CHAPTER SIX

Spider's Web

The jaran camp drowsed under the afternoon sun. The dusty air hung in a heat haze over the tents, and the cloudless sky seemed to breathe in and out with the pulse of the sun.

Tess liked these lazy afternoon days. Time suspended; there was no past or future, nothing but an endless present with her children playing nearby, her husband sitting beside her under the awning, usually in quiet council with one or another of his commanders, her sister twenty steps away weaving, her tribe—for that was what the jaran were to her, now—-surrounding her. On these long afternoons she could easily sit motionless for an hour at a time without anyone thinking it strange.

So she sat now, scrolling through information about Chapalii shipping schedules recently sent to her by her brother. The screen, which didn't exist physically, seemed to float in the air about an arm's length in front of her, and periodically she blinked twice to move the information on. The implant in her cranium produced these images and processed the information, and she used her eyes as the interface, processing visually.

"All encryption is cyclic," she said aloud.

"Hmm?" murmured Ilya. He was reading, or dozing, beside her, sprawled comfortably on pillows.

They weren't quite touching—it was too warm for that—but she felt the length of his body all along hers, his back to her side.

"Encryption. Ciphers, also called codes. They're cyclic, so they can eventually be decoded, be broken and deciphered, but a cycle could be so long that by our standards it's essentially unbreakable...."

He shifted around to look at her. "You think about the oddest things."

She made the mistake of glancing at him. The two sights, her screen of numbers and linked spatial codes and his face, blurred together and made her head hurt. She blinked four times hard and the implant switched off. "Ouch," she said reflexively. Even after years of living with the implant, it still caught her out at times.

"Staring at the sun again?" he asked lightly.

"No."

He watched her for a little while in silence. For a moment, he seemed on the brink of asking her a question. But he didn't.

"I'm just thinking about why merchants use encryption," she continued, and he let her go on, knowing she liked to talk things out. "To conceal their manifest of cargo, or to avoid a prince's tax they don't want to pay. Plotting treason. Or if their cargo is particularly valuable, they might want to discuss and plan out the route of travel in secret, so that no bandit or competing house would know where to lie in wait for an ambush."

"You've been talking to too many merchants."

"Actually, I was thinking about something my brother said to me in his last letter." She hesitated.

Charles sent information embedded in the tiny cylinders used to seal the handwritten parchment and paper letters that were his overt communications. Even these handwritten letters, although not the main part of the information he continually fed to Tess, were themselves partially encrypted so that Ilya could read them without suspecting that he was seeing only part of the message. But seeing Ilya's expression now, Tess wondered if he knew that he was being served only part of the truth. "About Chapalii merchants. He thinks they may be using ciphers, but he wonders why they would use them.

Especially since the emperor controls all the shipping routes with an iron hand."

"You know that the emperor controls these routes? Or only believe that he does? We watch the merchants travel from one city to the next, from Hamrat to Parkilnous to Jeds, and we may think they travel on a set pattern fixed by years of tradition or by a king's will, but then if you speak with these merchants you see that the truth is not so simple. Sands shift and cover old roads and watering holes.

Alliances shift and turn two princes into enemies where they had once been friends. A grandson may choose to rebel against his grandfather's set ways, and he may try a new road and find that it leads to disaster, or to riches. And yet again one family may have trodden the same paths for generations, never changing. By walking the same road, each girl after her mother, each boy after his father, so does that road become their family and each of them lives on forever in the ones who come after."

Insects droned in the quiet. Harness jingled and stilled. "Are you going to give up conquest for philosophy, my love?"

A smile tipped his lips. "Your own brother once told me that knowledge is power. Is philosophy not a form of conquest?"

"I thought it was more like a search."

"Isn't that the same thing?"

Tess touched his cheek, but it was so damned hot that even that contact was too sweaty to prolong. "Only for you, my heart. Ilya—?"

"Yes?" He smiled now, a real smile. He looked so youthful that it was uncanny, even though she knew why he wasn't aging at a normal rate. Still, at forty-five, he wasn't quite yet old enough that the few strands of gray sprinkling his hair weren't enough; that the gray hadn't increased in eight years had not yet excited suspicion. But it would. Soon enough, seeing time somehow suspended in him, people would begin to wonder how he stayed so young.

"Nothing," she replied.

"A wise ruler," added Ilya after a few moments, "maintains stability so that merchants may trade and increase his wealth through taxes as well as their own through profit. If these same merchants follow the rule of law, then it is in any emperor's interest to let them carry on their trade, which they understand best just as he understands how best to rule, without his interference."

"True," mused Tess. She examined him, where he lay so close: the coarse black hairs of his mustache which curved down around his lips to meld into his beard; the lines on his forehead, wrinkles brought on by frowning. Ilya had never developed laugh lines. An odd light dwelt in his eyes, as it had always done. He had never bothered to conceal it; thus had the gods marked him as one of their own.

He could not have concealed it in any case. He lived in the world differently. For Ilya the world was one great long vision illuminated by the gods' touch and through it he walked according to some hierophantic time.

"Is there something wrong with me?" he asked suddenly, touching his face with his right hand.

"Nothing cooler weather and a little privacy couldn't cure," she said with a grin.

"Mmmm," he replied. He sat up. "Here comes Niko."

Tess jumped to her feet and hurried out into the sun to give her arm to Niko. Even that short movement made her break into a sweat. "It's too hot to walk around, Niko," she scolded.

"I'm bored," said Niko, "and there are twelve children singing loudly in my wife's tent. Including yours. So I have come here to play a game of khot with your husband."

He moved slowly, and although for years she had stood eye to eye with him, now he stooped enough that she could look down on his head. Ilya set out pillows. Tess helped Niko ease down to sit and then filled a cup with lukewarm tea for him and arranged a plate with sweetcakes and fruit.

Carefully, stiffly, glancing once at Tess to make sure she did not interfere with the labored movements of his hands, Niko untied a leather pouch from his belt and set it on the carpet. Although khot could be played on a grid drawn in the dirt with sticks, Ilya had a gracefully carved wooden board which he brought out from the tent along with his own stones. Then the two men settled down to play. Tess reclined back on her pillows, blinked, and set up her program again. The quiet snap of stones being placed on the board serenaded her.

Twelve years ago, Charles had obtained the allegiance of a Chapalii merchant house. Eight years ago, Tess's old friend Sojourner King Bakundi and her husband Rene Oljaitu had managed to talk Charles and the Keinaba house elders into letting the two humans apprentice to the Keinaba family.

Bit by bit, information trickled in. Charles—or, that is, a consortium of people who worked with him—had collected it and other stray strands of information, packed it on a cylinder, and sent it to Tess. She had loaded the packet into her implant and now she picked her way through. It was rather like cutting a path through a dense jungle. The vegetation obscured the landmarks.

First and foremost, any great empire thrives on movement: stable lines of supply, of trade, of information. This movement must be unobstructed for officials on imperial business, and monitored and restricted for others on a scale that varied depending on the necessity of these functions to imperial strength and the likelihood of such restrictions causing dangerous levels of dissent.

In order to effectively sabotage the movement of ships and information in the Chapalii Empire, Charles had to figure out the logic of their transportation and communications web.

"Damn," muttered Ilya suddenly, jolting Tess back to the real world. "Why do you always beat me, Niko?"

"Because you still try to use force and the weight of numbers to take territory, rather than building a spider's web which looks fragile but in the end spreads its tendrils everywhere and takes over the board." Niko chuckled. "Shall we try again?"

Ilya grunted. Tess heard the sweep of stones being collected, a cascade as stones were poured back into their pouches, and then, starting again, the taps at uneven intervals as the two men took turns setting their stones on the board.

In the twenty-first century, humanity had braved the stars with a sublight drive. Soon after this momentous occurrence, the Chapalii had appeared and given the humans and their fledgling League the key to the vector drive, which allowed them to travel through space rather as ships had once sailed the seas between the continents of Earth. It reminded Tess all at once of the game of khot, if one warped the board so that the grid had a three-dimensional curve rather than a two-dimensional flat expanse. Relay stations (the stones) created the windows (the lines of the grid), the singularity in the time-space continuum through which ships traveled. The velocity and angle of entry—the vector—determined where and how far the ship would then travel in that "window" between two points in normal space. Thus, with this network of relay stations, the Chapalii Empire controlled a system of movement that encompassed navigable space.

That much humans knew for sure about the vector drive, that, and that their routes of passage were strictly controlled by the Protocol Office. Tess could not help but wonder, though, if the relay stations created the windows or merely allowed them to be accessed. As far as human scientists had discovered, the windows existed naturally somehow, since it was remotely possible—if terribly dangerous—to navigate with the vector drive without the aid of relay stations, devising calculations by instinct, skill and sheer good luck. Perhaps in a long, slow outward expansion the Chapalii had mapped the network of windows and marked them for their own, creating a web on which they could traverse the stars. Like a spider's web. The thought triggered a series of connections deep in her implant, and abruptly an old Machine Age flat poem wavered onto the screen: A noiseless, patient spider,

I marked where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

"Better," said Niko, breaking the silence. His voice was still lucid, but heavy with age. "But you've still let me encircle you. Shall we try again?"

Ilya grunted, too irritated, too intent, to reply in words. Stones poured.

Tess flickered her attention back to the screen and the spider.

.... Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be formed, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere—

Only Walt Whitman was talking about the soul, which wound her around to that days-ago conversation with Ilya, in which a woven pattern had seemed to her to express as much about her own and little Lara Orzhekov's personalities as any straightforward listing of attributes might.

Unless one thought of the web of windows linking planets and stations each to the other across the

"measureless oceans of space" as the soul, the breath, of the Empire. Like a great net, pulsing with the inspiration and expiration of its own being.

Ilya chuckled suddenly, distracting her. Like an echo ringing faintly after his laugh, she heard bells.

She blinked hard four times and the screen snapped into oblivion, leaving her with a lingering aftervision that dissipated as a belled messenger rode through it, pulled up, and dismounted, handing his reins over to one of the day guard.

Without looking up from the game, Ilya lifted a hand, and the soldier approached. He was a young man, his black hair twisted into three braids, his cheeks ruddy from the heat. He knelt just under the shade of the awning, bells chiming softly, and sat back on his heels, resting his palms on his thighs. He looked content enough to wait, out of the sun. Tess poured him some tea, and he thanked her prettily and sipped at it with commendable restraint.

Ilya and Niko finished the game, which, naturally, Niko won. As far as Tess knew, Ilya had only ever bested Niko at khot two times in his life.

Niko shook his head. "Ilyakoria, I despair of ever teaching you the serenity that will allow you to master the game. Yet somehow the lesson you cannot learn on the board you have learned to apply in war, so I have not utterly failed.".

Ilya glanced up sharply at the old man. "You have not failed at all, Niko," he said harshly, and then subsided when he saw the smile on Niko's face. "You will stay here, of course, and listen to the report."

"Of course," murmured Niko, still looking amused, although Tess also saw that he was beginning to look tired.

Ilya turned to the messenger. "Your name?"

"Daniil Obolensky, of Zvertkov's army," said the young man promptly. "I bring two pieces of news.

The first is of a revolt in Salkh, led by a bricklayer dressed in rags who claims to have heard the word of their God through a fog that set upon him in the night—"

"And no doubt gained the backing of their discontented noblemen as well," muttered Ilya.

"That is so," agreed the soldier, "according to the messenger who got through to us. The jaran garrison was set upon, although some tens are still barricaded in the citadel and others escaped to the ruins in the sands which the khaja will not visit for fear of demons."

Tess sighed, though she said nothing. Ilya listened intently. For eight years Salkh had remained a sore point in the southern Habakar district of the growing jaran empire, under jaran suzerainty but never quite yielding.

"What action has Zvertkov taken?" asked Niko.

"He has called back the advance troops from the Heaven Mountains to throw a perimeter around the city. But he has only just established himself in the city of Kalita, which lies thirty days' ride across the wastelands from Khoyan, which itself lies twenty days' ride across desert from Salkh, so he does not wish to withdraw any significant portion of his army back across these wastelands. By his order, I delivered these tidings as well to Prince Mitya as I passed through Hamrat in Habakar. The prince has sent two thousands south to help establish the perimeter. Otherwise he awaits your word."

"Did Prince Mitya send word to me on how he intends to deal with Salkh?" Ilya asked, looking annoyed that such a matter had been brought to his attention rather than summarily dealt with.

The rider dipped his head, acknowledging the unspoken censure in Bakhtiian's question. "Prince Mitya adds these words: 'While I would otherwise simply destroy Salkh and its people for their rebellion, my wife begs that I spare the city, since in it rests a great and ancient temple to her God founded by a holy man whose daughter many daughters removed is her mother.' "

Ilya grunted. "Tell Prince Mitya this. 'You will level Salkh until it is no higher than the sands which surround it. If you first set the town on fire, then the holy sanctuary may be spared if it is built of brick; if it is spared, then it alone may be allowed to stand while what remains is leveled, to show our mercy toward those who submit to the will of the gods.' "

"What about the inhabitants of Salkh?" Tess asked. Ilya glanced at her. Tess knew it puzzled him, her concern for a thousand, ten thousand, insignificant lives, but he was used to her quirks by now.

"Those who led and countenanced the rebellion will be executed." He hesitated and considered Tess for a moment, frowning. "Artisans and craftsmen may be dispersed to where they will do the most good. Those with special skills will be sent to Sarai. Of the rest, they may be made servants of the empire or sold into slavery, as Prince Mitya and his wife and ministers see fit." He nodded once, decisively, to show that the matter was ended. Tess said nothing. It was a more merciful fate than some cities had met. "The other message?"

The rider reached under his coat of bells and carefully drew out oiled cloth, which he unwound.

Two thick slabs of paper lay protected within. He offered the first to Tess.

" 'From Kirill Zvertkov to the Prince of Jeds,' " he recited from memory. " 'Greetings, and a treaty from the merchants of Byblos, who lay at rest in the caravansaries of Kalita and were brought before me. After two days of feasting we agreed to the following terms.' "

Supple with oil, the parchment unwrapped smoothly. Jaran commanders usually used foreign scribes, writing in Rhuian, to record their treaties. Tess could tell by the formality and flowing curves of the calligraphy that this was done by a Habakar scribe now in the service of the jaran conquerors.

Underneath the Rhuian, a second hand had roughly traced in a translation, in the script (derived from the Jedan script) which Tess had devised for khush, the language of the jaran.

" 'By the authority invested in me by Ilyakoria Bakhtiian, dyan of the jaran, and by Tess Soerensen, Prince of Jeds, I, Kirill Zvertkov, commander of the Army of the Right Hand, hereby authorize this treaty. As Kalita is the northernmost city to which the merchants of Byblos travel, so shall they henceforth send detailed reports to the jaran army as they travel of the worth of the local merchants and the routes of the caravans and the strength of the princes both in soldiers and in wealth, and reports as well of the movements of any soldiers in the lands through which they travel. As well, the merchants of Byblos shall tell at every city through which they travel of the great strength of the jaran army and of the favor shown us by Mother Sun and Father Wind, such that no prince and no people can stand against us. In return, wherever the jaran ride that is south and southeast of Jeds, we will destroy any trading station that does not hold allegiance to Byblos.' "

When she had finished, the messenger handed her the second note. This one, a little drier, crackled as she opened it. Inside was a brief letter written in a hand Tess recognized, one she had trained herself, that of Shura Sakhalin.

" 'Here follows a description of the merchants of Byblos,' " she read aloud, " 'given by Kirill Zvertkov, commander of the Army of the Right Hand and husband of Mother Veselov, and written down by Shura Sakhalin, eldest granddaughter of Mother Sakhalin. The men of Byblos are small of stature, with red-brown skin. They come from lands far to the south of Kalita. They wear loosely draped finespun cloth of white with blue or purple borders and they comment constantly on how cold it is, although it seems hot enough to me. They have no women with them. Neither do they travel with soldiers, trusting to their god, Son-of-Falcon, to protect them as he does all travelers. They wear delicate necklaces of gold and of jewels unknown to me. They all know how to read and write and tally accounts, a gift granted to their people by a goddess named Bird-Woman, whose claws left tracks in the mud, the first writing. By this veneration of birds I judge them to be civilized people."

Finishing, she made no comment. They all sat a while in silence. No wind stirred the tents at all.

The heat of the sun seeped down through the grass and into the earth as if it had weight. A child's pure voice lifted in a song, and soon a ragged chorus joined it, nearing them.

"Go to the tent of Eva Kolenin," said Tess finally to the rider, remembering her manners. "She will feed you and give you a place to rest. Her husband is Konstans Barshai, who is the captain of Bakhtiian's jahar. In the morning you will return to us, and we will give you messages to take back to Zvertkov."

The rider inclined his head and took himself off, bells whispering as he walked away from them. He passed an unruly pack of children, two of whom broke away from their companions and ran over to the tent.

"Mama! Papa!" cried Natalia, dancing around under the awning in excitement. "Mother Orzhekov says there is to be a birbas in ten days, with ten tribes, or more!"

Yuri sat down in his mother's lap, and then reached over and stole a sweetcake out of his father's hand. He smiled sweetly, and Ilya let him keep it.

"Sit down, Talia," said Niko. "You're making my head hurt. Here, you can play a game of khot with me. At least you're more of a challenge than your father."

Natalia flung herself down opposite Niko, her back against her father, and transformed herself into a paragon of stillness. "I am not! He beats me all the time."

"But you will be," replied Niko mildly.

"Niko," broke in Tess, "are you sure? You look tired—" Niko shot her a look that said, perhaps, more than he meant it to, or perhaps not: Let me play khot with the child while I still can.

"What do you know of Byblos?" asked Ilya suddenly.

Tess considered. "I don't even know if it's a trading house, a city, or a kingdom. I confess I know very little about the lands south and southeast of Jeds, except that they must be very hot. It was clever of Kirill to word the treaty like that."

"Indeed," said Ilya coolly. Tess glanced over at him. Was it possible that he was still jealous of Kirill? Surely not. Ilya admitted few women and fewer men into his circle of absolute trust. His aunt, his female cousins and especially Sonia, his niece Nadine, a courtesan of Jeds named Mayana, Niko's wife Juli Danov, Dr. Cara Hierakis, and Tess, of course: Nine women that made, but Tess could only think of five men. Three men had been with him since the beginning, Niko, Josef Raevsky, and Tadheus Lensky; the fourth was his first and most valuable ally, the great general and prince Yaroslav Sakhalin. But eight years ago by some invisible process impossible to understand or describe, Kirill had become the fifth.

"Yuri, you're too hot," said Tess, abruptly irritated that Ilya might find any praise she gave Kirill to be suspicious. Yuri opened his mouth to complain, thought better of it, and popped in the rest of the sweetcake instead. Then he pressed his sticky fingers onto her cheek and giggled. "Off!" He grinned and jumped up, unaffected by the heat, and ran out into the sun to greet Mother Orzhekov.

Ilya's aunt Irena, etsana of the Orzhekov tribe and the most powerful woman in the jaran tribes now that Mother Sakhalin was failing, took Yuri's hand, dropped it, and said a few words to him which immediately caused him to look abashed. He ran off in the direction of the river. Mother Orzhekov advanced without any loss of dignity, even when she licked her fingers clean.

Tess rose at once and gave her a kiss on either cheek.

"I won't sit down," said Irena, twitching her skirts away from the half-empty tray of sweetcakes. At sixty-two, she still had strength and vigor. "I have only come to tell you that a birbas has been arranged for ten days from now, at the great wilderness to the west of Sarai. We have not had a princely birbas for two years now."

Ilya inclined his head, looking, before her, incongruously very like the messenger had looked before him. "That is well, my Aunt," he agreed. "How many tribes will come?"

"Those who can," she said. "It will be good training for the men who will return to the armies this fall, and for those young women and men who will ride out for the first time."

"In Sarai," added Ilya, "we can ask the merchants what they know of Byblos."

A horrifying thought struck Tess. What if it wasn't her praise for Kirill—the old rivalry between the two men for her love—that had annoyed Ilya? What if it was a lingering suspicion that she knew more than she would ever tell him? What if Ilya didn't truly trust her?

And why should he, in any case?