The highest tower of the Cathedral Severe looked out upon the rooftops of Anthusa. It provided a stunning sight at any time, but today, the smoke spreading to the north made for a truly sublime picture.
Lady Julia Forna took some small pleasure in knowing that almost nobody else would ever see the view from up here. Every single sunset, like clockwork, that Manzi fellow would crow about how he ought to get a painter up here to really capture how beautiful the city looked from the top.
And again, like clockwork, Brother Tor would remark that there was no bribe large enough, even with the Manzi family’s vast fortune all together, that could smuggle a painter into the tower.
Brother Tor was presently schooling Leo Manzi in a game of chess. It was the same game the two had played every evening since they’d been locked up here together. Sure, they switched colors, and yes, the moves were different each time, but they both played the same game. Manzi played aggressively, spreading his pieces in a wide net in order to crash upon the enemy king like a tidal wave at the crucial moment. Tor waited patiently, laying the shoals and bulwarks to disrupt the onslaught.
Sometimes Manzi won, sometimes Tor won. Their endless variation entertained them both.
But it drove Julia Forna into the very pits.
In theory, there was no lack of entertainment in the tower. Any book, no matter how rare, would be sourced from the city’s private collections or from abroad if a resident of the highest tower demanded it. Fine food was always available, and artisans would gladly donate jewelry and curios on request. The latest fashion often appeared here before it debuted in any ballroom. The open air theater in the Lords’ Square immediately below the tower was visible by telescope on cloudless days, and though it usually presented coarse fare for the public, a word from any resident of the tower would move any show in the city over there. With the cultivation bases of its residents, they might even be able to hear the lines, if they didn’t know them by heart already.
Julia Forna knew them all by heart. So did her eight cellmates. They were six months into their two-year internment, and it was already so tremendously dull.
The founders of Anthusa, being lovers of liberty and self-rule, sought to protect their city from conquest. They built high and sturdy walls to ward off attackers, constructed underground stores and reservoirs to hold out during a siege, and drew so much art, literature, architecture, and culture to the city that no intelligent enemy would risk destroying it with overwhelming force.
But even so, Anthusa was nearly conquered, again and again, not by outsiders but by its own influential citizens. Anthusa’s history was punctuated by periods of tyranny. Every time, the tyranny arrived slowly, almost peacefully, and was thrown out only with great and bloody convulsions.
In response, their ancestors contrived the most impractical system of governance they could imagine, so that nobody would want to rule the city at all.
Every two years they gathered together the city’s elites, discarded those who were elderly, insane, indebted, pregnant, or mourning, and selected nine rulers by lot. These nine were, naturally, immediately imprisoned in the highest tower of the Cathedral Severe, because no free-willed person would ever go along with such a farce. The upper floors of the tower were a luxurious palace in miniature: incredible expense and no small number of space-expansion charms had gone into constructing a bathhouse and pool, a theater, a feasting hall, and even a full acre of gardens and greenhouses within a structure that poked, lonely, above the clouds.
The catch, of course, was that there was nobody to enjoy such luxury but the nine prisoners themselves. All the servants were on the lower floors, and passed them food, letters, and supplies through an airtight chamber. Other than her eight involuntary roommates, there was absolutely nobody to speak to, to play music, to bathe with, to walk the gardens, to eat with. Nobody else to influence or threaten them. The tower was the single most heavily warded structure in the city, the garrison, vaults, and the homes of the great families very much included. Anything approaching by air was dissuaded by potent antipathy fields, and whatever made it through those got shot down by the patrols stationed along the tower. Anything approaching via subspace was eaten by a carefully maintained colony of phase spiders. All their letters took ten times as long to move, since they passed through a dozen hands on the lower floors and were read twice as often, so she couldn’t even ask for or spread any really juicy gossip.
Ten-thousand books, from plodding dramas to bodice-rippers, speculated on the steamy affairs that the rich and powerful led in their elevated seclusion. While such a thing must have happened once or twice, random draws rarely provided suitable candidates, and Julia wasn’t that desperate for novelty, not by far.
Nothing to do but watch the sunsets and play the same game of chess with the same eight other people for two years.
Well, there was the tower’s tenth prisoner, but the less said of her the better.
So no, there was no bribe big enough to smuggle even a painter into the tower. More precisely: if such a fortune existed, the Manzi family would have already bought the city outright.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Plenty of people figured they already had, Julia among them.
It irritated her to no end that the city was already virtually in the Manzi pocket, and yet she still had to stay up here for another eighteen godforsaken months.
The process of actually governing Anthusa, once she got down to business, was simultaneously tedious and superfluous. Diplomatic traffic with other planets often failed to remember exactly when Anthusa changed its governors, and mostly sent letters to people who were no longer there, who may not have been there for years, half bluntly familiar demands and half sly innuendos with no recoverable context. With months to go before a reply could arrive, there was little one could do before the timer ran down.
Their neighbors on the planet Vintal, meanwhile, sent in a flood of letters telling the new governors what their predecessors were up to, what deals they had struck, and, oh, would you please consider keeping things as they were? These details rarely matched up with the records left by their predecessors who, being both bored and trying to cover their asses, left an incredible quantity of utterly worthless documentation.
On the third day of her internment, before she entirely gave up, Julia found a file filled with recipes. Abyssinian honey cake, dragon tongue picado, fennel soup. She was utterly convinced that it was a secret, encrypted record of Anthusa’s international politics. Of course the stacks of deals and treaties and proposals and counterproposals were all meaningless. They were decoys! She had found the real deal, and spent an entire week deciphering it in secret.
She was wrong. It really had been a cookbook, compiled eight years ago by a prisoner in the later stages of madness, and the manuscript was abandoned in a disused desk, just for Julia to find it.
The other documents were real. Her job, one so sacred that nearly all flight was interdicted within city walls, so important that her every letter and package was searched by everyone from the scullery maid on up, so vital that she left her four year-old daughter one morning and wouldn’t see her for two years, was utterly pointless.
Not that she blamed the other powers and principalities for doing their real business with the Manzi family. It was a much more agreeable system, dealing with someone who would still be in charge two years later, with whom one could build an actual relationship. Julia Forna had grown up in the Holy City, thank you very much, and was accustomed to a political order that made a lick of sense.
But for now she was stuck up here, and she had to get creative. Her latest hobby was composing a delicate mix of truth and misinformation in her letters, so that when she got out, the entire city would be apprised of a monumental scandal that never even happened.
She was pondering the next twist in her saga as she gazed out into the dusk, the ominous black smoke lit in rainbow colors by the four suns.
The nine prisoners had already been apprised of the events of the past week. Abyssinian invaders with the Sultan at the helm, the destruction of the Holy City, the Holy Son in hiding. On the one hand, she really shouldn’t get such joy from watching her home and birthplace go up in smoke. It was a tragedy which would reshape the entire planet, maybe the whole universe.
On the other hand… it meant that bastard was dead. Everyone was already planning to kill him after the last Holy Son died, and he had only preserved his life then by taking refuge in the Sanctum Summum. But none of the other cardinals had any reason to keep protecting him once they took the throne, and with the Immortals descending on the city on top of that?
He was dead, pure and simple.
Checkmate.
It was Manzi’s victory. The game which had seemed to be going so well for Tor turned on him at the very last moment.
It really was the most entertaining event of the last week, but Julia couldn’t bring herself to care. She was just looking out at the fading suns, at a rising black cloud that carried all her troubles away. From up here it was private, ephemeral, something whose significance only she could ever even understand.
They needn’t send a painter, or a poet for that matter.
“What a delightful game, Manzi! I think this calls for a drink!”
Brother Tor belted out a laugh from underneath his walrus-like mustache.
“To the victor go the spoils,” said the younger merchant, leaning back in his chair and awaiting his libation.
“I think I’ll join you boys,” said Julia.
“Lady Forna? What a lovely surprise.”
“I don’t think you’ve ever joined us for a post-chess aperitif, my Lady.”
“I haven’t. Actually, I’ve just received some good news.”
“Well don’t keep us in suspense!”
“It’s private, I’m afraid.”
The two men groaned. Chess was the best, but gossip was a close second.
“To make it up to you, today we drink on me. My darling brother just sent over half a bottle of Bonnel, courtesy of your sister, Brother Tor.”
“Just half? There’s barely enough to wet my lips.”
“Well now, Manzi, don’t reject it too quickly,” Tor interjected. “The value of that bottle just doubled a few days ago, didn’t it?”
“Hmmm, quintupled, I’d say. It’ll be decades before they get the vineyards fruiting again.”
“So I take it that my offering isn’t too poor for you distinguished gentlemen?”
“By no means, but…” began the merchant.
“To what do we toast?” finished the monk.
Julia Forna poured out three draughts, and shook out the holy dregs for Manzi.
“How about… to new beginnings.”
Three gem-studded goblets clinked on the second-highest floor of the highest tower in Anthusa. Over the lip of the earth, not quite as far as any of those three might have guessed, new beginnings were indeed coming to pass.