Steel Gods

Book 2: The Great Silence

by Richard Swan

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Mystery

Synopsis

Steel Gods is the second novel in the Great Silence trilogy, which began with Grave Empire, from Sunday Times bestselling author Richard Swan - a dark flintlock fantasy filled with epic adventure, arcane mysteries and creeping dread.

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION BECKONS.
SPIRITUAL CATASTROPHE LOOMS. 
AND THE EMPIRE OF THE WOLF TEETERS ON THE BRINK

The true horror of the Great Silence has been revealed. As nation after nation succumbs to the mind-plague and Sova scrambles to enlist help from across the globe, Ambassador Renata Rainer has been given a simple task: save the world.

While she travels to the Principality of Casimir to enlist the help of the Empire’s oldest enemy, Lieutenant Peter Kleist returns to the haunted forests of the New East to search for ancient answers—and finally confront the terrible fate that awaits him. In their wake, a task force of engineers, soldiers, and arcane experts will try and unpick the final secrets of the Great Silence—on both sides of the mortal plane.

But time is running out. Count Lamprecht von Oldenburg has returned to the capital, armed with a terrible vision and enough madness to see it through. Those who stand in his way face a simple choice: join the revolution, or die.

As the world tips towards chaos, all paths converge on the Eye of the Sea, where the fabric of reality wears thin – and where the Empire of the Wolf must confront the most terrible enemy it has ever known.
 

Release date: March 31, 2026

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 464

Sample

“The legacy of the tyrant is always a fleeting thing, for he is unable to build, only destroy. His laws and reforms extract the lifeblood from public works like a parasite, and concentrate it in the hands of the already wealthy. His accomplishments are the labours of his predecessor, whilst his failures must be unpicked at great expenditure of time and treasure by his successor. His executive is staffed exclusively by the inexpert, the incompetent, the fraudulent. He is feared and loathed during his premiership, and ridiculed and scorned in posterity. Yet we must suffer the tyrant to govern, for the memory of the enfranchised is short, and shortens by the year.”

SATIRIST AND PAMPHLETEER BILIOUS JOSEPH

SOVA

Silence. Not the Great Silence, just a local one. More a stillness than a silence, for this was a public bathhouse.

She sat in the hot mineral waters drawn from the Myočvaran wetlands, which stretched for several miles to the east of the city of Sova. The Sovan bathhouse was an institution in itself, patronised by kings and emperors and the equestrian classes of the city for hundreds of years. Some, particularly senators, came to do business here, and treated it as a social club; most came for the water’s restorative properties. The legend went that the water of the Myočvaran wetlands came from the Myočvara itself – the purgatorial marshes of the afterlife; spillover from the ancient magickal cataclysm, imbued with mystical arcane properties.

But for Renata, it was neither social nor medicinal.

It was practice.

She used to come here with Maruska and his big brass naval chronometer, and they would spend an hour or two in a private chamber, holding their breath underwater for as long as possible. The trick, he had taught her, was to remain calm. The urge to breathe was the body’s confection, and could be safely ignored for a great many minutes. He would tell questionable tales from his youth, in which he would have swimming competitions with the Sovans just over the border in Reichsgard. They would leap into the turbid Reka Estuary, where the river broadened and deepened and flowed out into the Zyrahn Straits, and see who could dive down the forty feet to the riverbed and return with a handful of silt to prove it.

She indulged the memory, though it made her melancholy. It had been a month since Maruska’s murder at the hands of the Knackerman, but the memory – to say nothing of the pain – was as fresh as if it had happened yesterday.

Just a messenger. And the message is: judgement.

She surfaced from the water with enough breath for a frustrated sigh, and groped for a towel to dry her eyes.

“I thought I might find you here.”

“Bloody Nema!” she shouted.

“Good gods, Ren,” Lyzander chuckled, handing her a towel. She snatched it from him and dried her face. “I thought you knew I was here.”

“How could I have known?” she muttered, gesturing to the sulphurous waters. The bath itself was a square pool ten feet to a side and five feet deep, tiled with a faded wolf-themed mosaic. At the far end of the chamber was a door, currently closed and locked, which led to the main bath complex.

“Sorry,” Lyzander said. He looked somewhat rakish, unshorn and wearing a loose-fitting shirt unbuttoned to the mid-breastbone and black linen pantaloons. Renata hadn’t seen him in his army uniform for some time – not since he had been seconded to the so-called “arcane task force”.

“It’s fine,” she muttered, wringing out her hair. “You shouldn’t be in here.” She said it because she felt as though she should, not because she particularly wanted him to leave.

Lyzander waggled his fingers. “Think of the scandal!” he said, grinning; then he sat, insouciant, on the bench beneath the high window that formed the chamber’s sole source of ventilation.

Renata rolled her eyes. She had long ago learnt that Lyzander’s devil-may-care attitude was not confined to the anarchic insanity of the North Kyarai; rather, and frustratingly, it seemed to be an innate part of him.

“How did you do?” he asked her, nodding to the chronometer.

“You tell me.”

“Four and a half minutes. Impressive.”

“I’ve gone for longer before.”

Lyzander opened his mouth to make a joke, but thought better of it. “I’ve just come back from my meeting with the Privy Council.”

Renata immediately shook her head. “Not yet. Just give me a little longer.”

“You’re going under again?”

She massaged her temples. “No, I just… I don’t want to think about it. All of it. Just for a few more minutes. I come here for the peace, more than anything.”

Lyzander nodded. He was serious now. “I should have waited. I’m sorry.”

She waved him off. “No, no, it’s fine,” she said. “Actually, I’m glad you’re here. Why don’t you join me?”

“I don’t have a bathing costume.”

Renata plucked the string tie open at the front of her weighted bathing shift. “Well, now,” she said, “neither do I.”

There was something about the act of sex which allowed her to truly switch off from the burdensome weight of events. With Alistair, her supposed beau, whom she had studiously avoided since her return to Sova, the act had been… not entirely devoid of passion, but more often than not pedestrian.

With Lyzander, and because of the extraordinary circumstances they found themselves in, their coupling was ferociously all-consuming. It was a drug, one that untethered her from the dark and bleak reality that constantly pressed down on her like the palms of a strangler. For the length of their sex, there was nothing except the contours of his body, the feeling of his mouth on hers, on her neck, her breasts, his hands on her buttocks, and then –

And then –

And then –

Release.

Whether by fingers or tongue, he always gave her that – knew she needed it – that trembling, toe-curling, thigh-clenching, spine-arching release.

She returned the favour with her mouth, tasting the mineral salts of the bathwater on him, eager to prolong the moment, the delirium, even though her climax was falling away and dismal reality was rushing back to the forefront of her mind like a tidal wave. But theirs was a burden shared; did the man not deserve every second of his own release, too?

Finally it was done, his arrival heralded by a great heaving spasm. She directed his emissions onto herself out of consideration for subsequent patrons of the bathhouse – an amusing thought which she would tell him later, and he would laugh – and then cruel reality reasserted itself, and she was just another cold, wet, naked mortal being pulled along by the crushing exigencies of state.

Half an hour later, they were dried and dressed and walking down the Schwartzheide, four acres of parkland abutting the River Sauber. Here the hot summer air was filled with the smell of tanneries and coalsmoke from the unsociable trades district and medical waste from the surgeries on Blood Street, whilst the Sauber itself was brown with an iridescent sheen from the chemical outflow in Shank’s Harbour. It wasn’t the most pleasant of promenades in Sova, but it had the benefit of being devoid of prying eyes and wagging tongues.

“Let’s have it then,” Renata said eventually. “What did the Privy Council say?”

Following the Empress’ decree that a task force be formed to examine, ameliorate the effects of, and ultimately remedy the prophesied Great Silence, it had been quickly subjected to the mercy – and ridicule – of the Imperial bureaucracy. Over the past month, the task force had managed to reduce their point of contact within the government to a single subcommittee of the Privy Council, and by unanimous vote, had appointed Lyzander as their sole representative. There was no authority high enough, no threat of punishment dire enough, to faze him. The man was clinically incapable of being intimidated – which was just as well, for there were a large number of extraordinarily angry politicians and businessmen who thought the prophecy was utter nonsense.

“Well, you can probably guess.”

“Whale oil? Still?” Renata groaned.

“Your peace treaty with the Stygion has killed off the Sovan whaling industry in a stroke. It’s impressive, really.”

“The Stygion are providing whale carcasses—”

“It’s not enough. Not by half.”

“I don’t think the Senate appreciates how much of a concession that is for them. For the Thrice Queen. The funerary whalefall rites are an important part of their culture—”

“They know, Ren. They know. They just don’t care. People are losing money. And the Casimirs are making it instead. Hand over fist. At this point in time your greatest enemy is not the Vorr but the South Seas Trading Company. Followed closely by the Imperial Bank of Sova and the Board of Trade – and the North Sea Exchange, the Imperial Stocks Exchange, Koenig and Keller Mercantile—”

“I take the point,” Renata snapped. Postcoital, she was doubly irritable.

“I’m not joking, Ren. The pressure in the Senate is reaching unmanageable levels. These people bend the Empress’ ear daily.”

“And you bend it back. Which I’m sure you enjoy.”

It was a cheap barb, but in the hot, stinking afternoon air, she could not help herself.

“Have I not demonstrated my affection for you? A dozen times over?” Lyzander asked, much more fairly than she deserved.

“You have,” she muttered. “Of course you have.” Part of her felt ridiculous for provoking such arguments. These were earthly, mortal trifles after all, hardly important in the scheme of events. But her relationship with Lyzander formed one of the very few avenues of escape from an otherwise all-encompassing burden that she had inherited. She and the other members of the task force spent every waking hour dedicated to unlocking the secrets of the afterlife, and all the while every person who died ran the gauntlet of a ghastly postmortem consumption at the hands – or the mouths, rather – of the Vorr. There was not even Amara’s irrepressibility to cheer her. If Lyzander’s attention and affections were returned to Zelenka Haugenate Imperatrix, he removed from her the only sliver of joy and humanity she still took from the world.

“What else?”

“Nothing you will not hear again from Bosko tomorrow morning.”

“Still no news about von Oldenburg? Where is Colonel Atanasov? She should have stopped him weeks ago.”

Lyzander could only shrug. “No sense in speculating.”

“‘No sense in speculating’? Half of everything we do is pure supposition.”

“Aye, well. At least we are doing something.”

They walked past the Senate House, and then cut across the desiccated grass and stood at the balustrade of the embankment. Lyzander bent down and picked up a handful of gravel, and idly threw the stones into the Sauber. Behind them, Assembly Square gathered nothing but dust and old pamphlets; it seemed even the rancorous Sovan commonfolk could not be tempted to congregate in the heat of a summer’s afternoon.

“They asked if you’d had any more visions,” he said quietly, not taking his eyes off the river.

“Because they think me mad? With grief?” The vision she’d had in the Temple of Nema – of Akhaber, the bird-headed patron saint of siblings, telling her that Amara’s immortal essence resided in the Golden City – felt like a memory of a description of someone else’s dream. But try as she might, and no matter how many times she revisited the chapel, she could not replicate the experience. “No,” she said, before he could reply. “I have not. Do you not think I would have said something?”

“I’m just telling you what they said.”

Renata took one of the stones from his hand and threw it into the river. “I know. I am sorry,” she added, but he waved her off. They stood in silence for a little while longer, watching the brown waters of the Sauber as they flowed out of the city. “Part of me wonders whether I am mad with it.” She took another stone and threw that, too. “I miss her, Joseph. So very much. A month later and it is no easier to endure.”

“Do you want to visit her grave again? I’ll come with you.”

She shook her head. “No. Not now. I want to see Velimir before it gets too late.”

“How is the good Colonel Glaser getting on?” Lyzander murmured.

“Not well,” Renata sighed. “Not well at all.”

She walked back through the Schwartzheide, crossed the Baden Bridge and made her way up the highway. Half a mile ahead of her, the defunct fortifications of Wolfgate marked the northern boundary of the old city; now its enormous two-headed wolf colossus watched over nothing more than an endless procession of cows being steered into the Fleischfelder livestock markets. The stench of thousands of animals and their dung was trapped in the air by a heavy layer of the city’s coalsmoke, and on hot summer days was intolerable.

The Summit of the Prefects rose out of this fug several hundred feet to her left, and she walked up the broad cypress-tree-lined boulevard into that gated and guarded precinct for Sova’s ultra-wealthy. She made directly for Colonel Glaser’s house, where he had been convalescing on his return from Port Gero. After the Knackerman’s attack, he would never regain his sight.

“My dear Renata,” Velimir said, opening the door. He was a far cry from the well-heeled, urbane gentlemen she had first met several months before. Now he looked exhausted and harried, his face marked by fresh wrinkles and stress lines, his stubble and hair greying prematurely. This was only partly due to Glaser. The market turmoil was exacting its own toll on the city’s wealthy.

“Did Zorica—”

“Finally gave up,” he muttered, bringing Renata into the entrance hall. “Can’t say I blame the poor girl.”

He gestured for her to make for the drawing room, and a few minutes later they were both sitting in beautifully upholstered chairs, nursing crystal tumblers of brandy.

“Has there been any change?” Renata asked.

“No,” Velimir muttered. “I’ve managed to get him to sit in the garden awhile, and join me for the odd meal. But the rest of the time he is in his office here, mumbling and muttering. He has commissioned tactile maps of the Kyarai and spends all day running his hands over them and re-fighting its loss. ‘If only Klossner had met them here’, ‘If only we had left the south battery a day earlier’, ‘If only the Navy had done this that and the other’. He keeps the curtains drawn.” He paused, taking a sip of his brandy. “Why does he need the curtains drawn? He cannot see either way. The physician said it was better for him – important for him – to get some sunlight.” Another sip, another silence. “Bloody fool.”

Renata toyed with her tumbler.

“Has anyone else come to visit him?”

“Oh, people come and go. Officers from the Life Guards. Privy Councillors. Other functionaries. He dismisses them all. I fear he is doing great damage to his social circle. His blindness has bred in him a ferocious resentment.”

“I’m sure he will adapt,” Renata said uncertainly.

“Perhaps. I have not seen him like this before. He was always so self-possessed. Now he raves about all manner of things. I am probably more familiar than most with the Neman Creed, but some of the things he talks about… well, it sounds like lunacy. Apocalyptic nonsense.” He sighed. “Of course, I know it is difficult, I’ll not pretend otherwise. But he is loved. He is adored by his soldiers. He is respected by his peers. Blindness is the end of one’s sight, but not of one’s life. The Raimund I know would adapt and overcome. The Raimund I knew.”

“Perhaps you should get him a dog?” Renata thought suddenly. “I have known sightless people to keep them. Not just for companionship. They can be trained to assist with all manner of things.”

Velimir considered this whilst examining the upholstery. “It’s not a bad idea,” he allowed eventually.

Renata thought about the Knackerman, the reanimated corpse of Herschel digging his thumbs into Glaser’s eyes, the horror of it all. Velimir would never understand – could never be allowed to.

“The circumstances of the colonel’s blinding—”

“Are a state secret, yes. I do not need to be reminded that I’m not allowed to know.”

“Please just… be patient. He has endured no small measure of horror – over and above the nature of the injury itself.”

Velimir sighed. “I must sound like such a heel, complaining like this.”

“Not at all.”

“I just want the old version of him back.”

“I understand completely.”

Velimir chuckled. “Your profession was well chosen.”

She smiled briefly, and saw off the rest of her brandy. “Do you mind if I see him?”

“If he will be seen. He is in his office. You remember the way.”

Renata set the tumbler down and left the drawing room, and made her way upstairs. She approached Glaser’s office slowly, and paused at the door, listening, but could not hear anything beyond the threshold.

“Colonel?” she said, knocking softly. “May I come in?”

“Who is it?”

“It’s Renata. Rainer,” she added, as though he knew many.

There was a pause. “Come in, then.”

She opened the door. Inside it was gloomy. The thick, heavy curtains had been drawn over both the office windows – for it had a dual aspect – and the windows themselves were closed. The air was stuffy and leaden, and smelt of body odour and pipe smoke.

Glaser was sitting in the armchair behind his correspondence desk. On it was one of the large tactile maps of the Kyarai Velimir had spoken of. It was an impressive feat of artistry; all of the contours and features and cities had been carefully rendered in what looked like plaster, with small wooden tokens for the armies and navies. Some, scattered across the carpet near the door, told of a recent fit of rage.

Glaser himself was clad in his military uniform, though the jacket was unbuttoned. His eyes were concealed behind a bandage, and his chin and cheeks were coated in stubble. Taken all together, the effect was of a condemned man. He looked as though he were minutes away from being tied to a post and shot.

“Ambassador,” he grunted. “What can I do for you?”

“I came to visit you.”

“Is that so?”

“It is.”

“Well. There you go. You have visited me.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Finding fault with a fat goose, to hear Velimir speak to it.”

“He worries about you.”

“As he should. I’ve half a mind to expunge my whole mind with that pistol. But the rogue has hidden my powder.”

“Well. I for one would be sorry if it came to that.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” he sneered.

Renata looked around the office. She wanted desperately to open the curtains. “Colonel, I know we have not always seen eye to eye—” She stopped, wincing at her choice of words. Glaser said nothing. “I know we have not always agreed on the best way to proceed. But your… drive, your singular force of will, your willingness to grapple with ideas beyond all of us, I believe have been a tremendous boon to our efforts.”

“Is that so?”

“It is. And I think it would be a shame to squander what you have gained. In both knowledge and ability.”

Glaser sat in silence for a while.

“That damnable Herschel left me with nothing,” he muttered. “Not a scrap of vision. I have known blinded soldiers to still have some rudiments of light detection. To see splashes of colour.” He leant forward. “I can still feel his thumbs. In my sockets. I can still feel them. Feel the sclera bursting. Feel the pressure on my brain. ’Tis as though he has left the offending digits lodged in my head.”

Renata cleared her throat. “It sounds positively ghastly, Colonel. But you are alive, at least. Plenty have died in that benighted country.”

“Am I, though?”

“Are you what?”

“Alive. Alive in a way that matters.” He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of brandy, and uncorked and drank from it. “You probably think me mad.”

“I think we have all had our sanity tested.”

He laughed bitterly. “Do you know what I think madness is?”

“What do you think madness is?”

“It is the burden of knowledge. The curse of knowledge. You know it too; cognisance of matters which we are not designed or equipped to have cognisance of. It strips the brain of its sensibilities.”

“You are talking about the afterlife.”

“But it is not the afterlife, is it? Those wretched Draedic death cultists were right. What were they called?”

“The Selureii.”

“The Selureii were right. Let me ask you this. If I took you to see a theatrical production, and we sat for the narrator’s introduction, and then left before the commencement of Act One, could you be said to have seen the play?”

“No.”

“No!” Glaser suddenly thundered, making her start. “If we live as mortals for but seventy years, and then as immortals for… a thousand? Ten thousand? A million? Eternity? Which part of our lives even is life?”

“Do not shout at me,” she said, keeping her voice level. “I came here as your friend.”

“Are you all right in there, Ms Rainer?” Velimir called uncertainly from the hallway.

“I don’t know, Colonel; are we all right in here?” Renata asked Glaser.

“We’re fine!” Glaser called back to his husband. “Don’t fuss so, mother hen!”

It saddened Renata to hear the moniker, which had once been uttered with wry affection, now spoken with derision.

She heard Velimir mutter something angrily, and then his retreating footsteps down the passage.

“You should be kinder to him.”

“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Not here. Not on this plane.”

“I reject that. It is too bleak an outlook.”

He turned to her sharply. “You cannot reject it. It is true. And you know it to be true. Our lives are but a prelude to deathless eternity. These fleeting years of mortality are nothing. Imbued with significance only by virtue of their currency. In the yawning beyond of the realm of Nema, there is naught less than infinity.”

Renata grimaced. She hated this. Not because of the shabby and broken figure Glaser now cut, but because what he spoke was a perfect distillation of matters as she herself understood them. It seemed that the afterlife was a place where one’s spiritual essence existed in perpetuity. How then could anybody ascribe any importance to one’s mortal life whatever?

“And now what hope we had of spending that infinity in the Golden City is extinguished. The fate of every living creature is mindless consumption thanks to some fucking… spirit vampyres.”

“No.”

Glaser seemed genuinely taken aback by the denial. “No?”

“I know of the Vorr, Colonel; but I know, too, that the Golden City still stands. Besieged, certainly, but extant. It stands to reason that there are other parts of the holy dimensions that remain untouched, too.”

Glaser shook his head. “’Tis not so.”

“Yes, it is,” Renata said firmly. “I was afforded a vision by Akhaber himself in the Temple of Nema. There is yet hope. We are working to remedy the situation.”

Glaser let out a spiteful laugh. “Working to remedy the situation. What could you possibly do to affect such monumental forces?”

“Something!” Renata snapped. “We are trying something, not rotting alone in our chambers playing what-might-have-been with wooden blocks and old maps.”

Glaser opened his mouth to angrily remonstrate with her, but whatever it was going to be died in his throat. Instead he deflated, and took another drink. “I still see them, you know.”

“See who?”

“The bodies on the bridge.”

“I don’t under—”

“The Kasar I had shot. So that we might enter Port Talaka. I dream about them. Mewling cubs. Dead mothers. Terrified civilians. Another batch of fresh amputees – if they even survived.” He nodded to himself, his expression sour. “I think about them all the time. I think it might be the most monstrous thing I ever did.”

Renata mulled over a dozen different responses, but the silence stretched too long for her reply to be anything productive.

“Don’t pussyfoot about. I know what I’ve done.”

“It was barbarous,” she agreed.

“Hell is real, and I suppose I shall go there for that one thing alone.”

“To be completely honest with you, Colonel, I’m not entirely certain that’s how it works.”

“Hm.”

“We are working to find the answers. Help us,” Renata said. “Do some good. Atone for it.”

“It cannot be atoned for,” Glaser said. “Sova in all things. Sova first, in everything, and damn every person, every wolf- and mer-man and Casimir in our way. I don’t think it’s possible to atone for it and work for the Sovan state concurrently.”

“It is an ethical ligature without peer,” Renata agreed. “I grapple with it myself. Constantly.”

Glaser sighed. He shook the brandy bottle, and then took another swig. “Leave me. I shall find my own answers in here.”

Renata paused, but eventually turned and opened the office door. She stopped at the threshold. “If you change your mind, we are based in the Royal Corps of Engineering headquarters.”

“My mind is made up.”

“Well. I certainly hope not,” she said, and left.

Renata hurried back through Sova, now heading home. She was feeling flustered after seeing Glaser, and her heart was fluttering in her chest. The very last thing she needed was another unwelcome surprise.

“Renata!”

She turned sharply. “Oh, for Nema’s—”

“Renata, where in all the countries of Hell have you been?”

It was Alistair, standing outside the Philosopher’s Palace. He had been talking to a gaggle of friends; now he broke off and began walking towards her.

She pretended she had not seen him, and carried on down the Creus Road, weaving through the evening congregations leaving the vast Temple of Nema Victoria. The cold, dangerous waters of the Stygion Sea, the hot, chaotic battlefields of the Kasar Kyarai, even the bleak, unknowable horrors of the afterlife she could deal with.

The jealous anger of a spurned suitor, she could not.

“Renata! Renata! Damn you, I know you can hear me!”

She sighed angrily and turned. Alistair was striding towards her at a pace. He was not an unattractive man by any means – tall, foppishly long brown hair, good skin and teeth; he was just so dull, and self-important, and over and above everything else had simply no idea of the matters she was grappling with. Nor, she suspected, would he even care.

“Not now, Alistair.”

“I have not heard from you in over two months!” he snapped. “You have not answered any of my letters. You have turned away all of my messengers. You have not even been in the city as far as I can tell. I have searched for you in the Imperial Office, in the kaffeehauses on Gooseneck Street, in your apartment. Just what in Nema’s name is going on?”

“I said not now,” Renata replied, acutely aware of the attention they were drawing.

“If not now, when?” He lurched forward and grabbed her arm as she made to turn away.

“Get off me,” she snapped, pulling out of his grip. “It is done with, understand?”

“Oh, it is done with, is it? Out with the old, in with the new?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You think I’m stupid?” he hissed, closing the short gap between them. “You think people haven’t been talking about you and that bloody Balabrian from the West Kovans? Promenading about the city together? Doing gods know what else in private, in abandonment of all decency.”

“Joseph is a colleague,” she protested, though her saddle-soreness told a different story. She was too astonished by the confrontation to fully exhibit the rage she felt. “At any rate, you’ve no right to my affection, nor to knowledge of my whereabouts and activities. This is all to say nothing of the incredible insignificance of this matter.”

“Oh indeed, indeed! The great Renata Rainer, ambassador plenipotentiary, prancing about the city, putting on airs. I love you, for Nema’s sake.”

She actually laughed then. “You have a most extraordinary way of showing it.”

He gritted his teeth. “Enough of this silliness. Come home with me now, and we shall talk about this in private.”

“Are you quite mad?” she said, eyes widening. He made to grab her arm again; this time she lurched out of his reach.

“Is everything all right, madam?” asked a passer-by, a young man on his way out of the Temple of Nema Victoria.

“We’re fine, confound you,” Alistair grunted.

“Madam?” the young man pressed, ignoring him.

“Quite all right, thank you,” she said, privately pleased for the interruption.

“Would you like me to fetch a constable?”

“For Nema’s—!” Alistair erupted.

“There is no need, thank you. I was just leaving,” Renata said.

“Hm.” The man, entirely untroubled by Alistair’s glare, moved off, but affected to linger ten yards down the highway.

Alistair turned back to her. “Ren—”

“Alistair,” she interrupted. “Our courtship – if it could ever so be called – is finished. You wanted to hear it plainly, so there it is.”

“I wanted to hear nothing of the sort!”

“And yet you have heard it! Now good day.”

And she hurried off before he could do or say anything further.

“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago; the second best time is now.”

TSUKUMESE PROVER