The Court of Broken Knives

by Anna Smith Spark

  ‘What’s been happening?’ Orhan asked him firmly. Focus. Things to sort out. People to kill. ‘Has March come round yet? Is there still fighting anywhere? How’s the city holding generally?’

  ‘Do we really have to talk business right now?’ Darath sat down on the bed. Pulled Orhan over next to him.

  ‘Yes. We do. If we want to live, anyway.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I suppose … We’re fine. The city is fairly calm. March is in a rage because Elis has somehow managed to contract himself to two different women in three hours, only one of whom has the misfortune to be a Verneth, but he’s pulled his men back. He can see which way things are going. Some more buildings burnt down last night, but the fires are out now. Money-lenders, mostly, you may be interested to hear. You didn’t set all this in motion just to burn your banking house down to the ground, did you?’

  ‘Tempting, but no. I’m not that devious. Also I’d have borrowed more first, if I had. Anything else? How’s the Emperor? And stop that …’

  ‘You really are boring this morning. I seem to remember we were doing this the other way round a few days ago, you couldn’t keep your hands off me … The Emperor’s still weak at the knees and white-faced with terror. Still clinging to you as the greatest hero the Empire has ever seen. Seems rather taken with your sister, too. Furious with March for any suggestion of suspicious conduct he may harbour against you. Or me. Relax, Orhan. Things are going well. We’re safe. Ish. Can I please take your clothes off you now? We can get straight back to business afterwards.’

  A servant brought a light meal later, bread and sweet-cured meat and soft cheese. Lemon-scented water, ice cold; flowery tea; sweet, dark wine. Cimma fruit, crusted with honey and spices, its rancid smell drifting over the room like the smoke. The tea bowls were a porcelain so thin and pale that their hands showed through it. Orhan stretched back in his chair, looking down at the palace gardens beneath them, the sun sparkling on the bathing pool, lilac flowers nodding in the breeze. The city rose behind them, the towers and domes of the great houses jumbled elegantly, the House of Silver flashing in the light.

  ‘This is all rather glorious, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re richer than the Emperor, Darath. Your house is better furnished. You drink better wine and eat better food.’

  ‘’Tis true.’ Darath chewed a piece of fruit lazily. ‘But it’s more fun doing it here. The view’s better, too. Some thoughtless bastard put a palace in the way of my balcony.’

  A tap at the door. A functionary in the Imperial uniform of dark grey and gold appeared. A nervous look on his face. One of the few survivors, who now leapt out of his skin whenever someone entered the same room as him.

  ‘His Eminence wishes you see you, My Lord Nithque,’ he said meekly. What does he think is going to happen? Orhan wondered. We’ll cut him down where he stands? Having a new reputation as an Imperial hero seemed to be something of a mixed blessing when he was dealing with palace servants. Unless the man had just assumed he and Darath were still right in the middle of things.

  ‘Work.’ Darath helped himself to another piece of cimma fruit, the juice running down his chin in sticky rivulets. ‘The one great disadvantage of power. I’ll see you later. Dinner? Here?’

  Orhan followed the functionary down the Imperial Chambers. A palace to redecorate. A Treasury to manage. Trade and defence to reorganize. Alliances to reconsider. An Empire to rebuild. Oh, yes, work. Darath was the perfect co-conspirator, leaving it all to him to manage.

  Slaves worked day and night to get the palace and the Great Temple in some kind of order. The latter had not been seriously damaged: the Great Chamber had been knocked about a bit, several slaves and three priestesses were dead. One foreign assassin had been found alive if terrified out of his wits drooling profanities, but had been swiftly torn to pieces by a screaming mob. Every candle in the place had gone out, even the red lamp on the High Altar. It would need some kind of formal ceremony of rededication and thanks; Orhan had Celyse planning it already. Glory to the Empire, the Emperor, and the Emmereths. Lots of gold splashed around the city on new clothing and jewellery and food. Fountains running with wine and honey; bread for the masses; whores dancing in the streets offering kisses for free; certain substances suddenly available surprisingly cheaply to those interested in such filthy things. He’d have to temporarily rescind the edict against travellers from Chathe to achieve the last, but it was probably worth the risk. Everybody had to be happy and glad to see the new regime, even the street scum.

  Orhan was beginning to suspect that Tam had been right, too: keeping the Emperor alive and bowed down with gratitude was a far more effective way of seizing power than killing him would have been. That the Emperor must, deep down, be aware Orhan had come fairly close to assassinating him whilst at the same time saving him from being brutally killed by the very assassins he’d hired was, quite possibly, an accidental masterstroke. Holt Amdelle seemed genuinely to believe Orhan’s version of events, but pretty much everyone else who mattered was quite obviously vaguely aware how things had fallen, but were just under the impression he had somehow controlled it all from first to last. Perhaps he had: been playing a game so complex even he hadn’t understood the moves he was making, the twists of the pieces as his failure led to victory.

  In which case, he was possibly the most brilliant strategic genius Irlast had ever known. Which seemed a truly horrifying thing to think. You got lucky, Orhan, he told himself sternly. You’re only able to think that because you got so lucky that you’re not now dead.

  The day of the ceremony dawned very hot. The priestesses had been gathered in the Temple all night, keeping vigil, praying in the dark of the Great Chamber. As dawn broke, the candles were relit on the altars and the red lamp blazed a brilliant crimson, bright as rubies and fresh blood. The Great Hymn resounded around the huge room, the candles flared up one after another in a long sigh like a wave. At the moment the red lamp was lit, the sun caught the small high windows in the east and turned them pure and perfect gold. The priestesses threw up their arms, their grey robes shining, their masks glittering with the dark eyes behind; before the High Altar, the tiny figure of a child knelt, clothed in silver, the lamp casting a red tinge to her hair and eyes. She had beautiful hands, slender and long and very white.

  The common people of the city had been permitted into the Temple to see this great moment: Orhan had been clear on this, and the old priestess Ninia had agreed with him. They needed to witness the light returning, the Temple and the city made whole and healed, the power of the God and the Empire blazing up. Literally. Arguably a bit over-symbolic, but Orhan rather liked the theatrics. Some things weren’t meant to be subtle.

  He watched from the back of the room, filled again with an astonished sense of wonder at what he had achieved. Darath hadn’t wanted him to go: there was a part of him that had agreed, drawn back, shuddered at it. A buried fear that the candles would refuse to light, that the child at the altar would rise up and scream out in the voice of the God that he was damned. In the dark before the dawn came the jewelled masks had been dimly visible, nodding and floating like birds, and he had felt horror seeing them. A rational man, but a guilty one. But he was glad, now, that he had come. The joy of it, the candles and the singing, the gasp of wonder and beauty as the darkness burst into life. He felt cleaner, perhaps more at peace with what he’d done. Glory to the Empire. Glory to the city. Glory to the God.

  The great ceremony itself took place in the afternoon. The entire city seemed to smell of cooking and perfume. The great families bustled about in fine clothes and glittering jewels, drawing up before the Temple in litters radiant with light. Orhan and Bil travelled together in a new litter of cool green silk. Bil was dressed in silver, her lovely hair falling loose about her waist, caught back from her face with a net of tiny diamonds. Her face and body had a plumpness to them, the swell of the baby was beginning to show. A new fashion for long sleeves and concealing gauzes, Orhan thought. Or artificial scars m
oulded in wax and clay. Though she’d perhaps care less now anyway, now that she had power and glory and a coming child.

  Bil fidgeted with her rings. ‘I read your letter,’ she said.

  ‘I meant to burn it.’

  ‘I did.’

  A silence. The litter jolted to a halt. They mounted the steps, stopped for a moment before the great closed door. The wood stared at them, an ancient thing, alive, the knots eyes, the grain rippling fur. The great gashes stood out starkly. As in the morning, Orhan felt fear settle on him, waiting for the doorway to seal itself before him with a crash. Bil stepped forward, pushed the door. It opened.

  The dark of the narrow corridor seemed less terrible, this time. Less crushing. Bil gripped his hand but did not seem to feel the same fear either, walking behind him with her head raised. The Great Chamber beyond blazed like a furnace: again, less frightening, less terrible. It was already crowded with the nobles and the wealthiest of the merchants, the priestesses, the Imperial officials, the few foreign somebodies who still happened to be around. Orhan and Bil took their places at the very front of the chamber, staring up at the High Altar and the tiny figure enthroned beside it. She wore gold and silver, hastily fashioned to fit her child’s frame.

  Finally, trumpets, a voice shouting, ‘The Emperor! All kneel for the Ever Living Emperor! Avert your eyes and kneel and be thankful! We live and we die! The Emperor comes! The Emperor comes!’ The assembled congregation knelt carefully. All but the child in gold who sat stiffly on her throne, her face all eyes, fidgeting with the hem of her dress. The Emperor entered slowly, cautiously walking the length of the chamber, flanked by two guards in black armour with drawn swords. That, the Emperor himself had insisted upon, though Orhan hated it and Celyse thought it vulgar in the extreme.

  The Emperor seated himself carefully on a gilt chair next to and a little in front of Orhan’s own. The new High Priestess stared at him. She was obviously scared out of her wits. No trouble there, either. She’d do as she was bid. She came back from the killing trembling, clutching the arm of the old priestess Ninia who had had to help and accompany her. Too weak to wield a knife. Such beautiful little white hands. Orhan felt sick at it. But it was the only way.

  I shouldn’t have come, he thought. I shouldn’t have seen this. Her.

  There was a great banquet after, in the vast, hastily redecorated festival chamber of the palace. Celyse had placed Orhan and Darath next to each other, Bil away on the other side of the Emperor’s dais so she could not see them, but in a grand place with various Verneth and Amdelle women somehow quite obviously beneath her. Darath reached out from his couch and touched Orhan’s arm.

  After the banquet he travelled with Bil back to the House of the East in the new green litter, quiet and tired in the dark. The city swirled around them, people singing and dancing and fucking in the streets. In the Court of the Fountain two men fought, white silks blossoming with blood. In the Court of the Broken Knife a woman wept beneath the faceless statue, a tiny candle flickering at her side. Bil pulled the curtains closed, and the figures became ghosts, their shouts far off.

  ‘It was kind of you,’ she said. ‘To come home with me.’

  ‘I— ’ I might go on to Darath’s house, Orhan almost said, but didn’t. Taken over an Empire, stabbed and then tortured a man he’d known since he was a child, but still couldn’t manage the full and exhausting complications of his wretched personal life. If he could just bring himself to really dislike Bil, it would be so much easier.

  ‘I’m sorry Sterne’s dead,’ Orhan said suddenly.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Truly?’

  Bil drew herself more upright, folding her hands over her belly where the tiny child lay. ‘No. Truly, it’s horrible and I miss him. Truly, I feel utter grief at his death, and I can’t even mourn him properly, because then people will know. Truly, I hate you for getting him into things that killed him. Your lover knew what was happening and survived, and you get to sit next to him at dinner and smile at him. You sent mine to his death.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But now I’m the wife of the Nithque to the Emperor, and my child will inherit wealth unbounded, and my father has finally stopped looking at me as though he wants to weep with apology every moment.’

  ‘Again, yes.’

  The litter halted as a great crowd of revellers surged past them in the narrow street, their shapes moving like shadow puppets on the silk walls of the litter. Voices called, drunk and singing: ‘Who’s inside?’

  When they heard it was Lord Emmereth, the voices took up a cheer. Bil squeaked as the litter rocked a little, people crowding close. Their guards shouted and threatened, the people cheered again and moved on.

  Orhan smiled wryly. ‘I wonder how long that will last?’

  He slept late the next day, like everyone else in the city apart from the wretches clearing up the mess. From the look of the crowds last night, that would be work worthy of a poem. The Song of the Red Morning, in which the poet’s hopeless love for a woman is compared to the never-ending task of shovelling filth from the city’s streets. Orhan bathed and dressed, smiling at the memory of the ragged cheers for the Emmereth name. That hadn’t been heard in Sorlost for centuries.

  Back to the palace after lunch, things to arrange and rearrange. Would this get boring, turn to a yearning for his quiet life of refined pointlessness? He’d barely had a chance to read a book since that night, only endless reports. Must have been the only sober man in the city last night too.

  He sat down at his desk, unrolled the map of Irlast and looked at it yet again. The Sekemleth Empire, edged in gold leaf, Sorlost a gilt blob at its centre. So pathetically small! A badly drawn dragon flapped to the east of the city, Chathe and Theme hemming them in to the west and north. Immish very large and bright, her borders already redrawn. Little room to manoeuvre, Orhan thought gloomily. The great Treasury ledgers were no better, a long list of debts, deficits and uncollected revenues exquisitely written in golden ink. Orhan’s hands traced carefully over the beautiful embossed leather of the covers: the books were reportedly bound in human skin. He opened one, took up a pen and slashed through a number of annual payments, one apparently made to himself, two to Darath. March’s stipend, for his role as ‘First Lord and Viceroy of Riva’, had better stay as it was for the moment. Orhan didn’t even know where Riva had been.

  Costs, costs, more costs … How could it be so expensive to run a palace effectively inhabited by one person? Builders’ bills coming in; a load more furniture to purchase; a large number of widows’ pensions to put into payment now too. Best to keep the newly-bereaved on-side. Darath’s joke about the money-lenders came back to him: a really clever man would have got rid of all the paperwork as well as the bureaucracy, and started again with a literally blank page.

  A quiet tap on the door: one of the palace secretaries, a youngish man with a narrow dark face and black hair flecked with gold, holding a large scroll.

  ‘My Lord Nithque.’

  ‘Gallus.’ Orhan couldn’t help liking the man. Efficient, helpful, bright, good-looking, cynical.

  ‘The letter to the Immish High Council, My Lord.’

  Orhan took the scroll and unrolled it. Beautifully written, the seal of the Empire set in gold on the bottom, so heavy it almost tore at the silver tissue it was written on. ‘That was quick work,’ he said approvingly. Scanned over the text. All correct, and the man had tidied up his syntax in a couple of places where he’d struggled to find the right words.

  ‘I’ll get the Emperor to sign it as soon as he’s awake.’ Which wouldn’t be for hours. ‘No, wait, I’ll sign it myself.’ A clear signal of a new regime, changes. Strength. ‘Then it needs to go by fast courier to Alborn.’

  It was a letter of formal apology. The Sekemleth Empire held Immish in no way responsible for the recent outrageous events against the life of the Eternal and Ever Living Emperor and the High Priestess of the Lord of Living and Dying, Great Tanis
Who Rules All Things, and had been assured the High Council was doing all it could to root out the conspirators clearly active within her borders. Any hostilities expressed by the subjects of the Sekemleth Empire against Immish persons or their property were purely the private actions of a people grieving and enraged by the attempt on the life of their beloved Emperor and the attack on the Temple of their God, and should in no way be taken as suggesting an official hardening of the Empire’s relations with Immish. No compensation would therefore be payable. The Ever Living Emperor did, however, express sorrow for any individual’s losses. As no official action had or was being taken against any citizen of Immish, any goods and possessions left abandoned in the city of Sorlost or its environs were considered forfeit and rendered the possession of the Imperial Treasury.

  ‘It’s quite … strong,’ Gallus said as he took the letter and sealed it.

  Orhan stamped it with the Imperial crest of a winged lion. ‘It’s meant to be strong. But if you read it carefully, there’s nothing Immish can actually object to. Their assassins did try to kill our Emperor and bring down our city.’ The scope of that lie in itself, he hoped, sent some kind of a signal: the Sekemleth Empire was tired of petty games and internal intrigues.

  Gallus nodded thoughtfully. ‘I’ll send two couriers, My Lord. Good horses. I know the men to choose.’

  Orhan smiled. ‘Good.’

  Gallus’s eyes flicked to the books on the table. ‘The Treasury ledgers, My Lord?’

  ‘Indeed. Remarkably depressing reading. The recent entries have seen a marked decline in the quality of the handwriting, too.’

  Gallus paused for a moment, then said quietly, ‘If My Lord wishes … I can help him with where the money is going. Who some of the payments are to. Which are more necessary than others.’