Nowadays the Empire felt safer with less forceful governance, and mistrusted local authorities who pointed to distant or future causes of trouble—or worse, local officials who suggested doing something about them. The powers of the Empire listened to nothing that would mean real revision of the Way Things Were.
That philosophy had gone on a long, long time, in a state of slow drift, slow rot.
But in the way of old Empires, once the heart began to soften, once certain strong-willed people living their lives out between the rotten core and the frayed edge began to understand that the Long Night could come down on them in their lifetimes, they found they had not been in the Empire long enough to be philosophical about it all.
They were inclined to fight against the Long Night.
And they might be barbarians, a generation back, but they had committed everything to the existence of the Empire. They saw the good in it, and they saw the alternative far more clearly than the denizens of the capital could see it—the red age, the blood age, the forever-dark to follow, with fire and with killing. They had fought their way out of it—and they were not ready to sit still and slide back into it.
So they stiffened their backbones and sharpened their wits and determined that an Empire rotten at the heart could survive, if wit and courage of its outliers stiffened resistence all about it. They would become the armor keeping an old, old creature alive and whole.
Dominic Flandry had bent events in the Empire’s favor. In an action fairly minor as the Empire viewed things, he had set up barbaric Scotha as a new and progressive part of the Empire, weaving a new patch onto an old situation. He had outwitted, outmaneuvered, and outplanned the opposition; he had set a new ruler on the throne, which had definitely been important for the Scothan Sector, and for the Hydran Quadrant which contained it. Where Dominic Flandry was now—whether he had gone off to the far edges of the Empire to devise some clever solution for its woes in another direction—possibly dealing with the Patmara affair, or the Mersians—no one locally knew.
But there had grown up a little cabal in the academy at the heart of the Hydran Quadrant, on this side of the Empire.
Four young diplomats belonged to this odd group. They were four very diverse individuals, a man and three women, classmates, or at least their academic careers had somewhat overlapped, and they found common interests and a common philosophy, in this artificial world distant from all their origins, working in the diplomatic service in various capacities. They all had a last name—not universal in the Empire, and it was all the same name, which was not at all as common as, say, Smith, Ngy, or No’b’Ar-Grisigis.
In this case, it was a name of legend in the Quadrant. The last name was Flandry, and it was not a common name in Scotha Sector, or Mardier Sector, or in Lussanche, or in Modi, or anywhere about these parts.
These four were human—well, mostly so. The junior of the four was a brown-eyed lad, all human, with a mop of ringlets and, lately, a mustache—the three senior were women, had ringlets more or less original, one short-cut and red-brown, one long and lustrously dark; and one, well, the hair had been white-blond from the start and the owner refused to say whether it was original, but one suspected . . . and the eyes—well, the eyes. All the lot of Flandrys had brown eyes except Audra, the young woman from Scotha, who had followed the fashion and had eyes as yellow as a G4 sun, a matter of some amusement to her half-brother and -sisters.
They all looked really not a thing alike—especially the yellow-eyed one, whose ears were somewhat odd, and whose brow had two dainty but distinct horns at the hairline.
They all were lightly built, not so tall—and as a group one would say they were a good-looking foursome, though they were not remarkable, not even the Scothian. But when you saw more than one of them sitting in a general meeting, or when they gathered, as they did once weekly, at The White Tree Pub, opposite the Quadrant Offices, you took a second glance.
Then if you’d ever known Dominic Flandry, you might take a third look, especially at the youngest, the young man, who was the very spit of the elder Flandry in his youth.
And when, deep in the secrecy of the Quadrant Offices, this four talked together, it sounded as light as their conversations in the pub, but life and death sometimes figured in it; and they talked about places on the edge of the great dark, and named names that should not be named elsewhere.
Not all of them had been on track for high positions in State. But the dark-haired eldest had been, and she had snared all the others. You wanted a favor from the State Department—she could do it.
And the blonde girl—Audra was her name, Audra Flandry, had come to her when she had needed the biggest of favors, and an assignment otherwise not likely to come to her.
“Heralt’s my brother,” Audra had said, showing a copy of a letter which had taken its sweet time getting to her. “Heralt’s mine.”
“You don’t want to rule Sotha,” the eldest had said.
Audra had shaken her head no, and yellow eyes flicked down and up, startling in their intent, under tilted brows. “No way do I want to rule Sotha. But I want this mission. I want a ship. I want everything I can get.”
Her mother, by a curious twist of fate, was Gunli, late queen of Sotha. Her youngest half-brother was Heralt, current king. And how that brother had gotten to be king was not a pleasant story.
“Your half-brother,” the eldest said, having read the letter—having, in fact, been the one to get it to her half-sister, “wants you to come back and marry one of his enemies.”
“His ally, actually.”
“An ally who’d betray him in a heartbeat. And you don’t certainly mean to go through with a marriage. With a barbarian lord who probably doesn’t bathe regularly—let alone accept Empire law?”
“I want a ship,” Audra said. “I’ve never asked a favor. I’m asking it now.”
The matter occasioned a meeting of the four, over tea, in a quiet, secure room, in Quadrant Central, and without the direct knowledge of persons highest-up in the Quadrant.
“You don’t want Sotha,” said another of the four. “And surely you don’t want to be queen of Wigan. So what are you thinking?”
Audra scowled. “That my half-brother is no fool.”
“No, more’s the pity,” the youngest said. “He’s ambitious, he’s just come back from exile and killed your uncle—”
“Who had it coming,” Audra said, and her face grew cold in contemplation of the history she knew. “Empire law wouldn’t let me deal with it. Not without resigning. And I wouldn’t. But—”
“But now you will?” the redhead asked, while the senior of them said nothing.
“No such thing. I have no intention of marrying the King of Wigan.”
“This half-brother—” the redhead said.
“I have every intent of dealing with this. I couldn’t, before. Now I have an appeal from inside Scothania.”
“That wants you to come back and marry a stranger who doesn’t bathe!”
Audra shoved back from the table. The youngest put out his hand and laid it on hers, calming.
“Audra’s entitled to have this mission,” he said quietly. “Audra could be Queen of Scotha if she’d wanted to.”
“Not just if I wanted to,” Audra said. “I could renounce the Academy and go—or go with that piece of paper asking me to come in.” She pushed away and walked to the side of the room, to the sideboard with its teapot, and poured a second cup, in silence.
“She has the right,” the dark-haired senior said. “She has the absolute right.”
“Trade a career the Empire for a planet with its problems?” the redhead asked, shaking her head. “I’m not fighting her getting a mission. I’m fighting her going out there and getting killed.”
“They killed her mother,” the young man said quietly. “Herse did. Killed her older brother. Killed the whole family except her mother got her out.”
“Except this boy Heralt,” the redhead said.
“This boy who’s now King,” the young man said. “Herse never got his hands on him. But who knows if he is Gunli’s son? Or whose son he is. He’s got the throne. He’s smarter than Herse and his lot. But now he’s making demands?”
Audra came back to the table with her cup of bitter tea, sat down. “My mother was pregnant,” Audra said in a low voice. “She got me to the spaceport. She reigned another sixteen months. She sent Heralt away with his nurse, up to the mountains. It cost the nurse her own son. Herse’s assassins arrived sooner than anyone thought. They took the nurse’s son away and killed him. I was in Antizonen, with no one, no help, not even papers. No one went with me. Heralt was in a stone hut with a grieving nurse. That was the way things were until my mother’s letter got to Quadrant and got me into the Academy. Herse had done for Cerdic, and that was the last of us. So Herse thought. Until Heralt came back.”
“We think it’s Heralt,” the redhead said.
“It is Heralt. The Frithians insist not. But the southerners have no doubts. And I don’t. The whole South rose up to put him in Iuthaagar.”
“All that’s well and good,” the redhead said. “The whole South supports him. And if he is or isn’t, he’d be fine so long as they think he’s Gunli’s son. He’s very cleverly survived in office, surrounded himself by men he can trust. But he’s ruling no differently than Herse. Herse took Scotha back to the old pattern, let the warlords take over in the provinces—he undid all Cerdic’s years of progress in sixteen decrees. I’ve been studying it. Rights for women were suppressed. The right of trial by jury’s overturned. The boy’s been reared in a hut, catch as catch can. His neighbors were hunters and his society were egg-diggers. Now his notion of ruling is to take Herse’s laws as they stand and accept the treaty with Wigan and follow through on the royal marriage. Only he’s run short of relatives and his advisors are hillfolk, no match for the politics in the capital. The place is a mess.”
“And the Empire is doing nothing,” Audra said. “I asked. Without this paper—I can’t go into the situation. With it—miserable as it is—I can. And if the Empire won’t do anything to set Scotha right, I will.”
“Solo?” the youngest asked. “A mission like this one? Audra, if you go in there, you won’t have protection, except us. The Empire won’t go in to get you out, either. And to have our sister kidnapped the way our father was, and married to some parasite-infested barbarian—”
“Not quite that bad,” Audra said. “I do honestly believe he bathes.”
“Audra, Audra,” the youngest said. “You honestly can’t mean to do this.”
“I do. I’ve pulled in favors, I’ve made the Empire promises.” A glance at the eldest. “And I’ve got a ship.”
“What did you promise?” the redhead asked.
“The usual. One soul, slightly used.”
“Don’t joke.”
“I have a ship. That’s what I need. I have a ship, and I have what my father gifted me.”
“And if you’re wrong about this boy, Audra? The boy’s asked you home for the only reason a Scothan male thinks you’re valuable, probably because his city advisors are still following Herse’s blueprint. So he’s got his revenge on Herse, but on his record of half a year in office, he’s made exactly the wrong moves, no different than Herse did, which says where his advice is coming from. He’s mobilized the fleet. He’s refused an Imperial Envoy. Your rights? You’ll have none. You’ll be in the same cell our father occupied inside an hour of setting foot outside the ship. He probably has no clue what the Empire could do if it did come after you—which the Empire won’t, because it knows it’d trigger the Confederacy to make a move. The King of Wigan has offered an alliance, a marriage is the price of it, and the Empire’s no real protection against the King of Wigan’s allies. ‘Pay us now or have the tide roll over you.’ And you’re the payment. More than that: Scotha’s going to be the payment, Scotha and its whole little federation, and either Heralt’s advisors are stupid, or they’re in the Confederacy’s pay. Its fleet will join Wigan and Wigan will join the Confederacy, and the Empire’s going to lose another chunk of real estate.”
“I didn’t get a promise of backup.” She smiled, did Audra Flandry. Then the yellow eyes flashed. “Yet Heralt’s not a fool.”
“If you leave that ship,” the youngest said, “you’re out of touch.”
“He won’t respect you. He won’t respect any woman. That’s the history of that world. I’m sorry. You’re the only thing that’s redeemed it. If the Empire doesn’t think the whole Scothan Sector is worth a war with the Confederacy—you’re fighting a losing battle.”
“Scothian ethics,” Audra said. “Kinship matters. And maybe I am Scothian enough. This is my mother’s son. And it’s our father’s work I’m in there to save. And if the Empire were sure Scotha would stand firm—it would think it could stop the Confederacy.”
There was a small silence at the table.
“Point,” the youngest said, looking very much like their father at the moment.
“It’s a gamble,” the dark-haired woman said. “A huge one.”
A shrug. “I’m Scothian. Gambling is the national vice.”
“I still think you should accept assistance. You’re to call for it, if you find a need and a chance.”
“The orders say I’ll have Fiona and Fleance again, to manage the ship. That’s enough.”
“Oh, fine,” the redhead said, “Fleance will cause a riot.”
“He can have that effect,” the youngest said.
“Sister,” said the redhead, “you’re to take care. Hear? Or we’ll take leave and come after you.”
“Don’t count on it,” the dark-haired woman said. “The Empire grants ships when it wants something. Not when one of us gets in over his head.”
“Three Flandrys can’t bargain themselves one more ship, out of our own government?” the youngest said.
“Won’t have to,” Audra said. “I have faith in you three. Have that much faith in me. And I promise you on a stack of state secrets that I won’t need rescuing. I’m a Flandry. But my brother’s at least my mother’s son. And that’s of some consequence.—Dinner at the Tree, tonight? All of us? And in a happy mood, if you please. No talk of marriages—or rescues.”
Fiona Kojobi handled the details all the way—dealt with the Empire pilot and two-man crew, blew them past outbound customs, fed the system the pertinent lies about destination: the Empire lied to its own officials, just occasionally.
Fleance skittered about on metal spider legs, nosing into the ship’s workings and the diplomatic records Fiona was creating. He plugged in, tweaked this, tweaked that, produced reports, and flashed with lights, red ones turning to green, which let you read Fleance’s mood. Fleance was not a conversationalist.
Neither was Fiona, who was Asturian, a polymath, had a mane of tiger-striped hair, and spent her spare time writing music, playing obscure instruments, and occasionally gambling with the crew.
The pairing worked out. Neither was Audra a conversationalist, when she was prepping for a mission, and she was prepping as hard as she’d ever prepped, for the biggest solo assignment of her life . . . refreshing her command of the language, settling her mind into a culture she had not experienced in any but a sheltered environment, under a different regime, and as a child under the age of understanding.
She’d lived her first five years on Scotha, during Cerdic’s reign, behind screens, behind veils, tended only by her mother. Then on one day, during the biennial visit from Quadrant Records, her mother, who had been pregnant at the time, had turned inexplicably grim, had seized her by the hand, taken her from her toys, and taken her to the strange man, the Terran. Her mother had stayed behind. Her mother’s guards had seen Audra and the Quadrant representative to the landing zone, and all the while Audra had thought it a little scary, but something she had to do, the way she stood at attention in formal audiences and waved at people in public appearances. She’d thought her mother wanted her
to see the ship she’d asked about, and that it was supposed to be a treat. An adventure.
But it hadn’t been a tour. They’d gone up the lift, there’d been a sharp pain in her back, and she’d gotten dizzy, and by the time she knew anything the ship had started making noises, loud bangs and thumps, as she’d later learned, the sounds of a ship detaching lines and preparing its departure.
To this day, Audra didn’t remember much of the representative, the ship, the voyage to Quadrant Central—just one woman who’d given her a sandwich and a drink, the first woman besides her mother who had ever seen her face without the veils, a woman who’d dried her tears with rough swipes of a napkin and then told her they were in space and she was going to Prism, and that her mother had given her a letter.
She hadn’t finished the sandwich. She still had that letter. Her mother had written it by hand, wishing her to be a good girl, and study hard at school, and make her proud. That it was a chance for her to go into her father’s sort of work. And that they would see each other in a few years.
The next ship to land back on Scotha met with a changed situation. Her mother was dead, Cerdic was dead, and her uncle Herse was King. New austerity laws had gone into effect, unraveling everything King Cerdic had done. Scholars disappeared, books were erased, records were locked away, and after a good deal of difficulty and stalling about landing clearances in the first place, the Empire’s representative had stayed to his ship and left the world in haste.
Every two years for the next eight years, a ship from Quadrant had gone to the planet, but stayed to contact in orbit. The representative filled out a meager report, with no direct observation. Trade ceased. The fragile web of Empire connections that had begun to function in Cerdic’s time had unraveled in Herse’s.
Audra had little word of any of it, beyond her mother’s death. She put aside the veils, put aside Scothian dress, and adopted her father’s heritage. At twelve, she entered Quadrant academy, and interned her last two years with the diplomatic service. What she heard of her homeworld had been only maddening. Her assignments had been many, elsewhere in the Quadrant, and minor—routine and minor, every one.