“He wanted to serve the Empire and make father proud, more than anything,” Pinion said. “You gave him the chance to prove himself. I hope I can find such a friend, if I fail the examinations.”
There was a bitter note in his voice. I remembered my own examinations. The pressure to perform, the certainty that I would fail.
“I’m sure you will succeed,” I said.
“I wish that I didn’t have to,” he said suddenly, his bitterness flowering into anger. “Oriole wanted to be Hand of the Emperor. I never did. What’s worse is I can’t even say anymore what I would do instead. When I was younger, I loved to paint--but was that only a childish fancy, or the hint of some other vocation I might have had, if Oriole had succeeded and I had been allowed to fade into his shadow?”
He breathed deeply and shut his eyes. “I ought not to be telling you all of this. Only…”
He trailed off. I considered whether to let the conversation die, or to share my own frustrations and make myself vulnerable as he had. Here was a chance to sow the seeds of a new friendship, to show Pinion that he was not alone in his doubts.
“I can’t say, either,” I said at last. “The examinations were the path my father chose for me. I tried to be a good son, and I did well. Well enough to find myself on a new path, even more constrained. But that is the nature of life in the Empire. So many choices are made for us.”
“The son must always suborn his will to the father,” Pinion said wryly. “And the Emperor is father of all.”
“What can we do, but do what seems right?” I said. “Does it seem right, to you, to take your brother’s place and become Hand of the Emperor?”
“It does,” he said. “But is that because it is, or only because it is the path that every logogram of imperial doctrine would bid me walk?”
“A good question,” I said.
“What about you? Does going to An-Zabat seem right?”
At first, I thought to say no, that An-Zabat--like Iron Town--had been chosen for me. Then I remembered the story of Naphena and her oasis, a miracle wrought from magic.
Naphena herself had died in the crafting of her spell, but she might have left a legacy--students, or at least some clue to how she had performed such a miracle. A thought that sent a thrill of excitement and anticipation through me, for the first time since Iron Town.
“It does,” I said. “But only because I have found my own reasons to press on.”
“Well,” Pinion said, and smiled. “Farewell, Alder. May both our paths be as golden as they seem.”
He took the broom and left me by Oriole’s grave, where I waited, alone, imagining the wonders I would see in An-Zabat. Its mighty domes and soaring towers. Its new people, neither Sienese nor Nayeni. And its oasis, birthed by magic, a clue--I dared to dream--to the mystery I had sought to unravel my entire life.
* * *
My father spent the whole of my brief visit home indoctrinating me in his various mercantile interests, insisting that I keep an eye out for merchants selling wares from the western lands beyond the waste that he could turn around for a high profit. Olives. Muslin. A certain violet dye. And to keep an eye out for buyers of silk and cinnabar.
I listened, and looked over his charts and books of accounts, but reminded him that I would be Minister of Trade and could not be seen to interfere to the benefit of my own family.
He pursed his lips and waved his hand in blanket dismissal.
“All that moralism was well and good for the examinations, but why would fathers spend so much on tutors if not as an investment?” he said. “You’re going to be an imperial bureaucrat. Corruption is expected!”
A statement to which I did not respond, but which only deepened the divide between us.
I was not sure what I had hoped for from this visit home. Comfort, perhaps. A brief return to the simplicities of my early childhood, before Koro Ha, before I was fire-named, when life was little more than a meandering journey from one amusement to the next, bereft of complex questions, pressures, and griefs. Interrupted only by the occasional anomaly, such as my uncle’s unannounced visit, and the soldiers who had come in search of him.
But there could be no unloading the burdens I carried. However much I longed for a simpler past, the future would come for me. As the time for my departure to An-Zabat drew near my anxiety conjured old recurring nightmares--the steps of the temple, my twisted flesh and brittle bones, the blazing eyes of the wolf gods watching from every forest shadow. Dreams no less terrifying for their familiarity.
And, if I was honest with myself, the past had never been simple. After Iron Town, all that I had suppressed of my grandmother's lessons had been stirred back up, left to float about the confines of my skull, agitating questions I had long thought settled.
The rebellion had killed Oriole, my only friend, but neither one of us would have been put in the path of violence if not for the Empire and its need to tighten its grip on Nayen. Worse, the magic the Empire offered me--the very thing that had enticed me away from my grandmother's path and into the Emperor's service--had failed to save Oriole's life. What was the point in learning a magic so constrained, so useless when I needed to reshape the world most?
The nightmares continued, now delivering me to that blood-soaked courtyard as often as the Temple of the Flame. I took to avoiding sleep and wandering my father’s gardens at night until exhaustion finally dragged me to bed for a few dreamless hours before sunrise. On one such sleepy, meandering walk, my feet carried me to the garden gate, then to the foot of the path that led to the Temple of the Flame.
New weeds had sprouted between broken roof tiles. The stone wolves were less menacing than they had been when I was a decade younger and half as tall. Yet when I walked past them, I felt a tingling down the back of my neck, as though they had turned to follow me with their eyes. I ignored the feeling. They were only stone, no matter that their eyes were fire and they spoke with human tongues in my nightmares.
In the temple hall there were paw prints in the dust--a fox, or a mountain dog--but no sign of human visitors. The flame in the altar’s heart had gone out; its stone surface was cool beneath my fingers.
Treasonous nostalgia dredged pleasant memories of that place. My grandmother had known me like no other person in the world. I could never share the side of myself that was cultivated here--beneath the buckling eaves and faded murals, on the swollen wood of the floor--with anyone else. Even Oriole had known only a fragment of me. Could I go on presenting only a curated self forever, living an identity tailored to the needs and pressures of Empire?
For a tortuous moment I wished that my grandmother had taken me with her, when she went north to join the rebellion.
Like the taste of delicacy melting on the tongue, or the sound of a fading note, that feeling passed. Her path would not have led to freedom, either. Only a different set of limitations, different shackles upon my power and my future. She may have cared for me, and done the best she could for me, but she understood as little as Hand Usher, and could give me even less.
I felt an overwhelming need for some memento of this, my final visit to the Temple of the Flame. A reminder that I once wielded magic without witch-marks or the canon, and that I would someday do so again.
I thought at once--as though the thought were forced upon me by an outside power--of the chest beside the altar. The books were still there, but they were conspicuous, and would be difficult to keep hidden. Beneath them, swaddled in a bolt of cloth, I found the obsidian knife.
I felt the heft of it, and marveled that this small, primitive weapon had dealt me so much grief. It was perfect. A memento meaningless to anyone not inducted into the rites of witchcraft, yet rich in meaning to me.
On the way back to my rooms, I was surprised to see a figure, dressed in a wispy robe beneath a heavy shawl, holding a lantern that cast a halo of warm light in the midnight dark of my father’s garden.
“I heard you wandering the grounds,” my mother said. Her gaze
drifted to the forest behind me. “I thought you had put such things behind you.”
“I couldn’t sleep.” An odd shame struck me, like I was a child caught sneaking sweets from the kitchens. I tucked the obsidian knife up my sleeve.
“There is something I have wanted to say to you,” my mother said, and trailed off. She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “There was never a good opportunity. Always we were…well…Sienese mothers so rarely have a chance to be alone with their sons.”
“Save when they’re sick,” I said.
She smiled at that, but her expression quickly regained its gravity.
“I know what your grandmother taught you,” she said. “She taught my brother, too, and dragged him into her desperate, vengeful war against the Empire. And…well, you have seen what that war is like, now. She is a madwoman, Alder. You must forget everything. Her stories. Her magic. All of it.”
“Even that the Empire killed your father?” I said.
My mother had been practising the poise and demureness expected of Sienese wives all her life. She showed a flicker of anger, quickly doused.
“Especially that,” she said firmly, with a note of command in her voice, as though I were still toddling at her knee. “I’m sure you have heard that the Emperor knows the thoughts of his Hands.”
My every unkind assumption about her seemed, in that moment, to be vindicated. I thought of the other Nayeni women I had met--my grandmother, Frothing Wolf, her daughters. My mother was so much weaker. Given over to rumor and fear.
“Which of us is Hand of the Emperor?” I said. “Which of us would know the truth of what the Emperor does and does not do?”
“No rumor so oft repeated is truly baseless,” she said. “You think little of me. I see it in your face. But you have no idea what I have done for you, to keep you safe in a world that should have killed us. You will be far from Nayen, which is good. Put it all behind you. Her stories, and her magic.”
“I am Hand of the Emperor. I wield sorcery and command armies. Who in the Empire is safer?” I offered a smile, showing warmth I did not feel, then strode past her. “Good night, mother. We both should get some sleep.”
Back in my rooms I stowed the knife in an old brush case, sealed the latch with wax, and hid it at the bottom of the black trunk that carried a transcript of my examination essays, a collection of the sages’ writings that Koro Ha had given me, and the books on An-Zabati language and culture. Despite my mother’s warnings, my visit to the Temple of the Flame seemed to have had the desired effect. My sleep that night--and for many nights after--was untroubled by anxious dreams. Instead, my mind conjured the wonders that awaited me in the west, by way of an audience with the Emperor, in the distant city of An-Zabat. And--if I distinguished myself--to the Academy Quarter, where, if Hand Usher could be believed, some scholars still studied the deeper truths of magic.
If there was a third path toward magic and freedom to be found, I would find it there, and I would swallow my growing distaste for the Empire long enough to seek it.
Part Three
Hand of the Emperor
Chapter Fifteen
The Thousand-Armed Throne
Two months later, Usher and I disembarked from the warship Winds of Great Fortune at the city of River Wall, on the north coast of the River Sien. Hand Usher and I spent a night there in the magistrate’s house, and the next day boarded the Golden Barge, a luxurious river ship that ferried the Emperor’s servants to Northern Capital. The Barge’s cedar planks were stained deep red, and every oar was decorated with gold filigree. The captain and crew of the ship were the most decorated veterans in the imperial navy. The oarsmen, they informed me, were peasants conscripted for a year’s service to the Emperor.
Such press-ganging had yet to come to Nayen. Here, in the heart of the Empire, no one feared revolt.
As we made brisk time up the slow-moving river, I drank in my first sights of inland Sien. I had grown up in a land of mountains, hills, and forests; of shadows and creatures lurking in the dark. The country we traveled through was flat as an inkstone by comparison. The few hills were gentle and rolling and blanketed in wheat, corn, and sunflowers. We passed sprawling settlements that I took for major towns. Hand Usher laughed and said that these were villages, with twenty thousand souls at most.
The city was heralded by a forest of buildings that grew denser as we traveled northward. Then, like a mountain range appearing on the horizon, we saw the city wall. It stretched to the east and west, seemingly without end. Soldiers, little more than silhouetted specks against the blue sky, walked its battlements. We passed between off-set guard towers, each mounted with a ballista designed to hurl grenades large enough to shatter any warship, then beneath the vast arch of the Southern River Fortress Gate. The wedged spikes of its portcullis were wide as two men abreast.
I imagined we would reach the Eternal Citadel--the Emperor’s palace--by nightfall, but the city sprawled on and on. Mooring docks jutted into the river like the uneven teeth of a tavern brawler. Fishermen threw nets from the piers and hauled in as much filth as fish. Other ships of the imperial navy slipped past broad merchant barges and pleasure yachts bedecked in gold that trailed ribbons of silk and peacock feathers. On land a cacophonous mix of carts, livestock, market stalls, rickshaws, palanquins, beggars, and guard patrols jostled past each other on streets that meandered through the urban landscape like the threads of a spiderweb. The private gardens of wealthy urbanites decorated the landscape with rare flecks of green.
“Every soul in Nayen could be housed in a quarter of this city,” Hand Usher said. He stroked his clean-shaven neck--for even he would not appear slovenly before the Emperor. “You get used to the smell eventually.”
Not until noon on our second day in the city did we see the palace. Its sweeping roofs rose above the urban sprawl like waves of liquid gold. We turned onto a canal that led through another gate faced in marble and carved with sea-drakes, into the Emperor’s personal harbor. The captain of the Golden Barge flew Hand Usher’s banner, and by the time the boarding plank was lowered a palanquin waited on the pier to receive us.
While it carried us to our guest house, Hand Usher explained the maze of walls and buildings we traversed. The Eternal Citadel was a city-within-a-city, as large as Iron Town and populated by the families of the Emperor and his Voices--as well as by the Emperor’s Fist, his personal guard of one thousand elite soldiers. Hand Usher pointed out the spire of the Imperial Academy’s observatory tower in the distance, and I felt a renewal of my ambition. One day I would have a place there, away from the complexities of politics and the horrors of war, free to puzzle over the great riddles of the world, magic foremost among them.
The palanquin delivered us to the Gatehouse Garden, which outshone even the opulence of Voice Golden-Finch’s estate. Small houses, pavilions, and gazebos had been built to blend into a landscape of sapphire ponds, emerald foliage, and striking artificial cliffs. Tawny deer, peacocks, and all manner of songbirds wandered the garden as though in the wild. The smell of late summer blossoms and incense mingled in the air, and even the servants wore silk and velvet.
Only Empire could produce such opulence. Power flowed out from the Thousand-Armed Throne, and wealth--seized in conquest and tribute--flowed back from every corner of the world. I was impressed but could not help but wonder how many people had died as Oriole had died, in the mud and the rain. Their lives--and the lives of the conquered--were the cost of this luxury.
Hand Usher had justified Sienese conquest as an ideological war against chaos, an effort to unite humanity against the primordial gods. How did he feel, knowing that the wealth that decorated this garden for the Emperor’s guests might have armed a dozen legions? He surveyed it all without expression, and I dared not ask.
* * *
“Remember to breathe,” Hand Usher said. “And don’t lock your knees.”
We sat on marble benches in the antechamber of the Emperor’s reception hall alo
ng with a dozen others, all awaiting our audiences. I was a fidgeting mess, plucking at the vast sleeves of the court robe Hand Usher had given me, running my fingers along the ridged spine of the book of translated poetry I had completed while studying the An-Zabati tongue, which I would present to the Emperor in thanks for my commission.
Hand Usher and Voice Golden-Finch had not recognized my witch’s scars, but the Emperor was nearly a god. I could feel the magic that radiated from him already; a weighty mountain, asserting itself against the natural flow of the pattern. A familiar fear, long tamped down, bubbled within me.
Another young man rose from the bench across the room, scurried to the broad entryway, and vomited onto the marble stairs. I felt an immediate camaraderie with him.
“See?” Hand Usher whispered. “A few nerves are perfectly normal. All you need to do is say ‘I, your servant, humbly present this gift to the Emperor and accept his commission to the province of An-Zabat.’ Someone will take the book from you. The Emperor may have a few questions, and then we’ll be dismissed. Simple.”
He spoke with casual confidence, but the tips of his fingers played at the hems of his sleeves like a child waiting for an audience with his father, and his eyes darted toward the grand door with the sound of every creaking hinge or echoing footstep.
My fingers curled around the book in my lap. The blue silk that swaddled it was soft against my scars. What worth, I wondered, could a thousand-year-old sorcerer, ruler of the known world--venerated for generations as a living god--find in a simple book of translated poetry? It was the gesture that mattered, of course, to symbolize that all my labors were but a gift to be laid at the Emperor's feet. And the humility of the book was, in truth, not what troubled me. There was nothing simple about bearing secrets into the presence of the divine.
A steward called my name. Hand Usher and I followed him. Our feet echoed on the marble floor as we entered the audience hall through vast doors plated in bronze. Incense wafted between cedar columns and up to wreathe the vaulted ceiling like mist. Lamp stands filled the room with a flickering glow. The ministers of the imperial court lingered silently among the columns, and behind them loomed fifty of the Emperor’s Fist--his personal guard.
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