THE SENATE FLOOR

The postern was open.

It stood at the end of a narrow lane behind the old kitchens of Calloway Academy, an iron-studded door in a wall of soot-black brick, so low that Declan had to stoop. The lock had been oiled. The hinges did not make a sound. On the step, in the dark, a single lantern burned with its shutter half closed, and beside it, in a gray cloak with the hood drawn up, stood a woman of sixty who looked as though she had been carved out of a fence-post.

"Eleven fifty-eight," said Dean Holloway. "You are early."

"You are on time," I said.

"I have been on time for forty years. It is the only vice I have." She stepped back to let us pass. Her eyes went over me once, with a cold professional sweep, and stopped at the black lace of the tree on my cheek. Something moved behind her spectacles. "So it is true."

"It's true."

"Then I was right to be ashamed." She pulled the door shut behind us and shot the bolt. "Come. Quickly. Do not speak in the cloister. There are Marshals quartered in the East Court, and their sentries have more ears than wits."

We went through the kitchens in single file. They were dark and cold, smelling of old grease and cabbage, and my boots left prints in the flour dust. A passage. A stair. A door, and then the cloister, a long arcade of pale stone, white in the moonlight, with the dead fountain in the middle and the statue of a founder gazing blankly over it. I had walked here a thousand times. I had kissed a boy here, once, behind that column.

I did not look at the column.

…

She hid us in the observatory.

It was a round room at the top of the north tower, with a brass telescope as long as a cannon and a ceiling painted with the constellations. Holloway lit a single candle. She laid out bread and cheese on a star-chart, and poured three cups of tea from a thermos that had plainly been waiting all evening. Nimbus got the cheese.

"The Senate sits at noon," she said. "The doors open at ten. The Chancellor will take the rostrum at ten past. He will speak for an hour. Then there will be a vote." She said it with distaste. "A vote of attainder, against yourself. It is quite irregular. The Constitution requires a trial. But the Constitution is, at present, in the Chancellor's pocket."

"And the Relay?"

"Wired for a full broadcast. They have set up the Glass in the gallery. Three technicians, a producer and a man to adjust the lamps." Her mouth twisted. "He means it to be remembered. A great public unmasking of the Republic's enemy."

"Good," said Declan.

She glanced at him.

"Yes?"

"He has arranged an audience for us," he said mildly. "It would have been churlish to refuse."

Holloway looked from one of us to the other. Her lined face did something I'd never seen it do. It folded, slowly, into a smile. It was very small and very dry and it changed her whole face.

"I see," she said. "Miss Reeve, I wonder if you know how like your mother you are."

I put down my cup.

"You knew her."

"I taught her. A long time ago." She turned her own cup in her fingers. "She had your habit of sitting very still just before she did something dangerous. I used to find it unsettling." She stood, abruptly, and straightened her cloak. "Sleep, both of you. I shall wake you at eight. I will bring you in by the Scholars' Gallery."

"Marguerite."

She stopped in the door.

It was the first time I had ever used her name. It seemed to startle her. She stood quite still, with her hand on the latch, and her back to me.

"Thank you," I said.

She did not turn. I saw her shoulders rise, and fall.

"Go to sleep, Miss Reeve," said the Dean, very gruffly, and went out.

…

I did not sleep.

I lay on a cot beneath the painted stars, in the dark, with my boots on, and listened to the city. It never went quiet. A far-off clatter of hooves. A bell tolling one, and two, and three. The long mournful whistle of a night train, passing on the Basin line, and then, an hour later, nothing at all.

I thought: Hawk.

I thought of him on the trestle, with a keg in either hand, in the dark.

Declan lay on the other cot, six feet away. He had not stirred. His breathing was slow and even, and I would have sworn he was asleep, if I had not known better. At four, in the black before dawn, I heard him speak very quietly.

"Tamsin."

"Yes."

"Are you afraid?"

I thought about it.

"Yes."

"Good." A rustle. "So am I. I would be worried if you were not."

"What do you do with it?"

"With what?"

"The fear."

"I fold it up very small," said Declan, "and I put it in my pocket, and I carry it in with me. It is a perfectly serviceable thing, fear. It sharpens the eye." A pause. "One only must not let it drive."

I stared up at the painted dome. A little bronze Orion, gilded, hung over my face.

"I'll remember that," I said.

"I know you will."

…

At ten past ten, a cannon fired from the Colosseum.

It was the signal for the Senate to convene. I heard it in the observatory, a flat dull boom that rattled the star-charts. I heard bells answer it from every tower in the city. I heard the roar of a great crowd, far off, rising and falling. I thought of the people in the squares, and the cafés, and the parlors, with a Glass in the corner and a cup of coffee at their elbows.

Eleven million people were about to watch the Chancellor of Halvern address the Republic.

Holloway came for us at a quarter to eleven.

She led us through the Academy by back stairs and service tunnels, through the cold arched cellars where the Houses stored their cask-wine, and out by a door I had never known was there. We were in a corridor of white marble. It was very wide, and very long, with a vaulted ceiling and a floor like a mirror. Statues stood in alcoves. Gilt lamps burned along the walls. At the far end rose a pair of colossal bronze doors, thirty feet high, with a panel of carved figures in relief.

The Senate of Houses.

I could hear it behind the doors: a vast, grave, expectant murmur, like the sea in a cave.

"The Scholars' Gallery is on the left," whispered Holloway. "You may watch from there. I shall take my seat among the faculty. When the time comes—" She stopped. "I will not tell you what to do."

"No."

"I only wish—" She bit her lip, and shook her head. "Never mind."

"Marguerite."

"Yes?"

"Take a seat near the aisle," I said. "I may need a witness."

…

I will not say that I was calm. I had thought I would be. I had stood in front of a Senate once before, and a Colosseum, and a ring of Hollow, and I had thought that a woman who had been through such things could be calm in the face of a room.

I was not calm. My heart was going like a hammer. My palms were wet. I stood in the dim gallery at the back of the vast white chamber, behind a screen of carved stone, with one hand on the hilt of a sword and the other on a pistol, and watched the world's most powerful men and women file in to take their seats.

The chamber was a round amphitheater, with tiers of black leather benches rising to a dome of colored glass. Three hundred and twelve Senators sat on them in robes of black and scarlet, and each one wore the badge of a House. The air was heavy with perfume and incense and the cold electric smell of ward-work. On the floor below, at the center, stood a rostrum of white marble, with a lectern. Above it, suspended from a brass arm, hung the great crystal eye of the Glass Relay, with its hundred small lenses glittering.

Behind the lectern sat an empty chair.

He came in at ten past eleven.

…

I had not seen Everett Crane in two years.

He was smaller than I remembered. That was the first thing. He was a lean, silver-haired, elegant man in his sixties, in a black frock coat with a single white rose in the lapel, and he walked with a slight deliberate limp, leaning on an ebony cane. He had a high, domed forehead and a long, grave, melancholy face, and pale eyes of a faded blue. He looked like a country doctor. He looked like a kindly uncle. He looked like the sort of man to whom a child would run, in a crowd, when she had lost her mother.

I had stood on a dais and looked at that face, in my first life, and had thought: he is so kind.

He took the lectern. He laid the cane against it. The Senators rose, in a long rustling wave, and sat again.

"My friends," said Everett Crane.

His voice was beautiful. It always had been. It was low and dry and warm, with a faint tremor in it, like the voice of an old actor who has stopped needing to act.

"My friends, I am afraid that I bring you grave news."

…

He talked for forty minutes.

I will not give it all. It was a masterpiece. He spoke of the Republic and its history, the long war, the Founders' sacrifice, the Houses that held the center against the dark. He spoke of order, and the price of order. He spoke of a young woman from the Frontier, an orphan, a scholarship student, who had been given every chance and had repaid it in blood. He named her crimes: the Marshal on the train, the Colosseum, the Whitlock House. He did not raise his voice. He let a faint, regretful sorrow creep into it, as of a man who has loved a daughter and lost her to bad company.

"She is dangerous," he said. "I say it without relish. She wields a power that no mortal should hold. She has been seduced, I fear, by a criminal of the old regime, a warlord whom the Republic put down forty years ago, and whom our fathers, in their wisdom, saw fit to chain." He sighed. "I would give a great deal to be wrong."

A murmur ran through the chamber. A few Senators nodded.

"It is my sad duty," said Crane, "to ask this body to declare Tamsin Reeve an enemy of the Republic. To strip her of every protection of law. And to authorize the Marshal Corps to take her by whatever means are necessary."

He bowed his head.

The silence was long. Then a voice rose, from the benches of the Great Houses: "Second the motion."

Another. A third.

And I stepped out from behind the screen.

…

I had meant to walk down the stairs. I had planned it. I had pictured a slow, dignified descent, the length of the aisle, with every eye upon me.

Instead I jumped.

I do not know why. It was thirty feet to the floor, and I took the rail at a run and vaulted it, and dropped through the air, and landed in the pit before the rostrum in a crouch, with one hand flat on the marble and the other on the hilt of my sword. The impact rang through the chamber like a bell. A hundred Senators leapt to their feet. Someone screamed. Somewhere a bench went over.

I rose slowly.

I was a figure in a torn coat, with a short ragged crop of black hair and a tree of cinder on my cheek, and a long black sword at my hip. I looked up. Three hundred faces looked down.

"I second the motion," I said.

My voice carried. It was the Archmage's voice, and it filled the dome without effort, low and clear and unhurried, like a bell in a canyon.

"But I should like to be heard first."

…

The Marshals came.

They came at a run, from the doors on every side, in gray coats with silver buttons, with their swords out. A dozen. Twenty. Forty. I felt Declan arrive at my back with a sound like a slammed door. He was a gaunt grim shape in a black coat, with the silver star blazing on his breast, and he took his place at my right shoulder as though he had stood there all his life.

"I will hold them," he said.

"Not yet."

"They are very close."

"Not yet," I said. "Wait for it."

I raised my hand.

I did not strike. I had no need. I let the Heart open, a hair's breadth, and sent the Cinder out in a single slow circle. It rolled across the floor like a tide of red smoke, soft, silent, and where it passed the marble blackened and the air shivered with heat. It stopped at the edge of the rostrum. It stood there, a ring of low flame, ten feet across. It hung in the air, whispering.

The Marshals stopped.

Every one. They stood at the edge of the fire, with their swords raised, and not one of them took a step. I saw their faces. I saw the sweat on them. I saw the youngest, a boy of nineteen, take a step back.

"Thank you," I said. "Now."

I turned to the Chancellor.

…

He had not moved.

He stood at the lectern with his hands on the edge, and his face, in the light of the dome, was calm. There was no fear in it. There was no surprise. He regarded me down the length of the rostrum with an expression of gentle, weary interest, as one regards a clever pupil who has finally come to the point.

"Miss Reeve," said Everett Crane.

"Chancellor."

"I did not expect to see you today."

"I know. You were told I was ill." I smiled. "Mabel sends her regards."

Something flickered in the pale eyes. It was very brief.

"I have not much to say," I said. "I only wished to ask a question. I should like to ask it of the Senate, and not of you. Because I think you know the answer, and I think there are three hundred people here who do not." I turned my back on him, deliberately, and faced the tiers. "My lords and ladies. Which of you can tell me what happens to the Tithe?"

Silence.

"You know it. The Tithe. The one-in-ten that is taken from every child of every House at the Ceremony of Sigils. The portion of talent that is set aside. That is held in trust for the Republic." I walked slowly across the floor. "It is a very old custom. You were told it was a ceremony. A blessing. A way of binding the realm. You were told that it went into the wards that guard the capital."

Nobody moved.

"It does not," I said. "It goes beneath this room."

A rustle. A murmur. A single high sharp voice: "Nonsense."

"There is a chamber," I said, "two hundred feet under this floor. It is where the Tithe ends. Every drop of Mana ever taken from a child in this Republic is in that chamber tonight, in the stone, in the walls, in a great engine of bone and silver. It is fed by the Ember-Rail. It is drawn on by the Houses, every day, through the ward-lines in the foundations. That is where your power comes from. Not from your blood. Not from your Founders. From them."

I pointed at the floor.

"From ten thousand children," I said, "who were told they were weak."

…

The noise was extraordinary.

It rose from all sides at once. Shouts. Cries. A woman in scarlet was on her feet, white to the lips, screaming for order. A white-bearded Senator beat his cane on the bench. And among them, here and there, I saw the others: the ones who sat quite still, with their faces gone gray, looking down at their hands.

They know, I thought. A third of them.

"This is absurd!" cried a stout Senator. "She has no proof!"

"I have one," I said.

And I looked up at the great crystal eye of the Glass.

…

It was Mabel's cue. I had not known how it would feel.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then every lens in the brass arm lit at once. A pure white glare, brighter than the day. And from somewhere under the floor, from somewhere deep and far away, I heard a low, steady, mounting hum.

Josie.

I had a sudden, vivid picture of her: crouched in a broom-closet in the basement, with her goggles on and a copper coil in her teeth, soldering iron in one fist and a Relay cable in the other, grinning like a lunatic.

The crystal flickered. It turned. It tilted down toward the rostrum, and for the first time I knew that the lenses were not pointed at the Chancellor.

They were pointed at me.

And behind me, in the great domed chamber of the Senate of Houses, the voice of Mabel, small and clear and a little hoarse, rose out of nine million Glasses at once.

"Good morning, Halvern," she said. "This is not the broadcast you were expecting."

The Chancellor's face changed.

It did not change much. A tightening at the corner of the mouth. A narrowing of the pale eyes. But I saw it, and I knew, as certainly as I had ever known anything, that for the first time in sixty years Everett Crane had been surprised.

"Cut it," he said quietly.

Nobody moved.

"Cut it."

"They cannot," I said. "The Relay is ours. The nine million Glasses of the Republic are showing this room. They will go on showing it until I have finished."

I faced the crystal. I faced the little glittering lenses, and the millions of faces behind them, the parlors, the cafés, the railway stations, the Frontier cabins with a single Glass on the shelf. I thought of Hawk. I thought of Josie. I thought of a girl in a white dress.

I drew a breath.

"My name," I said, "is Tamsin Reeve. And I would like to tell you what was done to me."

…

I told them.

I will not set down every word. I talked for twenty minutes. I told them of the Ceremony and the stage and the sand. I told them of the room beneath it, and the drain. I told them of the Whitlocks, and the muniment room, and the forty-three. I told them of a cellar in the Iron Pits, and a laundress named Marta Dellow, and a page of a ledger that I held in my hand. I read it aloud: the dates, the columns, the sum.

Ten thousand, four hundred and six.

I let the number fall.

"That is the count," I said. "Of the children. Since the first Tithe. Each of them was told that they had been weighed, and found wanting. Each of them was sent home. Some of them are in this city now. They are clerks. They are nursemaids. They are men who sweep your streets. They have lived their whole lives believing that they were not enough." I turned, slowly, until I faced the Chancellor. "And all the while, you were eating them."

I let the silence grow.

"That is my evidence, Chancellor," I said. "It is not a great deal. It is only the truth."

…

He was smiling.

I saw it as I turned. It was a slight smile, rather tender, rather sad. It was the smile of a man who has been shown a clever trick and is willing to admit that it has impressed him.

"My dear," said Everett Crane.

His voice was perfectly gentle.

"You have been very thorough." He took up his cane. "I am sorry. I had hoped that you might be spared this. I had hoped that you might come in your own time, and in your own way, and that we might have the conversation I wished to have. It was not to be." He sighed. "You are so very like your mother."

"Do not speak of her."

"I knew her, you know. Better than the Dean." The pale eyes held mine. "She came to me in the winter of her twentieth year, with a notion in her head. A noble notion. She wished to free the Tithe. She was a very clever girl. She nearly succeeded." He smiled again, a little wearily. "And so I did what had to be done."

The chamber had gone dead quiet.

I heard my own breath. I heard Declan's, at my shoulder, go still.

"She died," I said, "in the hour I was born."

"Did she?" said Crane, with a kind of gentle interest. "That is what I arranged for you to be told."

My vision went white at the edges.

"But I will not detain you," said the Chancellor. He raised his cane, with a graceful gesture, like a conductor lifting a baton. "You have spoken. The Republic has listened. It is time, I think, for the Republic to see what it is that you have come to destroy."

He brought the cane down on the marble.

Once.

The floor opened.