The Merchant Emperor (15 page)

“And what does that matter? You did everything you could, you were valiant and brave, and fulfilled every command that was asked of you.” The Invoker sighed deeply, took the reins of Melisande’s horse, and started into the greenwood in a slow walk. “Nature, and the very universe itself, is at the same time random and lawful, Lady Melisande Navarne. There once was a young prince who was given a prophecy that led him to believe he was special beyond measure. He was told that something he would do with his life would one day be the means by which his people, long oppressed and driven from their lands, would return to the place they were meant to be, where they would prosper in peace for centuries to come. The young prince could barely contain his excitement, knowing that greatness would one day be his, and history would record his name as the one who returned his outcast nation to its former glory. He laid plans, Lady Melisande Navarne, great plans that many of his advisors questioned, but he had come to believe that whatever he felt was right to do would be the means by which his nation’s glory, and his, was assured.”

The Invoker clicked to the horses, and they stepped around the mud of the floodplain.

“And then one day, when he was little more than twice your age, still uncrowned, still young and untried by life, he did something very much like what you did yesterday—while journeying through a wood, he was not watching where he was going, misstepped and tumbled down a crevasse where he became embedded in the mud at the bottom. And he died there. They found him days later, long cold. No one can know what came into his mind, nor will anyone ever know what he thought as he lay, broken and immobile, but I imagine that before death finally came for him, at least one of his thoughts was one of disbelief. How could the seer prophesy that greatness would come from his life, when he was to die in such an ignominious way? But that is how the universe works, Lady Melisande Navarne. After his death, another leader took the reins, and made a different plan, one that did not lead to the destruction that the prince would have wreaked upon his people, but rather to the outcome that had been foretold. What the young prince did with his life was to end it early, and thus spare his people the consequences of his bad decisions. His name is lost to history.”

“That’s a lovely story,” Melisande said acidly. “Thank you.”

“You did not like it?”

“Not really, since that same thing almost just happened to me. I don’t appreciate the suggestion that the most valuable thing I can do is die.”

The Invoker chuckled. “Sometimes I forget that you are merely nine years old,” he said. “I am not comparing you to that prince, Lady Melisande Navarne, far from it. I only wish you to understand that there are some things we can do to affect the outcome of life, and other things that life does to affect the outcome of
us.
Until the day is long past on the thread of Time, we cannot really know for certain how things have turned out. We can only do the best we can with what we think we know.” He looked up into the sky, then back at the little girl riding in silence beside him. “But there is one thing I know about your life that I don’t believe you do.”

“And what is that?”

Gavin smiled.

“It’s midnight,” he said. “That means spring has come. And you are no longer merely nine years old.”

Melisande exhaled, then looked down at the dragon’s claw in her hand. Far away in the recesses of her young mind she remembered the stories Rhapsody had told her, years ago on a warm day at the beginning of spring, before the world had gone wrong. She thought she recalled her adopted grandmother saying that her own reason for first coming to the dragon’s cave was to return just such a dagger. Rhapsody had been fearful of the beast’s anger, but Elynsynos had turned out to be not the vengeful, avaricious wyrm of legend, but childlike and warm, with a gentleness that belied her power.

Perhaps
this
is what I was meant to find,
she thought.
Perhaps, besides bringing Gavin to Krinsel, I was supposed to discover a weapon that had once been used to make a powerful, somewhat scary friend, the same way I have.
She glanced at the Invoker, now watching their path intently.

“Well, then, can we please hurry it up a bit?” she said, warmth returning to her voice. “At this rate I won’t get home before I turn eleven.”

PART THREE

A Moment of Solace in the Advent of War

SONG OF THE SKY LOOM

Oh, our Mother the Earth;

Oh, our Father the Sky,

Your children are we,

With tired backs.

We bring you the gifts you love.

Then weave for us a garment of brightness.…

May the warp be the white light of morning,

May the weft be the red light of evening,

May the fringes be the fallen rain,

May the border be the standing rainbow.

Thus weave for us a garment of brightness

That we may walk fittingly where birds sing;

That we may walk fittingly where the grass is green.

Oh, our Mother Earth;

Oh, our Father Sky.

—Traditional, Tewa

12

PALACE OF JIERNA TAL, JIERNA’SID, SORBOLD

The sky above Jierna Tal was erupting in explosions of sparkling color as Talquist stepped out onto the balcony of the western minaret, breathing the thin air for the first time as the officially chosen, formally crowned emperor of Sorbold, the Empire of the Sun.

He took a deep breath of that thin air, inhaling the fringes of the clouds of evening as they colored with splashes of gold and green, red and purple, lighting the desert at night in much the same colors that could be seen in it during the day. Standing so high above the ground, it was almost as if he was breathing the stars, like a god of the old world, from a time before the modern era, when beings of extraordinary greatness trod and shaped the very earth itself.

Much the way he was effectively doing now.

With each new pyrotechnic, a muted but widespread chorus of gleeful cheering and applause could be heard down below him. The people of Jierna’sid and those that had traveled from across the nation to witness his coronation were still filling the streets of the capital, celebrating his ascension to the Sun Throne with boisterous merriment and drunken revelry, even now, approaching midnight. Talquist’s heart squeezed in a swell of fondness;
my people,
he thought. A warm feeling surged through him, a sense of belonging, of acceptance and respect that his common birth and merchant status had never gained him before this day.

The day had been everything he had dreamed of, a grand spectacle of immense pageantry and military might, with a vast parade that escorted him to the Scales for his perfunctory Weighing, then to the steps of Jierna Tal, where he was crowned to the sounds of a three-hundred-piece orchestra and a citywide traditional dance from the days before the first Cymrian era. Grand feasting and a full-blown festival of all sorts of arts honoring the new emperor led up to the grand fireworks display that was now about to come to an end. Talquist was highly pleased with how everything had turned out.

It had been well worth the time and the cost.

Talquist sighed as the shimmering finale died away, the last of the firesparks winking out in the smoky air and falling quietly and slowly to the desert floor. He turned and hurried back into the tower, trotting down the staircase, humming his approximation of the coronation march that had been played repeatedly during the day.

At the bottom of the stairs to the third-floor Great Hall his fellow monarchs were waiting, at his request. Beliac, the king of Golgarn, was in a merry mood, while the Diviner of the Hintervold seemed preoccupied.

“Well, my friends, thank you for being here to help celebrate this day,” he said smoothly. “I hope you have enjoyed yourselves sufficiently to have made the journey worthwhile.”

The king of Golgarn nodded pleasantly, but the Diviner cast a sharp glance around the Hall.

“I am highly dismayed that the Lord Cymrian did not deign to attend,” he said curtly. “I wish you a long and successful reign, Talquist, but I must attend to my nation’s priorities now. I will be leaving forthwith and sailing back from Ghant. Thank you for your hospitality, long life to you.”

Talquist’s fine mood evaporated into the desert air. The Diviner’s intentions were completely contradictory to his own plans.

“Please reconsider, Hjorst,” he said smoothly. “I actually would like you both to consider undertaking a brief side expedition with me prior to returning to your kingdoms. I have some things to show you that I believe will raise your spirits and give you cause to believe in a happy outcome of all this current hostility.”

“What sort of expedition?” said the Diviner in exasperation. “I am facing almost a month at sea as it is.”

“No, no, my friend, it is a land-based journey,” Talquist said soothingly, though his eyes would have displayed annoyance if the Diviner had been looking into them. “And I promise it will be an easy trip, bolstered by fine cuisine and fine drink.”

“Where would we be going?” asked Beliac.

“To Sepulvarta,” said the newly crowned emperor. “It is a beautiful city, even if it was originally consecrated to a manufactured god.”

“Why would we want to travel
there
?” the Diviner demanded. “Neither Beliac nor I are adherents to the Patrician faith, obviously, nor are our subjects; there is nothing sacred there to either of us.”

“Trust me,” Talquist said, smiling brightly. “When you see what has occurred there, you will be feeling utterly transported. I’m very sorry that you were unable to meet up with the Bolg king and the Lord Cymrian, but when you see the loss they have absorbed in Sepulvarta, you will feel the diversion is well worth the delay in your return trips home.”

The two leaders looked at each other doubtfully.

“My friends,” Talquist said, looking over the staircase at the growing group of harlots that were gathering in the stairwell, “it’s been a very long day. I am ready to retire for the night; I suggest you take your repose as well. Tomorrow we will take the royal carriage to Sepulvarta; I promise you will find it a trip of great import.

“Now,” he said, signaling to the women waiting below, “good night, gentlemen.”

*   *   *

The blazing lights that had illuminated the towering walls and soaring ceilings of the palace of Jierna Tal well past midnight had dimmed to a soft glow in the hundreds of wall sconces and standing torches; the magnificent chandeliers that had glittered with the light of thousands of candles were dark now. The gleaming marble floors were laced with shadows, ominous and twisting, through which only a few servants and guards passed, their footfalls echoing up into the darkness.

Standing in a deep pool of such shadow at its traditional place in the Great Hall of the palace’s third floor was the stone titan, silent and still as death. The statue’s eyes were closed; each of the passing servants who walked by it did not even cast a glance in its direction.

But deep within the stone of the image of what once had been an ancient soldier from a time long before the Cymrians had come to this continent, to this arid, mystic land, a parley of a sort was taking place, a secret confab of two entities, one of even more ancient origin than the soldier, and one younger, both tied to elemental dark fire.

The F’dor spirit Hrarfa had been born in the early days of the world, in the Before-Time, a member of the Older Pantheon of demons that had been imprisoned within the Vault of the Underworld by the other four Firstborn races, only to escape from that vault when a falling star had plunged to Earth and ruptured it. Hrarfa was a demon of determined spirit with a remarkable ability to survive; it had no dominant gender at birth, but had thrived better in female hosts than in most of its male incarnations, and so it generally identified as a female. She was a talented manipulator of scent and taste, deep-seated memory and a liar of great skill. Passionate, sometimes rash, but intelligent and scheming, Hrarfa was one of the few remaining of the Unspoken, the upworld diaspora of the children of dark fire still free in the wind.

Her previous host body, that of a lowly servant, had been captured in the Thrall ritual of a Dhracian hunter that had shattered that body’s skull and sucked the life from its bones; Hrarfa herself was dying, all but dissipated when the titan that called itself Faron had appeared in the forest glade in Navarne. Faron had taken her on, had allowed the dying demon to move into his body of Living Stone, only for Hrarfa to discover when she did what was animating that titanic statue.

A Faorina spirit, the denatured, bastard child of another F’dor and a Seren woman.

Hrarfa knew what Faorina were, though she had never met one before. Very few had ever been brought into being, because F’dor were jealous of their individual power, and to commit to sire or give birth to a child while in the body of a human host was to voluntarily accept a permanent diminution of a demon’s strength.

Hrarfa was not certain what to make of her Faorina host, but the gratitude she was displaying was only a mask. She was biding her time, waiting to learn more of her new environment before deciding her next move.