The Hand of the Sun King

by J. T. Greathouse

  He opened it , filled the cups, and offered me the porcelain one. “Cheers, then.”

  I tried not to grimace at the bite of the liquor against the back of my throat.

  Oriole hissed through his teeth. “Oof. You’ve a taste for the rough stuff.”

  “Not really,” I admitted. “I thought you might.”

  “I’m glad you have such a high opinion of me!” He shook the bottle. “Shame to let it go to waste, though.”

  I offered my cup. The second drink didn’t bite as hard as the first. Oriole offered me the chair, sat down on the edge of his bed, and dragged a trunk between us to serve as a table.

  “I don’t know how much more of this I can drink for its own sake,” Oriole said. “If we’re going to drain this bottle we’ll need to find a pretense. A drinking game, or something.”

  Oh no. My goal was certainly not to drain that bottle.

  “We don’t necessarily need--”

  “I’ve got it!” Oriole sprang to his feet and retrieved a wooden box from his bookshelf. Its top surface was decorated with a pattern of tiny, equally spaced dots. The box held two lidded bowls of small stones--one set white, the other black.

  “Ever play stones before?” Oriole said.

  I had not. The rules of the game were simple, and Oriole quickly explained them to me. The goal of the game was to have more stones on the board than your opponent. Each player placed one stone a turn and could remove opposing stones by surrounding them with their own.

  “Let’s play, but add one extra rule,” he said. “For every five stones you capture, you have to take a drink.”

  That sounded like quite a lot of drinking. Oriole leaned over the board and offered me the bowl of white stones.

  “Alright,” I said, and promised myself that--no matter how drunk I got--I would not follow Oriole out into the city, no matter what adventure he might promise.

  * * *

  “Shit!” Oriole said as I closed a trap and captured six of his stones. “Oh, bleed it, at least you have to drink.”

  He poured for me, and I drained the cup, swallowed a hiccup, and nodded for him to begin his turn. The game had started out slow, but its inner complexities quickly made themselves known. Oriole had a significant lead--which meant he was also significantly more drunk than I was--but I was laying the groundwork for a comeback.

  “Of course, opportunity often distracts from danger.” Oriole said. He held a stone poised above the board and grinned, his eyes sharp and knowing. The stone completed a long, sinewy loop of black that jutted into my territory.

  “How did I miss that?” I blurted.

  Oriole picked up the seventeen stones he had captured, then reached for the bottle “You may outsmart me in most of the ways that matter, oh Hand of the Emperor, but I’m a sneaky bastard when it comes to stones.”

  Already frustrated by the blow he had dealt me in the game, his bitterness rankled me. “There’s no need to be an ass about it, Oriole.”

  “I’m just surprised that I’m beating you.” He drained his cup and refilled it. “We are not all blessed with talent, Alder.”

  “What are you talking about?” I was wine-addled and angry, and remembered Clear-River’s jealousy, and his threats. “You didn’t even sit for the examinations!”

  “Oh, but I did!” Oriole slammed his hand down on the trunk between us. Stones jumped from the board and clattered onto the floor. “I sat for it, and I failed. But what does it matter, eh? It’s not as though I need an imperial commission. My father offered to finance a business for me, and meanwhile our tutor has shifted his focus to Pinion. It seems the younger brother must defer to the elder brother, unless the elder brother proves himself a dunce.”

  I looked to the books on Oriole’s desk, hastily shunted out of the way to make room for liquor and cups.

  “You’re planning to retake it,” I said.

  “Of course I am!” Oriole said. He stared at the ruin of our game, then leaned down to reach for the fallen stones. “We're not all born geniuses, able to pass the fucking thing on our first try, raised from lowly birth to the heights of prestige and power. Some of us are born with bloody expectations around our necks, and spend our whole lives trying to live up to them.”

  He tossed a handful of stones back onto the board. “Hell. None of this is your fault. We should be friendly--if anything, I should show you deference. But every time I look at you, I see you on the stage with Hand Usher, living what I have always wanted, and will never achieve.”

  Oriole wanted to be Hand of the Emperor? Burly, straightforward Oriole, who preferred mythic romances to the literary classics? It was hard for me to imagine what his reason might be, other than the glory of the achievement itself.

  But of course, his father was Voice of the Emperor. Realization struck, and I found myself wondering at his pedigree. How would I have reacted if I had failed, and then the personification of my failure was brought to live in my home? I knelt to help him gather the rest of the stones.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He paused. “What for?”

  “I know what it’s like to live under heavy expectations,” I said. “My father was only a merchant, but he spent most of his small fortune to hire my tutor. And there were…other pressures put on me in my childhood. I can imagine it was worse for you.”

  Oriole slumped back into his chair and started sorting the stones into their respective bowls. “You can imagine, but I doubt your imagination would do it justice. I’m the first eldest son in ten generations to fail the examinations. All their names in the family record are followed by ‘placed rank blah blah blah on the first attempt.’ Not all became Hands or Voices, but my father did, like my grandfather and great-grandfather before him. And now I’ll be a piddling merchant--a mere mention in my brother’s pedigree--when I should have been a general.”

  “No, you won’t,” I said. “You’ll retake it.”

  Oriole tossed the last stone into its bowl. “That’s the plan. Every three years until I pass it, or I die. I’m beginning to think death more likely, especially without a tutor.”

  “I’ll tutor you,” I said.

  The tension between us, which had been lessening as we gathered the stones and spoke of our fathers, began to build again. Oriole scrutinized me, as though searching my face for some trick or a sign of mockery.

  “Think of it as a way of balancing things between us,” I said. “You help me with horsemanship, and I’ll help you with the examination. That way we’ll be equal.”

  It occurred to me as I said this how little equality I had known. My every relationship was constrained by rank and deference to the husband-wife, father-son, and elder brother-younger brother dichotomies.

  Did Oriole, too, long for a refuge from propriety in a freer, more equitable friendship? More importantly--and more worrying--did he see potential for such a friendship with me?

  “I don’t want to waste your time,” Oriole said.

  “I want to help you,” I said, and though I wanted to bite back the next thought, I took the risk of voicing it. “And it won’t be a waste. I half suspect that this is why Hand Usher wanted you to start teaching me horsemanship.”

  “So that you would end up tutoring me?”

  “So that we would become friends.”

  He seemed puzzled, but his expression slowly warmed. “I never understand what that man is thinking.”

  “Me either, most of the time.” I passed him his bowl of stones. “There’s liquor left in that bottle, and I’m finally getting the hang of this game.”

  Chapter Ten

  The Canon of Sorcery

  Weeks later, Hand Usher came to watch my riding lesson, unannounced. The lesson was nearly at an end--I had brought Wheat down to a gentle trot around the field to warm him down--but the old gelding had energy left in him, and I seized the chance to show Hand Usher what I had learned.

  I prodded Wheat up to a canter, then pushed myself up off the saddle till I w
as half-standing in the stirrups. Wheat took the cue to gallop. It felt almost natural, now, to ride the rhythms of his pumping muscles and churning hooves. We circled the field twice before I reined Wheat to a trot, then to a stop beside Hand Usher and Oriole.

  “See?” Oroile said. “As I said, it’s like he was born on horseback.”

  Hand Usher stroked Wheat’s neck. “Well done, Oriole. And thank you. If it is not too much to ask, would you take Wheat back to the stables for us? I’ve a lesson of my own to teach today.”

  Oriole took Wheat's reins and flashed a grin at me. “I'd finally gotten Alder to start brushing and unsaddling him, but I suppose one day without doing his chores can't hurt.”

  I rolled my eyes at him but returned the grin, elated that I had finally overcome Hand Usher's test. While Oriole led the horse away, I made a mental note to buy him a bottle of fine rice wine--something we could actually enjoy together without resorting to a drinking game--to thank him for his long suffering help.

  It was impossible to mask my excitement. My reading in economics, history, and politics had continued, but Hand Usher had taken a hands-off approach. He assigned books for me to read and occasionally initiated conversation about them, but he never engaged in lengthy dialectic as Koro Ha had done, nor did he task me with written compositions.

  Now he would give instruction in person rather than handing me a book. Which meant--I hoped--that he would finally begin to teach me magic.

  A path of cobblestones worked in spiraling patterns that evoked the flow of a river through deadly rapids led us around the artificial lake near our guest house. A narrow pier jutted out over the water to a small pavilion nestled behind the great porous stone at the center of the lake, hiding it from the rest of the garden. Brightly feathered songbirds flitted in wicker cages that hung from the eaves.

  “You and Oriole are getting along,” he said. “That is good.”

  Not a word about my horsemanship, which confirmed what I had suspected about the true cause of the lesson. Were all Hands of the Emperor subjected to such roundabout apprenticeships, I wondered, or only those who studied with Hand Usher?

  “I know you have been dabbling with sorcery,” Hand Usher said, studying an eagle-hawk that had built a nest in the crags of the porous stone. “I have felt the wake of your power in the night. You do nothing with it, which is wise, but you cannot resist the urge.”

  He had maintained an aloof affection, making himself doubly difficult to read. His words were a test, of that I was sure.

  “Is it not wise to examine the horse and tack before mounting?” I said.

  Hand Usher turned toward me, wearing his ghost of a smile. “That almost sounds like a quotation from a sage.”

  “Would it have been better to shirk from sorcery in fear?” I said.

  “Not better,” he said. “Maybe safer, but you have been chosen for power, and must accustom yourself to it.”

  He beckoned me to join him at the railing. A breeze off the lake stirred our robes and the wisps of Hand Usher’s beard. I smelled burnt cinnamon. A liquid shiver ran down my spine. He opened his right-hand over the water, his palm toward the sky. A rolling wake, as from a heavy stone dropped into a pond, unfurled from the tetragram branded there. The silvered lines on Hand Usher’s palm flickered like candle flames, and those flames coalesced into a sphere like opalescent glass.

  At last I would learn to wield and understand this power that I had longed for since childhood. And not in the moon-shadowed ruin of an abandoned temple from an outlawed witch, but in the governor’s own garden, from a Hand of the Emperor. Excitement swept through me, and the heady sensation of magic. I gripped the railing to keep my feet.

  “This is sorcery in its purest form,” Hand Usher said. “Potential itself. The threads from which the ancient gods wove the world. Or so myth and legend tell. Just as they tell of the heroes and tyrants who swore fealty to those gods, who doled out paltry fragments of power in return, and whose wars plunged the world into chaos. Chaos the Empire was forged to prevent.”

  He shut his fist. The sphere vanished, and with it the ripples of elation, the keenness of eye and mind.

  “Reach for that power,” Hand Usher said. “I know that you know how.”

  My right hand curled tighter against the railing. Again, I reminded myself that this was not forbidden. That Hand Usher meant, really and truly, to share with me the secret I had always thirsted for.

  I held my left hand out over the water and touched the power that churned always beneath those shimmering lines. The songs of the birds around us became delicate as crystal; their feathers shone like stars. Before, I had only touched magic in the dark of night, shut within an ancient temple or my private rooms. Even then, to look at the world while wielding magic was to see its every detail, in all beauty and all ugliness, amplified a thousand-fold. Beneath the bright, noon-day sun, all the world became as though refracted through a lens of light itself.

  “You must remember to breathe, Alder,” Hand Usher said.

  I gasped, filled my neglected lungs, yet my voice was still breathless. “What do I do now?”

  “Do you feel the channels?” Hand Usher said.

  I nodded. They were all around me, patterns imposed by a force outside myself on the magic I held. The stone channels, by which the Emperor had domesticated this world-shaping power. They bent and turned around each other, and I dwelt at the heart of that maze.

  The churn and flow of energy surged around me as I had known it in the Temple of the Flame. But the intractable walls of the canon created a space within those shifting possibilities. A maze to bind my will, and my use of magic.

  “Move into the first channel,” Hand Usher said.

  Confusion gave way to understanding. The channels fed one into the next, I now perceived, like locks in a canal. As the mind moves from thought to thought, I moved into the first channel. My tetragram began to shine, then to flicker.

  “This is the sorcery of transmission, the first power in the canon of sorcery,” Hand Usher said. “With it the Emperor built the rest of the canon, capturing and containing powers granted by the gods to conscript mortal kind into their ceaseless wars. That is the cause of Sien’s slow conquest of the world--to subject these powers to mortal mastery. And, in so doing, to free humankind from the tyranny of the gods.”

  Sorcery poured from my tetragram and out into the world, forming an opalescent sphere that hovered in my hand. I felt the weight of it like an inheld breath, like the apprehensive moment before a difficult decision.

  “By transmission, all our power is delivered unto us, sent from the Emperor to his Voices, and from them to his Hands,” Hand Usher said.

  “How do I use it?” I said.

  “Release that sorcery and attend to mine,” Hand Usher said.

  I retreated from the first channel and felt relief as the magic trickled out of me. Sorcery--at least, this first kind of sorcery--was a burden to hold, not the unfettered joy and wonder I had known in the moment before my first, failed veering.

  “We cannot wield transmission,” Hand Usher said. “Only the Emperor may control it, for with it any Hand or Voice might shape a competing canon of his own. There must only be one. One canon, one Emperor, for that way lies the end of chaos. But the rest of the canon is ours to command.”

  Now that I understood the maze of channels, I was able to follow the motion of Hand Usher’s will when he reached for sorcery. This time he did not linger in the first channel but pressed on into the second. I gasped as sensation washed through me--another breath of cinnamon, the warmth of sun-flushed skin, a chill wind in my lungs.

  Lightning flashed from Hand Usher’s tetragram. Steam billowed where it speared into the lake. Hand Usher closed his fist.

  “Once, the Girzan horse lords howled prayers to their many-winged storm gods and hurled bolts of holy lightning down upon their enemies,” Hand Usher said. “Magic we now wield as battle-sorcery. The first of the six sorceries, other than tr
ansmission, that comprise the canon.”

  It was a simple thing to emulate him, to move from the first channel into the second. I splayed my fingers and battle-sorcery poured from me.

  There were subtleties of form and timing by which Hand Usher hurled darts of lightning or held a blade of iridescent light. But the limitations of the canon were clear. The spell had already been cast. The Hand only gave it direction.

  The excitement that had been bubbling in my veins flattened and left me feeling leaden and hollow. A lump filled my throat, and pressure built behind my eyes, like I was a toddling child with a scraped knee. Hand Usher spoke of rivers, of herds, of ever-present lightning and the whorl of stars, all metaphors. It took all my attention and will to stand quietly and pretend to listen, to keep from lashing out in anger, or collapsing in a weeping, defeated puddle. There was nothing I could learn from him—nothing true. Nothing with the weight and meaning I had felt when I touched magic in its purer form, unconstrained by the canon of sorcery, unbounded even by witchcraft.

  I had come so far from that horrible night on the overgrown path. Yet I had made no real progress at all. All he told me in that first lecture, I already knew. Every creature, every stone, every drop of water, is but a painting that captures a single moment in the eternal exchange of energies that is the pattern of the world. It was this pattern that I felt when I knelt in the Temple of the Flame and tried to copy my grandmother’s magic. Magic--in all its forms--breaks that natural pattern and imposes one of its own.

  But we Hands of the Emperor did not reshape the pattern to our own design. We could only choose where and when to impose the Emperor’s will, transmitted through his canon.

  I closed my fist, squeezed until I felt my fingernails bite flesh, pressed my frustrations into the meat of my palm. I longed for understanding and mastery of magic--of the pattern itself, and the inscrutable, wonderful, terrifying power I had touched that first, fateful night. Mastery that the canon had been designed to deny me. If I damaged the mark, desecrating the symbol of the Emperor's power, could I free myself from those limitations? Begin to learn, again, the deeper magic that had offered the promise of a third path and a future of my own making?