The emperor looked for a moment as though he might argue, but finally seeing the sense in the matter, nodded and stood with his back to a wall. Titus moved carefully through the empress’s bedroom, dining room, sun-room, balcony, bath suite, changing room and finally her closet, checking behind everything that could conceal a human being. Finally, he re-emerged into the main room, his eyes serious.
‘No sign. Would she have gone out early? When did you last see her?’
The emperor began to pace, a return to his most common nervous habit. ‘Jala wouldn’t go out in the dark. She hates spring nights. Says it’s too cold for her Pelasian blood. She only likes the darkness in high summer. Besides, you know as well as I that it would take a natural disaster to tear her from her bed before dawn.’
Titus nodded. It was true, but he’d needed to hear it nonetheless.
‘So when did you last see her? She was at the state dinner last night, I remember.’
‘She was here when I checked on her last night. I had a few things to do and retired to my own apartment rather late, but I called here on the way.’
Titus nodded thoughtfully. The emperor rarely went to his bed before midnight, and mostly later even than that, claiming his mind was at its most productive in the hours of darkness. It was then that he attended to the minutiae of statecraft. ‘Times?’ the marshal prompted.
‘She retired after the meal, which would have been in the fourth hour of the night. I checked on her between the sixth and seventh hours, I suppose.’
‘And it starts to get light these days at around the tenth hour. I’ve been up and about since then, and the guard outside hasn’t seen any movement. That suggests she vanished during those three hours or so. At least I’m content that axe-wielding assassins didn’t break in here. I’d rather she wasn’t here than she was, under those circumstances, if you get my drift. She didn’t say anything to you last night?’
The emperor shook his head. ‘Nothing in particular. She was guarded, though. A little… off in some way that I can’t quite describe. But then you know that something has been wrong between us for months now. I can’t work out what it is, and I have no idea how to repair it. It seems to be something with Jala, though. In myself I am unchanged.’
‘Whatever the case, the empress likely left her rooms between the seventh hour of darkness and the tenth. And it would appear that she went with both maids. I will need to talk to the guard.’
Kiva reached out and grasped Titus’s arm. ‘Do you think someone has her? Someone with a grudge against the family, perhaps? I mean, it seems too much to be coincidence – first Quintillian, now Jala, and assassins in the palace to boot.’
‘I don’t know, Majesty, but I will find out. What we need to avoid right now is a panic. Rumour could be crippling. We need to keep the empress’s absence completely secret for now. We failed to do so with Quintillian and the damage to palace credibility was immense. Until we know more of what’s happened, tell no one. I will keep my guard silent, but I must speak to them first.’ He rolled his shoulders. ‘You’d better get to your morning business, Majesty. There are important people waiting for an audience.’
‘To the netherworld with them, Titus. This is my wife we’re talking about.’
The marshal huffed at the emperor, who was pacing madly back and forth and tapping himself like a maniac. ‘And this is doing you no good. The empire needs its emperor. Go to your people. I will speak to the guards and the servants and find out everything I can, then I will find you straightaway. Try to act as though everything is normal. But make sure you’re armed wherever you go, and if you feel danger closing, make sure to be near the guard. Within the hour they’ll be armed and all over the palace.’
As the emperor departed with a last look that told of a man at the top of a slippery slope into despair, Titus stood in silence, tapping the tip of the sword on the marble at his feet and thinking. It was just like Quintillian – there was no denying it. The empress had gone before anyone knew it. While he couldn’t yet say for sure she wasn’t taken by force, it seemed unlikely. The imperial guard were the best of the best, raised from the main army. Even the lackest-wit among them would have sounded the alarm at someone abducting the empress, and leaving anywhere but by the gates was all-but impossible these days. She must have gone deliberately, just like the prince.
Which raised at least one ugly question.
Could the departure of the prince and the empress be directly linked? A horrible idea popped into his head and he fought to drive it back out. No. Never. Quintillian was better than that. Jala was better than that. But the emperor had been correct in that there had been a strained distance between the two of them for perhaps half a year now. Anyone who spent almost every day in their presence could see it – could feel it.
It was not that love wasn’t there. Kiva wore his heart on his sleeve as always, and his love for his wife was visible and undeniable. And Titus, a man who knew how to read others whether across the dicing table or in a fight, had seen into the empress’s eyes. She loved her husband – of that he had no doubt. But there was something else there too. Something indefinable. Damn that Parishid family. The monarchs of Pelasia, from whose line Jala had sprung, were an inscrutable lot, practised at guarding their thoughts.
Ducking back out of the room, he jogged along to the remaining guard.
‘Has the emperor left?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. Then you’re not needed here right now. Find the duty officer from last night. Have every man who was on guard at an entrance or interior door woken and brought to the Gorgon Hall as soon as possible.’
The man saluted and hurried off, and Titus rolled his shoulders again. It would take time for the guards to assemble and in the meantime he might be able to narrow down the options by searching her rooms again – this time not for the empress, but for evidence of her departure. And if he couldn’t clarify anything here, by the time he was done the guards would be gathered in the hall. Then he would have the palace servants brought in for questioning, too. Someone, somewhere, would know about Jala.
But then, he’d said the same about Prince Quintillian…
He returned to the closet, this time examining the room rather than searching it. Sure enough, her clothing lay strewn across the chests and tables as though she had hurriedly been through everything deciding what to take. Like Quintillian, then, she had left of her own accord. Had she been snatched away by enemies they would have been unlikely to spend time letting her select specific clothing. No. This was definitely deliberate.
A quick search of the whole apartment failed to further enlighten him in any way and he finished, frustrated, standing in the empress’s bedchamber. There had to be something here. He could almost feel the presence of some unseen evidence. It was the same feeling he’d get in a game of dice when he knew – he just knew – that his opponent had rolled snake eyes and not yet revealed it. There was something here somewhere. And if it was not in open evidence then it would have to be somewhere hidden.
But where?
When he and Kiva had been young, they had slid the prince’s bed to one side, levered up a board in the floor and fitted it with a hinge. They had been so proud of their secret cache. It had been barely discernible to the unknowing. Of course, Quintillian had found it, but then the younger prince’s mind was almost as sharp as his brother’s.
Where would Jala’s secret place be?
Not an underfloor stash. The empress’s perfectly manicured nails would have shown betraying marks had she been messing with floorboards. And it would be somewhere the servants wouldn’t be all the time, changing and cleaning, tidying and organizing. Not the floor, the bed, the hearth, the chests, the table. Not behind a drape.
His eyes played round the room three more times and then, without conscious intent, stopped on the shrine. Close to the hearth of the fire stood a small shrine on a 3-foot-high pillar carved into the traditional Pelasian lotus flower capital. The shri
ne itself was made of perfect white marble in the form of an ornate Pelasian temple. Most of the inhabitants of the empire – the house owners anyway – had such a shrine to honour the gods of the household and the family. Not the great gods of the empire, of course – there were plenty of public temples to them. But the family’s private gods were kept with such shrines. And they were inviolable.
Muttering an apology to the star goddess of Pelasia, who he knew to be the empress’s favoured deity, he stooped slightly and opened the perfect replica doors of the temple. Inside, the goddess Astara sat on her moulded throne, glaring back at him with painted, regal eyes. The interior was shadowed, but there was clearly no room for anything else. Not in there, then.
Yet his spine was tingling, and somehow he knew that here, somewhere, was what he was looking for. He peered inside again. The temple itself was empty of aught but the goddess. He rose, scratched his chin and then began to feel around the edge of the temple roof. The pediment was solid, the architrave around the edge masterfully carved. No. Nothing there. Another frown.
Perhaps he was thinking along too intricate a line? Sometimes subtlety was much more basic.
With pursed lips he leaned forward again and grasped the temple, lifting it gently. With a slight clunk, it came free of the column. He’d not imagined this to be likely, given the weight of marble, but it seemed that the sculptor of the shrine had been a master of the art, creating the temple so delicately and finely that it weighed surprisingly little. Certainly Jala would have no trouble lifting the shrine on and off the column. Sure enough, as he looked at the nearby table he could see scrape marks where she had repeatedly placed the carved shrine. The servants had tried to polish them out but had failed. He slipped the marble structure on the table with a sigh as his back twinged as it sometimes did if he moved wrong. A plague of bodily complaints and weaknesses had been one of the most prominent hereditary gifts from his father, the Marshal Tythias.
Unburdened, he turned back to the column, entirely unsurprised to find that it was largely hollow, a stylus and a number of parchments resting inside, some blank, some loose, some rolled and sealed.
Secret correspondence?
Feeling curiously like an eavesdropper, the marshal reached down and pulled out a collection of the parchments, wandering over to a table beneath the window. Had it been one of the servants or guards prying in this manner, they would have lost their hands, or probably their head. The letter of the law would call for the same for him, in truth, but he could hardly see the emperor calling for such punishment, even had he not been here on Kiva’s business.
Discarding two blank parchments, he unrolled a third.
It was a letter from a cousin by the name of Arya. Despite his gruff manner and military nature, Titus Tythianus had learned young that he had a facility for languages, and Pelasian had been one of the first he had learned. He could still remember the envious looks he’d received from Quintillian, who failed repeatedly to master any other language at all, beyond a few words, and most of them curses. Briefly, he ran his eyes down the writing, feeling intrusive and wicked for doing so. He read just far enough to convince himself that this was unconnected, an outpouring of a young girl’s heart to her close relation. Just looking at it made him feel uncomfortable.
The next letter was in Jala’s own hand. He recognized the flourish and the elaborate, almost anachronistic nature of her archaic script. He scanned the lines, noting the opening words and once more feeling dangerously voyeuristic. It was an unfinished letter to her brother Ashar, the God-King of Pelasia. Prying into this could well see a man executed in two nations. The Pelasians would have to fight Kiva for his head.
Biting down on the discomfort of what he was doing, Titus scanned the letter.
His back, arms and neck began to tingle with gooseflesh that had nothing to do with the temperature. Eyes widening, he let the scroll furl again and leaned on the table, breathing heavily. In disbelief, sure that his eyes had somehow deceived him, he opened the letter once more and re-read it. No. It was definitely there. There were no names. Of course there were no names. Even in a secret letter, the empress could hardly risk applying names. But the meaning was clear even to Titus.
Could a person live a life loving someone, if they were in love with another?
That was the essence of the letter. A carefully vague outpouring of the soul. Titus stared. Phrases like eternity of heartache, the sour taste of duty, the tearing of a heart that wants two different things, leapt from the inked page and struck him repeatedly like a club.
Again, he let the page furl and leaned heavily on the table once more. It was becoming increasingly difficult to consider the two people’s disappearances to be mere coincidence. And if he thought for a minute… No. Despite how it looked, he had known Jala since she first came to Velutio, and had known Quintillian all his life. Jala would never betray her duty, even if her heart drew her. And Quintillian? No, he would never put a knife in his brother’s back that way. In fact, Titus mused, the prince would move the world itself to avoid doing so. He felt a momentary thrill of realization. Was that what Quintillian had done? Had he known what was happening? Had he known what was in Jala’s heart and removed himself from the equation? Gods, that would be stupid, but it would be so very, very Quintillian.
He sighed. Was there any way he could resolve this without the emperor seeing the letter?
‘No, you fool,’ the marshal whispered to himself. ‘It is your duty to show him.’ Just to be certain, he pushed that document aside and went through the others, each and every one from the hidden compartment in the column. There were no other such letters, though a missive from the god-king, her brother, dated around a month ago, hinted that Jala had shared some unhappiness over her marital situation even then. Grasping that, he added it to the unfinished letter and, his heart beating fast, scooped up a leather bag from the table near the window and thrust the damning documents inside. Leaving the room, he paused at the suite’s door and removed the key, locking it from the outside.
With a dreadful sense of growing doom about the day, Titus hurried through the palace corridors and down to the Gorgon Hall, a grand former audience chamber now used by the guard for training sessions and therefore far from the prying ears of the rest of the palace’s residents.
With a floor patterned of different coloured stone flags, the room was surrounded on all sides by two tiers of columns carved into the shapes of unfolding naked females with hair formed of serpents with sharp fangs that twisted and writhed.
The hall had always made Titus squirm. He hated snakes.
Already the duty officer had 30 or 40 soldiers lined up waiting. They stood to attention, despite all being clearly exhausted, dragged from their beds little more than an hour after they had ended their shifts. All had managed to struggle into uniform, though they could almost all do with bathing, he noted, sniffing gently.
They shuffled straight and raised tired gazes to the fore as the marshal emerged from the doorway.
‘My apologies for calling you back like this. I know you’ve had a long night. But it seemed the most expedient way of answering my questions. What I am about to tell you is classified information. It does not go beyond those of you in this room. Understand?’
There was an affirmative murmur.
‘Good. If even a hint of this reaches ears in the streets, each and every one of you will be manning a mountain outpost on the northern border within the week and for the rest of your lives. Be assured I am not jesting.’ He paused to let the importance of the matter sink in.
‘The empress is not in the palace.’
The news clearly shocked the men, whose eyes widened with surprise and then with heightened nerves. After all, if there had been an incident, they would be the ones accountable. Titus coughed and paced back and forth for a moment.
‘She disappeared sometime between around the seventh and tenth hours of the night. I know this palace is sealed tighter than a Germallan’s arse-cr
ack, so she did not leave the palace without being seen. That means that one of you knows what happened. Tell me now.’
A guard near the front stepped a pace forward. ‘I was on duty at the empress’s apartment, sir. She left her rooms not long before the seventh hour. It was unusually early, sir, so I noted the time out of interest. But she seemed content enough. The maid was carrying an armful of clothing, but nothing seemed amiss, sir.’
Titus nodded and the man stepped back into line.
‘So where did she go at the seventh hour? How did she leave the palace? Or did she leave the palace at all?’
There was a long, uncomfortable pause, and finally a guard raised his arm and stepped out of rank, marching to the fore.
‘I may have the answer, sir.’
‘Go on.’
The man’s eyes dropped for a moment, then came up to meet the marshal’s steely gaze.
‘Three servants left the palace this morning, not long before dawn. That would be I reckon about quarter of an hour after the ninth. All three were swarthy, Pelasian-blooded girls. They had documents signed by the empress, granting them permission to leave and they were carrying folded laundry. I thought nothing of it, sir. Servants come and go at all hours of the day and night, and they had the correct authorization.’
Titus nodded. ‘You did nothing wrong, man. Two of the women will have been Nisha and Zari, the empress’s body servants. The other will have been the empress herself attired in common clothing. At least we know she was not abducted now. I will check with the chamberlain, but I am content that we will discover those two girls to be absent too. Where were you on guard?’
‘By the Gold Tower postern, sir. It’s the most commonly-used gate for servants.’
Again Titus was nodding. The Gold Tower gate led directly out into the city’s mercantile area. Within two streets were the spice market, the vegetable market, the meat market and the flower market. Beyond that were warehouses and mercantile compounds, streets of manufacturers and artisans. And past those, down winding streets and narrow staircases, descending to the lowest level of the city, was the commercial port, often filled with Pelasian traders.
Insurgency (Tales of the Empire Book 4) Page 13