Blood of Fate

by Dan Sugralinov

  “You must be clairvoyant, Kolot. Another attempt on my life indeed. But you were wrong about one thing. You did lift a finger. It seems you value your oath and the Empire more than you think.”

  “Look, boys, a talking pig!” Hustig laughed. “Wow!”

  The general’s chin was smaller than the emperor’s third, but to hear such an insult from Hustig, who himself had never suffered from excessive leanness? That disrespectful insult was the last straw. In the last few days, Luca had been stoned to death, beaten by guards and Senior Apprentice Penant, peeled by Yadugara’s slaves, poisoned by Lentz and Keirinia, he’d had his life sucked out, he’d been eaten by chinils, and, as can sometimes happen, this boy, who had been famed for his limitless patience since childhood, lost control of himself. When he heard the general’s laughter, the furious Luca exploded; he got mad, and with unstoppable ferocity he wished for everyone that threatened him and his family to die, with no thought of the consequences.

  At that moment, the concept of that ‘everyone’ was embodied in a few entirely tangible figures in black armor. Luca imagined them being torn to pieces... Metamorphosis assessed the task and gave him an elegant solution, lighting up his direction of movement.

  From there, the emperor acted on instinct. Suddenly thrusting his left arm ahead, he released a tentacle from his index finger, so fine that it could have been compared with the tether that bound the khhar Terant in the jail. The fine string jumped to behind the soldiers, curved around them from behind and tied itself into a big loop behind Hustig’s back. Luca jerked his hand, felt a sharp pain at the tip of his finger as if a hot needle had pierced his nail, and the string fell off an instant later. His Wheel energy reserves had been depleted, they hadn’t had long to recover.

  At first nothing happened, the soldiers just twitched. The five warriors didn’t make a single sound.

  Then their swords and shields fell from their hands. Some them with the hands themselves, some without. The farthest one lost his whole arm at the shoulder.

  Then blood started to seep out, highlighting the finest cuts.

  Then their torsos began to slowly slip off, and their blood sprayed out in fountains. At that very moment, Hector screamed. Hustig joined him a second later.

  Ma Ju Ro himself stared dumbfounded through foggy eyes at what his hands had wrought, or rather a single finger strengthened by metamorphosis. Then his legs gave way and he fell onto the wooden floor, feeling weakness overtake him. Lentz rushed to his side, and the emperor watched with a faraway gaze as Hector easily disarmed the stupefied general.

  “What was that, sire?” Lentz asked in a whisper. “Was it... your divine nature?”

  Too weak to answer, Ma Ju Ro simply nodded. Metamorphosis reported the successful transformation of carbon into a monomolecular thread and the exhaustion of non-organic energy reserves, which meant that it couldn’t absorb the spent material. The knowledge of what ‘monomolecular’ meant floated up from Esk’s legacy, and then he saw a threatening red warning floating in the air.

  Tsoui points: −5. Current balance: 9.

  Minus five points for five corpses? While the murder of the real Emperor Ma Ju Ro, even if it was in self-defense, had earned Luca twenty one points. He had to think about that, but later. And the same for supporting the families of the dead.

  “I need to gather my men, at least those I’m certain of,” Hector said. “My ruler, what would you have me do with the traitor?”

  General Hustig, by now lying on his stomach with his hands tied behind his back, was trying to say something. Fruitlessly, since Hector had stuffed a woman’s stocking into his mouth that he’d found who knows where. Ma Ju Ro liked the captain’s nerves, but it was obvious that he had many questions he’d be asking later on, once the situation was resolved.

  The emperor rose on his own, without the healer’s help.

  “Give me a minute,” he said. “Then we’ll start to act.”

  He needed a minute just to think of what to do. He needed to get Hustig to talk. The method he’d used to ensure Lentz’s honesty wouldn’t work in this case. But metamorphosis suggested another option that the emperor didn’t hesitate to use. Now all he had to do was wait a little to raise the required tiny fraction of Wheel energy he needed to synthesize the substance and external agents.

  While Ma Ju Ro paced his chambers, Lentz and Hector exchanged glances. The captain narrowed his eyes, pointed out the corpses to the healer, then shook his head questioningly — how? Lentz blinked, which could be taken as knowledge of the answer, and showed his thumb. Hector frowned in confusion.

  The pantomime didn’t escape Luca’s attention, but before he explained anything, he wanted to know exactly what his subjects had seen. Did they notice the thread and its origin? Because if not, then it would be easier to explain it away with divine intervention. Call it the wrath of the Sacred Mother.

  “Take his gag out, Hector, and sit him down,” he said, stopping by the prostrate general.

  The captain did as he was told. Ma Ju Ro took hold of the traitor’s chin, lifted his head, injected him with a substance to loosen his tongue, then searched the betrayer’s eyes for an answer to his questions. He didn’t find it, and Hustig coughed, darkened and bent over sharply. He threw up. Waiting for his convulsions to end, Ma Ju Ro placed a chair opposite him and sat astride it, with his hands on the chair back.

  “Water,” Hustig gasped, staring at the others with bloodshot eyes filled with hatred.

  The emperor nodded, and Lentz gave the general a jug of wine. He drank it down greedily to the last drop, then wiped his mouth with his hand and fixed the emperor with an insolent glare.

  “I don’t know what the hell is going on here, but this changes nothing. You can bargain for your life, ‘piglet,’” he said, the last in word in falsetto tones, “and I might let you go. I’ll let you and your minions escape the palace.” Hustig moved his heavy gaze to the captain. “It’s unfortunate that you’ve chosen to take a side in this, Hector. You’ve made the biggest mistake of your life.”

  “The facts so far say otherwise,” the captain laughed. He was about to stay something else, but a glance from the emperor stopped him.

  “Have you captured the palace, general?” Ma Ju Ro asked in such a relaxed tone that even Hector believed that the ruler didn’t care either way. As if even if it had been taken, it would be clear of traitors within the hour, although it wasn’t yet clear how. “Who is the organizer of this coup? Who gives you your orders? Rezsinius?

  “What?! That Two-horns-cursed jackal? He’s no better than you, pig!” Hustig shouted, thrusting out his lip. “The minute that bastard turns up in the capital, I’ll string him up on a scaffold! There’s no organizer! Nobody would dare order me around! I am my own ruler! The army obeys me, I’m practically a father to all its officers!”

  “So you’ve decided to usurp my power?”

  “I don’t want the throne!” Hustig grumbled. “We’ll overturn you, defend the capital against your cousin and then I’ll step down!”

  Lentz decided to speak up. “Are you going to give up the warehouses you’ve filled with enough stolen provisions to last a century, too?”

  “I didn’t steal them for myself,” Hustig snapped. “The treasury is empty. Who will maintain the army?! If you don’t feed soldiers, they go and rob civilians! Is that what you want?”

  “Who are you planning to hand over power to if not Rezsinius?” Ma Ju Ro asked.

  “Nobody in particular. We’ll assemble a council of the worthiest citizens and let them rule this cesspit you call the Capital. Your heroic ancestor didn’t have much of an imagination. An empire called the Empire and a capital city called the Capital!” Hustig coughed, experiencing the side effects of the substance, and threw up again. This time Ma Ju Ro himself offered him more wine. The general caught his breath and continued. “Power? I spit on power! I’ll be in my vineyards in the east, raising my grandchildren and breeding horses. I’ve had enough of all this di
rt!”

  “And how is it that his imperial majesty didn’t fit into your plans, Hustig?” Lentz asked, narrowing his eyes.

  “To hell with His Fatass Travesty!” the general shouted, and Luca realized that his body — Ma Ju Ro’s body — was twice as young as the grey-haired general. “If I didn’t think he’d try something, I’d have sent him to the winter palace with his whole camp of sycophants, stuffed a wagon full of his whores and even given them all a stipend! His father and I grew up together, after all... Ah, those were the days! We may have kept an iron grip on the people, but they were happy! We used to burn the mutants to ashes before they hid in the caves! The southern barons prayed to the emperor for bringing to heel the Coastal Brotherhood — those filthy pirates! — and clearing the coastal trade routes to the islands! And the cult of the Sleepers? They feared to set foot out of their hideaways! Not like now, now they roam the country in the open and recruit idiots! Not to mention the Capital. All these thieving thugs and criminals flourished only under your rule... useless weasel!”

  Finally done, Hustig fell silent. The general’s mustache drooped, but his gaze still burned with an inextinguishable flame, save that his hatred and derision were losing ground to regret that his plan hadn’t worked. He turned his head to look at where his soldiers’ body parts lay, and bared his teeth.

  “How?” he asked. “What did you do to my men?”

  “The thing is, general, I’m not quite the emperor that you knew,” Ma Ju Ro sighed, coming to a decision. “One could even say that I am not him at all, with regard to my goals and desires...”

  “The Sacred Mother appeared before the emperor and gave him a modicum of her holy power!” Lentz interjected, squeezing the emperor’s shoulder. “The unbeliever will behold what will become of those that stand against the will of the emperor!”

  “That changes nothing,” Hustig spat, scowling. “You asked whether the palace has been taken? No. I wanted to do all this quietly. Not a single of Hector’s guards has been hurt. Your worthless soldiers’ training is worth nothing, captain! But if you think you can just get rid of me and go back to how things were, you are sorely mistaken! I have people in the loop! If I don’t show up at the arranged location, then the palace will be taken. And no Sacred Bitch will help you! The circus ringmaster was in here before me. Are these his tricks? I don’t care! If we have to, we’ll burn down the entire palace along with all the rats that live in it! So get up off your fat ass and untie me, Ma Ju! I promise that if you do, I won’t bury you alive or tie you to a stake in the square for the mob to tear you apart. I’ll send you to the winter palace. Like I promised, with all your hangers-on and all your whores. I don’t need them here, I’d send them all to Two-horns’ mother if he had one!”

  “I like it!” the emperor exclaimed. He thought for a moment, digging in the original Ma Ju Ro’s memory for the general’s name. “Hector, untie Miklos! Let’s discuss this rationally, general. I think we can find common ground. Just one thing...” He smiled a boyish grin. “Miklos, buddy, while you’re still the commander of my army and I’m still your emperor, could you respect the chain of command?”

  Chapter 32. Who is Herdinia Cross?

  THE CONFERENCE dragged on until the morning. Thanks to his metamorphosis, the emperor needed no sleep, which allowed him to first negotiate with the rebellious General Hustig, and then to build comprehensive and effective plans with him and the others; Lentz, Hector and Koerlig, who had wormed his way in to resume his secretarial duties and record the discussions on paper.

  They took many decisions. Ma Ju Ro spent a long time listening to complaints, of which there were many. In the end, it turned out that all the complaints could be combined into a few large groups. To tackle them, the emperor invited the others to suggest options. That was where the hitches began. Nobody had any ready solutions.

  General Hustig saw their main task as maintaining the integrity of the Empire, and he built plans to reinforce the army and their defensive bastions, and to upgrade their weapons, which would be difficult due to the lack of any reserves in the treasury. His solution to the epidemic of poverty and unemployment was, in his opinion, simple: recruit everyone into the army, crush Rezsinius and the southern barons, then feed the country using the southern lands and their rich supplies.

  Hustig found no answer to the question of what would happen when the war ended and the army needed something to do. He just mumbled that maybe they wouldn’t have to disband any cohorts after the war if most of them were lying dead on the battlefield, to which the emperor asked a reasonable question: what kind of general was he if he didn’t want to keep his army alive? After that, he reined himself in and started to listen more than speak.

  Incidentally, it didn’t take long to convince him that the emperor wasn’t the same fat sex-mad waster that he had been. All it took was the knowledge that the emperor’s favorites were no longer favorites, and the three new ‘flowers of the South’ in Reyk Lee Vensiro’s entourage had been sent homeward. Luca could have skipped a second demonstration, but it cost him no effort. With one touch, he fixed Hustig’s back, which had been bothering him for years and sometimes made it difficult for him to stand straight.

  For Hector, the most important problem requiring immediate action was the issue of the increasing hunger in the capital and surrounding areas. The cost of food was sky high, the workshops were letting workers go, which increased unemployment, which in turn led to higher crime. More and more honest craftsmen fell into the care of bandit gangs, and the citizens accepted their power far more willingly than that of the government.

  Nothing interested the city watch except filling their own pockets, and in that sense, the bandits were at least more honest. They never took anyone’s last coin. However, as Hector noted bitterly, it was a good bet that the guards had long been in the full employ of the criminal bosses.

  “So what worries you more, Kolot, hunger or crime?” Ma Ju Ro asked him.

  “Hunger, your majesty, first and foremost. Even if we eliminated all the criminals in a single instant, it wouldn’t change a thing. Others would come to replace them, and the violence, pillage and thievery would continue. For now, the gangs at least maintain an image of order and protect the merchants and tradespeople that pay them.”

  “The prices would be lower if you didn’t cripple the capital market with taxes,” Hustig grumbled. “And as for the corrupt watchmen, that’s the domain of Sommers, and he answers only to Naut...”

  The spreading poverty worried Lentz. It forced citizens to eat what they could find, up to and including garbage, which was causing infectious disease to run rife.

  “We’ll have an epidemic on our hands before long, sire,” he said in summary. “We could lose most of the population in a very short time, and then Rezsinius won’t even need an army to take the throne.”

  Of course, there were plenty of other problems too. Mutant raids in the northern lands, unrest among the Reyks and aristocrats, looted and deserted imperial mines worked by whoever found them, the impoverishment of the Empire’s intellectual elite from the government’s complete lack of interest in science and the lack of funding that came with it.

  A terrible storm had smashed all the fishing boats to kindling along the entire coast from the north of the Empire to the south, which was another problem contributing to the shortage of food. The nearest forests, which had been harvested for wood since time immemorial, were over a thousand miles to the south, and deliveries were impossible — the river along which the forests grew had almost dried up. The southern barons had been digging unauthorized channels without authorization to irrigate agricultural land, draining the river.

  But these problems were put on the back burner. Until things were running well in the Capital, it was pointless to think about solving other problems. As Hector so artfully put it, it was like building marble cesspits in the corner of the garden while your ceiling is caving in in your house.

  “Tell me about your provision s
upplies, Hustig.” emperor Ma Ju Ro commanded of his former conspirator-general, considering that all present were basically conspirators, but none of them had tried to kill him with impure motives.

  “It’ll last the army a couple of years,” the general growled. “I’m not giving it up.”

  “You’ll have to,” the emperor shook his head. “Not all of it, but to relieve the stress until we solve the hunger problem. I still don’t understand, how can we go hungry when we’re on the coast? Just stick a hand in and you’ll pull out something edible, fish, crabs, mussels, shrimp, seaweed...

  “Without boats?” Hector chuckled skeptically. “Ruler, I tried to live off the sea in my youth, it’s not that easy. And more importantly, the edge of the world is out there...”

  “The edge of the world?” Luca asked.

  In childhood, he’d heard stories from his mother that the Empire was on an island surrounded by water. The water was tears shed by the Sacred Mother, and the island itself was none other than the shell of the Defender Turtle, she who kept Two-horns from stealing away people and animals into the abyss. The water didn’t fall into the abyss because it was inside a colossal invisible cup made by a Creator who had long since abandoned his creation. But now he knew they were fairy tales. Terant had told him that the Great Earth existed beyond there somewhere.