The Hand of the Sun King

by J. T. Greathouse

  A spike of fear struck me, and I checked the seals on my luggage. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed, but I had to be certain. I unpacked the volumes of the sages’ writings that Koro Ha had given me, then searched through layers of documents and scrolls until I found the brush case in which I had hidden my grandmother’s knife. Only when I saw that the wax seal on its latch was still intact could I relax.

  My heartbeat slowed as I repacked everything, resealed the trunk, and flopped onto my bed. A long journey and a few too many cups of wine had left me exhausted. That was all this was, I told myself. Drunken foolishness.

  I lay awake for some time, that word--Easterling--winding its way through my mind. And just as sleep took me, I realized that of the three sorcerers Hand Cinder would most likely be tasked with my instruction in the canon.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Minister of Trade

  The next morning, I sought out Voice Rill as soon as my head stopped pounding and my stomach settled. I found him in the Gazing Upon Lillies pavilion, which stood in the center of the largest pond in the citadel. Ribbons of light like mercury wafted from Voice Rill’s forehead, leaving behind the familiar heavy wake of transmission. I waited on the bridge to the pavilion until the light and wake faded as Rill finished his daily communication with the Emperor.

  “You impressed Hand Alabaster last night,” Rill said when I joined him. “That is not an easy thing to do.”

  I thanked him and could not help but add; “There is a reason I was given this posting at such a young age.”

  Voice Rill stroked his shaved cheeks. The tetragram on his forehead glimmered like the surface of the pond.

  “Indeed. And you will go far, I think,” he said. “You have the same eager face I wore when I was a young Hand. I first served in Toa Alon, you know--ah, perhaps you don’t. It has been a province of the Empire so long there is hardly reason to draw its borders on the newer maps. A beautiful country, full of lush mountains and temples built of uncut stone. Gorgeous flora and fauna--some more dangerous than beautiful, though. Famous healers as well, the Toa Aloni. No longer, of course…”

  He trailed off and peered out over the waters.

  “I am eager to begin my work,” I said. “And to resume my training. I had only begun to master the canon under Hand Usher. Perhaps, if he has time, Hand Alabaster could--”

  “You will master the canon in due time, Hand Alder,” Voice Rill said. “This province places heavy demands upon us. Your duties as Minister of Trade must come first.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  My role, Voice Rill explained, would entail the setting and collection of tariffs and taxes, the monitoring of weights and measures, the management of mineral rights to the Batir Waste, and--most importantly--maintaining the tenuous relationship between the windcallers and the Sienese merchants who relied upon their windships.

  “The waste devours caravans,” Rill said as he led me to the secluded Wind Through Grass pavilion, which would be my office. “Out of every three soldiers who marched from Sien to conquer this city, two died of thirst. Without the windcallers, there can be no trade in An-Zabat.”

  Here, at least, was an anchor for my curiosity. To do my duty well I would have to learn as much as possible about the windcallers and their magic--including the goddess’ miracle.

  “Naturally, all of this will be done through intermediaries,” Voice Rill said. “There is a robust bureaucracy in An-Zabat, and the merchants work closely with our subordinate ministers. We are fortunate in that we can do most of our duty from this garden, though Cinder chafes at the quantity of paperwork.”

  “Surely there are some tasks better done in person out in the city,” I said, grasping for some legitimate excuse to wander beyond the walls. “Meetings with the Windcallers, or other important An-Zabati, for example.”

  Rill chuckled softly. “You are a Hand of the Emperor now, Alder. Any An-Zabati you might wish to speak with should be summoned here. To go to them would be to belittle your office, a grave violation of propriety. No. What little business you must conduct in person will be done so within this garden.”

  A disappointing notion, but I refused to let it dampen my mood. One question nagged at me. Innocent enough, it seemed to me, and one that Voice Rill could answer.

  “I do not mean to seem insolent,” I said, “but why are the windcallers permitted to use their magic? In every other region of the Empire--save the rebellious north of Nayen--native magic has been added to the canon or eradicated. Hand Usher spoke with deep reverence of the Emperor’s mission to free humanity from the chaos of old gods and older superstition and bring all under his guiding rule. Is that not our purpose here?”

  Voice Rill paused on the path and narrowed his eyes. The tetragram on his forehead, too, seemed to study me, as though the Emperor himself had heard my question. I remembered Clear-River’s threats, and my mother’s warnings, and it occurred to me that while the Emperor may not know the thoughts of his Hands, he surely knew the minds of his Voices. I wondered if I had offended him--Rill, the Emperor, or both--and readied an apology.

  “An-Zabat is unsustainable without trade,” Voice Rill said. “There is a green belt watered by the oasis, and a few crops grow there, but the city long ago swelled beyond the ability to feed itself. We have tried the ordinary methods to induct the magic of the windcallers into our canon--capturing and interrogating practitioners, and so on. No windships sailed to or from An-Zabat for a year, and the city nearly starved. We will have their secrets, one day, but for the time being you will negotiate with them.”

  “I will not fail the Empire,” I said, cowed by the severity of his words.

  Rill nodded, his expression softening. “We do not expect you to.”

  * * *

  The Wind Through Grass pavilion bulged with books and documents. Landscape paintings of southern Sien’s verdant mountains hung in every wall space free of shelves and cabinets. A desk stood beneath the north-facing window, which looked out upon a dense bamboo grove that offered shade and privacy. The desk’s few accoutrements included a bell for calling the servants, heavy jade paperweights engraved with a pattern of crawling vines, and a slate bowl for grinding ink. The smell of paper and old incense hung in the air and reminded me of my lessons with Koro Ha.

  My own private Academy, I mused.

  I hesitated as the weight of my responsibilities as Minister of Trade, at last made real by this mountain of ledgers and books, settled on my shoulders. The life and prosperity of a city--and a significant share of the imperial economy--had been thrust into my hands with only a modicum of ceremony.

  There was nothing to do but get to work and hope that Hand Usher had not set me up only to mock my inevitable failure.

  As I dug my way through the shelves, squinting at impressively miniscule handwriting and coughing at the dust that puffed from pages left undisturbed for years, I began to grasp An-Zabat’s economic situation. Almost all the city’s income came from luxury items traversing the Batir Waste. The windships ferried ivory and furs from the frozen north, palm oil, dyes, and spices from the west, and jade, silks, and grain from the Empire across the desert sea. They all made port in An-Zabat, to rest, resupply with food and water, and exchange goods. A lucrative business for investors and speculators, and the taxes collected in An-Zabat were triple the Empire’s total revenues from Nayen.

  I stood at the center of that financial whirlwind and had to keep it spinning--had to make it spin faster, and more expansively, if I could--and it only spun by the good grace of the windcallers. The Empire had conquered An-Zabat, but the windcallers ruled the city’s purse and food supply.

  If I managed my task well, especially if I found some way to break the windcallers’ hold, the Emperor would be unable to refuse me admission to the Imperial Academy--or a Voicehood. At the very least I would become known as more than the Left-Handed Easterling. None offering escape from the constraints of the canon and Empire, but all paving stones on the path
in their own ways.

  Lofty goals, and ones I would never achieve if I let far-off futures distract me from the task at hand. Patience and diligence would be key to my success as a bureaucrat, and every opportunity to prove my worth, no matter how tedious, offered another step toward freedom. I opened another ledger, sputtered and waved away a cloud of dust, and continued my work.

  * * *

  There was a knock at my door. I looked up from the ledgers, bleary-eyed, and wondered at the darkness in my room. I had been working past sundown, so engrossed that I had forgotten to light a lamp. Another knock roused me from my chair. I stepped carefully around the pile of ledgers I had already reviewed. Higher than my knees, now, but little more than an anthill beside the mountain of volumes that still burdened the shelves.

  A moment of despair rooted me to the floor. If that was all the progress I had made in a long, unbroken afternoon of work, it would take me…

  A third knock spared me the agony of calculation.

  Jhin bowed as I opened the door. A cool breeze wafted in after him, and I realized that my office had become not only dark, but stuffy with dust, sweat, and stale air. I’d entirely forgotten to open the window.

  “Ah…Your Excellence?” Jhin said. “I apologize for the disturbance.”

  “Not at all,” I said. My stomach gurgled. I flushed. “Pardon me, I seem to have forgotten to eat.”

  “Your dedication is admirable,” Jhin said. “Hand Alabaster sent a message inviting you to dine with him in the Golden Fortune pavilion this evening, but a meal could be sent to your rooms if you--”

  “I would be happy to join him,” I said, desperate for a reprieve from the dusty room.

  “Of course, Your Excellence.” Jhin bowed again, turned smartly on his heel, and led the way.

  Standing stones lined the path to a high cliff built from basalt columns brought by windship from western Sien. The Golden Fortune pavilion, where Alabaster kept his offices, was nestled beneath the cliff. The eaves of its flanged roof were decorated with golden medallions bearing the logograms for good luck and wealth. Incense wafted from one of the windows, mingling with the rich aroma of the meal Hand Alabaster’s servants had prepared.

  Alabaster rose to greet me. His office was arranged much as mine was, with over-stuffed shelves sprawling across the walls. The art in between was of solemn, melancholy scenes; jagged cliffs emerging out of fog, the wintry branches of a cherry tree. We settled into our seats. A servant followed me in and filled the teapot between us from a steaming kettle.

  “What do you think of your new home?” Hand Alabaster asked when the servant had left.

  “The little I saw of it on the way from the harbor intrigued me, though I must admit I'm daunted somewhat by the complexity of my responsibilities,” I said, hopeful that I might have stumbled upon an opportunity to go out into the city. The notion of sneaking out on my own had struck once or twice, but I could not be sure that my placement in An-Zabat was not yet another convoluted test. If I were on official business of a sort, and accompanied by another Hand of the Emperor, no one could accuse me of breaching propriety. “Perhaps you and I could arrange to venture out together. You could give me a tour, help me understand our subjects more fully in order to better govern them. As Minister of Culture, you surely know the city as well as anyone.”

  Alabaster frowned over the rim of his teacup. “I meant the garden, Hand Alder,” he said. “You strike me as a literary sort. More so than Cinder, certainly. I have put a great deal of effort into the garden--one of my primary duties. When our first crop of students come to sit for the examinations I want them to feel that they have stepped into the heart of Sien.”

  Embarrassed, and frustrated to have been thwarted once more in my desire to see An-Zabat directly rather than glimpsed over the walls of a garden, I sipped my tea while I composed my thoughts. “The gardens in Nayen adhered closely to the mountainous landscape of the island, with natural slopes and pools preserved rather than artificial ones constructed, though Voice Golden-Finch certainly spared no expense adding flourishes to suit his taste. This design adheres more to classical forms, which seems fitting to your purposes.”

  Alabaster pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “Would you have me make a garden out of sand and rocks?”

  “Your method is clearly suited to An-Zabat,” I said, realizing that I had offended him.

  A pair of servants brought trays of food--pork hand-pies, noodles in oyster sauce, and stir-fried greens and garlic. Alabaster picked absently at his meal. My stomach grumbled, but I waited for him to begin eating, respecting his role as host and mine as guest.

  “I want us to be friends, Alder,” he said at last. “Voice Rill is a respectable man, but the gulf of rank between us is too wide for friendship. Cinder and I can work together, but he is a militant brute.”

  “Gladly, Alabaster,” I said, thinking of Oriole. My time in An-Zabat would be busy but need not be lonely. “In fact, I had hoped you might continue my training in sorcery, though for the time being our friendship may be limited to shared meals. Dealing with the windcallers seems no easy task.”

  Alabaster waved dismissively and filled my cup. “No easy task, but not one to occupy much of your time. There is nothing to be done. They are a stubborn, incorrigible lot.”

  He patted his brow with a handkerchief, then straightened his spectacles and gazed out the window. “Enough talk of this infernal province. Tell me about yourself, Alder. We should know each other if we are to be friends.”

  * * *

  After a month in An-Zabat, I began to craft policy. I levied new taxes on grain imports and dedicated the income to building and filling new imperial silos. A strategic reserve, I called it. A defense against any future attempt by the windcallers to close the ports and starve the city.

  As Voice Rill had said, this work was done through paperwork and intermediaries. Each morning I woke to find a stack of reports on my desk. At the end of each week these were joined by a ledger totaling weekly imports and exports. I wrote instructions to my various subordinates in the port authority, office of weights and measures, and ministry of revenue, stamped them with my personal seal--a parting gift from Hand Usher--and gave them to Jhin, who in turn gave them to couriers to deliver throughout the city. I never met with these subordinates. Voice Rill insisted that such a meeting was unnecessary.

  “This is not a barbarian kingdom, where your ministers obey because of the force of your personality,” Voice Rill told me when I expressed my misgivings. “Who you are, and who they are, ought not to factor into your relationship. You are their older brother within the imperial bureaucracy. It is their duty to obey.”

  Alabaster and I continued our companionable meetings, always in either his office or in the Abundant Nectar banquet hall, where a cloud of hummingbirds fluttered among hanging baskets of fluted snapdragons. After a few weeks he began to show me excerpts of the letters he received from his betrothed.

  “Do her lines seem perfunctory, to you?” he would ask, handing me a poem she had composed. I always reassured him, but as I had never been party to romance I felt out of my depth.

  By the end of my second month in An-Zabat my work had fallen into a consistent rhythm, and I found that the day-to-day operations of my ministry were less demanding than I had anticipated. The usual reports and orders to my subordinates consumed my mornings, but most days I finished my work by midafternoon. An-Zabat was a thriving port, yet the business that crossed my desk barely changed from week to week.

  Until one day, three weeks after I had created the strategic reserve, I received an unusual letter in my stack of correspondence. It was written in a steady, but unpracticed hand--by someone who had learned to write logograms in adulthood, I expected. Further, it bore no stamped tetragram to identify its author. The short message itself, written in clipped, arrogant phrases, was direct and lacked any of the subtleties expected in official imperial correspondence.

  Honored Minister
, it read. The tax you have levied is unacceptable to us. It must be rescinded. Do not forget what happens when the Empire overreaches in An-Zabat.

  It was signed by a dozen names I did not recognize, written in phonetic runes.

  I rang the bell on my desk to summon Jhin, who did not recognize the names either.

  “My assumption would be that they are wealthy shipowners, or merchants. Perhaps windcallers themselves,” Jhin said, adding nothing that had not yet occurred to me.

  In Nayen, we had received similar protests from time to time. They could often be resolved by a few cursory meetings, minor gifts, and simple gestures--salving the wound to the pocketbook by cultivating the injured party’s sense of self-importance. I sent off a flurry of instructions to my subordinates, ordering them to identify the signatories to the petition and do their best to placate them without giving them what they wanted, and then asked Jhin to bring my lunch.

  My meal was interrupted by a familiar chill in my lungs and flush on my skin--the wake of battle-sorcery--followed by the hiss and crack of lightning. Jhin refilled the cup of tea that I had spilled.

  “It is only Hand Cinder at drills,” he said.

  Intrigued, I abandoned my half-finished meal and followed the sound to an archery range where I had seen members of the guard at practice. I found Cinder racing back and forth across the archer’s line. The iron scales of his armor flashed in the sun as he leapt into the air and lashed out with a cracking whip of battle-sorcery. A dummy burst apart and scattered smoldering straw across the range.

  He paused at my approach. “Hand Alder! Have you dug yourself free of the day’s paperwork?”

  “What remains is hardly urgent,” I said. “I felt a wake of sorcery in the garden and couldn’t resist my curiosity.”

  “Rill and Alabaster forget that we are soldiers first.” The whip disappeared with a snap as he relaxed his hand. “I spend free afternoons here, if not in the company of my lovely wife. When did you last practice sorcery?”