The Hunt

Lucan Verre kept a ledger of the Emperor's sins for eleven years before he understood that he was writing a history.

He had not intended it. He was by training an inquisitor, and by temperament a man who wrote things down, and in the cold clear weeks after the Fortress fell he had gone on writing because it was the only thing his hands knew how to do. He wrote the dead. He wrote the survivors. He wrote the names of the forty-one thousand laborers who had been carried off the Black Ridge by the Ashborn, and the three thousand who had not been carried quickly enough, and the long slow tally of the cost of the thing that had been built there. It was a penance. It was also the only honest record that anyone was keeping.

And then, in the spring of the second year, the Emperor sent for him.

…

"I am told," said Kieran Aldren, "that you have access to the Archive."

They were in a long cold room in the Black Citadel, a room Verre had never seen: a map room, lit by a single window, with a table the length of a barge. The Emperor stood at the head of it. He had grown thinner. His hair, which had been black, was shot with a single white streak from the temple, and he stood very straight, with his hands behind his back, and smiled at Verre in a way that made the small hairs rise on the Inquisitor's neck.

It was a perfectly pleasant smile. That was the horror of it. It was wide and kind and a little rueful, the smile of a man welcoming an old friend, and it did not move at all.

"I do, Majesty."

"All of it? Including the sealed vaults?"

"The seals were broken, after the Ridge. Most of what was there has been—"

"Good." The smile did not alter. "I want everything you have on the Veil."

Verre swallowed. "Majesty, the Veil is a working of the Queens of the Sky. It was last used at the fall. There is almost nothing—"

"There is the Queen's hand," said the Emperor. "There was her mother's. There is the Pontiff's. There is the thing that lives in the ash of the Ridge, and the bones of every dragon in the north. There is the Pale Mist, which the scholars say is the Veil's wake. There is a door in the sky, Inquisitor, and I mean to find the key."

"And if there is no key?"

"Then I shall forge one."

"Majesty—"

"I am not asking." The smile held. "I am telling you what I am going to do. You may help me, or you may tell me why not, in which case I shall listen, with great attention, for as long as it takes you to finish your sentence." A pause. "Then I shall do it anyway."

Verre stood in the cold room and looked at the Emperor and thought: He is not lying.

He had spent forty years learning to tell when a man was. This was something rarer: a man telling the exact truth, in a pleasant voice, about a thing that would destroy him.

"I'll bring you the Archive," he said.

"Thank you."

"You'll want it sorted by—"

"By date." The Emperor's eyes were gray. They were entirely clear. "I'm in no hurry. I have time."

…

He found the key in the autumn of the third year.

Or he found what he took for it: a single sheet of vellum in a cracked iron box beneath the third crypt of the Cathedral of the Light, in the hand of a scholar dead a thousand years. It described a working called the Sundering, a means of tearing the Veil from either side by the sacrifice of a great number of lives. It was not a key. It was a battering ram. Verre read it twice and put it into the fire, and then, because he was a man who wrote things down, wrote down what it had said, and locked the notebook in his desk.

He lied to the Emperor. He told him there was nothing.

He did not think it would work. And it did not. In the second week of winter a letter arrived at the Citadel from a Cardinal in the south, a man who had once sat at Marenne's right hand, offering the Emperor "a certain document" in return for a pardon. Verre was not present when it was opened. He was present, three days later, when the Emperor came down into the lower vaults with a guard of twelve and looked at him across the cold stone floor with his head slightly tilted.

"You told me there was nothing," said Kieran.

"I did, Majesty."

"There was a Sundering."

"It requires a great number of lives."

"How many?"

"Majesty, I—"

"How many, Lucan?"

"A hundred thousand." Verre's mouth was dry. "At the least. For each year of the gap."

The Emperor was silent for so long that the guards began to shift. When he spoke it was gently, almost kindly, with a kind of weary wonder.

"You were protecting me."

"Yes."

"From myself."

"Yes, Majesty."

"That's very good of you." The smile widened by a fraction. "But I was not asking for the number to use it. I was asking, so that I would know."

He turned to go. He stopped at the foot of the stair.

"Burn the Cardinal's house," said the Emperor, over his shoulder, "and all that's in it. He should not have written to me, if he did not wish to be believed."

…

They called it the Hunt, afterward, because there was no other name for it.

It began with the Cardinal's house. It spread to the Cardinal's city. By the fifth year it had a shape and a rhythm, and Verre, standing at the shoulder of a man he had once thought of as a lonely, difficult, brilliant boy, learned to read it as one reads the progress of a plague. The Emperor did not rage. He did not shout. He sat in the long cold map room with the lamps burning and a hundred reports spread on the table, and he moved small markers across the surface of the continent, and he said, "This one," and, "This one," and a week later a town would burn.

He was looking for the door. That was what Verre told himself. A hundred places in the old kingdoms had been marked as sites of the Veil: standing stones, ruined temples, wells that gave back no reflection. The Emperor visited them all. He walked among the stones with his hands behind his back and a chord of cold in the air about him, and where he walked, the stones cracked. He stood at the lip of the wells and called, softly, down into the dark. He called her name. Verre heard it, once, from a distance. It was a low, steady, patient voice, the voice of a man calling a cat in at dusk.

Nothing ever answered.

And when nothing answered, the Emperor smiled, and looked about him, and took the nearest town.

He took the scholars first, because scholars knew things. He asked them courteously. He took the priests of the little shrines, because priests had old books. He took the village elders, and the midwives, and the keepers of wells. When they did not know, or when they would not say, the Hollow did the asking. Verre had seen it, once. A man in a gray coat, a historian, seated in a chair in a stone cell, looking up into the face of his Emperor with a polite and frightened attention. The Emperor had laid a hand on his brow. The cell had gone very cold. And the historian had begun to speak, quickly, in a flat high voice, and had not stopped for four hours, and when he had finished, the Emperor had thanked him and walked out.

The man had never spoken again. He sat in his chair for eleven days and then he died.

I do not like it, Verre wrote that night, in his ledger. I do not like what he is becoming. I do not know what it was that I was afraid of, when I stood on that platform. I think now that I was afraid of this.

He added, because he was honest:

I do not think I will stop him.

…

There was a dragon in the sky, that summer.

It came from the north on a day of white heat, an enormous gray-silver shape, wings spread like a sail, and it circled the Black Citadel three times before it settled on the roof of the south tower. The whole city saw it. They came out into the streets and stood with their faces turned up, silent, hands to their mouths. It had been three years since a dragon had flown over the Ice Kingdom. They had thought the last of them gone.

It was one of the freed. Verre knew that, instantly. It had the broken horn and the almond eyes of the spirit that had touched Crane on the Ridge, made flesh by whatever strange mercy the Void leaked into the world. It sat on the tower roof, folded, silent, and looked down on the city. It looked at the smoke of the burning provinces on the horizon. It looked at the long column of prisoners moving through the east gate, in chains, to the cells.

It did not look at the Emperor.

He had come out onto the balcony of the map room. He stood at the rail in his black coat with one gloved hand raised, shading his eyes, and the white streak in his hair gleamed in the sun. For a long moment he and the dragon were quite still, the little human shape and the vast gray one, like two creatures at either end of a great empty room.

"Gron?" said Kieran.

It was not a shout. It was almost a whisper.

The dragon turned its head away.

It did it slowly, with a kind of dreadful courtesy. It lowered its great horned brow and looked out, over the roofs and the wall and the plain, at the north, as one looks at a thing one will not describe. Then it spread its wings, and rose, and went away.

The Emperor stood at the rail for a long time after it had gone.

"That was not Gron," said Verre, quietly, from behind him.

"I know."

"Majesty—"

"I know." He lowered his hand. The smile was still on his face. It had not left it in three years, and Verre saw with a sick lurch that it was now set into the muscle, in the deep lines around the mouth. "I know it was not. I only wished to hear what it sounded like when I said it."

He turned, and looked at the Inquisitor, and his eyes were gray, and clear, and entirely sane.

"Write that down, Lucan," said the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom, in a pleasant voice. "That I asked."