The Void Ascendant, page 2
They stared back at me. The Advisor, pointedly, took out his timepiece, a heavy gold number set into a bisected human skull, tiny as a pocketwatch in his great paw, and flipped it open. “They do not know,” he said calmly.
“But you know. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Are you prepared to begin?”
I put my hands in my pockets and inhaled deeply. Even today they would not break protocol; or, to be exact, they would not break protocol for my sake. Or to be even more exact, there was nothing they would break it for, and my mistake was believing that because I was the Prophet, I constituted some kind of reasonable exception to what was not even tradition or custom, but law.
Since I had arrived here I had tried a dozen times to skip the morning’s prophecy, but it had been like turning a corner and walking unexpectedly into a wall, something not merely unyielding but absolutely oblivious to so puny an obstacle as the bones of a human face. Even when I had been ill they had simply climbed to my room in the tower and extracted notes from my babbling through fever-split lips or between bouts of vomiting.
I looked beseechingly at the Advisor one last time; he regarded me placidly, his pupils so dilated that they overtook the bluish whites of his eyes. Stop it, his gaze seemed to say. You are balancing on a ledge that is too narrow to hold you, and you do not know which of these loyal servants might report you to the Royal Council for treason. A Prophet is allowed to be eccentric, not blasphemous.
What would happen to me for treason, I wondered? I had never really challenged the Mouth’s faith or loyalty. I did sense their everpresent fear of shirking, or being thought to shirk, this duty. Its magnitude worried me, seeming as out of proportion as it did to someone who had quit dozens of jobs in my previous life. They were afraid not for their status or position, I thought, but for their lives. And perhaps mine.
Still the soldiers went on. By this point I reckoned we were past thousands and into the tens of thousands, crossing the courtyard and marching through the arch on its far side, into the main palace compound. Surely towards Backless Hall, the only place large enough to collect them all. And to do what? And why now, why today? What did it mean?
“Fine,” I said. Maybe if I paid up, the Advisor would give me something in return. “Attend.”
“We are prepared to receive your dream, O Prophet,” said Phothenth, the second-most senior member of the Mouth after Yalip. I closed my eyes, hearing the familiar rustle as they retrieved notepads and pens from sleeves, bags, and pockets, and turned to a fresh page, followed by the even more familiar reverent hush. Next to me, I felt the air move as the Advisor rose to his feet, his motion wafting the curiously herbal or even resinous smell of his feathers and fur.
Raising my voice over the noise of the boots on the cobbles, I recited the pre-arranged dream I’d prepared last night after supper, as I always did. Lots of colour and texture in it, but totally false. I couldn’t remember when I’d decided to stop giving them my real dreams, but it had been a final decision, like a door slamming shut. No more. Never again. What they had of me would be what I chose.
And anyway, it was all bullshit; that the kingdom was still running and hadn’t fallen into ruin despite relying on my ‘prophecies’ for every major decision was proof of that. I suspected that I could say literally anything, true or false, and the books of interpretation would find a way to incorporate it into a reasonable policy decision.
“And that is truly what you recall, Your Holiness?” The Advisor’s eyes bored into me; his voice carried an edge like my crystal dagger.
“It is what I recall.”
“All of it? That was it, start to finish?”
“Yes, all,” I said. Sweat broke out in the small of my back. “You are not accusing me of lying, I hope.”
“Never,” he said. “I am only making sure. Please repeat it.”
I stared at him; he had never asked me to describe a dream more than once. “Very well,” I said, and ran through it again, already forgetting small details I’d added a moment ago: something about train tracks, which they didn’t have here, and a snowstorm, and a lantern in the distance. Something about birds, which always went over well.
“Thank you, Prophet.” I opened my eyes and Phothenth bowed low, blood coming into his beak so that he looked less pale and sickly. He turned and said to the others, his voice trembling, “Let us pray for the wisdom to understand this gift the Prophet has given us. For it is the wisdom of the Masters.”
“Let us pray,” the others chorused, visibly relieved, and formed a circle around me, joining hand to claw to paw to hand. First Sun crested the rooftops, sliced into bits by the maze of arch and ornament, transforming the pinkish dawn into crimson, then amber, then ordinary gold. Our shadows came into being and grew long and crisp across the pale cobbles and the black-armoured soldiers.
When the Mouth finished its ceremony and recited the Final Gratitudes, they left rapidly and a bit unsteadily, as if (I thought) they wanted to break into a panicked run, hurrying to the Sisur Archive for the books of interpretation, leaving me and the Advisor in the ringing sounds of the army retreating into the distance.
The Advisor gazed down at me, his eyes gradually returning to normal. “Sometimes I worry about you, Prophet.”
“This you’re not worried about?!” I pointed at the last soldiers as if the only thing impeding his explanation was that he for some reason could not see them. “What the hell is going on? Can you tell me now that we’re alone?”
“I still cannot.”
“I don’t like secrets being kept from me, Advisor.”
“It seems not,” he agreed. “Consider leashing that dislike, Prophet, lest it get loose and attack its betters.”
A threat? If it was, it was the first he’d ever expressed to me, and I was as startled as he’d surely meant for me to be. The Advisor was assigned to each incoming Prophet as bodyguard, interpreter, teacher, and mentor, and even though he was, technically, a coworker, he was also the closest thing I had to a friend here. We had never spoken a cross word to each other.
Not a threat, I decided. A warning. To exercise enough self-control in whatever came next, which he clearly knew and I clearly did not, such that I could avoid consequences that even he could not smooth over for me. He had done so in the past, I suspected. Quietly and for my sake alone. An Advisor was a great treasure to the palace—almost more so than a Prophet, for obvious reasons—and he was less replaceable, but not irreplaceable. None of us were.
“Is something terrible happening?” I finally said.
“Yes,” he said softly. “Oh, yes.”
Somewhere nearby, a joem called tentatively, as if it had just regained both its hearing and its composure after the thousands of ringing boots. Wings fluttered above our heads. An ordinary spring morning.
“But it was not given for me to tell you.” He flexed his wings, then tucked them along his back, preparing to walk. “Come.”
“Is that an official order, Advisor?”
“It is.”
“So I cannot say no; but I’ll be told what’s happening? By someone who knows?”
“Yes. I promise.”
It was a long walk. I called my new home a ‘compound,’ though the correct name, in High Dath, was an essentially untranslatable term to something as limited as what I had long ago realized English was. What I knew as an immense wall enclosing a few hundred buildings used by the Royal Family, they called the sithesu-arithsusuir philanu heothesuir, meaning something like, when you dug into the etymology, ‘the fortified place which is not a military fortress which is for good/positive reasons set above the reach of enemies/dangerous things.’
It had taken some getting used to, but I had started out, unlike most Prophets, with the advantage of a certain amount of familiarity. And that was because it looked like several scenes in a movie I had seen about two hundred times back on Earth: like Mortal Kombat’s Outworld. When I had been teaching English to the Advisor, one of the first things I taught him was ‘I can’t wait to see what the bathrooms look like.’ It was the first time I had seen him laugh, really laugh, showing all his sharp and glassy teeth.
“Good morning, Prophet!” someone called; I waved at the little group of guards, unsure who had spoken, as they trooped yawning from a watchtower. Out of sheer boredom one day, as well as hoping to practice my Low Dath, I had asked if I could train with them once or twice a week. Now we were all regular sparring partners, and ate together often after we trained. It was nice to have friends again.
Someone else shouted something I couldn’t hear as I passed, and I waved back. Something about a bun? I was hungry, and would have liked one if so, but the Advisor was moving fast and I had to walk at an undignified pace to keep from breaking into a trot.
It was warmer in the sun, cooler in the soaring baroque clutter of arches, skulls, bones, all carved in various colours of stone (or anyway, I hoped all the skeletons were made things; I tried very hard not to think about them not being carved and had never been tempted to ask for clarification, unlike the Advisor’s watch). In the cold spring morning everything glittered with frost, giving the impression it was moving even in its petrified immobility. Birds flitted back and forth, scuffling over the hundreds of good nesting places in sheltered tangles of ribs and inviting eyesockets.
“Prophet!”
I looked up, and raised a hand to another guard, leaning over the low parapet of his tower and waving his spear to get my attention. “Good morning!” I called up, pausing.
“Will we see you for cards tonight? Tower Eighteen!”
“Yes, I’ll be there! And you know what happens if I catch you cheating this time!”
“No one has forgotten!”
The Advisor turned and came back for me, not impatient, merely inexorable. “Prophet. Come along, please.”
“I do apologize.”
I began to note landmarks I knew: this garden, that statue, that crumbling arch, a strange cluster of eight joined towers like the columnar pod of a behek plant, topped with the same razor-sharp points. Lichen blinked sleepily at us, not warm enough yet to go crawling across the stones and up the faces and femurs of the walls. Three kalnis looked up at the sound of our footsteps, huge soft fuchsia shrubbery one moment, round-backed animals the next, but seeing that there were only two of us, they shuffled back into the shade and became shrubs again.
In the cobbles I spotted small things the army had dropped: coins, empty pens, other odds and ends wedged between the round stones. I stopped to pick up a piece of paper caught between the leaves of a weed. “I think it’s part of a letter,” I said when I caught up to the Advisor again. “Someone tore it up. Look, the date is five days ago. They must have changed their mind about sending it.”
“Very good, Your Holiness. Please keep up.”
“Or someone told them to destroy it. Why would they not want letters to be sent? Why not confiscate it?”
“Your curiosity is a credit to your people, Prophet.”
I knew what that kind of bland response was hiding; I couldn’t hear the tension in his deep, gritty voice, which simply due to the construction of the vocal apparatus, like a lot of people here (and oh how I had learned to expand what the word people meant), often seemed without expression or tone; it had taken me a long time to learn how to interpret what he said.
I kept up.
It occurred to me, not for the first time, that I could spend more time exploring the place that I was all but imprisoned in; but I’d never really wanted to. I spend more time at my window, leaning on the thick sill and staring at the landscape below. The forest beyond the wall, the occasional campfire of some furtive and desperate poacher, the gleam of the sea in the distance. One door, one window, circumscribed my whole life now. Whatever I asked for was brought to me.
And now, I thought with a sudden bolt of fear, someone had asked for the Advisor to bring them something; and I was the thing being brought.
“Where are we going?”
The Advisor glanced back at me as he walked, methodical, not rushing. “Do you not recognize the way, Prophet?”
“No,” I said, then corrected myself almost at once. “Yes. Sorry.” I had just recognized the long bridge we were crossing, slippery with frost along the curved spines or whatever it was that constituted the handrails, and the platform in the middle planted with golden ornamental grasses. The canal below flowed swiftly beneath a transparent scrim of ice that I suspected would be broken up for good by the afternoon, not to return until late fall.
Yes. To the Auditorium. And I knew what that meant.
But it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I was supposed to have been informed a moon in advance: exactly a moon, whichever of the twenty-six tiny glowing pearls had been in the correct spot in the Royal Astronomer’s grid on the day it had been decided. There was protocol. There were calculations, even. I thought about pointing this out to the Advisor, then changed my mind.
He was speeding up, lengthening his stride till the feathers along his neck and back streamed in the wind of his moving, and was soon moving fast enough even at a walk that I had to jog to keep up behind him. We were late. My fault. He’d take whatever blame there was for it, but if we could make it a little less noticeable, leniency was likely to be had.
I thought again: We’re not irreplaceable.
I thought: Why do I keep thinking that?
The Auditorium, like the other big buildings on this side of the compound, backed onto the cliffs, which I only remembered as we began to clamber rather than walk up the increasingly steep streets towards its windowless white wall of stone. You could only approach it from this one side. Very sensible, really. Didn’t want just anybody sauntering in.
The Advisor slowed as we approached, eyeing the huge tapestries dangling from the top of the exterior wall; in a strong breeze, they would occasionally snap out and knock you off your feet. From the open doors emanated the smell of the sea but also of gathered bodies, perfumes and incense, and the murmur of a crowd ordered to be silent but unable to stop itself from shifting. A smell also of burning. Woodsmoke overlying something definitively not wood, touching off a siren inside me that screamed without words. Birds sailed silently overhead, black specks against the green sky.
Don’t make me, I thought. Don’t make me. I don’t want to.
Please.
I said nothing. We emerged from the arched entryway and onto the expected purple carpet, a hundred paces long, its thick nap so far unmarred by any feet, spanning the smooth slate flagstones. At its end hunched the royal pavilion, swagged with thick fabrics shot through with gold thread so that it seemed to capture all the early dawn light, leaving its occupants in luxurious shade. Only an occasional glint of evidence like the eyes of animals in a forest: a crown, a scepter, a ring, a necklace. And below the pavilion, down a handful of shallow steps, waited a wooden platform, and something on top of it, on fire.
To either side of the carpet stood tables covered with trays of food and glass pitchers of wine, and huge bowl-shaped braziers, the flames invisible in the sunlight. Around us rose step after step after step, pale stone all but covered by the crowd. The walls here were studded with watchtowers, the guards within visible but still: yes, they were for watching within as well as without, the archers were ready to kill—eager for it in fact—and only awaiting their signal: treason, blasphemy, disobedience. Anything the King said. Anything the Queen said.
In the cool air, sweat gathered thickly on the back of my neck, my temples, rolled down into my beard.
As we approached the pavilion and the platform below, the King and Queen emerged and leaned on the edge of the stone box; the crowd fluttered in response, sighed in enforced silence. No cheers, no applause. A thousand soft breaths, stifled coughs. My empty stomach contracted as we passed the food, and again, harder, as we reached the platform.
I noticed the executioner first, but even as my body tensed to run from him, my eyes next fell on the sacrificial victim: Yalip, one of the usual six members of the Mouth. They must have gotten him in the night; they would have waited for him to produce yesterday’s prophecy. Squeeze out that final droplet of use.
Yalip was shivering in the light sacrificial robes of white silk; he looked thin, and old, and confused rather than frightened. I had never seen him without his robes and hat of office. And he was bald, or they had shaved him, leaving a dozen small cuts on his scalp. One last cruelty.
He stared at me as the Advisor and I stopped at the prescribed distance, in the prescribed silence. An act of haruspicy had been called for this morning. Now he would be the prophecy.
And they had brought in an outsider to kill him. At a distance I had known this stranger. Recognized him, feared him, so that the blood in my veins seemed to jump back even as I had kept walking. I felt emptied-out by terror, hollow with it. I had last seen him mounted on a dragon, flying after me in an endless darkness. But I had first seen him in a forest, long ago, on fire.
CHAPTER TWO
My legs felt too stiff to bend. Alone, I climbed the steps to the platform, feeling heat baking off the Burning King as he turned his faceless head to me without any emotion I could discern, including recognition. But of course you could tell nothing without a face. Or I couldn’t, anyway.
If he cries out, I thought. If he can speak. If he tells them who I am and where I am from, if he tells them: It is him! Here is what he has done!
And what had I done? Even now I felt the weight of years pressing down on the moment: the past, smothered under the layers of stone and mud I poured down on it, till the day came (I desperately hoped) I would not remember it at all, instead of pretending to not remember. Till the day someone would ask and I could say, I don’t remember that. No, that didn’t happen to me. It wasn’t me. It was someone else.
