The Empire's Ruin, page 19
“Gifts,” he said, “you may leave with me. I offer you my absolute assurance that I will see them brought before the Emperor.”
Akiil shook his head, tapped gently at his own temple. “The gift is in here.”
“A message.” Yumel darkened once more. “From Kaden hui’Malkeenian.”
“A message and an offer.”
“An offer. Very generous, I am certain. May I inquire after the nature of this offer?”
Akiil hesitated. He’d planned to save this part for the Emperor herself, but if he never got to speak with her, there was no point saving it.
“I know about the kenta.”
Back at Ashk’lan, one of Akiil’s teachers had forced him to paint leaves for months on end. Thousands of leaves. Every time he finished a painting, the monk would say, “Do you see now? There is no such thing as leaves? There is only this leaf. And this leaf. And this.”
It made Akiil want to punch him in the neck, but the monk didn’t seem to notice.
When they were finally finished with leaves, he was assigned to watch snow melt.
“The world is change,” the monk said, sitting beside him. “See the change, and you see the world.”
Now, sitting across the immaculately polished desk, Akiil watched the appointments minister, first rank as though he were snow.
Yumel’s face didn’t move. Akiil might as well have announced that he knew about apples. There was nothing but the same gray boredom in the minister’s eyes, and yet, something had changed. There was the tapping of the finger. It was quick, silent, barely a motion at all, but that finger had lain perfectly still before Akiil mentioned the kenta. Yumel was breathing faster, too—not much faster, but faster. His pupils had dilated.
Akiil smiled. “So you know about the kenta. Which means the Emperor told you about them. She asked you to look out for someone like me.”
“Kenta,” the man said, shaking his head. “I am afraid I do not know the term.”
“Yes, you do.”
Akiil winked.
Yumel closed his ledger, set down his quill.
“What would you say to the Emperor, bright be the days of her life, about these kenta? In the unlikely event that you were honored with an audience.”
Akiil smiled.
“In that unlikely event, I would tell her that I can use them. That no one else can. And that I can teach her to do the same.”
* * *
Back at the monastery, Kaden had talked at length about the Hall of a Thousand Trees—its size and beauty, history and magnificence. To Akiil, an orphan who’d lived half his life in the slums and half in the stony nowhere of Ashk’lan, it had sounded like a place straight out of myth or legend. And so the fact that he wasn’t escorted there was a little irritating.
Shouldn’t have worn the robe, he thought. Should have stolen something fancy.
Not only, in fact, was he not being led to anything that looked like the Hall of a Thousand Trees, the Aedolian Guardsmen at his shoulders—stone-faced soldiers built more on the scale of armored bears rather than men—seemed to be taking the most obscure passages they could find, guiding him through a labyrinth of courtyards and corridors, outside, then inside, then outside again, twisting and turning past temples and graceful halls, across bridges and beneath them, to a nondescript wooden door in an unremarkable stone wall in an utterly unimpressive long, low building that looked vaguely like a stable.
“This?” Akiil asked, raising a brow.
The smaller of the two guardsmen—smaller being a very relative term—didn’t reply. Instead, he knocked three times, paused, then a fourth. The door swung open. Two more Aedolians waited in the chamber beyond, hands on the pommels of their swords.
“Hello,” Akiil said, nodding to each in turn. “Hello.”
One of the men, his face grim as an undertaker’s, gestured with a gauntleted hand. “Undress.”
Akiil raised his brows. “Excuse me?”
“Remove your robe, or it will be removed.”
Kaden had mentioned nothing about being forced to strip in some obscure room for a group of nameless soldiers, but then, as the son of the Emperor, Kaden presumably hadn’t been the one doing the stripping. For a moment the cold hand of Akiil’s childhood reached out to seize him. He’d had friends back in the Quarter who’d disappeared into rooms like this and come out broken. Some hadn’t come out at all.
He took a steady breath, slowed his breathing, his heart.
To see the world, you must look past your own mind.
There was no lust in the faces of the soldiers, none of the eagerness or shame he might have seen if they’d brought him to the small room in order to rape him. Instead, they wore the hard gazes of men who distrusted everything, including Akiil. Especially Akiil. The leader held himself back, hand still resting on his sword, as though he half expected an attack.
Akiil allowed himself a smile.
“Of course,” he said, pulling the rough robe up over his head, holding it out to the man. “I promise I didn’t bring anything sharp.”
Evidently, the Aedolian didn’t think much of his promise.
As Akiil waited naked at the center of the knot of men, the soldier went over every inch of the fabric, taking special care to probe the seams, the hem, the doubled fabric where the hood met the shoulders. When he was finally satisfied he handed it back, waited for Akiil to dress once more, then opened a door on the far side of the room.
Akiil stepped past him, conscious of the man’s stare, into a walled garden. Unlike almost everything else about the Dawn Palace, the scale of the space was human. A small brook flowed in from beneath one wall, meandered in a lazy arc, then flowed out beneath another. Flowering ivy climbed low trellises. A maple with sun-bright orange leaves cast a light, dappled shade. There were no soldiers or flags. No statuary. No courtiers or palace guards or gongs. Nothing, in other words, that Akiil had expected. Instead, a ramshackle wooden table stood on crushed stone in a small clearing, the kind of workmanlike surface he remembered from back at Ashk’lan, a place for puttering or potting. Everything in the garden was natural, normal.
Except, of course, for the woman standing behind that table.
“Kneel,” growled one of the Aedolians. His gauntleted hand closed around Akiil’s shoulder, crushing it, forcing him down.
The stone dug into his knees. Half a pace in front of him, the ants had made three small hills. He watched as they dragged the body of a dead spider toward their home. If the Emperor or her thugs thought to put him off balance by making him kneel and wait, they’d made a mistake. He’d spent days at Ashk’lan, weeks, months kneeling in the snow, or the rain, or the vicious autumn wind, freezing his balls off, studying the migration of the birds or the shapes of the clouds or the incremental erosion of the rocks. Not that he’d ever been able to see the rocks erode. Still … if this was a waiting game, he was prepared to wait for a very long time.
“You knew my brother,” the Emperor said at last.
She sounded distracted, indifferent, as though she’d barely noticed his arrival. It was an act, of course. An excellent act, but then, he hadn’t come expecting amateurs.
Akiil nodded, kept his eyes on the ground.
“Tell me about him.”
A test. Tattered robes weren’t hard to come by, and it was no secret that the heir to the Unhewn Throne had trained among the Shin. Akiil would have been shocked if he were the first one who’d come to the palace claiming to have known the Emperor’s brother. The fact that he was telling the truth didn’t make his story any more plausible. There was a lesson in there, he thought, about the relative value of stories and truth.
“He didn’t like jam,” he said finally.
“I thought all you monks ate was tubers and gruel.”
Akiil nodded. “The Shin were great ones for tubers. Also gruel. But every year in late summer, way down in the valleys, the bruiseberries ripened. Hue and a few of the others used to make jam. Not very good jam, mind you, but better than anything else at Ashk’lan. I stole the whole pot once, hid it in my room.…”
“I am waiting,” the Emperor said, “to hear what this has to do with my brother.”
“Kaden hated it. Something about the texture. Didn’t like the way it stuck to his fingers. I told him he was insane to pass up the only tasty thing in that ’Shael-spawned place, but he never liked being told things.”
The Emperor didn’t respond. Somewhere deep in the palace a gong began tolling out the midmorning hour. Only when it was finished, when the last reverberations had died away, did Adare speak again.
“I expected you to choose as your proof some grander secret. Some greater revelation.”
Akiil shrugged. He tried to, anyway. It was hard to shrug with the Aedolian grinding his shoulder to mush.
“The mind knows nothing,” he replied. It was an old Shin aphorism, one that always annoyed him. Which wasn’t to say it couldn’t be useful now. “Truth lives in the hands, in the eyes, on the tongue.”
The Emperor snorted. “Certainly sounds like my brother’s type of bullshit.”
“We were raised, Your Radiance, by the same order of bullshitters.”
Adare’s laughter was grim.
“Leave us, Hugel, Brant.”
“Your Radiance—” protested the guardsman.
The Emperor cut him off. “If everyone is doing their jobs, he has been searched a dozen times since he set foot inside the palace.”
“They were admirably thorough,” Akiil added.
Hugel’s—or maybe it was Brant’s—voice came out a rumble. “Some men do not need weapons to kill.”
“If he murders me, I expect you to exact some terrible vengeance. Until he does, I expect you to obey my orders.”
The iron hand disappeared from Akiil’s shoulder.
“Apologies, Your Radiance. We will be just beyond the door.”
The footsteps retreated. The wooden door swung shut with a faint thud. A latch fell into place.
Akiil remained on his knees, eyes downcast. Kaden had never insisted on his imperial prerogatives, but Kaden had been raised by monks. Adare had grown up here, inside the palace, waited on by a thousand servants and slaves. For all he knew, he might have joined those abject ranks the moment he walked through the gate.
“Akiil, no family name, of the Perfumed Quarter of Annur,” the Emperor said.
So Kaden had mentioned him. That made things easier.
“Your Radiance.”
“You may stand.”
He straightened up slowly, ignoring the pain where the crushed stone had gouged into his knees, raised his eyes to meet those of the Emperor, produced his most winning smile.
Adare hui’Malkeenian did not smile back. Her face—all hard planes and angles—didn’t seem built for smiles. She stood beside the table, the stem of a single white orchid in her fingers, a vase filled with flowers before her, but she wasn’t looking at the orchid or the vase. She was looking at Akiil, and her eyes were on fire.
He’d expected this, of course. The burning eyes were the Malkeenian birthright, proof of the family’s descent from the Lady of Light, the goddess Intarra herself. Kaden’s eyes had burned, too—a fact that Akiil had always found vexingly ostentatious—but where Kaden’s gaze had reminded him of campfires or lanterns, the blaze in Adare’s irises was both brighter and colder.
A whirl of delicate scar cascaded down her face, a labyrinth of dozens of interweaving lines falling from her hairline into the collar of her robe. Her arms and hands were likewise marked. Akiil had heard this story all the way back in the Bend—how she’d raised a spear to call down the lightning, how, instead of killing her, it left her with this tracery of beautiful, inscrutable scar. Unlike her brother, Adare claimed to be Intarra’s prophet. Akiil knew a man back in the Quarter once—Drunk Tym—who’d claimed to be a prophet. This woman was nothing like Drunk Tym. She studied him with those shifting, burning eyes the way a butcher might size up a hog.
“My brother did mention you,” she said at last.
“We were close.”
“He said you were a thief and a liar raised by cutthroats and whores.”
Akiil spread his hands. “I requested, as soon as I was old enough to frame the words, a suite of private rooms in this very palace.” He put on his best perplexed frown. “I can only assume my request was somehow mislaid.”
The Emperor raised an eyebrow, then turned her attention to the orchid in her hands. “Perhaps you believe,” she mused, trimming the stem with a small, bone-handled knife, “that your purported friendship with my brother allows you to take liberties with me.”
“I believe,” Akiil replied, “that you’ll never learn what I can teach you as long as you insist on being an emperor and a prophet.”
“I am hardly going to become a monk.”
“What you need to become is nothing.”
A light breeze feathered the leaves of the maple. Adare trimmed the stem of the flower, tested it in the vase, then trimmed it again.
“Do you know what I tell my ministers,” she asked finally, “when they rise to the first rank?”
“Congratulations?”
The Emperor shook her head, chose a bloodred lily, considered it from one angle, then another.
“I tell them not to waste my time. If they can’t make a point in fewer than five sentences, then they are not worthy of the post.” She held the lily against the nuns’ blossom, narrowed her eyes, frowned, discarded it. “You have spoken sixteen.”
Akiil nodded, held up five fingers, lowered the first.
“The kenta are gates built thousands of years ago by the Csestriim to let a person cross half the world in a single step.”
“I’m aware of that,” Adare replied. “Every Malkeenian emperor before me used them to hold Annur together.”
Her face remained still, indifferent, but Akiil could hear the frustration in her voice, flecks of rust on a fine steel blade.
He nodded again, lowered another finger for each sentence that he spoke.
“A traveler through the kenta passes, between her origin and her destination, through nothing.
“Nothing is the territory of the Blank God.
“To pass the kenta safely, you must carry nothingness inside you.
“An emperor and a prophet are the opposite of nothing.”
That, at least, was the theory.
Akiil had never seen a kenta. The monks never talked about them, but he had learned early in life to ferret out the best secrets, and in this case he’d had an advantage; Kaden, after all, was sent to the monastery, like his father and his grandfather and all the rest of them, to learn to use the ancient gates. Akiil would have known a lot more if there had actually been a kenta at Ashk’lan. He’d have known a lot more if soldiers hadn’t come and slaughtered everyone who could have taught him. He’d have known a lot more if someone had bothered writing this shit down instead of passing it along in ’Kent-kissing riddles from one generation to the next for hundreds or thousands of years, but they hadn’t and he didn’t. The whole situation was less than ideal, but he’d spent a lifetime making the most of lousy situations. The Emperor didn’t know what he didn’t know, and he intended to keep it that way.
“Are you here to teach me Csestriim history?” Adare asked.
“I am here because I can teach you to use the kenta.”
The fire shifted in her eyes as she watched him.
“How?” she asked finally.
Instead of replying, he stepped forward, took the vase off the table.
“A beautiful arrangement,” he said, considering it. “As though these exact flowers were meant to be here, together, in just this way.”
“Szi szian,” the Emperor replied.
Akiil shook his head, admitting his ignorance.
“Right place,” Adare said. “It’s an old phrase.”
“What does it have to do with flowers?”
“There is beauty in a system—a painting, a government, a flower arrangement—in which the place of everything seems necessary, inevitable.”
“Spoken like a woman whose own place is atop the throne.”
“I believe in order. In the beauty of order.”
“Do you know what the Blank God has to say about beauty? About order?”
The Emperor watched him with those burning eyes, but didn’t reply.
Akiil upended the vase, scattering the flowers across the crushed stone. With the bare sole of his foot, he ground the petals into the rock, then shook the last drops of water from the vase.
“Nothing,” he said, setting the vessel back on the table.
“That was a ghost orchid.” The Emperor’s voice was mild, but he could hear the anger beneath it. “It blooms only once every four or five years. That single flower was worth a hundred Annurian suns.”
“And do you know,” Akiil asked, “how many Annurian suns will purchase you passage through the kenta?”
The Emperor’s jaw tightened. “I am beginning to suspect the answer is none.”
“Some things can’t be purchased.”
“Does that mean you’ll be providing this instruction for free?”
“The Blank God has no interest in coins or titles.” Akiil slid on the mask of his smile. “I, alas, am made of far weaker stuff.”
* * *
All around him the monastery blazed. Flames chewed through the wooden roofs of the buildings, hurled a garish light across the night sky. Armored men with massive swords stalked through the stone buildings, blood darkening their blades. There should have been screaming, terror, fighting or flight, but the monks did not die as other people died. They went silently, steel passing through them as though they were already gone.
A dream, Akiil tried to plead. This is a dream.
No, Akiil.
He looked down to find Scial Nin, the abbot of Ashk’lan, kneeling at his feet. Soot smeared the old man’s face. Blood caked his wrinkles.
This is not a dream, is it? the abbot asked. This is what actually happened. He lifted a hand to touch the sword buried in his chest.
Akiil, as he did every time, followed that blade, followed it back and back, followed it for what seemed like forever, dread mounting inside him, until he found the handle clutched in his own hand. Instead of his robe, he wore a suit of gleaming steel, as though he weren’t a monk at all, as though he never had been.
