The Merchant Emperor (6 page)

Thus, when the new emperor was chosen from the Mercantile, the merchant class, Fhremus had been slightly surprised, but did not question the decision at all.

The man who would be crowned emperor this day was a man with immense vision, Fhremus knew. Despite having taken a humble position by his selection, at which he had seemed more surprised than anyone else there, making an offer to serve as regent for a year and then being reconfirmed by the Scales a year later, he had embarked upon an ambitious agenda of changing, or rather, improving many of the long-established practices of the nation.

Fhremus had not been surprised by this aspect of the aftermath of the death of the empress. Leitha had ruled with an iron hand, but there had been rust on the iron; in spite of her surprising acuity at the age of ninety-eight, she was not as hale and vigorous as she had been in youth, and therefore had allowed various aspects of her governance to fall into disrepair. While she had officially outlawed bloodsport in the gladiatorial arenas that were an enthusiastically supported tradition for thousands of years before the Cymrians came, she had also turned a blind eye to its return twenty years into her reign, and a deaf ear to the sounds of hooting and violence that had continued to build outside the arenas as she grew older and her reign grew longer.

The gladiatorial arenas were not the only aspect of evident neglect. The return of the practice of slavery and slave trading had been more recent than the bloodsport, but it was even bloodier, though less widely known of. Fhremus had not been officially informed of the increase in the heinous activities, but would have had to have been blind in order to miss the buildup of the industries, state-run and privately owned, that had suddenly expanded their labor forces.

Though he was not sure why, he suspected that Talquist might have been involved with that expansion long before his elevation to the throne of the new dynasty he had established, called the Empire of the Sun.

The Mercantile was a misunderstood and, in Fhremus’s estimation, underappreciated social class. Looked down upon by royalty, the nobility, and even the Church, the merchant class was often a bastion of far greater wealth and international connection than any of those other groups possessed. It was all but impossible to be isolated or parochial when the very basis of a class’s existence was predicated on making contacts in every place possible around the world. While Fhremus knew little to nothing of the details of Talquist’s holdings, wealth, and connections to friends in both high and low places across the globe, he was quite certain those elements of the new emperor’s power were substantial.

Perhaps even frighteningly so.

As little as Fhremus knew about the financial and social secrets of the Merchant Emperor, he had a better window into Talquist’s military plans, though not as clear a one as he would wish. Fhremus had been instrumental in the training and deployment of the soldiers who rode the iacxsis, a strange breed of flying beasts that could both soar over walled fortresses and mercilessly attack the inhabitants of those cities. He had been given a tour of the breeding and training grounds, hideous caverns that had once been the central cistern and aqueduct beneath the streets of the capital city of Sorbold, Jierna’sid, where both the Scales and the palace of Jierna Tal stood. He had still been unable to purge his nose of the stench of the place and his mind of the memory of what he had seen there.

He had accepted the emperor’s word that the breeding and training program was essential to the survival of Sorbold, due to the merciless plans for conquest and expansion that the leaders of the new Alliance, the Lord and Lady Cymrian, were secretly putting into place. Talquist had shown him documents that detailed the royal pair’s nefarious schemes from other merchants in their employ around the world; Fhremus had seen them as credible and did not question the information.

He had also been introduced to another of the abominations that Constantin, the recently deposed Patriarch of Sepulvarta, the former holy city over which he was currently commandant, had been responsible for. Talquist had shown him a titan, an immense statue of a primitive warrior that had been animated, the emperor said, by the unholy practices employed in the holy city. The titan, now bent to Talquist’s will and loyal, in its limited capacity, had been instrumental in breaking down the infamous gate of the holy city and bringing it into immediate occupation. The Patriarch’s captured plans he had seen had made Fhremus glad that his army had been so successful, in concert with the iacxsis riders and the titan, in subverting and occupying the holy city as quickly as they did, before even more blood was shed.

“Uncle?”

Fhremus looked up.

A young soldier in the regalia of the army of Sorbold was smiling tentatively at him. He was handsome, possessed of the swarthy skin and dark brown eyes common in the residents of the desert nation, and a pleasant disposition; his sister’s son, Kymel, the fifth generation of the family to have begun service to the empress three years ago, and now was in that of the emperor.

Fhremus stood straight and saluted, to Kymel’s immediate response.

“At ease,” he said, clapping the lad on the upper arm. “Are you off duty?”

“Yes,” said Kymel. “On leave in honor of the Weighing and coronation. Titactyk has called us to muster at dawn tomorrow in preparation for the emperor’s arrival six days hence. We have been assigned to guard him while in Sepulvarta and then accompany his return to Jierna’sid at his will.”

“Congratulations.” Fhremus had to struggle to keep his lip from curling at Titactyk’s name. Titactyk was one of his own regimental commanders, and while he could not precisely put a reason to his dislike of the man, it was there nonetheless, though of course that information was unknown to the rank and file like Kymel. While Titactyk had never committed any offense or break of protocol egregious enough to merit discipline, there was an air of cruelty and insolence about him that Fhremus had seen before in other overly ambitious soldiers.

And others.

In his experience, it was always a bad sign.

It was very much the same feeling as he was having on this morning of celebration in Jierna’sid.

“Enjoy your leave,” he said to his nephew. “Happy Weighing, and guard the emperor well.”

Kymel grinned, then stood and snapped a salute. Fhremus returned it, smiling to himself as Kymel left, and then took one last look over the lands he knew he would soon be invading, putting to the sword and the flame, before making his way off the wall and down into the broken streets of Sepulvarta once more.

THE FORTRESS OF HIGHMEADOW, NAVARNE

To the north two hundred leagues and half a world away, Gwydion of Manosse, the Lord Cymrian, leader and high lord of the Alliance of the Middle Continent, was climbing a narrow set of curving stairs high into the tower in the center of his woodland fortress, known as Highmeadow, as he did each morning.

At the top of that curving staircase, he stepped out onto the cold, sheltered platform high in the tallest treetops of the forest canopy that held the aviary. The cultivation of a squadron of messenger birds had been one of his first priorities when Highmeadow was finally done with construction and being made inhabitable. His late father, Llauron the Invoker, the leader of the nature priests known as the Filids, had always made use of messenger birds for as long as Ashe could remember, as did another of the kings in the Alliance, Achmed the Snake, when he began retaking the mountains of Ylorc from the Firbolg four years back.

The Lord Cymrian had commissioned a series of birdhouses and rookeries for Highmeadow’s aviary that were like those his grandfather Gwylliam had designed, architectural renderings of the buildings, palaces, basilicas, and mountain fortresses that were the destinations of those birds in cities all across the continent. The detail that had been captured in balsa wood and twigs was astounding; he never ceased to marvel at how close to the originals the carefully fashioned cages were, down to details like bell tower windows and the shape of Grivven Post, the peak in the Teeth where Achmed received his mail.

It was from this birdhouse that the Lord Cymrian pulled a flyer now, as he did each morning. The brown wren squirmed for a moment in his hand, but he gentled it down quickly, billing its throat with his forefinger, then carefully attached the metal leg tube with the tiny scroll containing his meticulously graphed words of longing and adoration in a long-dead language, and turned it loose, watching it catch a warm morning updraft and take to the wind, heading east, making for the place where his family was in hiding.

Taking his love along with it.

He waited until he could no longer see the bird, nor sense it with the inner sight that was the gift of the dragon blood in his veins.

Then he checked the door of the birdcage and made his way back down the twisting stairs to the courtyard where his battlefield commanders were awaiting him for morning orders.

5

GWYNWOOD, THE DRAGON’S CAVE

The terrible moan trailed off into silence like the end of the night wind’s howl.

Fear receded into the depths of Melisande’s mind. Without further thought, she darted into the dark cave, calling as loudly as she could.

“Elynsynos! Elynsynos, I hear you! I’m coming!”

She had gone only a few paces when the total lack of light forced her to stop. The glowing lichens that had grown at the mouth of the cave had grown thinner and thinner in the dark, leaving the cave without any natural radiance on its walls. The acrid smell of fire and smoke long gone lingered in the air, making breathing difficult. Melisande’s lungs constricted as her fear returned.

I wish my father were here,
she thought, fighting back panic.
Or Gwydion—he would know what to do. Or Gavin.

At the thought of the Invoker a memory, recently made, came into her mind. She fumbled blindly in her pack until she felt the luminescent spores he had given her, soft and sandy, beneath her fingers, then pulled one out and squeezed, swallowing hard as small bits crumbled into powder. After a moment, a thin glow appeared in her hands, and the cave walls became dimly visible.

Around her, the tunnel yawned like the maw of a giant beast.

“I’m coming, Elynsynos,” Melisande said again, more quietly this time. She slung her pack onto her back and, holding the spore aloft, she started down into the darkness.

The tunnel twisted as she followed it, opening at the bottom into a large cavern below. The deeper she descended the more the cave began to curve, bending in a circular fashion to the west. At the bottom of the tunnel she could see a vague glow, like the distant light of firecoals. The dark walls began to brighten as she hurried on, reflecting the glow of the tunnel before them. The scent of the air changed, too; rather than growing more dank as she went deeper underground, the air around her began to freshen and take on a salty tang. Melisande recognized it after a moment as the smell of the sea.

That’s right,
she thought as she scurried down the earthen passageway.
Rhapsody told me about this, that Elynsynos had a lagoon of salt water in the depths of her lair. I wonder if it reaches all the way to the sea.
Even as she traveled, she discarded the notion. The sea was miles from this place.

Finally the widening tunnel opened into a vast cavern. Above her, as high up as she could see, the dim glow she had been following was emanating from six huge chandeliers, each large enough to light the ballroom of a palace. The chandeliers were dark except for a few candleless flames burning dispiritedly where thousands had once gleamed.

Their dim illumination cast little light on what at first Melisande thought were piles of coal and stones, but upon more careful investigation turned out to be masses of gems in every color of the rainbow. She held the glowing spore aloft, and the faint rays illuminated mountains of coins in gold, copper, silver, platinum, and rysin, a rare green-blue metal she had seen only once before.

Her gaze returned to the distant ceiling. The chandeliers were fashioned from the ship’s wheels from hundreds of vessels. Melisande began to shiver. Her father, Lord Stephen Navarne, would have given anything to have beheld this place, stocked as it was with the history of their people, the Cymrian nation that had fled the cataclysm that would claim their homeland, the Island of Serendair, to come to this place in ships which often did not survive the voyage. The few treasures he had lovingly preserved in the museum he maintained at their keep at Haguefort had caused his blue eyes to gleam with excitement. Looking around, Melisande could only imagine how thrilled he would have been to actually see the wreckage of the First Fleet himself.