The Goblin Emperor (33 page)

“And you are confident,” said Lanthevel, “that Edrehasivar will not throw
you
in the Esthoramire for criticizing the late emperor his father?”

“Ha!” said Pashavar with such force that Maia was not sure whether it was an exclamation or a laugh. “If Edrehasivar wished to start throwing people in the Esthoramire—or, better yet, the Nevennamire—we are not where he would start.” He gave Maia a sidelong look that was angry and mocking, but not entirely unkind. “Are we?”

“No,” said Maia, “but we could always change our mind.”

There was a moment of arrested silence, and Maia worried that he had judged Pashavar incorrectly; then Pashavar and Lanthevel burst out laughing, and Pashavar saluted Maia with his glass. “So the kitten has claws, after all.”

Maia smiled as best he could, grateful his skin was too dark to show a blush, and Orthema said quietly, “Just because a cat doesn’t scratch you doesn’t mean he can’t—as you well know, Lord Pashavar.”

“We are rebuked,” said Pashavar, still smiling.

“And there is a question we have not answered,” Lanthevel said. “Philology, Serenity, is the study of the origins of words.”

“The origins of
words
?” Maia said.

“We study how languages change,” said Lanthevel. “Why a word has one form among the silk farmers of the east and another among the herdsmen of the west. Why some words stay in use from generation to generation, while others are discarded. For example, for we see that you are still dubious, the word ‘morhath’ is the word for ‘sky’ that was used in the court of Your Serenity’s great-great-great-great-great-granduncle, Edrevechelar the Fourteenth. But no one uses it now or even knows its meaning. Our study is to track the course of its disappearance and the emergence of the word that took its place.”

“Actually,” Orthema said mildly, “that’s not quite true. We know the word ‘morhath’ because we heard it used by the Evressai barbarians.”

“You
did
?” said Lanthevel, all but pouncing on him, and Maia became less worried that this was an elaborate joke to discomfit the emperor. For one thing, he didn’t believe Orthema would be party to any such joke; for another, Lanthevel had become so intent on extracting details from Orthema that he seemed almost to have forgotten the emperor’s existence. Maia bent his head over his plate and listened as Orthema was slowly encouraged to speak, to describe the people he had spent much of his adult life fighting.

The Evressai Wars had been going on since the reign of Maia’s grandfather. The initial cause had been the refusal of the people of the Evressai Steppes to acknowledge Varevesena as their emperor or to pay tithes to the empire. The wars had continued on and off for more than eighty years because the barbarians could not drive the elves out, nor take the Anmur’theileian, the great fortress that had been under siege before it was even built, and the elves could not catch the barbarians.

“You cannot imagine, Serenity, how vast the steppes are. And the Nazhmorhathveras—that is how they name themselves, the People of the Night Sky—the Nazhmorhathveras do not build, nor fortresses nor towns nor even roads. They live in tents and they travel in groups of no more than twenty or thirty. Even if our scouts find a meeting of several houses, they will be scattered and gone before a battalion can reach them. And the Nazhmorhathveras are masters of the art of ambush. It is like trying to hold sand in your fist.”

“If the steppes are so vast, why do the Nazhmorhathveras not simply vanish into them?” Maia asked. He feared it was a stupid question, but it was beginning to seem to him that asking stupid questions was what an emperor’s job consisted of.

“Brute stubbornness,” snapped Pashavar.

“No,” said Orthema, “it is not that simple, though we did not understand the truth until we thought to ask a prisoner why the Nazhmorhathveras call the Anmur’theileian ‘Memory of Death.’ We had thought”—and he used the plural, with a gesture that seemed to encompass generations of knights and foot soldiers fighting and dying far from home—“that they named it that for the uncounted Nazhmorhathvereise dead. But this prisoner … do you know anything, Serenity, of the witches of the steppes?”

Maia shook his head; before he remembered that it behooved the emperor—as it behooved everyone (Setheris had said) not raised by goblin mudwalkers—to make a clear spoken response when asked a question, Orthema was speaking again: “The witches are the holy men and women of the Nazhmorhathveras, and they are always albino.”

The hiss of indrawn breath was from Dach’osmin Lanthevin; Lord Pashavar’s expression merely became more dour, and he muttered, “Barbarians,” just softly enough that Maia could not be certain he meant to be heard.

Orthema shrugged a little in acknowledgment—though not, Maia thought, in agreement—and continued: “We captured a witch, by pure stupid luck, nothing more, and for all that he was half-blind, he fought like a nazhcreis, the night-hunting cat of the steppes, which indeed was his usename. Our soldiers were wise enough not to kill him, and certainly his people bargained for his return as they had bargained for nothing and no one else.”

Orthema paused for a long swallow of wine. “But bargaining of that sort takes time, and we took over the care of the prisoner to ensure that he was not ill-used, for the common soldiers considered him an abomination and many of our fellow knights expressed the same opinion.”

“Which you did not share,” Maia said gently.

“Serenity,” Orthema said with a much more uncomfortable shrug. “We, too, have been called an abomination.” And he made the barest gesture toward his fierce orange-red eyes.

“But that’s—” Dach’osmin Lanthevin began, and stopped suddenly.

“Ridiculous?” Pashavar said dryly. “There were many mutters of ‘abomination’ when Varenechibel’s fourth empress bore him a child.”

“Please,” Maia said before Pashavar could embarrass the table further. “We wish to hear Captain Orthema’s story.”

“Serenity,” Orthema said with a slight inclination of his head; he seemed pleased. “We do not think that Nazhcreis Dein ever entirely trusted us, but he appreciated our care, and one day we asked him why his people called our fortress Memory of Death. For a long time he did not answer, and we thought perhaps he would not—for there were many questions he would not answer—but finally he said, ‘Because it is built on our dead.’ He gave us an unpleasant smile—we remember it still, for he was sharp-toothed, as all his people are. ‘We also call it Carrion-Bones.’ And finally, Serenity, we understood that he was speaking
literally.
The Anmur’theileian is built on a great outcropping of rock—they are scattered throughout the eastern steppes, like isolated mountains—and in truth we cannot fault our predecessors who chose to build there, for it offers both vantage and defense, which are otherwise not easily to be found. But what those builders did not know—or did not care, if they did know, and we have our suspicions—was that it was the custom of the Nazhmorhathveras to carry their dead to the top of this rock and leave them there to be stripped by the vultures and the nazhcreian. The rite of adulthood, Nazhcreis Dein told us, was to spend three days and three nights atop the rock with the dead.”

“We built our castle on their ulimeire?” Maia said, horrified.

“Essentially, Serenity, yes.”

“And is this the
only
rock that will do for their barbarian rites?” Pashavar said.

“That’s not the point,” Maia said, more sharply than he had ever imagined speaking to Pashavar. “Just because there is a ulimeire in Cetho does not make the tombs in the Untheileneise’meire less sacred.”

“Point taken,” Pashavar said sourly.

“But if that is true,” Maia said, “why have we not returned their ulimeire to them?”

Everyone stared at him in horror. “Serenity,” Orthema said finally, clearly struggling for words that would not be insulting or provoking, “it is not that simple.”

Pashavar, uninterested in tact, said, “Would you concede defeat in a war which is not of our making and which has claimed the lives of thousands of elvish men?”

“But the war is not of the making of anyone now alive,” Maia objected.

“Every effort was made by the late emperor your father to achieve peace,” said Lanthevel. “The barbarians—yes, yes, Orthema, the Nazhmorhathveras—refused.”

“Yes,” Maia said, “and were these efforts through the
current
Witness for Foreigners or the
previous
one?”

There was a short, appalled silence before Orthema rallied. “Serenity, if we simply yield to the Nazhmorhathveras, they will consider the towns of the badlands as no more than prey, as they did before the Anmur’theileian was built, and the people of the badlands are your loyal subjects and deserve protection.”

Before Maia could answer, Dach’osmin Lanthevin said, mildly but with a hint of steel all the same, “We feel that this discussion is better suited to the Michen’theileian or the Verven’theileian than to our dining room.”

“Of course,” Maia said. “We beg your pardon.”

There was another uncomfortable silence, in which Maia was reminded again that emperors did not apologize, and then Merrem Orthemo said bravely, “We are the daughter of the mayor of Vorenzhessar, which lies in the western badlands. We remember our grandmothers’ stories about the Evressai raids, and we assure Your Serenity, you have no stauncher subjects than the people of Vorenzhessar and towns like it.”

“Thank you, Merrem Orthemo,” Maia said. “It is a quandary and we must think on it carefully.” But she had also given him an opportunity to shift the conversation with some grace: “Then your town predates Ezho?”

“Oh, yes, Serenity.” And when she smiled, he could see that her canine teeth were long and sharp, as Orthema had said of Nazhcreis Dein. “Both our house and the house of our mother’s line have lived for centuries in the badlands. There were always people there, even before gold was discovered and the elves came. It is merely that now there are a great many more.”

The Ezho gold rush provided innocuous conversation for the rest of the meal; even Osmerrem Pashavaran unbent enough to tell the story of one of her grandmother’s brothers, who had gone north looking for gold and had found the mineral springs at Daiano instead—“which made him far more wealthy than a gold strike could ever have done, although even when he was a very old man, he would go out prospecting whenever he had the chance. But he never found gold.”

“Our mother went to Daiano for the waters,” said Dach’osmin Lanthevin. “They did not keep her alive, but they reduced her pain substantially, and for that we will always be grateful.”

Maia wondered if the springs at Daiano could have helped Chenelo, and he lost several turns in the conversation to a wash of futile anger at his father, who would never have granted her permission to try them.

His attention was reclaimed by a question from Lanthevel: “Serenity, do we understand correctly that you have halted negotiations over the Archduchess Vedero’s marriage?”

Maia’s ears flicked, causing a delicate chime from his silver and jade earrings. “Our sister is in mourning.”

“But you have broken off entirely the agreement with the Tethimada, which we have heard was very close to completion.”

“Do you trust your sources, Lanthevel?” Pashavar asked, and Lanthevel made an acknowledging gesture.

“But still,” he said. “It seems a little rash, Serenity, when you will only have to begin again from the beginning, and very likely from a less advantageous position.”

“We see nothing advantageous about our current position. And our sister does not want to be married.” He cursed the wine even as he saw everyone at the table become alert.

“For a woman of blood,” Osmerrem Pashavaran said harshly, “marriage is not about
wanting.
The archduchess knows that.”

“So did our mother,” Maia said. “We think it enough to inflict marriage upon our empress.”

“You would have done better to choose a daughter of a more traditional house,” Osmerrem Pashavaran said. “The Ceredada girls have just as many ridiculous notions as your sister.”

“We do not find our sister’s notions ridiculous,” Maia said. He took a deep breath and tried to let go of the scarlet-eyed rage that had swept over him. Osmerrem Pashavaran didn’t look like she minded a bit, but he was scaring Merrem Orthemo. “We do not think marriage is the only thing women are fit for, even if you do.”

“It is a vexed question,” said Lanthevel. “As is the question of what should become of women who—for whatever reason—cannot find a husband.” His gaze crossed his niece’s.

Dach’osmin Lanthevin said, “It is hard to find occupation when one has been trained for nothing but childbearing and then has no children to bear.”

“All women have duties,” Osmerrem Pashavaran snapped, although the betraying pinkness at the tips of her ears showed that she had not meant to hit a sore spot for the Lanthevada.

“But what do those duties consist of?” Dach’osmin Lanthevin pressed. “Does a woman not have a duty to use her talents, even if they are not talents for the care of children?”

“We had no idea you were so forward-thinking,” Osmerrem Pashavaran said sourly, making “forward-thinking” sound like the vilest of insults.

“We have had a certain amount of time to consider the matter,” Dach’osmin Lanthevin said. It was clear she was not backing down, and so it was a relief that she chose to turn the conversation to trivial matters while the plates were cleared.

Dessert was a cake made with spices from Anvernel, and from the natural silence of enjoyment, Maia dared finally to approach the subject of the bridge; as he’d expected, Pashavar denounced it instantly, but he had not expected him to describe it as a “cloud-fancy of Varenechibel’s. It will come to nothing except the waste of a prodigious amount of money.”

“We did not know our father was interested in the building of a bridge.”

“Oh yes,” said Lanthevel. “He felt that if a way was not found to bring the east and the west together, the Ethuveraz would split apart again. And we think he could not help but see that the Istandaärtha would always be a weakness unless a way could be found to bridge it.”