Days of Blood & Starlight

55 The Emperor’S Prowess

A bare foot, highly arched. A slender ankle festooned in golden bangles.

Nevo didn’t mean to see, but the music of the bangles drew his attention at the moment the girl stepped through the door and he glimpsed this secret sight before he could jerk his chin down and pin his gaze to the ground.

The concubine of the night, leaving the harem to be escorted across the skybridge to the emperor’s inner sanctum. She was veiled and cloaked as the women always were, in a hooded robe that concealed even her wings, and she would scarcely have registered as a person at all but for that glimpse of foot. It was the most Nevo had ever seen of one of Joram’s concubines, and he was caught off guard by its effect on him.

Instantly he wanted to help her.

Help her what? Escape? That was rich. It was his duty to ensure that she didn’t. He was part of the Silversword escort standing ready to deliver her across the bridge. They were six, a virtual parade. It was ludicrous: six guards to walk a girl across a bridge.

A girl—not a woman? Nevo couldn’t have said why he thought so—it was hardly the foot—but he guessed that she was young. And then, she hesitated.

When the harem doors clanged shut behind her, she stood frozen in place.

Nevo sensed frantic energy beneath all that gauzy cloth. He could see her veil stirred by too-quick breathing, and her cloak by courses of shivers, not from cold, but terror. It had to be her first time making this walk.

The thought pierced him.

Several times a week he drew parade duty, as they called it, and he had learned that you could infer a lot from the manner of a woman’s bearing, even beneath so much concealment. Slow, steady steps, short quick frantic steps; head held high or darting left and right, peering through the screen of her veil at the world outside her prison. He had seen—or guessed at—weariness and resignation, pride, dejection, but he had never seen a girl freeze before, and he tensed, thinking she was going to bolt.

The skybridge was a slender span of glass, the city far below, and sometimes the women chose to leap rather than be delivered across it. Under those cloaks their wings were pinioned, and to fall was to die—or try to die. A guard would leap after her. If he caught her, she was punished; if he didn’t, he was.

It had happened before, though not in his own time here. Nevo was only twenty; he had had his silver sword only two years, and been promoted to the emperor’s personal detail just two months ago. He didn’t know what to do in a situation like this.

Not a one of his fellow guards moved or spoke. They waited, and so he waited, too, unaccountably nervous. And when the girl began, finally, to propel herself so-slowly forward, trembling, Nevo came to understand something. He had thought the six-guard parade a ridiculous display: Lest anyone fail to take note of the emperor’s prowess, or to count the women who were his and the bastards he sired, here were six guards standing each over eight feet tall in their extravagant helmet plumes to draw all eyes to the spectacle.

But maybe there was more to it than that. Because in this moment, if Nevo alone were this girl’s escort, he couldn’t swear that he would do his duty. As powerful as his loyalty to the emperor was, there were stronger impulses, like the urge to protect the helpless.

Fool, Nevo, he chastened himself with an inward snarl. Some said Joram’s magi could read thoughts, and he hoped it wasn’t true, because in the space of seconds he had allowed such ridiculous visions to flit through his head—saving this girl, taking her somewhere safe. Godstars, there was even a lean-to dwelling in the picture, a garden behind it, and a great overarching sky with no spires as far as the eye could see, no Tower of Conquest, no Astrae, no Empire. Just a small, safe place, and himself hero to an unknown, faceless girl.

All because of a glimpse of foot?

Pathetic. Maybe his bunkmates were right, that Nevo needed some “tending to” in the soldiers’ comfort house. He told himself he would go, resolved on it as he marched, his boot heels too slow on the glass walk. The escort was grouped in two triads with the girl between, so that Nevo walked right behind her, adjusting his steps to match her mincing pace. She looked so small—they always did, framed by the giants of the guard. He could hear her uneven breathing—the high, fluting gasps of near-hysteria—and feel the waves of heat rolling off her cloaked wings.

Her perfume was so delicate it might almost have been her natural scent.

He wondered what color her hair was, and her eyes.

Stop it. You’ll never know.

The march was short over that span of glass, Astrae opening beneath them and closing again when they came to the other end. The girl was delivered. A steward met her at Alef Gate and she went in and was gone without a glance at her escort.

Absurdly, that stung. As if she should have taken note of him, somehow understood that he felt sorry for her?

Nevo knew that in his Imperial Guard uniform he was as anonymous to her as she should have been to him, and the thought made him restless and angry. He had lost himself to a uniform—this shining silver costume of a uniform with its bouffant plumage and its overlong bell sleeves that would interfere with a clean draw, if ever he were called on to draw his sword, which he never was, except in the training arena, and even that was more dancing lesson than fighting. The Silverswords were not what he had thought when he was selected from the ranks of the common army to join them. He’d been chosen for his height, not even for his swordsmanship, which he had once been proud to know was exceptional. But the recruiter hadn’t seen him fight. He had been interested only in his look, the upshot of which was that in all his finery Nevo was indistinguishable from any other Silversword in Astrae. Maybe his own mother could pick him out, but certainly the emperor’s terrified concubine wouldn’t recognize him if she saw him again, two times or two hundred.

And why should he care if she did?

He didn’t care.

Alef Gate closed, and the concubine’s perfume was too frail to linger on the air. She was gone to her duty, and Nevo would go to his and think no more about her.

As it happened, his post was here at Alef Gate. With another of his triad, he relieved the standing guard and took their places. The other guards of the parade went on to their own posts, most of them farther inside the great glass tower than Nevo had ever been. The emperor’s private quarters had been described to him as a kind of castle-within-a-castle, occupying the deep inner core of the Tower of Conquest. Alef Gate was the outermost entrance; inside it, corridors branched labyrinthine, so that there was no direct conduit to successive gates—Beit, Gimel, Dalet, and on through the alphabet. Nevo had been only as far as Beit, but the other guards said that it tested the memory to find one’s way within. It was all clouded glass, so much glass, thick and rich with a sheen like honey, and strong. In training they were invited to test it with their swords, and strong as Nevo was, he’d been unable to breach the walls even with his booted foot, even with the hilt of his sword. The corridors curved, layer upon layer of that glossy unbreakable glass, and were riddled with false doors and dead ends, all of it designed to confuse and trap invaders or assassins.

Good luck to them, thought Nevo. Ten guarded gates stood between himself and the emperor; no one was getting through there. Tonight he himself was glad to be as far from the center as possible. Guards on Samekh Gate sometimes heard… weeping.

Weeping.

The women at the comfort house might not weep, but Nevo knew he would not be going there, and as he stood at his post through the long, dull night, it felt as if his true work and challenge—other than standing still for long stretches of time—was in keeping himself from wondering what was happening within. It was ridiculous, how that merest of glimpses had made this girl real in a way that all the women and girls of the past two months had not been. Well, they had been, certainly, but he had managed to overlook it. Would that he could now.

He indulged in a different folly to distract himself. It was equally futile but less likely to drive him mad, and it was: wishing that he had never been plucked from the army to join the Silverswords.

It was not a rational wish. The guards’ pension was better—it went to his family—and the chances of survival much better than in the army, but unlike most Silverswords, Nevo had been a soldier first and knew the difference, and the difference was profound.

Out beyond Astrae, across this land and the next, soldiers had kept the beasts at bay for centuries, fighting and dying and finally winning. There was honor in that, even glory, though Nevo would have given up the glory for simple honor—to feel right in his days and nights, to do something….

Of course, it was more complicated now. The Chimaera War was over and a new one was brewing, but it was hard to feel the simple righteousness there had always been when fighting beasts.

The Stelians were seraphim. Beyond that, he knew next to nothing about them; no one did. The Far Isles were, quite literally, on the far side of the globe, trading suns and moons with the Empire in turn, never sharing day or night or anything else; if they had wronged the Empire in some way, it had not been felt by ordinary folk, who bore no animosity toward their distant, mysterious cousins. Nevo’s gauge was his own family, and he could well imagine the talk there would be when it got out that Joram had declared war.

“On who?” his father would demand, looking dumbstruck. “On a people whose king he doesn’t even know the name of?”

“If there is a king.” His mother. “I’ve heard they have a queen.”

“Oh, have you now. And that the air elementals are her spies?”

“Indeed. And she can kill with a look, and cooks up storms in a great pot to send out over the seas.” She would be smirking. His mother had a laughing smirk and a love of nonsense, and his father had a booming laugh, but a dark furrow of worry, too.

“What a fight to pick,” Nevo imagined him fretting. “It’s like pelting stones into a cave and waiting to see what comes barreling out.”

And Nevo was waiting to see. Envoys had been dispatched with Joram’s declaration two weeks ago and hadn’t returned or been heard of. What did it mean? Perhaps they’d gotten lost searching for the Far Isles and hadn’t delivered the scroll at all. Saved from war by poor navigation?

Wishful thinking.

He stifled a yawn. It was finally morning, or nearly. His relief would be here soon—

Alef Gate crashed open.

Nevo leapt airborne. Chaos poured out. Noise and wings and sparks and rushing and shouting and… what was the protocol? He protected the gate from without. What did he do when chaos burst from within? No one had ever said, and who was this? Stewards and servants, and a handful of Silverswords, too.

“What’s happened?” Nevo barked, but no one heard him over the roaring coming from within.

The bellowing, the fury.

Joram.

The girl, thought Nevo. And while stewards and servants stumbled over each other trying to escape the path of the emperor’s rage, he pushed inside. Beit Gate was abandoned; where was Resheph? Had he been one of those to flee? Flee? Unbelievable.

Nevo rushed through the door and was deeper in the inner sanctum than he had ever been. He didn’t know the way, but Joram’s rage was like a river he traced upstream. When he took a wrong turn, he doubled back and found the right way. Minutes were lost to the glass labyrinth. The emperor’s voice came and went now. The howling gave way to words, though Nevo couldn’t make them out.

Gimel Gate, Dalat, Hei, Vav, all unguarded; the Silverswords had either rushed out or in, leaving their posts. Nevo’s first thought was to be appalled by the lack of discipline, but then he realized that he, too, had left his post, and he began to be afraid. It was the only time he wavered; he could still go back—maybe in the madness his breach would be overlooked.

Later, it would be some consolation to know that it wouldn’t have mattered. By now, nothing he said or did could matter. All was done and decided long before he burst at a flying run into the emperor’s bedchamber.

Plashing fountains, orchids, the chatter and squawk of caged birds. The ceiling seemed leagues overhead—all glittering glass spangled by constellations of lights that gave the illusion of the night sky. In the middle of it all, the bed was raised on a dais, like some monument to virility. It was empty.

Joram stood in the center of the room with his hands on his hips. He was powerful, thickened by age but toughened, too, and marked with old battle scars. His jaw was square, his face red with rage and hard with scorn. He wore a robe; it showed a triangle of chest, and seemed somehow vulgar.

A handful of other guards were here, standing around looking—Nevo thought—stupid and large. Eliav was one of them. The Captain of the Silverswords had himself been on Samekh Gate, and would have been the first on the scene—save Namais and Misorias, of course, Joram’s personal bodyguards, who slept by turns in the antechamber. They stood just paces from their master, their faces seeming chiseled from wood. Byon, the head steward, was leaning heavily on his cane, his palsy much more pronounced than usual.

“You didn’t place it there?” Joram demanded of the old seraph.

“No, my lord. I would have woken you at once, of course. For something like this—”

“A basket of fruit?” Joram was incredulous, and then—“A basket of fruit!”—his fury returned and flashed through the chamber as heat and light.

Nevo took a step back. He scanned for the girl. He hadn’t been thinking clearly, or thinking at all; it hadn’t even occurred to him until this moment that he would see her unveiled, and certainly not that she, like Joram’s chest, might be… exposed. As soon as he caught sight of her—peripherally, a blur of flesh on the far side of the dais—he realized this was the case, and his instinct was not to look, not to turn toward her, but only to back out to the door and be away from here.

“Explain to me how it came to be here.” Joram’s fury turned to ice. “Through so many guarded doors to arrive at the foot of my bed.”

It was her stillness that made Nevo turn his head.

She was young; he had been right. And she was exposed. Naked. There was a girlish fullness to her face, but her breasts were full, too, nothing girlish there. Her hair was red and wild, and her eyes were brown. She was slumped against the wall, making no effort to cover herself, staring at him—at him—without expression.

Without motion.

Almost as soon as Nevo settled his eyes on her, she tipped slowly sideways. He watched it happen, remembering how slowly she had walked across the skybridge. This was like that, his mind tried telling him, just like that. But then: the rubbery jounce and splay of limbs as she subsided to the floor, the tinkle of her bangles settling, and stillness. The fire of her wings dimmed. Died. On the wall behind her was a streak of blood which, traced upward by the eye, led to a red stain on the glass.

Her head had done that.

She had been thrown.

Nevo was hot and cold and sick. He thought of the Shadows That Live—his instinct was to blame beasts, and he knew the fabled assassins were at large again, somehow still alive—but this wasn’t what they did. The Shadows slit throats.

And, of course, he knew who had done it. His eyes roved wild over the lavish room as snatches of conversation penetrated his dismay. He knew who, but not why.

“Every guard who was on duty,” he heard Joram say.

Eliav, in horror: “My lord! Every—?”

“Yes, Captain. Every. Guard. Did you think, after a lapse like this, that you might live?”

“My lord, there was no lapse. Your doors never opened, I swear it. It was some sorcery—”

“Namais?” Joram said. “Misorias?”

“Sir?”

Joram said, “See it done before the city wakes,” and the guards replied, “Of course.”

The emperor kicked out at something—a basket—and it tipped and sent pink orbs spinning, and one struck the bed dais and burst with a sound such as the girl’s skull may have made on the wall. Nevo looked at her again. He couldn’t help himself. The sight of her there, dead, and no one else seeming even to notice, made the whole scene feel like a vivid hallucination. It wasn’t, of course. It was all happening, and he understood with a kind of seeping clarity that he was going to hang.

But not why.

Only that it had something to do with a basket of fruit.