The Black Emperor

He kept a book, and every night he read it, and every morning there was less in it than there had been the night before.

It was a small book, bound in black calf, with a brass clasp and a ribbon of faded red. He had begun it in the first winter, in the camp below the Ridge, when the Hollow's voice was new and the fear of forgetting had been like a hand at his throat. It was not a diary. It was a catalogue. On the first page, in his cramped quick hand, he had written a single line: Things I know about Solaia Vraelyra. Beneath it, in two long columns, he had set down everything.

She cannot cook. She burns water. She puts salt on fruit.

She hums when she is happy and thinks nobody can hear.

She laughs with her whole body and covers her mouth afterward.

Left hand shakes when she is afraid. Right hand never.

She said Be small. She said I trust you.

Violet, when she is angry. Gray, in the morning.

There were nine hundred pages of it now.

He kept it in the breast of his coat. It was the only thing he had not allowed Valerian to touch, nor the Hollow, though both of them had tried. Once in every century or so one or the other would bring him a page, in the dark of a night, and say, in a voice of sweet reason: This one is false. You wrote it wrong. She did not hum, she whistled. Correct it. And he would look at the page, and the words would swim, and he would find that he could no longer remember whether the thing was true.

That was how it worked. The Night did not steal. It edited. It crept into the old, worn, well-loved places and rubbed a little, and a little, and a little more, until the line between what was real and what was told had gone soft as butter.

He had learned to check the book against itself. He had learned that the entries made in the first century were true, and the entries made in the second were true except where they were sad, and the entries made after the fourth had been, almost without exception, wrong.

He read it anyway.

…

The court of the Black Emperor assembled at the first bell, in the Hall of Bone.

It was a large and silent assembly. Four hundred men and women in black robes stood in ranks on the long floor of polished stone, each in the place that his rank and his family had been assigned. They did not speak. They did not shuffle. The only sound in the whole vast chamber was the faint dry rustle of fabric and the occasional creak of a boot, and under it all, as constant as breathing, the thin high whine of the north wind in the high windows.

Each of them wore a mask.

It was the Emperor's fashion, or so the histories said. A thousand years ago, in the early days of the Empire, a courtier had come before the throne with his face covered in a veil of silver gauze, to hide the scars of a burn. The Emperor had looked at him a long while. Then he had said, in a voice that no one in the hall would ever forget: I find that I prefer it. By the end of the year every lord in the Bone Palace was masked. By the end of the decade, every servant. They were simple things, plain oval plates of dull silver with two slits for the eyes and a third for the mouth. They covered the whole face. They made every man the same man.

He had never asked why the idea pleased him.

He knew now, of course. He sat in the throne with his elbow on the arm and his chin on his fist, and watched four hundred silver faces turn toward him like a field of white flowers, and the ring on his finger throbbed, and a very dry, very soft voice said in the back of his mind: You have always known.

"I know."

It was my doing.

"Of course it was."

I had to have somewhere to put my hands. There was a trace, almost, of laughter. It would be unseemly to rule the world through a hole in a man's finger.

"You rule nothing."

I rule everything you did not. A pause. Which is to say, the details.

He did not reply. It was the oldest argument in the world, and he had lost it a long time ago.

…

The throne room had one decoration: a saddle.

It hung on the wall behind the dais, in the place of honor, on an iron hook driven into the stone. It was an old thing, scarlet leather gone black with age, split along the seams and stiff with dust. The stirrups had rotted away. The girth was a rag. But the great curved pommel, wrought in gilded iron, still bore the arms of the House of Aldren, and a stranger, looking up at it from the floor of the hall, might have thought it a relic of some forgotten ceremony.

It was Gron's.

He had found it on the Ridge in the first spring, in the ruin of the Fortress stables, under a fallen beam. It had been Brannoch's, in the old days. It had been his father's before. He had carried it up the nineteen steps with his own hands and hung it where he could see it, and he had looked at it, over the years, a great deal.

He had not told anyone why.

He would have found it difficult. The truth was that he had loved the beast in a way he had never admitted, to himself or anyone, and that the animal had left him. It had gone through the door. It had chosen her. He had never once, in nine hundred years, been able to hold it against the creature, and it was the one thing in the world he could not forgive.

A saddle, the Hollow had said once. A stupid, mouldering thing. Why keep it?

"I don't know," he had said.

It had been the truth.

…

The business of the day was ordinary.

A chancellor read out the harvest tallies. A bishop of the Remnant Church, a stooped old man in a silver mask, petitioned for the right to rebuild a chapel in the south. A grand duke complained about a rival's tax-farm. Kieran listened with half an ear and said what was required. He had said it so many times that the words had become a kind of weather: Granted. Denied. See the Marshal. The Treasury will reply.

It was a monstrous thing, to be so good at ruling.

He thought so, on most days. He sat in the great pale chair at the head of the world, with his gloved hand slack on the carved arm, and he gave judgment on cases that had been brought before four hundred Emperors in succession, and he found, with a kind of dreary dismay, that he was still sharper than any man in the room. He knew each of their names. He knew who was embezzling and who was sleeping with whose wife. He could have recited the treaty of the third year from memory. And in the back of his head, a small cold voice said, over and over, What is it for? What is any of it for?

The ring on his finger was cold.

It is for me, said Valerian, sweetly. It is a very fine Empire. I am quite proud of it.

You are a parasite.

I am your co-regent.

Get out.

I would rather not. It is warm in here.

He turned the ring on his finger, slowly, with his thumb.

…

"Majesty."

The voice came from the foot of the dais. He lifted his eyes.

It was Corvin. She was kneeling at the bottom of the steps, in the black leather of the Guard, with her cap in her hands. Her face was gray with dust, and she had the dry-lipped look of a woman who has ridden three days without sleep. A pair of mud-spattered riders knelt a pace behind her, shivering.

He sat forward.

"Speak."

"Marshal Voss, Majesty. He marched on the north."

The Hall went silent.

It was not a quiet silence. It was the kind of silence that comes when four hundred people stop breathing at once. He felt it ring on his skin, like the flat of a blade.

"Marched on the north," said Kieran.

"Eight days ago. With twelve thousand foot and the Ash Guard banner. He ignored the order. He said the Emperor was—" She stopped.

"Go on."

"He said you were unwell, Majesty."

"Did he."

"He said the Empire could not be risked on the whim of a man who'd sat four hundred years in a chair." Her voice was flat. "He took the southern road. He reached the Ashborn wall on the ninth day."

"And?"

"And—"

She looked down.

It was the first time in fifteen years he had seen Captain Corvin hesitate. She drew a breath, and her knuckles whitened on the brim of her cap.

"There was a battle, Majesty. Or what they are calling a battle. The riders were within sight of the walls. They report—" She stopped again. "They report that the legion is gone."

"Gone."

"Not dead. They say not dead. They say every man of them lies in the snow, awake, breathing, and does not move. They say they cannot be roused. They say one of the Ash Guard sat down in the snow and has not spoken since." She swallowed. "The Marshal himself is alive. He walked back to the camp on his own feet and he's sitting in his tent. He asked for his boots. He asked for a map. And then he asked what the date was."

Kieran said nothing.

"The riders say they saw a boy, Majesty. On the wall."

"A boy."

"A tall boy. With wings." The captain's voice cracked. "And violet fire."

The Hall was a pool of black water, and nobody dared drop a stone in it.

He sat very still. The ring on his finger had gone ice-cold, so cold that it burned. In his chest the Hollow had risen, silent, attentive, like a dog that scents the hunter. And the book in his coat was a weight against his heart, the weight of every line that he knew was false.

Boy, said Valerian, in a strange, small voice. With wings.

"Yes."

Violet.

"Yes."

It cannot be.

Kieran stood.

He did it slowly. He rose from the chair, and the whole court rose with a single motion, a rustle of black cloth, the clash of four hundred knees on stone. He stood with his hand on the arm of the throne, a tall gaunt figure in a long coat, his white-streaked hair falling over his forehead, and looked down at his captain. The light from the north windows lay along his cheek.

He felt very strange.

It was like standing at the top of a cliff. It was like holding a breath. It was a long dizzy lurch of the heart, the feeling of a thing about to happen that one has dreaded and wanted so long that the two have grown together.

"Captain," he said.

"Majesty."

"Did the riders say how old?"

"Old?"

"The boy. How old?"

Corvin blinked. "Ten, perhaps. Twelve. They could not say. He was small, but he was tall, and there were—" She spread a hand. "They said his eyes were strange."

"What color?"

"Violet. With gray."

He closed his own.

For a long moment no one spoke. He stood at the head of the world, in the great pale hall of bone, and thought of nothing. He heard the wind in the high windows. He heard the faint, dry creak of a saddle on its hook. And beneath it all, in the dark behind his eyes, he heard a sound he had not heard in nine hundred years. It was small. It was clear. It was a woman's voice, saying, quite calmly, in a cold bright kitchen, over a pot of burned soup:

Kieran, I think I'm pregnant.

He opened his eyes.

"How long," he whispered, to no one, "how long have I got?"

And the book in his coat, the small black book with its nine hundred pages, gave a soft, dry, whispering rustle, as of a leaf, or a wing, or a single line of writing quietly beginning to fade.