Sunrise Lands

Sandra was an unexceptional woman in her fifties, pe tite and round-faced. Her stare could still make others flinch; it did now.

"I understand, my lady regent."

"Good. Then don't let it happen again. You have my leave to go. In proper form, Mary, " she said.

The baroness halted, made a sardonically precise curtsy that bowed her head just a hair more than ma

Sandra steepled her small elegant fingers and cocked her head a little, looking at the door through which Mary Liu had just gone in high dudgeon. It was massive, of light-colored oak over a solid steel core, and Liu hadn't been able to slam it, which must have a

"Do you know the problem with the Dowager Baroness Gervais?" the Lady Regent asked.

Conrad Renfrew, Count of Odell, took a walnut out of the bowl on the table between them and cracked it between finger and thumb, tossed the nut meat into his mouth and thought for a moment while he chewed.

"Is the problem that she's an evil, murderous, spiteful bitch who's conspiring with these assassins from the cow country?" he replied meditatively.

He was a thickset man in his fifties who'd always been built like a fireplug and had put on a little solid flesh lately. He wore casual-formal dress, a wide-sleeved shirt of snowy linen beneath a brown T tunic cinched with a studded sword belt, and loose breeches tucked into half boots; a heraldic shield on the tunic's chest held his arms-sable, a snow-topped mountain argent and vert. His face was hideous with old white keloid scars, his eyes blue under grizzled brows, and his head as bare as an egg with less need of the razor he'd used in his youth.

"No, that's not the problem," Sandra said, toying with one of the trails of her silk wimple.

"She's a stupid, evil, murderous, spiteful woman who can't even speak a simple English sentence without translating it into High Formal Bitch?"

"No, she's bright enough. What she lacks is self knowledge. I, for example, am fully aware of the fact that I'm an evil, murderous, spiteful bitch. And that I like it that way. Mary Liu just thinks she's hard done-by and never given her due and has to stand up for her rights in a hostile, unfeeling world. And her habit of self-delusion leads her to do things that are quite unwise. Attempt ing to deceive me about helping this Prophet fellow, for example. If I said, 'Mary, darling, as one evil bitch to another-don't…' Why, she'd be quite insulted."

All three of the nobles sitting about the table in the presence chamber chuckled. It was in the Silver Tower, sheathed outside with pearly granite originally stripped from banks in Portland and Vancouver when Castle Todenangst was built by the Lord Protector's architects and labor gangs in the second and third Change Years.

That color scheme continued within: white marble floors, light silk hangings, elegantly spindly furniture of pale natural woods or antiques salvaged from mansions and museums in the dead cities, only the rugs providing a blaze of hot color. A workshop in Newberg had spent two decades rediscovering the secrets of Isfahan and Tabriz carpets, but with modern themes: local wildflowers, hawks among trees and tigers creeping through reed beds beside the Willamette.

The air smelled slightly of jasmine and sandalwood; the closed windows kept the noise of the great fortress palace and the cold bright January day at bay, leaving only the slight hissing of the gaslights and an occasional gurgle from the recessed hot-water radiators behind their screens carved with scenes from Le Morte d'Arthur.

Conrad of Odell cracked another nut, dropping the shells into a Venetian-glass bowl.

"Stop showing off, Conrad," the third person said. "So you can still crack walnuts with your fingers. So what?"

She put one on a ceramic coaster and tapped it open with the plain brass pommel of her dagger; the two halves of the shell fell neatly apart. Then she continued: "Big fat hairy… hairless… deal. You're Lord Chancel lor now, and I'm the new Grand Constable. Breaking things is my job, and the method doesn't matter as long as the job gets done."

Tiphaine d'Ath-Baroness d'Ath in her own right, very unusually for a woman in the territories of the Port land Protective Association-was the youngest present by fifteen years, which put her in her mid-thirties.

In contrast to Lady Sandra's headdress and long skirted cotte-hardi of pale silk and dazzling white linen, she wore male garb; in her case, black silk and velvet, with arms of sable, a delta or over a V argent in the he raldic shield on her chest. Her face was calm, as it usually was: strong-boned, with pale gray eyes and hair so fair it would take a long while for the first gray strands to show, worn in what another age would have called a pageboy bob. She was tall for a woman, just under five ten, built with compact long-limbed grace. Some people called the Regent the Spider. They called her hench-woman Lady Death, in a pun on her title.

Nobody laughed. It wasn't that sort of joke.

" I'm not spiteful, in any case. Murderous, evil and a bitch, yes; spiteful, no," Tiphaine added, taking a sip at her glass of wine after eating the nut.

"Some would say a duel a month for six months shows a certain amount of spite," Renfrew said, smiling; she'd been his protege too, if not for so long as she had been Sandra's. "Particularly since you cut them to ribbons and they died by inches, screaming. Quite a performance; you couldn't have done better with a dungeon and its entire staff. Fulk De Wasco looked like he was naked and nailed to the floor even while he still had his sword."

"No, that was policy, not just fun. If Lady Sandra wanted me as Grand Constable, since I'm a woman I had to kill some of the more inveterate assholes, and in a way that would intimidate the others. A sword through the throat doesn't scare them enough; they're mostly too stupid to be cowards. Doing a little prelimi nary carving and trimming around the edges does give them pause for reflection at the closed-casket funeral, for some reason."

"Everyone knew you were good with a blade," Ren frew said. "Even Norman realized that, and he wasn't what you'd call the equal-opportunity type."

"He was smart enough to believe his eyes, when he didn't let his obsessions get in the way. With some people you need to use visual aids to make a point. I'm still a freak of nature, but I'm a freak they don't dare to diss."

A long-haired Persian cat jumped up on the table. Tiphaine dumped it unceremoniously down; Sandra smiled slightly.

She wouldn't have dared to do that once, she thought, tucking a lock of her graying brown hair back under her headdress; the silver-and-platinum band around it chinked softly.

Aloud: "Isn't it interesting that this Prophet fellow was prepared to send assassins all the way to Mackenzie country? And isn't it even more interesting that they knew this Vogeler was heading there? What do we know about these people? Refresh my memory; I've had more pressing business lately."

"It's a father-son team ru

"The Church Universal and Triumphant, yes?"

"Yes, my lady. Generally known as the Cutters, or at least their musclemen are, or the Corwinites, from their headquarters. It's in the country just north of the old Yellowstone National Park. They were there before the Change, and already had a couple of rungs missing from their ladders if you ask me, but the Prophet moved in and took them over with a group of followers in late 'ninety eight and added a lot of new stuff."

"He's not native there?"

"Rumor has it he was in California on the day of the Change itself. He'd been blowing up scientists in the eighties and nineties-had a major hate on for technology-and he was in jail in Sacramento. He escaped in the confusion, felt that God had personally answered his requests with the Change, and headed for Montana. That he got there does say something about his survival skills."