Peter Hamilton - The Evolutionary Void

“That might have been the end of it. But legally the rooms were registered to the brothers. So the newlyweds brought in legal help to revoke the residency and make it their own.”

Edeard closed his eyes in anguish. “Please! Lady, no, not him.”

“Oh, yes,” Macsen said with vicious delight. “Master Cherix took the case.”

Because the couple, legally, were unequivocally in the wrong and everyone knew it, all Cherix could do in court was fight a holding action. A registration of occupancy could be overturned only by an order of the Grand Council. In order to get that, the legal case had to become a political campaign. The Our City movement was born four weeks before the elections. Mayor Trahaval was strictly in favor of existing law and order, as espoused by the Waterwalker, as he was fond of repeating at every speech. Doblek, up until then a simple formality opposition candidate, chose to support Our City. He won a landslide majority, as did a host of Our City representatives.

The Our City movement was something its members took very seriously. By the end of the first week every single vacant space in every building in Makkathran was occupied and registered by one of their own. And the visitors arriving with their dying relatives had nowhere to stay; like the brothers before them, most couldn’t afford the inns for what might be months. It all came to a head in Ilongo a week after Doblek was sworn in at the Orchard Palace. Some newly arrived visitors, outraged at being told they couldn’t stay in the city where their dearly beloved were due to be guided from, tried to squat in some of Ilongo’s central mansions. There were riots that the constables alone couldn’t quell, not that they tried particularly hard. That was when Doblek acted with impressive resolution, ordering the militia in to stamp down hard on the disturbance.

From that day on, anyone who came to Makkathran to be guided by a Skylord and couldn’t afford a tavern room was prevented from passing through the city gates until a day before the great event, when the Lady’s Mothers organized their passage up the towers. Even then, relatives who’d been camping outside were discouraged from accompanying them to Eyrie.

“Doblek really thought he was emulating you on the day of banishment,” Macsen said. “Throwing them all out and forbidding them to come back was what you did to Bise and the rest. And enough stupid people think the same; they applaud how tough he was.”

“I’m surprised he had the courage to suggest such a thing,” Edeard said. “That’s not the Doblek I remember.”

“Power changes people,” Dinlay said simply, giving Macsen a sharp look. “And necessity. What else could he do?”

Edeard realized this was an old argument between his friends.

“I could accept that if he’d made any attempt to alter things since then,” Macsen said. “But he hasn’t. He doesn’t know what to do, and more people are arriving each day. Did you know we’ve only just started getting our first visitors from the most distant provinces? And I include Rulan in that.”

“Cheap,” Dinlay muttered.

“Not really. The volume of people coming here is still rising. Doblek has done nothing to address that. Nothing! He had to deploy another militia troop to safeguard the route into Makkathran. The people he’d forced outside were starting to waylay merchant carts and caravans. So now we have a permanent presence of militia extending well out into the Iguru, and the stopover camps are hacking down the forests outside for fuel. You know those trees were planted by Rah and the Lady themselves.”

“The area circling Makkathran was designated a forest zone by Rah,” Dinlay said wearily. “He didn’t go around planting seeds himself; that’s One City propaganda.”

“Whatever,” Macsen said. “The problem is Doblek’s actions, or rather lack of them. What does he think is going to happen, that it’ll all sort itself out? And Edeard, we’ve heard rumors that the Fandine militia is on the march through Plax.”

Edeard gave Macsen a puzzled look. “Why?”

“Because we’ve used our militia against their citizens. They’re claiming the right of protection.”

“Oh, Great Lady!”

“It’s the distance,” Dinlay said. “That’s our trouble. Rumor grows with each mile. A report of what was a grazed arm and a bloody nose in Makkathran has become some kind of mass murder of innocents by the time it reaches Fandine.”

“So is it true about the Fandine militia, then?”

“General Larose sent fast scouts out last week. We’ll know soon enough.”

“Militias fighting on the Iguru,” Edeard muttered in disbelief. The loss of life during the last campaign against the bandits had appalled him. He’d thought such horror had ended then. It certainly couldn’t be allowed to happen again; he had never forgotten the carnage Owain had unleashed. “I must speak with Doblek.”

“To what end?” Macsen asked. “You think he’ll back down and order the militia back inside the gate?”

“He was elected courtesy of Our City,” Dinlay said. “He’ll never go against the cause that put him in the Orchard Palace.”

Edeard briefly thought about using domination. He’d learned enough of that technique from Tathal and the nest in those last few seconds to change anyone’s mind for them. But the Mayor was only one man; it would only solve the immediate problem-that was if there even was a Fandine militia marching on the city with revenge in mind. It was the whole situation that had to be calmed-a situation the Skylords had created. And how’s that for irony?

He recalled the meeting he’d had with Macsen and Kanseen just after Dinlay had returned from his honeymoon with Gealee. At that point Mayor Trahaval had come nowhere close to finding a solution to the massive influx of people awaiting guidance. Edeard had told the others he’d try to find out why the Skylords would accept people only from Eyrie’s towers. But there’d never been time to ask them before his final confrontation with the nest, and this time around he’d never bothered. Such things had been abandoned in favor of the voyage.

If I can get the Skylords to visit other towns on Querencia, then this will all just go away . In the meantime he had to do something about the stopover refugees outside North Gate. All that animosity on both sides is going to corrode the fulfillment which the Skylords judge us by .

“All right,” Edeard said. “Just how intractable is Our City?”

“It’s a one-cause movement, which means they simply can’t be moderate,” Dinlay said. “There will never be any kind of compromise with them, so if you’re going to take them on, it will have to be a direct election and you change the law after you’re Mayor.”

“Sounds drastic.” Edeard sucked in his cheeks. “I’d better go take a look for myself, then.”

– -

Our City had, appropriately enough, set up its headquarters in Ilongo. Dinlay had told Edeard with grudging admiration how their political ability had grown since their hurried formation. Eight of the current district representatives had stood on the Our City ticket, forming a powerful bloc in the Council. But their greatest influence over the lives of citizens came directly from the residency issue. If you were a Makkathran native searching for somewhere new to live, you had to ask Our City for its cooperation. Now that their members had legal occupancy of every previously vacant room and dwelling, they were the ones who had to relinquish their claim before someone else could move in. Only when they’d confirmed you were a genuine born-in-the-city applicant would one of their members vacate the place you wanted. In effect, Our City now controlled who lived where. And as with all political parties, they traded advantage and made deals with rivals and other groups in the Council and down on the streets and canals, insinuating themselves deeper and deeper into the city’s political structure.