The Merchant Emperor (The Symphony of Ages), Page 3

  2

  THE KREVENSFIELD PLAIN, SOUTHERN BETHANY

  The first sign that there might possibly be hope left for the world came in the form of itching insect bites, the wiggling of a toe, and controlled urine.

  Anborn ap Gwylliam, Lord Marshal of the forces of the Cymrian Alliance, had lived more than a thousand years, and fought in brutal battles for most of them, so he was long inured to pain. It was not that he was unable feel it; on the contrary, he had trained himself to be so aware of his body that he could register almost any impulse his nerves were exposed to in a fraction of a heartbeat, making him in his younger days without peer where speed and skill with a sword were concerned, as well as giving him the ability to press on when injured to the point past which others would have long since collapsed. Even the loss of the use of his legs when his back was broken three years before had not kept him chairbound; his upper-body strength was sufficient, along with a specially trained horse, to allow him remarkable if limited mobility at an age and bodily state that would doom most men to invalid status.

  In spite of this rather remarkable level of recovery, Anborn’s heart burned always with a bitter resentment of his imperfect physical form. Phantom pain still chewed at his legs, even though he could have stabbed either of them with a dagger and not felt the wound as it emptied his life’s blood onto the ground. While he had made the necessary adjustments to be able to ride and toilet himself, he had not done so with grateful acceptance, but with livid anger that always lurked just below the surface of his consciousness.

  So it was not immediately apparent to him as he slept on the rocky ground of a sheltered swale, encamped with the rudiments of his army on the Krevensfield Plain, that the stinging on his calf was no mere phantasm of his mind remembering a time when he was whole, but was in fact the attack of a colony of ants, newly awakened by the approaching spring’s warmth and swarming his lower limbs.

  Hazily he waved away what he believed was a dream with his hand. The stinging did not disperse, but rather grew more intense.

  “Fornication,” the Lord Marshal mumbled in his sleep. He rose up on his elbow and rubbed his hand briskly down the leg of his trousers, then settled back down in his bedroll amid a copious amount of grunting and snorting.

  A moment later, a forgotten but distantly familiar feeling swelled in his abdomen, where no sensation had been detectable for three years. Anborn pulled his rough bedroll closer against the chill night air, but nature’s call would not be denied. Finally he woke, a pressing need growing more urgent in his belly.

  “What the—?” he muttered. Then his mind roared to wakefulness, the realization of what was happening finally banishing sleep completely.

  With a speed born of shock, the Lord Marshal crawled from his bedroll, dragging himself by his elbows, as he had learned to do, and edged agonizingly to a patch of frost-tinged weeds a stone’s throw from where his commanders and the soldiers not on watch were sleeping. A mix of confusion and excitement rose within him as he fumbled with the leather laces of his trousers, removed the absorbent cloth that had served as a barrier and dam for the last few years, then rolled to his side on the cold ground and relieved himself as he had done all his life before his injury.

  The cold patch of frost stung his genitals. Anborn quickly replaced the cloth and returned himself to rights, then lay on his back, staring up at the winking stars above, wondering what had just come to pass. Not only did he have sensation in places that had been completely numb, but control had returned to the muscles, as least in some cases. He tried to bend his legs, but they were unresponsive. He succeeded only in being able to wiggle the big toe on his left foot.

  It was an accomplishment that dwarfed any victory in battle that he could remember for the sheer thrill it brought him.

  The itching in the surface skin of his legs flared again. Anborn rolled onto his stomach and crawled back to his sleeping comrades, looking around for one man in particular and not finding him there among the off-duty soldiers. After a moment he beheld a shadow sitting at the top of a small rise near the western side of the swale. The Lord Marshal exhaled, summoned his strength, and crawled, elbow over elbow, dragging his useless legs behind him, to the crest of the swale.

  The figure atop the rise was cloaked and hooded beneath the moonless sky. The dim light of the campfire coals showed his garment to be the plain light gray cloth of a wandering pilgrim, a cloak like those worn by hundreds of thousands of other religious nomads who had come to the holy city of Sepulvarta over the last three years. Sepulvarta, the City of Reason.

  The city that lay now, four score miles to the southwest, smoldering in the ruins of siege and conquest.

  The Lord Marshal pulled himself along the crest of the swale until he was within arm’s reach of the cloaked man. He waited for the wind to gust, then when it died down he spoke, trying to keep his voice calm.

  “Constantin.”

  The man did not move.

  “Constantin,” Anborn said again, this time slightly louder.

  The figure finally favored him with a glance, no more.

  “My—my legs are itching,” the Lord Marshal said falteringly. “And I can piss on my own—I mean I can control myself.”

  The cloaked figure glanced at him again. The icy blue eyes beneath the hood of the cloak narrowed.

  “I’m happy for you.” The voice was as icy as the eyes.

  Anborn’s embarrassment drowned in a surge of indignation. “Neither of which was the case when I fell asleep this night,” he said harshly in response. “Do you, the Patriarch, the head of the most powerful religious sect on the continent, as well as the greatest healer in the land, have not even a shred of interest in what can only be a miracle?”

  The eyes remained fixed on Anborn’s for a moment. Then the head bowed slightly, and the man took down his hood, revealing white-blond hair that curled into the gray edges of a fulsome beard and features that seemed chiseled from stone, still handsome even in the creases of age.

  “I am sorry, Anborn,” Constantin said. “I am indeed glad on your behalf, but the sacking of my citadel, and the horror visited upon it and its inhabitants, as well as my own new exile, have left me without much joy to bestow on anyone, even a man who is experiencing a miracle granted by the All-God.”

  Anborn pulled his glove from his hand and slapped it across the Patriarch’s chest.

  “Fool,” he muttered. “Are you so mired in your grief and loss that you don’t see what is happening here? The All-God has little or nothing to do with this, except indirectly.” He crawled back to his bedroll, rummaged around inside it, then dragged himself back up the rise a moment later. “This—it is to this I owe the welcome itch and ability to control my water.” He extended his hand to the Patriarch.

  Constantin exhaled, then put out his own enormous hand, rough and scarred from a life of gladiatorial combat that had occurred both a few short years and at the same time centuries before. The Lord Marshal placed an object in it, and the Patriarch held it up to the fading glow of the campfires.

  It appeared, in what little light there was available to him, to be a large conch shell, the discarded home of a sea creature tossed up on the sand by the waves of the ocean. The Patriarch, weary and heartsick, handed the shell back.

  “I fail to understand what you are on about,” he said brusquely. “Again, I am happy that you can itch and not piss yourself. Now leave me in peace.”

  “In this shell I can hear the vibrations that make up my true name, the essence of myself at the purest of levels,” Anborn pressed on. “Vibrations placed in there by the only Lirin Namer I know. She told me if I were to repeat the song of my own name over and over again, I might be able to remake myself, at least somewhat, back to the way I once was. Foolish as it has made me feel, I have done as she asked. Three years I have felt nothing below my rib cage; now suddenly there is pain in my skin and strength in my groin again. You’re a man of faith, are you not, Constantin?”

 
The Patriarch snorted. “I was. Now I am an outcast, expelled from my office by the army of a nation that a few days ago was counted among the adherents of the religion. My faith in the All-God is not in question, but perhaps His faith in me is.”

  “Nonetheless, is it not possible that you are bearing witness to a miracle, or at least the successful application of an age-old lore?”

  “My city is in ruins, most likely with thousands dead. The Chain of Prayer, the core of our religion, has been shattered. I have told you that I am glad for you. What do you want me to do—dance in glee?”

  The Lord Marshal’s expression blackened. He crawled closer and seized the Patriarch’s hand and held it up before the man’s tired blue eyes.

  “Clearly the Ring of Wisdom that is the symbol of your office must have been shattered along with the walls of Sepulvarta,” he said acidly. “What is happening in my legs is the result of the same age-old lore that the Bolg king and the Lady Cymrian are working on at this very moment, in the depths of the mountains of Canrif. Recall the story of the Lightforge, the instrumentality built by my father Gwylliam, an instrumentality he used successfully to keep my hated mother Anwyn’s forces at bay for five hundred years in the Cymrian War? That is what has obsessed the Bolg king—he has been attempting to reconstruct it, or some version of it, for just such a time as this which is upon us now. Being a man of little faith myself, I did not believe either Achmed or Rhapsody had the insight or the skill to resurrect such an instrument, itself shattered and long buried. Rhapsody may be a Namer, but by her own admission she is largely self-taught and did not have access to the Primal Lore of her kind before she fled the Island of Serendair. But she evidently does understand how it works. And while he is half Firbolg, I have learned never to underestimate Achmed, though it still seems a daunting task to restore something that was built by the Nain a thousand years ago under the tutelage of Gwylliam the Visionary, one of the greatest inventors and machinists the Known World has ever seen, with nothing more than a cadre of brutish, demi-human Bolg as artisans. That is the miracle, you fool, though there are still only glimmers of it. Given how badly the Cymrian Alliance is outnumbered, and our position in the very middle of this continent, with potential enemy nations surrounding us, we will need that glimmer to roar, full-fledged, into a miraculous fire if we are to survive what is coming.”

  For the first time since he had crawled to the summit of the swale, Anborn saw the Patriarch breathe.

  Then a hint of light in his eyes.

  Finally the tall cleric turned to him, and steel was in his expression.

  “Let us begin gathering the kindling for that inferno, then,” he said.

  3

  PALACE OF JIERNA TAL, JIERNA’SID, SORBOLD

  Talquist, Emperor Presumptive of the nation of Sorbold, stood in the top parapet of the palace of Jierna Tal, staring west, watching the sun slide down an indigo horizon beyond the sandy desert rim. Dusk was his favorite time of day, especially in the arid realm of Sorbold, an old land long forgotten by the gods he didn’t believe in, full of magic and treasure hidden beneath dry vaults of richly colored windblown earth. While he didn’t believe in gods, Talquist did believe in magic, and to him there was nothing so magical as the desert sky darkening into night, sprinkled with sandy grains of diamond dust winking in the clear air as the stars appeared, one by one, from behind thin clouds.

  He remained in reverent silence as the sun slipped through the aquamarine veil at the horizon and beneath the world’s rim. The stars grew brighter, changing the colors of the city below him from the flat brick red visible in the midday sun to the flame-colored shadows that reflected off the stone buildings from the watchfires and forges smoldering at all times of the day and night. As beautiful as he thought the capital city of Jierna’sid was in daylight, it could not compare to the glorious sight of it at night, when the sounds of martial preparations and military cadences echoed off the walls and cobbled streets, blending with the incessant clopping of horses’ hooves, the clattering of wagon wheels and shouts of regimented discipline and drunken merriment into one building symphony of impending war.

  From his many years at sea as a merchant plying the trade winds the world round, he was knowledgeable of the stars and their movements in the heavens. He turned his gaze to the southwest and waited patiently for the evening star to appear.

  After a moment it did, twinkling brightly.

  As he knew it would.

  Talquist looked down at the scale in his hands. It was an ancient thing; that he’d known from the beginning. The moment he had found it, wedged in the bones of an old ship buried in the sand of the Skeleton Coast, a graveyard of things coughed up by the cold sea, he’d been aware that it was something far more special than he’d ever seen in all his travels, something more powerful than he might ever hope to fully understand. There must have been magic in it, for no one else might give it a second glance; it appeared to be little more than the scale of a giant fish or the slough of dead skin from the hide of something enormous. From almost the moment he touched it, his life’s obsession became the quest to discover exactly what he was holding. Talquist sighed, remembering those almost carefree days on the open sea, in search of answers to his endless riddle. He had whored himself out to anyone who might have answers to that riddle, but had discovered little.

  Finally he had come upon a reference to it in the ruins of a water-soaked tome in the Cymrian museum known anecdotally as The Book of All Human Knowledge. The fragile manuscript had identified his treasure as a dragon scale from a deck of scrying used by an ancient Seren woman named Sharra, and had noted its name as the New Beginning. None of the powers of the scale, however, had survived the book’s immersion in the sea, so he had had to discover its uses himself.

  One thing he found on his own was the effect starlight had on the object.

  Idly, Talquist held up the scale to the horizon where the evening star gleamed. What had appeared solid a moment before—a rough gray piece of oval carapace with a finely tattered edge scored across its concave surface—turned suddenly translucent, the etching of a throne in the center visible even in the dim light of dusk. A purple flash skimmed across the surface, then vanished as the scale became clear, with but a mere outline able to be seen. As many times as Talquist had seen the effect, he never ceased to be amazed by it, especially given that after a moment his own hand, and eventually the rest of him, would follow suit, turning ethereal enough to render him all but invisible, too.

  It had been an extremely useful tool in furthering his ends.

  With his musings came an overwhelming sense of loss. From the moment he had discovered his treasure, it had almost never left his body, tucked in the custom-made pocket of his garments just above his heart. Its vibration had seeped into his core, changing the rhythms of his body to match its own. It had given him the throne of Sorbold, allowing him to brutally depose the Empress Leitha, the withered crone who had reigned undisputed for three-quarters of the past century, and her corpulent heir-apparent son at the same time, bringing to an abrupt end the three-centuries-old Dynasty of the Dark Earth, making way for his new one.

  The Empire of the Sun.

  In order to remain undetected as the usurper, however, he had modestly insisted upon taking on the title only of regent at first, to be crowned emperor on the first day of spring a year later. Even now, as light fled the sky and night took a more confident hold, the preparations for his coronation were being made in the streets of Jierna’sid.

  It would be a festival without precedent and beyond measure.

  Talquist.

  The voice from the bottom of the stairs leading up to the parapet top scratched against his eardrums, sending chills down the length of his spine. It was harsh and high-pitched, with a crackling edge to it. In that voice the echo of other voices could be heard, some low and soft, others shrieking, all brimming with a nascent and ominous power that never ceased to make the skin on Talquist’s neck prickle in fear.
/>   Bring me the scale.

  The words echoed up the stone staircase, carrying with them unmistakable threat.

  More than anyone in the entire world, Talquist knew that the threat was not idle, even though there was no way for the one issuing it to gain access to the parapet. Not wishing to pass the remainder of his life in the high tower, however, the Emperor Presumptive sighed again, took one last fond look at his life’s treasure, then turned away from the window and walked dispiritedly down the stairs.

  As he rounded the last turn of the winding staircase he passed a mirror that had been set up to allow guards to see what might be pursuing them down or up the steps. An ordinary man of Sorbold looked back at him from the reflective surface; Talquist paused long enough to return his gaze. Clothed though he was in finely tailored robes of heavy linen trimmed in gold, in truth by outward appearance he was nothing more than a swarthy-skinned, thick-bodied man, dark of hair and eye, with a workman’s callused hands and a face weathered by the sun and salt sea air. Not born to be a king, much less an emperor, whenever he beheld himself, Talquist saw the lie beneath the finery, the commoner in the garments of a masquerade.

  And it infuriated him to the core.

  He doubled his stride angrily, arriving at the bottom of the stair with a resounding thump.

  The staircase opened up to the wide Great Hall of the palace’s third floor, an opulent room of high angled ceilings painted in grand frescoes above a polished floor where more than a million small pieces of multicolored marble had been inset into an exquisite design, unparalleled in the Known World for its beauty. Long, thin windows of colored glass reflected the light of the burning torches that lined the walls, making the room shine as bright as day.

  Standing just inside the room was an immense statue of a soldier, mammoth in size and heft, its features as detailed as life, down to the stone eyelashes and individual creases in each knuckle of its hands. The titan, more than the height of two men, was rendered in primitive armor and garb from a time before the Cymrians came to this land, ruining it forever, in Talquist’s opinion. The primal, indigenous nature of the time was captured perfectly in the stone man’s flat brow and broad face, with a strong, square jawline and sinewy limbs that ended in warrior’s hands and feet. Most remarkable of all were the eyes, clear and cloudless as a summer day, blue as the sky would be.