The Tower of Living and Dying

by Anna Smith Spark

  “Find him,” he ordered the guards. “Punish him.”

  “By why not just kill her when she was sleeping?” Darath asked Orhan. “Or you, in fact?” He had come, of course, as soon as he had heard. So, a while later, had Celyse. Orhan almost ordered the servants not to admit them. He sat by Bil’s sleeping body and did not want to be disturbed. The baby cried and gurgled by turns, seemed calmer, he held it for a while, breathed in the smell of its scalp and thanked the God over and over that it had survived. But … He clung to Darath, the warmth of his body, the grief in his eyes. And Celyse, also, capable and cold and broken-hearted, talking it through with him and helping him understand it was real.

  “I was out of the house with most of the guards”—in your bed, Darath, joy of my heart, arguing with you then making it up to you, your cock in my mouth; let us not forget that, oh my beloved, another taint like ashes to the honeyed bliss of our love—“I was out of the house, no one was around, they were stationed outside her very door. So easy. Such a show of power, in broad daylight, in my own home.”

  “Power?”

  “Oh come on, Darath,” said Celyse harshly. “Think! They weren’t deranged madmen. They were paid by Eloise Verneth.”

  “My son,” said Orhan, “for hers. In broad daylight, in my own house.” Darath’s face darkened, still, even now, at the words “my son.” “It’s clear it was planned. Another guard had overheard something, was watching them. That was what saved her, in fact. He rushed in, shouted, raised the alarm. Took a wound himself defending her. And Bil fought like a dragon. Shielded the baby with her body. Fought off the sword blade with her hands.”

  The storm came exactly as he had known it would. “Was watching them?” Celyse shouted. “Was watching them and had suspicions, and said nothing to you? God’s knives, Orhan!” Darath’s eyes went to the man on guard in the doorway, searching him or maybe just willing him dead.

  “He said he wasn’t sure, didn’t want to cause an uproar, thought they just wanted to steal some of Bil’s jewels to sell. He was frightened, of them, and of me. Who would dare try to do such a thing, in the Lord of the Rising Sun’s very house?” He looked at Darath. “He never changed his story, even at the end. So it may have been the truth.”

  Silence. From the next room a woman’s voice spoke to the guardsman at the door, asking permission to enter to tend to Bil. The sound of the baby fretting. The cooing voice of a woman in response. How many people have I killed now, Orhan thought? Can I even count any more?

  “So I suppose we have to kill Eloise now,” said Orhan wearily. Death breeds death breeds death.

  “No,” said Celyse.

  Silence.

  “No?”

  “Bil did give away one of my bride gifts to her as an offering at the Temple this morning,” Celyse said dryly. “And her baby has just disinherited my son. But no, God’s knives, brother! I’d rip Eloise apart with my bare hands if I could! But think. The city’s in a state of turmoil. The Emperor’s rather lost his burning adoration for you. It’s pathetically obvious you poisoned poor March. You may still have some shred of lustre in a few eyes now it turns out you saved the Emperor from an Altrersyr demon, but to half the city you seem to be the man who sold the High Priestess’s maidenhead to King Death. Your name stinks like carrion, Orhan. Don’t make it any worse killing a grieving old woman. Sit back and be the victim who’s above all this, and pray to the God things die down a bit now.”

  “No—” Darath began.

  Celyse cut him off. “If you can prove it was Eloise, in fact … there may be some good in it all,” Celyse said.

  Silence. Darath and Orhan stared at her. I think I will be sick, Orhan thought. Celyse said slowly, “The Emperor wanted calm, given everything. Certainly no credence given to these absurd blasphemous lies. He’ll be furious with Eloise. It swings the popular sympathy back rather towards you, Orhan, having assassins creeping around your house targeting your tragically disfigured wife and your baby son. The Verneths have tried to kill you twice now, with a big nasty terrifying mess left behind each time. You only did it to March once, and then very neatly so as it might not even be murder at all. Everyone knows March died of heat flux.”

  “That’s vile,” Orhan said. True, though. He found himself laughing. His mouth tasted of bile.

  “Are you sure you didn’t arrange it yourself, for the sympathy?” Celyse flushed. “I’m sorry. That was horrible. Tasteless.”

  But someone else will think it, Orhan thought.

  “No,” said Darath. “No! God’s knives! March and Eloise both tried to kill him. March is dead. Eloise dies. Slowly. Worse than March.”

  Celyse only rolled her eyes at Darath. A little, angry, blustering boy. The words made Orhan shiver: his lover, who used to think himself notorious because he occasionally chewed keleth seed and had once struck a hired boy in the face.

  “Quit while you’re ahead,” said Celyse.

  So crude.

  “You’re still alive,” said Celyse. “Both of you. So quit. Now. Before you’re not.”

  Darath almost bared his teeth at her. “Eloise dies. I won’t sleep until she does.”

  “Then you’re a fool,” said Celyse.

  Orhan took Darath’s hand. If Bil lives, Orhan thought. I owe her that. If she lives, Eloise lives and we go on and hope things can rebuild themselves and it was all worth the cost. Magnanimous in victory. A better and brighter world for my son.

  If Bil dies, I deserve whatever will come for me. So Eloise dies. And never mind the consequences.

  He looked at Darath. Squeezed Darath’s hand.

  And I’ll do it myself, this time.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  A man in a green jacket, bright in the afternoon sun. The sun- light flashed on his buttons. Flanked by men in gold armour. The sunlight flashed on their swords. The gates opened smoothly. Orhan watched them march towards the front doors.

  The man in green stopped before the pearl doorway. Shouted clear and slow. “A message for Orhan Emmereth, the Lord of the Rising Sun, Servant and Counsellor of the Emperor, Warden of Immish and the Bitter Sea, the Nithque of the Asekemlene Emperor of the Sekemleth Empire of the Golden City of Sorlost. Attend, My Lord!”

  So the Emperor summoned him again. Of course. Orhan considered putting back on the blood-stained clothes he’d been wearing that morning. Cut a fine and pitiable figure, wife and son’s body fluids bathing his favourite coat. Maybe tear it a bit in the hem and the sleeve lining, make it look battered, muss up his hair and get Darath to knock him about in the face.

  “My Lord?” The door keep, with a pale frightened face. “My Lord, a message—”

  “From the palace. Yes.” Darath stirred in his chair opposite, where he was sitting trying to read. “I’ll come.” Eyes met Darath’s. “No. As I said before. Alone.”

  “Orhan—”

  “Send a message, if Bil wakes, or …”

  Darath stood up. “Don’t order me around, My Lord Emmereth. I’m richer than you are. Even got a faint stream of semi-divine blood, which is more than you can say. And you’re not even the Emperor’s Nithque any more. Are we walking, or taking the litter? I’d suggest the latter. Marginally safer that way. I don’t want too much spit on my coat.”

  Thank you. Thank you, Darath. Oh Great Lord Tanis, thought Orhan, oh Great Tanis I am indeed grateful, for You are indeed sometimes kind.

  He went to see Bil and the baby. Bil still lay sleeping. The baby was sleeping, he bent and kissed its face. Darath was waiting by the door for him. Looked at him with an unreadable face.

  “I do love you for more than the beauty of your cock, remember, Orhan,” Darath said.

  They went out accompanied by Orhan’s guards, and Darath’s, and those the Emperor had sent. So many men with drawn swords. The servants—the surviving servants—no, most had survived, he could not think like that—seemed to hang around the corridors as they passed. Orhan found himself shaking. His head was hurting him, his body
rang with tiredness. After-effect of shock and terror, like the dregs of wine. I am the victim here, he kept thinking. As Celyse says. Or it was nothing at all. March died of heat flux. Two of my guards just suddenly ran mad.

  The people in the streets stared at the litter. He felt their eyes through the silk. “Traitor! Murderer! Blasphemer!” Everyone would know something had happened this morning. Everyone would know where he was going, with guards in gold armour at his heels and head. Whispers. Jeering. A few attempts even at a cheer. A great hero! An arch traitor! A master of intrigue! A gullible fool! He himself had lied so many times about that night he no longer had any idea what had occurred. They were Immish sellswords. They were dead bodies. I hired them. I killed them. I remember. Except that he kept seeing those beautiful terrible gaping eyes.

  I saw him, Orhan thought. I saw Amrath. I stood and looked at him face to face.

  Great Tanis lives in His house of waters. The Emperor lives in a palace of dreaming. The demon is loose in his tower of joy and despair. From the fear of life and the fear of death, release us. Great Tanis, Lord of All Things, hear me: I don’t want any more of us to die.

  “Stop it,” said Darath, nudging him in the ribs.

  “Stop what? What?”

  They were almost at the palace. Its dome gleaming in the light. Gold and silver and white porcelain. The bare blind windows, through which a boy who was Amrath the World Conqueror had fallen in shards of brilliantly coloured glass.

  “Your face, that looks like you’re about to open your throat in the street. You’re shaking like a leaf, Orhan. Stop. Try to pull yourself together a bit. Please.” Darath took Orhan’s hands. “Please, Orhan. Try to look like you think we might survive.”

  And in through the gates of the palace, where once he and Darath had marched with a troop of men behind them to save the Empire from decay. Up flights of marble stairs, through wide corridors painted with flowers, past open doorways giving on to empty dusty rooms. Past the hallway off to Orhan’s suite as Nithque.

  Yesterday. He was last here yesterday. It felt like a thousand years.

  The doors to the throne room were closed as they always were. Beautiful new carved cedar wood, still with the slight smell of metal and glue from when they were made. Men and women danced beneath a golden sunrise, trees spread forth cooling branches, birds sang in a hymn to the dawn. Eyes and faces peered from the borders. Dead bodies piled invisible just off scene. Great Tanis. Great Tanis. Ah, God, Great Lord, be merciful. Help me, please. Be kind.

  “Stop.” Darath squeezed his hand. “Breathe. You’re trembling.”

  The doors opened. Smooth and slow. There beyond the blaze of lamplight. So bright there were no shadows. Walls of gemstones dazzling to the eye. Confusing, like stepping into pure colour. Patterns that made no sense, that moved and shifted until they had no ending, things moving in them, never quite visible, too many angles, too few, walls and floor and ceiling all the same, no depth, no space in the world. Walking forward felt like falling. Or climbing. Walking upside down. The room was huge as the space between the heavens. Flat and tiny like the page of a book.

  Orhan had seen it built. Agreed its design principles. Argued with the craftsmen over the price. He’d watched a boy of six stick tiny tiles down into wet mortar, his face screwed up, already half blind. Like the doors, it still smelled faintly of glue and hot metal and men’s hands. His skin crawled. Cold sweat running down his clothes. Utter terror as he stepped forward. This room, this room is the power of life and death and the God. The centre of the world.

  At the end of the room, floating in the jewels, the great golden throne. Hard to look at, like it had no shape. But the eyes were pulled to it, even as the patterns moved. Painful. It hurt to look. It hurt to look away. The greatest power in this dying dreaming mummified dust city. The centre of the centre of the world.

  “You are dismissed as Nithque,” the Emperor had said to him in this room yesterday. “I do not believe these stories. Of course I do not. But I cannot have you as my Nithque, now, even so. Pray to the God that there is nothing more.” And all his hopes in ashes, there, in those words, everything that he had tried to do, all his crimes for naught.

  Darath and Orhan knelt. Darath bent his body forward, awkwardly angled, back curved. Orhan knelt upright, back perfectly straight but head deeply bent. Like a man offering up his neck to the blade. One of only two men who had the right to kneel upright before the Asekemlene Emperor, the Eternal, the Ever Living, the radiant dawn light of the Sekemleth Empire of the Golden City of Sorlost.

  The other man was March Verneth’s heir.

  Everything seemed designed so neatly to remind them all of everything.

  Orhan held the formal pose of his status a moment longer, then prostrated himself fully, face flat on the floor. Stronger smell of glue and workmen’s bodies. The sharp cold stones pressed on his forehead and nose.

  Silence. Dark before his eyes, sparks of colour from the gems as the lamps burned. He could feel Darath beside him. Uncomfortable, unpleasant pose. Still as statues, and his heart pounding and his head hurting and the fear and shock thrumming through him like the beat of a deep drum. Yesterday, he’d last been here. Yesterday. It’s just a room, he thought. He’s just a man. I almost succeeded in killing him. I saw this room in blood and flame. The gems were cutting into his knee caps. Darath shifted, trying to hold still. I’ll have the marks of diamond tiles on my forehead, Orhan thought suddenly, when if ever I’m bid to rise. God’s knives, whatever possessed me? Why didn’t I choose carpet, or Chathean seamarble, or a layer of smooth cool beaten gold? To be condemned to the fire with the marks of floor tiles embossed on my face …

  The Emperor said, “Raise your heads,” in his thin voice.

  “March started it!” Orhan wanted to scream. “He tried to kill me first! I didn’t know about the boy! I didn’t know!” He pushed himself up carefully back to kneeling. Heard Darath’s knees creak. The Emperor sat on his throne looking down at them. A youngish man with a puffy face and a puffy stomach, dressed in black that drained the colour from his skin. Orhan kept his eyes fixed carefully on the bones of his eternal neck. Never look at his face. Never. Apart from that one mad night. “I didn’t know they were led by a demon!” he wanted to scream. “Tam strung me along! I didn’t know! I didn’t know! I did it to save the city! I thought it was for the best!”

  “The Lord of the Rising Sun. The Lord of All That Flowers and Decays.” The thin voice paused a moment. “I did not summon Lord Vorley, I think.”

  Darath said, “My Lord Emperor, light of all the world, glory of the Empire, radiance of the dawn that sweeps away the dark of night. You did not. But Lord Emmereth’s business … is my own.”

  “Is it?” Orhan could feel the Imperial eyes tracing between them.

  “Yes, My Lord. It is.” The Emperor was eternally alone, without wife or child or parent or lover. And so in all his thousand thousand years of living, he would never understand love, or companionship, or loyalty to one’s heart.

  Pitiable, then, Orhan thought. So raw and lonely. I have Darath. My sister. Bil. My son. Even Amrath seems to have found his Eltheia, unfortunate though that may be for Darath and myself.

  “Very well, then. You may even be right.” The Emperor made a gesture. A pause, then the sound of footsteps approaching across the jewelled floor. Walking slowly. The click of heels on the gems. The Imperial guards behind the throne shifted very slightly. Tensed. A figure came down to kneeling on the other side of him, slowly and uncomfortably, with a creak of knees. Orhan could not move his head to look at the new-comer, visible only as a flickering of gold and scarlet in the corner of his eye. But it was obvious who it must be.

  “Raise your head.”

  Eloise Verneth did so, awkwardly poised in a deep bow. Darath’s knees creaked again.

  “My Lord Emperor, eternal glory of our eternal city, joy of the Empire, the dawn sun before whom the world turns its face in joy.” Eloise’s voice was afraid.


  “Lady Verneth. Lord Emmereth assured me only yesterday of his shock and grief at your son’s untimely death. Lord Emmereth sadly agreed that he could no longer continue in his role of Nithque. The city is in turmoil, filled with vile lies. You asked me to dismiss him. I dismissed him. I had ordered you both to behave yourselves. I had believed this business at least was at an end. You told me it would be at an end.”

  One should not tremble at a thin petulant voice saying such things.

  Eloise shuddered. Her hands twisted against her dress. “My Lord Emperor … I …” She sounded genuinely, deeply afraid. “Concerning … what happened today, my heart grieves for Lord Emmereth, rejoices that Lady Emmereth and her child live. I give thanks to Great Tanis for His mercy.” And she did, indeed, Orhan thought, she did sound grieved. The note of fear dropped for a moment. “Given that I know, better than any, deeply and painfully and raw in my heart, what it is to mourn a child’s death.”

  At least your child had forty years of life behind him, Orhan almost thought. The room fell silent. Darath’s knees creaked. Everybody weighing up everything, the Emperor trying to think where to go.

  Eloise was weeping. Orhan saw that from the far corner of his eye, the tears wet on her face. The Emperor saw it, he thought. The Emperor was frightened by her tears. By the love and grief in this room.

  The Emperor said carefully, “Lord Emmereth and Lord Vorley rescued the Empire from great peril. Far greater, it now seems, than even they knew. We all owe them thanks and praise. Your son, Lady Verneth, began this, I believe. I was displeased by his actions then. I am equally displeased by what has happened now.”

  Eloise seemed to flinch. “My Lord Emperor …”

  “Lady Verneth. Your son’s death was unfortunate. It was deeply”—the head turning towards Orhan—“deeply to be regretted. I mourn for your loss, and your grandchildren’s. I fervently hope such a thing will not occur again. As I told Lord Emmereth only yesterday. Lord Emmereth’s household has now also been the victim of a cowardly outrage. This too I fervently hope will not occur again. Am I clear?”