The Scaled Folk, at least, had not wanted that much from him.
The tableau broke, to the sound of servant’s footsteps. A face peered diffidently around the door.
‘My lord Ringil?’
Ringil sighed with relief. ‘Yes.’
‘A messenger for you. From the Milacar residence.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
They got back into Yhelteth just as the lamps were coming on across the city. Archeth, saddle sore and stuffed with questions she couldn’t answer, would have willingly gone straight to her apartments on the Boulevard of the Ineffable Divine, and to bed. But you didn’t do that kind of thing when you were about the Emperor’s business. She compromised, sent Shanta and the others on ahead to the palace, and stopped off at her apartments with Elith. She handed the old woman over to her major-domo, told him to put her up in the guest chambers.
‘Milady, there is already—’ the man began, but she waved it off.
‘Later, Kefanin, later. His imperial radiance awaits my presence at the palace. I speed to do his will, y’know.’
She swung back on her horse and clattered back out of the house’s courtyard, under the arch and on to the main thoroughfare. Sunset made a dusty furnace glow in the west, backdrop for the blackening silhouettes of minarets and domes across the city. The evening crowds pressed around her, trudged onward towards the end of their labouring day. She felt a twinge of envy. If she knew anything at all, Jhiral would probably keep her waiting a couple of hours before he’d even see her, just to make a point. And even without that expected pettiness, his imperial radiance didn’t habitually rise much before noon anyway; it wasn’t uncommon for him to hold long counsel with bleary-eyed advisers right through to dawn, and then send them directly off to their usual daily duties while he retired to bed. He’d likely have Archeth telling and re-telling the details of her report a dozen different ways until the small hours.
She stifled a yawn with the back of a gauntleted hand. Dug in her pouch until she found a small pellet of krinzanz, slipped it into her mouth and chewed it down to thin saliva-laced mulch. Grimace at the bitter, granulated taste, and swallow. She rubbed the residue against her gums with a leather finger, and waited for the gloom of evening to recede a little from her eyes, for the drug to prop the weariness away and lend her its counterfeit lust for life. *
Doors banged back for her, pike-men came to attention as she passed them down long marble halls. She tugged off her gauntlets impatiently, muttering to herself, as she strode the familiar path to her Emperor’s presence. From the walls, representations of the Prophet and other notables of imperial history glowered down at her. The krin buzz made some of the better-executed portraits quiver with a simulacrum of hostile life around the eyes. It was scrutiny she could have done without, and it didn’t help that there was not a single Kiriath face among those pictured.
You’ll have to make it work without us, Grashgal had told her, towards the end. I can’t hold the captaincies any longer. They want out. They’ve consulted the Helmsmen, all the stable ones anyway, and the answer keeps coming back pretty much the same. It’s time to go.
Oh come on. Hiding her desperation in a snort. Fucking Helmsman’ll give you sixty different answers to the same question depending on how it’s phrased. You know that. We’ve been here before, at least twice that I can remember, and I’m only a couple of hundred years old. It’ll pass.
But Grashgal just stood there at the balcony’s edge and stared down into the red glow of the workshops.
The engineers already have orders to refit, he said quietly. They’ll have a fleet that works by year’s end. I’m sorry, Archidi. This time it’s real.
But why? Why now?
A shrug that came close to a shudder. These fucking humans, Archidi. If we stay, they’re going to drag us into every squalid fucking skirmish and border dispute their short-term greed and fear can invent. They’re going to turn us into something we never used to be.
These fucking humans.
‘The lady kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal,’ bellowed the herald as the last set of doors opened before her, and across the vaulted and pillared space of the throne room, all the fucking humans turned to stare as she came in.
‘Ah, Archeth, you grace us with your presence after all.’ Jhiral was propped at a sardonic angle in the grandiose architecture of the Burnished Throne, one heel laid four square over his knee. Light from the Kiriath-engineered radiant stones set into the walls of the chamber behind him conferred the borrowed glow of divine authority. He flashed her a boyish grin. ‘Almost on time for once, as well. I understand you had to go home before coming to see us. Did you find everything there to your satisfaction?’
Archeth shrugged it off. ‘I thought it best to come before you fully prepared, my lord. I am ready to deliver my report.’
‘Oh, good. We have in fact already been hearing from my other, loyal servants.’ A casual gesture to where Mahmal Shanta, Faileh Rakan and Pashla Menkarak stood before him in a loose arc. Just the hint of a pause after other, the lightest of accents on loyal. It was done with masterful subtlety, and Archeth saw how secret smiles went among the courtiers. ‘It seems there’s some disagreement about how the situation in Khangset was handled. Some question of you overstepping the limits of your authority?’
Shanta slid her an apologetic glance. She could already guess how things were going. Menkarak had raged all the way back, had in fact been fulminating from the moment he woke up in the camp at Khangset and found Archeth had been busy all night without bothering to secure his approval for anything she’d done.
‘It was my understanding, my lord, that the expedition was placed exclusively under my command.’
‘Within the framework of the Holy Revelation,’ snapped Menkarak. ‘To which all secular rule is subordinate. There can be no light to outshine the radiance of truth, and the servants of truth must brook none.’
‘You were fucking asleep,’ said Archeth.
‘And you abroad by night in the company of an infidel sorceress.’
Jhiral lounged back in the throne and grinned again, toothily. ‘Is this true, Archeth? A sorceress?’
Archeth pulled in a deep breath, held it, let it out. She tried for authoritative calm.
‘The woman Elith believes she is a sorceress, that much is true. But her claims are suspect to say the least. I do not think she is wholly sane. She and her family suffered greatly in the war, she was forci- She became an imperial resident under very difficult circumstances. She lost almost her entire family in the war. I would say she was probably half mad with grief well before this raid took place. What she saw when Khangset was attacked may simply have pushed her the rest of the way.’
Menkarak exploded. ‘Enough! She’s an infidel, a faithless stone-worshipping northerner who would not convert when the hand of the Revelation was extended to her in friendship, and who persists in her stubborn unbelief deep within our borders. The evidence is plain - she has even torn the kartagh from her garb to blind the eyes of the faithful she dwells among. She is steeped in deceit.’
‘Well, now, that is a crime, Archeth,’ Jhiral said reasonably. ‘And crimes are usually committed by those with criminal inclination. Are you sure that this woman had nothing to do with the raid?’
Archeth hesitated. ‘There’s no evidence to connect her directly, no.’
‘Yet Pashla Menkarak here says you incited her to perform outlandish rites on the bluff overlooking the town.’
‘Well.’ She affected an icy disdain. ‘His Holiness was not actually present when we went to the bluff, my lord. So it’s hard to see how he could know. Perhaps he suffers from an overactive imagination.’
‘You blackened whore!’
And the world seemed to rock briefly on some unseen axis around her. The krinzanz slugged in her veins, pounded for release. Her palms twitched. Almost, her knives were in her hands.
But she heard the rustling murmurs run through the courtiers as well, saw the way
even the urbane Jhiral blinked, and she knew Menkarak had over-reached himself. Knew that in some hard-to-define fashion she’d won whatever ritualised combat Jhiral had wanted to see here.
She went in for the kill.
‘It’s also hard,’ she said evenly, ‘to imagine where His Holiness learnt his court manners. Must I and the memory of my people be insulted in this fashion, my lord, in the very throne room they helped build?’
From among the crowd on the right hand of the throne, a senior Invigilator detached himself and came forward to Menkarak’s side. He took the younger man’s arm, but Menkarak shook it off angrily.
‘This woman,’ he began.
But Jhiral had had enough, at least for one day. ‘This woman is a valued adviser to the court,’ he said coldly. ‘And you have just cast aspersions on her character that may require answer before a magistrate. You came highly recommended, Pashla Menkarak, but you disappoint me. I think you had better retire.’
For one insane moment, it looked as if Menkarak might defy the Emperor’s command. Archeth, watching keenly, saw something in his eyes that was at best poorly moored to any sense of self-preservation. She recalled Shanta’s words to her on the ridge overlooking Khangset. They say it’s a whole new breed coming through the religious colleges now. Hardline faith. She wondered if that included aspiration to martyrdom, something the Revelation had flirted with on and off in the past but hadn’t seen much of recently.
The senior Invigilator muttered intensely at his colleague’s ear and his fingers sank into Menkarak’s arm just above the elbow, this time with talon-like tenacity. Archeth saw the moment pass, saw the defiance in Menkarak’s eyes go out like a doused campfire. The younger Invigilator went down on one knee, perhaps forced there by the clawed grip on his arm. He bowed his head.
‘My deepest apologies, Majesty.’ The words didn’t quite emerge from between clenched teeth, but the tone was ragged - Menkarak sounded like a man slightly out of breath. Archeth surprised herself with a sudden spurt of fellow feeling for the man. She knew well enough the greasy, soiled feeling behind that bent knee and struggling voice. ‘If my zeal to serve the Revelation has in any way offended you, I beg your indulgence for my lack of courtesy.’
Jhiral played it for all it was worth. He sat forward, rubbed at his chin in kingly reflection. Assumed a stern expression.
‘Well, Menkarak, that indulgence is not really mine to give.’ A blatant lie - in the context of the throne room, all and any failure in decorum was a direct insult to the Emperor, whether he was present or not. ‘Your offensive comments were, after all, to my adviser here. Perhaps you could abase yourself to her instead.’
More grabbed-breath gasps around the hall. The senior Invigilator looked startled. Menkarak’s head came up out of the bow in disbelief. Jhiral held the moment like a long note on the horse bugle he was famed for playing with such virtuosity. Held it, expanded it.
And let it collapse.
‘Well, no. Maybe not. That’d be extreme, I suppose. Perhaps, then, you could just take your disagreeable presence somewhere it won’t offend again.’ Jhiral nodded at the senior Invigilator, voice hardening. ‘Get him out of my sight.’
The senior Invigilator was only too happy to comply. He practically dragged Pashla Menkarak back to his feet and then, bowing repeatedly, away down the hall to the doors at the far end. Jhiral watched them out, then he rose without ceremony - a minor breach of etiquette that his father too had been fond of using to upset the court - and raised his voice to cover the whole throne room.
‘Leave us. I will speak to Archeth Indamaninarmal alone.’
It took a minute or less to clear everyone out. One or two hung back, throwing curious glances at the throne; there were a few men among them whose concerns ran a little deeper than palace sinecure, but they were a minority, winnowed down in the years following the accession. Wherever he could afford to, Jhiral had nudged his father’s most loyal courtiers out to exile postings in the provinces, occasionally to jail and in one or two memorable cases to the executioner’s chair. A rump of essential competence remained, but it was cowed and dispirited just as Archeth supposed Jhiral had intended. The vast majority of those present were only too glad to follow the imperial will and vacate the chamber.
Faileh Rakan had not moved, awaiting direct command from his Emperor as befitted his rank among the Throne Eternal. And it seemed Mahmal Shanta wasn’t going to be sent home either - he’d begun to back away, but Jhiral caught his eye and made a tiny beckoning gesture with a cupped hand.
The brush and rustle of expensive clothing faded into the hall outside, the doors banged closed. Quiet settled into the throne room. Jhiral gusted a long, theatrically world-weary sigh.
‘See, that’s what I’ve got to contend with these days. These new graduates from the Citadel, I’m going to have to do something about them.’
‘Only give the order, Majesty,’ said Rakan grimly.
‘Yes, well, maybe not right now. I’ve no desire for that kind of bloodbath in the run up to the Prophet’s birthday.’
That’s right, my lord, we had better avoid a bloodbath. Krinzanz pushed the words forward on her tongue; it was a conscious effort to hold them back. Not least because, given the choice, the vast peasant mass of the Yhelteth faithful might just decide that fuck it, they’ve had enough, they’ll damn well take fanatical adherence to the tenets of the Revelation over venal exploitation of the throne and top-down decadence, give it a whirl, and see if it doesn’t deliver for them.
And when it doesn’t, of course, it’ll be too fucking late.
She remembered street battles in Vanbyr, the advancing lines of imperial halberdiers, the screams of the ill-equipped rebels as they broke and were butchered. The shattered homes of collaborators and the lines of shaven-headed captives afterwards. The shrieks of women dragged out of line at random and raped to death by the side of the road. The ditches piled with corpses.
After the savagery of Ennishmin and Naral, she had sworn she would not take part in any action like it again. She’d sworn to Ringil, as she talked him down, it was the last fucking time.
She rode through Vanbyr and tasted her own lie like the ashes in the air.
And now here was Jhiral, contemplating the same thing in his own capital.
‘Perhaps, my lord, we’d do well to analyse the new tendencies in the Citadel and aim to block them at a legislative—’
‘Yes, yes, Archeth, I’m well aware of your liking for legislation. But as you’ve just seen, the Citadel is not currently breeding men with much respect for the niceties of a civilised society.’
‘Nevertheless—’
‘God damn it, woman, will you just shut up.’ It was impossible to tell if Jhiral was genuinely aggrieved or not. ‘You know, I expected a little more support out of you, Archeth. It was you he insulted, after all.’
Yes, he insulted me. But only after you gave him cause to believe I was out of favour with that snide little comment about loyal servants. You built Menkarak a gangplank he thought was secure, and then when he set foot on it, you kicked it away from the ship and watched him get wet. You play your little games, Jhiral, you play us all off against each other for your greater security and amusement. But someday, you’re going to kick someone’s gangplank away and they won’t go down alone. They’ll grab your ankles and pull you down with them.
‘My apologies, my lord. I am of course deeply grateful for the protection you extend to my honour at court.’
‘I should bloody hope so. I don’t go up against the Citadel lightly, you know. There’s a balance to be played out here, and it’s ticklish at the best of times.’
She bowed her head. Anything else would have been risky. ‘My lord.’
‘They don’t like you, Archeth.’ Jhiral’s tone had shifted, taken on a pettish, lecturing tone. ‘You’re a final reminder of the godless Kiriath, and that upsets them. The faithful don’t react well when they run up against infidels they can’t conquer or co
ndescend to - it starts to look like a nasty little flaw in God’s perfect plan.’
Archeth sneaked a look at Rakan, but the Throne Eternal captain was impassive. If he heard his Emperor’s words as the borderline heresy they so patently were, he gave no sign that it bothered him. And the two guardsmen on either side of the throne might have been carved from stone for all the reaction they offered.
Still ...
‘Perhaps we should discuss Khangset, my lord.’
‘Indeed.’ Jhiral cleared his throat and she thought that for just a moment he looked almost grateful for the interjection. She wondered how much of his guard he’d let down in that last outburst, how much self-pity there was along with the sympathy in the words they don’t like you, Archeth. Rule from the Burnished Throne was, for all its brutal potential, very much the ticklish business Jhiral described.
‘We were discussing, my lord, the—’
The Steel Remains (Gollancz) Page 20
