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“‘Us,’” murmured the general as I poured water into a pitcher. “How interesting to phrase it that way. I should like to know how you managed to kill Drake’s fire and save Cat. You should not have been able to do that.” A chair scraped along the floor and I heard him settle onto it.
“I should like to get dressed,” said Vai, “but in all honesty, General, I’m not going to do it in front of you.”
“I don’t like to have a sword held to my throat, Magister, so I admit to enjoying placing you in a position of discomfort. We’ll have the talk here. You may dress, or not.”
“Bastard,” said Vai, perhaps appreciatively.
“I was very close to my mother,” replied the general in a tone so genial it made me pause.
“Then we have a thing in common. My apologies. No offense was meant to your mother.”
I began dabbing again; the ointment worked quickly; my skin was already better.
“Understood. So, thanks to the mothers who raised us, here we are, Magister. Why did you not kill me when you had the chance?”
“I am not that man.”
“Yet you could have been that man. Any reasoned assessment of the situation suggests I will bring war to Europa and many will die in blood and fire. You could have stopped that.”
“People already die. There will be a conflagration sooner or later.”
“You are the rich and privileged son of one of the most powerful mage Houses. Are you willing to give that up?”
“I am one of their weapons, rather as James Drake seems to be one of yours. I haven’t finished discussing the man who tried to murder my wife.”
“What do you want, Magister?”
“I want to kill him.”
“But not me?”
“You have something I want. The means to abolish clientage.”
“A legal code is not the means to abolish clientage. One must have the means to enforce such a code. I can say or write anything I want, and that does not make it happen, or make it true. Why should princes and mage Houses abolish clientage? Whatever your origins, Magister, you have benefited by your association with Four Moons House. You, and your people as well.”
“I may have. But they have gained material benefit, nothing else.”
“I would not call material benefit ‘nothing.’ I have seen a man holding his dying child, the one he could not feed because his crops failed and the share for his lord must be met regardless. I have seen a wife hold the broken ruin of her husband crushed in a fall of rock in a mine whose bounty enriches the mine’s owner but not those who work in it. Sometimes the gods are cruel, but more often it is the cruelty and greed of men that kills us. You stand in a high place with the waters rising. I would not be so quick to give it up merely for principles.”
“Are you a radical, General? Or just an ambitious man who plans to use the blood of others to wash his hands at the altar of victory?”
“As you say, there will be a conflagration sooner or later. Which do you want, Magister? I will bring it sooner, and before the old order is quite ready to combat it.”
“They are ready,” said Vai. “They will fight you to the last drop of their blood.”
“I would expect nothing less. Yet it is long past time for the old order to be strangled in its amply feathered bed of unspeakable luxury.”
“You live well,” said Vai.
“And I am given to understand that you tailor well. Don’t trouble me with the tired old argument that a radical must be poor to be pure. Nothing bores me more than the man who makes a parade of his austerity. You do not trust me, Magister. Yet I have something you want which the mansa will not give you. Since you are talking to me instead of killing me, for I see you keep your cold steel close at hand, I must assume you have already made your choice.”
“I have made my choice,” said Vai.
I had finished smearing myself with ointment and wielded a cloth fan to dry. From behind my screen, I asked, “General, did you know that Juba and Prince Caonabo are twins?”
“Why, yes, Cat, I do happen to know that.”
“Why not marry Bee to Juba? He could come back from exile and take the cacique’s seat of power with Bee at his side. Why marry Bee to a fire mage, when she might be caught in the conflagration? Can you imagine I would wish even the chance of this on Bee?”
