Veldrath — The Garrison Hall — Two Hours Later
The hall had been the city's administrative center before the siege and the garrison commander's meeting room after it, and it was large enough for three emperors and their immediate aides without the walls coming in, which was the first time Lorenzo had cause to be grateful that western administrative architecture defaulted to the imposing.
He had not cleaned the blood off his armor. He had considered it and decided against it, not as a statement but as a practical decision about what he wanted the room to see first. The armor had been through Grim-Watch and Thornfield and eight days of Veldrath and it looked like it. He was not going to pretend otherwise.
The table was Drevth's table, granite-topped, heavy enough that it would not move regardless of what gravity working was applied to the room. Seraphina had set three places — parchment, quills, ink at each. A water jug. No wine. Lorenzo had told her no wine, because wine was for negotiations where both parties wanted to reach an agreement, and he was not yet certain what everyone in this room wanted.
Varkas arrived first.
He came through the south entrance with his Grand Vizier, a narrow man named Amnon whose eyes processed the room in the specific way of people whose job was to process rooms and two guards who were decorative in the sense that they were present for the appearance of protocol rather than any genuine defensive purpose, which meant Varkas had assessed the room as safe enough that his real security was elsewhere. That was information.
He looked exactly like his portraits, which Lorenzo had always assumed meant his portraits were flattering and now understood meant his portraits were accurate. He was not a large man. He did not project the physical authority that Lorenzo associated with power — he did not need to. He projected something else, something that was harder to name, the specific quality of a man who had decided decades ago that the room always ended up arranged around him and who had been correct enough times that the decision had become indistinguishable from fact.
He looked at Lorenzo. He looked at the armor.
"You left the blood," Varkas said. His voice was warm and amused and had underneath it a layer that was neither warm nor amused.
"It's mine," Lorenzo said. "The shoulder. It's been eight days."
"Have someone look at that," Varkas said. He sat without being invited to, at the position to Lorenzo's right, which was not the position Lorenzo had indicated and which put Varkas's back to the east wall rather than the window. "My physician is very good. He has saved my life twice, which is two times more than my generals have managed."
"Thank you," Lorenzo said. "When this is finished."
Varkas looked at him with the expression of a man who has just been told something that he recognizes.
"When this is finished," he said. He poured himself water. "I like that. Most people, in your position, would have said 'if.'"
"If leaves room I don't want to leave," Lorenzo said.
Varkas nodded, as though this confirmed something he had been thinking.
Cassius arrived twelve minutes later, which was twelve minutes longer than Lorenzo had calculated he would take, and the twelve minutes were a statement about who set timelines in this room and who did not.
He did not use the door. He came through the hall's east window, which had been opened for the morning air, floating at a height that required the window frame to accommodate a large man traveling horizontally, which it did, barely. The basalt platform had been left outside. He descended to the floor inside and stood rather than floating, which was the West's version of the diplomatic gesture of setting a weapon on the table.
He was larger than he appeared at distance. Lorenzo had seen him on the platform at two thousand yards and at twenty yards and at the distance across the hall, and each reduction in distance produced a recalibration. The calcification was not uniform — it had built up where the working had been most sustained, the shoulders and the jaw and the hands, the surface of skin that had absorbed decades of gravity application until the stone and the skin had reached a truce that was neither fully one nor the other. The face had been human once. It remembered being human. It did not look as though it missed it.
He looked at Varkas. He looked at Lorenzo. He did not sit.
"You killed my warlord," Cassius said.
His voice was what Lorenzo had been told to expect — the grinding quality of the deep earth, the sound that arrived in the chest before it arrived in the ears. Not a voice from lungs in the ordinary sense. Something that had recalibrated along with the rest of him.
"Gant was killing Northern soldiers from a fortress you gave him specifically to do it from," Lorenzo said. "He was effective at his work. I stopped him from doing his work."
"He was mine," Cassius said. The weight in those three words was not the weight of sentiment. It was the weight of property. The loss was an accounting loss, not a grief.
"The working relationship is ended," Varkas said, from his chair. He had not looked up from the water cup he was examining with apparent interest. "Let's address the current situation, which involves considerably more than the disposition of one warlord."
Cassius looked at Varkas with the expression of a man deciding whether the person speaking deserved a response. He arrived at a decision and sat — not at the table, on a block he had located against the east wall, which he crossed to and sat on, which meant he was behind Lorenzo's left shoulder rather than across the table. Lorenzo did not turn. He had known where Cassius was going when he saw the block.
"You positioned eight Engines on the western approach," Lorenzo said, to Cassius behind him. "You haven't deployed them."
"I have not deployed them yet," Cassius said.
"If you deploy them, the southern force responds," Lorenzo said. "If the southern force responds, you are fighting a two-front engagement with your main column in a canyon approach where the terrain advantages you are accustomed to do not exist." He paused. "I am the least of your problems if that happens."
Silence. The specific silence of a man who has been told an accurate thing that he would prefer not to acknowledge.
"Why did you come?" Lorenzo said. Now he turned. He turned in the chair so he was facing Cassius directly, which required the chair to be rotated and the rotation to be deliberate. "You have more soldiers than I do. You have the Engines. The geometry of this situation favors you. So why are you in a room talking instead of doing the thing the geometry allows?"
Cassius looked at him. The grey eyes — the part of the face that had not calcified, the part that remained specific to the man who had been there before the stone — evaluated him.
"The same reason you're in a room talking," Cassius said, "instead of retreating through the breach in your northwest face."
The answer landed in the room and sat there. Maren, at the wall, shifted his weight. Seraphina, at her place with her parchment, did not move. Alexander, in the shadow of the northeast pillar, was perfectly still.
"Because the geometry is wrong," Lorenzo said. "Whatever the numbers say. The geometry is wrong and you know it."
"Enlighten me," Cassius said.
"If you destroy me here," Lorenzo said, "Varkas takes the iron. All of it. He takes the trade routes and the plateau access and the sky-bridge, and there is no one left in the North to contest him, because I am dead and my successor will need five years to consolidate. Five years of unchallenged southern economic dominance over the northern iron supply." He looked at Cassius. "You do not want that."
"You think you know what I want," Cassius said.
"I think I know what you can't afford," Lorenzo said.
"This is a productive beginning," Varkas said, pleasantly. He set down the water cup. "But I would like to ask a question before we proceed."
Everyone looked at him. When Varkas wanted to be looked at, everyone looked at him. This was the gift, and it was genuine, and it made him more dangerous than the six thousand soldiers outside rather than less.
"You are both wondering why I'm here," Varkas said. "The North." He looked at Lorenzo. "Because I received a letter from your brother, inviting my counsel and suggesting that southern intervention in this conversation might prevent a resolution that neither party desired." He paused. "The West." He looked at Cassius. "Because my letter to you proposed exactly that: a conversation. Nothing more."
"Letters," Cassius said. The word was granite.
"Letters from sensible people often prevent wars," Varkas said. "It's one of the more useful functions of correspondence."
Lorenzo looked at Alexander. Alexander, in the pillar's shadow, was looking at Varkas with the specific attention of a man who is listening for what is not being said.
"You came," Lorenzo said to Varkas, "because my brother wrote to you."
"Among other reasons," Varkas said. He smiled — the warm, complete smile that had nothing behind it except the decision to produce it. "I am not one-dimensional, Emperor. I have interests. My interests include a Northern iron supply that is not disrupted by a prolonged siege of a western city, because my shipbuilding program requires consistent iron delivery and disruption is expensive." He looked at the water cup. "That is sufficient reason for a very long journey."
Cassius made a sound that was not quite a word. "Leonard's son. Sitting in a western city he took while the West looked the other way. And the South arriving to ensure the West cannot reclaim it."
"I arrived," Varkas said mildly, "because the economics of the situation invited me. Nothing conspiratorial about it." He looked at the water cup. "I am a practical man."
Lorenzo looked at him. At the warmth of the man's face and the depth behind it. There was a reason Varkas had come that was not in this room and would not be found in this room. He filed it. He looked at the table.
"Let us negotiate," Lorenzo said.