The Steel Remains

CHAPTER 4

Bring me Archeth.

The summons went out from the throne room like a circular ripple from the flung stone of the Emperor’s command. Courtiers heard and, each competing for favor, gave hurried orders to their attendants, who sped in turn through the labyrinthine palace in search of the Lady kir-Archeth. The word passed from attendants to servants, and from servants to slaves, as the entire pyramid of authority turned its attention to this sudden diversion from the day-to-day drudgery of palace life. Serpent rumor coiled outward alongside the bare instruction, placing the tone in the Emperor’s voice somewhere between irritation and anger, a vocal spectrum that everyone at court, including even quite senior invigilators, had learned in recent years to treat with acute alarm. Best for all concerned, then, that Archeth present herself at speed.

Unfortunately, as was so often the case these days, the Lady Archeth was nowhere to be found. Since the Shaktur expedition, it was whispered, she had grown moody and taciturn and ever more unpredictable in situations where considered diplomacy really should have been the order of the day. She was given to prowling the corridors of the palace and the streets of the city at odd hours, or disappearing into the eastern desert alone for weeks on end, equipped, they muttered, with rations of food and water that verged on the suicidal. In the daily round at the palace, she was equally insensitive to lethal risk; she neglected her duties and heard rebukes with an impassivity that verged on insolence. Her days at court, it was said, were numbered.

Bring me Archeth.

The unfulfilled command echoed and lapped at the palace walls where they surrounded the outermost of the imperial gardens. Several among the courtiers began to panic. They cast the summons outward from the walls and down into the city itself, this time in the hands of imperial messengers, the so-called King’s Reach, famously skilled at finding and retrieving people anywhere within the far-flung borders of the Empire. Liveried in black and silver, these men spread out through the streets in groups, threading beneath the painted cupolas and domes of the city’s heart—the architecture that Ringil had once rather unkindly described as looking like a party of prostitute snails—knocking on the doors of likely pipe houses and taverns, slapping known associates about with casual brutality. It was a stupendous misuse of resources, a battleax to chop onions, but it was the Emperor’s command and no one wanted to be found lacking in response. There’d been too many examples made since the accession.

It took those of the Reach with the best luck about an hour to find out from tradesmen on the Boulevard of the Ineffable Divine that Archeth had last been seen strolling down toward the imperial shipyards, a long-hafted engineer’s hammer gripped purposefully in one hand and a krinzanz pipe in the other. From there it was a simple matter for these half a dozen messengers to trace the route, enter the yards, and pick a way among the skeletal keels of vessels under construction, asking after Archeth at every turn. It was an even simpler matter for the yard workers to turn and eloquently point.

At one end of the shipyard, a battered and stained Kiriath fireship stood isolated from its more conventional wooden neighbors on dry-dock props that appeared over time to have rusted solid with the hull. It was one of the last to be brought in from the desert while Akal the Great still sat on the throne and would countenance the expense, and an aura hung about it, of abandonment and black iron malice. The Reachmen, handpicked and known for their great courage in straitened circumstance, eyed the vessel without enthusiasm. Kiriath works were everywhere in the city, had been for centuries, but these contraptions set a shiver at the spine; bulge-bodied and looming, like some freak sea creature hauled up from the depths in an unlucky trawler’s nets; set about with unfamiliar gills, feelers, and eyes, all suited more to a living entity than any built device, skin scarred and blistered from repeated entry into a realm where human flesh and bone would melt to nothing in a single searing instant, where only demons might dwell, and carrying who knew what enduring underworldly taint from the places it had been.

And from within the closed iron cylinder, more precisely from the mouth of one downthrown open hatch in a row of five that were set into the underside of the hull, came the furious, repeated clang of metal pounding on metal. The sound, it seemed, of something trying to escape.

Glances went back and forth; hands dropped to the hilts of well-worn weapons. The Emperor’s messengers drew closer at a pace that declined with every step they took into the shadow of the fireship’s propped bulk. Finally, they piled to a halt just inside the circumference of the dry-dock framework that supported the vessel, and a good dozen paces back from the hatch, all of them careful not to step on any of the drooping feelers that trailed from the hull and lay flopped in the shipyard dust like so many discarded carriage whips. No telling when something like that, no matter the intervening years of disuse, might twist and snap to sudden, murderous life, coil about an unwary limb, and jerk its owner off his feet and screaming into the air, to be lashed back and forth or slammed to pulp against the grimy iron flank of the ship.

“Syphilitic son of an uncleansed, camel-fucking CUNT!”

A massive metallic crash fringed the final word, but could not drown it out. The messengers flinched. In places, blades came a few inches clear of their sheaths. Hard on the echoes of the impact, before anyone could move, the voice started up again, no cleaner of expression, no less rabidly furious, no less punctuated by the clangor of whatever arcane conflict was raging in the confines of the hull. The messengers stood frozen, faces sweat-beaded from the fierce heat of a near-noon sun, while recollected witch rumors crept coldly up and down their bones.

“Is it an exorcism?”

“It’s krinzanz,” reckoned a more pragmatic member of the party. “She’s off her fucking head.”

Another of the messengers cleared his throat.

“Ah, Mistress Archeth . . .”

“. . . motherfucking closemouth me, will you, you fucking . . .”

“Mistress Archeth!” The Reachman went up to a full-scale shout. “The Emperor wills your presence!”

The cursing stopped abruptly. The metallic cacophony died. For a long moment, the open hatch yawned and oozed a silence no less unnerving than the noise that had gone before. Then Archeth’s voice emerged, a little hoarse.

“Who’s that?”

“From the palace. The Emperor summons you.”

Indistinct muttering. A clank, as the engineer’s hammer was apparently dropped, and then an impatient scrambling sound. Moments later, Archeth’s ebony head emerged upside down from the hatch, thickly braided hair in stiff disarray around her features. She grinned down at the messengers, a little too widely.

“All right,” she said. “I’ve done enough reading for one day.”

BY THE TIME THEY GOT BACK TO THE PALACE, THE KRIN COMEDOWN HAD hit and the Emperor was waiting in the Chamber of Confidences, a fact whose significance was not lost on the ushering courtiers Archeth encountered en route. She saw the glances they exchanged as she passed them. The Chamber of Confidences was a tented raft of rare woods and silks anchored in the center of an enclosed pool fifty yards across and windowed only from above. Water cataracted down the cunningly sculpted marble walls at the circumference of the chamber, rendering eavesdropping an impossibility, and the waters of the pool were stocked with a species of highly intelligent octopi who were fed regularly on condemned criminals. What was said in the Chamber of Confidences was for the ears of either those utterly trusted by the Emperor or those who would not be leaving. And in these uncertain times, it was not always easy to tell which of those two groups someone might fall into.

Archeth watched with drugged disinterest as the two senior courtiers who had taken it upon themselves to deliver her this far cast furtive glances down into the pool. Beneath the ripples of the water, it was impossible to see anything clearly. A wobbling patch of color might be an uncoiling octopus or simply a rock, a stripe through the water a tentacle or a frond of seaweed. The courtiers’ expressions reflected every uncertainty as if they were in the grip of a bowel disorder, and the rippling, pallid light of the chamber conspired further to enhance the impression of illness on their faces.

The face of the slave who poled their coracle across the pool was by contrast as emotive as a stone. He knew he was needed to bring his Emperor back, and he was in any case a deaf mute, carefully chosen, maybe even specifically mutilated for the duty. He would neither hear nor give away any secrets.

They reached the raft and bumped gently against its intricately carved edge. The slave reached up for one of the canopy supports and steadied the coracle while the courtiers climbed out with evident relief. Archeth went last, nodding her thanks as she passed. It was automatic—Kiriath habits, hard to break even now. Like any piece of furniture, the slave ignored her. She grimaced and followed the courtiers through the maze of hanging veils within the canopy, into candlelit opulence and the imperial presence. She dropped to one knee.

“My lord.”

His radiance Jhiral Khimran II, first son of Akal Khimran, called the Great, and now by royal succession Keepmaster of Yhelteth, Monitor of the Seven Holy Tribes, Prophet Advocate General, Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Armed Services, Lord Protector of the High Seas, and Rightful Emperor of All Lands, did not immediately look up from the sprawled body of the young woman with whom he was toying.

“Archeth,” he murmured, frowning at the swollen nipple he was rolling between his thumb and forefinger. “I’ve been waiting nearly two hours.”

“Yes, my lord.” She would not apologize.

“That’s a long time for the most powerful man in the world, Archeth.” Jhiral’s voice was quiet and unreadable. He slid his free hand across the soft plain of the woman’s stomach and into the shadow between her cocked thighs. “Too long, some of my advisers have been telling me. They feel you”—his hand moved deeper and the woman stiffened—“lack respect. Could that be true, I wonder?”

Most of Archeth’s attention was on the woman. Like a lot of the harem, this one was a northerner, long-limbed and pale-skinned. Large, well-shaped breasts, not yet marked by motherhood. It was impossible to make out hair color or facial features—the black muslin wrappings of the harem veil covered her from the neck up—but Archeth was betting she was from the rather erroneously titled free mercantile states. The Yhelteth markets had seen a lot of this type recently, as the northern economies tottered and whole families were sold into slavery to pay their debts. From what Archeth heard on the trade-route grapevine, the free cities were fast becoming home to a whole new class of slavers; canny entrepreneurs who made their rapid fortunes acquiring the local flesh at knockdown prices and then selling it on southward to the Empire, where the centuries-old tradition of servitude made for a massive established market and a never-slaked hunger for exotic product. A woman like this one might easily increase her initial sale value by a factor of fifty on the long march south into imperial lands. With profit margins like these, and war debt in most cities still largely unpaid, it was hardly a surprise that the League had rediscovered its enthusiasm for the trade. Had neatly and cheerily rolled back nearly two centuries of abolition in order to facilitate the new flow of wealth.

The Emperor looked up from what he was doing.

“I require an answer, Archeth,” he said mildly.

Archeth wondered briefly if Jhiral planned to hurt the woman while she watched, to punish the alleged lack of respect by proxy. A calmly rational rebuke for the intensely black woman before him, while the milk-white woman in his lap suffered the physical cruelty like some kind of inverted avatar. Archeth had seen it done before, a male slave lashed bloody for some trumped-up infraction and, against the backdrop of tortured cries and the wet slap of the lash, Jhiral remonstrating gently with one of his chiefs of staff. He was not and never would be the warrior his father had been, but Jhiral had inherited the same shrewd intelligence and with it a depth of court-bred sophistication that Akal Khimran, always in the saddle at one end of his empire or the other, had never troubled to develop.

Or maybe the woman was simply there to tantalize. Not much was secret in the imperial palace, and Archeth’s preferences were widely whispered of, if not actually proven or known.

She cleared her throat and lowered her eyes deferentially.

“I was working, my lord. In the shipyards, in hope of some progress that might benefit the realm.”

“Oh. That.”

Something seemed to shift behind the emperor’s eyes. He withdrew his hand from between the pale woman’s thighs, sniffed delicately at his fingers like a gourmet chef, and then clapped her on the rump. She coiled out of his lap with what looked like schooled decorum, and crept out of the imperial presence on her knees.

“You may rise, Archeth. Sit near me. You two.” He nodded at the courtiers, who might have been made of wood for all the life they showed. “Get out. Go back to . . . whatever valuable tasks it is you usually fill your time with. Oh, and—” Upturned hand, a regal gesture of magnanimity. “Well done. There’ll be a little something in the new season’s list for you, no doubt.”

The courtiers bowed out. Archeth seated herself on a cushion at Jhiral’s left hand and watched them go, torn between envy and scorn. As soon as the veils had fallen behind them, Jhiral leaned across and gripped Archeth’s jaw tightly in his hand. His fingers were still damp, still scented with the white woman’s cunt. He pulled Archeth to him and stared at her as if her skull were a curio picked up from some bazaar stall.

“Archeth. You really must get it through your head, the Kiriath have gone. They left you behind. You do accept that, don’t you?”

So here was the punishment after all. Archeth stared away over Jhiral’s shoulder and said nothing. The Emperor shook her jaw impatiently.

“Don’t you, Archeth?”

“Yes.” The word dropped out of her mouth like rotten meat.

“Grashgal refused to take you with him, and he said they wouldn’t be coming back. The veins of the earth will take us from here as once they brought us. Our time and tasks are done.” Jhiral’s voice was kindly, avuncular. “Wasn’t that it, the An-Monal valediction? Something like that?”

Her throat lumped. “Yes, my lord.”

“The Kiriath age is over, Archeth. This is the human age. You’d do well to remember that, and stick to your new allegiances. Eh?”

She swallowed hard. “Majesty.”

“Good.” He let go of her jaw and sat back. “What did you think of her?”

“My lord?”

“The girl. She’s new. What do you think? Would you like me to send her to your bedchamber when I’m finished with her?”

Archeth forced down the scalding behind her eyes and managed a dry, self-possessed voice.

“My lord, I fail to see why I would want such a favor.”

“Oh come, come, Archeth. Do you see an invigilator in here? We are alone—and worldly, you and I, soaked through with the storm of education and experience this world has given us.” The Emperor gestured with his scented hand. “Let us at least enjoy the pleasures that derive. Laws graven in stone are all well and good for the common herd, but are we not above such paltry considerations?”

“It is not given to me to question the Revelation, my lord.”

A swift borrowing of the Prophet’s words, weighty with the echo, and solid coin as a result. Jhiral looked miffed.

“Clearly not, Archeth. To none in the material realm is it given. But consider, as even the Ashnal interpretations do, that there must surely be compensation for the burden of leadership, a loosening of ties intended for governance of those less able to govern themselves. Come, I shall send the girl to you as soon as you return.”

“Return, my lord?”

“Oh yes. I’m sending you to Khangset. It seems there’s been some disturbance there. Some kind of reavers. The reports are rather incoherent.”

Archeth blinked. “Khangset is a garrisoned port, my lord.”

“Just so. Which makes it all the more strange that anyone would be stupid enough to launch an attack on it. Ordinarily, I’d simply send a detachment of the Throne Eternal my father was so fond of, and then forget about it. However, the messenger who brought the news seemed to think there was some kind of sorcery at work.” Jhiral saw the look Archeth gave him and shrugged. “Science or sorcery, the man’s a peasant and he’s not clear on these distinctions. I can’t say I am myself, come to that. Anyway, you’re my resident expert on these things. I’ve had a horse saddled for you, and you can have that detachment of the Throne Eternal I mentioned. With their very own and most holy invigilator attached, of course. Since you’re feeling so pious these days, that should suit you down to the ground. They’re all waiting in the west wing courtyard. Quite impatiently, by now, I should imagine.”

“You wish me to leave immediately, my lord?”

“Yes, I would be immensely grateful if you would do that.” Jhiral’s voice dripped irony. “At a hard ride, I’d imagine you could reach Khangset by tomorrow afternoon, wouldn’t you?”

“I am wholly yours to command, my lord.” The ritual words tasted ashen in her mouth. With Akal, it had been different, the same words but never the same taste. “My body and my soul.”

“Don’t tempt me,” said Jhiral drily. “Now, do you have any requirements above and beyond the men I’ve allocated?”

“The messenger. I’d like to question him before I leave.”

“He’s going back with you. Anything else?”

Archeth thought about it for as long as she dared. “If this was an attack by sea, I’d like to have Mahmal Shanta’s opinion on any wreckage we find.”

Jhiral grunted. “Well, he’ll be delighted, I’m sure. I don’t think he’s been off that housebarge of his since the Ynval regatta, and even that was only to inspect the new navy launches. He certainly hasn’t been on a horse this year.”

“He is the foremost naval engineering authority in the Empire, my lord.”

“Don’t lecture your Emperor, Archeth. It’s not good for your health.” The tone of the veiled threat was playful, but Archeth knew she’d struck a nerve. “I’m well aware of the court appointments my dear father made, and why he made them. Very well, I’ll send to the cantankerous old bastard, and he can meet you at the city gates. You’ll be good company for each other, I imagine.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

“Yes.” Jhiral rubbed at his chin and caught the scent of the slave girl on his fingers again. His nostrils flared slightly, and he made a dismissive gesture with the hand. “Well, you’d better go then, hadn’t you?”

Archeth got to her feet, rituals at the ready.

“I speed to do your will.”

“Oh, please, Archeth. Just get out of my sight, will you.”

On the way out, she passed the pale-skinned slave girl where she sat between the inner and outer curtains, awaiting the imperial summons. She’d lifted her veil, and Archeth saw that she was, perhaps unsurprisingly, quite beautiful. Their eyes met for a brief moment, and then the girl looked quickly away. A scarlet flush spread down over her face and breasts.

From within came the sound of Jhiral clearing his throat.

The girl scrambled back to her hands and knees and crawled toward the gap in the curtains. Her breasts swung heavily with the motion. Archeth placed one hand on her shoulder, felt a flinch go through the smooth flesh where she touched. The girl looked up.

“Your veil,” Archeth mouthed, in Naomic.

Parted lips, a soft, panicked sound. The girl began to tremble visibly. Archeth gestured calm with both hands, crouched beside her and settled the veil carefully in place, reached up inside the muslin to tuck away a loose fall of candlewax-colored hair.

On the other side of the inner curtains, Jhiral cleared his throat again, louder. The girl lowered her head and began once more to crawl, under the curtain and into his imperial radiance’s presence. Archeth watched her go, lips pressed tight to cover for the gritted teeth beneath. Her nostrils flared, and the breath that came through them was audible. For a single insane moment, she stood there and strained toward the inner curtain.

Get the fuck out of here, Archidi. Right now.

Just another slave, that’s all. It flitted through her head, faster than she could catch at it. She wasn’t sure whom the thought was referring to.

She turned and left.

Went obediently about her Emperor’s business.