by J. B. Lucas
LORETICUS
LOST EMPEROR TRILOGY
BOOK I
LORETICUS
J.B. LUCAS
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by J.B. Lucas via Type & Tell Copyright © 2017 J.B. Lucas
The moral right of J.B. Lucas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. Neither the whole nor any part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78745-025-7
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J.B. Lucas has lived and studied in eight different countries so far. Passionate about high politics, he studied the inner workings of the European Union as an undergrad with a view to eventually working in the arena of international border disputes. His career has taken a different route, but he is still writing about the obsession that has captivated him his entire life – the tectonic movements of states.
He now resides in the darkest depths of leafy West London, where he writes using the inspiration of the India–Pakistan split, the founding of Israel, the identity crisis of Brexit and the maelstrom within the EU.
Loreticusis his debut novel.
Chapter 1
The priest stood alone in the chapel, calling prayers to a congregation that had fled and would never come home. He snapped wrists as he chimed the hand bells in an ancient rhythm, shooting their peals through sunlit dust in to the deep, cool corners.
Round notes bounced out of the temple’s open doors, hitting the wood and brick of the cooling buildings in the dusk. They continued, muffled now, down the broken-toothed path of the alleyway, which stood as a dark frame to the glowing palace, basking with its height and age in the last half hour of the sun. Tonight, a dozen killers listened for the bells and quietly moved into place. The priest with his ageless call to prayer was unwittingly signalling a massacre to begin.
Thus most normal evenings settled across the capital, and shutters clacked shut as cool breezes came to disturb sleeping children. Old soldiers, now lamp lighters, limped down dry streets, leaning on sun-hot bricks to ignite the braziers on corners. Visitors would comment that the lights seemed premature, extravagant in the still golden light. But the locals knew how quickly the sun fell behind the mountains and how hurriedly the shadows and cold flooded in like a breaking wave.
The district around the Red Palace was a marketplace, crammed with ancient family stalls. At this time of evening they were all noiseless, the fruit stamped into the ground for flies and mice to feast on, the blood from the butchers driving up a briny smell, which hung in the nostrils.
Behind the painted towers and the high, crenellated corners of the palace loomed those black-purple clouds on the mountains. On a particularly haunted night you might see a flick and a flash of lightning, but the sound and the moisture never made its way to the capital. This was a dry land, a dusty land, and its people were not meant for the damnation smudged into those peaks.
Of the many active soldiers who roamed the quiet streets of the wealth-crusted city, none were more imposing than the royal guard. They were off duty that night as the young emperor was safely behind the steep walls of the palace. Many were eating or laughing with their families. Others were out, draped in no more than a tunic and carrying nothing more fearsome than a regimental dagger. The streets had been safe for ten years, since the expulsion of the zealot insurgents, and the population had short enough memories.
Statian was the captain of the guard, reporting directly to the head of the entire palace military. He was tall, elegant, settled in his own skin and was a man who bent the air around him as if his lean, thickly muscled frame weighed more than it should. He had fought in this neighbourhood every day of that dark year of civil war as the Butcher’s men burned down the streets during the Terror. The temperature of those fires rose as the emperor punished the religious community, and the Butcher in turn spilled the blood of the empire’s own soldiers across the city.
“Long may he rot over the mountains,” muttered Statian to himself as he turned down a silent street full of memories. This lane had once been a frequent bottleneck of violence. Such is the irony of life that as Statian contemplated how each side had used this urban trap time and again, he was too far away in reminiscence to digest the present.
Without warning a hulk stepped out of an ink-black shadow, just as Statian’s soldiers had done a decade before. Statian jolted into a sickly realisation of his complacency. The thug in front of him was too confident and professional to be a mugger, and he was too quiet to be anything other than a distraction. The palace guard turned hastily, the edge of his blade shushing as it drew past the scabbard lip. First there was no one behind him, then there was. From the side, a small ghost jumped and split open the veins on his elegant, unshaven neck with a whetted stiletto.
Statian knew he was done as soon as he felt the stinging, and he didn’t fight. He wanted to nod at the man out of respect for such a professional delivery, but he was probably nodding already without knowing it. Humour, even in his last moments.
The small man stood back, his form unsubstantial against a failing sun and the chill dusk. He delved into a pouch on his belt, then threw something gold over Statian’s head.
“Don’t spend it here. You know what’s next?”
It seemed the thug gave a nod, because the man turned and simply disappeared. There was a shuffle, a wheeze and then a colossal grab of the back of his tunic. Statian, the tall and dapper guards’ captain, was hoisted and draped over the thug’s shoulder. His head bounced in step, blood ran over his upside-down face and his mind faded away.
Chapter 2
The Red Palace was a small town unto itself. Residential plots rubbed shoulders with administrative offices, squeezing the beautiful and influential people in to a space which, had it been less jumbled, would have taken no more than a half hour to cross on foot.
If a visitor were allowed to enter via the heavily guarded door from the market, through walls as thick as a house and as old as the empire itself, she would undoubtedly be important. Her first impression was of a small, perfect reception garden. Here thick-trunked trees sheltered the visitor from the late-morning sun, jasmine and lavender scented the air throughout the afternoon. Four grand arches, stacked two-by-two on top of each other, lifted the face of the entrance building which stared down as she walked further.
During the day the gate was usually open, or at least it had been since the end of the civil war. At the end of this simple antechamber was a choice. Take the left door and she would turn to the administrative heart of the empire, where hundreds of thousands of salaries were calculated, where maps were drawn, where taxes were collected and judgements given. Turn right, and the visitor would enter the important part of the Red Palace.
Loreticus’s ro
oms were situated at the top of a tower in the important part. There should have been a warning sign outside his rooms, stating “Life is imperfect, and we need not accept this”. It was a lament, not a criticism. If the visitor was unaware of this and on the wrong side of that invisible dictum, then she might be quickly dismissed back down the stairs.
If she had enquired about the occupant of these rooms, there would have been a mixed collection of opinions, all of which were right from their own perspective. Most ladies and young men found him charming, despite his fifty-something years. Children found him approachable and engaging, and servants seem to forget their subservience around him. But to be a man or woman of influence or pride in his presence was tantamount to a challenge.
If the visitor had anything to offer Loreticus in his work of defending the empire and its ancient ruling family, then it was likely that he would welcome her conversation. However, if the visitor truly did have anything of worth, it was more likely that a boy or old lady or run-of-the-mill merchant would have tugged at her sleeve the day before in the middle of the street to tell her that she was someone that “someone wanted to talk to”.
But were the visitor someone of influence, it would be rare that Loreticus would face her directly, rather offering a gaze both direct and indirect. There was a sensation that he was always looking down from a slightly higher vantage point, despite his average build. It was nothing that Loreticus said, or implied, but it was a spirit which came over him. Legends were tattooed across his demeanour, telling of his deeds in the civil war a decade ago, and the bitter compromise he was instructed to make on behalf of the old emperor. The visitor might also feel there was ample opportunity to strike this man in his quiet contemplation, but the testament of his still being alive after so much turmoil offered the best counsel not to try.
And so Loreticus was in his quiet contemplation now, looking through a narrow window at a column of white bonfire smoke from the gardens. The window stood five storeys off the ground, and as such enjoyed a rare pure breeze, which touched Loreticus’s skin in sporadic, gentle breaths. As he turned, his gaze came back into the room and turned once more proud and impenetrable. His right eye was still in the sun and stayed wide open, his left shaded and partially closed. This splitting of the man by the soft shadow spoke more to his person than any words could.
His gaze of vexation fell on his assistant, who once again had managed to hit a nerve. Pello was not a person that Loreticus plied his tricks on. He was not a threat, a man of influence or a person of interest. He was the quirky son of a cousin to whom Loreticus had owed a favour. He lived his life in lists, something which Loreticus liked, but his head often remained in some vaporous world when his thoughts should have been in the room.
Everything that morning was hushed. Loreticus’s rooms were never a centre of rambunctious activity, but the line of bludgeoned and cold bodies that he and Pello hosted soaked in any fugitive sound. This silence was now sharpened by Loreticus’s irritation. Pello had the talent of speaking when his master was just starting a statement.
“Gods be damned. I was trying to lay the logic out loud,” Loreticus snapped.
“Sorry,” returned Pello, pulling his face into a rictus of guilt.
“You always do it.”
“Sorry.”
“I was summarising our predicament for your notes. The emperor was allegedly with his mistress last night and now he’s nowhere. His guards were murdered. We have no other candidate of royal blood. The thick-headed generals will have to take charge.”
Pello always drew his thoughts on paper in the style of a knotted string. Each knot gathered existing threads and scattered resultant questions to the next range of knots. Loreticus looked over at his work.
On the left was a scribbled black ball with “Emperor kidnapped/murdered/runs away”, with each option on separate lines. Underneath was “Bodyguards murdered”. To the right of this ball and its options was a large blank expanse of paper. Pello scribbled a knot with the question, “Who’s in charge now?”
“We have Ferran,” offered Pello. They contemplated each other for a moment, and the unspoken rebuttal hung in the air as an unnecessary rebuke. “Why the generals instead?”
“Ferran might be my friend, but he’s a lazy oaf. Between him, Antron and Iskandar, they command three of the four armies. There are very few men who have a natural authority to bring those scoundrels into line and so one or more of them needs to be on the seat. So better a partnership between them than the three of them squabbling,” said Loreticus. “Our problem is that they only have the talent to destroy, not build something to last. If the generals go to war, it’s a catastrophe for the country. But it seems inevitable. If the Emperor Marcan has been kidnapped, they have an excuse; if he’s been assassinated, they have an obligation of honour. War would be the end of our empire.”
He wrote the notes in his knot-map: Kidnapped = war (bad) Murdered = war (catastrophic) Disappeared/drunk = to be determined “I don’t understand, sir,” interrupted Pello. “We’ve always been very successful at war.”
“Not this time. We’re broke and we’ve got no-one nearby to invade other than the zealots. All our trade left when the religious community took it with them. So, it can’t be the generals on the throne and Marcan has caused a scandal and disappeared. It seems that no-one is going to fix this mess unless we sort it out. No, there’s no simple route back to where we were without Marcan in the palace.” He pointed at Pello’s paper and waited, listening to the scratching of the quill. He thumped the base of his fist in to his palm. “We must find him, protect him and return him to his throne. If he’s still alive. But it still niggles me why Antron deigns to share the power with his rivals. I would have thought he would have taken it alone.”
There was a movement of air in the room as a breeze found its way in. A newly mounted mirror caught the sun and sent blinding rays around the room. Modern décor, modern pains.
Pello had drawn a knot in the middle of the paper, with the title “Return of Loreticus’s preferred emperor”.
“Change that,” snapped Loreticus. “Take out my name and put in ‘rightful emperor’.”
Pello did as ordered. Loreticus looked back out over the buildings. The phraseology was not an issue, he knew. It was the unconnected knots between Pello’s growing cluster on the left and the solitary one in the middle. A lack of logic, and a lack of a plan.
“So strange it happened on a day like today,” opined Pello, looking up and out at the sky, mimicking Loreticus’s pose. The painted red stain on the outside of the building curled around the edges of the window. Clatters of broken speech lifted from the market in the street, the shouts of the traders robbed of their urgency by the height of the tower. He was right. The rhythm of normalcy sounded alien to Loreticus.
Loreticus sighed and sat down at his desk again. Three obvious possibilities to cause the emperor’s disappearance, any of which would cause chaos. Either there would be war because of an assassination by the zealots; or a war because the three generals, Antron, Iskandar and Ferran, had assumed control of the throne and didn’t know how to do anything else; or peace because the Emperor Marcan would be found drunk or hiding in a cupboard somewhere. Loreticus thought could he manage Marcan, because he was a deeply flawed man and a poor emperor. He could not help but believe once Marcan had understood the need for reunification, he would act on it. If the generals stayed in control of the throne, the threat of an impoverished country would cause them to race to ransack every neighbouring country. Another decade of war caused by shallow men who knew no different.
In front of Loreticus lay the wreckage of the slipshod palace coup by an unknown enemy. Slipshod, but still successful. He glanced at the mess, stood up, flushed his mind to clarity, and moved forward to the line of murdered guards. Throats cut, hair matted, skin marbled. He leant over the captain of the troop, someone who was well known in court and had even protected Loreticus on several missions. The old spymaster looked
for a moment with compassion, then assumed a detachment, and once again went about a repugnant task on behalf of an oblivious monarch.
There were none of the heroic deaths frozen in the paintings around the building. This was simply a grotesque slaughter carried out by professionals on the orders of fools. Loreticus took a breath. He sniffed, opening his nostrils which had collapsed with the summer dust. He immediately regretted it. The air held a flat, gamy odour from the bodies. He didn’t like the smell of mortality. It gave too close a connection to the animal world.
The long gash in the neck of one of the corpses had opened in a straight line, concentrating the colour of life into the inner flesh and greying the skin beyond it. This deep cut gave the neck an extra length and it gaped as the head rested off centre. This was the effort of a forceful killer.
“Professional work,” muttered Loreticus as he walked along the row. He kept his voice steady whilst his stomach rolled. He wished for once his mind might master the horrific sights to which he was constantly exposed. “Four look like they were done by the same man and the rest by two or more who learned from him. The cuts are the same style but less exact and less deep.”
Pello walked behind him, skin white and lips blue. His ankles wobbled as he made notes in his idiosyncratic way, walking and writing, rarely looking up from the papers. Loreticus could imagine Pello fainting during a haircut.
“Statian,” Pello stated. Pello’s quill had stopped scratching. They stared at the face, which lay crown towards them.
“Yes. Our friend Statian. Where was he found? Please say not in his house with his family.”
“No, sir. He was left outside our door,” said Pello plainly. “Outside our door? Just here?” Loreticus felt his stomach constrict. “Five floors up? I didn’t see any blood.” “No, there wasn’t any. It was very tidy.”