The Dragon Round (Dragon #1)(72)
4
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Having spent a half hour staring at manifests, bills, and logs to avoid staring at the galleys leaving for Yness, Livion climbs to the Upper City and the Blue Tower, where Council takes place. Three hundred feet tall, the tower is the most recent magnification of the simple wooden keep around which the city first grew. The previous iteration was called the Raven Tower for the birds that had long roosted on it. The current name comes from the great blue dome that was added when the tower was heightened to mark the League’s creation. The ravens now float around the dome’s white cupola, their own private tower.
Livion hurries across the plaza in front of the tower, through the tall double doors, and up a wide staircase to a thin vestibule. It’s crammed with the aggrieved and desperate waiting for the public pleading later in the meeting. As a guard lets him through the door into the council chamber, Livion wonders how many of them would end up dying if Hanosh went to war. They seem to wonder why, having paid their pleading fee, they can’t go in with him.
The semicircular room covers half a floor of the tower. From an elevated banc the councilors face two columns of pews populated by those scheduled to address them. Agents and factotums from the major and minor companies, as well as the few petty companies that can afford it, have standing tables around the room. Each sports a small company flag like those in front of each councilor, except theirs belong to the richest companies in Hanosh.
The largest tables are empty, though, their flagsticks pulled. Over the last six months, the other League cities have called their lead agents home to protest Hanosh’s war talk. They still have their sources in the city and their alliances with various companies, so the Council declared the gesture mere pageantry. Livion slows as he passes through them, feeling the weight of their agents’ absence, until he notices Chelson staring at him from one end of the banc and he ducks into a back pew.
The Council is dispensing with basic business: decobbling the streets in the workers’ district instead of repairing them (back--burnered), installing more streetlamps in the servants’ district (rejected), adding workhouses in both (heartily approved). It’s dreary talk in a dreary room. The walls are bare stone, the ceiling plain wood. The only decoration other than the flags hangs behind the banc: a large pine H. The symbol of the city, its crossbar extends beyond its stems, making it look like either a gallows or, as the Aydeni say, a double cross.
Livion wishes they could meet in the original council chamber beneath the dome. He’s heard it’s magnificent, with gorgeous murals, stained glass windows, and dominating views, a celebration of all the League aspired to be. But when the councilors discovered how taxing it was to climb so high, they moved Council here to what had been a ballroom and left the old chamber to the rats and dust. The decision makes sense in retrospect. The League is decaying too. And no one has balls anymore. They’re a pointless expense.
Eles, leader of the council, gavels the ongoing business closed and opens the speakers’ portion of the meeting. Ject, general of the city guard, rises from the front row. He’s polished from his boots to his mustache. Given his rank, he’s allowed dyed silk for his shirt, which is cut to recall a guardsman’s blouse. Its deep green vibrates against his red sash of rank, which glitters with a long matrix of honors. His tight pants are brushed to perfection. A ceremonial dirk completes his outfit.
Before he can say anything, Eles says, “Where is our general of the army? We pushed this meeting up to hear his news. Is it not so alarming that I must sit here squandering minutes?” Eles is so old and desiccated he reminds Livion of a chicken killed, plucked, and forgotten for a week in the sun. His voice, though, retains the sharpness of a beak.
“The general,” Ject says, “has been overstepping his bounds, arresting people in the Upper City, an alarming issue in its own right. While the general may conduct certain operations in the city, I ask the Council to remind him that his activities must be coordinated with the guard. For the public’s safety.”
And for a cut of any prisoner’s board, Livion thinks, if Ject can have a prisoner sent to the guard’s cells instead of the army’s. Ject also gets a piece of a prisoner’s service contract with a company after a conviction. Some of this coin trickles down to the guards, who call it the spoils of their daily war.
“I would like the Council to instruct the general,” Ject says, “when he deigns to appear—” As if on cue, a guard opens the chamber doors and Herse enters.
Unlike Ject’s clothes, Herse’s are rumpled, as if he has just returned from an engagement in the field. He approaches the banc, adjusting his sash. When he was coming up through the ranks, Herse bore a kopis under his arm and his sash was as bedazzled as Ject’s. Now he goes unarmed—the army is his sword—and his sash sports only one honor, the crossed spear and sword for basic weaponry, the first all soldiers receive and the one, Herse has explained, that binds them together in common cause for the city.
By declaring that Ayden, not a dragon, destroyed the wolf pack, that cause would be war.
Could Herse have been lying? Could he know about the dragon attacks too? A double dragon attack does seem less likely than an attack by privateers, especially with Solet coming up empty of late. As for other survivors, would Herse’s forces silence them? Would he just pretend there were no survivors until it’s too late to halt the war?