The rain I’d called followed us for three days. Perhaps I could have stopped it, but it suited my mood. It slowed our cross-country travel, but I couldn’t bring myself to be bothered by that, either, despite our urgent need for speed.
The twin visions I had seen with the Oracle of Ghol Vidar weighed heavy on me. What would it mean, among humans, for an emperor to live for generations? The shadow of Aemillian’s will had covered so much of Vencar in that vision. He would endure, but would he or the nation truly thrive? Rule would dignify Elana no better, though she and her children would let more light shine upon their subjects. And both visions ended the same way: monsters and monstrosities out of the south – out of the tombs and valleys of a’Rasyr, and made in their image. And then, the dead rising in their wake to feast upon the living.
It would not be the first plague of revenants. That first had been in the fourth century, and had precipitated the coming of the Prophets of Torh, who had taught the people of the Vencari Empire – a true empire, then, ruling broad swaths of territory that had once been parts of Illustria and a’Rasyr, and subjugating the people of Namora – how to lay their dead to rest so they would not rise. Prophesies and doom-sayers had threatened another ever since the first had been put down.
We cut through fields and forests, following country roads when we could and disdaining them when they did not go in the direction we wanted. Elana and Rennin knew these back roads well. These were the paths by which they’d survived the first years of their exile. The memories retracing those steps stirred up did not improve their attitude toward me. My presence – my power – was a necessity, but a deeply and increasingly unpleasant one. Khanaarre, bless her, seemed as concerned for me as she was upset at me.
Then, at last, more than a week after our violent escape from Boospolis, the City came into view.
The approach from the east was not the most stunning view of the City. That honor went to the opposite approach: coming in by the Great Crystal Lake. But Vencar City was easily the most impressive metropolis of the Compact from any direction, outshining even Khrigo City and other lesser polities of the Holy Empire.
The outer walls were made of massive blocks of granite and limestone that gleamed white in the sun. No gate-towns grew outside the City walls. The last great act of the Inimbri Dynasty, almost two hundred years ago, had been to enclose the previous three centuries’ worth of urban expansion behind a new set of defensive walls and forbid the establishment of any business or house-holding within seven miles of the City in any direction. Fields and orchards filled that buffer, now, and great public parks and gardens.
Behind the walls rose the towers for which the city was famous: the guildhalls and citadels of the wizard’s orders, the palatial mansions of the Great Houses, the legendary Three Towers Hotel, the Imperial Palace, itself, and so many others, each a marvel of wizardry and architecture. Some were topped by crenellations, some by onion domes, some by observatory spheres, some by spires built just to claim a few more yards of height. The smallest officially recognized tower was a mere fifty feet. The greatest, setting the limit above which no others were permitted, was the Emperor’s Lookout, an eighth-century addition to the Imperial Palace, nearly three hundred feet high.
We had, inevitably, some concern about the ease with which we might enter the City. As difficult as travelling across the northern half of the kingdom had been, though, we found no troop movement or anything resembling a checkpoint south of our final, brutal encounter with the army outside Boospolis. We let our horses go in an orchard, a few hours walk outside the walls. Unmounted, we were just four travelers among hundreds that afternoon, all passing between the enormous caryatids that guarded the Dawn-Kissed Gate.
I felt bad for Khanaarre, then: unable to stop and gawk at the monumental sculptures for more than a moment, more because of the pressure of those queing up behind us than any risk of detection. The heart of Vencar deserved to be ogled, and after two years of travelling with the prince, seeing the best of Namora and Georg but only the least of Vencar, she deserved to see what she was really fighting for.
The press was worse just inside the gates, as travelers were confined to the broad and busy streets, but eased some as we moved into the city, where travelers spread out to every available road. The wood and stone and concrete buildings that lined the massive central road by which we entered the city were all businesses. Three, four, even five stories of hotels and inns and stables, hostelries and general stores, outfitters and clothiers, storefronts for blacksmiths and whitesmiths and jewelers whose workshops were located in other districts. There were offices, too, for lawyers and notaries and bankers and other professionals. Crossroads were marked by unique statues that served as landmarks: heroes and monsters and garden plots, patrons of arts and armies. And, of course, at the first great public square we came to, there were the great pillars of Vencari society: a courthouse, a barracks, a public altar, a gymnasium, and a bath house.
The great public bath houses of Vencar were wonders of art and architecture and engineering and magic. The water that poured from the elaborate stone fountains outside was free to all, and the fee to use the baths was a pittance, a mere copper taken by a smiling guard who stood on the concrete steps outside the ornate sandalwood doors. Inside, amid the marble-clad concrete columns and caryatids, where the air itself was wet with steam, the amenities cost a little more: soap and sponges and scented oils, towels and robes, medics and masseuses, and, most of all, private rooms.
We poured coins unflinchingly into the hands of the attendants, claiming the first available private rooms for a party of our size. With a smile, a young man in a clinging gauzy chiton took our bags and secured them in lockers to which he gave us the keys. He then led us to a fountain-room where we all stripped off our filthy clothes and sat on low concrete benches. The young man poured warm water over each of our heads while another appeared to take our clothes to the laundry. He didn’t bathe us – we had declined that service – but he waited patiently while we scrubbed ourselves with soap and sand, then sluiced us off with another bucket of warm water, one at a time. It took three such cycles to get all the road dirt off of us. Finally, he opened the steam vent, and left us to luxuriate in the heat until a caldarium came available.
We waited in companionable silence. Much of the tension we had been carrying had washed down the drain along with the dirty water.
“We need at least two days to rest and plan,” said Rennin. “Do we have any contacts in the City? Or suggestions for places to stay?”
“Not the Three Towers,” I said, attempting a bit of gallows humor. “I will be recognized immediately, even after all this time.”
Elana laughed.
“You know,” she said, “the most expensive hotel in the world had not even occurred to me as an option.”
Rennin and Khanaarre laughed, too.
“You were a regular at the most expensive hotel in the world?” Khanaarre asked, shocked and amused.
It had been a bad joke, in retrospect.
“Himself would settle for nothing less,” I said. It was not difficult to affect a long-suffering tone. The Three Towers Hotel had been an extravagant indulgence. Doubly so, since Aemillian had enjoyed near equal luxury at the Solirium estate and the Obsidian Cabal, especially once he had achieved the Grand Mastery. And I must have done so convincingly, because all three of my companions laughed again.
“I realize that this is the worst time to ask this,” said Elana after a moment, “given where we are and what we must do. But … I have to know. What did you see in him?”
I was spared answering immediately. The attendant knocked, then appeared from a half-concealed door in the wall opposite where we had entered. We stood and followed him, naked, through a warm and hidden hallway to the caldarium.
The fountain room had been largely unadorned, just plain gray concrete, with faucets in the walls and a drain in the floor, easy to clean. The caldarium was more elaborate, with columns carved and painted to resemble flowering trees around the sunken pool, and vividly colored garden frescoes on the walls. Bottles of wine and fruit juice waited for us, along with bowls of cubed feta cheese and pitted olives.
Shallow steps gave access to the steaming hot waters, and a low bench ran along the entire perimeter of the pool. We filed in – Elana first and me last – with the prince and her consort flanking the bulk of the snacks. Khanaarre settled herself between them and me, a clear and deliberate buffer. I thought I might escape the prince’s question, but her steady gaze made clear that she’d repeat herself if she had to.
I sighed.
“I’m sure you want to hear that it was all ambition on my part,” I began, “or all predation on his. A calculated seduction for material gain, his power to cloak my alien origins or to support my ambitions. Or perhaps my naiveté and his abuse of his position. But it began like most affairs: forced proximity and shared interests. There was some rivalry, too; neither of us were accustomed to having an intellectual equal. Many of the priestesses were smarter than me, certainly, but few of the freemen or the hands, and fewer still among the humans I had met before joining the Cabal, could begin to call themselves my equal.”
I stood, and reached across the prince to grab a bottle of wine. I opened it with a twist, and took a deep swig straight from the bottle.
“I won’t pretend that there wasn’t always a sliver of ice in his heart,” I went on. “I will also admit that I made it worse when I helped him to form the syphon that made us what we became. I must similarly admit that while the women I have loved have all been generous as they have been brilliant, my taste in men has always been more … questionable. I like them hard and sharp and dark, inside and out, and … he was, and is, all those things.”
I took another swig of wine and stared into the painted foliage of the frescoes. To my surprise, Khanaarre took my hand under the waters.
“I’m sure you are hoping that I will repudiate him,” I said. “That I regret the years we spent together, and the power that I helped him unearth. To say that I am in no way conflicted, now, and that I will not flinch to face him in the coming days.”
“You’re not wrong,” Elana admitted.
“I could say those words, but I don’t think that I could say them convincingly. I loved him. I still love him. I am deeply conflicted. I will not be well when our work is done.” Another swig of wine. “But I am here, aren’t I? I have taken you beyond the mortal world to retrieve a thing of divine power, and I have revealed my most closely guarded secrets to bring you safely home. I have murdered dozens to see you safely here, in the City. I will see you through to the end of it, and I will do what is necessary. When the throne is yours, you will build me my tower beyond the edge of the Compact. Do not ask me to feel good about any of it.”
===
“You will be leaving, soon?” he asked.
His hand on my face was hot with the power that poured into him from the Rorgoth Throne. My eyes drifted closed and I shuddered, slightly. It didn’t even feel like him.
“Yes,” I said.
“When?”
“Now.”
It took all my strength to pull away from him. I turned and walked away as fast as I could without completely abandoning my dignity. I dared not look back.
The palace reeked of blood and fire. Dead guards and armed retainers lay in pools of their own blood. Solirium troops and Cabal wizards, still glowing with their own aegis-spells, saluted or called out greetings to me as I passed. I ignored them.
When I came to the wing where the royal family had been housed, I found a dozen Solirium soldiers waiting for me.
“We have the heir trapped in her bedroom,” their lieutenant told me, “just as you ordered.”
“Good.”
“But there’s a complication.”
“What?”
“The captain of the Iron Guard is in there with her.”
“Even better. You all stay here.”
I turned, my robes swirling around me, and brushed past them to what had been the Emperor’s bedchamber. I was relieved to see that no one had been here when the soldiers came through, and that no armsmen lingered. I had seen enough blood for one day, and it was best if the secret of these passages remained mine alone.
It took me a few minutes to find the entryway: a wardrobe had been placed in front of it. To my delight, the wardrobe proved to be open-backed, and I was able to reach through it to press the release on the wooden panel, then pass through and close both wardrobe and passage behind me.
The passage was lightless and close, dusty and dank with decades of neglect. I nicked my finger with my knife and conjured a light. When I found the door to the prince’s room, I donned my iron mask. Another drop of blood activated the protection and obfuscation spells that lay within it, so that I need not worry about the sword-skills of the prince or her Iron Guard captain, or that Aemillian might decide to track us out of the palace. The plan would work better if he genuinely did not know where any of us had gone.
I was relieved that this passage did not open into another wardrobe. That would have reduced the drama of my appearance. This panel proved to be unblocked entirely, allowing me to swoop into the room like an apparition.
The room’s two occupants turned in surprise at the sound of my entrance, then stepped back in alarm. The prince was a young woman in her middle teens, pretty but pock-faced, with unruly dark hair. She leapt behind her companion, a handsome young man only a handful of years her senior, hard-eyed and serious, his head shaved meticulously bald, dressed in the formal hoplite armor of the Traianum Emperor’s Iron Guard.
I was dressed in my formal robes as a wizard of the Obsidian Cabal, but few outsiders recognized the white robes of the highest ranks, and my iron mask was deeply uncanny. It had its intended effect: he raised his sword between us, the point of the leaf-shaped xiphos aimed at my ribs, but he hesitated to charge.
“Come with me if you want to live,” I said, the full-faced iron mask giving my voice a strange reverberance.
He hesitated a moment longer, compulsively glancing toward the barricaded door and the Solirium soldiers that he knew waited on the other side. I could guess what he was thinking: Why had they waited so long? Was the prince not a priority? Or did they have worse planned for her than simple murder?
He lowered his sword but did not sheath it.
“Can we trust them,” asked the prince, hiding behind her guard.
“I don’t think we have a choice, your grace.”
With a decisive nod, the prince moved around him.
“We follow, unknown savior,” she said, addressing me as, in Vencari stories, people addressed strangers they suspected of being gods in disguise.
I stepped backward into the passage, blocking off the way I had come.
“That way,” I said. “I will seal the door behind us.”
They moved past me reluctantly, the guard taking point and the prince following close behind. They went a few paces past me then stopped. It was enough. I pulled the passage closed behind them, then muttered a few words in the language of the priestesses who had raised me, rhu xian thaumaturgy that I had carefully eschewed for decades. The passage was sealed, and no one without the counterspell would be able to operate the latch.
My magelight still hovered in the hallway, throwing us all in deeply uncanny and unflattering lights and shadows. My charges looked scared to death. I wished I could, in good faith, offer them any real comfort.
“Keep going,” I said. “This will lead us beyond the palace walls.”
So saying, I dimmed my magelight until it was barely bright enough to give us a sense of where the walls were and where we stood in relation to one another. I knew where we were, roughly, with regard to the rest of the palace. The map I had found had been far from complete, and I had walked enough of the place today to fill in some of the gaps in my head, but I did not want to risk shining a light out of some unsuspected peephole.
The dim also increased the uncanny sense of my presence, dressed all in white robes and my gleaming steel mask. It was very easy to keep the prince and her guard moving just by looming a little too close behind.
It took almost an hour of narrow, silent movement between the walls and descending down hidden stairs and ladders to reach the gate I knew was waiting for us, cut into the foundations of the palace wall. This, I unlocked with a wizard’s spell, then sealed behind us with the same rhu xian thaumaturgy that I had used on the prince’s bedroom. An hour later, I repeated that sequence and let us into a long-abandoned cellar, so ancient as to be devoid of even rats and mold. The west wall was pierced with small, grated windows near the high ceiling, letting in the wan afternoon light and cool evening air. A grate in the floor let out any water that might get in. The only sign that anyone had been here in the last century was the pile of supplies that I had left here a week ago, secret even from Aemillian and the Obsidian Cabal.
“They will search for you for the next three days,” I told the prince and her guard. “On the fourth day, it should be safe for you to go up those stairs –” I pointed to a door “– and steal a change of clothes. Do not contact anyone you know until you are safely out of the city.”
“Who are you?” asked the prince.
“How can we trust you?” asked the guard.
I walked over to the pile of supplies and pulled a talisman from the backpack. This was another thing of rhu xian thaumaturgy, used by spies and refugees alike. I might have been able to make something like it with wizard’s magic, but it amused me perversely to protect the prince, whom I knew to be an initiate of the Triumvirate mysteries, with magic of gods I knew she would fear and hate.
“One of you should wear this at all times,” I said. “I did not expect to be able to save more than just the prince. This will hide you from your enemies, but you must stay physically close for it to conceal both of you. With a little luck, it will see you safely out of the City.”
The prince took the talisman with an air of wonder.
The guard furrowed his handsome brow.
“Hide us? How? Didn’t you see what our enemies are capable of?”
“No mortal can see what the gods conceal from him.”
I didn’t give them a chance to ask further questions. I simply turned toward the stairs and ascended them with a dramatic swoop of my robes. At the top was a trap door that led to another room, as unfrequented as the first. Here, I had left myself a change of clothes, giving up my Cabal finery for Handari tunic and leggings. My wizard’s chest was waiting, and a backpack just big enough for it. I stuffed my robes and the mask into the chest, then the chest into the backpack. Unrecognizable as myself, except for the scar, I slipped out of the long-forgotten room into the long and equally long-forgotten alleyway, and from there into the City, where I would escape the chaos with the legitimate refugees.
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