“Nothing?” Ma Ju Ro asked, walking around the table and approaching Rizmayer.
“There is absolutely nothing that can be done!” the second advisor stated with certainty. “Nothing! Alas, the situation in the government is such that...”
“Very well,” the emperor interrupted the advisor’s stream of consciousness with a satisfied nod and went back to his seat. Once seated, he turned to Herdinia next to him. “Remove Second Advisor Kris Rizmayer from his post. I suggest considering Reyk Lee Vensiro as a candidate for his replacement. I will give the new advisor his tasks personally.”
“Understood, sire,” Herdinia said, noting it down. “When would you like the Reyk to take up his new responsibilities?”
“Immediately, Lady Cross, immediately. But first, let’s deal with the other candidates...”
Once done with Rizmayer, who left the imperial chambers on shaky legs, the emperor ordered that all the new members of the Council be summoned immediately.
In record time, all four newly-minted counsellors took their seats at the table, behind which a range of unexpected decisions were taken before lunchtime. Lodyger, now in the minority, didn’t object to any of the questions. Cross, obviously bored and constantly distracting himself with some glass disk covered in colorful pictures, relied entirely on his wife’s opinion as far as Ma Ju Ro could tell. And his wife couldn’t tear her lovesick eyes from the emperor.
Funny, Luca thought. The pheromones have long since stopped working, but Herdinia still has feelings. The important thing now is not to accidentally humiliate her. Hell hath no fury... It wasn’t clear whether those were his thoughts, Esk’s, or maybe even the original Ma Ju Ro’s, but Luca didn’t worry about it. In the last few days, he’d gotten used to changes in his thinking. It might have seemed that his mind was still that of the youth he’d been, but he knew now that it was all different. It was comparable to how a person wizened by experience thinks of himself as a youth; it was him, but also someone else. Without the baggage of knowledge that only years of experience can bring. The difference was that Luca had many years of experience lived by others — Esk and Ma Ju Ro — and they’d been imprinted on his consciousness almost instantly...
In the end they negotiated (or rather, Ma Ju Ro suggested and the others agreed) the following. Herdinia took the chair of First Advisor Naut, while still keeping her post of secretary.
Lentz took responsibility over science, medicine and public health, but considered it necessary to note that as soon as current issues were resolved and the rebellious Rezsinius took up residence in the dungeon, science would require a separate office. Lentz even had someone in mind who might be a good fit for the role, if he wasn’t in prison for having the gall to ask the emperor for money for certain fantastical projects.
The excited Reyk Lee Vensiro, who over mere minutes had ascended from an impoverished and ridiculed aristocrat at court to the emperor’s second advisor, was unable to say a single word for some time, but then got into his stride and suggested a whole range of competent ideas based on problems already solved.
“Bread and entertainment! That’s what the simple folk want most of all. And they are our chief bulwark in the looming war against Rezsinius! First and foremost, I suggest we initiate a range of charitable events in the name of his majesty: work with the temple of the Sacred Mother to hand food out to all the poor and needy, and also fill the street stalls and markets with food at cheap prices.
General Hustig, now the fifth advisor, chuckled at those words. The Reyk looked at him in confusion and continued.
“In addition, we should declare the opening of a free hospital for all the disadvantaged. By my calculations, we’ll have to double the number of town criers, and I suggest we employ the most respected and authoritative residents of the slums for this. Right now, the criers only operate in the districts and squares close to the palace. Most citizens get their news third-hard, and in a thoroughly distorted form...”
Then Vensiro ridiculed the pride of the former second advisor Rizmayer, the imperial theater, saying that it was absolutely impossible to watch, may the emperor forgive him, such crap while sober and sound of mind was. It was boring, condescending and, why sugarcoat it... mediocre. The actresses were mostly young maidens who were certainly very talented in the bedroom, but somewhat lacking in the sphere of artistic performance. As for the theater’s plays themselves, Rizmayer himself wrote them, a man far from the common people. It was no wonder that his shows were unpopular.
“And how much do we pay for Mr. Rizmayer’s shows?” Luca asked, turning to Herdinia.
The secretary answered, and all except her husband gasped. General Hustig swore profusely and colorfully spoke of the grave in which he would bury the imperial theater, all its actors and Mr. Rizmayer personally.
“Apart from that,” Vensiro renewed his speech, “we need to allow street entertainment again. If I may be so bold as to remind you, by your order last year, my ruler, due to satirical scenes and parodies, street performances were banned all across the capital, along with other forms of folk fun and entertainment: magicians, musicians, bards, tale-tellers, illusionists, acrobats...”
“Enough, Mr. Vensiro,” Ma Ju Ro interrupted him. “I understand the idea. Agreed.”
“The activities of artists and sculptors have also been banned...”
“No longer. As of today,” the emperor ordered, and Herdinia made more notes.
“Fortunately, I have nurtured relationships with a range of creative individuals, and I am sure that all of them will return to the capital or emerge from the underground soon. Rest assured, I will guide them in which subjects they may use for their art...” Vensiro rubbed his hands, but checked himself when he saw Herdinia’s strict gaze, and continued without such open displays of emotion.
In addition, the Reyk, who knew the court nobility like the back of his hand, had the responsibility (with the support of Herdinia and Hector) of writing up complete lists of all the courtiers and those close to the palace, writing a separate dossier on each and deciding whether their presence is necessary.
“The palace is no place for idleness!” Ma Ju Ro slammed his fist on the table for effect. “The fates of the Empire are decided here!”
Hustig chuckled with delight and Hector’s eyes widened.
The general, with the aid of Naut and Herdinia, was to review the military budget and begin taking on new recruits. Unemployment was helpfully high in the capital and the surrounding areas, which meant plenty of potential soldiers.
Kolot Hector was to lead a united power structure: the city watch, the militia, the tax collectors and a newly created special forces unit. The aim of this unit would be explained later, in private, when Ma Ju Ro gave him the task (again with the help of Naut and Herdinia) to strike the least trustworthy rich people and aristocrats from the lists, along with those accused of corruption.
All these plans required resources. The treasury was empty and Luca planned to donate his own funds to the government.
When the council was ended and all its participants released, Lentz stayed behind to tell him of the fate of Terant, the dark-skinned khhar with whom Luca had sat in the city jail.
“He escaped after he was sentenced to fight in the Arena. He was last seen on the way to the Wastelands.
The advisor also told him that the boy Luca’s sister had regained consciousness and was demanding a meeting with the emperor. The girl accused his majesty of murdering her brother, and it had taken a great effort to keep her isolated with her mother. Luca ordered them brought to him.
Hector replaced Lentz. The former captain, now commander, privately reported that all the emperor’s favorites — former and current — had been checked, over a hundred of them, and he’d found no signs of conspiracy with Rezsinius, in spite of his highly efficient interrogation methods. No, nobody had been hurt. The inquisitors had enough psychological tricks. They’d stayed up all night, but managed to question them all in a very short time.
Ma Ju Ro ordered that the girls be released, but also that they be prevented from accessing the palace as a precaution.
No sooner had the door closed behind Hector than it opened again. Luca turned, ready to welcome his mother and Kora, but it wasn’t them. The man who came in closed the door carefully, sat down at ease and studied the emperor’s face closely for a while.
“Well, this is all very curious,” Fourth Advisor Cross laughed. “You’ve even managed to pull the wool over my wife’s eyes, and she, if I may be so bold as to inform you, is a very mistrustful woman and never believes in coincidence. I admit, you had me as well, but this here,” he waved that glass disk that he’d been staring at, with the colorful pictures, “this device cannot be tricked. Who are you, you son of a bitch, and what did you do with Ma Ju Ro?”
Chapter 34. The Fourth Advisor
ANTHONY CASSIUS CROSS first came to Syahr a year before he came of age. The trip had been short, and not particularly memorable. The young Anthony had fallen in love for the first time in his life that summer, and for the entire three days as he accompanied his father, who had been declared the next Overseer on Syahr at a family council, he’d made it clear how much he was suffering and missing the object of his passions. His dear uncle Lucius Cassius Cross, who had served as Overseer for thirty years before his father, was tired of it and ready to retire.
Anthony didn’t bother to pay much attention to this part island, part inadequate continent that normal people had abandoned, but when his father invited him, he didn’t dare refuse. His father would have accepted his refusal, but he wouldn’t be happy about it.
The boy spent the full three days in the family shuttle, which hovered high above the island, limiting him to a bird’s-eye view of the capital of these genetic outcasts. He did, however, agree to a night-time tour of the emperor’s palace. A three-storey stone hovel, pompous and crude, with crumbling vulgar gilt. A palace? Hah, hah, hah. The young Anthony had been disappointed. Their winter family residence alone was three times the size of this so-called ‘imperial palace.’ And the color gold was considered something crudely common and tasteless. In his family, as in all the racant families, the noble color was black — the untainted virgin-black color of a switched-off screen. White belonged to the Ra’Ta’Cant royal family as a symbol of perfection. All the other colors were the in the domain of the inferior.
The next year after his introduction to Syahr, Anthony’s first love, a beautiful girl called Elizabeth, broke his heart and left him for a man who was the grand-nephew of a twice-removed cousin of Queen Taira herself, a connection perhaps tenuous, but apparently still valuable. To rid himself of all that reminded him of her, he flew out to the island to see his father.
He spent the entire summer, right up to August, within the walls of that palace, quenching his thirst for the female form in endless feasts and the orgies that followed them. Although the father of today’s emperor was a fine ruler indeed, he didn’t deny himself the earthly pleasures. Back then, the young Anthony was discovering all the charm and shame of what his father called ‘leching with all one’s might.’ If it weren’t for his enhanced immune system protecting him from all known illnesses, the man would have died young. Ki Ra Nun the First, father of Ma Ju Ro the Fourth, had no such immunity, and therefore his soul went to Two-horns earlier than might have been expected. Unsurprisingly, the reason for this untimely demise was a venereal illness that this backward society was unable to cure. He’d caught it from a courtesan, a migratory southern beauty who had begun her career, as it later emerged, at sixteen as a dock whore.
And so Anthony witnessed a new emperor ascend to the Imperial Throne — the nineteen-year-old youth Maj. As the eldest of the brothers, he had been brought up as heir to the throne — with strict and harsh limitations. The antics that were allowed to his younger brothers and sisters — of which there were many, it should be said, since Ki Ra Nun never abandoned his bastards, instead bringing them up alongside his lawful children — were never accepted in the heir’s behavior. His strict teachers, one of whom had been Hustig, back then still a captain, spent all day and night drilling all the knowledge required of a ruler and strategist into the boy’s young head.
After his father died, young Maj changed. Not right away, but every day he tired to push against the limits of the allowed, test the boundaries of the acceptable. By the time normal young men were just beginning to look at girls, and to wake up in the night from wet dreams and their first emissions, Ma Ju Ro the Fourth could have been considered a connoisseur, almost a professional in all the sins known to the world, both the everyday variety and the extremely exotic.
None of his former tutors could influence him. In the end, his mother followed after her husband, and Anthony was absolutely certain — he’d checked it himself, — that the emperor had sent her there. Not himself, not by his own hand, of course, but it was done at his order. Then the remaining offspring of Ki Ra Nun the First and his close relatives fell one after another, from various unfortunate incidents which, however, won no awards for variety. Anyone that had any possible claim to the throne.
Only one managed to escape this fate. A distant relative had taken away Rezsinius, Ma Ju Ro’s cousin, just in time and hidden him in the South. There were rumors that Rezsinius had gone to become a sailor on a pirate ship in his teens, and then appeared again in public years later under his true name as a grown man. Anthony had even gone to the trouble of flying to the South to check Rezsinius’s DNA. The new pretender to the throne was authentic, not an imposter.
But in that first full-fledged summer on Syahr, Anthony was only just beginning his acquaintance with this reservation of inferior savages, and poured all his energies into discovering all the charms of adult life. Immediately after this experientially rich vacation, he went to study for a year at the Academy, where he and a thousand other students were moulded into the future rulers of the planet. Then he went for another year to the Selection, a process held among those who wished to occupy even a slightly important post in society, no matter how minor. He’d made no great achievements there, but then nor had his uncle or father. He’d made it out alive and his injuries weren’t too bad, which was the main thing. His wounds had of course been healed, but his Selection results impressed nobody, which is why his family assigned him the same role as his father; when the senior Cross went into retirement, his son would take his place. And so it went.
It’s worth mentioning that in the vast Cross family, the Cassius branch was far from the most influential. It could even be said that it was the most unsuccessful, considering that for three generations now, the Cassius Crosses had been unable to attain even the top one hundred at the Selection...
For all these years after replacing his father on Syahr, Anthony had been openly bored. His spouse, Herdinia, who had belonged to the Servilius family as a maiden, was from a racant caste, but just like Anthony, not a particularly influential one. The Servilius family dealt in absolute trash: they held auctions for items of artistic value and considered themselves experts in the field, but could never hold their own against a couple of other competing families. This meant that year on year, they desperately tried to maintain their position at least through marriages such as this one. The Crosses had decided that the slight superiority of the Servilius genes — by a mere millionth of a percent, but nonetheless, — could make an important contribution to the future of the family. This meant that he had entered into his marriage with Herdinia purely based on the calculations of both sides.
Herdinia found things to busy herself with at the imperial palace. For the first few years, she tried to find other distractions, thinking up ideas for a future business, not losing hope that she and her husband would one day return to the big wide world, to normal life. She flew out to family councils constantly to discuss projects, but they turned down her budgetary requests every time. Despairing, she decided to find herself elsewhere and started needled her husband into giving her a role at the palace. Anthony
at first laughed at his wife, but then, on the verge of madness from her constant whining, he gave in. He called Ma Ju Ro to see him and declared that from now on, his secretary would take care of all his business.
“What sort of beast is that?” the emperor asked in surprise.
“A person who will do all your work for you,” Anthony said carelessly. “So that you can concentrate on more pleasant matters.”
Ma Ju Ro took that explanation far too literally and began to completely neglect all matters of state. Seeing this, his advisors and barons began to split the country up into still juicy pieces, maintaining the appearance of loyalty not so much now to the emperor, but to Herdinia.
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