The Merchant Emperor (The Symphony of Ages)

by Elizabeth Haydon

  * * *

  The knock on his bedchamber door roused Achmed from his reverie. He rose from his chair, went to the door and opened it.

  Rhapsody was standing in the hallway, her arms empty.

  Silently Achmed held the door farther open.

  She crossed her arms as she came into the room, looking around at the surprising opulence. The Bolg king was a man of ascetic tastes, but the one place he had ever indulged in any form of luxury was his bedchamber. The man whose life was a constant assault of vibrations on his ultrasensitive skin had outfitted his sleeping quarters with black silk sheets and dark, thick carpets, making his time unconscious comfortable and allowing himself the respite of oblivion from the torment that was each waking moment.

  “I have a request of you. Please don’t grant it if you don’t want to.”

  Achmed’s brow furrowed. “You know me better than to need to say that.”

  “I do. I would like you to do me the honor of being Meridion’s guardian.”

  The Bolg king stared at her.

  “I do not know why you seem to hate him as much as you do,” she said, looking away. “You have sacrificed much to save both him and me, twice from Anwyn, and now from Talquist. But the things you call him—”

  “Stop. I don’t hate him. He irritates me.”

  “I find that very hard to believe,” Rhapsody said, meeting his gaze again. “Say I’m biased, but Meridion is the easiest, most cheerful and musical child I’ve ever known. Almost every time he has cried, or stunk up your sensitive sinuses, it has been a warning that we were being followed, or that the dragon was awake in the baths of Kurimah Milani, or that Kraldurge was full of assassins, or a dozen other things that might lead anyone who didn’t hate him to recognize his innate magic. But you have nothing good or kind to say about him. You have never referred to him as anything but a brat, which in the language of my childhood either denoted spoiled behavior, which insults him, or illegitimacy, which insults me.”

  The unsettling eyes bore into her.

  “Then why would you want me to be his guardian?”

  Rhapsody exhaled.

  “Because I love you. Because I trust you. Because there is no one on this earth he is safer with. If something should happen to me, I want to be able to die knowing that you will make sure he gets back to his father, that he will not be abused or harmed. It just makes me sad that you can’t be kinder to him.”

  “You believe I’ve been unkind to him?”

  She reconsidered. “No, I guess that’s wrong. I think you’ve been unkind to me about him. And I don’t know why. I don’t know what I did to gain your ire, to make you angry, to make you say the things you have. But whatever regret I have about this is dwarfed utterly by how grateful I am for everything you’ve done to protect us, to rescue us, to keep us safe. So I ask you, please, will you do this for me? Will you protect my son if I am killed? Will you see to it that he is safe until Ashe can get to him?”

  Achmed continued to stare at her for a long time. Finally he nodded silently.

  “Thank you,” Rhapsody said. “I’m sorry you don’t know this for the honor it is meant to be, but you have my deepest gratitude. Maybe one day I will understand what I did to make you so angry and hostile about him.”

  She turned on her heel and left the room without a backward glance.

  Achmed felt the reverberations of the door in his skin and eyelids until they died away.

  “You let Ashe be his father,” he said aloud to no one.

  * * *

  Rhapsody had taken a short walk in the evening wind to clear her head before talking to the third man she loved that night. She could hear the soft cooing noises even as she opened the door to her chamber.

  Analise had already picked him up and was smiling down at him, carrying on a conversation with him in Ancient Lirin. Rhapsody chuckled; the baby responded happily to each phrase she uttered in a variety of nonsense syllables that made tears come to her eyes.

  Analise, knowing what she was about to do, kissed her friend and put the baby in her arms.

  Rhapsody waited until the door closed behind her, then laid Meridion down on his back on her bed and watched him for a long time, smiling down at her son. In her hand she held a tiny pearl earring.

  She reached out and gently touched his ear lobe, speaking the name of mist.

  For a few moments, the little boy’s skin became vaporous, just long enough for Rhapsody to pin the earring through without hurting him. Then she stopped her chant, and caressed the lobe as it became solid again.

  “Leaving you surely is the most difficult thing I will ever do,” she said, trying to smile. “But I must be brave, as you have been so, so brave. If I falter now, how can I ever hope to be worthy of the role with which you have blessed me?”

  The infant’s eyes were locked on her, the look in them quizzical. Rhapsody leaned over him and kissed his forehead, then his tiny hands and belly.

  “Y pippin,” she said softly. The words came from the deepest part of her heart, in the language she had spoken almost solely with her mother, Ancient Lirin, the tongue lost to the world when the Island of Serendair sank beneath the waves of the sea. Words by which her own mother had called her. Y pippin.

  My baby.

  She blinked, trying to keep the tears out of her eyes. With a trembling finger she caressed the tiny pearl in the baby’s earlobe.

  “In this pearl I am leaving you my true name and my heart, my lovely little boy, along with the memory of what I am telling you now. What better place to keep them than with the only other Liringlas Singer in our family?”

  The baby gurgled and smiled toothlessly, making her eyes sparkle and fill with tears at the same time in spite of her efforts to hold them back. His clear blue eyes, almost the exact color as his father’s, were still focused on her, the tiny dragonesque pupils within them twinkling as if he understood everything she was saying.

  She thought back to the earliest part of her pregnancy with him, when a nightmare from her past, a demonic host, a man obsessed with her, had chased her into the sea, where she was trapped in the swirling fury of a tidal cave. The terror, the savage danger of the rising tides, the churning waves that blasted her about in the dark, scraping her against the ceiling of the cave, had been easier to bear and eventually vanquish when she had begun talking to the baby, newly conceived. She remembered the words she had spoken to him one day, floating in her watery prison, while listening to and learning the songs of the sea.

  How lucky you are in a way, my child, to have this time. You are being steeped in elemental magic—the baptism of the sea, the fire that warms and dries us when the tide is low, the sheltering cave of earth that was formed in fire and cooled in water, the wind that blows through, singing its ageless song. One day you will make a fine Namer if you choose to be one.

  Several times she could have sworn she heard his voice within her speaking to her, singing along with the music of the sea.

  “I love you with everything that I am, Meridion,” she said, the tone of her True-Speaking ringing in her words, even over the sadness with which she pronounced them. “And I swear to you, as dearly and completely as I will love any siblings you may one day have, if God the One, the All blesses us with them, you will always be uniquely special to me, because of what we have lived through and endured together.”

  The baby cooed as if in agreement.

  She struggled to keep the tears out of her voice, but her throat was tightening to the point it was hard to swallow. “It was you that made me a mother, something I wanted to be more than anything for as long as I can remember. You, pippin. Thank you—I am so—honored—that you chose me. So honored to be il mimen, your mama.”

  She bowed her head, trying to keep the halting words steady, but choked with the effort of restraining her tears from the baby’s sight.

  Her words ground to a halt as her eyes overflowed. Rhapsody kissed him again, wiping back the tears as she did, and coughed soft
ly, trying to keep her voice steady.

  “Il hamimen, your grandmother, would have loved you so,” she said when she could speak once more. “It was she that gave me the name I am keeping—Rhapsody—because she wanted me to have a Lirin name, a musical name—my parents gave it to me as my middle name. I need to hold on to this name, because I learned most of my lore as a Singer, as a Namer, under it. I will need that lore, those powers, in the days to come.” She smiled at the baby, and received a beaming grin in response.

  “But I am now going to give you the rest of my name, the name my father chose, by which I was known in the old world. It was by this name that my family knew me, both the formal and the nicknames, my human name. It was the name your father called me by when we first met. It has only been spoken one other time in this world, in the ceremony in which he and I first married in secret. It is the name I carried when I first learned how to love, Meridion—it is from that time when I was taught about family, and music, and the tending of the earth, and our tie to the stars. It was the beginning of the fulfillment of my greatest dreams which led, eventually, to your entry into this world. Keep it for me, will you?”

  The baby whimpered.

  Rhapsody lowered her lips to his tiny ear where the pearl earring gleamed.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Please, Meridion, please don’t forget me. Though others will care for you, and tend to your needs, and love you, please don’t forget me. Please, remember your father, too—he loves you as much as I do. Please—remember—”

  Meridion whimpered again, more insistently this time.

  Rhapsody kissed the tiny ear. She hummed her Naming note, ela, the musical tone her child shared, then whispered words, almost too soft to be heard, commanding them to leave her and be held within the pearl.

  Amelia Turner, she said. Emily. Emmy. Il mimen—your mother.

  She kissed his ear again. The pearl was warm, humming against her lips.

  Deep within her, she felt the fire in her soul diminish somewhat.

  Leaving her internally colder.

  Meridion began to cry.

  The tears evaporated from Rhapsody’s face. Quickly her hands went to the brads on her shirt, and she put her son to the breast, gentling him, soothing him, singing his wordless lullabye, the song they had learned in the sea together.

  “Shhh,” she said as she caressed his tiny cheek. “Hush now, y pippin. I love you.”

  As the baby suckled, she heard him sigh, but for the first time that she could remember, she was unable to tell what emotion he was trying to convey.

  And at that moment, the realization dawned that, just as his entry into her life had changed her dramatically, the loss of him from it would do so as well.

  42

  THE IRON MINES, VORNESSTA, SORBOLD

  The lashmen must have been tired today, Evrit mused absently as he hauled his third load of the day to the ore stockpile and dumped it onto the screen. It was almost noon, and he had only tasted the whip once; by this time on most days, his back had been striped at least four times.

  He stepped out of the way of the line of his fellow slaves who were likewise waiting to offload their scuttles, and hurried back to the wall.

  As he made his way to his slice of the wall of the volcanic deposit where he was assigned to scrape ore, day into night into day, with but four hours for rest, Evrit cast a subtle glance over the edge of his section. The sheer size of the area of the mine that he could see never ceased to take his breath away; the tall cave in which he spent his days beside several hundred other slaves was but one of dozens, similarly populated, on the same level of the mine. On levels above and below him, many of which he could see beyond the edge, hundreds more slaves toiled in each of dozens more caves, forming an immense, moving mass of muscle and sweat, producing a noise that had all but deafened most of them. Evrit had once tried to estimate the number just within the section he could see, but gave up quickly, because the very thought threatened to consume him with despair.

  Despair was an adversary that had defeated him long ago.

  Evrit returned to his labor.

  In spite of the horror that was his daily existence, Evrit had managed to maintain a resolute will to survive his enslavement. Unlike his hollow-eyed companions in the mine, men who were little more than sinew and a blank expression whose very existence was nothing more than a cycle of the harvesting of iron ore interrupted by brief moments of urination, defecation, consumption of tasteless sustenance and unconsciousness, his mind was always working, always focused on one thing.

  Finding his family.

  Evrit was not by any means alone in this vision, he knew. All of the men who had been brought here under the lash of the emperor’s guards had started out bristling with rage and murderous intent, determined to escape and find their own wives, children, siblings, parents even. The endless torture of the routine coupled with a regimen of abuse and deprivation just short of starvation had leached the anger from them, had stripped them of every bit of energy that could be put toward sustaining fury.

  Evrit, however, had managed to maintain his determination.

  Prior to his enslavement, trained and experienced as a tailor, Evrit had been a leader and influential member of a gentle religious sect, known as the Blessed, for most of his life. It was in that capacity that he had undertaken to hire a vessel, a ship named the Freedom, to transport him, his wife and two sons, along with a number of other members of their order, away from a life of religious persecution in Marincaer in search of tolerance in the land of Golgarn, a place known for its lack of a state religion and an acceptance of other points of view.

  The ship had never made it there.

  Evrit brought new force to bear with his diamond-edged trowel against the stone wall, remembering the Freedom foundering in the treacherous waters off the Skeleton Coast of southern Sorbold. As death loomed, a rescue sloop had launched from the shore and come to the aid of the sundered ship, bearing every one of her passengers to safety, only to turn out to be piloted by slavers, who had informed the pilgrims politely that their rescue would require them to serve for three years in the olive groves of Nicosi, after which time they would be released.

  Evrit had thought as he sat, blindfolded and bound in the slavers’ wagon, that his lot could not have been worse. It was then that a coterie of soldiers of the newly chosen emperor-to-be had come upon the slavers, had ridden them down and taken them into custody, had executed the leader, and set about unbinding the eyes of the slaves. The Emperor Presumptive had addressed them initially and apologized for their capture; Evrit had prayed in relief and thanksgiving.

  Until Talquist had informed them all that rather than being indentured in the olive groves, the men would be serving in his iron mines and steel foundries, the women working in the linen factories, and the children sweeping the soot from the chimneys of the cities of Sorbold. The Emperor Presumptive had taken Evrit’s own wife into his coach and ravaged her, then had returned her to his wagon, graciously allowing her to sit by her husband’s side once he was done with her.

  Hatred flashed and burned behind Evrit’s eyes at the memory.

  Then faded into the determination of survival again.

  As he scratched the iron ore from the endless stone before him, he pushed away the memory of his beloved spouse’s face, tear-stained but set in a rigid mien, unable to look at him as the wagon carried them away from the southern seacoast and into the mountains of the central part of the kingdom. He wondered where she was; he had been able to gain no indication from the conversations of the guards and the lashmen as to where the linen factories of Sorbold were located, except the broad implication that there were many of them across the country.

  He suspected his sons were closer to him in proximity. He had been blessed to catch a glimpse of Jarzben, the elder of the two, in a line of ore-scratchers like himself, being transferred into a cave on the level below him many months before, and had been even luckier to have met his glance;
his son looked thin and hollow-eyed, but in one piece, and the exchange of recognition had brought a look of shock, followed by a wan smile, to the lad’s face before he was led away.

  He had not seen his younger son, Selac, since he had been unloaded from the slave wagon, but suspected he was working as a chimney sweep in the capital city of Jierna’sid, if he was still alive.

  That last thought shattered Evrit’s brave determination.

  A knot of immense size tied itself inside his throat. Dearly as he wanted to believe that each of the members of his family was still among the living, his rational mind knew that most likely he was the only one to be so.

  He dug even more furiously into the stone before him, ignoring the thin tears that were streaking his cheeks, spilling what little water he had within him.

  Sometimes he wondered dully if his determination to find his family alive was even crueler than what the emperor had laid out for them; at least with death would come the end of the pain and the degradation, as well as sweet rest and the chance to be reunited with one another in the Afterlife.

  He was so intent in his thoughts that at first he did not notice the other slaves around him freezing in their assigned places.

  When their cessation of work finally caught his eye, Evrit looked up.

  Beside him, staring down at him, was an enormous soldier, a lashman of great musculature, his eyes dark and piercing, his expression forbidding. A long whip with metal falls at the tip was coiled in his hand.

  Evrit’s chest began to heave with fear.

  The soldier looked harshly up at the other slaves, glaring them back to work, their eyes averted in terror. He seized Evrit by the leather collar around his neck and hoisted him off the ground, his black eyes boring into Evrit’s wide green ones. He dragged the terrified slave up until their gazes matched. The lashman wrapped his whip around Evrit’s throat, making a motion as if he were tightening it like a noose, though it did not actually cut off his air.