The Orb of Cairado

Chapter One

W HEN THE Wisdom of Choharo crashed (he would figure out later), Ulcetha Zhorvena was halfway out Neli?n Mulabin’s window, praying that the fire escape was sturdier than it looked.

“Zhorvena, your glasses, ” Osmin Mulabin hissed, holding them out to him, and shouted over her shoulder, “Just a minute, Father!”

“Ah, gods, thank you.” He crammed them on his face and half-fell the rest of the way onto the fire escape rails. Which hurt.

“Bruises tomorrow,” he muttered, but he was already on his way down, even as she slammed the window shut. He could imagine her pulling herself up and putting on her frostiest expression before going to open the door to her choleric and suspicious father. She had told Ulcetha once that she had been fighting with her father since she was sixteen, and that was at least fifteen years’ practice right there.

He dropped from the bottom of the fire escape, landing safely on the balls of his feet. It was pitch-black in the alley, with only a faint nimbus from the nearest gaslight on the street to help guide him out from between the buildings. He managed well enough, though, and made no noise loud enough that Osmer Mulabar would hear it.

He walked home cheerfully through Cairado’s midnight bustle, for it was truly a city that did not sleep. The municipal ferries weren’t running, but there were goblin ferries (so-called, even though half the ferrymen were elves), and he picked one mostly at random for the trip across the Athamara.

His teenage goblin ferryman sang snatches of opera all the way across. Ulcetha dug out most of the spare change in his pockets to pay him when they reached the other side, and they wished each other a good night. From there, he walked through the cramped and twisted streets of East Shore to the converted palace where he had a one-room apartment with a glorious view of the river and went to bed. He slept well.

And all the time, Mara was dead. Burned and mangled and dead in the worst airship crash that had ever happened.

* * *

Like many goblins in Cairado, Onaba Salathgarad—tall, black-skinned, eyes of a brooding firelight red—ran an import-export business. Ulcetha sometimes wondered morbidly whether the others were honest, or if they were all as crooked as his employer, who also did a brisk business in fake artifacts. He had no prejudices: he sold fake elven artifacts to the Barizheisei just as happily as he sold fake Barizheise artifacts to the elves—and he sold both kinds over the mountains and across the sea. Nothing was sacred in Salathgarad’s shop.

Ulcetha hated him.

Salathgarad sneered at Ulcetha’s education, but exploited him as ruthlessly as he exploited his other assets; one of Ulcetha’s main tasks was writing fake provenances for the fake elven artifacts that came into Salathgarad’s hands. (He knew nothing whatsoever about Salathgarad’s sources, and Salathgarad watched jealously to be sure that did not change.) It was a terrible use of second-class honors in history, but Ulcetha gritted his teeth and did it anyway because he was paid extremely well. He even came to find the work perversely interesting. His own specialty being narrowly the reign of Edrevenivar the Conqueror and its effects on the cities of the south, he perforce learned a great deal about relations between Cairado and the great city Vasthorno at diverse periods; about the reigns of Prince Coluna and Prince Lizhana; about the doomed princess Hathi?n; and about the work of the great jeweler, Dachensol Tobora Theramar.

It was work, he reminded himself daily. Crooked work, but work all the same, and without it he would be living in a tenement instead of a converted palace or even facing the municipal House of Indigents where his shame would be complete. So he kept his hatred for Salathgarad behind his teeth, kept his head down, and kept his job.

In writing fake provenances, Ulcetha also learned a great deal about the history of the lost treasures of Cairado, not because Salathgarad was stupid enough to fake them, but because so many of his Ethuverazheise fakes ended up being somehow tangential to them.

The Orb of Cairado was a flawless star sapphire as large as an egg. It had been presented to Prince Olnera some seventeen hundred years ago and made promptly into a scepter to symbolize the princes of Cairado. It had remained in Cairado until it was given—or “given”—to the prince of Vasthorno in exchange for Cairado’s independence from the larger and much more powerful city. The princes and people of Cairado had lamented this loss for two hundred years before the Orb returned to the city as part of the dowry of Hathi?n Estervin.

Hathi?n’s dowry also included the Star of Cstheio, a blue diamond the size of a man’s thumbnail. Some long-ago prince of Vasthorno had had it set into a ring for his wife, and it had since passed from mother-in-law to daughter-in-law in an unbroken chain. Sending it to Cairado was a measure of how desperate Hathi?n’s father was to see her married before her “nervousness” devolved irredeemably into madness, which all parties involved knew it was going to. Ulcetha had come to have no good opinion of Prince Shevora, who had married Hathi?n anyway for the sake of her dowry.

Hathi?n died insane when her son was an infant, and the Star of Cstheio remained simply a treasure of the princes of Cairado…until it became urgently necessary in the wake of Orava the Usurper, the only maza ever to attempt to use his powers to take the throne, to prove the good will and loyalty of the Cairad’athmaz’are before the people of Cairado stormed the Cairad’mazan’theileian and killed every maza they could find. The prince and the Cairad’athmaza had cobbled together a ceremony involving the Orb of Cairado and the Star of Cstheio, which was then repeated yearly until the coming of Edrevenivar the Conqueror.

This bit, Ulcetha had already known. Prince Rinava, whose son had been killed in the futile defense of Vasthorno, had put all of the treasures of the Moraclada in a vault deep beneath the Summer Palace of Cleth and then—when Edrevenivar’s armies were busy razing Vasthorno to the ground—burned down the palace with himself inside. And Corica Athmaza had hidden the Star of Cstheio and then gone mad, coming to believe that everyone around him was an agent of Edrevenivar; all he would ever say about the Star was that it was hidden where Edrevenivar would never find it. And that part was true.

* * *

When people were asking each other later, Ulcetha knew exactly where he’d been when he learned about the crash of the Wisdom of Choharo. He’d been in Salathgarad’s small but elegant office, struggling to make the public books and the private books balance in a way that looked innocent on one side and was accurate on the other.

Salathgarad banged through the door as he always did, but instead of yelling, he stood quietly until Ulcetha and Eda were both looking at him in puzzlement and said, “They’re saying the emperor’s airship crashed.”

“Crashed?” said Eda.

“Do you know which airship it was?” said Ulcetha.

Salathgarad said, “Does it matter?”

“Yes,” Ulcetha said, much closer to snapping at Salathgarad than was probably wise. “It matters to me.”

“The Wisdom of Choharo, ” Salathgarad said instead of snapping back, and Ulcetha put his head in his hands, cold with horror. Mara was the pilot on that ship.

Eda said, “Is the emperor…”

“Dead,” Salathgarad said bleakly. “He and his sons.”

And the airship crew, Ulcetha added, but even if he’d been willing to chance Salathgarad’s temper a second time, he couldn’t get the words out.

Salathgarad said abruptly, “I’m closing the office for the day. You two go home.”

Neither Ulcetha nor Eda waited for Salathgarad to change his mind.

* * *

Mara and Ulcetha had been friends since earliest childhood, and they had stayed friends even when their lives went in radically different directions. Mara was the only person who had attended Ulcetha’s second-class honors ceremony; none of his family could be bothered. Mara had also stayed by him when he was asked to leave the University of Cairado, another thing his family couldn’t be bothered to do, and Ulcetha had sworn to himself that he would do as much for Mara, should the opportunity—gods forbid—arise. And now neither that nor any other opportunity would ever present itself.

Ulcetha was confident that Mara had died knowing that Ulcetha was his friend and that he loved him, but the balance between them was out of true. He thought there was nothing that could fix it, that this was just one more place in his life where things were off-kilter, his entire life out of whack, but that was before Sinzharo showed up at his door.

Sinzharo was Mara’s wife—widow now. She and Ulcetha had hated each other on sight and had both tried to hide it for Mara’s sake. Ulcetha sometimes suspected they hadn’t done a very good job, but if Mara knew, he said nothing. Mara would do anything to avoid a fight; pretending not to see what they were trying to hide was no more than the flick of an ear.

Ulcetha had fully expected never to see Sinzharo again, and his face and ears must have shown as much when he opened the door, for she sounded both nervous and apologetic when she said, “Hello Ulcetha.”

“Hello, Sinzharo,” he said, and by rote, “I am sorry for your loss.” Then he looked at her more carefully and felt much less rote about it.

No one had been sleeping well in the week since news of the crash had reached Cairado, between grief—whether personal or part of the strange public grief for someone you had never met, never expected to meet, and maybe hadn’t liked—and nervousness edging up on fear about what the new emperor (Edrehasivar, he was calling himself, and what did that mean?) might choose to do in the wake of his father and brothers’ deaths, but Sinzharo behind her careful maquillage looked as if she hadn’t slept at all.

“Thank you,” she said. “Would you…would you come have a drink with me? I have something I need to talk to you about.”

“To me ? That is, yes, of course. Just let me get my shoes.”

They walked in silence a block and a half to the Cat and Carpenter, where they found a table and each ordered a glass of the house Romaki. They sat, still in silence—for what in the world was there to say to each other?—until the wine came.

Sinzharo took a swallow of wine as if fortifying herself and said, “I found something in Mara’s desk that had your name on it.”

Ulcetha was surprised she’d brought it to him, but had the wit not to say so. He waited, taking a sip of wine himself, and Sinzharo pulled a long envelope from her inside jacket pocket. He saw that she’d opened it, but didn’t say anything about that, either. Instead, he took out the piece of paper inside and unfolded it to reveal…

“A map?” he said, looking at Sinzharo.

Her bafflement was plain in her ears; she said, “He never talked about wanting to go to the Vershaleen Islands to me. Did he to you?”

“No,” Ulcetha said. He took his glasses off and examined the map more closely. “This isn’t a standard map. You can see where it was torn out of a book.”

“Yes,” said Sinzharo. “But I have no idea which book it might be, nor if that’s important.”

“You think it must be something important?”

“Mara went to some trouble to be sure you got it,” she said. “He wouldn’t have done that on a whim.”

“No, but there’s nothing marked on the map.”

“I know,” Sinzharo said. “It’s just a map of the Vershaleen Islands, and I have no idea why he wanted you to have it.”

“There wasn’t anything else with it?” Ulcetha checked the envelope again.

“No,” said Sinzharo, either missing or not resenting the implication that she might have interfered with the envelope’s contents.

They both drank more wine.

“Do you think the map came out of a book Mara owned?”

“He wouldn’t have torn a map out of a book he’d borrowed. Frankly, I’m surprised he tore a map out of a book at all.”

“It does seem unlike him. Which suggests that, as you said, this is something that was important to him.”

“Yes,” said Sinzharo. “The Witness for the Dead tried, but he couldn’t get anything from Mara’s body. So I just… I’m trying to do what I think Mara would want.”

“Yes,” Ulcetha said. No matter how much he disliked her, he had never doubted that Sinzharo loved Mara. “Clearly, you’re right. He wanted me to have this map. I just wish I had any idea why.”

Sinzharo shook her head, making the black beads of her earrings clatter together. “I don’t know, but if I think of something, I promise I’ll tell you.”

“Thank you,” Ulcetha said, and they finished the wine in a silence that was almost companionable.