Silvariana korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore wakes up in her big feather bed with late-morning sun pouring golden all over her, stretches, and wanders naked and yawning around the house. She splashes water on her face, swordfights the dust motes drifting in the shafts of sun in the upstairs corridor until she’s sweaty and breathing fast, then perches on the cold stone of the kitchen counter and eats fresh fruit, juices running down her fingers and wrists. She’s finishing off breakfast with her first little bottle of tonic for the day — tonic, ha, it’s spiderbane dissolved in honey wine; she’s too old to be coy, it’s drugs to make the day bearable — when somebody knocks on the door.
Still naked and juice-smeared, she grabs a tea towel and deploys it as the flimsiest excuse for modesty when she opens the front door enough to scowl around it.
“Ma’am,” says one of the younger generations, too young for her to place the name or face, only the crisp professionalism. One of il Generale’s little minions, with the manners of a butler and the brain of an accountant.
Just for being called ma’am, Silvariana flicks the tea towel over her shoulder, but the little besuited tin soldier on her doorstep doesn’t turn a hair, cheating her out of even getting a prudish rise out of them. She scowls harder. “What?”
“Il Generale sends her apologies for disturbing you, but wonders if you could make your way to her at your earliest convenience, to discuss an application for your skills.”
“My skills?” She opens the door a little further, sticks her head out, cranes a theatrical look at the sky, and around the leafy little courtyard that her entrance is tucked into. “Gracious. Is the world ending?” and laughs, the kind of black and full-bellied laugh you earn for that kind of joke from being there when it happened, watching cities you’d lived in, and their populations, and people you loved, all cease to exist as reality’s new edge relentlessly contracted and excluded them and consigned them to Nothing.
“There’s a car waiting now, if you’d dress,” the annoyingly unflappable little thing says. They must be fantastic at their job, in il Generale’s brave new bureaucratic empire.
“Ugh, fine,” Silvariana says, and closes the door. She washes her hands, goes upstairs and slips into a sundress and a garter of throwing knives around one thigh, pulls her hair back with a ribbon, downs a second bottle of — ha! — tonic, and opens the front door to find il Generale’s factotum standing exactly, neatly where they had been when the door closed.
“You are very young and very keen and it’s very annoying,” Silvariana says, with the immense dignity of someone who’s just felt two bottles of spiderbane hit like a brick to the temple, and carries her strappy sandals to the car so she can spend the ride there sitting down and very carefully fumbling the straps into the buckles.
“This way, ma’am,” the factotum says at the other end of the drive, ushering her into the korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater mansion.
“I know the way,” Silvariana snaps, and immediately has to be directed out of taking a wrong turn; arriving in the presence of il Generale with a slightly queasy stomach and an ill temper, which dissolves the moment she walks into the solarium and finds two heads bent together over the intelligence reports. “Oh!” she says, fond tears springing to the corners of her eyes. “Girls! Why, you’ve both grown so much!” She fumbles in her tiny handbag, and, sniffling nostalgically, thrusts her hand out toward them. “Do you still like lollipops?”
Vespidine korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater looks at her, and silently presses the tips of her index fingers into the bridge of her nose.
“She is stoned off her tits,” her sister Cosimisa says.
“You’d know,” il Generale says from behind her hands. Cosimisa glares at her, then turns a sharp, fake smile on Silvariana.
“I love lollipops,” she says, taking one of the offered sweets.
Il Generale takes a deep breath, folds her hands on the table in front of her, and ignores her sister as she noisily unwraps the lollipop, props her feet up on a spare chair, and sticks it in her mouth. “Great-aunt Silva—” she starts.
“The first time I was in this room,” Silvariana says, raising her chin mulishly, “they said to me: the world is over, Silva. It’s too small now, Silva. It’s all to be brave and bright and friendly now, we have no need of an assassin. Have a house, Silva. Take up hobbies that don’t kill people. Knit. Well, how’s your brave, bright world, children?”
“How’s your knitting?” Cosimisa snipes back.
“You have no respect for your elders,” Silvariana says. “I’m going home,” and gets as far as turning around.
“You’re right,” il Generale says, pure cold steel. “Nobody respects you. Nobody remembers you. But they know me. Walk away from me and find out how far my word goes, if I say: nobody sells your little easements to you any more, not so much as cough syrup.”
Silvariana stops, swaying a little on her feet, and turns around very carefully. “You can’t do that,” she says.
“I can,” il Generale says.
“No,” Silvariana says. “I was — I was older than you today, at the End. You’ve buried one wife. I’d had — I’d had wives. I’d had husbands. I got to bury nothing. You wouldn’t. You couldn’t be so cruel.” Her lip wobbles.
“I am everything I need to be,” il Generale says, immovably grim, and Silvariana believes her, and slumps her shoulders, and sits in a chair, and wishes she had another bottle of tonic.
“Great-aunt Silva,” il Generale says more quietly. “The world doesn’t, but I remember what you’re for. I remember what you’re feared for.” She touches the dossiers spread out on the table. “The annual diplomatic team to the Eaststone is out of contact with us, and our sources suggest they’ve been taken inside.”
“Inside,” Silvariana says, an insensible repetition like an echo-bird, and then, sharp in tone, even if not quite managing sharpness in her tonic-sweetened brain: “Inside the Eaststone?” And at il Generale’s nod, she breathes: “Callooh callay!” and turns burning eyes from Vespidine to Cosimisa and back. “I am loosed from my leash!”
“She’s stoned off her tits, Vespidine,” Cosimisa repeats around her lollipop, rolling her eyes.
“If you find our people alive,” Vespidine says, eyes burning back at Silvariana in equal measure, “I want them returned to me, alive,” and Silvariana’s veins sing like elated angels, better than drugs, with the restricted specificity of whom is not to die. “If you need people, if you need equipment: all is available to you. You leave tonight.”
“Have a lollipop,” Silvariana says, holding it out with a shaking hand. “You are my favourite. Do you have somewhere I can make myself throw up? I’ve had enough spiderbane to kill a horse.”
