The Tower of Living and Dying

by Anna Smith Spark

  The things you learnt.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  In the blazing afternoon sunshine the Emperor’s litter arrived at the Temple. It floated in the heavy light, a great black box reminding Orhan of the black entranceway of the Great Chamber so obscenely exposed. Carved of bone that was said to be dragon bone, dug out of the sands of the eastern desert barely a day’s walk beyond the city walls. Hard and dry and silvery, knotted ends like tumours, cold to the hand like thick cracked ice. Blue flames licked the curtains of the litter. Raced over the cold cold metallic bones. Basins of ammalene resin, dried lavender, dried mint, copperstem flowers preserved like sugared roses, a servant in gold and silver net like fish scales scattering them before the litter, the lumps of incense smouldering on the stones. Let the feet of those who carry the Emperor never touch the city’s ground.

  “All kneel! All kneel for the Ever Living Emperor! The Emperor comes!”

  The litter bearers wore hoods and masks so that one never saw their faces. Embroidered all over with pure white pearls. They walked with a slow, heavy, rolling, tripping gait. The God alone knew if they were even human. Demons summoned up from the bones of the litter, yoked to it by the power of the God. Immortal and ageless and mindless and formless, inhuman things of light and shadow, curling teeth and curling horns. Or servants in padded costumes. Sworn to silence for cheap effect.

  From out of the litter a man emerged. A thick black cloak covering his face. So great his grief for his city that he could not bear to let the light touch his skin. He was carried up the steps of the Great Temple in a golden chair canopied with simiseren feathers, in which, it was noted, he sat awkwardly twitching and hunched. So great his grief for his city that he boiled with pain in his chair. In black-gloved hands he carried a single white candle, as offering for the God. His life, Orhan told the soldiers closest to him in an awed whisper. His life he would pledge, to die when the candle died, to purchase the lives of all in the city, to suffer in exchange for his people’s salvation all the agonies of death and rebirth.

  What exactly transpired in the Great Temple no one but the God and the man in the black cloak would ever know. Except that it didn’t last very long. After what seemed to Orhan no time at all the golden chair was carried out again and the black-cloaked man placed back in his litter. “All kneel! All kneel for the Ever Living Emperor! The Emperor comes!” The soldiers shouted a cheer as the litter departed swaying and rolling.

  Lady Amdelle, robed in cloth of silver with a headdress of red glass, came to the Temple a little later in the first lengthening evening shadows, bringing her son and half of her household in her train. They lit a hundred beeswax candles. Lady Amdelle dedicated a moonstone the size of a serving plate and a rope of green pearls as long as a man’s body and a statuette of a magnolia tree in flower cut from a white striped ruby, only as tall as a child’s finger but so perfectly carved that every flower had petals and stamen and pollen grains. Lord Aviced followed her, weighed down in a coat encrusted with jewels, half his household following in torn clothing with bowed heads. He lit a hundred candles, dedicated a golden bowl of hens’ teeth and an emerald the size of his clasped fists. Both, it was noted, threw gifts of gemstones and coins to the soldiers tending the fires. Lady Amdelle, it was noted, bent her head before one of the pyres and wept. To Orhan’s astonishment, Eloise Verneth followed, all in white and yellow, mirrors on her gown reflecting his puzzled eyes. She stopped her litter and looked at Orhan. A long look he could not understand. She brought the petals of a cetalasophrase preserved in rose oil, a wreath of clear ice that was enchanted against melting, a vine of amethyst grapes with gold and emerald leaves. Her servants gave out bread and cold roast meat to the soldiers. Another couple of lesser nobles, one of them some distant cousin of Darath’s, his face near enough to Darath’s face that the line in the set of his mouth stabbed at Orhan’s heart. A handful of the richest of the merchant families, just about a measurable proportion of those still left alive.

  A kind of calm descended on the city. The desire for violence choked out, smothered like the flames. Sanity returning, people waking to stare at each other, curse themselves and look away, grieving shame for themselves and their city, unaccountable, frightened, sick at heart but also purged and calmed in themselves. It was announced shortly after dawn that the Emperor had died peacefully, His last words a prayer for His people and a thanks to the God for granting His only wish. In the eastern desert, it was rumoured, dragons danced red and green and silver on the wind. The air grew hot and stifling. The city was plagued by clouds of great fat black flies. The House of Flowers stood sealed and silent. Orhan sat outside Bilale’s bedroom, listening to her croon to his son behind layers of locked doors.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  It delighted Nilesh’s heart, that Lord Emmereth was reinstated as Nithque.

  The proclamation was made at midday on the steps of the Summer Palace. Thick crowds swirled around it, had done so since the Emperor’s death was announced. The Emperor had named the Lord of the Rising Sun as Nithque again in place of Lord Tardein, who was too broken with grief at his family’s deaths to go on. The gates of the city were to remain sealed. But the early signs were that the outbreak of plague was coming to an end. The prayers of the Emperor, the great sacrifices made by his people, the purging of the false High Priestess by those who had acted out of love of the God: all of these things had saved them. Great Tanis was merciful indeed.

  “He will help us,” Nilesh assured the woman standing next to her in the Street of Closed Eyes. “He will put things to rights, now.” A regency council was appointed, headed of course by Lord Emmereth, including also Lord Tardein, Lord Amdelle, Remys the new Imperial Presence in the Temple, Lord Lochaiel the new Lord of the Moon’s Light the new Dweller in the House of Silver the late lamented Lord Verneth’s cousin and heir.

  “You see? It will all be well now.”

  The woman next to Nilesh grunted. Grudgingly hopeful, Nilesh thought.

  The city was to remain under curfew. The Great Temple was to remain under guard.

  Mutterings in the crowd at that. Angry, frightened voices. Nilesh sighed at them. Why could they not see?

  The crowd shifted. Soldiers outside the palace. The crowd began reluctantly to disperse. Nilesh began to move with them. She was beginning to think about things like what to do with herself. Clean up the Five Corners and live there, perhaps. Or beg Lord Emmereth for help.

  The man in the green coat, Cauvanh, was suddenly near her. Nilesh felt great surprise that he had not been killed in the Grey Square. He noticed her. Smiled.

  “Hello, Nilesh.”

  “Hello.” She remembered him shouting to the crowd to attack Lord Emmereth on the Temple steps. Drew back from him, afraid.

  Angry.

  “Nilesh?” He seemed sad that she was afraid and angry. “I just want to talk to you.” He had a bruise on his face. He was no longer wearing the green coat, but his shoes were the same and they had dark splashes on them, one was missing a button, its leather torn.

  “Go away,” she hissed at him.

  “You should be pleased,” Cauvanh said. “Your Lord Emmereth is Nithque again. He would not have been restored to his power had the rioting not broken out.”

  “Go away.”

  He looked saddened. “Keep safe, Nilesh. Go inside. Stay there.”

  “Why?”

  He shook his head. Went off into the crowd. She heard, she thought, his voice raised talking to a woman in a red dress. “… And why should the Temple remain under guard?”

  Nilesh stood in the street. Confused. Everything was good again. Peaceful. Lord Emmereth Nithque. The city restored. She remembered Bilale talking with real excitement of some plans Lord Emmereth had to clean and improve the housing in Fair Flowers.

  If only Lord Vorley would recover, she thought. Lord Vorley was in some way an enemy to Bilale. Yet to think of Lord Emmereth having to live without him grieved Nilesh’s heart.

 
; She went back to the Five Corners. She had got the door mostly open, one of the women living further down the street had got her son to help. The rotting bodies still sat in the hallway, by the fountain, slumped on their beds. But she had found a storeroom that was clean. Soon, she thought, she would ask the soldiers patrolling the streets to help her. She had seen them stripping clean the baker’s house opposite, where all the inhabitants seemed to have died.

  Noise woke her in the darkness. Shouts and cries. The rioting, she thought in horror. Lord Emmereth! Bilale! She pulled on her clothes and ran out into the street. Torchlight flickered on the walls. People stirring, stretching their heads from the windows, peering out. What is it? What is it?

  A man came running towards her. He came from the direction of the palace. He was shouting, so fast and panicked Nilesh could barely understand.

  “The Immish! The Immish! God’s knives!”

  “What? What’s happening?” A woman in the street grabbed his hand. “Sit down! Tell me!”

  “The Immish! Ah, God! I need to get back to my home! Bar your doors! Pray!”

  He pushed the woman away, ran on.

  Nilesh stood staring after him. People in the street were staring after him, talking, repeating “the Immish” in confused tones. What is it? What? More shouting, coming from the direction of the palace, the direction the man had come from.

  The bell of the Great Temple began to sound. The twilight bell. Ringing out loud in the dark. It sounded like the strangest thing in all the world.

  On and on.

  “The Immish.” “The Immish.”

  Nilesh began to run in the direction of the shouts.

  The Temple bell fell silent. As terrifying as when it had begun to ring. More and more people were running, milling, standing staring caught in the flood. Everywhere the cries “what is it?” and the confused words “the Immish have come.” Nilesh ran on. Legs shaking. Bilale! she kept thinking. Bilale! Bilale! She came to the Court of the Broken Knife. An overturned candle beneath the faceless statue, a man sitting beside it panting, a crowd around him buzzing like flies. He was talking, telling them something, the crowd shouted angrily, swirled in the square, the same angry words. “The Immish!”

  “What is he saying?” Nilesh asked a woman on the edge of the crowd.

  “The Immish have come,” the woman said. She was weeping. “Returned. Not just the palace. Soldiers. So many soldiers. We are overrun.”

  They had come in at dusk. The Maskers’ Gate had been opened, though at dusk it should have been sealed and sealed. A company of soldiers, an army, thousands, heavily armed, a magelord at their head. The city was surrounded, besieged, occupied. The Immish were rounding up the great families. Killing them in their beds without mercy. Killing everyone.

  “I don’t believe it,” a voice shouted. “It’s another trick, like the last time.”

  “I saw them!” another voice shouted. “Immish soldiers.”

  “To the palace!” A third voice. “Defend the city!” People began to move.

  Nilesh looked at the faceless statue. Remembered the dead bodies piled in the Grey Square.

  She followed the flow of the crowd down Moon and Sunlight. Through the Court of Evening Sorrows. Down the Street of Bones. On the corner of Gold Street and the Street of Children a knife-fighter lay in the dust. Abandoned. As though the fighting had been cut off in the midst, before he had been killed. Before the gates to the House of Glass two men sat with wounds and bloody knives. “The Immish!” they shouted hoarsely. “Go back to your homes! It’s too late! Too late!”

  Lord Emmereth, thought Nilesh. Bilale. Oh, Bilale.

  A troop of soldiers came towards them, down the Street of All Sorrows. The crowd stopped.

  They were not Imperial soldiers. They were not armoured in shining gold.

  Their armour was black. Thick, heavy corselets. Black helmets covering their faces, moulded into blank metal faces through which their eyes stared. They carried spears that ended in crescent hooks.

  “The Immish,” the crowd whispered.

  A couple of the spears were already stained dark with blood.

  A soldier at the head of the troop strode forward. His helmet had a thick crest, like a horse’s mane. He did not have a spear. Carried a drawn sword.

  “People of Sorlost,” he shouted. “Go back to your homes. The Immish Great Council has heard of your troubles. Murder. Treachery. Plague. The betrayal of your Temple to the Altrersyr demon king. And now the terrible death of your Emperor. The rightful Nithque, Lord Tardein, fearing for your safety, has appealed to the Immish Great Council for aid. And Immish has answered! We come to bring you and your children peace!”

  Silence. The crowd shifted. The terrible spear hooks lowered behind the man with the crested helmet. Hooked blades reaching towards the crowd.

  The man with the crested helmet said something in a different language to his soldiers. They took a step forward.

  “Go back to your homes,” the man with the crested helmet went on. “Your city is safe. The Imperial Palace and the Temple are guarded. The Nithque Lord Tardein will address you tomorrow. You must return home.”

  The hooked blades beckoned like fingers.

  The crowd murmured and shifted. Began to move back away.

  Lord Emmereth is the Nithque, thought Nilesh.

  I don’t … I don’t understand.

  She remembered again conversations she had overheard between Bilale and Lady Amdelle. Lord Verneth, Lord Rhyl, Lord Tardein, Lord Emmereth. Treachery and betrayal. Everything going round and round. She went slowly back down the Street of All Sorrows. Down the Street of Gold. The knife-fighter still sat in the corner, clutching his wound. There was another troop of black-armoured soldiers in the Court of the Broken Knife. The man who had sat beneath the statue had gone. She went back to the Five Corners. Lay down in the storeroom with a chair pressed up against the door.

  “Your city has fallen into great turmoil,” a voice shouted in the street. “You have been betrayed and conspired against. But we come now to your aid.”

  The Immish soldiers filed out through the city. Guards at the gates of the palace. Guards in the Great Temple, watching over the priestesses and Remys the new Imperial Presence. Guards in the Grey Square, in the Court of the Fountain, in the Court of the Broken Knife. Guards around the House of the East, the House of Flowers. Guards around the House of Breaking Waves where the true Nithque Lord Tardein tried to talk with an Immish general instead of weep for the death of his only son.

  Six thousand men in black iron armour, black helmets that covered their faces like the priestesses’ masks, crescent-shaped hook-bladed spears, fat stabbing swords. A mage in a silver robe. A representative of the Immish Great Council who dreamed of trade opportunities. A general in the Immish army who had once hanged the Telean nobility from a gateway after a company of mercenaries betrayed the city to his spears.

  Sorlost. The Eternal, the Golden City. The most beautiful, the first, the last, the undying. The unconquered. The unconquerable. The greatest of cities, that was old before Tarboran built her tombs, before the Godkings were even born. Its walls have never been breached: even Amrath himself dashed his armies to pieces against them to no avail and gave up in despair. Oh city of shit and sunlight! Oh city of dawn and the setting sun! So weak and defenceless and worn down. A dead man’s dreaming. A useless heap of crumbled rock. The decaying heart of the decayed remnant of the richest empire the world had ever known.

  Sold to the Immish by March Verneth may the God Great Tanis the Lord of Living and Dying blast his bones to ashes, and Eloise Verneth may the God Great Tanis the Lord of Living and Dying choke her lungs with gold dust, and Cammor Tardein may the God Great Tanis the Lord of Living and Dying run his veins with molten lead. Sold for gold and diamonds. Sold for fear and honour. Sold for hate. Sold for revenge.

  Such precious things.

  Orhan Emmereth is a prisoner in his study. He hears his wife and his son weeping through th
e walls. His sister is a prisoner in her bedroom. She beats on the door begging her husband to let her out. His lover lies a prisoner on his sickbed. He stirs in his sleep and calls Orhan’s name.

  “Traitor! Murderer! Monster! You did this! You brought this on us! I killed people for you! Because I believed in you! I’ll see you and everything that’s yours die in screaming pain! I swear!”

  And how much will a man sacrifice, to make the world a better place?

  PART SEVEN

  THE PLACE OF THE DEAD

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Illyr did not, of course, fall to him in one battle, as Ith had done.

  As Marith had said to Thalia, he didn’t want it to. No mercy. No accepting their surrender. The descendants of the traitors who had defied Amrath. Abandoned Him, turned on Him, torn His watch towers and fortresses down. Killed any number of Marith’s ancestors, saying they would have no more of demon-spawned kings. They wanted to fight for every scrap of ground he would rip from them? Then he’d fight them. Really fight them. Really make them suffer. Every village. Every field. Mageries and gods and magics, they’d throw at him, all the power that had destroyed his ancestors, and he’d show them.

  The dragon looked to be even more fun than the shadows. His punishment on them. The way it killed things, the sheer power and weight in it, the glorious utter absurdity, “a dragon killed them,” “my dragon killed them,” “I sent the dragon and it burned them all to ash.” It hated him, bucked beneath his control of it, spoke to him with pain begging to be let free. Loved him. Knew that in him, at last, it had found a thing more terrible than itself. It made him almost ashamed, sometimes. To have something that vast and terrifying bound to his control.