Chapter Text
Rial’s feet had taken him past the turning to his office and he was climbing yet another set of stairs before he realised where he was going and why. The Palace apartments for lesser nobles were arrayed along the grand corridors on the mid-level floors, all much of a muchness, but this route was familiar enough he could have followed it in his sleep. There had been times when he almost had, when the tides of court politics allowed. Some years had passed since he came this way, though, and he found he was unsure how he would be received.
Lady Kuyulush’s chief attendant, Dwinnilaur, ushered him in with his customary warmth. Rial thanked him and settled down to wait for the lady to emerge, which she did after the flatteringly short interlude of half a bell.
“Irry!” she trilled, gliding across the room with every sign of eager welcome. He stood to greet her. There would be no comfortable slackening of Astandalan court etiquette in this meeting. Lura Kuyulush delighted in its every nuance. She fluttered her fan as he gave her a carefully calculated admirer’s bow, then returned a shimmering half-curtsey of her own.
He might be an ignoramus when it came to clothing, but Rial knew better than to greet Lura without making a point of admiring her outfit. Trains of sequins flared about her figure as she moved, accentuating those broad shoulders and strong calves. The rich turquoise shifted across shining slivers of the peach-coloured silk underneath, and the whole ensemble glowed against the misty grey and pearlescent off-white silk hangings. She grinned under his long assessing look, and shifted a little to set the trains of sequins rustling.
“Dwinnie, dearest, would you go and find us a nibble or two?” she asked, adding the gesture which emphasised that she wanted a private conversation. Dwinnilaur bowed his way out, and they sat.
Rial regarded Lura with his court face concealing his pure pleasure in her company. She was his one - indulgence, perhaps a luxury - the one person he had found in the whole of the Palace who shared his wry discomfort with the aristocracy from within it. Never mind that she chose to embody its wildest fashions; she made them her own, stretched the glitz and the glamour in directions that his family would have found as shocking as his own entire disinterest.
As the daughter of old Lord Kuyulush she was, technically, very much junior to the sole surviving Lord of House Irridis. He rejoiced, therefore, in letting her speak first and set the tone of the conversation. Which she did, as soon as Dwinnilaur was out of sight, by scrunching her long legs up onto the chair and twisting them comfortably underneath her.
“Well, darling?” she said, “what brings you to my humble abode?”
He relaxed his own posture, twisting his legs together underneath his chair in the least manly pose he could make comfortable. “I want career advice,” he said, to make her laugh.
“From moi?” she fluttered her fan again, “I am quite overcome.”
“You know the personalities in question,” he told her. “Myself, of course - and a certain fifth degree secretary.”
“Ooooh,” she said, sounding thrilled, “our old friend cupcake Cliopher?” She grinned in triumph as this startled him into a bark of unguarded laughter.
“The very same,” he said, when he had recovered his composure. “Whatever advice you gave him before he joined my office seems to have been effective. And now he’s asking if I want a job.”
Lura clapped her hands. “But this is too perfect! Did you know that he has just fired me?”
“He what?”
“My dear, I regret to tell you that I am no longer a Minister. I am, naturally, inconsolable.”
“Naturally,” said Rial, drily. Lady Kuyulush’s ministerial role had been a total fiction with a salary attached. He had always found that reprehensible, and told her so, and she had smirked and taken it anyway and ignored him.
On reflection, perhaps there had been more than one reason why Mdang joined his office in such an aggressive mood.
“What did you say to him?” Rial asked, out of pure curiosity.
“About sacking me? Nothing, yet. It came by letter. I would take that avoidance as a backhanded complement, but the monster had a list and ticked off a good number of us useless parasites together. No doubt he and Indrogan were simply too busy to come round and break the news in person. So I am biding my time before replying,” she stretched a little, and winked at him.
“What did you say to him before, about his career, I mean?” Rial clarified.
“Oh! Well, I asked him what the hell he was doing drifting around with me, since he cared so much about fixing things,” she said. “If you ever need an afternoon’s entertainment, darling Irry, you absolutely must get cupcake aside and ask him what’s wrong with the government. I have to admit I fell asleep while he was talking, and possibly also died a little inside, but I did manage to hide it and I think I heard most of what he had to say.”
“You listened to his views on government, then told him to get on with it?” Rial could not, quite, keep the surprise out of his voice.
“Hmmm, yes,” she said. “Unexpected, isn’t it? It made me so angry, all that passion going to waste. And besides, I knew Indrogan could do with a kick in the arse.”
“So you wished him on me?” said Rial, thinking back over what had happened, at least a year ago now. Possibly much longer, if you counted by the turning seasons, which he tried not to do these days. It was disconcerting to have possibly lived for over a century, and even more so when he considered that most of that time seemed to have been spent in the office.
Lura Kuyulush occasionally did approach him at court, mostly when she was in need of a straight man for a joke. She was never knowingly unkind, though. He knew himself to be quite hopelessly dull beside her, but he enjoyed her company, which was always entertaining, and she professed to enjoy his.
That evening had started much as usual, except that Lura had had Cliopher sayo Mdang trailing around after her in imitation of those members of the Upper Secretariat who had some reason to bring their secretaries to evening court, or even to have secretaries in the first place. It was the sort of exhibitionism the court associated with ‘louche Kuyulush’. She had been cheerfully obvious about showing the poor man off like some kind of prize pony, too. The part where she wagered his services on a card game had seemed like a prank, at first, until she went through with it.
“I trusted you to give him a start,” she said now, as serious as he had ever seen her. “I suspected the results would be spectacular. I am… pleased, but surprised, that he survived it, to be honest. Cupcake has the brains, all right, but his court manners - ugh! I did my best, but he never really saw the funny side to all this” she flirted a hand, “stylish nonsense.”
“Neither do I,” said Rial.
“No, you don’t, darling,” she reached across to pat his cheek, which he tolerated with the faint, controlled, socially appropriate smile. “You’ve had it all beaten into you, though, my poor dear.”
The words were delivered gently, but her eyes were sharp with sympathy. Rial caught his breath at this razor honesty. “Yes,” he said, simply, though it cost him to hold composure.
Lura pulled back, just far enough to create a space between them for his words. He managed a smile. “I don’t have your - flair - or your courage - either of you,” he said, “but… I am intrigued. I prefer Mdang’s version of the Service to… anything else I’ve ever seen, to be honest.”
“You’re as addled as he is,” she said, fondly, “give him my dearest love, why don’t you? And ask him whether the Emperor does appreciate his haunches, there’s a dear.”
She was sliding back into her more usual mode - formal body language, risqué chatter - so Rial took this in his stride. “I’m sure he’d prefer that question came from you,” he said, and rose to give her his most formal bow of thanks-between-peers. She stood to return it, with an extra sashay and a flicker of sequins.
For a moment they looked at one another, mutually amused, and then Lura stepped closer and seized the top of his robes, gently twisting the silk. “You’ve been in here over a bell, and I have a reputation to maintain,” she said, her voice sinking just a little lower, a little huskier.
He looked up into her eyes, tawny brown and soft as thistledown, and saw in them - knew in himself - the myriad calculations of the court: Lord Irridis and Lady Kuyulush; long-rumoured to be lovers (but only as a sort of admiring joke, he thought, of which, most unfairly, Lura seemed to be the butt and he the sly dog); his potential new position, allied to a rising Palace star; her loss of her sinecure; the pair of them a little out of the focus of gossip right now, as the aristocracy was swinging away to support the rival camps in the growing power struggle on the other side of the world.
The frustration that they shared, at the strictures of Astandalas, and the ways in which they both embodied the court even as they rejected it. With Lura, he never had to explain.
“Later,” he said, only slightly hoarsely, “after work.”
She gripped his robes tighter and lowered her lips to his. He turned his face up and let himself sink forward into her embrace. Lura kissed as she talked, sly, teasing, sincere when it served her purpose. For a moment or two the ledgers of ramifying calculations receded, as two odd halves made a whole. Rial felt the familiar heady rush of her presence, the brief ecstasy as her tongue slipped between his lips, the soft firmness of her, the gentle questioning… and then the Palace bell chimed, a reassertion of reality that made him draw back, just slightly. They slipped apart.
“Later,” she agreed, and they both knew it was political, and also that it was not, entirely, and that (for them, for now, as it had been in the past, until the calculations shifted) that was enough.
—
As soon as he got back to his office, Rial sent a page up with a note asking for a brief conversation with the Imperial Secretary. He was trying to settle back down to reviewing his department’s latest risk register, and to stop the back of his brain sketching out audit plans, when the page returned to say that Sayo Mdang could spare fifteen minutes at the next bell, if that was both sufficient and convenient.
It occurred to Rial, as he hurried up the stairs, that Sayo Mdang might truly have meant both those qualifiers. He had always been polite, and never given to petty power games. If Rial had sent the page scurrying back to his office with a request for a meeting tomorrow instead, in all likelihood the Imperial Secretary would have been completely unruffled and would have tried to fit him in. It would certainly have been the better move to play with a court insider, to exert his independence, and yet… Rial didn’t want to send back a stiff little deferral, and spend the afternoon at his desk reviewing risk mitigation policy for trade.
The Imperial Secretary’s private office was currently crammed into a series of small working rooms that curved around the centre of the Palace, right up against the Imperial Apartments. Rial had not been inside the Tower since he was a young teenager, when he was still considered presentable as an addition to his father’s many, many suits to the Lord Emperor. Old Lord Irridis had delighted in his right as a noble to seek imperial audiences directly, and had found a reason to do so three or four times a year at least. Walking past the great doors, with the sigil of the sun resplendent against the ivory and black, Rial remembered the sticky sense of discomfort he felt every time they were admitted, the Emperor’s expressionless distaste, his father’s fawning, his own fear.
In those days the whole Palace had always been abuzz with activity, particularly in the busy seasons when the Lords and Ladies Magi were in Astandalas, and all the great nobles gathered. Now, in the Tower, the buzz was back, at least in part. There were no passing knots of nobles or outworlders in strange garments, but Rial saw pages in several different liveries, passing guards, a pair of priest-wizards in their silvery robes, and dozens of bureaucrats of all grades and disciplines. Rial felt his pulse speed up, just a little. With so much of the rest of the Palace left quiet and empty, it was energising to be around so many people who seemed to have found a purpose.
After a couple of attempts he found the office that the Imperial Secretary allegedly worked in; it was not a private study but an open space with several ranks of desks and, at the moment, a notable lack of Sayo Mdang. As he had arrived shortly before the bell, Rial had expected to wait around for a moment or two. He had not expected to be waiting perched on what seemed to be a battered old kitchen chair shoved into the back corner of the room behind Sayo Mdang’s own desk, watching curiously as a team of (by their clothes) analysts exclaimed over some findings that they were passing round.
One woman reached up and clutched her hat dramatically; a man sitting opposite almost snatched the paper across the table and scrawled something in the corner, then held it up and shook it at her. Beyond them a few pages were shifting papers into and out of a set of three open dispatch boxes. On the other side of the room there were two desks completely surrounded by silent, focused, scribbling figures in secretarial robes. Incongruously, one of the secretaries at the near end was absent mindedly stroking a large black cat who lay sprawled across a set of what looked like technical reference books to one side of him. The cat, to Rial’s delight, was wearing - or at least tolerating - a tiny red sash on its collar, turning it into a miniature version of the analyst’s belts.
Absorbed though he was in the byplay, Rial was aware at once of the slight shift in dynamics - the tautening of attention - that signalled Sayo Mdang’s return to the room. He was trailing three more pages in a little procession that broke up as they came in, each heading energetically in a different direction.
Mdang himself made straight for Rial, who started to rise but was firmly gestured back into his seat. The new Imperial Secretary was still wearing the robes of his former rank in the fifth degree, a russet brown almost certainly designed primarily to act as a dark backdrop for the aristocrats in the Upper Secretariat to pose against. Rial was almost entirely sure that this costume was force of habit, or perhaps Mdang not allowing himself the time to go and find a new set of robes in the black and red he was now entitled to, but in the language of the court it was also a show of raw power. I am secure in my status, it said, it is your job to know who and what I am, not mine to display it to you.
“Lord Irridis, thank you for coming up on such short notice,” said Mdang, as if he were the one who had asked for Rial’s time.
Oh yes, the message of those robes was most definitely an accident. That didn’t make it any less accurate.
“My pleasure,” said Rial, which was fully correct according to the Astandalan script, and then, in response to the robes, and the blunt approach, and the fact that he just liked Mdang, he added “I couldn’t stay away from the prospect of a good round of audits.” Which was entirely incorrect, and far too keen, whether from a Lord to a commoner or from an applicant to a prospective employer.
Sayo Mdang gave him a conspiratorial grin, pulled across a notebook, and said, “we’ve only managed one so far but I have great hopes. His Radiancy is fully behind the concept of auditing every department in turn, though with the team I have at the moment that would take us several years to achieve… we have the budget to bring in three more teams before the end of the court session but that means we’ll need to train them up, so we’ll want to balance that against the need to hit the likely worst offenders sooner rather than later - and I have to admit I am not confident that the whole of his Radiancy’s government is in a reasonable enough state to implement any recommendations, so we’ll need repeat visits at intervals, which will also have to be factored in… Lord Loveless told you that I’m looking for someone to coordinate all of this?”
“Yes,” Rial said, slightly dizzy at this vista opening up before him, “he told me a little about what you found at the Treasury…”
“I’ll give you a copy of the report to read,” Mdang promised, with a grimace. “It’s not pretty.”
“Well, the best approach is going to depend on the size of the team - how many analysts have you got your hands on, so far?”
“It depends if you care how experienced they are… I’ve got a whole set of likely trainees. Numerate, curious, not afraid to ask questions.”
“That’s a gift,” said Irridis, absently, tugging the notebook over and skimming the draft schedules. He felt his eyebrows shoot up. “You’ve included the Ouranatha?”
“They receive funds on behalf of the Emperor,” said Mdang, as if it was that simple. “I don’t have many magic-users, though,” he added, “and in the first instance am thinking primarily of finance and admin process audits - his Radiancy can keep track of their arcane business.” At Rial’s sceptical look he went on, “I expect them to refuse anything but the barest look at their books, but we will have to insist on that. Believe me, we’ll get it. His Radiancy is… not best pleased with the priest-wizards. You can -” he caught himself. “I’m sorry, I’m making assumptions.”
“I can insist?” said Rial, giddy at the thought. “If you’ll back me, certainly.” He was vaguely aware that he had entirely lost track of the proper Astandalan courtly response, and also that he fundamentally did not care. He was grinning like - like a boy. Like he seldom had, as a boy.
And perhaps it was as simple as that; perhaps together they could just - disregard what was proper, and do what was right.
Fifteen minutes was hardly long enough to scratch the surface, but Sayo Mdang let him take the notebook in return for a promise to be back the next day to meet the audit teams, and to move up permanently as soon as he was able.
Back in his own office, Rial drafted a letter of resignation for Indrogan and acceptance for Mdang. He hesitated over the audit plans, then put them firmly aside to finish reading through the risk register, because that was his responsibility. If his free hand rested on the notebook, well, it was good to have a solid reminder under his fingers that today had not been a dream.
His family were long lost on Ysthar, and the gentle green valleys he loved and tended as a young man were gone, too, and he had spent too long walking around with his head in the past. It was time to recognise that Astandalas was lost, and neither its beauties nor its ghosts should rule him any longer.
And because that reflection was alive in his eyes when he met them in the mirror in his chamber, he repeated it to Vobu.
The hands shifting his work robes down his shoulders froze with uncharacteristic suddenness, and then shook, slightly. Vobu’s face was in shadow and Rial could not read his expression in the mirror, and he thought to hell with this and shrugged out of his sleeves himself so that he could turn and look at his attendant directly.
“Vobu…” he began.
“You’re right,” said Vobu.
He did not add ‘my lord’.
“I -” Rial began, feeling his familiar helpless sense of inadequacy rising, but determined to revisit this conversational ground. They had both been avoiding this for half a century too long. “I - don’t think I need an attendant? - but I wanted you to feel wanted, for as long as you needed.”
The robe slipped out of Vobu’s hands in a rustle of silk and puddled on the floor between them. Rial bent down awkwardly to pick it up, then stood holding it, waiting for Vobu to speak.
“It did help,” said Vobu, at last, his face working. “especially at first. But I was so angry at you.”
Rial sighed and scrunched the silk inexpertly together. “Thank you,” he said, though he wasn’t sure if that was for the reassurance or for the willingness to follow his lurch into interpersonal honesty. Either. Both. “Shall we… start again? I owe you for - so many years. You can stay in my household as long as you like. Or do something else,” he hesitated again at the edge of acceptability, but he wanted to be - curious, and not afraid to ask questions. And there was an imbalance here, a debt that he ought to make good. “You don’t have to tell me at once, or at all,” he said, “but - Vobu, what do you want now, for yourself?”
Vobu’s eyes were wide in what could have been shock, or horror, the whites showing clear all round his pupils. “I - I - I don’t know,” he whispered.
“Will you take some time to think it over? You don’t have to tell me about it,” Rial said again, “but… let me know what you want from me. Anything - or nothing - or…”
Vobu reached forward and snatched the crumpled robe out of his hands. “Oh, give me that, before you ruin it,” he said. Then, “I will… leave you to your evening? And let you know.”
The shift in Vobu’s tone - that unheard of censure - the open uncertainty - was the relief of a weight he had not known had grown so heavy. Rial sucked in his breath, lightheaded. “I - yes, please. Thank you.”
Vobu hooked the silk robes over a chair and left, without looking back. Rial, staring after him, felt the ache of the long tension abruptly released, the emptiness the loosed burden left behind.
And then - he was alone, in his chambers, as he had never been. He was - free.
After a few moments of opening and closing wardrobe doors - he had never felt comfortable looking through his own clothes, here in were Vobu’s domain - Rial found a plain and soothing linen robe that he had almost forgotten owning. He threw it on, sank into an armchair, and pulled out the notebook. He had an hour or so to spare, before Lura would expect him, and a great deal of strategising to do.