Yanados: "What kind of hot springs?"
"Hot springs in certain mountains," Sulun said, thinking still about those accounts, "the sort where one also finds black glass."
"Maybe not hammered at all," Omis murmured, turning the cup faster and faster in his hands. "Cast? But you can't get the impurities out without hammering. Got to start with twenty-times-hammered iron, a sheet or a rod or a block . . . Maybe drilled? But what could drill iron?"
"Find your answer soon, friends," Zeren muttered under his breath, "find it soon or not at all."
CHAPTER TWO
The great houses hove up in splendid independence on the heights of Sabis—occupying the hilltops, generally, set to catch the wind in their upper tiers. The block-long apartment buildings that were the lot of the most of Sabis's citizens occupied the low ground of the riverside and the valleys between Sabis's fair hills, territory prone to settling (and unheralded building collapses), prone to stale air and river stench (and the stink of other things, since the city provided sewers to the street, but not to the buildings), lately prone to overcrowding, since the city had become, over fifty years of dwindling provinces, the refuge and the economic hope for the world (the sink of all the sewers of the earth, the late Emperor had said on his deathbed—so the story ran).
There were Houses and there were Houses, and Shibari's was, like the family, old, well-suited, and cracking in its walls. It sprawled over a large area of the hill of Muzein, with a splendid view of the river and the poor district of warehouses that had grown up in a utilitarian age more dependent on trade than on a warrior aristocracy.
It overlooked the warehouses, it lived off the warehouses, now that the world went as it did. No more divine right for lords: just the Emperor—on the highest of all hills, outside town—and the Emperor's soldiers, also mostly outside town. Sabis had become increasingly polyglot, the old Sabirn aristocracy increasingly strangers in their own city, in the ascendancy of the nine-year-old son of a provincial-born general and his Sabisan maternal -grandfather—who had been a gentleman farmer and an atrocious poet before he became a regent.
So in the modern city, the old House of Shibari survived—in the neighborhood of woodcarvers, a couple of taverns, three slightly seedy apartments, and a wineshop of odd and criminal patronage barely down the street from its vine-covered walls and sheds and its still-magnificent front entry, its plaster pillars incised more with accidents—the bash of a cart here, the knock of a box-edge there, over the centuries—than the graffiti that scored the walls in the poorer areas just slightly downhill from here.
The front doors were still bright; the fish-tailed, twenty-breasted goddess Ioth on the right, and snake-tailed Baiz, pouring the waters of his river from a bottomless jar, on the left. The sea and the rivers indicated an ancient past, a claim on Sabis's long past, when the Sabisi had come in from the sea and conquered the peninsula, when the sea-lords had become the first lords of Sabis, the aristocracy of the aristocracy that arrived later and settled at its skirts.
Of that most ancient past, Shibari was one of the most ancient, perhaps—certainly no one of this nervous age dared speculate—with an ancient claim on imperium, on the throne itself.
But mostly Shibari just struggled, like any house however noble, to pay its war-tax, and struggled with business decisions (because the great Houses traded nowadays; the emperor had confiscated too much of the land in too many previous rebellions, and doled too many holdings out to new favorites, and levied too severe a tax on old wealth for a House to live on past glories.)
And business decisions, Sulun knew, trudging up the cobbled, littered street toward that facade and an unwelcome necessity to confess his results—business decisions were what had to prevail, increasingly.
"Sulun! Sulun!" It was a swarm of youngsters, inside the marble hall, with the sea-goddess frescoes and the bronze figure of a ship prow for a centerpiece—ties to the sea, always, where Shibari's fortunes had begun. And always the children: Omis's three, the cook's two, several slave kids, Shibari's own four—voices pealing off the high ceilings, small feet pattering on the marble . . .
He used to make fireworks, little poppers, paper rolls with just enough firepowder to make a flash—to the annoyance of Shibari's house wizard, whose daughter Memi had been no less a participant in the fireworks.
Memi stood at the back now: a quiet, sullen child.
"Did it work, did it work?" Tamiri asked, clapping her hands. Omis's daughter, who had seen the bombard in its forging, who had, at least to her own estimate, considerably helped Omis work the bellows.
"Mostly," Sulun said. It was terrible enough to face the children. But he had to walk down the hall, shake off his young escort, and walk in on Shibari in his study, accounts in arms, and stand there until Shibari, in a spindly chair at a desk piled high with codices and scrolls, realized he had a visitor.
"Sir," Sulun said, finally, and cleared his throat.
Shibari looked at him most carefully in a troubled way, as if he could read everything in Sulun that he possibly wanted to know today.
"A failure?" Shibari said.
"Not unqualified," Sulun said.
"Not unqualified." Shibari sighed and shook his head.
"Four firings and accuracy, sir—"
"Accuracy where? Expensive fire tubes, apt to explosions? Four strikes at the barbarians and an explosion wreaking havoc in our own lines?"
Sulun squared his shoulders. "Still four to one, sir."
Shibari's mouth stayed open.
"That's the way a soldier put it to me, sir," Sulun said.
"Zeren. Zeren's a mercenary." Disgust came through: the old-line aristocrat against paid soldiers, against foreigners, against a world quite, quite changed from honest, honorable ways. "Blow up one crew, hire another—I suppose that's very easy in Zeren's accounting. I tell you—"
The door opened. Mygenos insinuated himself through the door. "My lord."
"Come in," Shibari said, and Sulun folded his arms protectively across his account book and regarded Mygenos with a scowl. Memi's father. Mygenos the wizard. Mygenos the very well-fed, sleek, and comfortable wizard. Mygenos never had to beg for funds. Even if a house was in Shibari's financial straits, it paid its wizard, and paid two of them if it could afford it—the best wizards it could find.
If he's so damn good, Sulun thought, not for the first time, why is the house in this mess?
But of course he didn't say that. He bowed to Master Mygenos. Mygenos bowed to him with a frown that became a sweet, unctuous look the instant he turned his face Shibari's way.
"I'm very sorry," Mygenos said smoothly. "I was in the garden."
"Master Mygenos asked to be here," Shibari said. "He's quite concerned about this for another reason."
"My lord." Another bow in Shibari's direction, a straightening of the body, and a folding of the arms when he looked Sulun's way. "I hope you'll understand, Master Sulun, I bear you no personal ill will, all our differences aside. It's priorities, and I can't advise my lord to pour more resources down this rat hole, granted, granted you've made minor progress with your fireworks—"