Path of Revenge

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  Jau Maranaya expected the green, perhaps, or maybe even the yellow. He dreamed of the red, glorious red, of course; everyone did. Red meant the highest favour of the throne. Indigo and violet were not to be countenanced: these seldom-used colours usually heralded some form of punishment. And there were rumours of an eighth colour. Black, the sentence of death. No one in the lesser Alliances knew about the black. It was something Jau heard once, no more, from a street-seller. He assigned it no credibility.

  Clearly, then, punctuality was critical to the colour of the corridor. So why the wait? His time had been specified. Would not this delay ruin the Emperor’s visible sign of favour to him? Or—and the thought settled on him like a benison—had the Emperor heard about his latest gift to the city? He had culled some of his Omerans and gifted the land they’d grazed for a small hunting preserve. Perhaps the August One himself might desire to hunt? Did this so-precise delay herald the red? Jau would think of some gracious way to issue an invitation to his Emperor should this prove to be the case.

  He could well afford the gift, he reflected as he waited in the stifling heat. Years of petty graft had filled his coffers with good Amaqi gold. He knew people all over the city in positions of influence and trust; people with secrets he had made it his business to uncover. They were only too happy to put a little aside from taxes or profits in order to buy his discretion. And if they refused, he had them taken care of. It was expensive, this care-taking, but paying to rid himself of people with scruples cost him but a small part of the profit he made from those who had none.

  ‘It is time, ma sor,’ said one of the Omerans, pulling the pole from the ground and breaking it across his knee. This action disquieted the visitor, but he was allowed no time to reflect. ‘You must come now.’

  The Gate of the Father swung open like his own father’s welcoming arms, and Jau Maranaya gasped in astonishment at the scene spread before him. Though it shamed him before the Omeran guards, he could not help crying out. The Garden of Angels was everything he had been told.

  He assembled his words, his descriptions, even as he walked through the garden. He imagined returning to his family and telling them of the stately fountains, spreading lawns, sculpted bushes and exotic plants of every imaginable shape and size. The Emperor treated water as a plaything, he would tell them. He spent it on fancies. On colours and shapes. On the play of light, on the texture of grass scissored short or left knee-high and waving in the afternoon breeze. He heard water splashing, trickling, gushing, tinkling, pouring. It sent a frisson of desire through him. This was the deliberate exercise of power through profligacy. Such power, to waste water in the pursuit of beauty! He would tell his family that his honouring by the Emperor was perhaps the first step to taking all this power for himself.

  A gardener, a small, wizened woman with a fork in her hand, emerged from behind a hedge and smiled an improbable smile full of gleaming white teeth. ‘Very good, very good,’ the woman said, eyeing him like a particularly interesting botanical specimen. Before Jau could respond, the gardener disappeared behind her hedge. His unease grew, partly masked by a faint disappointment. He’d hoped for more time in the fabled garden—indeed, he ought to have insisted on waiting here for his delayed summons rather than out on the dusty street—but the Omeran guards bustled him through the sparkling grounds and towards a small, unadorned door.

  He had to kneel to enter the Corridor of Rainbows. A little heavy-handed, surely. If I become Emperor I will not insist on such things. He saw himself as more open-hearted than that. But as he scrabbled on his knees through the door, his body felt as small as did his soul. Small and vulnerable.

  This, then, was the famed Corridor of Rainbows.

  He was early, even though the guards had held him back until this moment, and no light yet penetrated the corridor. He walked some distance, unsure of where he should position himself. Somewhere to his left, he’d been told, lay an open space, a gallery in which the Emperor himself sat, hidden behind the golden mask he always wore, surrounded by his court. At the moment it was in darkness. He’d not heard that the Emperor sat in the dark before his subjects were honoured, but this gesture of humility only made his reward greater. Once the prisms and mirrors took effect he’d be able to see them, bathed in the colour of the Emperor’s choosing. The reality, of course, was that the colour would bathe him. He, not the Emperor, will soon be the centre of attention. Was it too much to hope for red?

  ‘Hea, Jau Maranaya.’ A voice spoke in greeting, rumbling through the corridor, filling the darkness around him. ‘Hea!’ The voice of the Emperor.

  Jau’s great moment was irredeemably spoiled by the malfunction of the corridor. Where was his colour? What had happened that the Emperor himself continued to sit in the dark? No matter the honour intended, Jau’s enemies would make capital out of his discomfiture once they heard of it.

  ‘Hea, ma great sor,’ Jau began, as protocol dictated. ‘Despite the corridor not functioning as it should, I acknowledge the…honour…done me…’

  His voice died away to silence as the truth took hold of his mind. He could hear them breathing in the darkness, the intentional darkness chosen for him.

  ‘The hidden eighth colour of the rainbow,’ said the voice, ‘a colour suited to your perfidy. We choose not to look upon you, and invoke instead the darkness to cover your many sins. Let your accusers now speak.’

  And they spoke, oh they spoke, one after another, each voice a knife paring away the frightened man’s illusions. ‘I paid you to keep silent about my theft,’ said one, invisible in the darkness yet so present to Jau’s terrified mind’s eye. ‘My confession absolves me of my crime.’ ‘You bribed me to overlook customs due on your goods,’ said another, ‘and my confession absolves me of my crime.’ Jau’s head swam at the depth of the betrayal, the completeness of official knowledge of his crimes. Long before the last accuser finished speaking he had become a hollow man, all illusions scooped out by the words of these once-bought men and women. Facing himself in the dark he began to shake and whimper in fear, and the Emperor and his court listened in silence to the sound of guilt.

  Later, after the sentence was pronounced and he was removed to the dungeons beneath the Palace, his whimpers turned to screams. An Omeran went to work on him, first prodding and scraping, then cutting and burning, until his spirit seemed ready to separate from his tortured body. Methodically they destroyed his beloved flesh past any healing, and the pain took him into a world beyond his most dreaded nightmare. Then a man wearing a hood came and asked him questions, not about his offending—he had confessed his crimes and begged forgiveness until something in his throat had broken—but about what impending death felt like. Like a little child in an earthquake, lost and bewildered, running towards shelter of any kind, Jau begged the man in the hood for help. But the hooded man just asked his gentle questions, coaxing answers out of the captive’s ruined throat as the Omeran thinned out the fragile connection between Jau Maranaya and this world.

  Despite his extremity he saw the hooded man turn to the Omeran and heard him speak. ‘This I have learned today. Being born is a violence akin to being thrown from a cliff.’ His words carried the solemn weight of a newly learned truth. ‘Only it takes a lifetime to strike the rocks below.’

  And, wonder of wonders, the Omeran replied thoughtfully, as though he was an equal.

  ‘No, ma great sor, we fall from a cliff of unknowable height, hoping it will take seventy years at least to get to the bottom, but fearing it might be much less—might be now, or now—all the while trying to forget we are falling.’

  The man in the hood laughed at this, as though a sly joke had been made at the expense of the universe. ‘We are learning, my friend, from one whose fall is almost over. Let us see what else this unfortunate has to teach us before we give him his landing.’

  Before the end the hooded man removed his covering, and Jau received his last and greatest shock of the day. And at dawn, when the shrieking and pleading we
re over, and all the lessons learned and recorded, Jau Maranaya was taken to the Garden of Angels and laid to rest in the bed prepared for him.

  Lenares shifted her aching buttocks, trying to ease the cramps hurting her. This was her first time in the Talamaq Palace, and she knew she had to behave. She did not want people to notice her until the right time, but sitting on a hard wooden bench for (calculate) seven and eight-fifteenth hours had made her afraid that if she did not find relief soon she would cry out with the pain.

  ‘Why must we put up with this, ma dama?’ she whispered irritably to Mahudia, the head of her order. ‘Why could we not have stayed home? We could have been summoned when it was our turn to meet the Emperor. I want to go home.’

  The Chief Cosmographer turned to her young charge, patience puckering her kindly, open face. ‘The Emperor has his reasons,’ she answered primly. ‘Be still, girl. If my bones can bear this waiting, so can yours. Be thankful you are not the one about to face his crimes.’ She waved a slim wrist towards the Corridor of Rainbows and, as she did, the light began to fade.

  The day’s entertainment had made Lenares angry. She knew it was wrong to think such thoughts—‘treasonous’, Mahudia called her words when she’d whispered them in her ear—but to Lenares their beloved Emperor acted like a bully. Earlier in the day she had watched a man praised for squeezing extra rental money from poor stallholders in Avensvala (she listened to the long list of figures and calculated seventeen thousand, five hundred and sixty-three mola total profit at thirty-six point three per cent, a figure eleven point three per cent over the odds). He was honoured with yellow-green light and some flattering praise. Another man had been told off because he’d been kind to tenants in the Third of Glass, and as a result hadn’t collected as much rent as the Emperor demanded. The Emperor hadn’t raised his voice from behind his big yellow mask, but the man had been scared and, in between stuttering and grovelling, promised to do much better. Lenares couldn’t understand what was wrong with being kind. Wasn’t that what they were all taught to be? Hadn’t Mahudia told them the Emperor was the kindest of all men?

  Following this a tall, thin woman had been bathed in orange light, and rewarded with one thousand mola (two point four five eight eight three five times the average annual cosmographer’s salary, Lenares calculated to six decimal places) for her part in uncovering an assassination attempt. Apparently the woman had overheard some discussion among her fellow seamstresses and reported it to her seniors—at considerable risk to herself, she said. Lenares did not believe the woman’s story, though she could not say why. According to Mahudia, who called it intuition, Lenares was seldom wrong. Never wrong, according to herself.

  Of much more interest was an army captain’s lengthy report on a journey of exploration to the little-known lands fatherwards of Elamaq. The report listed the value of items received through judicious trading (the captain emphasised this repeatedly) but was silent on the shape of the land, the beliefs and customs of the people and other things of interest to a cosmographer. This frustrated Lenares. Why are the important things always ignored? The man was awarded a generous annual stipend of one percent of the value of his plunder (she calculated the stipend as thirty-one thousand, one hundred and seventy-eight point nine mola, seventy-six point six six six nine one two six times the average annual cosmographer’s salary, to seven decimal places this time). The Emperor would meet with him again soon, the herald said.

  Cramped and bored, Lenares had little to occupy her mind as she waited for Mahudia to present her to the Emperor and his court. She was special, everybody said so, even the jealous ones who continued to tease her. Lenares was about to become the latest fully commissioned cosmographer, a rare thing in these secular days, bringing the total to sixteen women and two men. This total was the lowest since the establishment of the Elamaq Empire three thousand, one hundred and seventeen years ago (one million, one hundred and thirty-eight thousand, six hundred and seventy-two days ago, including leap years and other adjustments, she calculated absently). She should be treated with reverence and honour, but after watching the day’s tawdry display of greed she doubted the Emperor would recognise her value.

  The Emperor knew something about value, however. This was clear from the wonder of Lenares’ surroundings. Mahudia, who said she had been here many times before, had spent some time this morning explaining this to her, warning her not to touch anything. Lenares liked to touch things. She enjoyed the sensations texture created on her fingers. She wanted to run her hands over the thick red and blue rugs arranged on the pale stone floor. If only she was allowed to touch the tapestries hanging on the walls, each depicting a scene of importance in the empire’s glorious past, she would be happy. She imagined how they would smell. The information they might yield to her! Yet the effect of the rich carpets, the detailed tapestries, the paintings framed in gold, the bronze statues, the intricate mosaics—colours, textures, scents—was to frustrate her still further. Why display these things only to deny her the opportunity to look at them? Perhaps when she was raised a true cosmographer she would be granted permission. She would ask the Emperor.

  Now the corridor was readied to reward yet another revenue-gatherer or informer. Lenares prepared to sink her mind back into distance-and-bearing calculations for the Third of Pasture, the fatherback sector of the city, just for the fun of playing with the numbers. Around her the light dimmed, and dimmed further, through blue and indigo and violet. Her head jerked up, calculations forgotten, as the Emperor addressed the invisible figure in the dark corridor.

  What followed made her feel ill. The crooked stallholder was undoubtedly a bad man, she could hear it in his thin voice quivering in the darkness, but the way the Emperor dealt with him seemed unfair to her. His crime was behaving like a bully, just like the Emperor, only smaller. Her all-loving ruler forced frightened citizens to testify against this man. ‘I sold Jau Maranaya many secrets from my employer’s factory,’ said one man, smelling of terror as he spoke, his voice hesitating as though he had been forced to learn his speech. She could hear his fear; it frightened her. ‘He threatened to tell my wife and employer about my perverted liaisons with Omeran females if I didn’t.’ A silence: Lenares imagined him glancing around the chamber, shame and misery in his eyes. ‘My confession absolves my crime.’ But the man’s frightened voice made it clear that his crime was not absolved. Something awful would be done to him. Why else would he be so scared?

  And what would happen to the stallholder in the corridor? He deserved some punishment, but not this humiliation. How many other people would die for imitating their Emperor? We have lost our way, Lenares realised, using a phrase her teacher often employed. The thought made her feel sick, especially in the light of what she knew. We cannot afford to lose our way, not now.

  Two Omeran guards bundled the man out. Hauled him away like refuse. Gentle pale light flooded the audience hall through the Corridor of Rainbows, and around Lenares people took deep breaths and began to stretch aching muscles. It seemed the Emperor had had enough of audiences: he instructed his herald to dip the royal standard, signalling the end of the day’s court.

  Beside Lenares, Mahudia bit her lip, concern etched on her pale patrician face. ‘He has forgotten us,’ she said, and to the young cosmographer’s literal mind the comment seemed to sum up everything she had seen.

  They filed unregarded from the vast audience hall, and passed quickly through the Garden of Angels. The garden’s delicate beauty touched her far less than it had this morning. Perhaps it was her black mood, or the cramps still causing her pain. She paused to stare interestedly for a few moments at an elderly gardener standing in a deep, narrow hole, then left the woman to get on with her digging. Her tables of figures called to her.

  ‘I am so ashamed, Lenares. You ought not to have been brushed aside in this manner.’ Mahudia followed her words with a hug.

  ‘I don’t care,’ the girl replied, her mouth half-full of bread. ‘I don’t need the Emperor’s b
lessing to be what I am.’

  ‘But we do.’ Worry rippled through the Chief Cosmographer’s voice. ‘Thanks to your calculations we know that something has changed in the world, and we need the Emperor’s help to combat it.’

  ‘Soon I will know what it is and where to find it,’ Lenares said, seizing the moment.

  ‘You will?’ Mahudia smiled warmly. ‘That’s wonderful news. But it will mean nothing unless we can persuade the Emperor to listen.’

  Back to this again. The young cosmographer didn’t care overmuch about the Emperor and his doings. She couldn’t see how he could do much about the growing change she could sense in the world around her.

  The change fascinated her, consumed her, forcing her to check all her calculations again and again for error, even though she never made mistakes. What is the change like? Mahudia asked her regularly. Impossible to answer. Lenares’ world was different to that experienced by others. Hers was made up not of people and events, but of nodes, each node a number, with threads between the nodes giving them meaning. She was not good with words, Lenares knew this, but no one saw numbers as she saw them. Numbers were places, real places in the landscape of her mind, each place connected to thousands of other places by a network of threads like lines on a map. Except this map was not fixed on paper; it was constantly on the move, with herself at the centre. She had a highly developed spatial sense, Mahudia always said by way of explanation. Lenares shrugged. Unimportant.

  Much more important was the widening hole in the threads of her world, a jagged tear as though someone had taken a knife to her mind. It terrified her.

  Lenares suspected the hole had always been there. Something had always lurked just beyond her best efforts to bring it into focus, a shape with no shape—a nothingness, she had no words for it—that interfered with her perception of an ordered world. When she first tried putting it into words Mahudia named it randomness, said it was a metaphor for the changing world Lenares had always been afraid of. Part of her specialness. Lenares always shrugged when her teachers said things like that. The words sounded right because they were clever, but they didn’t fit into the nodes and threads, so they were wrong. She could not demonstrate this to the third degree of proof needed for cosmography, not yet, so she was not believed by anyone but Mahudia.