It was in the Warrens that Simon Jester had once again slipped through their fingers, and neither of them yet understood how.
Muscles bulged at the corners of Berne’s jaw, and he clutched the scabbard of his sword until his knuckles popped. Toa-Sytell hadn’t seen Berne wear this particular sword before. It was longer than Berne’s usual style, and broader as well, and he wore it across his back with its hilt jutting above his left shoulder. Berne’s usual quality of boneless relaxation was conspicuously absent; Toa-Sytell guessed that the Count was actually frightened. This was unsurprising, and Toa-Sytell didn’t fault him for it. They both had sufficient reason for fear.
Berne still wore the bloodstained clothes he’d worn all day, through this dusty and exhausting and finally futile search. The blood that had dried in a ragged splotch across his chest belonged mostly to that gladiator brat whose neck he’d sliced in the tenement, although some of it had leaked from wounds his Cats had suffered.
None of it was his own, more’s the pity.
“I don’t like to be stared at.” Berne had never turned from the window, and his normally petulant tone held a thin edge of danger.
Toa-Sytell shrugged. “Sorry,” he said tonelessly.
“Keep your eyes to yourself, if you want to keep them in your face.”
Toa-Sytell smiled thinly. “I’ve apologized already.”
Berne now came away from the window, and his pale eyes burned. “You apologize too easily, you spineless cocksucker.”
“You’re ahead of yourself,” Toa-Sytell murmured. His eyes held Berne’s, while his fingers unobtrusively caressed the hilt of the poisoned stiletto that he wore in a sheath strapped to his wrist beneath his sleeve. “Perhaps if Ma’elKoth judges against me, he’ll give me to you. Until then, have a care with your words, catamite.”
His colorless tone, as much as the words themselves, brought rising purple to Berne’s face. Toa-Sytell was fairly sure that he couldn’t survive an attack from the Count; before his ennoblement a few months ago, Berne had been a notorious freebooter whose swordsmanship was legendary. On the other hand, with his fingers on the stiletto, he was fairly sure that Berne wouldn’t survive it either.
Some of this assurance must have shown on his face, for Berne chose not to pursue the discussion. He spat on the pale limestone floor at the Duke’s feet and stalked back to the window.
Toa-Sytell shrugged, and continued to stare.
The screams built toward a climax.
Toa-Sytell was a man of average size and average appearance, with one of those blandly regular faces that one forgets a moment after looking away; only the keen brain behind his forgettable eyes was extraordinary. He had been in service to the King’s Eyes for twenty-three years, in that time rising from an apprentice shadow-pad to the apex of the organization. Born with the common name Sytell, he had been privileged to take the prefix after he was ennobled by the late Prince-Regent Toa-Phelathon. In the yearlong chaos of civil war that followed the murders of the Prince-Regent and the Child Queen, he had survived by making himself equally indispensable to all sides, never seeking power himself but gathering resources and men into the agency he led.
He alone of the Council of Dukes had survived Ma’elKoth’s coup with life and power intact; the new Emperor had been already well aware of Toa-Sytell’s value. It was, in fact, at Toa-Sytell’s advice that Ma’elKoth had taken the title Emperor: the restless and quarrelsome nobility would never have tolerated a King who bore no trace of royal blood, but an Emperor was a different matter. Perhaps Emperors were always commoners who ruled by fiat, backed by a loyal military; who could say different? Ankhana had no Imperial traditions—the nation had, after all, become an empire largely through Ma’elKoth’s astonishing successes as Toa-Phelathon’s most trusted general.
This transparent rationalization could be used by the nobles to satisfy their liegemen. They didn’t have to believe it themselves; their own cooperation was ensured by the diligence of the King’s Eyes.
Under Toa-Sytell’s leadership, the King’s Eyes had grown from a simple gang of spies and informers to a full-fledged secret police with nearly unlimited discretionary powers. Rare was the Duke, Count, or even provincial Baron who would dare to whisper treason, even to his own wife in the privacy of their bedchamber; the King’s Eyes could see, so it was said, even through the thickest stone.
But the mere knowledge of treason was never sufficient to quash it. The nobility had traditionally woven tangled nets of alliances and blood bonds to protect themselves from the power of the Oaken Throne; to attack any single one would invite full-scale civil war. These alliances had made the nobles untouchable until Ma’elKoth devised his most brilliant stratagem: the Aktir-tokar.
A Baron who whispered against the Imperial Government now might well find himself denounced as an Aktir. Certainly, the unfortunate fellow’s allies would know that the charge was fraudulent, but that knowledge bought them nothing. The Empirewide Aktir-tokar had spawned such a frenzy of suspicion and fear that any noble who openly supported a denounced man would face sudden hot rebellion from his peasants, and not a few of his arms-bearing liegemen. One by one, the nobles fell, slowly, in a carefully calculated progression; soon, only those nobles who supported Ma’elKoth would remain, along with the dregs of their fellows, too cowed to give the Emperor so much as a sidelong look.
Toa-Sytell was not concerned only with the upper reaches of Ankhanan society; he also directed the Imperial Constabulary and was on his way to running the criminal elements of the Empire as well. He had already unobtrusively assumed control of the most powerful of the Warrengangs and had his men busily infiltrating the rest. The King’s Eyes were spread throughout the Empire; they reported only to Toa-Sytell and took only his orders. He could almost certainly have controlled the Empire himself, in secret; he did not. His ambitions did not tend in that direction.
The bloody sun sank into the horizon, smearing crimson across Berne’s too-pretty face.
The screams within the Iron Room faded with the light; as the giant brass bell in the Temple of Prorithun tolled the curfew, the sobbing from behind the door was buried under a new voice, a dark and savage throbbing that Toa-Sytell could feel vibrating in his guts; the words meant nothing, but the mere depth of the tone was like a finger that jabbed into the notch of his collarbone. Toa-Sytell shuddered and made no attempt to listen.
There was only one man alive that Toa-Sytell feared; but the beings that Ma’elKoth trafficked with, behind that door, were not men. Nor were they, strictly, alive.
That voice became difficult to ignore in the silence of the antechamber. Toa-Sytell rubbed his forearms, to make the hairs on them lie down once again, and spoke mainly from a desire to fill the quiet. “One of the prisoners—Lamorak—he’s been asking for you,” he said.
Berne snorted. “I should think so.”
“Oh?” Toa-Sytell said mildly. “Why is that?” Berne suddenly coughed into his fist and turned his face away from the Duke. Toa-Sytell waited for him to elaborate, watching him with the unblinking patience of a snake coiled at the mouth of a rabbit hole.
The silence, underscored by the voices from the adjoining room, stretched thin. Berne coughed again. “Well, I have his sword, don’t I?”
“Do you?”
Berne drew the blade smoothly over his shoulder. Its edges shimmered in the crimson twilight, and a whining hum came clearly to Toa-Sytell’s ears. “The enchanted blade Kosall—you’ve heard of it?”
“No.”
“Well, it is. Enchanted, I mean. It’s packed to the eyeballs with magick.” He held it slanted at garde to admire it in the fading light. “Cuts through anything. Huh, he nearly killed me with it. He dropped two of my boys, and when I came against him myself his first stroke sheared my blade in two, a handbreadth above the guard.”
“How did you take him?”
“I grabbed this blade with both hands, and held it while I kicked his lamps out.” Berne smiled with adolescent sm
ugness and flexed his fists before him like a stretching cat. He opened his unmarked palms and turned them toward Toa-Sytell as though to say, See? It cuts through everything—except me. “Being Ma’elKoth’s favorite comes with bonuses.”
“But this is no answer,” Toa-Sytell said. “I questioned him, and the other, for hours. Why would he insist that he will speak only to you?”
“Maybe it’s because I beat him,” Berne suggested with a shrug. “A point of honor, between men. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I see,” Toa-Sytell said blandly. “It’s clear enough that there is certainly something here that I do not understand. Yet.”
Berne only smirked and whirled the enchanted blade through a complex arc that ended with it once again within its scabbard. He went back to the window.
The distant-thunder rumbling of the savage voice faded after a time, and there came an explosive pop, like a giant’s handclap. Ma’elKoth’s negotiations were complete.
Berne came hesitantly to the inner door, a great black slab of cold-worked iron. On that door hung a massive ring forged in the ancient symbol of the serpent devouring its tail. To lift and drop it would be a simple thing, a second’s work that would produce a resonant clang, but Berne’s hand, reaching for it, trembled like an old man’s. He swiftly shot a glance over his shoulder, to see if Toa-Sytell had noticed.
Toa-Sytell allowed himself another smile.
A swirling wind came from the center of the closed anteroom as though someone had opened the window where Berne had stood, as though the calm night outside had become a gale. The wind pushed the great door smoothly open with a hollow rushing sound like a distant waterfall.
“Berne. Toa-Sytell.”
The Emperor’s voice was richer and more resonant than the temple bell that had recently rung the curfew. Toa-Sytell never thought to wonder how Ma’elKoth had known they were out here: Ma’elKoth always knew.
“Join me, my loving nobles.”
Toa-Sytell exchanged a glance with the Count he despised—a sudden kinship of apprehension between them—then together they crossed the threshold.
The Iron Room, in which they now stood, had been built more than a century before, early in the reign of Til-Menelethis the Golden, the last Ankhanan king to dabble in sorcery. The windowless interior of the room was plated with interleaved sheets of hammered black iron, the joints worked with binding runes of silver. Silver runes ringed the doorway and the only two places where the palace’s stonework was exposed: the matching mystic circles, one at the center of the floor and the other on the ceiling above.
The room had been sealed by order of the Council of Dukes in regency for Til-Menelethis’heir after that unfortunate experimenter descended into wailing madness; the Wards had been set by the legendary Manawythann Greyeyes, and had stood inviolate against all attempts until broken by Ma’elKoth himself.
In the northern quadrant of the mystic circle, the naked body of a middle-aged man lay across the altar of native limestone, now greyed with soot and crusted with ancient brown blood. Toa-Sytell knew this man, knew him well, had eaten with this man’s wife and had patted his children’s heads; he didn’t allow himself to think of his name.
An intricate web of wetly pulsing ropes stretched upward above the man’s torso to hang suspended from a treelike metal rack, the arms of which ended in silver hooks that were driven through the ropes . . . But the ropes, they weren’t ropes: ropes aren’t slick with blood, and they don’t twitch with the rhythm of a slowly beating heart.
In a single dizzying instant, Toa-Sytell’s vision seemed to come finally into focus as he understood what he saw: these ropes were the still-living guts of the man on the altar, withdrawn through a gaping slice below his navel and hung from these silver hooks like chitterlings in a smokehouse. Toa-Sytell’s stomach twisted, and he risked a sidelong glance to see Berne’s reaction.
Berne had leaned forward and to the side, craning his neck for a better view.
The Emperor stood within the mystic circle, bare to the waist like a wrestler, his hands dripping blood to the elbow. Ma’elKoth’s eyes were as black as a clouded sky at midnight, and they glittered with indifferent perfection, neither warmth nor chill. He nodded toward the low sofa against one wall, and his voice seemed to rumble from the roots of mountains. “Sit, while I cleanse my hands.”
They did, and they both watched as the Emperor went to one of the lazily smoking braziers that provided both reddish light and a juniper-oil scent that nearly covered the sulphurous fecal tang that always hung in the air within this room. Ma’elKoth stared at the brazier, without word or gesture, and yellow flame now leaped crackling from it to the height of his head. He thrust his hands within it, and the flame turned brilliant green around them; the blood on his hands caked, charred, and flaked away.
The Emperor Ma’elKoth, Shield of Prorithun, Lord of Ankhana, Protector of Kirisch-Nar, Lion of the Northern Waste and a host of other titles, was the largest man Toa-Sytell had ever seen. Even Berne, tall by ordinary standards, barely reached Ma’elKoth’s stiffly waxed beard. His spreading curls of chestnut hair gleamed rich red in the light of the flame before him and draped across shoulders like the rock of the Shattered Cliffs.
The Emperor worked his hands within the flame. His biceps bulged like barrels, and the massive swelling muscles across his chest might have been carved of individual stones and joined together like a puzzle. His growing grin showed perfect teeth as the blood crackled from his fingers. The flames faded away from his hands, and he brushed them together briskly, scraping away the last of the burned blood. When he looked down upon his seated nobles, his eyes now shone with the deep blue of a late-summer sky.
The Emperor was the one man that Toa-Sytell feared.
“Do not trouble to report,” Ma’elKoth said. “I have tasks for you both.”
“You, ah . . .” Berne said, straightening, coughing harshly to clear his throat. “We’re not going to be punished?”
His brows drew together. “Should you be punished? How have you betrayed Me?”
“I, I ah.” He coughed again. “I haven’t, but—”
“But Simon Jester once again escaped,” Ma’elKoth said equably. He stepped out of the mystic circle and over to the sofa, where he crouched before Berne and put a hand on his shoulder like a father gently correcting his young son.
“Berne, do you know Me so poorly? Am I a maniac, to punish men for My own failure? Was I not with you at every moment? I do not yet know what this Simon Jester did, what magick it is that still dances within us all. If I can neither break nor avoid this power, how should I punish you for that same inability?”
Berne looked up, and Toa-Sytell was astonished to see on his face an almost pathetic eagerness to please. “I only . . . I didn’t want to disappoint you.”
“And that is why you are My favorite Child,” Ma’elKoth said warmly. “Here, scoot, both of you. Let Me sit between you.”
Toa-Sytell hastily shifted to the end of the sofa. This was part of why he feared Ma’elKoth: the man was as changeable as a summer storm. One moment he could terrify you with a mere glance from the mountaintop of his regal majesty; in the next he might sit familiarly beside you like a boyhood friend on the stoop of your house.
“It is My lust that has undone Me,” Ma’elKoth said, leaning forward onto his knees. “I have made this Colhari Palace proof against all magicks that are not of My own making. In the crucible of My desire to capture Simon Jester, I forged the knife that now trembles within my belly. It was the channel that joined us, Berne, that was the fatal chink through which Simon Jester’s dart has stabbed Me. The Power that I summoned this eve—to ask what can be done to break this magick—laughed. It laughed at Me! It said the magick is easily broken, once I lay hands upon its caster.”
Ma’elKoth shook his head slowly, with an inward-looking smile as though deeply amused at this irony. “Can you feel it? Berne, you met Simon Jester face-to-face—what did he look like?”
Berne shook his head miserably. “I don’t remember. I have tried . . . I think I may have even recognized him.”
“I know you did,” Ma’elKoth rumbled. “Since this morn I have worked to deduce who Simon Jester must be, based on what I know of whom you know. It cannot be done; each time an inkling comes, I feel the pull of that cursed magick and the inkling is driven off. I have even tried to use the spell against itself, working through the alphabet for initials, for names at random, and waiting to see which trigger the pull—and I find myself, again and again, staring at a sheet full of letters with no memory of which pulled and which did not. Were I a man given to fury, I would find it infuriating.”
“But you seem, Imperial Majesty,” Toa-Sytell said delicately, “almost pleased.”
The smile that Ma’elKoth turned on him held an irresistible heat; despite the Duke’s apprehension, the smile warmed him to his core. “But I am! This is new, Toa-Sytell. And a challenge. Do you have any conception how rare it is for Me to be surprised? To be frustrated? This Simon Jester is the most interesting opponent I have faced since the Plains War. He’s outfoxed my entire pack of hounds; the solution to such a problem is, of course, to find a better hound.”
“Better?” Berne said, frowning.
Ma’elKoth smiled and engulfed Berne’s shoulders with a titanic arm. “Do not take the metaphor personally, dear boy. I apologize for the misspeech; I should have said, one more suited for this particular task.”
“And that would be?” Berne said sullenly.
“Come. I will show you.”
Ma’elKoth rose and entered the mystic circle. Toa-Sytell joined him instantly, but Berne hesitated, looking at the man who lay stretched across the altar. “He, uh, he looks familiar.”
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