The Mist Thins

The Emperor of Ash had a rule that no one in the Bone Palace was to speak of the weather, and by the nine hundredth year of it, no one remembered why.

They only knew that he disliked it. It had been a custom in the earliest courts, passed down from chancellor to chancellor like a spoon, that if a man should wish to remark upon the rain, or the cold, or the quality of the light, he must hold his tongue, or else take it outside to the stable-yard and tell it to the horses. A page who had once whispered that the sky looked "like snow" had been dismissed within the hour. A bishop who had greeted the Emperor with the words "A fine morning, Majesty" had been quietly retired to an abbey in the south, where he had lived another sixty years in perfect comfort and perfect silence.

No one had ever asked what the Emperor did to deserve such care. They had heard the stories. They knew he had walked into the Mist at the well in Hallowmere, and had walked out again twelve days later, alone, without a hair out of place, and had gone straight to his throne. He had sat on it ever since. He did not eat in public. He did not sleep in any way that anyone could see. He sat with his elbow on the arm of black bone and his chin on his fist and his gray eyes fixed on the middle distance, and from time to time, very quietly, he turned a silver ring on his smallest finger.

They called him the Black Emperor. They did not call him anything else.

…

The Bone Palace stood on the Black Ridge.

It was built from the ruin of the Fortress, from the ash and the cracked ivory and the fallen pillars. He had raised it himself, in the three hundredth year, from the dust of the dragon-spirits' prison, with a patience that had alarmed even his own architects. It rose now in nine tiers from the crown of the mountain: a pale, spare, many-windowed pile of white and black stone, with a great hall at its heart and a throne at the hall's far end, a seat of fused vertebrae, huge and pale as a whale's skeleton, set on a dais of nineteen steps.

He had designed it so that the throne faced north.

No one had asked why. The north windows, broad and tall, gave on to a view of plain, mountain, sky; there was nothing there. There had been nothing there for a thousand years. The Ice Range stood on the horizon, a low blue line, and the glacier along its spine had long since gone to bare rock. The Emperor looked at it all day. He looked at it as a man looks at a clock.

On the morning of the nine hundredth and forty-second year of the Empire of Ash, the chief chamberlain entered the hall at the hour of the first bell and found him standing at the window.

The man stopped dead.

In four hundred years, nobody had seen the Emperor on his feet. The chamberlain, a stiff gray eunuch whose name was Oske, stood just inside the door with his wand of office clutched in both hands and felt his knees begin, politely, to give way. The Emperor stood at the middle window with his back to the room, his hands clasped behind him, a tall figure in a long black coat, quite still. A thin gray light came through the glass. It lay along his shoulders like a shawl.

"Majesty," said Oske. His voice was a thread.

"Close the door, Oske."

He closed it.

"Come here."

He came. He crept the length of the hall, between the pillars, with his sandals whispering on the flags, and stopped three paces from the Emperor's shoulder. He did not look up. He did not dare.

"Look," said the Emperor.

Oske lifted his eyes.

The view was exactly as it had always been: the plain, the road, the smoke of distant hearths. But the air was different. He could not have said how. He stood there blinking, for a long moment, and then he realized what it was. For the first time in his life, he could see to the horizon. The pale haze that had hung over the south for centuries, the shining, silent, smothering mist, was gone. It had thinned. It had drawn back, like a tide, from the rim of the world. The land lay in the gray dawn plain and bare and honest, with every hedge and furrow sharp as a cut, and above it the sky was the color of a pearl.

"It's lifting," whispered Oske.

"Yes."

"Majesty, I— by what— I do not understand—"

"Nor do I." The Emperor's voice was quite level. "Which is why I am looking."

…

He had not meant to rise.

That was what he told himself, afterward, in the long hours that followed. He had been in the throne a very long time. He had told himself it was patience. He had told himself, on those rare occasions when the Hollow had stirred in his chest and the ring had grown cold on his finger, that it was the only useful thing left. A man could not be a threat to anyone from a chair. A man who did not move could not burn anything.

But that morning he had felt it, in the middle of the night, like a hand on his sleeve. A change in the air. A pressure behind the eyes. He had come awake in the silence of the vast hall, with the dark windows full of stars, and knew before he knew anything else that it was north. The bell was ringing. It was the bell of her name, which he could hear, as he could always hear it, a faint high ringing in the bones of his skull, as of a finger on the rim of a glass. But it was louder. It was nearer. It had a shape.

It had been calling him for nine hundred years.

Sit down, said the Hollow.

"No."

You are a fool.

"Yes." He laid a hand flat on the cold glass. "I am."

There is nothing there. There never is. You will go out into the dawn and stand in a field and weep, as you did at the well.

"Perhaps."

And when you are done, you will come home, and I shall be waiting.

"You always are."

It is the one thing about me, said the voice, with a trace of weary humor, that you can rely on.

He nearly smiled. It was a stranger thing than he'd have thought: that a creature so old, so patient, so hungry, could have in it so much of a tired friend's irony. He had stopped hating it somewhere in the third century. He did not trust it. He never would. But it had been with him a very long time, and he had learned how to listen to the pauses.

There is something there, said the Hollow, at last, reluctantly. I feel it also.

"What?"

A fire. The word came slow. Two. White and black. Old. I do not like it.

"No," said Kieran, softly. "I imagine not."

Majesty, said Valerian, from the ring, with sharp attention. Do not be hasty. If she has come, if the Queen has truly returned, then she is no friend to us. She will burn the Hollow. She will burn the ring. She will burn you.

"Yes."

You must prepare.

"No."

Boy—

"I have been preparing," said the Emperor of Ash, "for nine hundred years."

He turned from the window.

…

They found him at noon in the long gallery of the palace's seventh tier, where the portraits hung.

He had not been there in a very long time. It was a cold bare corridor lined with frames, a hundred tall panels of dark wood, and in each of them hung the face of a man or woman of his line. Aldren after Aldren after Aldren; thin, proud, long-jawed, gray-eyed. He walked down the row slowly, with his hands behind his back. He had forbidden the artists to paint him. There was no portrait of the Black Emperor in the Bone Palace. But at the very end of the gallery, in a niche of its own, in a frame of plain gray wood, there hung another picture that he had never allowed anyone to see.

It was a small thing. A drawing, in charcoal, on a sheet of brown paper. It showed a woman sitting in a window, with her bare feet drawn up on the sill and a cup of tea in her hands. She was looking out at something, a little to the left of the viewer, with an expression of fond contempt. Her hair was untidy. Her mouth, he thought, was very nearly smiling.

He had drawn it himself.

He had done it on the first winter, in the dark, by candlelight, the night the Hollow first spoke to him in her voice. He had been afraid he would forget her face. He had been right. After a hundred years, the details had faded, and after five hundred it was only a feeling, and now, when he looked at the paper, he could see the scribbled lines and the smudged shadow and the faint pencil note in the corner in his own cramped hand, Sol, 2nd March, kitchen, and he could not picture her at all.

He stood a long time in front of it.

"I am going to see you," he said.

The picture did not answer.

"I do not know what I shall say. I have rehearsed it, you know. For years. I have a speech. It's very bad." He gave a small crooked smile. "I shall probably forget all of it. But I shall be there."

You will be killed, said Valerian.

"I should hope so."

You are being a child.

"Yes." He touched the frame, very gently. "I rather think I am."

…

At dusk, when the lamps had been lit, he came down to the great hall and sent for his captain.

Corvin arrived at a run. She was a lean, quick, black-clad woman of forty, with a burn scar across her jaw and the unhurried eyes of a soldier who has seen too many things to be impressed by any of them. She dropped to one knee on the lowest step of the dais, and waited, and he looked at her for a long moment.

She was Pip's granddaughter's granddaughter. She had her great-grandmother's sharp face and her way of standing, a little off-balance, as if ready to spring. He had given her command of the Guard fifteen years ago. She had never once asked him a question that he did not wish to answer.

"Captain."

"Majesty."

"There is something in the north." He sat down, at last, on the throne, with his hands on the arms. "I do not know what. I want it watched. I want a chain of riders from here to the Ice Range, fifty leagues deep, with fast horses and good eyes. I want to be told of anything that moves, or burns, or sings."

"Yes, Majesty."

"And Corvin."

"Majesty?"

"Whatever comes," said the Black Emperor, quietly, "it is not to be touched. Not by any man of mine. Not by any weapon. If a dragon flies, you will not shoot at it. If a woman walks, you will not stop her. If a child speaks, you will listen to what he says." He drew breath. "Do you understand?"

She looked up at him.

She had never seen his face like this. It was white and drawn and oddly open, the face of a man on the edge of something very large, and in his gray eyes there was a light that she could only call terror, and under the terror, a thing so much worse that she looked away.

"I understand, Majesty," she said.

"Good."

"May I ask—"

"No."

"Yes, Majesty."

She rose. She bowed. She went out. And when the great doors had closed behind her, the Black Emperor sat alone in the lamplit hall, on the pale throne, with his gloved hand over his mouth, and listened to the sound of a bell no one else could hear, ringing, and ringing, and ringing in the north.