So. The expedition fatherwards was to be an army of conquest, a grand and expensive undertaking to enlarge the land of the Amaqi, to claim rich lands and their bounty. Something to satisfy everyone, even the gods people no longer believed in. Certainly the Alliances would compete to be represented in this venture, so great would be the financial rewards. The Emperor stood to gain territory and the power associated with new subjects. Torve read two further reasons his master would sponsor such an expedition. It would keep the Alliances quiet, depriving them of much of their power here in Talamaq, allowing the Emperor to consolidate his hold on the throne. He would remain behind, of course. The expedition could have no negative outcome for him, whether it succeeded or failed. In fact, the loss of the entire army at the hands of the Bhrudwans, while unlikely, might actually be preferable to a victory, so severely would it weaken the Alliances. Preferable but for the second reason: the whispers of immortality Captain Duon had brought back with him. These rumours, above all else, had drawn his master’s eyes fatherwards to where a supposedly immortal man ruled. Open a vein, collect the blood, drink it down and live forever, or some such thing. No more need for torture. No more questions for the dying. An end to his master’s obsession.
Torve hoped the legends of immortality were true. He hoped it with all his heart.
Hudan stirred in his seat. ‘A word, ma great sor?’
The royal hand waved, the mask inclined slightly.
‘I understand you have my daughter in custody. She is, of course, your subject, to do with as you wish.’ No expression on the man’s face, no betrayal of feeling. An example of why this man led thousands. ‘I would humbly request, however, that in its dealings with her the Empire would be mindful of the delicate balance between the Elboran and Pasmaran Alliances. I feel we will be of more use to you if the present stalemate continues.’
‘Had your daughter,’ the Emperor said. ‘Had. We have come to an understanding with her. The cosmographers are about to make themselves useful.’
‘Ma great sor,’ Hudan acknowledged.
‘You are the wisest man in the empire,’ the Emperor continued, the comment dragging a slight reaction from the normally imperturbable man. ‘As such, you will understand when we suggest it would be best if you found yourself confined to your bed for the next few weeks. Food poisoning, perhaps? We, too, are concerned about balance. You weigh heavily on our scales.’
Only the raised eyebrows gave away Hudan’s surprise. He did not ask the questions that must have been consuming him. Why? How could he profit from remaining behind? Would this not upset the balance between the Alliances? Torve marvelled at the man’s composure.
‘The empire needs leaders such as yourself,’ the Emperor said to Hudan as the men rose from their seats. And that, Torve reflected, was tantamount to inviting Hudan to take the throne should anything happen to the man currently sitting on it.
Plans within plans.
Lenares was lying on her bed, blanket under her arm, face pressed into her pillow, when her door opened.
‘Ma dama Mahudia!’ The pillow went one way, the blanket another as she scrambled to her feet. About to open her arms for a hug, she remembered herself just in time.
‘Just Mahudia. You are raised, so no longer need to use the honorific.’ Mahudia’s voice settled like a blanket over her, soothing, calming. ‘I hear you’ve been having adventures.’
‘Ma da—Mahudia, if only you could have seen me! Everybody staring at me, amazed at what I said to them. Did you hear about my dress? It took three seamstresses most of the night to sew. Look! Well, it’s dirty now, but everyone thought I looked wonderful!’
‘Was this when you returned to speak to Nehane?’
‘No, silly, when the Emperor introduced me to his court!’ She put her knuckles to her mouth as she realised what she had said, but Mahudia didn’t seem to have noticed. ‘I wish you had been there.’
‘So do I, Lenares. Spending a day in the dungeons was undoubtedly less entertaining than your experiences, I’m sure.’ Just a little tartness in the voice, but Lenares heard it.
‘I…Forgive me, Mahudia, I should have worried more about you, but so many good things happened to distract me. The Emperor threatened you, I remember. He said your father would be told you had been killed in the Garden of Angels. What happened?’
Lenares was annoyed with herself. Ever since she’d been old enough to understand, people had been telling her how selfish she was, how little she thought about the needs of others. She tried so hard, but such thoughts did not stick in her head if they were not associated with numbers and patterns. Social skills, Mahudia called this kind of remembering.
‘I came to an understanding with the Emperor, who realised the risk of my father finding out the truth was too great, particularly since he’d seen fit to release you.’ Mahudia smiled fondly. ‘Part of the understanding was that neither you nor I would repeat anything the Emperor said. That won’t be too hard, will it?’
‘No,’ said Lenares, faintly disturbed. There was something in what Mahudia had just said…She reached for her numbers, but then put them aside. She always tells me the truth—or, at least, when she lies, it is for my own benefit. ‘Come on, Lenares, it tastes nice.’ ‘They didn’t mean to hurt you.’ Other such white lies. Too hard? What would prove too hard for her to bear would be losing Mahudia’s trust.
Mahudia peered at her, as though she could read the conflict on her face.
‘Lenares, child, the Emperor and his Omeran friend had a long discussion with me today. I can’t tell you all of it. I’m not allowed to. If I hadn’t agreed to keep silent, they wouldn’t have let me go. That’s all right, isn’t it?’
She nodded. ‘They didn’t hurt you at all?’
‘Not once I persuaded them of your worth, Cosmographer Lenares.’ A smile, a hint of pride. ‘You have saved the cosmographers, you know.’
‘Saved them?’
‘The Emperor thought to disband us, to put aside three thousand years of accumulated knowledge. Your actions convinced him otherwise.’
Again, a hint of evasion, of something not quite right. Some truth Mahudia insisted on shielding her from, no doubt. She shook off the suspicion.
‘I am about to call a meeting,’ Mahudia said. ‘But I will tell you first, since it concerns you. The Emperor has announced an expedition to the fatherwards lands, beyond Nomansland, and he wants the cosmographers to be an integral part of the expedition. He specifically named you, Lenares.’
No! How could she leave now? What was the Emperor thinking? The tear in the world grew bigger every day. Now she was a cosmographer she could choose her task, and she had already decided to find the tear and what was causing it. And you will not be able to go to court, whispered another, deeper voice. Her face crumpled.
‘It is a great honour,’ Mahudia whispered close to her ear. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’
No, no, no! She had never once been out of the city. The prospect of open desert, of wide rocky nothingness, frightened her. How could she read the numbers when there was nothing to read? She would have no point of reference, no reality to which she could secure herself.
‘It has been decided,’ Mahudia said, arms folded.
No, a hundred times no! The Omeran servant of the Emperor had disturbed her. Everyone knew Omerans were dumb animals. So how could this one reason? How could it do calculations in its head? Another mystery to resolve. She could not, could not possibly leave Talamaq without knowing more about the Omeran.
Lenares found herself on her bed, curling into a ball, with Mahudia standing over her, pleading, coercing, demanding. The voice washed over her: just Mahudia’s anxious sounds, irrelevant, meaningless.
‘No,’ she said into her mattress. ‘No. No. No.’ Again and again she said it, in time with the beating of her heart; a hundred times she said it, then another hundred, then a third. When she finally turned her gaze towards the door, Mahudia had gone.
The golden mask turne
d towards him. ‘You know why you have to go, Torve. If you do not acquiesce I will make it a command.’
‘Ma great sor, my place is by your side.’
‘Words that must never be uttered in the hearing of the Alliances. “No one stands beside the Emperor of Elamaq,” they would say as they dragged you to the block. “All must kneel before him.” Your place, my friend, is wherever I say it is.’
‘But how can I be of service if I am separated from you?’ Torve tried to contain his panic.
‘Do you really need to ask me that question? Tell me, who else could I trust to collect the great prize and not use it for themselves?’
The Omeran bowed his head. The Emperor’s command had been inevitable from the moment Captain Duon mentioned the legends from Bhrudwo. He’d marshalled many arguments against his master’s wishes, from the sophisticated to the desperate, but despite his fear he found himself reluctant to use them. The expedition would see him isolated and powerless, vulnerable to those opposed to the Emperor. He would be separated from his master for the first time since he’d been given as a gift, so long ago he could not remember it. Separated from the man he hated, the man he loved, his constant companion, a twisted torturer. Ah. A part of him actually welcomed the Emperor’s plan. The part of me sickened by what he does in the dungeons. If I can bring back the immortal blood, the killing will stop. And there was something else, a kernel of curiosity seeded within his fear: a desire to see how he would behave, what he would do without the golden mask always by his side.
‘No, ma great sor, the question need not have been asked. I am yours, body and heart, and I cannot disobey you.’
This last he knew as a certainty. Bred for obedience, all Omerans knew it. Obedience at the very core of what we are. Our curse and our salvation.
‘I have left instructions with Duon,’ the Emperor continued. ‘The Lord of Bhrudwo is to be captured alive if possible. We do not know how efficacious the blood will be if taken from a dead man.’
Torve raised his head. ‘Of course, the very idea of killing an immortal must be at the least an uncertain one, ma great sor. How can someone claim immortality if they can be killed?’
The mask nodded. ‘Ah, Torve, your thoughts and mine travel ever on the same path. I have spoken at length with our philosophers and wise men on this subject. They are, of course, of many opinions. Frata the Logician claims, rightly in my view, that an immortal must by definition live forever. The corollary is that immortals can never die, even if they themselves wish it, no more than a man can fly or a camel live under the sea.’
‘Yet, my master, how might an immortal live if his head is separated from his body? If his bones are ground to dust? If the very blood preserving his life is drained from his veins?’
‘And so argued Pragmatist Sybil and her cadre, with some force. She and Frata nearly came to blows. You can see, my friend, why I want this immortal alive. It is not enough to become an immortal; I must understand the limits of immortality, if there are any such, and prepare for them.’ He leaned forward on his throne. ‘The experiments might take some time.’
Torve kept his features impassive, while inside he reeled from the blow. Fool. Would he forever underestimate the depths of the one he served? There will be no end to his experiments. The promise of blood filled his future.
Unaware of the effect of his words, the Emperor went on to discuss various aspects of the arrangements for the expedition, though without Torve’s full attention. Preparations would take at least a month, apparently. Investment would be solicited from those Alliances most likely to benefit. The Emperor himself would contribute a large sum. He mooted recalling his older son from exile in Nobe to act as political officer, proposing that if the foolish boy performed well his sentence would be commuted or even waived. The idea was sound but not without risk, Torve commented, though in truth the words flowed from his tongue without any real consideration. In the same fashion he mouthed further meaningless responses to his master, who in his preoccupation clearly did not notice his servant’s misery—nor would it have merited sympathy if it had been noticed, Torve reflected.
The day wore on. Heralds and pages ran to and fro with instructions, their bright cloaks registering as little more than flashes before Torve’s eyes. The Emperor’s court convened later in the day, after the afternoon’s heat had died down, and the Omeran resumed his usual position near the doors. Even a full-fledged argument between two of the minor Alliances was not sufficient to capture his attention: some disagreement over rank on the expedition saw two young fools cast their hats to the floor in the traditional gesture, though the Emperor overruled the duel.
While a small part of his mind monitored the tensions between the factions in the court, Torve began to question whether slavery was better than death. The Omerans existed only because their forebears surrendered to the Amaqi rather than suffer the genocide meted out to many of the other races of the great continent. Had they made the right choice? Would the Omerans have been better to go the way of the Galantha or the Poppy-eaters or the First Men, harried and hounded to extinction? Three thousand years of Amaqi domination had led to this: their reduction to animals, a designation not wholly inaccurate for the unthinkingly obedient house servants and farm workers who made up the majority of what the Amaqi called the Omeran ‘stock’, and perhaps too generous for the lives endured by those who satisfied the Amaqi in secret rooms throughout the city. How could extinction be worse than this? How could it be worse than washing someone’s entrails from his forearms?
Despair is the great enemy. The thought rose from its deeply ingrained place, the Omeran answer to such thinking. Torve supposed it had been placed there by his mother and father, though he would never know: like all young Omerans he had been taken from his parents when very young, and could not remember their names or faces. Learn your Defiance. Do not struggle against what others make you into. Despair is the great enemy. A litany to keep a race alive in the face of a ruthless foe.
Torve watched the argument between the Syrenian and Anaphil Alliances gradually subside into bickering and snide comments. The two would-be duellists angrily pulled their hats back down onto their heads, then turned to their parents for more instructions. The Amaqi had succeeded in making slaves out of their own children. Look at those two: had the Emperor permitted them they would have fought to the blood, or perhaps to the death, over some point of pride, a minuscule tilt in the ongoing balancing between all the Alliances. Was it really their choice? Do they really have more freedom than me? Was the Emperor the only free man in the empire?
The Emperor, free? A man enslaved by obsession, a man terrorised by the fear of death, bent into cruelty by it. A man so free he had not ventured from the city in more than a decade, and never left his Palace without a full complement of guards. A man whose uncovered face it was death to see. Who would be alone, without counsel, when Torve left with the expedition. Whose only consolation had been the Garden of Angels, a place of restful beauty and of searing evil. Oh, and the friendship of an animal.
Torve’s heart ached for him.
Trumpets blew, their fanfare billowing across Avensal’ibnu Square towards the golden Talamaq Palace. Soldiers and spectators alike waited, immobile. The male choirs, arranged on temporary scaffolding around three sides of the open space, began their deep humming. The sound from a thousand throats worked its stirring magic, as it always did. Certainly Captain Duon felt himself stirred, his own throat vibrating, the hairs on his arms and neck rising in response. Glorious. The word seemed to have a deeper meaning today. His skin prickled as a hundred sweet female voices joined the sound—glorious!—and the trumpets sounded again, this time taking the theme hummed by the choir and making of it a victorious paean to the empire.
At precisely the right moment the shimmering silver curtain behind the balcony of the Talamaq Palace parted, and the man in the golden mask came through. With deliberate steps he walked to the balcony’s railing, paused a moment, then lifted
his hands to the heavens. The music ceased.
Glorious.
A cathartic silence settled upon them all.
It seemed every citizen of Talamaq, and many from the surrounding towns, had come to see off the fatherwards expedition. The Emperor’s great gambit. Twenty thousand men: a compact fighting force augmented by a hundred unstoppable chariots that would cut a bloody swathe through any enemy foolish enough to stand against them. Duon knew only a small proportion of Talamaq’s half-million residents could fit into the broad square before the Palace, but the knowledge did nothing to diminish his awe at the public display of power and glory.
The Emperor lowered his arms to his sides, and it seemed as though a grinding weight settled on the square. An enormous presence, said to be the legacy of a hundred emperors, the Spirit of Empire itself. Only the truly dedicated Amaqi could sense the Spirit. Duon knew himself to be gifted, a legacy from some mixed-blood ancestor, so his mother always said; but today his heart thrilled as he not only felt the weight, but also heard a descending note, a groaning akin to the fall of a mighty tree.
The citizenry knelt, while the soldiers remained standing. Duon wished he could prostrate himself on the ground and cry out his love for the Emperor.
In that moment of silence, just before the man in the golden mask began to speak, Captain Duon heard the faintest sound of mocking laughter.
It seemed to be coming from behind him. His right arm twitched, the beginning of a movement towards his belt knife, but he arrested the motion. He dared not turn his head, not in this sacred moment. To answer the laughter with death would be its own blasphemy. But he expected the crowd to descend on the one who laughed and tear him apart.
Path of Revenge Page 13