The Dark Glory War Read Online Free Page A

elected by the Lower Assembly, which was made up of tradesfolk and nobles from cadet branches of the houses. Each had to be able to trace his family back to the time of the Great Revolt, and while many folks in Oriosa could do that, only those who had amassed a certain amount of material wealth ever reached the Senate floor.
    On this night the Upper Assembly’s small gallery, which sat above and behind the entryway to the Lower Assembly floor, had been staffed with musicians who played a host of songs which had been sanctified by their antiquity. To enter the gala, I passed through a long corridor that led beneath the orchestra and brought me out at the head of some long steps going down to the rectangular assembly floor. A wide-railed walkway ringed the room to provide space for spectators wanting to study the Assemblies in action but, unlike tonight, chairs were not usually provided.
    I paused at the head of the stairs as a masked chamberlain in red pounded his staff against the floor twice, then announced me. “I present Master Tarrant Hawkins.” Mild applause, mostly from the spectators, followed the announcement, then I descended the steps.
    The room spread out wide on either side of me. A massive castle of ascending high benches split the far wall as the stairs did at this side. The hardwood platforms rose one above the other, front to back, and normally housed the Assembly’s Speaker and his various deputies, but this night were festooned with flowers. A big, round silver mirror, reminiscent of the moon, hung from the Speaker’s seat and provided us with a view that gathered us all together and shrank us down to nothing. Tables laden with food and drink surrounded the Speaker’s platform as if breastworks to hold us at bay.
    I quickly spotted Rounce and joined him at a table where a servant pressed a goblet of wine into my hands. The vintage was a red that was both dry and hearty, though it had a touch of sweetness and the faint flavor of berries. It was a wine that had aged, which surprised me, since the moonmasked often got brand-new wines that had yet to mature.
    I smiled at Rounce. “Good wine.”
    “I know, I picked it out.” He bowed his head to me as applause descended from above in the wake of another entrant being announced. “The Speaker asked my father to supply the wine for this evening, and he intended to use the first pressing from last year, but I prevailed upon him to go deeper in the cellar. He almost balked, but I reminded him that what moongold buys now, real gold will buy later, and having us remember the wine as good instead of symbolic would be best.”
    “Good thinking.” I sipped more wine and raised my goblet in a salute to him. “Though thoughts like that are what made me wonder about your tridentine mark.”
    He gave me a quick smirk. “Armies need quartermasters, don’t they?”
    “My father never reported having good wine in the field.”
    “Then I’ll have to change that.” He held his goblet in both hands and looked down into it. “I thought about Graegen, as you suggested, or even Turic …”
    “Turk? You’d pledge yourself to Death?”
    “The female aspect is more concerned with change than death, but you can’t say that death has not changed my fortunes. Here I started life as the first son of a merchant who had a noble for a cousin, then an illness takes that branch of the family and suddenly we’re elevated. I’m not really different than I was before, but …”
    I nodded. I had seen Rounce in Valsina before his family’s elevation when I accompanied my mother on her trips to market. Playfair & Sons Traders were known as honest merchants, but Rounce and I were just kids who eyed each other suspiciously. When his father became a noble, the family firm became Playfair & Sons Trading Company, and Rounce was expected to move into new social circles. He ended up in the same student battalion as Leigh and I. Being bigger than most others since we’d gotten our growth early, we were thrown