Emly and her brother Elija had been brought to the empress’s mountaintop palace more than half a year before, with the City collapsing around them. As children they had been saved from a wretched life in the sewers of the City, Em by the old man Bartellus and Elija by the enemy, and they were reunited, against all hope, on the Day of Summoning, the pivotal day in the history of the City when the tyrannical emperor was killed and his stronghold, the Red Palace, destroyed by flood. Archange, who had allied with the Petrassi general to end the war, had now been empress for nearly two hundred days.
The brother and sister had spent the first weeks there huddled together, reluctant to be parted, sharing tales of their eight years apart while Elija’s broken arm mended. Then, while he started exploring the library’s trove of books, Emly had set out to discover the bounds of the palace.
The White Palace, which Archange called the Serafia, was built of white marble and creamy alabaster. The halls were lofty and light, the windows reaching for the sky in elegant arches. Its spaces were bare and echoing, for the only people living there were Archange’s household staff and a century of soldiers, the Nighthawks.
The contrast with the Red Palace was complete. That ruined building, far to the west, with its dark, carved walls and blood-red floors, had drawn you ever down towards the waiting waters in the lower depths. The Serafia’s high vaulted rooms, white walls and soaring windows always reached for the clouds. Even the kitchens and barracks, on lower levels, were light. Nothing was cramped or confined.
‘Why did you abandon it?’ Emly had asked Archange one day as they sat in the old woman’s summer parlour, a round room decorated with filigreed marble and inlaid flowers of carnelian and lapis lazuli.
‘We did not abandon it,’ the empress replied in her contrary way. ‘We just stopped coming here.’
Emly had walked the corridors, up and down stairs, in and out of high doorways until she had grasped the geography of the White Palace and felt at home. It was small compared with the vast ruin she had escaped from, but it was built on many levels. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of steps, running inside and out, connecting all the floors and fragile towers, the fairy bridges and balconies and terraces. There was no rhythm to the place that Em could detect; nothing she saw on one floor gave a clue as to what was on the floor below, or that above. It seemed a folly, built by a madman – or perhaps for one.
Then Emly found the garden. It was on the southwest side, protected from Cernunnos the north wind by the palace walls and by a grey ridge of rock which stuck out to the west. It was a meandering patch of long grass surrounded by what had once been rose beds but which had become choked by weeds. So in the grey light of early spring Emly had set about cutting down brambles, revealing struggling roses and other plants which had been fighting to survive unseen. She had asked permission to roam the Shield and the untended gardens of the other Family palaces to seek new plants. She revelled in the quiet of these gardens, unkempt and rustling with wildlife, and the great buildings with their doors and windows locked, barred and bolted against intruders. She discovered huge glasshouses, their windows all smashed, foundering beneath the weight of scrambling weeds and ivy, and wondered what they were for.
Emly stood and rubbed her hands again and walked to the edge of the garden. On one side was a low wall, built of flints. She picked up her skirts and stepped over it, then up a short rise to where a seat had been carved into the rock wall.
She looked down on the City spread out before her. The Red Palace was a jumble of broken rock from this distance, with only the odd robust tower still standing. A river, the Menander, ran through the ruin now, flowing freely in a deep muddy channel where once had been the sewers where she and her brother lived. She turned her gaze south, where the damage was the greatest, where the flood, caused by the enemy’s forces breaking the dams of the two high reservoirs, had pulverized the great walls and brought death and destruction. Here large tents had been erected, succeeded in time by wooden buildings, to house the injured: enemy and City, soldiery and hapless citizenry. These hospitals had been a source of friction between City folk and the Blueskin soldiers and there had been much blood shed over them.
With interest Emly had watched over the past days the muster of an army led by Marcus Rae Khan, now the City’s premier general. Tens of thousands of men and women and horses and carts and livestock had gathered to march north to Petrus in accordance with Archange’s peace agreement with the Petrassi general Hayden Weaver, to support his people’s war against the northern barbarians who had flooded his country while his armies were away fighting the City. General Weaver had sent the Petrassi army back north twenty days before. The Khan army’s exodus had been delayed, then delayed again. But now it had departed. The only enemy troops still left in the City were the wounded and the soldiers charged with guarding them.
From her vantage-point Emly could see nothing to report to Elija, who was not interested anyway, and she turned and climbed back over the flint wall. Then she stopped, in shock, for walking across the garden towards her, the sun at his back, was a soldier. Evan!
Yet even in that wonderful heart-soaring moment she saw the man was not Evan Broglanh at all, but another. She and her lover had not been together since before the Day of Summoning. Em saw him all the time in the palace, for he was constantly in attendance on Archange, but although they spoke occasionally it was never of private matters. She had been forced to the conclusion that he would not feature in her future, yet her heart still yearned for him.
This soldier, a discordant figure in the gentle garden in his black and silver armour, was Darius, commander of the Nighthawks, the empress’s bodyguard. He was like Evan in that he was tall with light-coloured hair, but Darius was younger, his hair redder, the planes of his face harder, his eyes a brilliant blue.
She smiled, so he would not see she was disappointed.
‘You’re wanted in the throne room,’ he told her, brief and to the point as always.
She nodded and fell into step with him as they walked back. She had nothing to say to him, nor he to her, so she was surprised when he asked, ‘Are you well?’
Emly looked up and nodded again. She was still nervous of soldiers, but this man had saved her life, and that of her father Bartellus, on the Day of Summoning and she would always be grateful to him. She wondered why such an important soldier, a hero and military adviser to the empress, should be sent to summon her like a servant – or a lowly grunt, as Evan would say. Darius strode quickly and Em, who barely came up to his armoured shoulder, had to run a little to keep up with him.
The throne room was at the centre of the palace, a light circular space under an immense dome of glass. The glass was stained with bright colours which on a sunny day sparkled in brilliant dots of blue and green and gold on the stone floor beneath. On a normal day Em would stand entranced by this wonderful demonstration of the stained-glass artist’s skill. But today was not a normal day, for the chamber was crowded and Emly paused on the threshold, biting her lip. Present were many warriors – most of Darius’ Nighthawks and palace guards – along with Archange’s ever-hovering counsellors and servants, and other civilians unfamiliar to her. A huge warrior stood to one side with a broadsword unsheathed, something she had never before seen in the empress’s presence.
Emly hated throngs of people. In her experience of the world, nothing good had ever come of them. Her happiest times had been alone with her brother, or with her father Bartellus, or Evan Broglanh. Crowds she associated with fear and flight and blood and death. She licked her lips anxiously and sought Evan’s face, but he was not there.
Archange was seated on her throne, a great slab of alabaster, sumptuously cushioned in red and gold and silver. The empress, tall and stately though she was, looked tiny on it and Emly wondered why she used the throne when it diminished her. Unsmiling, Archange beckoned her forward. She looked tired, Em thought, her face more gaunt than she had seen it, her dark eyes dull.
&nbs
p; All faces turned towards Emly as she walked across the wide floor chequered in black and white marble, her heart fluttering, her mouth dry. What were all these people here for? There was a metallic smell in the air, the odour of blood and death.
Dol Salida, Archange’s first counsellor, limped forward with the aid of his silver-topped stick. As the company fell silent, he said, ‘Each of us here remembers clearly the terrible events of the Day of Summoning.’ He paused, stroking his wide white moustache, as if in deep thought. ‘That we survived and now live at peace under the benevolent reign of our empress is due to one man. The hero Shuskara welded the loyal forces of the City together to battle for our lives and our future. Sadly he was killed, giving his life for the City he served, and we all mourn him and are indebted to him for his sacrifice.’
He paused again and gestured to the guards on the north door. The entire company swung to watch as a ragged, badly injured man was dragged in between two soldiers.
Em had seen some terribly wounded people in the days of the City’s liberation, but perhaps she had since become softened, for she brought her hand to her mouth in shock. The man’s face was distorted, his jaw broken and his one eye closed shut with blood. The other eye was concealed by a dirt-encrusted patch. He could not walk. Perhaps his legs were broken too for the soldiers had to hold him up. He wheezed painfully through an injured chest. He was filthy and clotted blood covered his tattered clothes.
He was dragged in front of Emly and held by the guards. She watched him with horror then looked to Archange. Why are you showing me this poor man?
Dol Salida went on: ‘What many of you do not know is that there was an attempt on the life of General Shuskara in the summer before, an assassination bid which very nearly succeeded.’
He turned to Emly. ‘Lady Emly. Is this the man,’ he asked her, raising his voice and looking around at the assembly, ‘who attempted to kill you and the hero Shuskara?’
This is a trial, Emly thought bleakly. She looked at the prisoner before her and he managed to open his one eye. His pain-racked gaze hovered uncertainly on the people around him, then veered about as if he had no control over it. Em frowned, remembering the day she had tried to forget. Then, under the blood and the swollen flesh, she could make out the features of the tall assassin who had led the men who killed their servant Frayling, stabbed her father and left them to die in the blazing House of Glass. She had memorized his face with her artist’s eye; she would never forget it. And she had hoped to see him brought to justice. But she felt no vindication now, only sorrow.
The man blinked his one eye and bloody tears ran down his face. He sagged in the soldiers’ grip, and they hoisted him up again on his broken legs. He peered towards Emly but his eye was unfocused and she supposed he couldn’t see her.
She cleared her throat and raised her voice to the assembly.
‘No,’ she told them firmly, ‘it is not him.’
The girl is lying, thought Dol Salida.
Although his meticulous files had foundered in the wreck of the Red Palace, and many of his informants with them, as Archange’s trusted counsellor Dol now had access to information backed by imperial power. It had been easy enough to discover that one of the blackened corpses in the shell of the House of Glass was a petty thief and wastrel named Ragtail, and to follow his unsavoury trail to an assassin called the Wolf. The Wolf, it transpired, was a one-eyed former infantryman of the Eighteenth Serpentine better known as Casmir.
If this were the only lead to Casmir, Dol might have accepted that a mistake had been made and the girl was speaking truly. But he had privately followed a second, more cryptic trail which had tenuously connected the Wolf to agents of the Red Palace and to Rafael Vincerus himself. Both the Vincerii – Marcellus and his brother – had reason to want the old man dead. It was not clear to Dol whether they knew Bartellus was the legendary general Shuskara. Perhaps they did not. But, either way, he was confident this Casmir was the assassin.
And so the girl was lying. He wondered why.
He watched the guards take the broken man away. Casmir would no doubt be allowed to mend, then what? Would he be tried for other crimes? Released with the palace’s regrets? Quietly taken away one night and killed? That was a problem for another day.
The girl was still standing by Archange’s throne, listening to the conversations. Though a child of the sewers and just seventeen, she had been witness to momentous events and knew, in Dol’s mind, far too much to be trusted. The old woman was talking to the current focus of Dol’s interest, Jona Lee Gaeta. He was of the enigmatic Family Gaeta, soldiers, scholars and perhaps mystics, who had clung to the Iron Palace, their home on the Shield, long after other Families had abandoned theirs. Jona and his soldier brother Saul, their mother Sciorra and numerous unexceptional sisters had kept themselves distant, remote particularly from Araeon and the Vincerii. Jona had not fought in the war, though he looked like a soldier and Dol scoffed at the notion that he was a scholar. He was said to have a private army which stayed aloof from the events of the Day of Summoning, acting against neither the Immortal nor Archange. That lady was reticent on the subject of the Gaetas, as she was about so many things. It was not Dol’s duty to keep her safe – she had a small army in the palace and constant bodyguards to do that – but he worried that this inscrutable man, perhaps a Serafim, had insinuated himself so far into her confidence.
The rest of the assembly waited patiently for Archange’s permission to depart. Dol found the marble floor cruel on his game leg, and he resisted the urge to pace up and down to ease it. It would not do to look impatient in the presence of the empress. Instead he craned his neck to admire the glass in the dome high above. He had little sense of the aesthetic, he was just an old soldier, but he knew skilful work when he saw it and this was magnificent. Not for the first time he wondered how many centuries the dome had been there and what power had made it so durable.
He remembered that Emly had been a glassmaker once. It was something he had forgotten, for it had no relevance to anything.
‘The girl is lying,’ a voice said.
Dol Salida lowered his eyes, feeling his neck creak. Jona Lee Gaeta stood at his side, smiling pleasantly. He was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and the fact that he had sidled up to Dol unnoticed seemed a clue to his character.
Dol nodded his acquiescence. He was not going to say the words out loud. The girl was under Archange’s protection, and was inviolate. In addition he himself, in a moment of insanity, had vowed to her father that he would protect her. ‘I will see she is safe, general. This is not her battle.’ He would keep this promise if it remained within his power. Unless, he added to himself scrupulously, she were to prove no longer an innocent and chose to take sides against him.
‘Don’t you find it irritating, Dol Salida, that your keen intelligence is confounded by the words of this girl?’
Dol shrugged. He genuinely didn’t. He found it interesting. ‘Casmir is not going anywhere,’ he said. ‘We can investigate the truth of this story at our leisure.’
‘The lady seemed … irritated.’ Gaeta nodded his head towards Archange.
In Dol’s experience Archange could seem irritated by a change in the weather, a speck of dust on the hem of her skirts, or the ripe smell of one of her guards. Yet the woman had lived as a fugitive for decades, had consorted with the then enemy, and had dwelled in the City’s sewers. If she chose to take on the disposition of a finicky old biddy now, well, that was her own business. And the fact that her ward would lie to her would scarcely disturb the empress. Like Dol, she might find it interesting.
But he had no intention of airing this to Gaeta. Any more than he would confide in the girl who cleaned his chambers.
He said, ‘Perhaps.’ Then, to be polite, he added, ‘The empress has many problems on her mind. This is not the most thorny of them by any means.’
Gaeta’s look was wintry. ‘Yes. Now the Khan army has marched north the City looks worryingly vulnerable.’
In truth, he too had been a little disappointed when they marched away, for with the Khan army went the last of the Petrassi troops and their general Hayden Weaver. An old soldier, Dol had at first bristled at the suggestion of talks with the enemy, until he discovered that most of the talks, and the peace agreement, had been done and dusted long before the invasion. His task had been to deal with Weaver to bring mutual aid to the wounded of both sides and settle the day-to-day problems of the occupation. He had expected a man of intelligence and military skill, of course, but Dol found Hayden Weaver to be a kindred spirit. The Petrassi leader was witty and plain-spoken, and interested, in a way that was unheard-of among the City’s generals, in the wellbeing of his men. And he had a devious, politician’s mind and, Dol later found, a fund of ribald stories to which his foreign accent added a piquant flavour.
‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ Gaeta was saying, his eyes boring into Dol’s. Dol Salida saw with discomfort that Gaeta had black eyes like Archange’s. ‘As the empress’s most valued counsellor, did you recommend the settlement with Hayden Weaver?’
Dol did not allow it to show, but he was surprised at such a direct query. It was not the way of the White Palace, under Archange’s lead, to ask questions so baldly. He said, pleasantly though ambiguously, ‘The empress has many senior soldiers to advise her.’
‘Speaking of which,’ Gaeta said, looking around, at the gathering of soldiers and counsellors and at Emly, slight and dark, standing before the empress, ‘I heard some interesting intelligence today. I understand Evan Broglanh, that most intimate of the empress’s inner circle, has left the City for parts unknown.’
Dol gazed at him, unimpressed. ‘That would be more interesting if the parts were known.’ This was not entirely true. Broglanh was now one of the most powerful men in the City and the empress treated him as her closest confidant, like a son or, as Gaeta implied with crashing obviousness, like a lover. Anything that soldier did was worthy of attention.
The Immortal Throne (2016) Page 19
