I thought about calling the arbites on the vox, but decided against it. The attack on Spaeton House must surely have been noted by sentries at Dor-say, especially once the main fires started, but no emergency support units had come. Had the arbites been paid to turn a blind eye? Had they been more complicit still in the raid?
Until I understood who and what my enemies were, I could trust no one, and that included the authorities and even the Inquisition itself.
Not for the first time in my life, I was effectively alone.
I headed for the mountains. For Ravello.
Ravello is a hill town in the flanks of the western Atenates, situated at the foot of the Insa Pass, on the shores of a long freshwater lake that forms the headwaters of the great Drunner. It has a small but distinguished univer-sitariate specialising in medicine and philology, a brewery that exports its lake-water ale all over Gudrun, and a fine chapel dedicated to Saint Cal-wun, which houses to my mind some of the best religious frescoes in the sub-sector.
It is a quiet place, steep and densely packed, its old buildings lining narrow hill streets so tightly their green copper roofs overlap like plate armour. From the air, it looked like a patch of dark moss clinging to the blue slopes of the Itervalle.
The sun was rising as we approached from the north. The air was clear, a baking blue. We had left the wild woodland in the first touches of dawn, and climbed up into the foothills, following the line of the Atenate Minors up into the higher altitudes. The Itervalle was high enough to have cloud cover round its peak, but across the lake, the first of the great giants rose: Esembo, ragged like a tooth; Mons Fulco, a violet triangle stabbing the sky; snow-capped Corvachio, the sport and bane of recreational climbers.
We were nearly out of power and the speeder was getting sluggish. I dropped us to road level and came in through the western gate. There were no traffic and no pedestrians. It was still early in the morning.
The streets were paved with the same blue-grey ouslite that the buildings were constructed from, bright in the sunlight, dank in the shadows of the narrow streets. We passed through a square where a student lay sleeping off a night's drinking on the lip of a small fountain, along a wider avenue where ground cars and civilian fliers were parked in a herringbone, and then turned up a narrow street and climbed the hill out of the glare of the sun. I opened the speeder's windows and breathed in the fresh, clear air. The muted sounds of the flier's engines washed back at me, reflected oddly by the tall, shuttered faces of the dwellings on either side of the steep, paved lane.