Танит Ли - Anackire

Somewhere in the war, Emel was again about to die. Obviously.

But it should not have been necessary. Should not have been here for him, this pitfall. Raldnor overreaching himself, Suthamun, damnable Ashara-Anackire—

“That may be of help, my lord.”

The second physician—the other was laid up, a flogging—straightened from his task. The wound, now packed with medicine, seemed numbed, but not eased.

“Tonight,” said Kesarh, “come back here and cauterize it. This time, efficiently.”

“Don’t worry, my lord. I saw what happened to your other attendant.”

“You were meant to. What’s this?”

“Something to cool the fever.”

“And which will make me drowsy? Do you suppose I can afford to sleep here?” Kesarh pushed the cup aside and it fell to the floor. The arbitrary violence was unusual. As a general rule, Kesarh was fair to underlings. The wine merchants of Karmiss, who had rebuilt their trade on his patronage, adored him, praising his magnanimous charm and personal power. The very men outside, despised, would have fought Free Zakoris for him this minute. That had been part of the spell in the old days, too. Even those who were accorded punishment felt they had been singled out.

Rem . . . Why was he thinking of Rem-Rarmon Am Dorthar. Raldnor’s son. Riding, somewhere, on some errand—Val Nardia’s child. No, it was himself, riding to Ankabek which was no more. And the child . . . No, the child had been a nightmare. It had never happened, any of that.

The second physician, who had got in only an hour ago, with the rest of Kesarh’s slight staff, bowed himself, unseen, out.

Biyh was the next visitor.

Kesarh had ordered himself by then.

They went through everything. The obeisances, the fawnings, the agreements. Without doubt, Biyh had been constant. He would be rewarded. A knife’s length between his ribs before summer. But one need not explain that.

Knives. That brainless Xarabian mare. Had her knife been anointed?

Even from a battlefield no wound had ever festered. That flying splinter in the sea-fight off Karmiss, which should have put out his eye, deflecting, leaving a clean scar hardly visible.

Only the snake at Ujis had ever poisoned him, and that at his own discretion. The scar from that was clearly marked. It lay half an inch above the spot where Ulis Anet’s knife had gone in.

Val Nardia, threatening him with just such a tiny knife, unable to use even her nails against him. She had found it simpler to harm herself.

“You did well, Biyh,” he said. “I shan’t overlook it. You’ve earned Lan’s Guardianship, at least.”

Biyh, missing he had been given what he already had, flowered into idiot grins.

“But Emel, my lord?”

“He imagines I may dispose of him, since Raldnor swore I attempted it, last time.”

“Quite, my lord.”

“Reassure Emel,” said Kesarh. “He’s my King. He’ll leave me charge of the armies, I think. I’m a soldier. Let us all stick to the thing we’re best at.”

Biyh shifted. He had, after all, been one of the Nines. He had seen how Kesarh’s mind could work. He knew some ten-year-old secrets, and knew that Kesarh knew that he did.

“My lord, there’s something—” Biyh hesitated. He gnawed his lips. When Kesarh did not prompt, he said, “there’s something Raldnor did, to safeguard Emel. Or rather, himself.”

“Dressed the boy as a woman and taught him harlot’s manners. So I gather.”

“Well, my lord, actually rather more than that.”

The black and merciless eyes, glazed with a strange opaque brightness—fever, they said an assassin had tried to stab him at Istris—pinned Biyh to the air so he writhed. Better come out with it, make a love-gift of it. Left to himself, Kesarh would learn sooner or later, one could not use it for bargaining, and look what he had done with the troops, spun them round like a wheel. He was as much the showman and the mage as ever—

“Raldnor brought in Ommos surgeons. They did what the Ommos have a talent for.” Kesarh gratified him by blinking. “Yes, my lord. The Prince is no longer any sort of a man. Gelded. Not fit to be a king, not by Vis standards, let alone Shansarian. You wouldn’t want to make a fuss here. They’re that touchy. But the council in Istris—”

Kesarh started to drink wine. There was a silence. Kesarh eventually said, “And how do you know?”

Biyh shrugged. Honesty was the wisest course.

“I don’t mind ’em like that. I’ve seen him stripped. I’ve had him.” After another silence, Biyh, feeling more secure than he had for days, added, “You might let him live. Or you might not. But he can’t harm anyone, poor little beggar.”

Emel himself did not hear this culminating plea. He had heard the rest.

Having been penned in Amlan’s palace so many months, he was privy to several of its more interesting crannies. He had sometimes, fascinated and repelled, played voyeur to Raldnor’s sadistic bed-sports, utilizing an unfrequented overhead gallery with a loose tile or two. Kesarh, as the intermediary captains had done, installed his suite in Raldnor’s apartments. It had not been difficult to employ the previous method.

From the moment Karmian ships had been sighted, Emel had felt the gray draught of death drizzling on his neck. Then Kesarh was in the city, and the soldiers cheered just as loudly as on the night Raldnor had produced his insurance among the torches. Emel considered bolting, but the palace was rushing with men. Kesarh entered the palace. Not only one apartment, he was in every shadowed place.

The act of going to eavesdrop on fate needed all Emel’s courage. While he did it, even listening to Kesarh’s earlier words, Emel had not deemed himself reprieved. To be told he would live and be a king always had intimations of a death-sentence. They had all, had they not, promised him that? But he had been praying, too, not to Ashara or any deity of name, but to some unformed god of the self, that Biyh would somehow gain a means to protect him. For Biyh, surely, was faithful. Then Biyh surrendered him uncaringly.

Emel returned to his bedchamber. He had picked up a flair for cruelty from Raldnor, and coming on a beetle on the door, pulled off its legs as he wept with fear. Hearing the steps approach along the corridor, preface to the executioner, he crushed out its life also under his heel, a counterpoint.

Another gaudy orange sunset lit the ceremony on the stairway, hitting the painted walls and tiers of the palace, the stout painted wooden pillars with their lotuses of indigo and henna, and capitals of flying bis. Kesarh had requested that the King and Queen be present, and they sat in their bone chairs with bone bracelets, behind him up the steps. She was lovely, and her brother-husband was sick, still. Kesarh had asked after his health, and the Queen had said, “It’s nothing, lord King of Karmiss.”

“Since I put men into Lan,” said Kesarh, “he’s been failing.”

“Just so,” she said. “He and I, we are Lan. Distress this earth, and we are stricken.”

“Are you?” he said. “You yourself seem to bloom, madam.”

“A painted complexion,” she said. “Didn’t they tell you, lord King, even Lans know something of deception.”

He thought of Val Nardia again. Sister and wife.

Then he went out into the sunset, and the bone chairs came, and the other participants of the play. The soldiers crammed the Square and hung from the rooftops and trees to see. There would be Amlans, too, watching. Perhaps the reinstatement of blond rule, this sham, would seem bitterly humorous to Lan, also.

At each breath, the light throbbed. In an hour or so, there was the second cauterization to look forward to.

Emel was being escorted down the stair.