The Hierchon Ormilla was present, as was the rest of the surviving Mercatoria top brass. There hadn’t really been time to start serious alterations on the Mercatorial power structure, and when he’d found that, as the Beyonders had reported, the Mercatoria was disliked and resented by most of its citizens\subjects, but not actively hated by them, Luseferous had left the bulk of the civil authorities in place. The main players had all pledged allegiance to him, apart from Fleet Admiral Brimiaice, who’d been killed in action, the Shrievalty colonel Somjomion, who’d disappeared and was probably on one of the ships that had run away, and the Cessorian Clerk-Regnant, Voriel, who’d chosen death rather than what he seemed to regard as the dishonour of recanting his religious vows. Idiot. Luseferous had shot him himself.
He’d had some of the people who’d been involved in the Dweller Embassy — set up a few months before the invasion -brief him on what to expect from the floats. Most of the Embassy people had been killed when the commander of the ship they were in had refused to surrender, but a few had survived. Luseferous wasn’t sure he trusted them, though.
Three of his own top half-dozen commanders were present too. The rest were engaged elsewhere, keeping an armed presence wherever it might be needed and preparing for the anticipated high-speed pass-through of the Summed Fleet’s advance units.
No Beyonders, of course. They were still in shock from his unconscionable behaviour in the matter of the single small city and a habitat full of artists, weirdos and do-gooders. He must tell them he’d only chosen the city — whatever it was called, he’d forgotten — because it was on the coast and sheltered by mountains, so that he could do his sculpting trick again. That would horrify them all over again, with luck.
The — delegates? representatives? whatever the fuck they were — from the Dweller side were an unprepossessing bunch. They looked big and impressive, especially in their giant wheel-like esuits, but there was the — apparently perennial — Dweller problem of finding somebody with sufficient authority to speak for a whole planet. He’d learned early on in his career that Dwellers were best avoided. Leave them alone and they’d leave you alone. He wouldn’t have chosen to have anything whatsoever to do with the damn floats if he could possibly have avoided it. But he couldn’t, so he was doing his best.
Present were three Dwellers. All were supposedly as senior as each other, and they were each alone — no aides or secretaries or underlings of any sort, which with any other species would have indicated that these were not serious people at all but with Dwellers meant nothing in particular.
They were Feurish, some sort of political scholar who spoke for the great red-brown equatorial band they could see beneath them, Chintsion, who was the current chief-of-chiefs of an umbrella organisation representing all their clubs and other voluntary organisations (sounded insulting, but allegedly their “clubs’ included their supposedly highly effective military) and Peripule, who was the City Administrator of their largest city, though this was not a capital city in the accepted sense, and apparently being voted to be City Administrator was regarded as an imposition, not an honour or a chance to enjoy power. They all had grandiose-sounding titles that didn’t really mean anything. All they did was tell you how old the Dwellers were.
The Archimandrite would have preferred more obviously senior people — if such a thing existed in Dweller society — and more of them, but he had to work with what was to hand, especially given the time constraints. They did have other Dwellers on the Luseferous VII, however — over three hundred of them. Two whole shiploads of adolescents and young adults had been welcomed aboard for an extended tour as part of what sounded like a school trip for grown-ups. An alien-ship enthusiasts club, apparently. He would never have allowed this normally.
Luseferous was fairly certain that he didn’t really have the Dwellers’ full attention. His alien-watching experts advised him that the majority of the population of Nasqueron was unconcerned about the small war that had just taken place and the presence of the invasion fleet. In fact, the majority didn’t even know what had happened and would be unlikely to care. The planet’s news services, such as they were, were full of reports concerning something called a Formal War taking place between two of the atmospheric bands. This appeared to be a form of extreme sport played out on a vast scale, rather than what Luseferous would regard as a proper war. They were playing.
Well, he would just have to see what he could do to make them take proper notice of him.
Suspended over the vast view, the attendees seemed to hang as though about to fall. Above them, on a network of gantries, Luseferous’s personal guard stalked in exoskels, the pads of their claw-feet stalking with a steady, silent precision.
“Let’s get to the point,” Luseferous said after some desultory inconsequentialities had gone on far too long. “We want the Seer Fassin Taak,” he told the Dwellers. “Even more to the point, we want certain information he’s supposed to have been looking for.”
“What information?” Chintsion asked. The “clubs’ chief was proving the most voluble of the three Dwellers so far. His huge esuit sat cradled in a sling-seat poised over the shallow concavity of diamond film beneath, the planet’s bilious reflected light shining faintly up from underneath him. His esuit was grey, with garish pink chevrons.
“We are not at liberty to divulge that,” Luseferous told the Dweller.
“Why not?” asked the scholar, Feurish. His esuit was a kind of dirty white.
“I can’t tell you,” Luseferous said. He held up a gloved, ringed hand. “And please don’t ask why. Just accept this.”
The Dwellers were silent. They were probably signalling to each other. His tech people had warned him of this and had attempted to design the sling-seats so that the creatures couldn’t communicate like that. But as soon as the Dwellers had seen the seating arrangements they’d protested and fussed and started pulling and prodding and attempting to reconfigure their seats and even began rearranging them so that they were in positions relative to each other which they liked better. Luseferous had ground his diamond teeth, signalled to the tech people to help, and waited for the Dwellers to declare themselves happy.
Finally they were all sitting in a great circle, the Dwellers and the Hierchon and his handful of advisers forming most of one half of the circumference, the humans and others, including the Archimandrite, making up the other half.
“We don’t know where Seer Fassin Taak is,” Chintsion told Luseferous. “Last heard of, he was making for a city in the northern polar region called Eponia. Though that is just a rumour.”
“Eponia?” the third Dweller, Peripule, said. His esuit was deep, gleaming brown, frilled like seaweed. “I heard he was seen in Deilte.”
“Deilte?” Chintsion said scornfully. “At this time of year?”
“He is an alien,” Peripule said. “He knows nothing of fashion.”
“Well, first of all,” Chintsion began, “he has a minder, and—”
“Gentlemen,” Luseferous said. The three Dwellers all rocked back as though shocked.
“The Archimandrite Luseferous is a busy man,” the Hierchon Ormilla boomed. “Discussions regarding the seasonal fashion-ability of cities in Nasqueron might be best conducted between sessions, not during.”
“Little dweller,” Chintsion said to the Hierchon, “we are, as a favour to your latest batch of masters, and notwithstanding the likely and faintly hilarious brevity of their precedence, attempting to establish the whereabouts of this Taak fellow. The…”
Luseferous stopped listening. He turned to Tuhluer, who sat just behind and to the side of him. He looked the other man in the eye. Tuhluer held his gaze. Luseferous saw the other man swallow. Still his gaze was held. Tuhluer had never dared to do that before. Luseferous bent fractionally towards him and said quietly, “Desperate times require desperate solutions, Tuhluer.”