"Isn't it exciting?" Keffrine squealed.
Helga sighed. Well, what can you expect. Keffrine was a gift from Sub-Director Deneuve, and born in his hareem. This sort of environment was all she'd ever known. And I thought I'd led a sheltered life.
"It may get more exciting than you'd like," Helga said. "Come on, we'd better go talk to the Eldest Sister."
The old bat was a harridan of the first order, but she'd been here since the Director was sixteen, and he told her things. If anyone knew. .
"Yes, let's!" Keffrine grabbed her hand and pulled her out into the corridor, past arches and mosaics, into the main circular room where a dozen or so of the others lounged on couches, nibbled snacks, or paddled languidly in the pool about the carved youth whose seashell spouted warm scented water. The light from above was filtered through a fretwork stone dome.
Helga felt her heart beat faster. More exciting than they'd care for, she thought. But any change is an opportunity. I've been here far, far too long.
Keffrine was really starting to look tempting, for instance.
Far, far too long.
* * *
"Oh, what a beautiful, beautiful position," Simun wheezed.
Adrian nodded, breathless himself despite being twenty years younger and less burdened. The tower was ruined in the sense that some of the internal floors had collapsed, fire or rot destroying the beams. The central spiral staircase was stone, though, and still reasonably sound. So was the uppermost floor, and the crenellations were still waist-high. That would give the arquebusiers cover and excellent rests for their weapons; they were setting up now, with a little amiable squabbling for the best shooting spots. The infantry from the Sea Strikers had taken up ground around the tower's base, blending in to the maquis-covered slopes. The air had a slight brimstone smell from the black powder in grenades and cartridge boxes, and a wild spicy scent of crushed herbs from the ground around. It was warm now, and insects buzzed through the flowers; fliers darted by snapping at them.
Vase was laid out before them like a relief map, too-he could see men hurrying in and out of the two towers that anchored the citadel's harborward wall, others massing on the wall itself, still more movement in the narrow twisting streets beyond. Overhead the sky was a hot white-blue; he could even see the banners snapping on the gunboats in the harbor beyond, and the foam where the measured centipede stroke of their oars churned up the water. As he watched, a puff of smoke came from the lead craft. A measurable time later the flat deep thudump reached his ears, like a very large door slamming far away. A slightly louder explosion came from among the warcraft packed along the docks in front of the sea wall; they were firing shell initially, then. Smoke and fragments vomited up over the harbor defenses, and a slender galley began to burn and sink at its moorings, spine snapped. It couldn't sink far, in water only six feet deep under its keel, but that served to put the fire mostly out.
By the time the fourth round had hit, the remaining crews were scrambling ashore, tiny as ants as they swarmed through the sally ports next to the main gates.
"Ah, already spooked from the forts at the outer harbor, sor," Simun chuckled. "Ah, this is a fight how I loik it, sor," the middle-aged mercenary went on. "No risk, none of that there nasty hand-to-hand stuff."
Adrian smiled in turn. Odd, he thought. This man and he had as little in common as two beings of the same species, gender and nationality could, yet in a way they'd become good friends. .
Comes of risking your lives together, son, Raj thought, amused. One of the things that, unfortunately, makes war possible.
"Sort of a commentary on humankind, I suppose," Adrian muttered.
"What was thot, sor?"
"Just regretting you weren't a beautiful woman, underofficer," he said briskly.
Simun chuckled. "Well, then I'd be out of place here, eh, sor? Place for everything, yis, yis." He looked at the minarets, domes, gardens of the palace citadel ahead of them. "Though they say hareem girls smells tasty enough, yis. Hey, sor, you oughtn't to be doing that, now!"
Adrian ignored the hand that anchored the back of his weapons belt as he leaned over the crumbling sawtooth outer wall of the tower. "Simun," he said sharply. "Take a look there-do you see a mark in the ground there, leading from the tower to the citadel wall?"
The noncom respectfully but firmly pulled him back, then leaned over and peered himself. "Hmmm, now that you point it out sor, so I do, indeed. Old wall, mebbe? Hard to see why, though-just the one-tis not a walled way to this here tower, that would make sense, though. ."
Adrian craned his neck. The line through the scrub was irregular, as much a trace-mark in the vegetation as anything, an absence of the low thorny scrub trees in the middle and a thicker line of them on either side.
He froze as Center's icy presence seized his eyes. For a moment the world became a maze of lines and points and moving dots, a glimpse of something too vast and alien for him to comprehend. Then it settled down to a schematic-clear white lines outlining the trace through the slope, and a cross-diagram beside it showing a tunnel with an arched stone roof.
covered way, sunken to escape detection. The machine intelligence sounded inhumanly confident. . but then, it always did, even when confessing a rare error. since the tower went out of regular use, the initial covering of soil has partly eroded from the upper surface of the ceiling.
"Yes, by the Gray-Eyed Lady!" Adrian said.
Simun was looking at him with mingled alarm and expectation-the Gray-Eyed was also a Goddess of War; more precisely, of stratagem and ploy, as opposed to Wodep's straightforward violence. Adrian knew that the Emerald mercenaries they'd brought with them thought he communed with Her regularly; Esmond's new troops were picking up the superstition rapidly.
"That's a tunnel-a covered way into the citadel," Adrian said.
"Oh, ho!" Simun said. "First in, first pickings. . no, sor, though, even Islanders, they wouldn't leave it open-not when this here place ain't garrisoned, no, no."
"We'll take a look," Adrian said. "Can't hurt."
Simun nodded. Yes, I know Esmond set you as my watchdog, Adrian thought without resentment-after all, he was the younger brother, and not trained to war. On the other hand, curiosity was an Emerald characteristic; where it concerned his trade, even a professional like Simun had his fair share.
"Oll right, sor, but me'n the squad, we goes along."
"No argument."
* * *
"The city of Vase is under attack," the Eldest Sister said calmly.
A chorus of squeals and giggles died down into uncertain murmurs as the figure beside the head of the hareem stepped forward-it was an entire man, one of the few Helga had seen since she passed through the door. A soldier, one of the Director's personal guard, slave soldiers bought in infancy and raised in the household; armored from head to foot in black-laquered splint mail, with a broad splayed nasal bar on his helmet that hid his face. He rested the point of his huge curved sword on the carpet and folded his hands on the hilt.
"Do not worry!" the stout, robed, middle-aged woman said. "In all things, we will accompany our lord."