Most of the reminders came from the desperate battle that had nearly killed him, and that had brought him unsought fame and advancement, but he had acquired newer ones here and there as well, over the years. The life of a Knight of the Sphere was not one of peace and quiet, no matter how much a person might try to make it turn out that way. That was another reason Anna never liked to see him go away from home, although she wouldn’t say as much aloud. She was always afraid that she’d end up visiting him in the hospital afterward.
Jonah had offered more than once to find a less hazardous line of work. His heart, though, wasn’t in the offer and Anna knew it. He valued too much the way that a Knight could act directly to redress grievances and do justice when needed, instead of having to humbly petition some higher-level bureaucrat who might give or withhold needed help, purely in order to serve a political agenda.
The rulers of The Republic meant well. They were men and women of—for the most part—high ideals. But they were a long way removed, most of them, from those other men and women whose lives they sometimes expended in the service of the government.
As usual, the inner voice of conscience and reason (which sounded, during the times Jonah was not at home, a great deal like Anna) took the opportunity to point out that the rulers of The Republic were no longer “them,” but “us.” Jonah Levin was as much a Paladin—one of the seventeen men and women who ruled The Republic at its highest levels, and from whose numbers the next Exarch would be elected—as was Heather GioAvanti or Victor Steiner-Davion.
That still didn’t mean he liked freezing rain and snow, or even bright cold days like this one, when the sky was an intense and pitiless blue and the sunlight off Lake Geneva blinded his eyes without giving warmth. He had known that the change was coming. He’d packed for it, and had adjusted the climate controls in his quarters on the DropShip during the long transit.
Nevertheless, he was cold, toes and fingers and nose and ears. He was glad to reach the small residential hotel on the Rue Simon-Durand that had been his preferred lodging place in Geneva since he was first made a Knight and started having to make periodic visits to The Republic’s capital city.
He passed through the doors and entered the pocket-size lobby and guest parlor, made warm by efficient central heating and by the psychological effect of the briskly burning faux logs on the small hearth. The crackling fire was only molded ceramic heating elements and a specialized tri-vid display—preserving clean air above the city was too important to allow for the real thing—but it made an effective imitation. Jonah resisted the urge to go stand in front of it and toast his extremities back to normal, and went straight to the front desk instead.
Madame Flambard herself was at the desk. The plump, gray-haired woman broke into a smile at the sight of him.
“Monsieur Jonah—I mean, Paladin Levin! It’s an honor to have you back with us.”
Jonah could not help smiling in return. “You have a room, then? I sent word from Belgorod—”
“Yes, yes. We were all so surprised—we hadn’t thought we’d see you here again, now that you’re not just a Knight anymore.”
He shook his head reprovingly. “Nobody is just a Knight.”
“Of course not. But Paladins—”
“Should give up staying in places where they’re known and comfortable, and go stay somewhere big and impressive instead? No, Madame, the Pension Flambard suits me very well.”
He took the key-card and ascended to the small room up under the eaves, which had been his favorite ever since he first came to Geneva as a new-made—and far from wealthy—Knight. The garments he had bought from the tailor in Belgorod would arrive later by van from the transit hub. Anything important or private had come with him in his single small bag.
He secured the bag and its contents in the wall safe, then turned to the combination desk, communications console, and entertainment center that took up most of the space in the room not occupied by the bed.
Madam Flambard’s grasp of the priorities was yet another thing that Jonah approved of. Most of the Pension Flambard’s furnishings were either genuinely old or deliberately retro, but its communications consoles were always kept current with the state of the art. Jonah connected to the government’s secure network and entered the password that gave him access to the Paladin-level files and private areas. He needed to get an idea of the general state of affairs—and not just the commonly available information, either—before he talked to anybody.
Genevan politics at the Knight level had been full of old feuds and secret alliances, private antipathies and conflicting agendas, and he had no reason to believe that things would be different now that his rank was higher. So far as he knew, being named a Paladin had never made a man—or a woman—any more righteous than he or she was before, and even people of goodwill and good intentions could be bitterly divided on what course of action was best for The Republic.
He went to the situation updates on the Prefectures first. With regret, he noted the changes in the format there. Updates were no longer available in as close to real time as to make no difference. Instead, entries were tagged with the date of their first report and the date of their confirmation, and sorted by provenance and reliability—direct transmission, official government data disc or other storage medium, commercial or personal data medium, verbal report from official source, verbal report from outside source, and so on.
Scanning the entries, he found himself missing Anna with a real and sudden pang. She had always been much better than he was at disentangling complex webs of hearsay and pulling loose the threads of truth and relevance.
Intelligence analysts do this sort of thing all the time, he told himself sternly. So can you.
The hot spots of the moment appeared to be Prefectures II and III. Former Prefect Katana Tormark and her supporters in the Dragon’s Fury were making serious inroads there. Katana made as formidable an enemy of The Republic as she had made a supporter, and her defection—nobody wanted to use the painful word “betrayal”—had shocked a number of people who’d thought that her loyalty was absolute.
And maybe it still was, Jonah thought. Perhaps Katana’s loyalty had always been given to something whose true nature only she knew, and which she didn’t see as embodied in The Republic anymore.
He turned from the Dragon’s Fury to Clan Wolf. The Steel Wolf faction had been active recently, but at the moment appeared quiescent. Reports had come into Kervil several Terran months back that Prefect Kal Radick, the Wolves’ de facto leader in The Republic, was dead in a challenge, and that his successor had led the Steel Wolf forces in a strike at Northwind. But if the Wolves had thought to profit from the relative inexperience of Katana Tormark’s replacement as Prefect, they were sadly mistaken. Countess Tara Campbell—with the aid of Paladin Ezekiel Crow—had repulsed them handily.
A far bigger threat, in Jonah Levin’s mind, came at the moment from Jacob Bannson. The business tycoon, thwarted once already in his desire to set up operations in Prefecture III, was rumored to be moving again in that direction.
Jonah frowned. Bannson was dangerous. Richer in his own right than some planetary governments, the man hungered now for things other than money: power, high office, and a voice in the running of The Republic. Some informants claimed that he even had his eyes on Paladin status. More than one person, in fact, had confided in Jonah that his own elevation had enraged Bannson, who had thought of the vacant seat as owed to him.