The Merchant Emperor (5 page)

Finally he had come upon a reference to it in the ruins of a water-soaked tome in the Cymrian museum known anecdotally as
The Book of All Human Knowledge
. The fragile manuscript had identified his treasure as a dragon scale from a deck of scrying used by an ancient Seren woman named Sharra, and had noted its name as the New Beginning. None of the powers of the scale, however, had survived the book’s immersion in the sea, so he had had to discover its uses himself.

One thing he found on his own was the effect starlight had on the object.

Idly, Talquist held up the scale to the horizon where the evening star gleamed. What had appeared solid a moment before—a rough gray piece of oval carapace with a finely tattered edge scored across its concave surface—turned suddenly translucent, the etching of a throne in the center visible even in the dim light of dusk. A purple flash skimmed across the surface, then vanished as the scale became clear, with but a mere outline able to be seen. As many times as Talquist had seen the effect, he never ceased to be amazed by it, especially given that after a moment his own hand, and eventually the rest of him, would follow suit, turning ethereal enough to render him all but invisible, too.

It had been an extremely useful tool in furthering his ends.

With his musings came an overwhelming sense of loss. From the moment he had discovered his treasure, it had almost never left his body, tucked in the custom-made pocket of his garments just above his heart. Its vibration had seeped into his core, changing the rhythms of his body to match its own. It had given him the throne of Sorbold, allowing him to brutally depose the Empress Leitha, the withered crone who had reigned undisputed for three-quarters of the past century, and her corpulent heir-apparent son at the same time, bringing to an abrupt end the three-centuries-old Dynasty of the Dark Earth, making way for his new one.

The Empire of the Sun.

In order to remain undetected as the usurper, however, he had modestly insisted upon taking on the title only of regent at first, to be crowned emperor on the first day of spring a year later. Even now, as light fled the sky and night took a more confident hold, the preparations for his coronation were being made in the streets of Jierna’sid.

It would be a festival without precedent and beyond measure.

Talquist.

The voice from the bottom of the stairs leading up to the parapet top scratched against his eardrums, sending chills down the length of his spine. It was harsh and high-pitched, with a crackling edge to it. In that voice the echo of other voices could be heard, some low and soft, others shrieking, all brimming with a nascent and ominous power that never ceased to make the skin on Talquist’s neck prickle in fear.

Bring me the scale.

The words echoed up the stone staircase, carrying with them unmistakable threat.

More than anyone in the entire world, Talquist knew that the threat was not idle, even though there was no way for the one issuing it to gain access to the parapet. Not wishing to pass the remainder of his life in the high tower, however, the Emperor Presumptive sighed again, took one last fond look at his life’s treasure, then turned away from the window and walked dispiritedly down the stairs.

As he rounded the last turn of the winding staircase he passed a mirror that had been set up to allow guards to see what might be pursuing them down or up the steps. An ordinary man of Sorbold looked back at him from the reflective surface; Talquist paused long enough to return his gaze. Clothed though he was in finely tailored robes of heavy linen trimmed in gold, in truth by outward appearance he was nothing more than a swarthy-skinned, thick-bodied man, dark of hair and eye, with a workman’s callused hands and a face weathered by the sun and salt sea air. Not born to be a king, much less an emperor, whenever he beheld himself, Talquist saw the lie beneath the finery, the commoner in the garments of a masquerade.

And it infuriated him to the core.

He doubled his stride angrily, arriving at the bottom of the stair with a resounding thump.

The staircase opened up to the wide Great Hall of the palace’s third floor, an opulent room of high angled ceilings painted in grand frescoes above a polished floor where more than a million small pieces of multicolored marble had been inset into an exquisite design, unparalleled in the Known World for its beauty. Long, thin windows of colored glass reflected the light of the burning torches that lined the walls, making the room shine as bright as day.

Standing just inside the room was an immense statue of a soldier, mammoth in size and heft, its features as detailed as life, down to the stone eyelashes and individual creases in each knuckle of its hands. The titan, more than the height of two men, was rendered in primitive armor and garb from a time before the Cymrians came to this land, ruining it forever, in Talquist’s opinion. The primal, indigenous nature of the time was captured perfectly in the stone man’s flat brow and broad face, with a strong, square jawline and sinewy limbs that ended in warrior’s hands and feet. Most remarkable of all were the eyes, clear and cloudless as a summer day, blue as the sky would be.

They were open and watching him intently.

“There is no need to summon me like a fishwife, Faron,” Talquist said smoothly, but with an undertone of anger. “I told you I would confer unto you the scale; did you not believe me?” He stretched out his arm, wincing inwardly but maintaining an indifferent mien, with the scale in hand.

The immense stone soldier continued to eye him, but the corners of the mouth seemed to contract in the hint of a smile.

I had no doubt that I would be taking the scale from you, one way or another,
the shrill voice Talquist had heard in the parapet replied. The titan’s lips did not move; the sound seemed to issue forth from within its thoracic cavity.

Talquist stared at the statue. Then he brought his arm back to his side.

“It would seem prudent that, as we are allies, you should trust me to hold on to what is mine—after all, I have not asked for possession of any of
your
scales. Tomorrow is the day of my second Weighing, and coronation—perhaps the presence of the scale is necessary to ensure that I am once again selected by the Great Scales as emperor. Given how critical that selection is to both of our plans, our
mutual
plans, I would think you would be hesitant to risk failure of all we have set in place.”

The titan smirked.

We have mutual plans, true. But our priorities within those plans are not the same, Talquist.

The Emperor Presumptive’s deep brown eyes darkened to the black of a sky before a night storm, but otherwise his face betrayed no anger.

“Do you wish to dissolve our association, then, Faron? You say you seek a child who resides deep within the mountains of the Firbolg, protected by their king. Without me, the armies of Sorbold will not follow you—do you intend to try and take the mountains on your own? Best of luck with that, impressive as you are.” The look in his eyes sharpened now to a glare. “I tire of your threats and your attempts at intimidation, especially on the eve of my Weighing and coronation. Remember it was I that brought you into life, into awareness, into the strength with which you menace me now, in the first place. Without the body of Living Stone I provided for you, you would still be a gelatinous mass of freakish flesh in a carnival sideshow! And in thanks you threaten and shriek at me in your newly found voice which, by the way, sounds like that of a tone-deaf whore yodeling in pretended passion.”

Well, you would know all about that.

Talquist thought he perceived an amusement he had never seen before in the statue’s expression.
When and how did he grow so much more sophisticated?
he wondered.
He was not even sentient when he first stepped off the Scales, stumbling and barely able to stand.
He decided to take the negotiation to a higher level.

“Here is the deal on the table: if you wish to continue our association, we will need a new understanding about our interaction. I will not tolerate disrespect of this nature any longer. It is critical that the army of Sorbold sees you as my champion, under command of the generals who are subordinate to me. Otherwise, there will be chaos, and you will be on your own. I will treat you as my partner in secret, but in public it is necessary for you to blend in better, to not challenge me. Between us, we have almost a full set of Sharra’s scales. Each of us should retain possession of his own until we are prepared to make use of them as a set. Remember, I, too, seek a child, with as much fervor as you do, I believe.”

The titan eyed him, but said nothing.

“Do we have an understanding, then, Faron?”

Footsteps sounded on the wide marble staircase known as the Great Stair. Talquist turned quickly to see Lesik, his protocol officer, hurrying to the top of them from the second floor below.

He glanced back over his shoulder at the statue. It had seemed to fade into stolid inanimation again, its earthen eyelids colorless.

“M’lord?”

“Yes, Lesik, what is it?”

“Beliac, king of Golgarn, and the Diviner of the Hintervold have arrived. I will show them to their rooms unless you wish to greet them.”

“Ah, thank you, Lesik,” the Emperor Presumptive said. “I do indeed want to have some time with them this evening before tomorrow’s festivities occupy me completely. Will you have supper and libations sent up here? I will be down directly to welcome them. Have them wait in the entryway.”

The protocol officer bowed and hurried back down the staircase.

Talquist turned quickly to the titan.

“Make your decision, Faron,” he whispered. “If I have your agreement, I will conduct my business with these two powerful allies here in the Great Hall, where you can be a silent witness to it, assuming you can be silent. If not—”

I will be silent.

“Good. Then I shall return with them momentarily. And while you wait, you might want to contemplate what you might need to do to deepen this new voice of yours. It’s rather embarrassing, frankly.”

Talquist turned again and trotted down the wide stone staircase, whistling, his good mood restored.

*   *   *

The titan watched until the Emperor Presumptive had descended out of sight.

Then, within the massive chest cavity of the statue, the recently insulted voice spoke, though it would have been inaudible to any human ear. It was not a feminine voice, but it had a woman’s tone of comfort, of seduction.

He did not perceive me, Faron. He merely thinks you have matured.

Deep within that same cavity came a wordless agreement, different from the voice.

Then the voice spoke again. There was a definite excitement in its words.

Good; this is good. Do not chafe under the mantle of servitude, of obedience—trust me, when the time comes, Talquist will come to heel
.
Once we reveal to him what we know about the child he seeks so desperately, he will grant us whatever we wish. You and I will lead his army to take the Firbolg mountains.

And then it will all begin.

4

THE OCCUPIED CITY OF SEPULVARTA

Fhremus Alo’hari, supreme commander of Sorbold’s land force, stood atop the wall that overlooked the Krevensfield Plain and the larger panorama of Roland to the north, shielding his eyes from the bright sun of morning, thinking.

Fhremus was not generally a pensive man; he had risen to command slowly, working his way through the ranks, not because of some grand undertaking or highly visible act of bravery, but rather a consistent reliability and staunch loyalty. He had been raised in a military family with many generations of service to the Crown, four of those generations specifically devoted to the late Empress Leitha, who had reigned for three-quarters of a century, and had taken, upon her death almost exactly one year before, the long-standing Dynasty of the Dark Earth with her.

Not that this vainglorious ending had been her idea. Her one and only heir, the grotesquely corpulent Crown Prince Vyshla, had managed to die within an hour of the empress; he had actually died first, but his death’s significance paled in comparison with hers. Their synchronous endings erased several centuries of their family’s dominion over the vast, forbidding nation that Fhremus loved, and set the stage for a battle of wills between, in the absence of any other royalty, the lesser nobles of the largest of the city-states of Sorbold, the Mercantile, the Church, and the army itself, which Fhremus had represented at the conclave that met prior to the Weighing.

Fhremus had been pleased with the outcome of the conclave, the decision to keep the empire united, rather than dividing it into city-states, as the nobility had pushed for, a decision made by the Scales, the enormous set of weighing plates that had long been the decider of contested questions in Sorbold and, in fact, many of what had once been the Cymrian lands. It was an old instrumentality of deep lore and magic from the Island of Serendair, brought in pieces on a ship with the refugees of the Third Fleet that had landed on Sorbold’s southern maritime border known as the Skeleton Coast, a treacherous, mist-shrouded coastline that had been the graveyard of many ships over the millennia. For a thousand years since that landing, the Scales had weighed every major issue of state, and were considered to be undisputed in their wisdom and judgment.