A Fall of Princes (35 page)

He was slender and strong, like a warrior woman. But he was
no woman at all.

He was an Asanian courtesan, and he knew precisely what he
was doing.

Sarevan lifted him bodily and bore him to the door, kneeling
burdened beside Zha’dan. The Zhil’ari lay motionless, wide-eyed. Sarevan pried
the arms from about his neck and held them away from him, meeting the burning
golden stare. “You know I can’t,” he said.

Hirel tore his right arm free and struck, backhanded.
Sarevan swayed with the blow. “You are no man,” Hirel spat at him. “Virgin.
Limpyard. Eunuch!”

“When the wine’s worn off, little brother, you’re going to
be sorry you let it rule you.” Sarevan let go the boy’s left arm. It did not
strike. He brushed away a tear that crept down the rigid cheek.

Hirel shivered convulsively. “Damn you,” he said. “Oh, damn
you.”

Sarevan stood. “Zha’dan. Love him for me.”

He turned. It was wrenchingly hard. His torque, gold and
iron both, was strangling him. He cast himself down and cursed them all.

o0o

Sarevan had seen splendor. He had seen the festivals with
which the Sunborn had regaled his armies. He had seen the lords of Keruvarion
riding in triumph to the Feast of the Peace that ended the great wars in the
empire. He had seen the consecration of Endros Avaryan, and the games of High
Summer there every year after, and his own confirmation as High Prince of the
Sun.

He had seen splendor. This did not blind him, but it widened
his eyes a little. The Asanians granted to the gateway of autumn that
preeminence which belonged in Keruvarion to the gateway of summer.

Then were all the gods worshipped. Boys became men, girls
became women; marriages were made, children named and presented in the temples,
heirs proclaimed and lordships allotted and princes taken into their
princedoms. The emperor held full court in the great hall of his palace, the
Hall of the Thousand Years with its thousand carven pillars upholding a roof of
gold.

So huge was that hall that an army could array itself
therein; armies had, for festivals, for the pleasure of emperors: even mounted
warriors whirling on the sand that lay beneath the inlaid panels of the floor.
At the hall’s farthest extent the panels were lifted from a moat of glittering
sand: dust of gold, and a kingdom’s worth of jewels crushed and strewn beneath
the armored feet of a hundred knights. These were the Golden Guard of the
Golden Throne, princes of the princes of Olenyai, a living wall about their
emperor.

He sat alone within the circle of his knights, raised high
upon his throne. It was no eastern chair but a great bowl of gold set upon the
backs of golden lions. Even its cushions were of cloth of gold. He sat erect,
banked in them, a golden image, masked and crowned and robed in the ninefold
robe of the highest of all kings.

His sons held the foremost rank of the court, and Aranos
foremost of them, standing with his guards and his mages and his priests before
the emperor’s face, three spearlengths from the Golden Guard. The prince wore full
court dress, almost too heavy to stand in: the robe of seven thicknesses to
which his rank entitled him, with its hood woven of gold and silk laid on his
shoulders, baring his artfully painted face. He was expected to stand but
permitted to lean on the arms of his two most favored mages.

Sarevan, fantastically armored and viciously uncomfortable,
had taken station with Aranos’ personal guard. As the tallest of the line save
for Zha’dan who stood beside him, he had been given the place of honor directly
behind the prince. Hirel was farther down, invisible unless he turned his head
in the stiff and blinkering helmet.

Which he did, more than once, damning discipline. Hirel’s
armor was as ridiculous as his own, his visor a dragon mask with darkness in
the slits of its eyes. Of Hirel there was nothing to be seen.

When the boy woke to a pale dawn, he had been as
catastrophically sick as Sarevan had expected. Aranos’ slaves had brought him a
potion with which he seemed unhappily familiar. He took it with distaste,
grimacing as he swallowed it, but it brought the light back to his eyes and the
color to his cheeks.

He even ate a bite or two, under duress. Thereafter he
seemed much as he always was, facing what he had to face with admirable
steadiness.

Sarevan was not sure he trusted it. Hirel had not spoken to
him since the night’s bitter words. He had not let Sarevan touch him in his
sickness; when Sarevan tried to speak, he turned his back. He had put on his
haughtiest mask, at its most insufferable angle.

Sarevan sighed and faced forward. He could not see the army
of Hirel’s brothers, but he could feel them behind him. Aranos had come in last
and most royal; they had had to bow as he marched in slow procession before
them.

Sarevan had had time to number them, even to consider faces.
Forty, he had counted, which could not be all of them: the rest, no doubt, were
too young or too indisposed to stand in court. Boys and youths and young men of
every shade from umber to ivory, clad variously according to degree in robes of
five and six and seven, bull-broad and whip-thin, twitching with nervousness
and motionless with hauteur, beautiful and unbeautiful and frankly ugly, but
all marked with the stamp of their lineage.

It might be as little as the set of the head. It might be as
complete as Hirel himself, whose portrait graced the Hall of the High Princes;
but that portrait was his father’s before him, and his father’s father’s.

Sarevan had marked two princes most clearly. They stood
highest but for Aranos; like him and like no other save a handful of very young
children, they wore the sevenfold robes of princes of the first degree.

They were not the least beautiful of the emperor’s sons.
Indeed Vuad might have surpassed Hirel but for the misfortune that had given
him hair the color of old bronze.

That was reckoned a flaw here, and a tragedy. Sarevan
thought it very handsome. But he was only a tarry-skinned barbarian with no eye
for beauty.

Sayel he liked less, at least to look at. He was a pale
creature, pretty enough if one were fond of milk and water, attired unwisely in
gradations of crimson. His eyes were sharper than Vuad’s, his tension less
readily apparent.

He was watching Aranos as a bird watches a cat: in fear, but
mindful of its beak and claws. He had noticed the prince’s following. Too
carefully. By the pricking of Sarevan’s nape as the ceremonies crawled on, he
was still noticing it.

Sarevan shifted infinitesimally. His back itched. His
bladder twinged. He cursed them both, and his armor into the bargain: steaming
hot, hideously heavy, and far too ornate to trust in any battle. If its weight
did not fell him, its curlicues would, catching blades and hampering his arms.

He would not have to fight. Not here. Not in front of the
Asanian emperor. Courtiers waged their battles more subtly, with poisoned words
and poisoned wine.

It was close now. He dared a twist of his body, a sweep of
his eyes within the helmet. The princes had tensed subtly. Their eyes were wide
and bright.

A very young lord was being presented to the emperor with
the full rite, even to the nine prostrations. He performed them with grace and
composure, although his face was ashen.

He rose for the last time, said the words that he must say,
backed from the presence. When he had taken his place among the ranked nobles,
there was silence. Bodies shifted, eyes flickered. Only Aranos did not move.

With imperial slowness Ziad-Ilarios stood. Not dignity alone
constrained him: his robes were heavy, as heavy as his burden of empire. He
rose like an image ensorceled to life, and his face was no face at all, but a
mask of beaten gold.

It was custom, Hirel had told Sarevan. The mask was the mask
of a god: ageless, flawless, impervious to human frailties. How simple then,
Saraven had said, to murder an emperor in secret and take on his mask and his
name and his power.

Hirel had been far from amused. The common crowd was not to
know when an emperor was old or ill or unbeautiful. Indeed the emperor who had
begun the custom had been an outland invader with a terribly scarred face and
the gall to have won his predecessor’s confidence, wedded that emperor’s only
daughter, and disposed of his marriage-father by means more foul than fair. But
no one in the years since had succeeded in perpetrating an imposture. Not only
were the princes and the queens and certain of the High Court entitled to see
their lord’s face; his identity was attested at intervals by a council of
priests and lords, aged and wary and incorruptible.

So had they attested at the beginning of this endless festival.
Sarevan did not need to be told. His skin knew who wore that mask; the void
behind his eyes was sure of it.

Save only when he spoke of matters of the highest import,
the emperor did not speak even to the High Court. A Voice spoke for him, a
shadow-speaker, a herald in black whose mask was black and featureless but
whose voice was rich and full.

“It is time,” he proclaimed, “and time, and time. The throne
is filled, its majesty is strong, may its bearer live forever. But even highest
majesty, which makes the laws, must also obey them. So was it decreed in the
days of Asutharanyas whose memory is everlasting: Every lord must name his
heir. If that heir be of full years, one naming suffices. If said heir be yet
in his minority, whether babe newborn or youth well grown, he must himself,
upon attainment of his manhood, request and receive the name of heir from the
lips of his lord. Then only may his title be affirmed.”

The herald paused. The silence deepened. Even the manifold
sounds of a thousand people living and breathing and standing close together
had sunk into stillness.

“On the first day of autumn in the thirty-second year of the
reign of the divine emperor, Garan-Shiraz Oluenyas, whose memory endures
forever, to the High Prince Ziad inShiraz Ilarios and the Princess Azia of pure
blood and great worship, was born a son: Asuchirel inZiad Uverias, highborn,
chosen heir of the chosen heir of Asanion. In the eighth year of the reign of
his majesty, the great one, the Lion, the golden warrior of Asanion, Ziad
inShiraz Ushallin Ilarios, came word of the death of his chosen heir. In the
night it came, in the spring of the year, in grief immeasurable.

“But the law endures; it knows no grief. Every lord, even to
the very lord of lords, must name his heir. It is time; it is time and time.
Hear and attend.”

The silence focused, stirred, began to thrum. This was the
highest of moments. The emperor must speak as the law commanded; he must name a
name. The princes waited, even Aranos standing erect, alert, forsaking his
pretense of ennui.

It smote Sarevan then, almost felling him. How cruelly, how
bitterly they had failed. The emperor must name the name. If Hirel had gone to
him, made himself known, assured himself of the naming—but they had obeyed
Aranos. They had trusted him; they had let him seclude them all.

And thus, serpentinely, he mocked them. Ziad-Ilarios did not
even know that his true heir was there to be chosen. Before Hirel’s very face
he would name Aranos the heir of Asanion.

In the mighty silence, metal chinked on metal. Sarevan
glanced aside, cursed the helmet, turned half his body.

One of Aranos’ guards had left his post. He stood on the
glittering sand all alone. The Golden Guard lowered their spears, warning. He
had discarded his own.

The emperor seemed not to see him. He was only a lone
madman, a nonentity; beyond the sand, only the princes could know that he was
there. The Guard would deal with him; the court need never know what had
passed. The golden mask lifted.

The man on the sand moved swiftly. His hands caught at his
corselet. The emperor’s knights began to close in upon him. Sarevan left his
place, elbowing through startled guardsmen, shrinking slaves, the odd
inscrutable mage.

Within the elaborate armor, hidden clasps gave way. The
whole clever shell opened at once and fell clattering to the sand. Robes
gleamed beneath, white on white on white: simplicity of purely Asanian
complexity.

There were seven of them, and over them a shimmer of gold.
The eighth robe, the imperial robe, the robe of the high prince.

A grey shadow sprang from air, or perhaps from among the
mages. It crouched before Hirel. Its snarl was soft and distinct and deadly.
The emperor’s knights paused.

Sarevan won his way to Hirel’s back. Zha’dan was with him.
They stood, warding him.

He seemed aware of none of them. His back was straight,
slender still for all the waxing breadth of his shoulders; proud and yet
ineffably lonely with all the staring eyes behind him and his helmeted face
turned toward his father. He set his hands to the helmet’s plumed extravagance.
He flung it aside with sudden and most uncourtly force, shaking out his shorn
hair. He raised his chin and fixed his eyes upon the emperor.

Sarevan’s mouth was dry. He would have given much to be able
to see the faces of Vuad and Sayel. But more, infinitely more, to see the
emperor’s.

The mask betrayed nothing at all of the man behind it. He
had half a hundred sons. Would he even recognize this one, altered as he was,
grown from child into man? And even if he did, would he name the boy his heir?

Hirel did a thing that could only be perfect courage, unless
it was perfect insanity. He walked forward. Ulan walked with him. He walked
straight and unwavering toward the lowered steel. Just before the first
spearpoint touched his breast, he raised a hand.

The spears hesitated. Suddenly they swung up. The Olenyai
stepped slowly back.

The princes could see all of it. Perhaps some of them
understood it. In the hall beyond, the silence’s length had begun to rouse
wonder. A murmur grew.