It was all very pleasant, and by no coincidence at all kept the nobility’s household troops outside the walls of the Crown City. She swung up into the cab and Lioncel got in beside her.
“Customs House,” she said to the man on the pedals. Then: “Odd,” to Lioncel.
The driver-rider pedaled hard down Vista to Everett through the brightening day, then turned east on the thoroughfare, sounding an imperious bell with his thumb and occasionally shouting for way. Most of the passersby scattered at the sight of the arms on the pedicab or simply because it certainly held someone influential.
“Odd, my lady?”
“The word cab used to mean a public vehicle for hire. They were everywhere and people flagged them down and were taken to where they needed to go. There was enough business that several hundred could work all day long. In the downtown and on docksides, where the streets were really narrow, pedicabs like this were used. We still call these things cabs but they’re private vehicles and only nobles and a few guildmasters and such have them.”
The boy nodded, polite but slightly baffled, and Tiphaine stifled a sigh.
They just don’t have the background. Best to live in the present as much as you can, Tiphaine, like a Changeling which you almost are anyway. The oldsters get tiresome when they go on about the old world and I don’t want to end up like that. Of course, everybody thinks about the past more as they get older. I’m just starting to realize that’s because you’ve got more past as you get older. And Portland sets me off because I was born here. Forget it. That Portland died at the Change, this place just has the same name and some of the geography. It’s like a new person wearing a dead man’s shoes.
The trip from the de Stafford residence to the South Park blocks and the old Customs House was quick, less than a mile and a half. Most of the buildings outside the city wall had been systematically torn down to leave clear fields of fire for the monstrous throwing-engines on Portland’s walls, except for the Civic Stadium to the south of Everett, still used for soccer, baseball and jousting tournaments. Tented camps with troops from all over the Protectorate and the other realms of the Meeting sprawled over the open space usually used for turnout pasture and truck gardens and livery stables, and there was a thick mist of woodsmoke as cooks started their morning fires.
As always, she felt a prickle of unease as she approached the city wall.
You do, if you remember how Norman used the labor camps as a horrible example of what could happen to you. People sobbed with joy when they got picked to be peasants on the manors instead. That’s a long time ago now, but the memory sticks.
The defenses ran along the eastern edge of what had been Interstate 405, which neatly enclosed the old core of Portland, the original city along the west bank of the Willamette before the twentieth century and sprawl. The broad roadway was sunken well below the surface most of the way too, which had made it a perfect dry moat; apart from narrow laneways left for workmen it was a continuous bristle of outward-slanting angle iron posts now, set deep and then ground to vicious points and edges like a forest of swords.
The wall itself was poured mass concrete sixty feet high and thirty thick, around a frame of steel girders ripped out of old skyscrapers. Round towers stood at hundred-yard intervals, rearing twice as high and thick enough to seem squat, each a miniature fortress in its own right that could be cut off from the outside by raising footways and slamming thick steel doors. The towers had steep metal roofs like witches’ hats, steel plated with copper; a hoarding of the same material made a sloping roof over the crenellations of the wall. Wall and towers both were machicolated, the fighting platforms on top protruding over the walls on arches so that trapdoors could be opened to drop things straight down.
“Say what you like about Norman, he didn’t think small,” Tiphaine said, looking at the curiously graceful massiveness of it, glistening in the dawn light with the white stucco that covered the whole surface.
“My lady?”
“Nothing, boy.”
Most of the bridges that had crossed Interstate 405 had been destroyed. The others had been fortified with Norman Arminger’s usual combination of brutal functionalism, paranoid thoroughness and deliberately soul-crushing use of intimidation-architecture. Everett Street Gate was typical. They crossed a drawbridge that could be raised instantly by giant counterweights, then a great squat castle of four towers on the western bank of the 405, with the roadway running past massive gates of solid steel and under a high arched ceiling pierced with murder-holes and slots for portcullis after portcullis to drop, more gates, the bridge with sections that could be dropped at the pull of levers or flooded with burning napalm or both, then another castle as strong as the first in the city wall proper.
The guard commander gave her a swift but genuine once-over before passing her through; despite the early hour the traffic was heavy, but the crossbowmen were still searching wagons and pulling random or suspicious travelers aside for more thorough searches. Tiphaine nodded sober approval; she’d signed off on those orders herself, and damn the inconvenience. Being dead was more inconvenient still.
Lioncel looked at the fortifications with innocent pride; they’d been finished before he was born.
“They say Des Moines in Iowa is bigger, my lady, but I doubt there’s a city anywhere that’s stronger!”
“Probably not,” Tiphaine said, and the page rested silently; he knew better than to try to chat.
She swung down from the pedicab outside the building that housed the War Ministry, across from a small square of greenery and trees. Other pedicabs came and went along Park, and horses clip-clopped; churls and varlets pulled handcarts, led long teams of oxen that dragged heavy wagons, hurried about errands. A streetcar rumbled by behind its six-mule hitch down tracks completed just last year, and there was a scattering of private carriages as well.
Farther north and closer to the river-wall the Main Post Office building was serving as a hospital and relocation depot, since it was amply large and was conveniently across the street from Union train station. A trickle of ambulances passed, taking the recovering elsewhere, and everyone tried to make way for them.
“Lioncel,” she said. “Go down to the hospital and make sure your lady mother isn’t overdoing it. If she is tired or looks tired, tell her I said to go get some rest and to remind her she’s seven months pregnant. If she won’t, go find the Dowager Molalla and get Phillipa to help you chase her home. Don’t take no for an answer. Once you’ve done that, get one of the housemaids to sit with her while she rests and come back to my office.”
“Yes, my lady!”
He smiled, ducked his bright head with its black brimless page’s hat, and dashed away.
The guards in front of the five-arched granite loggia of the War Ministry were a platoon in three-quarter armor with glaives, seven-foot pole arms topped with a wicked head like a giant single-edged butcher’s knife with a thick hook on the reverse. They were at parade rest-feet apart, left hand tucked behind the back, extended right hand holding the weapon with the butt against the right foot and the rest slanted out. As she came up they went to attention and rapped the steel-shod butts of the glaives against the pavement, and Tiphaine returned the salute gravely.
Their gear was not quite the kind the Association used, and the sigil on their breastplates was the snarling red bear’s-head of the Bearkillers. They weren’t A-listers, the Bearkiller equivalent of knights; things were too fraught to waste elite troops on duty like this, though even Bearkiller militia had a precise snap to the way they did things.
But they’re doing something useful here, not just propping up their glaives. They’re showing for everyone to see that this is an alliance and we’re all in the war together. Armed Bearkillers in Portland, the people founded by Mike Havel, the man who killed Norman Arminger. Now if we had more than a talking-shop to coordinate things at the top, we’d be… not fine, you can’t be fine when you’re outnumbered two to one… we’d be a lot better off. The problem is none of the existing rulers will bow to one of their own.
The legend along the top of the loggia had been switched from US Customs House to War Ministry of the Portland Protective Association long ago. Now that was tactfully obscured by staffs bearing a dozen flags, covering all the more important realms of the Meeting. The Lidless Eye in gold and crimson on black wasn’t even in the center.
Sandra really knows how to handle this sort of thing, Tiphaine thought. Considering that this is where we plotted and planned and schemed to conquer everyone and divide their land up into fiefs. What a magnificent bitch that woman is!
The building was a block-square pile in the Victorian era’s idea of Italian Renaissance style right down to the terra-cotta up on the fourth-floor roofs and the Doric columns. The nineteenth-century stone-and-brick construction was why it had been a natural for post-Change conversion once Portland settled down, with a hundred thousand
