The Vizier touched the very tip of his finger to the crown-and-swords on the seal on his summons. Then he blinked, and folded the paper, and tapped the edge against his fingertips and stared very hard at nothing at all for a long fistful of minutes. He knew the Queen was en route back to Urse from an interrupted tour of the outer colonies, and that she had not yet arrived. So either her entire tour had been a ruse in which the Tadeshi media had been complicit, or someone else was using the royal seal to conduct government business. And if the latter was true—sending, and using, that seal sent its own message.
The Vizier set the paper down gently beside his turing terminal. He considered whether or not he should acknowledge that message when he met with the sender. He would be a poor vizier indeed if he failed to notice a royal seal in place of a standard government sigil; but there was no reason to suppose whoever had used that seal knew what sort of vizier he was, or had any special expectations of him, and the seal might be a test, of sorts. A measure of the Consortium’s strength and worth, marked by its willingness to chastise a not-quite-ally on the eve of a state funeral. The Vizier considered that his own king was currently badly wounded and lying in a hospital. He considered that his Consort was heavily pregnant, and the only living heir was a princess not yet ten years old. And he decided, in that moment, that it was better to be supposed feckless, and perhaps a bit of a fool, to whomever was using the Tadeshi royal seal, than a threat.
So when the Vizier selected his robes for the meeting, he chose the set with the barest bit of fraying on the left sleeve cuff. He poured a bit of ink out into the sink and rubbed his fingertips in it, until the flesh under the nails turned indigo. He pulled several strands of hair out of their braid and let them corkscrew out of the side of his head as if he’d been caught in a spring windstorm. Then he hexed his aura to conceal strong emotional reactions. Such hexing is standard practice among diplomats, and requires the sort of rudimentary arithmancy one acquires in primary school, and generally takes a only a few seconds. The Vizier, whose arithmancy was considerably more advanced, applied a more elaborate hex that took several minutes. He did not merely wish to conceal his emotions; he wished to present precisely what the observer most expected to see.
Then he went to keep the appointment. Along the way—and it was a short walk from the embassy to the municipal complex, a fifty meter stroll across a wide station corridor and up the ring—he counted the number of black uniforms dotting the otherwise colorful crowds. There were not as many as one might expect, given that the King had died by a Tadeshi assassin. And he noted the unexpectedly few security personnel were inversely proportional to the number of clerks and minor functionaries and liveried servants clogging the corridors of the municipal complex.
The Vizier was a cautious man, disinclined to paranoid imaginings, preferring to amass and analyze all available data before reaching a conclusion. The increased number of servants could be a result of the sheer number of foreign and domestic representatives arriving on Urse by the hour. The paucity of security could be because the screening hexes at the docks were very, very good, or because no one would be foolish enough to attempt an explosion on an aether-station, with merciless void on the other side. Or, he admitted to himself with some reluctance, because the person in charge of dispensing security was unworried about a repeat act of violence, which brought with it a host of questions whose answers promised to be as unsettling as the unofficial armada hovering in the system.
The Vizier passed through the doors, which bore the same royal seal as his invitation, and was immediately hailed—shouted at, really—by a blinking, roundish individual who, having screeched your excellency the Vizier of Thorne across a crowded foyer, could not be persuaded to speak above a marble-mouthed murmur while he guided the Vizier through a labyrinth of corridors and finally deposited him in a lush conference room.
The Vizier noted the breadth of the table, and the conservatively beautiful artwork on three bulkheads and the row of portholes on the other. He noted the pair of chairs, and surmised which was meant to be his by its proximity to the door through which he had entered the room, and its distance from a smaller door on the opposite side of both room and table. It was the sort of door a king or a queen might enter through, to avoid hallway traffic. Whoever would come through that door was not worried about assassins or security at all, which suggested either a fool or someone with reasons not to worry. Then he sat down, folded his hands on the table, and waited. At precisely two minutes past the appointed time, the Minister of Energy entered the conference room through that small door.
The Vizier supposed he had enough data now to reach a conclusion. He rose.
“My lord Vizier,” the Minister said crisply. “How kind of you to agree to meet me.”
“Minister,” the Vizier said. The social rank between a minister and a vizier was such that a handshake should have sufficed as a gesture of greeting. The Minister had not yet extended his hand, and the Vizier considered for less than a breath extending his. Then he brushed across the Minister’s icy blue eyes and bowed instead, his deliberately ink-stained fingers pressed together in front of his chest, as if to a superior. “On behalf of the Thorne Consortium, Minister, let me extend our deepest sympathies and regret for the loss of King Sergei.”
“Thank you,” said Minister Moss. His gaze flickered over the Vizier, marking every loose hair, every smudge, every wrinkle. One corner of his mouth quirked with a mild, condescending amusement. “Allow me to express our dismay that his Majesty, King Philip, was also harmed in the incident. I trust he is recovering?”
The Vizier hoped his own expression was better behaved. “King Philip is receiving the best medical care our chirurgeons can provide, Minister.”
The Minister rearranged his features into a careful mask of regret. “The Free Worlds of Tadesh hope for his swift recovery.”
The Vizier bowed again. “Thank you, Minister.”
“And please extend our regard to the Consort in what must be a difficult time.”
The Vizier blinked and held his bow a half-heartbeat longer while he schooled his own face into obedience. The seal was not the only royal prerogative the Minister was using: he’d assumed the pronouns, too.
“Of course, Minister. I am certain she will appreciate the thoughtfulness. She is hoping to place a quantum-hex call to the Queen on the day of the funeral to convey her personal regrets. I was hoping to arrange that with you today, so that I can advise her Grace of the Queen’s availability.”
Now it was the Minister’s turn for an extra second of hesitation. Then he flattened his lips into what the Vizier imagined was meant to be a small, pained smile, and which instead looked like the Councilor had eaten something disagreeable. “The Queen is conducting a tour of the outer colonies, and even by tesser-hex, her return will take more time than is seemly for our King to wait for his funeral. We can arrange for a call upon her return to Urse, when I am certain she will be glad to hear from the Consort.”