He looked up from his papers at the breathless earl who’d burst into the room and broken the news. The earl’s name was Droffo, from Shilda, if Oramen was not mistaken. Meanwhile a couple of the palace servants piled into the room behind the nobleman, also breathing hard and looking flushed. Oramen sat back in his seat. He noticed it was dark outside. A servant must have lit the room’s lamps.
“Dead?” he said. “Both of them? Are you sure?”
“If all reports are to be believed, sir. From the army command and from tyl Loesp himself. The King is — the King’s body is returning on a gun carriage, sir,” Droffo told him. “Sir, I’m sorry. It’s said poor Ferbin was cut in half by a shell. I am so sorry, sir, sorry beyond words. They are gone.”
Oramen nodded thoughtfully. “But I am not king?”
The earl, who to Oramen looked dressed half for court and half for war, looked confused for a moment. “No, sir. Not until your next birthday. Tyl Loesp will rule in your name. As I understand it.”
“I see.”
Oramen took a couple of deep breaths. Well, now. He had not prepared himself for this eventuality. He wasn’t sure what to think. He looked at Droffo. “What am I supposed to do? What is my duty?”
This, too, seemed to flummox the good earl, just for an instant. “Sir,” he said, “you might ride out to meet the King’s bier.”
Oramen nodded. “I might indeed.”
“It is safe, sir; the battle is won.”
“Yes,” Oramen said, “of course.” He rose, and looked beyond Droffo to one of the servants. “Puisil. The steam car, if you would.”
“Take a little while to get steam up,” Puisil said. “Sir.”
“Then don’t delay,” Oramen told him reasonably. The servant turned to go just as Fanthile, the palace secretary appeared. “A moment,” Fanthile told the servant, causing Puisil to hesitate, his gaze flicking between the young prince and the elderly palace secretary.
“A charger might be the better choice, sir,” Fanthile told Oramen. He smiled and bowed to Droffo, who nodded back at the older man. Fanthile was balding and his face was heavily lined, but he was still tall and carried his thin frame proudly.
“You think?” Oramen said. “The car will be quicker, surely.”
“The mount would be more immediate, sir,” Fanthile said. “And more fitting. One is more public on a mount. The people will need to see you.”
One can stand up in the back of my father’s steam car, Oramen considered saying. But he saw the sense in what was being proposed.
“Also,” Fanthile continued, seeing the prince hesitate and deciding to press, “the road may be crowded. A mount will slip through spaces—”
“Yes, of course,” Oramen said. “Very well. Puisil, if you would.”
“Sir.” The servant left.
Oramen sighed and boxed his papers. His day had largely been taken up with working on a novel form of musical notation. He had been kept, with the rest of the household, in the cellars of the palace during the early morning, when the Deldeyn had first been expected to break out from the nearby Tower, in case things went badly and they had to flee through subterranean tunnels to a fleet of steam vehicles waiting ready in the city’s lower reaches, but then they had been allowed out when, as expected, the enemy had been met with such prepared force they had soon ceased to be a threat to the city and their attention became focused instead on their own survival.
Mid-morning, he’d been persuaded to climb to a balustraded roof with Shir Rocasse, his tutor, to look out over the stepped palace grounds and the higher reaches of the hilltop city towards the Xiliskine Tower and the battleground that — telegraph reports now stated — stretched almost all around it.
But there had been little to see. Even the sky had appeared entirely devoid of action. The great battle-flocks of caude and lyge that had filled the ancient airs and made the battles of yesteryear seem so romantic were largely gone now; consigned — reduced — to scout patrols, messengering, artillery spotting, and raids that were little better than brigandry. Here on the Eighth such flying warbeasts were widely held to have no significant part to play in modern ground battles, largely due to the machinery and accompanying tactics King Hausk himself had introduced.
There had been rumours that the Deldeyn had steam-powered flying machines, but if these had been present today they must have been in small numbers or had little obvious effect. Oramen had been mildly disappointed, though he thought the better of saying so to his old tutor, who was as patriotic, race-conscious and WorldGodly as any might wish. They came down from the roof, for what were supposed to be lessons.
Shir Rocasse was nearing retirement but had anyway realised during the last short-year that he had little to teach Oramen now, unless it was by rote straight out of a book. These days, the prince preferred to use the palace library unmediated, though he still listened to the old scholar’s advice, not entirely out of sentimentality. He had left Rocasse in the library, wrapt by some dusty set of scrolls, and made his way here, to the round room, where he was even less likely to be disturbed. Well, until now.
“Oramen!” Renneque ran in, darting past Droffo and Fanthile and flinging herself at his feet in a derangement of torn clothing. “I just heard! It can’t be true!” Renneque, the lady Silbe, hooked her arms round his feet, hugging tight. She looked up, her young face livid with tears and grief, brown hair spilling. “Say it’s not? Please? Not both. Not the King and Ferbin too! Not both. Not both. For anything, not both!”
Oramen leant down gently and pulled her up until she knelt before him, her eyes wide, her brows pulled in, her jaw working. He had always thought her rather attractive, and been envious of his elder brother, but now he thought she looked almost ugly in this surfeit of grief. Her hands, having been deprived of the patent reassurance of his feet, now clutched at a plump little World symbol on a thin chain round her neck, twisting it round and round in her fingers, the filigree of smaller shells inside the spherical outer casing all revolving, sliding back and forth, continually adjusting.
Oramen felt quite mature, even old, all of a sudden. “Now, Renneque,” he said, taking her hands and patting them. “We all have to die.”
The girl wailed, throwing herself to the floor again.
“Madam,” Fanthile said, sounding kindly but embarrassed and reaching down to her, then turning to see Mallarh, one of the ladies of court — also looking tearful and distracted — appear in the doorway. Mallarh, perhaps twice Renneque’s age, face pitted with the tiny scars of a childhood infection, bit her lip when she saw the younger woman weeping on the wooden floor. “Please,” Fanthile said to Mallarh, indicating Renneque.
Mallarh persuaded Renneque to rise, then to exit.
“Now, sir…” Fanthile said, before turning to see Harne, the lady Aelsh, the King’s present consort and mother to Ferbin, standing in the doorway, her eyes red, fair hair straggled and unkempt but clothing untorn, her face set and stance steady. Fanthile sighed. “Madam—” he began.
“Just confirm it, Fanthile,” the lady said. “Is it true? The two? Both of mine?”
Fanthile looked at the floor for a moment. “Yes, my lady. Both gone. The King most certainly, the prince by all accounts.”
The lady Aelsh seemed to sag, then slowly drew herself up. She nodded, then made as though to turn away, before stopping to look at Oramen. He looked straight back at her. He rose from his seat, still held by that gaze.
Though they had both sought to conceal it, their mutual dislike was no secret in the palace. His was based on his own mother having been banished in Harne’s favour, while hers was generally assumed to be caused by Oramen’s mere existence. Still, he wanted to say that he was sorry; he wanted to say (at least when he thought more clearly and logically about it later), that he felt for her double loss, that this was an unlooked-for and an unwanted promotion of his status, and that she would suffer no diminution of her own rank by any action or inaction of his either during the coming regency or following his own ascension. But her expression seemed to forbid him from speech, and perhaps even dared him to find anything that might be said that she would not find in some way objectionable.