A Matter of Oaths (29 page)

“That may be enough.” Dhur pressed the points of his fingers
together and looked at them consideringly. “If we move quickly, we can be in a
position to stop Julur before he does anything irreversible to Lin.”

“Rafe isn’t important,” Rallya told him bluntly. “If we can
get him back safely, it will be a bonus, but…”

“On the contrary,” Dhur interrupted her. “The
only
important thing is to retrieve him
safely.”

“I doubt the New Emperor would agree with that,” Rallya
snapped. “Or that you’ve the authority to make that decision for him.”

“Let us consider your authority first, Commander Rallya,”
Dhur said softly, leaning back in his seat. “You’re offering the support of the
Guild of Webbers to strip power from the Old Emperor and hand it to the New. Tell
me, is control of the Guild included in the bargain, or do you intend to keep
that for yourself? And how much support do you have in the Guild, outside your
own web-room full of Oath-breakers? What gives you the right to alter the
balance of power in the Empires?”

“Should I let Julur get away with Oath-breaking?” Rallya
countered. “Should I let him worm his way into control of the Guild, with all
that would mean for the balance of power? No, Lord Dhur. Control of the Guild
is not included in the bargain, neither for Julur nor for Ayvar nor for me. But
I will have its support, once I expose Julur’s Oath-breaking. And if the New
Emperor doesn’t think that’s important enough to take action over, the Guild
will be reconsidering its loyalty to him too.”

“I believe you.” Dhur sounded more amused than anything, to
Rallya’s added fury. “Now we’ve established that your authority is spiritual
whereas mine is only temporal, shall we try to agree a set of common goals? Given
that I insist on Lin’s safety, and you insist on the Guild’s independence and
renegotiation of the Emperors’ Oaths.”

“Which will include an end to the war in the Disputed Zone,”
Rallya said promptly.

“Agreed.”

“You can’t…”

Rallya stopped, belatedly recognising the sound of total
self-certainty. Dhur did have the right to negotiate with her; he was doing it
on his own behalf. She looked at him, past the likeness to Joshim, past the
infuriating patience with which he waited for her to realize exactly how much
authority he
did
have. How had she
expected an immortal to look? she asked herself angrily. Not like Joshim, and
that had blinded her to the preternatural depth of this man, his almost
physical aura of power. She laughed aloud, first ruefully at herself, then more
forcefully at Rafe’s hubris. The New Emperor’s lover. It made truth of that
ridiculous obituary —
held in deep
affection at court
— and it made sense of Julur’s interest in him.

Or partial sense. “I understand now why Julur might have
wanted Rafe dead,” she said, “but why take the risk of snatching him? And why
keep him alive this long?”

“It wouldn’t have been enough for Julur, just to kill him,”
Ayvar claimed. “He would have wanted to own him, to have the pleasure every day
of knowing that he had stolen something from me and made it his. And the
pleasure of knowing that I didn’t know what Lin was suffering,” he added
bleakly.

“Why did you put Rafe in that position?” Joshim demanded. If
he was impressed by his doppelganger’s identity, it did not show, to Rallya’s
approval.

“I held out against him for three years,” Ayvar said mildly.
“He was sixteen when he first tried to seduce me.” A smile at the memory. “He
was fighting for survival and he needed a friend more powerful than his uncle. He
decided it was going to be me. I took his side, but I didn’t take him into my
bed — I knew what the dangers for him would be if I did. He isn’t the first
lover that Julur has reached.”

He released the pressure on his fingers, as if he had only
just remembered what he was doing, and watched the colour flood back into their
tips.

“Three years later, he was on his half-year leave, between
his apprenticeship and taking his Oath. There was no doubt that he would take
the Oath, and I thought that it would only be for a short time, that it wouldn’t
last after he took his Oath. I was wrong,” he said ruefully. “And I was wrong
when I thought that the one person who would be safe from Julur was a webber,”
he added bitterly. “Even when he died in an aircar crash, I didn’t guess. And I
should have guessed — you
can
blame
me for that,” he told Joshim.

“I hardly took better care of him,” Joshim muttered. “Do you
really think Julur will keep him alive, even now?”

“Alive, yes,” Ayvar said. “But he’s still in danger. There
are things Julur might do that couldn’t be reversed…

“Tell me, Commander Rallya, did you come here hoping that I
had the answers, or do you have some suggestions of your own?”

“All I require from you,” Rallya said stiffly, “is a
guarantee that you won’t interfere between the Guild and Julur. Which I assume
I have, in view of your obsession with Rafe’s safety.”

“Obsession? Yes, it could fairly be called an obsession,”
Ayvar said, unruffled. “But you don’t have a guarantee. Not unless you can
guarantee Lin’s safety in return.”

“Nobody can do that,” Rallya objected.

“Then I feel free to interfere. After all, there are other
ways to obtain what
I
want. I could
negotiate with Julur directly. Offer him my support against the Guild perhaps…”

“You won’t do that,” Rallya said shrewdly. “You can’t afford
to lose the Guild’s services any more than Julur can.”

“The Guild isn’t irreplaceable,” Ayvar commented.

“No, but could your Empire really survive the change?”
Rallya challenged. “Do you think the F’sair would wait for you to build up an
effective space force of your own? Are all your aristos so loyal that they
wouldn’t make private treaties with the Guild, treaties that encouraged them to
secede from the Empire?”

“And you’d stand by and watch that happen?” Ayvar asked.

“If Julur gets control of the Guild, neither of you will
have a choice,” Joshim snapped. “Which is more important? Finding out who’s
going to have the last word — and I would have thought it was obvious, Rallya;
he’s had several thousand years more practice — or doing something to stop
Julur?”

“You’re right, Joshim.” Ayvar made a gesture of apology to
him. “I’m afraid I find it difficult to resist a new challenge.” He repeated
the gesture to Rallya. “You should be glad he isn’t wearing your face,
Commander. It’s disconcerting to be told off by your own double.”

“He’s usually right,” Rallya muttered. “That’s what I like
least about Webmasters.” Not that she was convinced that a few thousand years
made so much difference, but there would be time to settle the point later.

“Since you’ve no real intention of negotiating directly with
Julur, even if he’d listen to you, which I doubt, what do you intend to do?”
she asked directly.

“Support you in regaining control of the Guild, and then use
you as a lever to make Julur negotiate.” Ayvar’s face clouded. “He won’t bend
to a threat to withdraw the Guild’s services from his Empire; he can afford to
wait out a few hundred years of chaos. And he knows there’s a limit to what I
will allow to happen to him. I won’t take his Empire from him.” He raised a
hand to forestall Rallya’s protest. “What would you do with an Empire without
an Emperor? Rule it yourself? Give it to me? Neither of us could hold it
together, and if one Empire falls, they both do.

“And what would you do with an Emperor without an Empire? He
won’t retire to a backwater world to watch the flowers grow, and he won’t
disappear gracefully off the edge of the map. And even if you could bring
yourself to kill him, I couldn’t allow it.”

Rallya scowled. It
was
uniquely obscene, the idea of killing a person who might otherwise have lived
forever, the thought of destroying an unbroken thread of existence. And that
was the reason the Empires were saddled with a pair of immortal fools. There
was
nothing that could be done with
them, other than make them gods or Emperors. And if it was not done for them,
they would do it themselves, like oil inevitably rising to the top of water. Or
scum separating out, in Julur’s case.

“If we can’t threaten to kill him, and we can’t threaten to
take his Empire away, just how
do
we
persuade him to give Rafe back and renegotiate his Oath?” she demanded.

“I didn’t say you couldn’t threaten to kill him,” Ayvar
corrected her. “If the Guild were to besiege Old Imperial, I wouldn’t be able
to prevent you. I might protest convincingly from a safe distance, but that’s
all I could do. And fear for his life is the one thing that will make him
release Lin.”

“It would be a dangerous precedent to set,” Rallya said
slowly. “Let some of Julur’s aristos — or your own — know that it can be done
and they’ll be hiring Outsider fleets to try it themselves. The Empires would
be run by whichever aristos most recently scared you shitless.”

“Not if the Guild guarantees our protection,” Ayvar argued.

“I don’t like it,” Rallya said stubbornly. “And it isn’t
necessary. We can break Julur’s hold on the Guild without it, and maybe even
renegotiate the Oaths.” She snorted. “For what that would be worth in his case.”

“But we couldn’t get Lin back safely,” Ayvar said flatly. “I
told you, Commander, that matter is not negotiable.”

Could five thousand years warp a perspective that far,
Rallya asked herself in disbelief. “What if the Guild decides that Rafe is
expendable?” she questioned. “That we aren’t willing to spend the lives it
would cost to get him back.” And it would cost lives, she thought grimly; Old
Imperial was not a soft target.

“Whatever it costs, you won’t leave him,” Ayvar said
confidently. “You won’t found
your
Guild on a betrayal like that, Commander Rallya.”

Damn you, Rallya thought furiously. I would like to pull the
cocky little scut out of the trap he sprung on himself when he jumped into your
bed. I would like to drag Julur out of his palace and send him on a one-way
jump to the other edge of the galaxy. But I will not condemn the people of the
Old Empire to a few hundred years of chaos. I will not throw away webbers and
ships to salve your pride. And I will not have my options dictated by you.

“I’ll need a fleet to dislodge Carher,” she told Ayvar
coldly. For now, let him think she had capitulated. “I want every ship you’ve
been assigned for use in the Disputed Zone; you can change
their
orders without anyone questioning it. And I want Khirtin
station too — that’s your command centre for Zone operations, isn’t it? I want
the ships assembled there in five days time. Flash a message to the
Stationmaster to call them in. Tell them to reserve the first arrival slot for
your yacht and another one four days from now, also to be notified to you. And
I’ll need a coded tight-beam to pass that information on.”

She would have liked to have
Bhattya
there earlier in the sequence, but it could not be done. The
shuttle with Caruya and Peri aboard would not reach the ship for three more
days. And Vidar would want to move out of the rings around New Imperial’s
neighbouring gas giant; that was no place to start a fixed-window jump with
only a Second and a Third to back him in the web.

“You’ll have all of it,” Ayvar assured her. “Yulenda, warn
Khetya
to expect us. Four passengers:
Lord Dhur, yourself and two anonymous guests.”

“You’re not coming,” Rallya decreed, standing up to leave.

“Commander, you and I still have guarantees to discuss.”

Imperial Zone, Old Empire: a Class
One restricted zone. Prior authorization to enter must be obtained from the
Imperial Palace; access is permitted via a single jump point (O-I-1). A
defensive sphere is maintained around the system; any unauthorized ship
penetrating this sphere is liable to attack without warning.

It was impossible to know, Rafe thought shakily, which
one of them would speak first. Or, if the Old Emperor was first to break the
silence, whose victory that would be. Blurred memories — which he was
struggling to rebury, in spite of the days that he had spent aboard
Havedir
fighting futilely to unearth
them — told him that, in some warped way, it would be Julur’s victory if Rafe
outlasted him, because Rafe dared not speak until he had control of his voice
and the same blurred memories had deprived him of that control.

The waiting had ended without warning, ten days of isolation
curtailed by the soporific that had flooded his stateroom. Rafe had regained
consciousness strapped into this seat, free only to see, to hear and to speak,
in a room brightly lit around him and shadowed at the edges. Julur was in the
shadows: visible, not recognizable, but it could only be Julur. Cat-and-mouse
would not be Braniya’s style, not once the hunt was over, but Julur took
delight in it. Rafe fought off more unwelcome images, of a similar room or the
same one, of a similar struggle for silence.

He had no way of knowing how long it had been between losing
consciousness and regaining it, no way of knowing what they had done in that
time. Had they sorted through his head, to discover how much he had remembered,
and how much he had not? What else might they have done? There had been games
that Julur had played the last time…

“Shall I call you Lin or Rafe?”

A triple shock. The ending of the silence, for all that he
had known Julur would speak eventually. The voice, better remembered than the
face, because it had been possible to close his eyes but not his ears… And the
name, Lin, indisputably his, bringing with it a stream of fresh associations
that he could not dam, ice-clear memories of the man who had bestowed it upon
him. And because no reaction was more appropriate to the enormous irony of that
shared face: Rafe laughed.