sorry, she said.

The words slid off him.  Had Ligeia been prone to embarrassment, she would have felt uncomfortable at having said them at all.  They were fifty silent metres down the corridor and she had assumed the matter was closed when he spoke again.

We discussed it amongst ourselves, Cairistiona and Leontius and I.

Ligeia had forgotten who Cairistiona was, but she wasn't going to admit it.  It was probably the legitimate sister.  I wasn't aware Leontius was capable of discussing anything with anybody.

So most people believe, who don't take the trouble to find out, said Karely, staring straight ahead down the corridor under those coffin-lid brows of his.  We agreed that this venture offered a good chance at raising the scrip for Leontius' treatment, without finding ourselves beholden to the Gentileschi again.  Make no mistake, Lady Boccamera.  I'm not doing this because of the old alliance between our Spires, or because of what some long-dead Malabranca said to some ancestor of mine. I'm doing it for my brother.

Thank you for taking me into your confidence, Bastard, said Ligeia with unimpaired calm.  You must give my regards to your sister Lady Cairistiona the next time you see her.  And your brother Lord Mukhtar, of course.

He looked at her as if she were a chess puzzle. It occurs to me, he said, that Shainault is known as the Spire that Walks.

Ligeia had no idea what he was getting at, but she wasn’t going to let her calm be disturbed by a little thing like that. I’ve seen it, she said. A remnant of the engines created by our forebears, and a reminder of the knowledge we have lost. She made a small signal with her hand, one that a member of the Order of the Neither would recognise.  He didn’t seem to notice.

And if you had those engines, what could you and your Calinda-class drones do? The muscles in his arm tensed under her hand.  "Or perhaps it would be more precise to ask – what could you not do?"

Why would an ally of mine worry about that? said Ligeia and smiled.  He looked as if his stomach had gone sour.  Sourer, at least, than usual."

My father is your ally, he said, and escorted her through a blast-door and into the cramped but echoing dining-room. I am merely his bastard.

Dinner was pleasant enough, if overly taken up with discussion of small-unit tactics.  Ligeia supposed it was preferable to Karely Mukhtar's only other topic of conversation, which was his numerous bastard half-siblings.

Ligeia could not imagine parcelling her heart out amongst so many.  In Karely's place, she would have sent the old man off to Ailebroc the first time he complained of prostate problems and arranged to have his tubes clipped whilst he was there.  She listened politely, and supposed that it was practice for when her daughter's nurse Peapod came to her with tales of Tristis' boring minor accomplishments.

Karely walked her back to her rooms, bowed at the doorway, and left her.  Ligeia sat down at the Retort-station.  She had a few messages; one contained a picture of her daughter Tristis' bodyguard Malik holding Tristis up and making her laugh, which she transferred to her picture-cube.

She hesitated over which picture to replace, and chose one of her favourite father, Numair Broc de Boccamera, smiling.  She already had a picture of Numair that she preferred; it had been taken in the rain, and he looked as unimpressed as a wet cat.

Ligeia checked that the channels were secure.  They were, as far as she could tell, though her skills as a Maker were adequate at best.  The Retort was Tzenni's, as much as the Swarm was Catha's.  But here Ligeia was, all the same, in charge of both.

She closed her eyes and dived into the alternet.  It was blockily rendered, and would grow even sketchier as they skimmed further away from the Coronath Retort.  She spoke a verse of Scripture.  In front of her, a long stripe of shadow appeared in the air; turned sideways, and became a grey doorway.  She stepped through it.

The alternet was even slower here; she was connecting not merely to the Coronath Retort but through it to the Retort where the Order of the Neither kept its own private alternet.  She didn't know which Retort that was, not being high enough in the Order.  She'd always assumed Ailebroc.

Figures swam murkily past her, about their own and the Order's business.  She ignored them.  She recited another Scripture verse, and her own console appeared in front of her, as comfortingly familiar as its physical self back at Lionvarre.  She formed the glyph for assistance between her fingers.  The distant Retort responded sluggishly.  The air juddered around her.  She didn't have much time before the connection to Shainault went down altogether.

Her assistant kerub appeared, a blank-faced, six-winged golden creature.  Ligeia felt better.  It was all very well for Tzenni to remember the glyphs for a couple of thousand Retort-commands, but she preferred to just give orders and leave the inner workings of the Retort to those who understood them.

I need to send a message, she said.  With the utmost urgency.  To milord Dimche Malabranca.  Tell him that I know exactly what dealings he made with Dio Gentileschi, and that if he does not wish me to share what I know with Malabranca Prime, he will wish to speak with me.

TWO

'Prime, your guest is sacred cargo.  You are bound by duty, one to another. When duty breaks down, order breaks down; and when order breaks down, the survival of the Spire itself is in peril.'

- Lukari Volkov (130-209 S.F), A Meditation Upon The Ordnance: Prime's Burden

6-1 Crystal, 432 S.F, Shainault

Is it too much to expect that for once all of my sons should be where I can see them? roared Kapellan Prime. The emphasis he put on too was enough to rattle the table, and once shook a vase of flowers off its shelf and into the hands of a waiting servant. Where's Kjarten?

Tzenni Boccamera looked down at her congealing breakfast.  She hadn't really wanted eel-broth that morning, and she wanted it even less now.

Kjarten left a note saying he'd gone on manoeuvres, and beyond that you know as much as the rest of us, so I don't know why you keep shouting about it, said Tzenni's sister Catha, who was utterly fearless even at breakfast. Take away this ham, someone, I think the Retort-template for it must have corrupted.

Kapellan Prime heaved his shoulders angrily forward and glared at her.  Catha stared coolly back at him.  Tzenni felt like hiding under the table.  She had never met a man who felt so entitled to things – to respect, to victory, to being treated like the rational person he clearly was not. 

Catha made a small motion of heart-and-brow.  It would have looked more respectful she hadn't been holding a forkful of ham.  "Voy sivitora, Father Hendryz."

"If you were my servant I'd have you whipped."

"If you'd given me the option of being whipped, rather than killing my scouts for what I led them into, I'd have t-taken it," said Catha.

I don't doubt it, girl.  You're brave enough to make a mistake like that.  Once.

"I was brave enough to think you'd hold to Ordnance when it came to the treatment of your prisoners. Once."

I offered you compensation for what happened to the Medinacelli boy, and I offered you and your sister full guests' rights at Shainault.  I don't know what you want beyond that.

Catha opened her mouth to tell him.  Tzenni felt sick, and wondered to herself whether being Kapellan Prime’s acknowledged guest actually was any better than having stayed locked up in the brig.

You do know what she wants beyond that, my love, said Kapellan Prime's first wife Lady Rosalind Swaine, sprinkling candied rose-petals on her porridge.  She wants to marry our son.

There was an explosive silence.  The servant rearranged the flowers.  Several more attendants in livery began marching in with salvers carrying small, steaming bowls of the nasty medicinal-tasting tea that Kapellan Prime favoured with his breakfast. Tzenni pushed her plate away.  Catha made a long arm and snagged it for herself. 

Kapellan Prime's second son Alister looked up from the immense plate of breakfast he was consuming.  The bacon alone could have fed a family in the lower corridors for a week.  Catha is my wife by oath and will soon be my wife by Prime's Word, he said flatly.  I happen to think it's the most sensible thing any Boccamera or any Kapellan's done in the last two hundred years, but whether you agree or not, it's not open for discussion.

I will not be spoken to that way at my own breakfast-table, said Kapellan Prime.

In that case I've finished my breakfast. Alister shoved the plate aside. Your servant, Prime.  Mother Rosalind.  Lady Tzenni.

Can I have the rest of his bacon? said twelve-year-old Philip-August Kapellan, reaching for the rose-petal sprinkles.

You can have his inheritance, if he keeps this up, growled Kapellan Prime.  One son married to a poor relation, one marrying a Boccamera, and two promised to the sun-cursed Hawkwoods.  You'll have to marry well and retrieve our fortunes, Philip-August.  And be a Maker, which is more than your brother Kjarten ever managed.

Kjarten's just s-showing off, said Catha indistinctly around a mouthful of ham and broth.  Kjarten's always just showing off.  Wherever he's gone, he'll come strutting back into the Spire as soon as he's good and ready.  You'll see.

How kind of you to instruct us on our own adopted son's well-being, said Lady Rosalind politely.

Catha waved her fork in the air.  You're welcome.

I suppose the joy of your conversation over the breakfast-table will be one of my comforts over the years, said Lady Rosalind.  And that of your sister, until she leaves us.  Unless she too plans to marry one of my sons?

Tzenni wondered how it was that she had lived life this far on the assumption that the world was made up of atoms and molecules, because as far as she could tell at present the world consisted entirely of her own embarrassment.  She would go home from Shainault, she told herself.  She would not think about anyone she’d kissed at a dance here, or anyone she’d admitted to herself she was falling in love with, or not contradicted Innes about when her bodyguard teased her, or…

One of my sons, Lady Rosalind had said. Tzenni held on to that as if it was the single uncorrupted copy of an otherwise hopelessly mangled template in the Retort.  She definitely wasn’t interested in marrying any of Lady Rosalind’s sons.  And now she had to speak up, because if she didn’t, Catha would.  She raised her eyes and looked Lady Rosalind in the face. I am not betrothed to anyone.  Nor can I be, without the word of Boccamera Prime.

How curious that doesn’t apply to your sister.

At the other end of the long table, among the body-servants and the higher-ranking household staff, there was a sudden stumble and a crash.  Tzenni wasn’t sure how it had happened, but a gangly lad in livery seemed to have tripped over something, sending the precious china bowl of tea on his salver flying.

In the midst of it all Tzenni’s bodyguard Innes Liang, apparently without looking, stretched out one long arm behind their neighbour’s shoulder.  The bowl fell neatly into their palm.

Innes kicked their chair back and approached the head of the table, bowl politely held in two cupped hands, head lowered, soft blue hair making a curtain against their high cheekbones.  Did someone misplace their bowl of bitterness?

Innes stood behind Tzenni’s chair.  She resisted the urge to lean back against them.  Quite apart from anything else, she suspected the Kapellans would have misinterpreted it. I don’t know whose bowl of bitterness it is, she said, and turned her soft gaze on Kapellan Prime.  It isn’t mine.

Kapellan Prime glared at her with an expression that she was surprised didn’t make the flowers in the vase wilt.  Boccamera… he began.

Kapellan Prime’s eldest son Majed, who had been quietly consuming enormous amounts of eel-broth and conversing with his very pregnant wife, pushed his chair back and rose to his feet.  Father, we can keep the peace for another few longdays, surely? For Alister’s sake.

For Alister’s sake, Kapellan Prime growled. If it wasn’t a breach of Ordnance, I’d abandon the pack of you to do as you please and set the Spire walking into the iceworks until it ran out of fuel.

No, you wouldn’t, said Catha unexpectedly.  Whatever else you are, you’re a man of Ordnance when it comes to your own people.

Praise from a Boccamera. He shoved his chair back and reached for his bowl of tea with one enormous red-knuckled hand.  "Now I have lost my appetite.  May the Prophet save us all."

Why on earth does he drink that horrible tea? Tzenni asked Innes as they walked back to their apartments.  Is it something to do with being a Prophecyman? I know they don’t swear oaths, or eat certain kinds of fish.

I think he’s a little ecumenical on the swearing oaths part. Innes paced along beside her, tall and floppy-haired, their hand never straying far from the kinjal at their hip.  And it seems no one’s gossiping about you and milord Latinus Malabranca, because if they were, someone would have told Kapellan Prime’s wives by now.  And that’s better luck than we deserve, given that you go about kissing him at parties.

They passed a small shrine decorated with strings of painted popcorn and a portrait of some Kapellan ancestor or other looking smug. Tzenni put her tongue out at it.  "I can’t think about that now.  I can’t think about him now.  I have to keep a promise I made to a ghost."

Kjarten Helm took a long breath, then another.  He could feel his chin tucked down against his chest.  He could feel his drawn-up knees.  He could feel his arms wrapped protectively about himself.  He wriggled his toes experimentally, and discovered that he could feel them too.

He tapped his fingers against the opposite shoulders, first to one side, then to the other.  Not dead, then, nor scrambled into small and only notionally animate twitching bits.  It was a relief to be sure of that.  He opened his eyes.

It was still dark.  Or possibly he had been assembled correctly except for the mechanism of his eyelids.  He pressed his eyes with his fingers, found his own eyelashes and felt a wobbly and enraging relief. Kjarten scrambled to his feet, finding a handhold that felt like a wooden shelf. He wasn’t on the Hawkwood land-barge any more.  That thing they called a portable had worked, and flung him somewhere else like a kerub travelling through the Retort.

At least he’d escaped the Hawkwoods.  He hadn’t been kicked out to die in the iceworks either, not unless the shambling beasts that inhabited the place had had the decorators in. But this could still be the Spire of Civitavecchia.  That… there weren’t bad enough words to describe her… Sorszenna Hawkwood had mentioned Civitavecchia.  She had lied about just about everything else, but maybe she’d told the truth about that

If it was Civitavecchia, it might be a relief.  He could leave his failed venture against the Hawkwoods and everything else involving Shainault behind.  He wouldn’t have to face his brother Jahsvir over their failed plan to elope with two young ladies who were most definitely not of Hawkwood lineage.  He wouldn’t have to face that… worse words than were deserved by Sorszenna Hawkwood… Façade Blue, who lived like a ghost in the Retort.

He wouldn’t have to face his father. Somewhere in the Spire there would be a Courtesanat niece-house; and where there was a niece-house, there would be people willing to do a favour for the Courtesan-General's nephew.  His fingers skittered along the shelf, hoping for a bag of coin, or better yet, a lacquer materia-box.  Failing that, he'd settle for a bowl of cold half-eaten noodles, or even a cup of water.

Instead, his questing fingers skidded across something that felt horribly like withered skin.  He jerked his hand back and cradled it against his chest, his heart hammering double-triple time; and realised belatedly that what he had touched was the leather-bound spine of a book.

He pivoted on his feet, smelling leather and resin and glue.  A book in a bookshelf in the back room of a bookshop, curse his hammering heart, and curse him, too, for a fool.

That didn’t prove anything.  They had bookshops in Civitavecchia.

Wherever he was, it smelt like Shainault, but for all he knew all Spires did.  He had been born in Venexia, but he didn't remember any smells from the place except for milk and his mother's perfume.

Kjarten felt his way round the room.  Just as his fingertips stumbled onto a doorframe, he felt a great sucking silence in his ears, as if he were flying on a suncloth glider and had dived too sharply.  The floor shook under his feet.  Kjarten reached for the wall to steady himself.  Was the Spire Walking? If it was, surely the air should be full of sirens and safety exhortations…

The silence gave way to noise.  The floor bucked under him.  It reminded him of the first time he'd been put on a vrykol's back.  He had been two years old, and it was a big, ill-tempered vrykol.  He fell against the door, caught his hip on the handle, and fell on through the doorway into a bigger, slightly less gloomy space.

Kjarten lay still until he was sure the floor wasn't going to start moving again.  He could hear sirens hammering far away.