Days of Blood & Starlight(95)
She looked at Issa, who gave a little nod, and she took a deep breath. To the rebels she said, “Most of you or maybe even all of you cheered at my execution. Maybe you blame me for all of this. I don’t expect you to listen to me, but I hope you’ll hear Brimstone.”
That caused a stir. “Brimstone?” some said, skeptical. They looked to Issa, as they should.
Thiago looked to her, too. “What is this?” he asked. “Does Brimstone’s ghost speak through you, Naja?”
“If you like, Wolf,” returned Issa. To the soldiers: “You all know me. For years I was Brimstone’s companion, and now I am his messenger. He sent me out from Loramendi in a thurible to serve this purpose, and to do so meant that I could not die beside him as I would have chosen. So listen well, for the sake of his sacrifice and mine. It is grotesque to imagine that killing and mutilation and terror could ever deliver to us a life worth living. They will bring what they always have: more killing, more mutilation, more terror. If you believe vengeance is all that is left to you, hear me.” How lovely she was, raised tall on her serpent’s coil, and how powerful with her cobra hood flared wide, her scales gleaming like polished enamel in the dawn light. She was beaming, beatific, and radiant with emotion.
She said, “You have more to live for than you know.”
66
KILL THE MONSTER. CHANGE THE WORLD.
“The emperor will receive you now.”
Akiva had been staring over the skybridge at the gray glass domes of the seraglio where he had been born. It was so closed and silent, so unknowable from the outside, but he had dim memories of noise and shafting light, children and babies, playing and singing—and he looked around at the voice. It was the head steward, Byon, leaning on his cane and dwarfed beneath the high, heavy arch of Alef Gate and the pair of Silverswords who flanked it. He was white-haired and grandfatherly at a glance, but only at a glance. It was Byon who maintained the lists of the emperor’s bastards, canceling the dead so their names might be given to the newborns. Seeing him, Akiva couldn’t help wondering if he would outlive the old seraph, or if that crabbed hand would draw the strike through his own name. He had stricken six Akivas already; what was one more?
For a moment he felt himself to be nothing more than a placeholder for a name—one is a succession of flesh placeholders for a name that belonged, like everything else, to the emperor. Expendable. Endlessly renewable. But then he focused on what he had come here to do, and he met Byon’s rat-black eyes with the cultivated blankness that had been his default expression for years.
He was no placeholder. There would be no eighth Misbegotten bearer of the name Akiva; fathering bastards was only one of many things that Joram would not be doing after tonight. Along with starting wars. Along with breathing.
“Remove your weapons,” Byon instructed.
This was expected. No arms save the guards’ own were permitted in the emperor’s presence. Akiva hadn’t even worn his usual pair of swords crossed at his back—the cape that was part of his formal uniform interfered with them. He had buckled a short sword at his hip only to make a show of laying it down on request, which he did.
Hazael and Liraz likewise disarmed and laid down their weapons.
Their visible ones, anyway.
Akiva’s own glamoured blade hung from the opposite hip from the one he had laid down. It couldn’t be seen, but anyone studying him closely might notice a quirk in the play of shadow along his leg where it hung invisible, and of course it could be felt—cold steel—by any who brushed too near or thought to search him or embrace him, which Akiva thought a small enough risk—the embrace, anyway. As for the search, this was the first test of the emperor’s suspicion.
Had he brought the Prince of Bastards here to use him, or to expose him? Akiva waited out the steward’s scrutiny. There was no search. Byon gave him the merest nod, and when he turned and vanished into the Tower of Conquest, Akiva fell into step behind him, and Hazael and Liraz behind him in turn.
The emperor’s inner sanctum. Hazael had made inquiries; they knew roughly what to expect—the interlocking passages of thick, honey-hued glass, gate after guarded gate. Akiva committed each turn to memory; this way would be the only way out. They would glamour themselves; that was the plan. In the tumult that would follow the assassination, in the rush and stomp of guards they would vanish and retreat. And escape.
He hoped.
Another passage, another turn, another gate, another passage. Deeper into the emperor’s inner sanctum. Akiva’s anticipation grew taut.
How weary he was of this brute response to all problems: Kill your enemy. Kill, kill. But right now the brute response was the only response. For the good of Eretz, for an end to war.
Joram must die.
Akiva reached for sirithar—the state of calm in which the godstars work through the swordsman—but didn’t come anywhere close to it. He managed to hold his heartbeat steady, but his mind raced—through scenarios, magical manipulations, even words. What would he say when he faced his father and unsheathed his blade? He didn’t know. Nothing at all. It didn’t matter. It was the deed that mattered, not words.
Do the thing. Kill the monster. Change the world.
67
THE ONLY HOPE IS HOPE
Amzallag bulled forward and fell to his knees before Issa. “Who?” he asked, almost whispering. “Who went into the cathedral?” A few other soldiers leaned forward with intense, restrained yearning.