Petty Treasons Read online

  He had practiced, that was clear.

  The secretary did not know any of the discreet gestures you used, and so for the first time that morning since you had finished the morning ceremonies, you spoke out loud. Your voice resonated through the room, the acoustics catching it into something musical despite the neutral intonation. “Rise and take your seat.”

  Cliopher sayo Mdang was more awkward rising from his prostration, but that was common enough. He was also visibly relieved to be sent to the secretary’s desk. Well, perhaps he’d heard of the candidate dismissed before he’d even finished the obeisance.

  The bells rang the hour. Cliopher sayo Mdang took the opportunity to set out his pens, brushes, inks—including a traditional inkstone, which was interesting—and an array of papers. He was finished and attentive before the bells had finished tolling.

  Two points before you’d even started. That was enough to win him the position, to be honest.

  The Glorious One—such an absurd array of titles you possessed! Some days you felt most at home piling them up upon yourself, a child building cloud-castles, a poet spinning fancies, a fool trying on names—decided not to question your new secretary, for fear of what you might learn, and instead launched into dictation. Your new secretary was responsive and polite and thoroughly, gloriously focused on the work before him.

  One quarter-bell, two, three. Cliopher sayo Mdang wrote quickly, neatly, easily, his brush singing across the pages before him. His hands were sinewy and strong, deft in his craft but surely shaped by other skills. He asked no questions other than the odd request for clarification, and those were few and far between.

  Three points, four … Could this be an actually competent secretary at last?

  Surely not. The Master of Offices had never attained so high. Sometimes you felt, you the Last Emperor, you the Lord Magus of Zunidh, you the Lord (still, somehow) of Five Thousand Lands and Ten Thousand Titles, you felt that the Master of Offices was just that bit worried what might happen if his ostensible lord and god took a greater hand in the running of the government.

  Instead you were given all the broken magic to mend, which they did not think you could do (and which I could not do, though I tried; I tried), and the glory of being the figurehead, and the honour of being the still, stable, central point in the dance of society, and that was surely enough. More than enough. Even in these trying times, what luxury was not yours to command?

  (Up fifteen strides, down twenty-five, ten back to my—your—the desk. Don’t ask such questions.)

  Just before the midmorning break, when the household attendants would bring in refreshments, you turned to dictating a series of points about the various regions of the world insofar as they had been reported. It was dispiritingly full of war and the rumours of war. Not to mention all the natural and magical disasters. Except for, where was it? Yes—the Vonyabe—

  “I beg your pardon, Glorious and Illustrious One?” said your new secretary.

  Glorious and Illustrious? You considered the secretary, whose head was bent down to his desk. He was bravely endeavouring not to show his anxiety. His voice was a low tenor, pleasant on the ear, the sharp rural vowels a refreshing change from the lilting court accent.

  You wondered what the man’s singing voice was like, before corralling your thoughts back to the matter at hand.

  “The Vonyabe,” you said, slowly. “It is in the former Imperial Province of the Wide Seas.”

  Sayo Mdang hesitated, very carefully not looking up. And then he said, his voice nearly, nearly calm, “Ah, yes, the Vangavaye-ve.” His voice lingered on the sounds, savouring the vowels, briefly musical. He wrote the name down with a swift flourish, no hesitation over the spelling.

  It had been—

  You stopped. Glorious, Illustrious, Radiant, Serene—Most Serene, even—it had been a very long time since anyone had corrected you.

  An hour and a half since Cliopher sayo Mdang had arrived.

  You regarded your secretary with narrowed eyes, intent suddenly on winkling the man’s character out of him. The man sat there, shoulders back, spine straight, eyes on his paper. His right hand holding the brush nearly steady; a few droplets of ink were beading on its camel-hair tip, catching the light in winking flashes.

  Yes, indeed. Cliopher sayo Mdang knew exactly what he’d just done.

  You had always endeavoured to be precise with words. Use the correct one, in all instances. Rejoice in learning something new. “The Vángavaye-ve, then,” you said, mimicking the pronunciation, and continued with the rest of the sentence and a return to your steady pacing.

  As you turned away from your secretary’s desk, you caught the younger man’s faint exhale of relief and, with your own back to the guards, permitted yourself a small, fleeting smile.

  To competent and intrepid you had to add—oh, what a delight it was to have to do so!—you had to add unrefined to the adjectives you might bestow upon your new secretary.

  Oh, Cliopher sayo Mdang was not discourteous; not in the least.

  Or—the pun was too great—he was discourteous, but only because his manners were polished for far different company, under far different principles. There was very little of the courtly about him. His accent was defiantly rural (where? The Von—Vángavaye-ve? Surely only someone from there would care enough about its pronunciation to interrupt the Sun-in-Earth in order to correct it!); and though all the key behaviours were performed assiduously, they were endearingly, obviously, performed.

  When the refreshments came in, you the Lord of Rising Stars moved another piece in the game you were playing with your secretary, and offered him some.

  Your secretary might or might not have realized you were playing, but instead of making either of the obvious moves—either to accept or protest the offer with fulsome compliments—he said, “Thank you, my lord,” and continued on with his notes.

  A very few minutes later Sayo Mdang realized his mistake; but instead of producing some overabundance of courtly manners to recover, he merely bit his lip and continued on as he had.

  It was a delight. Competent, intrepid, unrefined—what else?

  He had a sense of humour.

  No one had a sense of humour, not around the Wearer of the Crown of Living Flame of Zallahyr. (Not even though the Crown of Living Flame, which I’d once found, had turned out to be a disappointingly mundane item made of electrum and fire opals set on little dangly wires. I’d left it in its spot in the Treasury, in a pile of ancient gems that could probably have ransomed three kings and their consorts. Occasionally it showed up in the rotation of jewels, reminder of a splendid half-hour sifting through the flotsam and jetsam of history with no one else close to hand.)

  At the end of the morning, you and he had managed to get through more work than the three previous secretaries had done in their entire combined tenures.

  Admittedly, that was only three weeks and two days: three weeks for the third-last, two days for the second-last, and nothing at all for the most recent, but even so. Even so.

  You wondered if you dared, and found you did. Cliopher sayo Mdang was packing up his writing materials, waiting for the last page of notes to finish drying before he made his obeisances and departed to wherever it was Fifth-Degree Secretaries went when they were not taking dictation.

  (I had a brief, amusing vision of all the secretaries trundling back to their rooms, one after another, and tucking themselves comfortably next to their writing cases on a shelf, ready for the next day. I—you—had to hold court tonight, for those aristocrats who remained rattling around the Palace. I could imagine the quiet, unassuming pleasure of being tucked away for the next day, no one to call me out of myself if I wanted them not to.)

  You waited a moment, until the younger man was half-distracted, and slid into the air a line.

  It was a good line: perfectly innocuous by itself—or, at least, mostly; even here, even now, you were (I was) who you were—and yet also an opportunity.

  Your new s
ecretary caught the innuendo, and not only that, threw it back, with a razor-sharp twist that delighted you so much you replied in kind, in turn, in joy and secret awe and—

  And Cliopher sayo Mdang laughed out loud and looked you straight in the eyes as he declared it a perfect riposte.

  I stared at the younger man, shocked.

  (I did.)

  Cliopher sayo Mdang had dark brown eyes, sharply, brilliantly alive, full of merriment fading into horror.

  You tore your gaze away, snapped back into your imperial self, benevolent and serene and all that folly of a pretence of divine equanimity. Your new secretary fell rather than descended into his obeisance, eyes glimmering with welling tears. At your automatic dismissal Sayo Mdang turned and fled, writing kit forgotten on his desk and magic reverberating in the air.

  The door snicked gently into place, the two guards standing at their precise, perfect, unvarying attention. Sergei on the right, Ludvic on the left. Sergei from the former duchy of Kolascz on Ysthar before the Fall, Ludvic from Woodlark in the Azilint of Zunidh.

  They did not meet your eyes; they were far too well-trained for that.

  You took a few moments to compose yourself before you could say, quietly and calmly: “Send after Sayo Mdang to return his kit.” You gestured at the leather box. Your guards would be looking at your hands, to ensure they missed none of your unspoken orders.

  You, even you, even after everything, had to take another deliberate breath before you could say the next sentence. “If the taboo against looking full upon our eyes holds, see that he has all the medical and other assistance he needs. If … if it does not, inform the Master of Offices that we are pleased with his choice and duly appoint Sayo Mdang as our personal secretary.”

  “Very good, my lord,” said Ludvic, saluting.

  Ludvic never let anything rock him. He had been the safe harbour in the storm after the Fall. One day he would be promoted to something more than just one of your personal guards. One day.

  You (yes—you—the Protector of the People, you the Shield of the Empire, you the Sun-on Earth) turned and went into your private study, where no one, not even the guards, not even your servants, not even the Emperor went.

  You stared blindly at the dim room, lit only by the one square of brightness high up on the wall, the only unscreened window in the Imperial Apartments.

  You sank down on the bench immediately inside the door and briefly, just briefly, buried your face in your hands as you thought how pleased you had been (I had been), a quarter-hour before, working with the man you might have just permanently blinded.

  You held court, Glorious and Illustrious and Most Serene, in stiff robes of gold-embroidered white samite over gold ahalo cloth. You wore the Lesser Gauds, for it was one of the many small holy-days of the court. Possibly it was your official birthday.

  You sat on your golden throne, on the dais fifteen feet above eye level. The jewels were heavy: yellow diamonds and golden pearls in simple chains, layer upon layer across your shoulders, around your throat, around your wrists and your ankles, your waist and your forehead. Gold leaf had been painted on your eyelids by your attendants. As always you had kept your eyes closed the whole time they were attending you.

  They had seen your face at close quarters, but you had never seen theirs.

  The golden pearls and the ahalo silk came from the Von—the Vángavaye-ve. You savoured the sound of the name in your mind, your eyes on the patterns of the dancers below. The floor of the Throne Room was another map of the five worlds of the Empire, jewels set in silver. The courtiers wore slippers, soft-soled, to protect the precious stones. You could not quite determine where the Vangavaye-ve began in the expanse of lapis lazuli that delineated the Wide Seas of Zunidh.

  Your attendants had lacquered your nails with gold, fingers and toes. They had slipped rings on your fingers, your toes, gold set with diamonds, with pearls, with citrine and topaz and every glittering yellow and white jewel. They had anointed you with more perfume, roses from Ysthar, kvalin from Colhélhé, musk from Voonra. Every time you shifted position slightly a little burst of scent filled your nose and your mouth, as if you were eating rose petals, drowning in amber.

  You had not walked down to the throne room. There had been the gilded litter, borne by six of the guards, with six more ahead of you, six behind. They had made a solemn procession down the winding ramp that spiralled around the core of the Palace, from the heights of the Imperial Apartments to the Throne Room on the ground floor. It was a way for those who could not attend the court still to see you, to be reassured that you were alive, that you were awake, that you were sane, that you were there.

  It was not true you never looked upon anyone’s face. The throne was fifteen feet above the floor, and the lower dais swept out far enough that anyone on the main floor was at least the requisite seven ells’ distant. You could recognize your courtiers by their faces as well as their gaits, their shoulders, their hands, their garments, their voices. They looked upon you, always, one eye watching you, taking in your appearance and bearing as indications of the state of the world.

  You sat there on the golden throne, the golden cushion, in your robes of gold and white, breathing in the perfumed air that held still and serene around you, perfectly still and perfectly serene, watching your court dance.

  The music was good, of course.

  The first hours of the day passed as they always did. The sunrise ceremonies, abbreviated as they were compared to what they had been in the Empire, still took time. You prayed for your people, to the real gods above you, and took the time to try to settle your magic.

  Even now, three years after you had woken from the coma after the Fall, three years after your magic had come cringing back to you, like a beaten dog wondering how much more pain it would take to be forgiven, it was still raw and painful, still tender and tentative, still passive and remote.

  All those years as Emperor had affected it, you knew, and the Fall as well. A hundred years comatose and three years recovered—

  If that hundred years and those three years were true. That was what the priest-wizards said, and you perforce had to believe them. It was not as if you would know if no one told you directly. The guards did not gossip in front of you, or even to you; no doubt the rumours of your early behaviour as Emperor still lingered.

  (I was sure there had been more than three official birthdays, even if when I pressed my memory I could not imagine why I thought so, for though the hours, days, months, years seemed endless, they always seemed endless. Fourteen years, four months, four days, and seventeen hours; and then the Fall; and now the future unspooled before me, uncertain, entirely changed, and yet entirely the same.)

  You prayed, and attempted to settle your magic, and bathed, swimming vigorously in the pool for a good half of an hour. You would have stayed in the water longer if you’d dared, relishing the feel of it on your skin, the fact that you could duck your head below the surface and, for as long as you could hold your breath, be alone and yet embraced in warm welcome.

  You could not hold your breath long, though each morning you tried to go a few strokes further.

  You prayed, and attempted to settle your magic, and bathed, and were dried off and dressed by your attendants. Black today, and gold-figured black above. Only your signet ring on your fingers, no rings on your toes. A belt of onyx set in gold worked into the shape of ivy leaves, tiger’s-eye agates round berries between the links. You closed your eyes as one of your attendants used a sponge to rub lotion into your bald head, then even more gently, more carefully, across your face.

  You broke your fast on flatbreads and bittersweet marmalade, the closest you could come to fresh fruit, and tea. You read the morning’s reports, wondering whose neat hand had scribed them, whose quick wit had summarized them, whose anonymous brilliance was thus displayed. It was not whoever had been doing it the week before.

  Your guards stood at the door that led into your official study, their eyes on t
he wall behind you, one facing to the left of you, one to the right.

  Your magic darted around the room, tasting the magic around Ludvic and Sergei, still on the morning duty. Sergei’s magic was twisted around itself, seeking a home that no longer existed. Ludvic was much more restful, settled in himself, the connection to Woodlark comfortable and secure.

  There. A quarter to the third hour of the morning, nine of the old clock, sonorous here as it was everywhere in the Palace except the Throne Room. In there one could hear only the great bell that rang the four quarters of each day, entirely unintimidated by petty human concerns. Not that anyone who spent more than a few days in the Palace did not come to be excruciatingly aware of the rhythm of the bells.

  You rose, and strode towards the door Sergei had immediately opened. The guards looked out; from the corner of your eyes you could see their heads turned, as if for threats; as if there would be any threats, here in the innermost chambers of the Imperial Apartments, that did not come from you.

  You went into the study, preparing yourself for what you knew was going to come. Yet another secretary, no doubt nowhere near so competent, so intrepid, so unpolished, so funny.

  You would have to ensure that Cliopher sayo Mdang had all that he needed. Healing. Mind healing, after so abruptly losing his position, his profession, his sight. A way home. If he were from the Vángavaye-ve, entirely the other side of the world, would he want to go home?

  (What had brought him here in the first place? Through all those wars and rumours of war, those natural and magical disasters, that wall of storms across the Wide Seas? Why had he come here, to the Palace, to become a Fifth-Degree Secretary? What had he left behind? What had he hoped to find? What dreams were now ashes in his hands? Had he lost everything in the Fall, and come to the Palace in the hopes of making some future for himself?)