Days of Blood & Starlight(98)

Night fell, and she found out.





68


SIRITHAR


Akiva followed Byon through one last set of doors. Fragrance and humidity greeted them; a billow of steam obscured Akiva’s vision at the moment he crossed the threshold, and he heard his father’s voice before he saw him.

“Ah, Lord Bastard. You honor us with your presence.” It was a powerful voice, honed on bygone battlefields crying death to the beasts. Whatever he was now, Joram had been a warrior once.

And he looked it. Akiva bowed; he was rising as the steam cleared, and saw that they were in a bath, and that Joram was naked. The emperor stood on the steaming tiles, hale and solid, his flesh rouged by heat, surrounded by the small army of servants apparently required to purify his royal person. A girl tipped a pitcher of water over his head and he closed his eyes. Another was on her knees, washing him with a lather as thick as whipped cream.

Akiva had envisioned this meeting many different ways, and in none of them had his father been naked. He suspects nothing, he thought. If he did, he would meet me clothed and armed. “My lord emperor,” he said, “the honor is all mine.”

“Our honor, your honor,” drawled Joram. “Whatever shall we do with such an excess of honor?”

“We could always hang it from the Westway,” said another voice, and Akiva didn’t have to see that cut-in-half face to know whose it was. Sunk back on a tiled bath bench in a pose of informality that he alone would dare in the emperor’s presence, was Jael. Well, that was a convenience, as, of course, Jael could not be allowed to live any more than Joram could. He, blessedly, was fully clad. “If only there was room on the gibbet,” he said like a lament, and low laughter rumbled through the others assembled here. Akiva gave their faces a quick scan. None lounged like Jael, but all seemed enough at their ease that he took these bath-time councils to be a common occurrence.

Joram’s mouth carved a smile from his cruel face. “Room can always be made on the gibbet,” he said.

Was it a threat? Akiva didn’t think so. Joram wasn’t even looking at him; he closed his eyes and tipped back his head for another sluice from his attendant’s pitcher, after which he shook his head hard, spraying water. Namais and Misorias, standing near as ever, both blinked at the spray but elsewise moved not a muscle. Joram’s personal guards—brothers—were said to be deadly fighters. They were Akiva’s first concern. Silverswords were present, as well, two pairs each along facing walls: eight Breakblades with condensation fogging their silver armor, their plumes gone limp in the steam. He wasn’t worried about them.

In fact, as his father stepped out of the shallow pool of lather, away from the white-garbed girls and toward a servant holding a robe, Akiva found his worry draining away. He may not have envisioned a bath in his planning, but in all ways, here was his optimal scenario: a light guard presence in a contained environment, a limited number of witnesses whose word would be taken on faith, and, most important: the absence of suspicion.

Nothing in the eyes of these seraphim hinted at wariness.

There was Crown Prince Japheth, glassy-eyed with boredom. He was a blandly attractive seraph of around Akiva’s age, with some indefinable flaccidness about the set of his features that spoke of weakness. Akiva knew that Japheth was no paragon. He would be better than his father; that was what mattered. Beside him was white-haired Ur-Magus Hellas, head of the emperor’s circle of useless magi, said to have the emperor’s ear. His look of heavy, half-lidded condescension was all Akiva needed to see to know that his own magic remained his secret. A few other faces were unfamiliar, uniform in their haughtiness.

“Let me look at you,” commanded Joram.

“My lord,” replied Akiva, and stood where he was as his father centered himself before him and inspected him with a squint. He had put his robe on, but hadn’t closed it; Akiva wished he would. It seemed a strange intimacy to kill a naked man. Joram was so near that Akiva could have reached out and tapped him on the breastbone. Or pierced him through the heart. He had the unwelcome thought that his father’s steam-pink breast would give like softened butter. He was aware of his own heartbeat pulsing in the tension of his hand. His hand, his arm, his body wanted to draw his sword and be done here, but his mind buzzed with questions.

What is this about?

And something else. Terrible what happened to her. If Akiva didn’t find out now, he never would.

He held his father’s stare. Or perhaps his father’s stare held him. Joram’s eyes were so like Liraz’s and Hazael’s: blue, down-tilting at the outer-corners, generously lashed in gold. Unlike theirs, though, their father’s were devoid of any trace of soul. His stare was infamous; it was said one saw one’s own death in it, or at least the utter worthlessness of one’s life. It brought seraphim to their knees; the unworthy were said to open their own throats for terror and shame.

And Akiva did see death in the emperor’s eyes, but not his own.

He felt a thickness in his throat. He knew what it was: It was emotion, but… for what? Not for Joram, not remorse for what he was going to do. Was it for the faceless, all-but-forgotten woman who’d given him her tiger’s eyes and stood aside as the guards took him? Or… for the face he had seen in silver that day, small and terrified and mirrored over and over in the shin plates of Silverswords. For himself. For all that he had lost and all that he had never had and never would have.