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 iss
ue of state, and were considered to be undisputed in their wisdom and judgment.
Thus, when the new emperor was chosen from the Mercantile, the merchant class, Fhremus had been slightly surprised, but did not question the decision at all.
The man who would be crowned emperor this day was a man with immense vision, Fhremus knew. Despite having taken a humble position by his selection, at which he had seemed more surprised than anyone else there, making an offer to serve as regent for a year and then being reconfirmed by the Scales a year later, he had embarked upon an ambitious agenda of changing, or rather, improving many of the long-established practices of the nation.
Fhremus had not been surprised by this aspect of the aftermath of the death of the empress. Leitha had ruled with an iron hand, but there had been rust on the iron; in spite of her surprising acuity at the age of ninety-eight, she was not as hale and vigorous as she had been in youth, and therefore had allowed various aspects of her governance to fall into disrepair. While she had officially outlawed bloodsport in the gladiatorial arenas that were an enthusiastically supported tradition for thousands of years before the Cymrians came, she had also turned a blind eye to its return twenty years into her reign, and a deaf ear to the sounds of hooting and violence that had continued to build outside the arenas as she grew older and her reign grew longer.
The gladiatorial arenas were not the only aspect of evident neglect. The return of the practice of slavery and slave trading had been more recent than the bloodsport, but it was even bloodier, though less widely known of. Fhremus had not been officially informed of the increase in the heinous activities, but would have had to have been blind in order to miss the buildup of the industries, state-run and privately owned, that had suddenly expanded their labor forces.
Though he was not sure why, he suspected that Talquist might have been involved with that expansion long before his elevation to the throne of the new dynasty he had established, called the Empire of the Sun.
The Mercantile was a misunderstood and, in Fhremus’s estimation, underappreciated social class. Looked down upon by royalty, the nobility, and even the Church, the merchant class was often a bastion of far greater wealth and international connection than any of those other groups possessed. It was all but impossible to be isolated or parochial when the very basis of a class’s existence was predicated on making contacts in every place possible around the world. While Fhremus knew little to nothing of the details of Talquist’s holdings, wealth, and connections to friends in both high and low places across the globe, he was quite certain those elements of the new emperor’s power were substantial.
Perhaps even frighteningly so.
As little as Fhremus knew about the financial and social secrets of the Merchant Emperor, he had a better window into Talquist’s military plans, though not as clear a one as he would wish. Fhremus had been instrumental in the training and deployment of the soldiers who rode the iacxsis, a strange breed of flying beasts that could both soar over walled fortresses and mercilessly attack the inhabitants of those cities. He had been given a tour of the breeding and training grounds, hideous caverns that had once been the central cistern and aqueduct beneath the streets of the capital city of Sorbold, Jierna’sid, where both the Scales and the palace of Jierna Tal stood. He had still been unable to purge his nose of the stench of the place and his mind of the memory of what he had seen there.
He had accepted the emperor’s word that the breeding and training program was essential to the survival of Sorbold, due to the merciless plans for conquest and expansion that the leaders of the new Alliance, the Lord and Lady Cymrian, were secretly putting into place. Talquist had shown him documents that detailed the royal pair’s nefarious schemes from other merchants in their employ around the world; Fhremus had seen them as credible and did not question the information.
He had also been introduced to another of the abominations that Constantin, the recently deposed Patriarch of Sepulvarta, the former holy city over which he was currently commandant, had been responsible for. Talquist had shown him a titan, an immense statue of a primitive warrior that had been animated, the emperor said, by the unholy practices employed in the holy city. The titan, now bent to Talquist’s will and loyal, in its limited capacity, had been instrumental in breaking down the infamous gate of the holy city and bringing it into immediate occupation. The Patriarch’s captured plans he had seen had made Fhremus glad that his army had been so successful, in concert with the iacxsis riders and the titan, in subverting and occupying the holy city as quickly as they did, before even more blood was shed.
“Uncle?”
Fhremus looked up.
A young soldier in the regalia of the army of Sorbold was smiling tentatively at him. He was handsome, possessed of the swarthy skin and dark brown eyes common in the residents of the desert nation, and a pleasant disposition; his sister’s son, Kymel, the fifth generation of the family to have begun service to the empress three years ago, and now was in that of the emperor.
Fhremus stood straight and saluted, to Kymel’s immediate response.
“At ease,” he said, clapping the lad on the upper arm. “Are you off duty?”
“Yes,” said Kymel. “On leave in honor of the Weighing and coronation. Titactyk has called us to muster at dawn tomorrow in preparation for the emperor’s arrival six days hence. We have been assigned to guard him while in Sepulvarta and then accompany his return to Jierna’sid at his will.”
“Congratulations.” Fhremus had to struggle to keep his lip from curling at Titactyk’s name. Titactyk was one of his own regimental commanders, and while he could not precisely put a reason to his dislike of the man, it was there nonetheless, though of course that information was unknown to the rank and file like Kymel. While Titactyk had never committed any offense or break of protocol egregious enough to merit discipline, there was an air of cruelty and insolence about him that Fhremus had seen before in other overly ambitious soldiers.
And others.
In his experience, it was always a bad sign.
It was very much the same feeling as he was having on this morning of celebration in Jierna’sid.
“Enjoy your leave,” he said to his nephew. “Happy Weighing, and guard the emperor well.”
Kymel grinned, then stood and snapped a salute. Fhremus returned it, smiling to himself as Kymel left, and then took one last look over the lands he knew he would soon be invading, putting to the sword and the flame, before making his way off the wall and down into the broken streets of Sepulvarta once more.
THE FORTRESS OF HIGHMEADOW, NAVARNE
To the north two hundred leagues and half a world away, Gwydion of Manosse, the Lord Cymrian, leader and high lord of the Alliance of the Middle Continent, was climbing a narrow set of curving stairs high into the tower in the center of his woodland fortress, known as Highmeadow, as he did each morning.
At the top of that curving staircase, he stepped out onto the cold, sheltered platform high in the tallest treetops of the forest canopy that held the aviary. The cultivation of a squadron of messenger birds had been one of his first priorities when Highmeadow was finally done with construction and being made inhabitable. His late father, Llauron the Invoker, the leader of the nature priests known as the Filids, had always made use of messenger birds for as long as Ashe could remember, as did another of the kings in the Alliance, Achmed the Snake, when he began retaking the mountains of Ylorc from the Firbolg four years back.
The Lord Cymrian had commissioned a series of birdhouses and rookeries for Highmeadow’s aviary that were like those his grandfather Gwylliam had designed, architectural renderings of the buildings, palaces, basilicas, and mountain fortresses that were the destinations of those birds in cities all across the continent. The detail that had been captured in balsa wood and twigs was astounding; he never ceased to marvel at how close to the originals the carefully fashioned cages were, down to details like bell tower windows and the shape of Grivven Post, the peak in the Teeth where
Achmed received his mail.
It was from this birdhouse that the Lord Cymrian pulled a flyer now, as he did each morning. The brown wren squirmed for a moment in his hand, but he gentled it down quickly, billing its throat with his forefinger, then carefully attached the metal leg tube with the tiny scroll containing his meticulously graphed words of longing and adoration in a long-dead language, and turned it loose, watching it catch a warm morning updraft and take to the wind, heading east, making for the place where his family was in hiding.
Taking his love along with it.
He waited until he could no longer see the bird, nor sense it with the inner sight that was the gift of the dragon blood in his veins.
Then he checked the door of the birdcage and made his way back down the twisting stairs to the courtyard where his battlefield commanders were awaiting him for morning orders.
5
GWYNWOOD, THE DRAGON’S CAVE
The terrible moan trailed off into silence like the end of the night wind’s howl.
Fear receded into the depths of Melisande’s mind. Without further thought, she darted into the dark cave, calling as loudly as she could.
“Elynsynos! Elynsynos, I hear you! I’m coming!”
She had gone only a few paces when the total lack of light forced her to stop. The glowing lichens that had grown at the mouth of the cave had grown thinner and thinner in the dark, leaving the cave without any natural radiance on its walls. The acrid smell of fire and smoke long gone lingered in the air, making breathing difficult. Melisande’s lungs constricted as her fear returned.