“That’s the issue,” Noll said. “Dozens of symbols share the arrow shape—in many cases I cannot be certain which variation we are reading. The structures might be storehouses or they could be any kind of house—goat houses even.”
Sarra groaned.
“But there is hope. At the road’s end, we found a third symbol.” Noll scratched the mark on the tablet with chalk.
“The symbol combines three ideas: house, stone, and stars. The order dictates the overall meaning. When drawn in this configuration, the symbol reads ‘house of stone, house of stars.’ We found instances of this same mark in the documents loaned from the Harkan repository. We were uncertain why the Harkan literature referenced the symbol until we found the road.”
“The road leads to Harkana?”
Noll nodded reluctantly. “To the Shambles. We could send priests, but the Shambles is a forbidden place. Only Harkan royalty are permitted to enter the sacred grounds.”
Sarra knew the prohibitions attached to the Shambles. She was once Harkan royalty herself, and since Arko had stripped her of her title but had never disowned her, she was still due the benefits of the king’s wife. But she had not stepped foot within Harkana since she left her husband ten years prior. The Shambles was a dangerous place, filled with reavers and outlanders from the High Desert. She risked her life by going there.
Sarra leaned over the drawings, studying the symbols and considering her options. She had searched for storehouses all over the empire and had found success, but more often than not she had found only failure, tombs and caverns that had long ago been emptied of their grain by thieves or animals or the elements. In the past, she had sent only acolytes to search for the grain, but now she must make the journey herself.
Is the amaranth worth my life? Maybe. A new storehouse might put off the impending crisis, buying her a few more years. If the shortage were discovered, the rabble would tear her apart, just like they did with Garia on the last day of the year.
In the end, she had little choice in the matter.
“I’ll go to the Shambles. I was once their queen,” she said. “If I make the journey, the Harkans will not block our convoy. As a member of their first family it is within my right to request an escort and entry into the Shambles.” She would send word to the Harkans, requesting soldiers and horses to aid her on their journey.
Noll looked uncertain, but Sarra saw no other way. “You’ll come along as well,” Sarra said, urging him to stand. “We leave in two days’ time.”
29
“Why have you come?” Arko said to the slender man who stood in the doorway. Groggy from sleep, he remembered only vaguely what happened the day before, the tour of the Empyreal Domain, and the bloody spot Suten left when he fell dead on the stones. Afterward Arko had stumbled back into the Hollows of Solus. He had not wanted to slumber in the domain of the Soleri. The thought of sleeping there gave him a bitter chill, so he had sought accommodations elsewhere. In the many waiting rooms outside of the Shroud Wall he had found this small chamber with an unused pallet, and had made his bed.
Now someone had come to wake him. The man was short and slender, robed in gold, his skin as dark and wrinkled as a sun-dried date, his bald head stippled with silvery hairs. The man did not reply to Arko’s question, which had long since passed. He only waved his hands in fawning motions as he knelt before Arko, his forehead touching the stone as he bowed to the new Ray of the Sun.
“Up,” said Arko. And the man stood, slowly.
“My lord,” the man said, “I am Khalden Wat, the servant of the Ray. I’ve been looking for you. It’s my duty, my master, Suten Anu, bid me to serve you.”
“Your master is gone.” Suten Anu was rotting in the throne room of the Soleri, but this man didn’t know that; he could not enter the domain of the emperors.
The servant nodded. “He bid me to guide you in the ways of the Soleri and the customs of the court. That is why I am here.”
“Well, what is it then?” Arko asked impatiently.
“It is time,” said Wat, “for the new Ray to perform his first and most important duty.”
“What’s that?”
“Letting them know you exist.”
Arko raised an eyebrow.
“It is time for the people of Sola to wake up to a new Ray. The light must shine upon the mountain, then the people will know that a new Ray wears the Eye of the Sun.”
“Give me a moment,” Arko grumbled. His muscles ached and his head throbbed. He pushed himself up onto his elbows and swung his legs over the side of the bed. A deep sluggishness had settled into all of his limbs, so that it took him a great deal of mental and physical effort just to move his arms and legs. Lying on the bed far belowground, crouching in the meager chamber, he had the feeling of being buried alive—a not entirely unwelcome sensation, given the magnitude of the task that Suten Anu had left to him. In many ways he wished the old man had simply taken his head, rather than the other way around. No. Arko took back his wish. He did not regret what he’d done, the task he had accepted, the life he had taken. He felt sick, dizzy. There was blood on his hands and he needed a drink. He had grown accustomed to starting his day with an oilskin of amber, sometimes two. How shall I eat? Who will feed me?
Wat glanced at his bloodied hands, but he made no mention of them. “There is a tower at the far end of the Empyreal Domain, a structure set apart from the others. The men and women of the Kiltet service this place; go there and they will provide you with food and clothing, anything you require. Once you are Ray, when this day is finished, you will have no need to visit this place.” He wiped a strip of dust from the wall. “This is a place for ghosts, come here too often and you might scare them away.” Wat rubbed the gray dust from his finger. “The tower was Suten’s home, and now it is yours. You may go there when we are finished. Today we travel to another place, to a chamber buried deep beneath the mountain.”
Arko stood, brushed the sleep from his eyes, and pushed his hair back behind his ears. When he was ready, Wat lit a lamp and led him out of the room, following a path different from the one Arko had taken the previous day. Wat guided him through underground chambers of magnificent size. The halls here were brightly ornamented. Slabs of calcite, lapis, jade, and alabaster painted the walls, each stone emblazoned with the symbols of the forgotten tongue. These passages belong to the Soleri. These halls are meant for gods. Indeed, he noticed the exaggerated height of the ceilings, the preposterous width of the corridors. This was a space built for beings whose proportions, or at least their egos, must have dwarfed those of normal men.
“All this was theirs?” Arko asked. “They lived here once?”
“A long time ago,” Wat said, pointing to the shallow grooves in the floor. “A hundred generations of Soleri walked these corridors before they sealed themselves behind the Shroud Wall. Now only the Ray may gaze upon their likeness,” he said, reaching another door and pushing it open. “Come.” Wat beckoned. “The people await their new steward.”
Arko followed the old man through a warren of long corridors—some brightly painted, others flecked in silver and electrum—keeping his eyes on the lamp that Wat held the way he had kept his eyes on the lamp the emperor’s blind women had used. It was unexpected to learn that so much of life in Sola was lived underground. This was the city of the sun, and yet since he had arrived, he was constantly in darkness. Could he possibly get used to it? Living buried in the earth like a mole? These brightly colored walls were no substitute for the sun. As king of Harkana he had lived entirely in the open, his successes and failures all perfectly clear to both his friends and his enemies. This was something new; now he would have to get used to the shadows.
Down they went, into the bowels of the earth far below the city of light, far below the city of darkness even. They walked in a place beyond the Hollows, journeying past caverns of glittering black stone and dried-out caves of water. Stalactites dripped stone from the ceiling, forming little hillocks and hollo
ws and tunnels, sometimes narrowing to dark passageways, sometimes opening up into great halls many stories high. For hours they journeyed in near silence, only their sandals breaking the quiet.
After a time, the rough stones gave way to a smoothly carved floor.
“Above us, on the surface, it is afternoon and the sun is low in the sky and this part of the mountain is cloaked in shadow. Time to begin the rite,” Wat said without explaining himself any further. Listening to the old man speak, Arko barely noticed that he had stopped walking. They were in front of a door, one that appeared black at first but as the two men came closer and the light fell across it, it bloomed into a glossy amber, the color of the sky at the edge of morning. The stone was veined with white and brown streaks, polished so that the flames, and the men, were reflected on its translucent surface.
“Here’s where I leave you,” Wat said. He reached down and lifted the bronze ring, and the door swung open easily, as if it had been opened just yesterday instead of half a lifetime ago. “Your passage starts here. You will do as all have done who have taken the Ray’s seat, you must walk alone, deep into the mountain. You must find the Ray’s staff and fit it with the glowing citrine that Suten Anu pressed into your hands. The Eye of the Sun.”
“Then what?” Arko asked, but Wat would not explain further.
Sighing, Arko took a lamp from the wall and pushed through the door. It shut behind him with a barely audible click.
When he was alone, Arko took a moment to take stock of where he was. The chill he had felt outside the door seemed to dissipate almost immediately, replaced with dense, humid warmth, making him break out in a light sweat along his hairline and across his upper lip. The floor was smooth and worn, the space dark, though he could see a hint of light on the edge of the wall along the chamber, a fleeting glimpse like a shooting star, a spark caught by the lamp and winking back at him. The echo of his footsteps and the eddies in the air gave him the feeling of being inside a great space, though the dark pressed in, pressed down, until he almost felt as desperate as the blind men who begged at the gates of Harwen, except instead of food and water all he sought were answers and a sense of purpose to this journey.
He was meant to find a staff, of all things, in which to place the great jewel. Then what? He knew the answer as well as the old servant: then he would be the Ray of the Sun, the most powerful man in all of Solus. Arko had come to the city expecting to meet the divine, and instead of seeing the face of god he was shown his own face in the mirror. This is all that is left of the Soleri, Suten had told him, and so the First Ray of the Sun continues the tradition; we serve an absent emperor, and with our service we preserve the peace of all the kingdoms.
Arko wandered the dark passageways until he found the door of a small anteroom, a tiny chamber carved into the stone at the far edge of the cavern. He bent down and ducked inside. In a narrow space, a small round room carved with the names of the dead Rays—Ined Anu, one said; Heruhirmaat Anu, said another—and at last he found the staff, bronzed and polished and balanced upright in the middle of the floor. At its head was a golden circle carved with symbols he could not read, and in the middle of that, a small recess just big enough for a single yellow jewel.
He laid down the lamp, took the jewel from his pocket, and placed it in the hollow, but nothing happened. He picked up the staff from its resting place, but when he closed his fingers around it, he was not transformed. He was alone in the dark with a staff and a jewel and no idea what he was supposed to do with any of it.
Arko muttered a curse, frustrated. Picking up the lamp once more, he spied a pair of doors at the far end of the cavern, their surface cast with images of the rising sun, a radiant landscape soaked with the golden light of Mithra-Sol. He pushed open the doors and stumbled forward, but still there was darkness, nothing special about it except for a ray of light that came in from someplace up on the surface, a pinprick really. He eyed the staff. Perhaps I’m supposed to use it as a blind beggar uses his cane. Another thought occurred to him just as quickly: lift it up. Taking the staff, he raised it high above his head. The Eye of the Sun seemed to seek the shaft of light of its own accord, grabbing the light as a lodestone grabs a lump of iron.
With a flash—
The light exploded from the Eye of the Sun in infinite multiplication. Out and out and out it flew into the vast blackness that surrounded Arko Hark-Wadi, gathering strength and growing in intensity until it was so bright that it seemed Arko stood inside a flame—a bitterly cold flame that made him want to shiver. The room was full of crystals, great yellow crystals of the same shade as the Eye, the finest quartz and citrine in the entire world. When at last the light seemed to peak, Arko lowered the staff, sensing the glow would not fade, and indeed it did not. Light continued to shine all around him, twinkling and pulsing.
The passages he had walked had taken him deep within the heart of the mountain. He had sensed that the cavern was large, but now that he could see it clearly, the cave was so vast that any notion of size or scale was subsumed by the space. The crystal formation captured the single ray of light that had come from above and multiplied it endlessly. It was like witnessing the beginning of the world, the birth of the universe, a thing so new it did not cast shadows.
The light that reflected in the cave could be seen through a breach in the shadow-drenched mountain, sparkling like a star in the heavens. When the people of Solus saw the cavern’s light shoot through the twilight sky, they knew that the Ray of the Sun was dead, and a new Ray of the Sun had been chosen.
The light reflected from the cave was the light of Mithra-Sol.
A new Ray of the Sun glowing in the darkness.
Blessed by the gods of the Soleri.
It was impossible to measure distance in that strange pulsating space, Arko tried to count his steps but lost track after two. There was no way he could concentrate. He felt his hands shaking and gripped the staff as tightly as he could. The room seemed to grow colder and colder as he approached the far end, and he seemed to grow older and weaker with each step. Without realizing it, he began to lean on the staff. Never mind how holy it was—without its support, he would collapse. The weight of the light was too heavy for any man to bear.
When Arko was sure he could no longer endure the exhaustion, Khalden Wat entered the chamber. He met Arko’s gaze and nodded—the task was complete. The empire knew of the new Ray’s ascension.
Arko dropped his staff and it rolled to the floor.
I am the First Ray of the Sun.
I have to send word to my family that I am alive.
THE NIGHT WEDDING
30
The blackthorn tree shivered in its death throes.
Deep in the Gray Wood, slaves wearing little more than breechcloths scurried up the winding scaffold that ringed the tree, making the ancient wood shake with motion. Merit followed the busy workers as they surrounded the trunk, scraping at its tough bark with sharpened flints till the gnarled black hide gave way to pale sapwood. She counted a hundred men involved in the felling, maybe more. The sun was nearly set and, although the work had begun before dawn, the workers were only now reaching the tree’s lower sections. The first rite of the Feren king’s wedding, the felling of a blackthorn, was nearly half complete. Merit had hoped to avoid the long ceremony, but Dagrun had insisted she join him.
On the roads between the kingdoms, she heard rumors about the fate of the Mother Priestess during the Devouring that never came. Some said the pilgrims dragged the Mother from the wall and tore her limb from limb. But others swore her followers had shepherded her through the city unharmed. Merit didn’t know which was the truth and which was the lie, perhaps neither was true. The riots in Solus made communication with her emissaries in the capital nearly impossible. She would have to wait to know the truth, which left her feeling cold and uncertain. She never knew what to think of Sarra Amunet. You are the Mother of the faithful, the mother of thousands, but you never took the time to be my mother, to be a
mother to your own family. Merit did not even know why her mother had left them. It was Sarra’s choice, Arko told her again and again, but he offered no further explanation. Merit had her suspicions, she guessed Ren was the cause—that Sarra could not stand to lose her son to the Priory. But the loss of one child was hardly reason to give up on the rest of the family. Why not stay with your daughters?
The sound of wood breaking caught Merit’s attention. Presently, she stood atop a hastily assembled platform, the king at her side, along with a host of other dignitaries, all of them gathered to watch the Feren rite. A branch fell from the upper half of the trunk, its thorny pods showering the platform. She snatched one of the pods and held it up to the light. The shell was as hard as iron; a needle pricked her thumb. The blackthorn was named for its spiky seed, but she could not help but think the empire’s name for it was more appropriate. In Solus, they called it ironwood; there the wood had been used to make mighty barques, trestle bridges, and breaching towers of exceptional strength and longevity since the earliest days of the empire. The blackthorn trees stretched two, sometimes three times the height of a desert palm. And while the Feren commoners fashioned their homes from the smallest trees, the king reserved the cutting of the largest blackthorns for royal events: funerals and coronations. For his wedding, the king ordered the felling of several of the oldest blackthorns as well as his birth tree, the one that was planted on the day he left his mother’s womb. The Ferens called it Cutting Day. An honor Merit guessed her absent sister would neither care for nor appreciate.
The bride had not yet reached Rifka, but preparations for the wedding continued apace. Nobody seemed much concerned, least of all Dagrun. “We found her in the Cragwood,” he said as the slaves swarmed the fallen trunk with their axes and picks. “We caught her servant escaping into the stones, and he led my soldiers to her,” he said with a confident shrug before returning his attention to the felling. “She’ll be safe in Rifka in a few days’ time.”
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