by Kate Elliott
And he knew that he was the first human ever to sit and breathe unaided—except not unaided—in the air of Chapal, with the great palace defining the horizon on his right and an endless park of pink and white flowers to his left.
The river dipped, sinking beneath them, only it wasn’t sinking, it was rolling on along the level ground. The skiff was sinking on an impossible strip of water that seemed to be tunneling into the river itself, as if they were contained in another, invisible bubble. The river rose around them on all sides and they raced into it, underneath it, swallowed in a darkness that roared with the tumult of waters. He felt that slight touch, like the delicate brush of a hand, that usually signaled the passage into a window.
Farther back along the tunnel, receding endlessly into the distance, stands Genji, observing him still.
The blackness sluiced away like water pouring off a duck’s back and they came out of the tunnel into an eerie grotto. Anatoly pinched himself to see if he was awake. They could not have gone through a window, not on a planet. He was obviously hallucinating. Perhaps it was an aftereffect of his intermingling with the membrane. Only an idiot would think that such a procedure could occur without strange side effects coming after it.
The grotto lightened. They passed out under a glowing arch strung with glittering orreries onto a sunlit lake strewn with petals of gold. The light was blinding, like a thousand mirrors turned to reflect the suns.
Anatoly shaded his eyes, which helped enough that he soon discerned that the lake was vast and probably square. The shoreline rode like a thin boundary of white on the still expanse of shimmering gold. In the center rose an island, and toward this island the skiff flew, skimming over the surface of the lake without touching the surface of the water or the curling leaves of the golden petals. It’s this lake, he thought, craning around to look behind himself, that Naroshi’s garden was set out to imitate.
The island rose, and rose, as they neared, a shore of gleaming white pebbles bounded by an ebony wall. Enclosed by the wall stood a marble ziggurat, squares piled upon squares, receding toward a distant peak, the even line of the ascending ziggurat severed by a wide staircase as bright as diamond. The skiff slowed and coasted to a halt where a staircase that seemed to be carved out of a single piece of ivory marched into the water, receding into the depths until, farther out, its descent was shaded by petals. Anatoly wondered, wildly and at random, if there was a second ziggurat mirroring the first, thrusting down deep into the earth.
Two Chapalii in silver livery came down the steps. Lord Kato and Lord Tona stood at once and bowed to them, but the two new lords bowed in their turn to Anatoly, by which he deduced they must be dukes in the service of the emperor. To his surprise, they took his saddlebags and saddle, and when he jumped out of the skiff and began to climb the stairs, they flanked him, one on each side, bearing his worldly goods on their shoulders.
It was a long climb.
Anatoly paced himself, taking it slowly and allowing himself a pause every one hundred steps to take in the changing view. But the higher he went the more winded he got, so he mostly got the impression of a vast blinding lake surrounded by a luminous gray mist, like fog creeping in. Yet even as high as he climbed, knowing that each successive platform was smaller, when he reached the top he halted on the edge of a broad square field. Glancing back, he saw the dukes standing about one hundred steps down, waiting. Below them, a wispy strip of cloud draped the ziggurat. He did not remember climbing through it.
“Come forward,” said a voice in Chapalii. Unlike all other Chapalii voices, except perhaps that of Genji, it hinted at emotion, curiosity, perhaps, or something unfathomable, inhuman.
Obediently, he walked forward. This field, perhaps one hundred meters square, was as black as the void of space except for the glowing lines that crossed back and forth in a giant grid. It reminded him of a huge khot board. In the center sat a slab of jet-black stone, like an outgrowth of vacuum, only it was not a standing stone but a throne. He kept to one of the glowing lines, feeling superstitious, and as he walked he passed near a three-dimensional model of a hydrogen atom, hovering about a meter above an intersection of lines. It shimmered as he passed, spitting sparks at him. He walked on, turned a right angle, and a second, and came to a halt.
It took him a long moment to find his voice.
“Yaochalii,” he said at last in his mangled accent, but he knew enough formal Chapalii, he hoped, to get by. He bowed, slightly, inclining his body at the waist just enough to show that he respected the person who sat on the throne but not that he considered himself in any meaningful way lower than him. Lifting his head, he stared.
The emperor was old. Unlike Genji, whose skin had a pearlescent hue, the emperor’s skin seemed so pale, so thin, that Anatoly almost thought he could read the shape and flow of his internal organs as through a fine parchment gleaming with the faint oils of a scribe’s fingers. Elaborate carvings decorated the throne, towers and orreries and molecular structures entwined by an endless looping, spiraling vine. Carved out of the ebony substance of the throne itself, they stood in relief as distinctly as if they been painted white in contrast. The air around them was as still as glass: If it moved at all, he could not perceive it.
“Welcome to the game of princes,” said the emperor, and extended a hand, closed in a fist. “Here is your token. Take it, and you have entered the game.”
Anatoly had learned many things from his grandmother. One was never to move in haste. “What is the object of the game?”
“To take the throne.”
“Who are the other players?”
“Is it not called, the game of princes?”
“What are the rules?”
The emperor seemed amused. “That is the disadvantage of entering the game late. The first rule is that each player must learn the rules.”
“What happens to you, Yaochalii, when the throne is taken?”
Now the emperor chuckled, not a human chuckle, but a rolling swell of amusement. “I am nothing. I cannot be taken. But the princes bide their time and maneuver for position, and when it is proper the Yaochalii passes through and a new Yaochalii takes his place.”
“Ah. Then with what resources do I play?”
The emperor lifted his other hand. It was so pale that Anatoly thought that he glimpsed, for an instant, a shifting line of carvings through it as it carved an arc in the air, rising to touch the emperor’s own mouth, fingertips brushing across his nostril slits.
“What resources do you bring with you?”
“I am a prince of the Sakhalin tribe, a captain in the jaran army led by Ilyakora Bakhtiian, a husband to the Singer Diana Brooke-Holt, a brother and a father and a grandson. That is all.”
The emperor considered. Anatoly noticed for the first time that filaments grew out of his back and into the throne, as if he was somehow in symbiosis with it.
“Because you are daiga, all daiga holdings accrue to you. I have spoken. It becomes as I decree.”
He said the words softly enough, but they rang like hammers in Anatoly’s ears. All daiga holdings.
“Because you are so young as to be more like a first breath of mist born of the morning than a true, solid form, I grant you this courtesy: That any of my servants you have met and will meet this day shall enter your service, they and their houses, to the end of time. I trust this will be sufficient.”
Like a flower opening to the sun, the emperor’s hand opened. In his palm sat a miniature tower, forged like a castle keep, the last refuge, the stronghold. Anatoly smiled wryly, recognizing the symbol for what it was: possession of a piece of ground, meaningless to him but so utterly important to khaja of all kinds, even zayinu.
“When you take possession of this token, you will enter the game. You will continue to travel as you will, and as you must. But you will leave behind on my board a splinter of yourself, a shard, by which I may monitor your movements and amuse myself with watching your progress in relationship to the others.”
He waited for Anatoly to come forward.
“How am I to know the other princes, Yaochalii?”
The emperor’s gaze swept the plateau. Out there, on the lines, placed on intersections just as khot stones were placed in the grid, stood a handful of images, like that model of the hydrogen atom he had passed on the other side of the throne. Images, like badges, like banners, like nesh images, each one representing one of the princely houses: a streamlined and archaic-looking rocketship, a teardrop, a blade, four strands of colored rope knotted together, an inverted tetrahedron. The other four were out of sight behind the throne.
It was time to act.
Anatoly stepped forward and lifted the tower from the emperor’s hand. It was as solid as stone and as slippery as water. It throbbed in his hand, as if it linked him to the pulsing web of light on which he stood. And it did link him.
Even as he stood, breathing hard through his mouth while he felt the glare of two suns on his back and the oppressive stillness of the air on his skin, an image formed around him, a glimmering that slowly faded into being. It grew and shaded from mist to gray to the false solidity of a nesh image, superimposed over him. Startled, he stepped back, out of it, and stared at the piece that now took its place on the board.
It was a jaran rider, his saber riding on his belt and the butt of his spear tucked into the curve of his boot. He wore his hair long, in the traditional style of a soldier, three braids, and Anatoly saw there his own profile, sharpened in nesh to a brittle perfection. The mare was the image of Sosha.
Like Anatoly, the rider remained still. But of course, he could not move unless Anatoly moved. He was, of himself, nothing, nonexistent, and yet he was also, as the emperor had said, a shard of the true Anatoly. The token, the tower, remained as solid as a stone in Anatoly’s hand, his passage into the game, his first playing piece, perhaps, or a reminder that what appeared as a game on this high and isolated board, here in the center of the emperor’s great palace, weighed heavily on the worlds below.
A cloud drifted by, breaking up on one corner of the ziggurat and reforming into a hew shape over the golden lake.
It was time to move. The emperor waited, one hand open, the other hand closed.
“Yaochalii, may I ask one more question?”
“You may.”
“Do you have any favorites, in the game of princes?”
“I have none.”
That seemed fair enough, assuming he was telling the truth. But at that moment Anatoly did not truly care if the emperor was telling the truth; how could any human hope to know, in any case? All daiga holdings. That meant that not just Earth but Rhui was his, that he was their suzerain, their governor. And that meant Bakhtiian had, in one brief stroke, in the unfolding of a single hand, won his war.
All khaja lands now belonged to the jaran.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
An Ominous Silence
TESS LIKED THE EXHAUSTING pace forced on her by the messenger bells. It meant she was too tired to think. She didn’t mind the pain either, the scraped and sore ribs, the aching muscles, the constant rasp of her breathing as the chill air of autumn pulled the warmth out of her lungs. She had earned that pain. Like a badge, it reminded her every instant of what she had done to get herself here: She had killed her husband because she was afraid to tell him the truth.
Kirill said, once, “Tess, there might have been survivors. Two of the monks said that they saw a handful of prisoners the next day.”
“Said it because they were about to be killed and they probably thought it would save their lives!”
Kirill only shrugged. It seemed perfectly logical to him that every inhabitant of the monastery had been killed after a brief and no doubt brutal interrogation. Tess found it appalling. No doubt the poor heretic who had been taken from Parkilnous and hauled off to face trial at the monastery had been killed as indiscriminately as the rest, meeting an ironic and cruel fate as the unwitting bait that had drawn Ilya to his doom. She had absorbed the full report, but she felt so detached from it that it seemed to trail in her wake, not quite connected to her. It had been thorough, in its way, information gleaned from four dozen interrogations listed efficiently, easily memorizable, so that the messenger’s verbal report had tallied exactly with the written scroll.
The gods had struck down the chief holy man when he was brought before the jaran captain who had led the expedition to Urosh Monastery in search of Bakhtiian. By this, Tess supposed that the presbyter had died of fright, probably a stroke or a heart attack. Unfortunately, that also meant they had gotten nothing from him.
For the rest, they knew only that Andrei Sakhalin had been there, not whether his troops had gotten caught and killed with the others. Fifteen monks had claimed no knowledge of the attacker, two said it was the hand of God at work, and seven had recognized the colors of the prince of Dushan known as Janos the Disgraced due to some recent upheaval at court. His troops had done their job well: The slaughter had been complete, according to all but two of the monks, the two who claimed to have seen prisoners.
Tess tried to let herself hope, but it hurt too much.
They rode. The passage of ground jarred hope out of her; the rising sun each morning leached it away, and the setting sun dragged her down into a heavy sleep bereft of dreams. She thought of Vasha and Katya, of Niko’s grandson Stefan, children who had become dear to her, killed before they could reach their full growth as adults. Because she was Charles’s sister, she thought of Princess Rusudani and wondered sardonically, angry at herself for her calculating mind, how great a prize they had lost thereby.
Ten days and perhaps a thousand kilometers south of Sarai, she stared at Kirill as they swung onto their horses at the posting station, their escort of Gennady Berezin and fifty riders mounting up behind them, and she swore.
“What an idiot I’ve been! There’s no obvious reason for a khaja prince to attack the guard, even knowing whose it was, especially knowing….” She could not bring herself to say his name. “It’s irrational. It doesn’t make sense. Unless he thought he was getting something. What if that something was Princess Rusudani?”
“Of course,” said Kirill mildly, as if he had long since assimilated this information and stored it away for future use. “She is the key. Why else would the jaran traitor in our midst have sent a message to the Mircassian king?”
Kirill’s bland demeanor irritated Tess so thoroughly that she did not speak to him for the rest of the day, but then, she rarely spoke on the long, hard ride each day. It took too much effort. It was effort enough to ride for hours at a stretch, changing horses at each posting station, forcing dried meat and sour yoghurt down her throat, drinking komis until she was giddy from it.
Nineteen days after they left Sarai they came up before Parkilnous, and two days after that, they found an outrider; by afternoon they had fallen in with the waiting army, the host with which Ilya had ridden south weeks and weeks ago, now camped somewhat off the main road south.
She held court under an awning. Every captain in that host—and there were over a hundred of them—came forward and offered her his saber, giving it up to her because of the dishonor they had each and every one of them brought on themselves by letting their dyan fall prey to a khaja ambush.
She said, each time, so that it became a mantra: “Keep your saber. You are not done with it.”
After all of them had knelt before her and, with her refusal, retreated to leave room for the next one, she rose. The captains knelt in a semicircle before her and beyond them, the host of riders, gathered as close as they could. The five hundred riders from Bakhtiian’s personal guard ranged around her awning, equally silent. They sent Gennady Berezin forward and he knelt before her, unsheathed his saber, and laid it at her feet, his head bowed in shame.
She picked it up and gave it back to him. “I don’t want to take your sabers from you,” she said, loudly, pitching her voice to carry, knowing that this man more than all the others represented the whole ar
my, a man who had ridden faithfully with Bakhtiian from the beginning. Without realizing she meant to say it, she did anyway.
“I want revenge.”
They responded with silence, ominous because it shouted approval, and a moment later with the rustling of thousands of soldiers rising to their feet, preparing to ride. After that, it was too late to call the words back. She felt, at that moment, that her assimilation to the jaran, a cleaner, more honest, more brutal life than the one she had known on Earth, was complete.
She swayed, overcome by emotion. “We’ll have to ride in the morning. I’m falling asleep on my feet.”
Several of the young women, archers with the army, came forward and led her to a tent. She slept like one dead.
Kirill woke her before dawn. “Come. There’s news.”
Catching his excitement, she jerked on her boots and belted her saber on. “What is it?”
“The rider sent out thirty days ago has returned from the court of Dushan, where he has a report from Andrei Sakhalin, who is whole and safe. Sakhalin says that he left Bakhtiian at the monastery and rode on to the court, and that the last he saw of them Bakhtiian and his guard were alive. So the attack must have happened after Sakhalin left. Perhaps the khaja prince saw Sakhalin leaving and thought he could easily defeat the group remaining.”
“Perhaps.”
“Sakhalin also sends word that this Prince Janos is out of favor at court, and was once betrothed to Princess Rusudani.”
“Is that so? Interesting that the princess never mentioned that she had ever been betrothed. I wonder how her parents came to break off the arrangement and put her in a convent instead.”
Tess’s escort consisted of Kirill and two of the young women, bright, hardened girls who had the swagger of experienced soldiers and the solicitous nature of jaran women.
But Kirill did not lead her to the awning where she would have expected to have an audience with the messenger who had come from the Dushanite court. He led her to the surgery tents. A host of lanterns gleamed around the central tent belonging to the chief healer riding with the army. An apprentice healer held the flap aside for her to enter. Inside, lanterns illuminated the body of a young man lying on furs in the center of the tent. She recognized him, even through the filth. Dirt and the rust stain of old blood matted his clothing. His hair ran gray with dust. Grime streaked his hands and face, as if he had attempted, intermittently, to clean them. He had only recently been admitted to Bakhtiian’s jahar, a signal honor, one sought after by every young man who had aspirations.