“You are the one who mocks an old woman’s pain,” Usher said. “I only do what is necessary.”
“Necessary!” I bit back another burst of laughter. It was all so preposterous when you looked it in the face.
Yes, I was culpable for the suffering at Iron Town, in An-Zabat, and now as my grandmother writhed on the table. But I had done my best, lived as well as I could within the confines of the world the Empire had built. It was those confines--doctrine, canon, propriety--that were cruel. Despite the beauty of its art and poetry, that cruelty defined the Empire, for what could be more brutal than to tolerate--even endorse--the suffering of those who failed to meet some arbitrary standard, and to kill others for their honesty?
As life gives way to death, as winter to summer, so brutality would produce rebellion, long after the cultures of Nayen, An-Zabat, and the other conquered lands had been forgotten. Such was the ebb and flow of the pattern of the world.
And with that realization, I understood Hissing Cat’s instruction. Align your will to the pattern. Not to stagnancy, but to the necessary outcome of every action in the interplay of all things, from moment to moment. Even those outcomes I longed to avert or wished to rewrite.
And, laughing, I let my will collapse. In Hissing Cat’s cave, it had been a sphere of polished jade skimming along the surface of the pattern. Now it fell into the pattern’s depths, seeing it not from above, but within.
From within, I saw a deeper truth. Suffering is inescapable, for it is the dusk that must follow every dawn. But cruelty…cruelty is a human invention, justified by doctrine and canon, but far from necessary.
“Will you laugh, even as she screams in agony?” Usher said and cut my grandmother. He placed the seed within her. The spike of his will moved through the channels of the canon, which stood like a seaside cliff against the pulsing waves of the pattern. An intrusion. An artifact of Empire.
The flow of magic was clear to me, now, as it had not been since my first fumbling grasp for power, before my grandmother marked me. I traced the pattern of the world in that room and felt the missing steps in the eternal dance. The truths of the world as it ought to be, and would have been, if not for the canon of transmission.
I threw my will against the walls of the canon, as I had done when I knelt over Oriole’s corpse in Iron Town.
Extinguish the flame, Hissing Cat had said. Not a flame, this time, but the canon itself.
All the world was on my side, for the pattern always resisted magic. The wakes of magic were the shadow of that resistance, and the greatest wake of all was the stone-heavy maze of the canon.
I aligned my will to the wake of the Emperor’s transmission--the world’s desperate attempt to free itself of this weapon of cruelty and conquest, this thing that never should have been. Together, the pattern of the world and I pushed against its walls, and felt it crumble to dust.
As my grandmother once undid the magic that had made me something between human and eagle-hawk, now I undid the magic that bound Usher to the Emperor and conveyed the canon to this remote place in the mountains of Nayen.
The light that bound me vanished, as it vanished from my grandmother, who lashed out in pain and fury. Pinion recoiled. I felt Usher’s will move through the pattern, but without the guiding walls of the canon he floundered, ignorant and powerless. A single spark crackled between his fingertips.
“What is this?” Usher rounded on me, still digging at the pattern. “What did you do?”
I stood, cradling the stub of my severed hand. Pact and canon had been cut from me, leaving me naked before the pattern of the world. Unprotected, but unconstrained. Able to extinguish the flame. Able to do so much more.
“Take Pinion and your men and leave,” I said, even as I began to carve my will into the pattern as Hissing Cat had done. As I had done, years and years ago, and nearly destroyed myself. But I knew much of magic, now, though far from all. Enough to work the spells Usher had tried to take from me with the edge of his knife, even without the sheltering guidance of a pact. “Flee Nayen,” I went on. “The Emperor has no more power here.”
A mercurial light erupted from the tetragram on Usher’s forehead and streamed to the west, seeking the Emperor and the canon. Its wake in the world was like a river, and easily dammed by a motion of my will. Usher staggered backward, into the table, and raised the knife between us.
“This is impossible,” he said.
“Give up, Usher,” I said.
The ghostly smile touched his lips, then twisted into a sneer. He lunged and slashed with the knife. My feet found the first steps of the Iron Dance. My remaining hand lashed out, gripping a blade of wind instead of a dowel. Usher’s fingers spun away, trailing blood, and the knife clattered on the floor.
“I don’t want to kill you,” I said.
“How are you doing this?” He clutched his wounded hand and snarled, then reached for battle-sorcery, as once I, in my ignorance, had reached for the power to veer. “No matter. I’ll dig this and every other secret from your quivering, screaming flesh.”
A bolt of lightning lashed out from him and struck the wall, scoring black scars deep into the stone. Another ripped through the chair where I had been bound.
Bolt after bolt speared the floor, the walls, the ceiling. It might have been possible to stop them as I had stopped the Emperor’s transmission, but they flashed into being with a speed I could not hope to match. One would surely kill me, or my grandmother, or Pinion, before I learned their wakes well enough to unmake them as they struck.
I drove my will into the pattern and began to weave a sorcery I had seen at An-Zabat and in the courtyard mere hours ago, but never learned. The sensation of its wake was cool and crisp, and it manifested in the world as a shield built from curtains of light. They appeared around Usher, enfolding him. Lightning struck them and rebounded, until the space between them was filled with screams and acrid smoke and blue-white flame.
His gaze found mine, wide and terrified, his mouth twisted into a hideous scream. No hint of that ghostly smile. With a final spark, Usher’s will faded from the world.
The curtains of light vanished, and all that remained of Usher was a pile of bone and ash. I felt an odd pain--a wish that I could mourn his death--and turned to my grandmother.
“You killed him,” Pinion said.
I met the horror in his eyes. “He could have released his magic,” I said. “He did not. That is why he died. All I wanted was to shield the rest of us.”
And it was easy to see how the world should be changed, and simple to find the magic of that change, when I knew what I truly wanted.
“I’ll not hurt you, Pinion,” I said. “The offer I made to Usher stands. Take your men and go.”
He raised his hand, but I felt no movement of his will. With Usher dead, there was no nearby Voice to transmit power to him. He would be helpless, until Voice Golden-Finch realized what had happened here and turned his attention--and the Emperor’s transmission--toward us.
“Do you think your brother would accept this?” I said, gingerly touching my grandmother’s tortured arm. She groaned, but otherwise lay still, her breath shallow and full of grit. “Would he have gone on fighting for an Empire that caused such pain?”
“I cannot know,” Pinion said. “The rebellion killed him. I will never have a chance to ask.”
“I cradled his head while he died,” I said. “And I think he would have sooner driven that knife through Usher’s throat than be party to such torment. I cannot know, as you say, but I believe that he, too, could have learned, just as I have learned. I would like to believe the same of you. Ask yourself, as you asked yourself at Oriole’s grave when last we saw each other. Does this seem right?”
The carrion crawler had made my grandmother’s arm a twisted wreck of puckered flesh and glistening bone, all wrapped in the green of new-growth vines. No medicine could repair this damage, and healing sorcery would drain her to the brink of death.
As I had in
the mud at Iron Town, I reached for magic beyond healing sorcery. Unhindered by the canon, I found it, and took it, and felt it bind us.
I heard footsteps, and the hinges of the door, and orders shouted in Sienese, but paid them little mind.
My thoughts returned to the overgrown path to the Temple of the Flame, where my grandmother had found my broken body and rebuilt it. Now I did the same for her. With magic that I had once known as the witchcraft of Nayen, I reshaped her limb, pulling out the vine that had wound itself through her muscle and bone. I knitted her wounds, and then felt a wave of weakness as the greater healing magic that bound us began to restore her life by draining mine.
The pattern of the world surged against me, for I was cheating death, one of its deepest certainties. But while I knew the pattern should reject Usher’s cruelty, I knew as well that it should accept this kindness. The world must change, in the end. Let it change for the better.
As a leaden weariness filled me, I heaved myself onto the table. Clutching her hand, lying beside her, cradling her head with the stump of my right arm, I listened to her heartbeat deepen and grow in strength.
Bone-deep exhaustion, the slow drain of her healing, and the lullaby of her breath carried me to the space between sleeping and waking, where I found myself in the company of gods.
They surrounded the table. Some I knew--Ateri and Tollu, with their stone muzzles and blazing eyes. Others were strange, but known from myth, like the man with hair and beard of wispy cloud and eyes like starlight who could be none other than the Skyfather, subject of many an old An-Zabati poem. There were creatures like living mountains shaped like human beings with forests for hair and molten fires for eyes. Men and women with the heads of beasts. Creatures composed entirely of wings that unfolded like the petals of an infinite, fractal flower. Others, strange, wonderful, terrifying, but I was too exhausted to feel anything but peace.
“This one has broken pact,” the Skyfather said in a voice dry as desert wind.
“He was ours before he was any of yours,” Ateri said. “We claim his fate.”
She leapt onto the table, heat pulsing from her open mouth. A woman with the head of a horse pushed her aside. “You cannot claim him,” the horse-woman said. “He broke pact with all of us.”
“What pact?”
Okara, in the body of the mountain dog, bounded through the doorway and mounted the table beside his mother. He challenged the other gods each in turn, staring out from his web of scars.
“You know well what pact,” Ateri snapped. “Many pacts, in truth.”
“Where are the marks carved in his flesh?” Okara said.
The eyes of the gods searched the diamond scar on my palm, the wealed flesh below my elbows, the pink stump at the end of my right arm.
“He is of the old sort,” the Skyfather said.
“Of the old sort, but not present when the pacts were made,” Okara said. “And uncarved. Thus, unbound, and free to wield any magic.”
Ateri showed her teeth.
“Was this your doing, wolf of guile?” said one of the living mountains. “Perhaps we should punish you, instead.”
“You might point to the Emperor of Sien and accuse him of worse than I have done,” Okara said. “The pact does not bind this one, but he is on our side.”
“Our side of what?” snapped the Skyfather. “We wage no war.”
“You have watched the peoples of your pacts crushed by Sien,” Okara said. “That is Tenet’s doing, and he will not be satisfied with mortal conquest. He seeks an end to every old order, and a new pattern of his own design.”
“So say you,” a voice echoed from the depths of unfolding wings. “Yet in this time, in this pattern of this world, we wage no war.”
“But what of the future?” Okara said. “He can fight Tenet on our behalf and break no pact. He can contain this conflict before the seas boil and the earth tears itself apart.”
Silence held between the gods. Ateri menaced her son, the elder wolf snarling, the mountain dog hunching low.
“If he has broken no pact, there is no punishment we can deliver without violating it in turn,” said Tollu, wolf-sister and daughter, breaking the tension. “Let him live. But we consider him bound as all the witches of the old sort are from this moment. If he teaches the old magic, his life will be forfeit.”
“That is acceptable,” said the Skyfather, and vanished.
One by one, the gods assented, and were gone, till only Okara and Ateri remained. He showed her his back and nuzzled my chin.
“Do not act as though you love him,” Ateri said. “You would make of him a weapon, and an unwieldy one. Do not be surprised when it cuts you deepest of all.”
Then, in a flash of flame and heat, she too departed.
Okara licked my chin and I stirred, rising from half-sleep, still weak and feeling the last of my strength drain into my grandmother. He dashed from the room. I heard his nails on the stone floor, and then his bark, and a muffled curse.
The door flew open, and Okara rushed through, with Hissing Cat at his heels, the skulls in her hair clattering.
“Sho, he’s nearly killed himself! Get in here!”
She crossed to the table and slapped me hard across the face.
“Enough of that, you fool,” she said. “Do you want her to wake and find herself draped in your dried-out husk?”
I released my spell. Though I was weary, I no longer felt as though all my blood were half its thickness, and every breath far too shallow. My grandmother was still sickly, but there was color in her cheeks, her bruise had faded, and her arm was whole. The frayed remnants of the carrion crawler lay scattered across the floor.
Hissing Cat’s gaze lingered on Usher’s corpse and the lightning scars that lined the walls.
“So, you saved the bloody rebellion, did you?” she said. “Are you satisfied?”
I pushed myself to my feet, and found that I was, indeed, satisfied. A deep satisfaction I had last felt after passing the imperial examinations. The feeling that the path of my life had been leading me through trial after trial toward some purpose, finally achieved.
“How many survived?” I said.
“Enough to keep Sho well distracted,” she said, leaned out the door, and shouted. “Hurry up, you old bastard! I’d like to know if he’s going to drop dead!”
“What are you doing here?” I said. “I thought you were finished with me.”
“I was,” she said. “But one does not live as long as I have without regretting a few decisions. This was one. So, I put the issue to the bones.”
“And they told you to forgive me?”
“No. But I only listen to them half the time.”
Doctor Sho trundled into the room and thumped his chest of drawers down in the corner.
“There are twenty-eight people in that courtyard, several of them badly wounded,” he said. “A doctor’s duty is to the patient in front of him, not to the whims of whatever bee flew up your robe and made you care for the boy all of a sudden.”
He crossed to the table, felt my grandmother’s pulse, then held out his hand for mine. Unthinking, I offered my right wrist.
“At least it healed well,” Sho said. “But best I examine the other pulse.”
“You could repair it by veering,” Hissing Cat said.
I stared at the empty space above the pink stump while Doctor Sho prodded my left arm and returned to his chest of drawers.
“I might,” I said, and left it at that.
Hissing Cat crossed her arms. “Well, it’s your body. And from what I felt of the magic you wielded here, you’ve little need for hands.”
“You should hear what the soldiers are calling you,” Doctor Sho said, plucking herbs from their drawers and dropping them into a clay bowl. He filled it from his waterskin and offered it to me. “That should be warm, by the way.”
I took the bowl in my remaining hand and conjured a candle flame to dance along its base. “What are they saying?”
<
br /> “That you conjured the sun itself to defend the keep,” Doctor Sho said, preparing another dose for my grandmother. He looked up at me, his brow furrowed in worry. “They say it is a sign. They call you Sun King.”
“They are confused,” I said, tickled by the thought, remembering the Valley of Rulers and the last time I had earned a new name. “My uncle fled, but not all of them were there to witness. Perhaps they thought he stayed behind.”
Who would want me--failure of failures--for their king? I laughed, shook my head, and sipped the tea. It was bitter, but soothing, and I felt strength flow into my limbs as I drained the cup. Strange, I thought, how even after a battle fought with magic the only way to truly heal the body was with time and herbs, grown naturally, born out of the pattern of the world.
Doctor Sho and Hissing Cat exchanged a glance. Okara huffed.
“She will explain to them,” I said, helping Doctor Sho support my grandmother’s head. “When she wakes, she will tell them that I am only a Foolish Cur.”
Acknowledgments
Like any book off the shelf, The Hand of the Sun King would not exist but for the support, influence, and help of dozens of people. I am daunted by the simple task of remembering who I ought to thank, and organizing their names into some sort of meaningful sequence, let alone providing adequate and thorough acknowledgement.
First I want to thank my parents, Jenny and Ward, who not only raised me but have always encouraged my creativity (even when the neighbors became unnerved by imaginary war-games in the front yard). Further, they educated me for the majority of my childhood. Whoever I am, and whatever I am capable of, it is largely thanks to them. My mother, especially, for instilling me with a love of reading and writing, and my father for helping foster my work ethic, and for sharing his shelf of science fiction paperbacks.
I want also to thank my brothers, Seth and Nathan, who are full of creativity and intellect and a constant source of support and inspiration. Similarly, I want to thank Tom Schultz, who has been a friend for as long as I can meaningfully remember and is in some ways like a third brother, as well as the first person to tell me, in no uncertain terms, that I was an artist, not just someone who liked to draw and write for fun.
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