Steelhands - Jaida Jones [108]
“And why’s that?” I asked.
“Because they start knowing you too well,” Adamo replied.
EIGHT
BALFOUR
We were in the middle of delicate talks with Chanteur—we’d graduated from the laborious task of hammering out land trade rights and finally come to the crux of the Arlemagne visit, which was to establish our mutual desires for alliance during future wars—when I first heard the noise.
It was a low hum, like gears beginning to grind slowly against one another. I looked up to see if anyone else had noticed, but they were all paying attention to the passionate speech Chanteur was giving—about their centuries-old marine difficulties with Verruges, and why it was necessary for Volstov and Arlemagne to crush those seafaring pirates once and for all.
No one but I had noticed, then.
I waited for the sound to fade, or for someone else to glance up and catch my eye. But neither of those things happened; rather, the noise grew louder, and it sounded like a piece of metal being dragged over steel. I pressed my fingers to my temple, wondering why no one else was reacting to it. Chanteur hadn’t even paused in the middle of his speech.
Perhaps there was some construction happening in the street and I’d been so immersed in my own business that I’d missed reading the notification posted downstairs. Or perhaps everyone else in the room was simply a more professional diplomat than I, trained to tune out all extraneous noise so that it wouldn’t interrupt proceedings. Even Troius didn’t show any signs of being disturbed—half-asleep, perhaps, and twiddling a pen between his fingers like he was thinking about taking notes, but also thinking about how nice it would be not to bother. There was nothing in his expression that indicated he was hearing the same frightful noises I was.
I drew in a deep breath, willing myself to be calm. Despite all my best efforts to ignore what I was hearing, the sound itself was slowly intensifying. It was like being caught within the workings of some enormous waterwheel, the metal groaning and creaking all around me.
At the Airman, Ivory had often complained of suffering from headaches so severe that he took to bed and wouldn’t speak to anyone for the entire day. He’d said it sounded like all the dragons crowding themselves into his head at once, squeezing and scraping up against one another until he felt like sticking his knife in there just to get them out again.
Fortunately for everyone, not the least Ivory himself, he’d never actually gone through with the plan.
“I think that you’re forgetting where Volstov’s strengths lie,” said Diplomat Auria, one of the more-experienced civil servants attached to our particular case. “It’s been years since we fought any kind of naval battle—decades, even. Our resources are exhausted from warring with the Ke-Han for so long—until these past months, that was our main focus—and we’ve only just begun to recover from the economic loss, not to mention the depletion of our soldiers. Surely none of you has forgotten this.”
She added this last point with a look around the Volstovic side of the table, as though we’d all managed to fail her once again. It was evident that she was frustrated by her team being comprised of mostly novices. Most of those with more experience, such as Margrave Josette, were working on relations between Volstov and the Ke-Han—and Auria had made it clear on more than one occasion that, should negotiations fall through, she did not expect to catch any of the blame for it. One woman alone could not champion this cause, she’d explained, and also, it seemed immensely humorous to her that after years of being qualified for more than she was given, she’d somehow gone back to being a ’Versity lecturer rather than receiving her desired promotion.
“Surely there’s no need to be so negative,” Troius reasoned. “No one’s counseling we leap from one war and straight into the next. It’s merely a question of support—isn’t that right, Chanteur? If Verruges should come knocking, we pledge to lend our boots to give them a firm kick in the ass,