Castu bowed and withdrew, and Tegestu broke the seal. The vellum scroll unrolled itself heavily in his hands. Though it was not embroidered or illuminated it was a neat copy, the vertical Brodaini script executed with a careful hand within almost-invisible guidelines. There was no sign that it had been written in haste.

  “Hail cousins, kamliss-Pranoth-sa-Arrandal,” Tegestu read, “greetings from Tastis Senestu Tepesta y’Pranoth, drandor y kamliss-Pranoth-sa-Neda. May your demmin increase; may your arms never fail.

  “Let your council witness the fact of revenge executed by kamliss-Pranoth-sa-Neda against persons who were our betrayers and secret enemies; let your witness extend to our sorrow and triumph, and to a disobedience required by self-respect.

  “Understand that the leaders of Neda-Calacas were unwise in their actions and often insulting, but that, knowing they were ignorant of nartil, we refrained from taking offense against ar-demmini, knowing their insults as harmless as the threats of so many cattle, or the insults of the black hangman-birds that flock in jeering numbers among the eaves of the city. Yet there came last month an insult we could not ignore: one of our own, Norvenan Tolmatus Tepesta y’Pranoth, a lady of the spear and a Brodainu of some respect, was savaged and raped by a gang of city youths. Though she fought she was overcome by numbers; despite her distress she was able to identify her attackers. Some belonged to the family of the deissu Spensas, and the rest to his household.

  “Spensas, informed of our complaint, agreed to punish the attackers, but we later learned that the punishment consisted only of confinement within the deissu’s palace. Upon being informed that the punishment was inadequate, Spensas referred us to the Abessu-Denorru Nadielas, who in turn informed us that our complaint was out of order.

  “At his point Norvenan fell on her sword, feeling herself ar-demmin. Shamed by this, our aldran determined to take action, and declared angu with Spensas, Nadielas, and their houses. Eight days followed the decision, our plans completed, we took the city.

  “We are now in full command. Surprise was complete, and resistance insignificant. Spensas and those of his family who participated in the incident have been dying since their capture; we shall use our skills to keep them dying as long as possible. Their family has been purged; their banking house and its assets have been seized; and their goods confiscated. All shall be given to the population of the town, that all might see we acted for our demmin and not for gain.

  “Nadielas Abessu-Denorru was allowed a swift death, as were certain of his supporters. The Denorru-Deissin is disbanded, and several of the bearni bands have been disarmed and dismissed from service of the city. They were not ashamed by their capture, but angered only: ar-demmin creatures indeed.

  “Action was supported by the full membership of the aldran, including those who do not belong to kamliss Pranoth. We do not desire angu with the other cities; we are not dai-terru who desire merely conquest. We desired only to guard our own demmin; we shall continue to guard it.

  “Witness, kamliss-Pranoth-sa-Arrandal, our action in defense of our self-respect; witness the end of Spensas and his household; witness whether it was fitting. Hail, kamliss-Pranoth-sa-Arrandal, and bear witness.”

  “Aiau!” breathed one of the welldrani — Amasta, and white-haired, lined, ferocious old woman who sat at the end of the table. “That was aspistu indeed. This Norvenan must have been a woman of great respect.”

  Aspistu — the discipline of artful and imaginative vengeance. Amasta had herself practiced aspistu in her youth: her cold, imaginative retributions, merciless and deliberate as the stalk of a giant cat, were still spoken of with respect and private shivers. The idea that an entire city was taken as aspistu for a single Brodainu woman was impressive.

  “Shemmina,” Acamantu said quickly. Long-faced, thin and long-limbed, he echoed his father in physical caste and also in distaste of excess. “There is no demmin to be gained in revenge taken on ar-demmin beings, beings who cannot appreciate aspistu or its beauty. Simply killing them would have sufficed. Taking an entire city was excessive.”

  Amasta looked at Acamantu with pale, pitiless eyes. “Circumstances had to be taken into consideration,” she said. “The city would not have tolerated a raid on two of its ruling families. Tastis was correct to take precautions against retaliation.”

  “Such precautions are irrelevant to aspistu,” Acamantu said. “They reek of dai-terru; Tastis reached too high. Proper behavior would have necessitated the death of these criminals and their protectors, and then the publishing of the decision so that the population and the Denorru-Deissin could have understood. If the city chose to take offense, then any further violence would have been the fault of the city.

  “In order to prevent revenge by the people of Neda-Calacas,” Acamantu concluded, “Tastis has taken the city and invited revenge not only by its people, but by the other cities in the Elva.”

  “Cousins,” said Tegestu, interrupting quietly before the disagreement could split the aldran, “we are not obliged to judge whether Tastis’ action was appropriate, but only to witness it. Our duty lies in recording our notice, and in sending such to Tastis.

  “Further, we must deal with the implications of this message. It was sent kantu-kamliss, that no one but Pranoth should be able with honor to read it or comment publicly on its contents. Surely this ban is inappropriate. The taking of an entire city was a public act; such an act demands public justification.’’

  “The insult was to kamliss Pranoth,” Amasta said. “Kamliss Pranoth has taken revenge. Justification of such an act is not required except to those of the kamliss concerned.”

  “I think, respected cousin, that bro-demmin Tegestu is correct,” said Sethenthu. He was sixty-eight, bald but carefully wigged, and known as “Sethenthu the Silent” for his reserved manner: he rarely volunteered an idea or participated in an argument, but only spoke when he thought the subject needed clarification. “Your argument, cousin Amasta, is inconsistent. You defend the seizure of the city on practical grounds — very well, but since you must realize the practical consequences of this message, the potential for causing distrust between ourselves and our lords, surely you must do Tastis the honor of believing him to realize this also?”

  Amasta was silent for a moment, and then bowed. “I stand corrected, bro-demmin Sethenthu. May your arm never weaken.”

  “This private message was sent very publicly,” Tegestu said. “By messengers arriving in a dispatch boat that cleared quarantine here and the local customs, and who then hired horses and gear and paraded their Pranoth-sa-Neda banners through the streets of the city before coming to our keep. The Abessu-Denorru Necias doubtless knows the message was sent. Yet it will be a difficult matter to convince him that we cannot inform him of its contents, we who are his servants.

  “Surely Tastis intended distrust between ourselves and Arrandal. The kantu-kamliss message was such that our entire Aldran might not read it; yet according to the scroll Tastis’ entire aldran consented to the capture of the city, and his aldran, like ours, is composed of clans other than Pranoth. Surely Tastis intends — I will not say distrust, but certainly disunity — within our aldran. For what purpose, other than the sowing of discord, would Tastis send us such a message? And how, bro-demmin cousins, should we deal with it? How can we keep the trust of the city without breaking our sacred obligations?”

  Amasta’s pale eyes glittered coldly. Her voice, when she spoke, was arrogant and commanding. Tegestu recognized the tone at once: her superb, cunning, ruthless mind, once presented with the problem, had found a plan worth considering.

  “Bro-demmini,” she said, “there is a way.” Lazily, she took a drink of tea. “It will require a sacrifice — there will be killing — but I assure you, there is a way.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The room was small but exquisitely decorated, from the deep brown parquetry of the floor, to the lighter-colored carved paneling of the walls, to the lovely bronze shrine to the household gods that occupied the corner. The parquetry was gradually accumulating a series of scuff marks as Acragas Necias, master of the city of Arrandal, paced rapidly back and forth like an animal in its cage. He consumed tea-cakes at frequent intervals, chewing in a brisk, businesslike fashion with the few good teeth he had remaining on the right side. Tegestu was due for his audience within the half hour, and Necias knew the Brodaini chieftain would be precisely on time. He halted his pacing, irritated at his own distress. He felt he had lost cimmersan, becoming disadvantaged, and he had no clear notion of how to regain the initiative.

  He was the Community Speaker of the city, Abessu-Denorru — “Abeissu” for short — and he was a man of vast wealth. Perhaps the wealthiest man in Arrandal, perhaps not: his social position required great expenditure, and those with greater acquisitiveness and fewer civic ambitions might have surpassed him. Though the Acragas family had not been prominent in his youth, he had nevertheless been nominated to the Denorru-Deissin, the nine-man oligarchy who ruled the city, at an early age, and had by now married into many of the great families of the city. He was not used to frustration, and was not bearing it well.

  He was a large man, with a massive barrel chest and brawny wide-spread arms, and he was always in motion; for nearly twenty years he had run the city and its affairs, through a half-dozen successful wars and a score of little country clashes, and in these last years he thought he had finally reached some kind of plateau of stability, that all the forces — social, economic, baronial, racial, military — were finally adding up to some kind of balance. There hadn’t been a major war in ten years; trade agreements with the other Elva cities had seemed to define effectively the various areas of influence; the importation of Brodaini warriors had created a climate of military stability, with no city having the advantage of another; the outland barons were slowly being pacified. Necias had, he had thought, created a peace that might last a hundred years.

  But now Neda-Calacas had burst into rebellion — worse than a rebellion, really, for revolts were frequent in the Elva cities, as houses of one faction purged those of another. This was a race war, as a minority warrior caste tried to impose its will on a much larger, sophisticated, and vastly dissimilar population.

  And, of course, the revolt could spread to Arrandal. Perhaps, he thought with an angry, fatalistic despair, the astrologers had been right about a season of upheaval. Ever since the new, fixed star had appeared, apparently right overhead, the astrologers had been predicting a great change below. They were, as usual, unspecific about the exact nature of the change, but Necias had been assured it would be major, perhaps catastrophic. Necias had thanked the astrologers and gone about his own business, convinced that there was little point to their art if they couldn’t offer him practical advice— and then he’d turned the new star to sensible advantage by offering a cash prize for anyone working out a way to navigate by it. But still, he thought grudgingly, perhaps the astrologers were right; perhaps it was all in the stars, and the sky had already proclaimed that Necias’ century of peace was not to be.

  He had been certain of Brodaini loyalty; he had seen it demonstrated in so many ways, including the intramural wars fought between the cities of the Elva, when Brodaini in the service of one city had fought Brodaini in the service of another. His policy had been based on Brodaini loyalty; his very rise to power was based on it. The knowledge, sudden and stunning, that his power may have been resting on unstable foundations had filled him with anxiety.

  Necias gobbled another tea-cake, bit down hard on a bad tooth, and winced. He paused for a moment, rubbing his jaw, and pondered.

  Why hadn’t Tegestu reported to him the contents of the communication he’d received from the rebels? The message had been delivered publicly; Tegestu had to have known that Necias was aware of its arrival, and would be chafing to know its contents. Tegestu’s uncompromisingly obedient reply to his summons was reassuring; but still there was a deep anxiety that underlay all Arrandal’s relationships with its Brodaini, and not a little fear. There was something unsettling about the Brodaini, something alien and fierce — the Brodaini could explode into ruthless violence if provoked, and no one quite understood what constituted provocation.

  Necias resumed his pacing, scowling as he prodded at his rotting teeth with the tip of his tongue. He was, he thought, a practical man; he had risen to power by making practical decisions. He had started as a middleman, priding himself on his contacts among the deissin and the guilds, the color gangs, the pilots’ league — his name had reached its first prominence as a man who knew where a certain thing could be procured, who to go to when a certain favor needed to be asked. From that he’d gone on to a role as a power-broker, acting as middleman in the city’s internal struggles, helping one faction obtain what it needed to triumph over another, collecting favors and eventually his reward. He’d been appointed to the Denorru-Deissin and given, among his other tasks, that of Chairman of the Famine Relief Fund, which had always been considered a license to embezzle and speculate with the vast stores of grain the city maintained as a bulwark against crop failure. He hadn’t held the post for more than three years before the drought struck, ruining the crops across the entire continent, spelling disaster for the population of the cities... but then, to the astonishment of everyone, Necias had opened the granaries and fed the city for the two years the drought lasted. The grain had not, as had always happened before, trickled away into somebody’s pocket, or been gambled away in speculations — it was there in the granaries, where no one, not even the poor whose very lives depended on the grain’s remaining where it was, had ever expected it to be.

  People began to talk about Acragas Necias.

  It was not that Necias was scrupulous. There had been plenty of fiddles of one sort or another with the grain supply; but there had always been ways of speculating that didn’t require the goods to leave the warehouse. But he had known that a famine was about due, and that the best way to make a name for himself was to do the unexpected and feed the population.

  After that he’d used his popularity to become the leader of the city’s war party, and after importing the first Brodaini from the north had forced a declaration against Neda-Calacas, at the time the most powerful city on the continent— and Tegestu had beaten them on land and sea. By the time Neda-Calacas tried again two years later, Necias had imported more Brodaini and the twin cities had been crushed so thoroughly they still hadn’t recovered. After that there had been a purge of the city deissin, and Necias’ faction had emerged as victors; Necias had been made Abessu-Denorru, had launched more wars with more Brodaini, had beaten Cartenas and Prypas and a dozen barons, and he’d revived an old moribund alliance against the barons, the Elva vor Denorru-Dorsu, and turned it into an alliance of all the city-states, and he’d made himself chairman of it.

  It hadn’t, he thought, been as difficult as it might have seemed. He’d simply had to reason with people, and point out that their path of advantage lay alongside his own. He believed firmly that if one simply made it obvious to people the course that would bring them advantage and profit, they would eventually follow it. He was, he would point out, a practical man; and he made a point of appealing to the practical side of others.

  But that course, he knew, could not be taken with Brodaini. There was a grim kind of practicality about them, to be sure, but it couldn’t be counted on. Their allegiance was not to profit, or even to cimmersan, but to a warriors’ code that made no sense at all — even, Necias suspected, to the Brodaini themselves.

  He remembered the horrid experience he had trying to learn Gostu. Tegestu had given him a Classanu tutor and he’d met with the man daily for three months, only to be confronted each time with the same illogical, imponderable, impenetrable language. “Beg pardon, cenors-stannan,” the tutor would always correct, “but you must remember, the indirect object is always placed before the direct object. You cannot place it before the verb, as you can in Abessas, but only before the direct object.” But why? Necias would howl in desperation, flogging his brains in frustration and wondering why the Brodaini couldn’t simply decline their nouns like civilized, sensible people and stuff them into the sentence wherever there was room for them. In the end he’d had to give it up, concluding that Gostu was simply the impractical language of an impractical people, and rely on translators who were paid to understand such madness.

  But even through a translator Necias could not talk to Brodaini as he was accustomed to talking to others; he had to feel his way carefully, making certain not to inadvertently offend one of their strange codes of conduct and cause insult. He could not appeal to their practical nature, because often the practical course was denied to them by their beliefs — which, fortunately, at least allowed utter practicality in war.

  The Abessla and the Brodaini had always had to be wary of one another; and in Arrandal Necias had tried to minimize the chances of collision by giving the Brodaini possession of what was, in effect, a city-within-a-city, the former Old Quarter, with their own keep. There Brodaini law prevailed, and their oddness, their impractical ferocity, was masked.

  But Tastis’ Brodaini had also had their own quarter in Neda-Calacas, newly-built by the Neda Denorru-Deissin outside the former city walls. Yet Tastis and his warriors had boiled out of it, taking both cities, and at a seemingly trivial slight. Did they seriously think that some woman’s distress was justification for the capture of the twin cities, the interruption of commerce, the execution of an entire household, and almost certainly general war within the Elva? Such was the justification offered by Tastis in the communication that had arrived just yesterday, along with a bland, badly-stated wish for peace and normalization. Was Tastis serious in his wishes: was he really that imbecile, to think that the other cities of the Elva would tolerate a coup by Brodaini? By flenssin, mercenaries? — for the Brodaini were certainly mercenaries, even if they insisted they weren’t.