Chương 164: Chapter 160. The City of Seven Winds

Oberys Baelys?" Adom had just spent the better part of an hour laying the whole thing out — Morgana, the contingency, the emperor, the lawful shape of all of it — and of everything in that hour, this was apparently the part that had reached up and grabbed Sam by the collar.

"... Of all the things I just told you," Adom said, "that's the part that stuck?"

"Well…" Sam pushed his glasses up.

"I mean, yes, the emperor thing is enormous, obviously, we'll come back to the emperor thing. But Oberys Baelys, Adom?" He said the name with weight, like it ought to mean something to anyone with sense.

"Do you actually know who that is?"

"I know he's a merchant."

"He's not a merchant. He's the merchant." Sam leaned in.

"House Baelys isn't one of the old families — they're sixty years on, give or take — but Oberys built them into something the old families lose sleep over. He's got trade moving through ports nobody official has even mapped. And half of what he deals in isn't goods, it's knowing things. Who owes who. What's about to move. Which lord's quietly bankrupt behind his nice gates.

People go to that man when they need the truth about something and can't get it any other way, and he sells it to them fair, and keeps his word after. My father did business with him twice when I was a boy. Came home both times looking like he'd been politely robbed and couldn't stop admiring how it was done." So. Not a small name.

"That's what gets me," Sam went on.

"If a man like that has turned his eye toward any of this, then it isn't a rumour anymore, but a real thing, with real weight behind it."

"I mean." Karion tipped his chair back onto two legs.

"Quietly replacing the sitting Emperor of Sundar was already a real thing, Sam. I'd have put it fairly high on the list. If your terrifying merchant can point us at where the replacement's got to, wonderful, that's genuinely useful, but let's not act like he's the headline here. The headline was the first ten minutes." He glanced at Adom.

"No offense. It's a lot."

"None taken." Damus, who'd said nothing the whole time, spoke up.

"How did you know he knew?" The table turned to him.

"Baelys," Damus said.

"That he's the one who can find Morgana. You said it like a fact. Where does a fact like that come from?"

"Ah." Adom sat back.

"I have people. An information network, eyes in the right ports, ears in the right rooms. It's what flagged him."

"You have a network?" Sam repeated.

"I do."

"Run by who? Because I know you do not have the time for something like that."

"Valiant." There was a short, unanimous pause.

"... That mouse friend of yours?" said Karion.

"That's the one."" He runs your spies?" They were all looking at him like he was dumb.

"He talks a great deal, and he doesn't look like much," Adom agreed.

"But he's good at what he does. Genuinely good, whatever else you want to say about him." He shrugged.

"Best I've ever worked with. It isn't close." Sam held up a hand.

"Okay. Let me make sure I've got this." He started counting it off.

"Valiant brought you word that Oberys Baelys wants to meet you — having worked out, somehow, that you've been quietly looking for Morgana — and that he knows where she is. But he won't just hand that over. He wants to look you in the eye first and decide for himself whether you can be trusted."

"That's it," Adom said.

"And Morgana." Sam pushed on.

"Morgana is an actual princess. A real claimant to the throne. Whose father the Emperor might have killed, with the Chancellor's help, and who we now want to find and keep somewhere safe, in case the Emperor comes apart at the seams and we need a replacement ready to hand."

"You got it." Sam sat with that for a moment.

"... Okay," he said. He nodded slowly to himself.

"Okay. Okay." He turned his cup a quarter-turn on the table and stared at something past the lamp.

"Okay," he said again, with feeling.

"How many times," Karion asked, "are you going to say okay?"

"Why are you guys so calm?" Sam rounded on him.

"Why doesn't either of you look the least bit; this is the part where a normal person panics, surely. Even slightly. We are on a boat, talking about a coup. An actual coup. Or a civil war, if it goes sideways, which these things have a real fondness for doing."

"Adom I can understand. He's not normal""Hey."

"Sorry, but it's true." Sam looked between Damus and Karion.

"And you two are just sitting there?" Damus turned his own cup a small degree, weighing something. Then, quietly: "My father says the Emperor is unwell." They all looked at him. Damus didn't much care for being looked at, but he went on anyway. He was a Lightbringer, and House Lightbringer was a ducal line with blood that ran back toward the imperial seat — thin, and a long way back, but there — which meant his father heard things at tables the rest of them would never be seated at.

"Not unwell as in dying," he said.

"Unwell as in he isn't the one holding the reins. Hasn't been for years. You hear 'the Emperor decreed' and 'the Emperor has decided,' and what it more and more actually means is the Chancellor decided, and the Emperor signed it. It's backwards. The man's meant to be the throne. Instead he's the seal somebody else presses." He paused.

"... I never brought it up because it isn't the sort of thing you say out loud. But it's been getting worse. There's been friction these last few years between the throne and a good many of the great houses; real friction, quiet so far, nothing the broadsheets would touch, but big enough that it makes lords stop answering summons and start quietly counting their own swords."

"It's true." Karion had stopped tipping his chair. He said it plainly, and the Dimitris were no small house themselves.

"My family's felt it. The orders come down from the capital under the Emperor's name, and everyone who deals with him knows whose voice is really inside them now. They haven't all been kind to Sundar. Some of them haven't looked like they served anyone's interest at all, except the Chancellor's." He looked at Sam.

"So, no. We're not panicking. We've been quietly worried about this for a while. You just gave the worry a name." The lamp swayed on its hook from the ship's movements.

"Oh," Sam said, much more quietly this time.

"... Okay." If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Seven days passed after that one okay from Sam. They spent them on the water, the ship pointed south and running hard, bound for the one place Oberys Baelys had agreed to be found: Oriscael, a small elven kingdom near the bottom of the world, and within it the capital city of Highmere. The crossing itself gave them little to remember it by. Grey swells and bright ones.

A pod of something vast and slow that surfaced off the bow one evening and went under again without ever showing its whole shape. A night when the sky filled with more stars than Adom could find names for, and an afternoon of rain that hammered the deck flat and drove them all below to play cards badly and argue about the rules. What carried them so far so fast was the current.

There were roads in the ocean, for those who knew where to find them — long channels of quickened water that ran straight and tireless across the deep, laid down in the old ages and tended ever since, a vessel caught in one moving at a speed no sail or wind could match on open sea. They were how a ship crossed whole oceans rather than bays: one continent left behind and another drawn up over the horizon while its passengers slept.

Lowe's ship had ridden the southern current for days, the water around the hull faintly alight and always rushing the same way, and it had carried them clean off their own continent and onto the doorstep of a new one. On the morning of the seventh day, a knock came at Adom's door. He surfaced slowly out of sleep.

"Mm?"

"Magus." One of Lowe's men called through the wood.

"We've arrived, sir. Captain thought you'd want to be up for it." Adom was up. He came onto the deck still straightening his coat, into a cold clean wind and a sky going gold at the edges; and found the whole ship there ahead of him. The crew, his friends, every man aboard, standing at the rail with their heads tipped back and saying nothing at all. This was the thing they'd been promised since they boarded, the sight worth waking the magus for, and not one of them turned when he came up. They only looked.

Adom followed their eyes upward, and there it was. High above the sea, where there should have been nothing but open sky, a city sat upon a cloud.

It was an actual cloud: vast white shelf of it holding steady in the air, and the city built squarely across its top: spires and domes and bridges of pale stone catching the first of the sun, towers so tall and so high they trailed mist from their crowns, waterfalls spilling off the cloud's underside to fall and fall and scatter into nothing long before they ever neared the waves.

The whole of it glowed in the dawn turning slowly in the light, hanging there over the ocean as though the laws everyone else lived beneath had simply been asked, very politely, not to apply. This was Highmere. Capital city of Oriscael, also called the City of Seven Winds. Adom smiled. He had never seen it. Not once, in either of his lives. In the life he'd already lived, Highmere had burned.

It was gone before he ever found the time to come south and look at it, lost with so much else in the wars, and he'd spent decades after listening to people who'd been lucky enough to stand where he stood now describe what it had been. The City of Seven Winds. They'd all said it the same way, like a thing too lovely to have been real. But it was real. It was right there, turning gold in the sunrise, and this time it was his to walk into. The wind pulled at his coat, but Adom kept on smiling.

This, after all, was the point of everything he had fought so long to protect: the chance to stand before the world's wonders, see them with his own eyes, and enjoy them while he still could.

Getting into the city meant becoming, for a little while, one body in a very large crowd. Guards in pale livery worked the press of people at the approach to the gates, waving them on and splitting the flow — traders to one side, visitors to the other — keeping a patient, steady stream moving toward the great archway ahead. And there were so many people.

Adom and his friends were a few drops in a river of them: merchants hauling goods up from the sky-docks, families craning at everything, hawkers, pilgrims, whole tour-parties strung out behind guides who held painted poles overhead so no one wandered off. That was half of what Highmere was now: a wonder people crossed oceans just to stand inside of. The city was old past easy reckoning.

Old enough that the floating towers of Xerkes, which had struck Adom as the very height of magical ambition the first time he walked beneath them, turned out to have been built in deliberate imitation of this place, centuries late and a fraction of the scale.

"All right, so." Sam had produced a folded paper guide from somewhere and was reading it.

"We're here for the one thing, obviously. But if there's any time afterward at all, we are not leaving without seeing the Sword."

"The what?" said Karion.

"The Sword in the Stone. How do you not— " Sam flapped the paper.

"There's a blade set into a rock up in the high square, been there since the founding. Tradition says that if Oriscael's line ever fails and there's no clear heir, whoever can draw that sword out of the stone takes the throne. It doesn't care whose child you are or what blood you carry. You pull the sword loose, you're king. Overrides the bloodline entirely."

"And how many people," Karion asked, "have managed to pull it out?" Sam hesitated.

"... None."

"None."

"In several thousand years, no."

"So it's a rock," Karion said, "with a sword stuck in it."

"It's a legend," Sam said, wounded, "and I want to see it." He turned to Adom.

"Tell me we can see it."

"We can probably see it." And he meant it. He had, quietly, a great deal of interest in any object said to choose a ruler over and above an accident of birth. It struck him as a very relevant sort of legend to be standing near, just at the moment. The line shuffled forward, and then it was their turn at the gate. This one was kept by elves; tall, unhurried, and very hard to surprise. One held out a hand without quite looking up.

"Identification." Adom gave over the token, a small flat disc gone warm in his pocket. The elf ran a thumb across its face and read whatever rose to the surface there.

"Sundarian." The elves noticed through the accent, probably. He said it in flawless Sundarian common, too: unaccented, exact, every vowel sitting precisely where it belonged. That was the thing about the long-lived races, and elves above all: they collected languages the way other people collected coin, and they had earned the right to be smug about it.

By their own telling, and most scholars didn't argue, the thirty root tongues that humans, dwarves, and elves all spoke today had branched, every one, from elder speech the elves had shaped in the first ages. To be corrected on your own mother tongue by an elf was a particular kind of humbling, and they knew it. His eyes came up now and settled on Adom's face.

"Long way from home. Purpose of your visit?"

"Visiting," Adom said. The elf went on looking at him — a calm, thorough sort of look — and for half a breath the old instinct stirred, the urge to do something with his expression, to manage the thousand small tells he'd long since learned to control when someone was studying him. But Adom let none of them happen. The face under the elf's eyes wasn't his.

Behind the mask he could have grinned like a fool and the guard would have seen only Law: a tired, unremarkable traveler with a southern errand and an accent off the wrong continent. The trick was to remember that, and to let the borrowed face do the lying, and not reach out to help it.

"Mm." The elf turned the token over and held it back out.

"Welcome to Highmere, Master Law. Mind the edges, and don't lean on anything that isn't stone."

"Thank you," Adom said, and stepped through into the city in the clouds. Through the gate, the city opened up, and it was beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with home. Arkhos was marble and ambition, everything squared off and grand and built to be admired.

Here, the streets didn't seem built so much as grown: pale living wood and stone that curved where a human mason would have cut a straight line, archways like the meeting of branches, towers tapering to points that shouldn't have held, the whole of it tall and narrow and hushed in a way that set the back of his neck prickling. It was lovely. It was also, plainly, not made by or for people like him.

The tourists were easy to spot: the ones stopping every few steps, heads tipped back, fumbling with little paper guides. And the locals, Adom noticed, were every one of them elves. He'd grown so used to Arkhos, where a single street might hold a dozen different races at once, that he'd half forgotten how rare that was. Most kingdoms kept to their own kind. Sundar, and a handful of others, were the odd exceptions; this was the rule.

For a moment the four of them round ears just stood there in the current of it all, a little lost.

"So," Damus said, bringing them back.

"Where are we actually meant to go?"

"To an inn called the Silver Bough." Adom steered them off the main thoroughfare, toward the quieter streets.

"We've rooms there. And at ten exactly, we're to meet someone in the common room; back corner, the table furthest from the door. Older human gentleman, silver at the temples, dressed well but plain about it. He'll have a compass sitting on the table in front of him." Adom kept looking around.

"That's Oberys." Sam already had his watch out of his pocket and was frowning at it.

"Right, hang on." His lips moved, counting.

"We've come a long way south and east. The hour won't match home. Highmere runs about nine ahead of Arkhos, so back in Arkhos right now it's actually..." He squinted, recounting.

"Yes. Fine. The point is I have to add the nine. Which makes it, here, locally…" He tapped the glass once more to be sure.

"Nine forty-seven."

"And we're meeting him at ten?" Karion asked.

"Yeah, at ten. So, in thirteen minutes." Sam snapped the watch shut.

"And from everything I know about the man, he's exactly the sort to have already decided something about us if we come through that door at one minute past. His kind count time. We can be tourists after." The boys looked at each other for a moment, and after a tacit agreement, they all started running. They stopped only long enough to ask directions from anyone willing to stand still and point.

One wrong turn cost them a minute and a half they could not spare, and then the sign swung into view above a narrow door: a branch worked in tarnished silver, a line of flowing script none of them could read, and beneath it, in plain Common, the part they could. The Silver Bough.