Path of Revenge (9 page)

A path of revenge.

IT WAS SAID IN THE Great Houses, where some people knew, and echoed in the souks, where they definitely did not, that early morning was the best time to view the Garden of Angels. Certainly a visitor to the Emperor’s Talamaq Palace would not see the garden at its best in the afternoon, when the sea breeze stirred the desert dust from the streets and middens of the city and interfered with the play of light on the celebrated golden fountains of Talamaq. Needless to say, Jau Maranaya, scion of a lesser Amaqi Alliance, had not been given an early morning appointment.

Nevertheless, to be given any appointment at the Emperor’s Palace was an honour, even one at midafternoon when the broiling air addled the wits and made even a grateful man impatient. Jau stood for a moment before the great Gate of the Father, composing himself, and once again ran through in his mind what this meeting would mean. He had it down like a mantra. Preferment, patronage, prestige, profit. Especially profit. His customers and competitors knew about his appointment with the Emperor, he’d made sure of that. They would come to his emporium to ask him questions, and would buy his goods without the customary haggling. He would move up the city’s
hierarchy of traders, and his fortune would surely grow. And if he was fortunate he might be invited to join one of the greater Alliances. He was young yet, and clever. Who knew how high he might aspire?

Two Omeran guards stood before the massive wooden gate, arms folded, scowls on their broad, dark, inhuman faces. ‘Health to the Emperor!’ Jau said companionably to the nearer of them, and made to approach the gate.

‘Wait, ma sor,’ the Omeran said in a soft voice, stepping a pace forward.
A gelding, then.
The Emperor was rumoured to have a number of them in his employ, and here stood the evidence. Two legs they had, and two arms, but no Amaqi would mistake an Omeran for human. This one had soft features to match the voice, but was menacing enough to keep Jau from questioning the order.

‘And that is
good
health to the Emperor,’ said the other guard, and his voice was definitely not soft.

‘Good health, yes, that is what I mean,’ Jau said, more politely than he felt. Where had they learned to speak like this? He had put Omerans to death for lesser slights, but these were the Emperor’s trained guards. Who knew what latitude they were allowed? He wanted to ask how long he must wait, but the guards seemed ready to turn aside any question he might ask. He would not lower himself to be refused by an Omeran, even one in the Emperor’s employ.

They were mind readers too, it appeared. ‘Until the shadow of the stick touches the gate, ma sor,’ the first guard said, pointing to a slender pole stuck in the ground to his left. ‘You wait.’ The words sounded as much threat as command.

Jau judged he had about a sunwidth to endure. Frankly, he was unsure why he should wait at all. Appointments with the Emperor were by necessity punctual affairs, involving as they did the Corridor of
Rainbows, and the timing of his arrival was important. The functionary who delivered his summons explained all this to him, though he knew much of it anyway; it appeared members of the lesser Alliances knew more than the Emperor suspected.

The Emperor’s Palace, the functionary had told him, the Talamaq after which the city was named, was one of the world’s wonders, with pillars of gold and glass fingering the sky. Well, everyone knew that. Prisms and mirrors took the sun’s light and shepherded it into the Corridor of Rainbows, where those Amaqi graced by an appointment with the Emperor approached the throne. The colours displayed in the corridor depended on one’s status and the level of regard in which one was held. This was also widely known. Subject to constant rumour and gossip, in fact. The corridor reflected the ineffable will of the Emperor, the court official told him, but Jau was aware how it really worked: the path of the sun was known for every day of the year, charted by cosmographers, and cunning machinery altered the mirrors and prisms to break up the light into the colours of the rainbow. The operators, Omerans painstakingly trained for the task, could flood the Corridor of Rainbows with any combination of colours the Emperor dictated, depending only on the weather—though clouds seldom obscured the sun above Talamaq—and the time of day. A triumph of Amaqi science, and a powerful political tool.

The functionary had left Jau in no doubt about the honour being done him. In fact, the tedious man had coached him for the better part of an afternoon on how he was to behave. What he was to say, where he was to stand, where he was—and was not—to look. Jau listened attentively, his nervousness increasing with every word, but comforted himself with the knowledge that this was exactly the effect the instructions were designed to produce.

Jau Maranaya expected the green, perhaps, or maybe even the yellow. He dreamed of the red, glorious red, of course; everyone did. Red meant the highest favour of the throne. Indigo and violet were not to be countenanced: these seldom-used colours usually heralded some form of punishment. And there were rumours of an eighth colour. Black, the sentence of death. No one in the lesser Alliances knew about the black. It was something Jau heard once, no more, from a street-seller. He assigned it no credibility.

Clearly, then, punctuality was critical to the colour of the corridor. So why the wait? His time had been specified. Would not this delay ruin the Emperor’s visible sign of favour to him? Or—and the thought settled on him like a benison—had the Emperor heard about his latest gift to the city? He had culled some of his Omerans and gifted the land they’d grazed for a small hunting preserve. Perhaps the August One himself might desire to hunt? Did this so-precise delay herald the red? Jau would think of some gracious way to issue an invitation to his Emperor should this prove to be the case.

He could well afford the gift, he reflected as he waited in the stifling heat. Years of petty graft had filled his coffers with good Amaqi gold. He knew people all over the city in positions of influence and trust; people with secrets he had made it his business to uncover. They were only too happy to put a little aside from taxes or profits in order to buy his discretion. And if they refused, he had them taken care of. It was expensive, this care-taking, but paying to rid himself of people with scruples cost him but a small part of the profit he made from those who had none.

‘It is time, ma sor,’ said one of the Omerans, pulling the pole from the ground and breaking it across his knee. This action disquieted the visitor, but he was allowed no time to reflect. ‘You must come now.’

The Gate of the Father swung open like his own father’s welcoming arms, and Jau Maranaya gasped in astonishment at the scene spread before him. Though it shamed him before the Omeran guards, he could not help crying out. The Garden of Angels was everything he had been told.

He assembled his words, his descriptions, even as he walked through the garden. He imagined returning to his family and telling them of the stately fountains, spreading lawns, sculpted bushes and exotic plants of every imaginable shape and size. The Emperor treated water as a plaything, he would tell them. He spent it on fancies. On colours and shapes. On the play of light, on the texture of grass scissored short or left knee-high and waving in the afternoon breeze. He heard water splashing, trickling, gushing, tinkling, pouring. It sent a frisson of desire through him. This was the deliberate exercise of power through profligacy. Such power, to waste water in the pursuit of beauty! He would tell his family that his honouring by the Emperor was perhaps the first step to taking all this power for himself.

A gardener, a small, wizened woman with a fork in her hand, emerged from behind a hedge and smiled an improbable smile full of gleaming white teeth. ‘Very good, very good,’ the woman said, eyeing him like a particularly interesting botanical specimen. Before Jau could respond, the gardener disappeared behind her hedge. His unease grew, partly masked by a faint disappointment. He’d hoped for more time in the fabled garden—indeed, he ought to have insisted on waiting here for his delayed summons rather than out on the dusty street—but the Omeran guards bustled him through the sparkling grounds and towards a small, unadorned door.

He had to kneel to enter the Corridor of Rainbows. A little heavy-handed, surely.
If I become Emperor I will
not insist on such things.
He saw himself as more open-hearted than that. But as he scrabbled on his knees through the door, his body felt as small as did his soul. Small and vulnerable.

This, then, was the famed Corridor of Rainbows.

He was early, even though the guards had held him back until this moment, and no light yet penetrated the corridor. He walked some distance, unsure of where he should position himself. Somewhere to his left, he’d been told, lay an open space, a gallery in which the Emperor himself sat, hidden behind the golden mask he always wore, surrounded by his court. At the moment it was in darkness. He’d not heard that the Emperor sat in the dark before his subjects were honoured, but this gesture of humility only made his reward greater. Once the prisms and mirrors took effect he’d be able to see them, bathed in the colour of the Emperor’s choosing. The reality, of course, was that the colour would bathe him. He, not the Emperor, will soon be the centre of attention. Was it too much to hope for red?

‘Hea, Jau Maranaya.’ A voice spoke in greeting, rumbling through the corridor, filling the darkness around him. ‘Hea!’ The voice of the Emperor.

Jau’s great moment was irredeemably spoiled by the malfunction of the corridor. Where was his colour? What had happened that the Emperor himself continued to sit in the dark? No matter the honour intended, Jau’s enemies would make capital out of his discomfiture once they heard of it.

‘Hea, ma great sor,’ Jau began, as protocol dictated. ‘Despite the corridor not functioning as it should, I acknowledge the…honour…done me…’

His voice died away to silence as the truth took hold of his mind. He could hear them breathing in the darkness, the intentional darkness chosen for him.

‘The hidden eighth colour of the rainbow,’ said the voice, ‘a colour suited to your perfidy. We choose not to look upon you, and invoke instead the darkness to cover your many sins. Let your accusers now speak.’

And they spoke, oh they spoke, one after another, each voice a knife paring away the frightened man’s illusions. ‘I paid you to keep silent about my theft,’ said one, invisible in the darkness yet so present to Jau’s terrified mind’s eye. ‘My confession absolves me of my crime.’ ‘You bribed me to overlook customs due on your goods,’ said another, ‘and my confession absolves me of my crime.’ Jau’s head swam at the depth of the betrayal, the completeness of official knowledge of his crimes. Long before the last accuser finished speaking he had become a hollow man, all illusions scooped out by the words of these once-bought men and women. Facing himself in the dark he began to shake and whimper in fear, and the Emperor and his court listened in silence to the sound of guilt.

Later, after the sentence was pronounced and he was removed to the dungeons beneath the Palace, his whimpers turned to screams. An Omeran went to work on him, first prodding and scraping, then cutting and burning, until his spirit seemed ready to separate from his tortured body. Methodically they destroyed his beloved flesh past any healing, and the pain took him into a world beyond his most dreaded nightmare. Then a man wearing a hood came and asked him questions, not about his offending—he had confessed his crimes and begged forgiveness until something in his throat had broken—but about what impending death felt like. Like a little child in an earthquake, lost and bewildered, running towards shelter of any kind, Jau begged the man in the hood for help. But the hooded man just asked his gentle questions, coaxing answers out of the captive’s ruined throat as the
Omeran thinned out the fragile connection between Jau Maranaya and this world.

Despite his extremity he saw the hooded man turn to the Omeran and heard him speak. ‘This I have learned today. Being born is a violence akin to being thrown from a cliff.’ His words carried the solemn weight of a newly learned truth. ‘Only it takes a lifetime to strike the rocks below.’

And, wonder of wonders, the Omeran replied thoughtfully, as though he was an equal.

‘No, ma great sor, we fall from a cliff of unknowable height, hoping it will take seventy years at least to get to the bottom, but fearing it might be much less—might be now, or
now
—all the while trying to forget we are falling.’

The man in the hood laughed at this, as though a sly joke had been made at the expense of the universe. ‘We are learning, my friend, from one whose fall is almost over. Let us see what else this unfortunate has to teach us before we give him his landing.’

Before the end the hooded man removed his covering, and Jau received his last and greatest shock of the day. And at dawn, when the shrieking and pleading were over, and all the lessons learned and recorded, Jau Maranaya was taken to the Garden of Angels and laid to rest in the bed prepared for him.

Lenares shifted her aching buttocks, trying to ease the cramps hurting her. This was her first time in the Talamaq Palace, and she knew she had to behave. She did not want people to notice her until the right time, but sitting on a hard wooden bench for (calculate) seven and eight-fifteenth hours had made her afraid that if she did not find relief soon she would cry out with the pain.

‘Why must we put up with this, ma dama?’ she whispered irritably to Mahudia, the head of her order.
‘Why could we not have stayed home? We could have been summoned when it was our turn to meet the Emperor. I want to go home.’

The Chief Cosmographer turned to her young charge, patience puckering her kindly, open face. ‘The Emperor has his reasons,’ she answered primly. ‘Be still, girl. If my bones can bear this waiting, so can yours. Be thankful you are not the one about to face
his
crimes.’ She waved a slim wrist towards the Corridor of Rainbows and, as she did, the light began to fade.