by Ken Scholes
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Frederico leaned close to smell the poison on his thirteenth wife’s cold, dead lips. It tickled his nose and he resisted the strong desire to kiss her that suddenly overcame him.
That you might lose yourself from sadness by my lips, my husband and Czar, her open, glassy eyes promised him. He looked away, uncomfortable with her empty, inviting stare.
Behind him, the Minister of the Interior cleared his voice and spoke. “The cabinet feels it would be more stabilizing to consider this an assassination. Jazrel was a most popular wife.”
Frederico nodded. She had quite a following among the young girls in Espira, the region she represented, and this was a dance he knew. He’d been in this very room three years ago to watch them cut his ninth wife’s body down.
When Sasha had hung herself with a rope of knotted silk, six thousand young women in Borut had done the same to declare sisterhood with their region’s wife.
“Assassination,” he agreed. For a moment, he felt a stab of guilt when he thought about the young girls who spent their childhoods emulating his wives in the hopes that one day they would be chosen. I’ve robbed them of an ending, he thought.
He turned now to his Minister of Intelligence. “I assume you concur, Pyrus?”
“Yes, Lord Czar,” he answered. Pyrus was a large man, his beard and hair close cropped. He held the Czar and his tears in quiet disdain but Frederico did not fault him for this. Pyrus had climbed the ranks from private to general during the fifty-year war with their bloated southern neighbor, a nation of leftovers from the defunct Engmark Republic. He’d retired into his intelligence role, bringing an edge to it that only a soldier could bring. He was a hard man from hard times. He ran a hand through his hair. “We implicate the Lunar Resurgence,” he said.
Frederico’s eyes wandered back to his dead wife and he sighed. “And then host a Purging?” He looked up now, forcing himself to meet Pyrus’s eyes.
Pyrus nodded. “The black-coats are already lacquering their guns. We could put the Resurgence away quickly enough and be done with their idle mysticism.”
The Czar contemplated this. He glanced back to his dead wife, Jazrel, and sighed again. “I suppose it would be timely,” he finally said.
But not even the thought of a Purging could lift his downcast spirit.
* * *
Frederico took his midmorning chai on the observation deck of his winter garden dome but could not find peace in the bright colors and warm scents that surrounded him.
Jazrel’s eyes and mouth haunted both his waking and his sleeping hours, though he knew this particular grief would pass soon enough.
Six days ago, the black-coats had begun their work under Pyrus’s watchful eye, moving out through the cities and rounding up the Resurgence. They’d sent birds throughout the districts, leveling their charges and decrying Jazrel’s assassination. And the people had responded much as they’d hoped. Outrage in the streets. Young Espiran girls attacking rumored Lunarists with hate in their eyes, curses on their lips and stones in their fists. Wagon-loads of prisoners deposited in the healing care of the Ministry of Social Behavior. Other wagon-loads winding their way to quiet forests where servants could dig quiet graves by moonlight.
Tomorrow, I eulogize, he thought as he sipped the cinnamon-bittered chai. A canary flitted past and he felt the brief wind of its wings move over his unkempt hair.
The softest chiming of a bell reached him and he lifted his own bell, ringing it twice to signal that he could be approached. A black-coat captain, his pale and nervous face starkly contrasting the deep velvet of his officer’s jacket, materialized behind one of a dozen crimson-clad house servants that waited at the garden’s edge. He carried something wrapped in burlap.
The captain bowed deeply. “I beg forgiveness and indulgence, Excellency, but Minister Pyrus is unable to attend you in person. He sent me in his place with apologies.” The officer risked looking up and Frederico let their eyes meet. There was fear there and something else.
He sees your tears without disdain, a voice whispered in the back corners of his mind. Was it compassion? Perhaps pity? Frederico raised his silk napkin to dab beneath each eye. “You have my grace, Captain.” Replacing the napkin in his lap, he raised the chai-cup and paused before it touched his lips. “What news of the Purging?”
“We’ve finished sweeping the capitol and outlying cities. The district outposts report similar progress.” He shifted, his leather boots creaking as he did. “We’ve found the local Temple and set torch to it. Their priestess is in custody.”
Frederico nodded. They’d made good progress in short order. The Lunarists had never completely resurfaced after the last Purging three years earlier. They’d remained quiet this time despite a thousand years of dying and coming back to life, a stubborn weed of mysticism that would not forego his family’s garden. “I am grateful for the news. I hope they can eventually become productive, rational citizens again.”
“Yes, Lord Czar,” the captain said. “And we’ve found something hidden in the temple. The priestess is being questioned about it now but Minister Pyrus wanted you to examine the object and bid me bring it to you immediately.” He started to step forward, then remembered himself and bowed again. “May I approach, Lord?”
Frederico lowered the cup and gestured for the man to step forward. The captain walked quickly to the small table and laid the object upon it. Then, with his white-gloved fingers he picked at the corners of the cloth until it fell away to reveal the metal horn beneath.
No, Frederico realized, not a horn. A crescent. And of such brilliant silver that it stung his watery eyes. Sunlight, already sharp and slicing through the crystal domes high above, struck the metal and burst into whiteness. He squinted at it until it took focus for him. There were markings on it—etched lines that were familiar to him. The line of a continent here, a mountain range there. He suddenly remembered summer nights spent staring up through the glass ceiling of his bedchambers. “It is the moon at first sliver,” he said.
The captain nodded. “It was hidden beneath the altar. The priestess would have given her life to protect it if we’d not overpowered her.”
Frederico stretched out a tentative finger, placing it on the surface. It was warm to the touch. “What metal is this? It’s unfamiliar to me.”
“We are uncertain, Lord Czar. Minister Pyrus has brought in scholars from the Triumvirate Universities as well as the Chief Journeymen of the Smithing and Alchemy Guilds. It’s unlike anything we have ever seen.”
It’s beautiful, Frederico thought and didn’t realize he’d whispered it aloud until the captain agreed.
“Yes, Lord Czar. But there is more, if I may?” At Frederico’s impatient gesture, he lifted the crescent and came around the table. Careful not to touch his Czar, the captain held the silver object up to Frederico’s ear.
At first, he was uncertain of what he heard and imagined it was merely the noise of his own garden, somehow bent around the sliver of moon much like the light had been. But as Frederico leaned his ear closer, he realized that the sounds he heard lay over the top of the noise sur
rounding him. His breath caught in his throat and something washed through him that felt akin to fear or perhaps wonder.
He leaned even closer, feeling the warm metal of the moon press against his ear before the surprised captain could pull way. His eyes darted up and he saw terror on the officer’s face. “Hold,” Frederico said in a quiet voice. “Your Czar bids you hold.”
The crescent trembled in the young man’s hands but he held it in place as Frederico brought all of his concentration to bear upon the sounds whispering out from this strange and wonderful object.
Water burbling, muffled and metallic. And above that, the distinct but muted music of summer frogs.
* * *
All that day, deep into the night, and all the following morning, he could not escape that incessant whispering. It hunted him even while servants curled and perfumed his hair and dressed him in golden robes. It pursued him through the black-laced motions and trappings of funereal statecraft as he pressed hands with the Lords and Ladies of his empire and those of the outlying lands. Even as he rode through the pomp and splendor of Jazrel’s last procession, he found his memory returning to those sounds like a tongue to an empty socket. When they reached the Garden of the Fading Rose where she was to be buried, and when he stood and gave eulogy to her life—a simple girl chosen as the bride of a god—he found the sound of that running water and those croaking frogs always nearby.
When all was finished and when she lay at her final rest, Frederico returned to his private study in the western tower that housed his quarters, stripped off his feline gloves and rang for Pyrus.
The old general, still in his black-coat and ministerial cloak from the occasion, came quickly enough. Frederico saw the lines in his face and the firm set of his jaw. He is angry at the interruption. But of course, he’d say nothing.
Frederico gestured to the chair before his wide, walnut desk and waited for Pyrus to sit. The Minister of Intelligence sat slowly, leaning forward slightly with both boots planted firmly on the carpeted floor. “What have you learned about the silver crescent?"
Surprise registered on Pyrus’s face. “Nothing of real certainty. We continue to study it.”
“What does the priestess say of it?”
Pyrus looked uncomfortable. “Mysticism and nonsense,” he said. “My men broke her early this morning—it took some doing—and I fear they took her too close to the edge.”
Frederico’s eyes narrowed. “What did she say?”
“She says it is the whispering of the moon. Proof of life there.”
Frederico looked up and out beyond the high glass ceiling of his office. It was too early yet, but soon it would rise, blue and green. “We know better than that. Did she say where it came from?”
“From Carnelyin,” Pyrus answered. “She claims he brought it back with him.”
Of course. Lord Felip Carnelyin’s One Hundred Tales. The hundredth being his fanciful flight to the moon under the supposed auspices of an earlier Czar in the earliest days of empire, before the weeping bred itself into the great families. Before the world lost hope and meaning. The first of the Lunarists had emerged from those early times though there was no evidence whatsoever of a Czarist Lunar Expedition in the meticulous archives Frederico’s forebears had maintained.
“We know of a certainty,” Frederico said, “that it can not be so.” Once maybe, he thought, before the plagues ravaged its blue green surface and killed the last of the Younger Gods who hid there away from a ravaged world below that hated and feared them.
“I suspect it is simply a harmless curiosity of Elder Times,” Pyrus said. “Something dug out of the Runemarch that they’ve bent into holy relic.”
A harmless curiosity. Frederico nodded. “I suspect so. What more do you think you will learn of it?”
Pyrus shrugged. “I doubt we’ll learn more. The priestess is broken—I have no doubt she believes it is lunar in origin.” Here, he smiled but it was a weak smile. “One can be sincere and still be sincerely mistaken.”
He thought for a moment. “Or misguided,” Frederico finally said.
“Yes.”
Frederico felt a smile pulling at his own mouth and it surprised him. Judging by the look on Pyrus’s face, the slightest hint of his good humor was also surprising to the Minister of Intelligence though the old soldier tried to conceal it. “If you believe there is nothing more to learn, I would like to have it.”
Now Pyrus’s surprise could not be concealed. “I’m not certain that would be advisable, Lord Czar.”
“It is a harmless curiosity,” Frederico said, his voice taking on an intentional edge.
Pyrus’s eyes betrayed uncertainty at how best to proceed. “Aye, Lord, but it is also an invaluable artifact that—”
Frederico’s smile widened as he interrupted. “That will be kept safest with the best-guarded man in the empire. At all hours, a hundred of my Red Legion are at watch over me.” He sat back in his chair and watched his Minister of Intelligence. “And certainly,” he added, “I will not interfere with its continued study should there be anything to gain from it.”
Pyrus looked at him and Frederico saw resolve forming now in the line of his jaw. His tensed shoulders relaxed and the slightest sigh escaped his lips. “I will have it sent over tomorrow morning once the current shift of scholars have concluded their study,” he said.
Frederico inclined his head towards Pyrus—a gesture he rarely offered. “Thank you, Minister Pyrus.”
The minister returned the nod, but his eyes betrayed a buried rage. “You are most welcome, Lord Czar.” He stood and smoothed the crimson trousers of his rank. “If that will be all, I will return to my work.”
He wanted it for himself, Frederico realized. But he put that knowledge aside. “Yes, Minister,” he said. “That is all.”
And after Pyrus had gone, after the servants had brought his liquored and foaming chocolate and collected the empty mug once he’d drained it, and after the sun had set and the moon had risen, Frederico still could not purge the sound of that running water and those singing frogs from his ears.
He lay awake and alone in his silk-sheeted bed, beneath his crystal viewing dome, and watched the blue green sliver where it hung haphazard in the star speckled sky.
* * *
Frederico gazed out over the crowded room from his private balcony. The men and women, dressed in their finest, moved across the inside of his privacy screen as they moved about the ballroom twenty cubits below. They were a rainbow of colors bathed in light from the gem-lamps that spun and scintillated above, hung by fine strands of silver cable.
He sipped his chilled peach wine. “It is a good party,” he said. But even he could hear the lack of enthusiasm in his voice. It had been seven weeks since Jazrel’s suicide—six since the silver crescent had come into his possession—and the only comfort he’d taken had come from the unexplainable sounds from that artifact leftover from the Younger Gods. He’d not visited any of his wives in all that time though that was surprising to no one. He’d favored Jazrel and she was gone.
Tonight, down below, twenty of Espira’s favored young women waited in hopes that the Lord Czar Frederico XIII would ask them to dance and initiate a conversation that might result in courtship. Over two hundred others waited at the palace gates, dressed in their finest and hoping one of the twenty would fail even though they knew they had no chance of being invited in. Back in Espira, another two or three thousand sat at home and hoped for notification that they would be considered if tonight’s ball did not bear fruit. Publicizing Jazrel’s death as an assassination had created both an anger bent towards vengeance and a compassion bent towards comfort—especially in the young women who hoped to replace her as his thirteenth wife and represent their corner of his empire.
Beside him, the Espiran senator shifted in his plush armchair. “They are a lively lot. Twenty of our very best. We’ve already received proposals from a dozen houses in the event that your Lordship does not find them suited t
o his taste and need.”
Taste and need. A sudden memory of Jazrel took him by ambush. She was naked and upon him, her hips rocking slowly, her eyes open and fixed on his as she bit her lower lip in the midst of their passion. The bed shook from the intensity of her movement. He shivered from the sudden recollection and pushed it away.
Frederico glanced to the senator—a sprightly looking older man resplendent in a deep blue suit, a black cloak, and a gold, high-collared shirt—and forced a smile. “I’m certain they are the best and brightest of your eligible women,” he said. But no Jazrel would be found among them.
A bell rang and Frederico lifted his own to reply. Josefus, his Minister of the Interior, pushed his way through the ruby curtain and bowed. “Lord Czar,” he said, “I trust that you are well?”
Frederico nodded and lied easily. “I am well. Please sit with us.”
The Minister of the Interior sat and pulled a pair of jeweled opera glasses from the velvet case that dangled around his neck. He held the glasses up and picked out the silver tiaras below. “Ah,” he said, “are they not beautiful?”
The senator smiled at this. Frederico raised his own glasses and looked again. “They are lovely.”
And suddenly, she overtook him again and he smelled Jazrel’s perfume mingled with her sweat. The force of it was so overpowering that he spilled wine onto his lap. He leaped to his feet and the sadness, curled like a snake within him all his days, struck at him and its fangs went deep. The tears were near now; he felt them pulling at his eyes. And he felt his heart racing as his hands trembled.
They come upon me faster now. He slipped his opera glasses into their case and carefully placed his wine glass on the small table they shared. He did not have much time. “I am sorry, gentlemen, but I am overtaken by illness.”
They each stood, unable to mask the surprise and disappointment upon their faces. The Minister of the Interior found his words the fastest. “Lord Czar, I—”
Frederico cut him off. “Please give my apologies to Espira’s finest and assure them that they do not lack in any way.”