The Game of Courts, page 2
His own nature had kept him from the strongest drugs, for he did not like the ones that made him feel invincible. He liked the ones that closed off the world and let the noise inside his mind quieten and grow still, but everybody had wanted those in the aftermath of the Fall, and the supplies were long since finished.
There was always alcohol, because that could be made by even inexpert hands. By the end of that year, or that century, several of his friends were great experts in turning whatever they could find into liquor.
How was it a century? How could anyone think the year had taken so long? The days were endless and the weeks short, the nights spinning together, always the wild raucous beginning, always the heavy slow ending, when the drinks had finally done their work. But they were not spinning years, decades, together—how could they be?
He looked in his mirror, and saw himself looking no older than one might expect, with the shadow of the Fall on him. Always slim, he had lost weight and was now gaunt; his cheeks and temples were hollow. His skin was more sallow than the honeyed brown to which he was accustomed, but then he so rarely went outside.
After the Last Emperor awoke, he went outside, pacing slowly down the one safe gravel path. The dead gardens were now almost entirely drowned in greenery. Trees thrust upward through the mass of vines, and clumps of huge paddle-shaped leaves erupted in flowers like spiky crane’s-heads.
He recalled his great-great-great-grandmother’s oaks, and stared upwards at the tall trees, their trunks wider than he could embrace. Even in the tropics, even with magic wild and untamed, surely it had taken more than a singular year for those trees.
But there were stories about magic wild and untamed. What was more likely, that the magic had urged those trees upwards, those vines to tangle, those great erupting flowers to grow? Or that the Palace moved at its own time, separate from the world around it?
It had somehow been plucked from one world and dropped on another. Was there any reason it could not have been plucked out of ordinary time as well?
He disliked everything about this. The hot, humid air, the clouds that looked as if they were about to dump a year’s worth of water on his head—it was mid-day! How could it possibly be raining?—the unfamiliar trees, the vines and the thorny, snaking plants that seemed to move when he was not looking directly at them.
He did rather like the giant erupting flowers. They reminded him, just a little, of Terec. Not so much that Terec was like them, but that he would like them.
He turned and looked at the Palace, shining white against the bruised sky. The Emperor’s Tower soared high above him, the Sun-in-Glory banner flying proudly from its peak. His heart lifted despite himself.
Conju stopped drinking (twice), but he had no friends outside his set, and none of those seemed to care as he did that the future might change.
Most of them thought the Last Emperor’s waking a trick by the Ouranatha to underscore their authority, and refused to be taken in by such a scam by the priest-wizards.
Conju did not disagree with their suspiciousness. The Ouranatha had not protected them against the Fall. Why should anyone trust them to rebuild after it?
But he had felt the air change, and he did not think the Ouranatha had done that, for they would have earlier if they could.
A problem with stopping drinking was that it left him with long days and even longer evenings empty of companionship or activity. He went through his rooms with a meticulousness he had never shown before, cleaning everything down to the grout in the bathing-room tiles, polishing every pyx and phial and alembic until they gleamed as resplendent as the Emperor ever had on his throne.
He went looking for others with healthier habits, but all he found were those he already knew, in their idleness and debauchery; or those who had thrown themselves into work, and were as numb and banal as his previous set but with grinding labour instead of drink or drugs.
Anyone who had any spark left to them after the Fall appeared to have joined either the Ouranatha or the constellation of terrifyingly earnest bureaucrats under the Princess Indrogan.
Conju did not believe in the gods: he never had growing up, and the Fall had not made him begin. And he had always disliked the wizards because it was their magic that had driven Terec away from the Empire.
That left Princess Indrogan, who knew very well how useless his life had been.
“What skills do you have?” she asked bluntly when he finally managed to secure an interview with her.
Conju had dressed as best he could, and knew he had chosen wrongly as soon as he saw the princess’s severe court mourning. In consequence he felt he could not say dressing well, although he had always thought himself skilled in that art. He knew cloth and cut and even some of the tricks of mending and sewing, for he and Terec had sometimes played at tailoring with their respective sisters.
Princess Indrogan stared at him, entirely unimpressed with his silence. He was plucking at the fabric of his hose, loose as had been the fashion the last year of the Empire. His mind was blank, all his carefully-rehearsed words gone in the face of her forbidding stare.
“I am good with perfumes,” he said eventually, scrambling for something to say. “Mixing them. …” He trailed off as her frown grew even colder.
“What a useless waste of air you are,” she said. “Still, we need all the hands we can get. Report to the Duke of Blix. He’s good at putting people to work.”
The Duke of Blix was in charge of supplies, it turned out. He was a small man, shorter than Conju and thin in a way that suggested he wanted to be plump but had lost weight from worrying. He regarded Conju with as little enthusiasm as the Princess Indrogan.
“Another lost lordling, eh,” he muttered, even as Conju gave him the appropriate bow for their respective ranks. The Duke ignored the reciprocal courtesy, which rankled, and then set Conju to the task of inventorying storerooms.
Conju stood at the mouth of a long, echoing corridor deep in the bowels of the Palace. He hadn’t even known these floors were here, with the stones heavy grey blocks, cold and clammy and mouldering. The Duke of Blix had given him a box of leather-bound notebooks, a metal-nibbed pen, and a bottle of cheap ink, and left him alone.
He took a deep breath and regretted it. He had spent years training his nose to decipher scents, and these were vile. Mould and dust and cold stone and rust and abandonment. They smelled like ruins.
They were ruins.
He fought open the first door, which stuck, and found within it a shambled pile of stuff, scrambled and tumbled about by the earthquakes and magical displacement of the Fall. They had lost the door to this hall for years, the Duke of Blix had said, and no one now remembered what had been in it. It was unlikely to be particularly useful, but they did need to know.
It was something he could do, he supposed.
Conju was slow, but he did know how to be meticulous, at least, and he filled the books the Duke of Blix gave him with notations. The first storerooms were of supplies: leather and string and rope, wood in a hundred forms and tools, metal hinges and nails and wires and so on and on and on.
There were whole sections where he had to go find someone to name the items so he could record them properly.
Each time the Duke of Blix gave him an unimpressed look, sighed, and found him someone who was more useful and should have been doing something else.
Eventually Conju found one of the Palace libraries and flirted with the librarian until the man would find him encyclopedias of tools and practical objects.
It was a nice flirtation; a good distraction. For a while it almost seemed as if it would go somewhere beyond flirtation and a bit of casual sex, but then the librarian went out one day to the community that was growing up outside the ruins of the Palace gardens, and never came back.
Conju thought of how tempting the green jungle encroaching the old gravel paths was, and added the librarian’s name to the list of those he remembered.
Vanilla and leather and a bright coppery thread of the dyrfil, for old books and red hair and a few stolen months of pleasure.
He wished he could believe in a god, any god. That he thought there was anything past this life but darkness and silence.
There were no gods, none that Conju could find. None that he could believe in. Not truly. But then again, if one were perhaps a little less choosy—
There was the Emperor.
Only called divine. A man, really, for all that he was garbed in the pretence of holiness, of radiant divinity, of power. A man, not so different from Conju, who might be neither good nor great. But then again, he was there. Or at least somewhere. People said he was there, anyway.
Conju didn’t need anything more than that.
This was the game of courts: you won if you had the favour of the Emperor.
You received the favour of the Emperor by—well, it depended on the Emperor in question. This one, Conju’s Emperor, Artorin Damara, hundredth and last—
No one seemed to know, exactly.
Conju listened to the gossip.
The Lady Jivane had handed over the crown of Zunidh to the Last Emperor, and the Ouranatha had appointed him lord magus.
Conju did not quite know what to think of this, and held his peace, asking questions here and there, listening to the answers and what was merely hinted. He could not be but cynical at the optimism that the Last Emperor was now the Lord Magus of Zunidh. It was a good move, politically, he supposed.
Only a handful of paths outside were safe, and it was hard to find the one or two guides. The trees surged upwards, the vines grew more thickly tangled, the village one could glimpse out some of the Palace windows had become a town and seemed to be sprawling into a city.
Yet—inside the Palace he worked his way through the silent, mouldering storerooms. He ate in one of the refectories, making acquaintances with the other lost lordlings under the Duke of Blix. He had not known any of them well before, and did not feel much urge to befriend them now.
But they were people to sit and eat and gossip with. Occasionally he had a bit of fun with one or other of them, though never in their own rooms. Fortunately there were always plenty of abandoned suites to choose from.
None of them seemed particularly inclined in anything more than that.
No one wanted anyone to get too close, really.
Conju thought it was sensible. There was only so much loss a person could take.
Conju disliked the Ouranatha, who swanned about in their masks and their heavy, shapeless robes. Their predictions and tomfoolery, their dramatic pronouncements and sly insistence on their power, their authority, their salvation.
They had crowned the Last Emperor the lord magus. They were guiding him, directing his steps, channelling the magic.
Conju listened to the gossip coming out of the Emperor’s Tower. The Last Emperor apparently spent his days pacing, reading reports of and writing responses to the events of the world outside the Palace walls, and dismissing his staff.
Only his guards stayed a stable grouping. They lived in the lower floors of the Tower, training and eating and sleeping together. It was only on their odd hours off that they might speak to anyone outside of their tight cohort. Conju knew none of them enough to warrant a greeting, alas.
He sorted and inventoried the storerooms, learning how to distinguish sizes of wires, types of nails, grades of leather. He too was assisting in the work of restoring order, however minutely. And it was better to numb himself with the mindless, persnickety work than it had been to debauch himself.
At least this way, when he sat at the desk his brother had given him, looked at the portraits his father had painted, smelled the fragrances his mother had distilled, his siblings had given him, his beloved friend had also loved, he no longer felt so thoroughly ashamed.
Conju remembered many happy hours spent listening to court news when he was a child, when Eritanyr had been on the throne. As a youth and in his own time at court it had been Artorin Damara, hundredth and last Emperor of Astandalas.
They still gossiped about Artorin Damara, the sun at the centre of their orbits, pulling them towards him with his brilliance even as they stayed a safe distance away so they would not be burned or blinded.
Conju had always followed the fashions and the gossip around fashions. He knew that the Emperor Artorin had always been noted for caring about his dress, to the point of being considered difficult.
Conju felt a certain kinship with the Last Emperor in this regard. He too cared about his dress a little too much, to the point of being considered difficult. He wondered whether Emperor Artorin also felt it was a way to bring order to his days, whether he too found his garments a form of artistic expression, whether he too simply loved the small rituals and soothing activities involved in being well dressed.
When he heard of the Last Emperor dismissing attendant after attendant, he sympathized.
He made sure to talk to the attendants thus dismissed, introduction passing to introduction until he became known as a kind of fixture around the periphery of the Tower staff. He shifted refectories to the one more often frequented by them, and listened to their increasing tendency to swear by the Emperor, as if he were in truth the god Astandalan state policy had declared he was.
He found it amusing. These people had to know he wasn’t actually a god, after all. He could only suppose it was someone’s idea of a heartening notion.
Probably the Ouranatha’s, he decided over time. They were the ones who improved their standing by deifying the Last Emperor. They were the priests, the mediators between mortals and gods, and if the Lord of Zunidh, the Last Emperor, were a god, then who better to be his mouthpiece?
There were two main threads in the stories he heard from the staff dismissed from serving the Last Emperor.
They had been careless with the clothes and jewels and irritated the Last Emperor’s sense of decorum; and they had responded to his displeasure with excessive obsequiousness.
Conju knew of the formalities hedging in the Last Emperor. His grandmother had been an intimate of the Empress Anyoë’s younger sister, and he remembered her stories about the taboos around the personage of the empress. No touching; no looking her in the eyes; no impertinent familiarities.
That the Emperor was their sun was metaphorical, a statement of political fiction or theology: that he would burn or blind those who got too close simple fact.
Avoiding impertinent familiarities or excessive abasement was mere good manners, in Conju’s opinion.
He sympathized with the Last Emperor. The Ouranatha were circling close, wolves around a stag that might or might not still be in his prime. No doubt the frequent dismissals of his staff were one of the few ways the Emperor had to undermine the Ouranatha’s growing authority without causing a major upheaval.
It was a pity the Emperor had yet to find a stable core of people loyal to him outside the Imperial Guard. He needed people beyond the guards to stand behind him, ensuring he could do all he needed to.
He needed, in fact, someone like Conju.
Conju started to revolve the idea in his mind, that perhaps he might find a place in the Last Emperor’s immediate service.
He spoke with the dismissed attendants, and he started also speaking with the other members of the Imperial household: the guards who would deign to converse outside their ranks, the lower servants, the secretaries who were dismissed even more abruptly than the personal attendants. Most of them were willing to trade a crumb or two of gossip.
There was a lot of time to think as he made his way slowly through those storerooms. Far above him, the Last Emperor paced, sorting through the mess of the Fall in his own way. Sometimes the Last Emperor came down to the throne room for an evening of court, almost as glittering and magnificent as he had ever been. The Ouranatha crowded around him, mediating the inner circle of courtiers, pressing the advantages they had formed over the year (or hundred years) of his incapacity.
Conju did not go to court very often. He no longer had court dress, and without any friends to speak to he found it tedious. It had been fun when he had someone to gossip and dissect other people’s costumes and manners with; it was dispiriting to stand to the side and watch on his own.
But he did come to a private opinion about the Last Emperor, which was that no one who cared about his clothes the way he did could possibly want his attendants to be so self-abasing they had no opinions on them whatsoever.
When, therefore, a year and a half or so after the Last Emperor had awoken, there came the news that yet another groom of the chamber had been dismissed, Conju rallied his courage and presented himself to the Master of Offices with the request that he be considered for the position.
3
To enter into the service of His Radiancy—as those a part of the Tower Household called him—was to enter into a world at once familiar and deeply removed from ordinary court life.
Before he was permitted out of the lowest levels of the Emperor’s Tower, he spent six months in training and ceremonial purifications.
“It is not what it was,” the Steward of the Lower House informed him as she showed him the rooms that would be his new domain. “It used to be a full year in training before one could even hope for advancement … but times have changed, and the pool of applicants is not what it once was.”
The Steward knew what Conju had been doing since the Fall, that was clear. Conju held his chin up. He had debauched himself thoroughly and also been the one to lift himself out of that shameful period. He was the Cavalier an Vilius, last of his house and name, which was not of ill repute.
“Good enough,” the Steward said. “But we do not tolerate poor behaviour. You will comport yourself as befits a servant of the Holy Emperor.”
