His Conquering Sword (9 page)

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” asked the doctor from her table. He felt her move, without seeing her. He caught a movement in his peripheral vision; an instant later he shot his left hand up and caught a little ball she’d thrown at him. “Good reflexes,” she said. “Squeeze that as hard as you can.” He complied, then transferred it to his other hand and squeezed it again. The ball was made of some strange substance he did not recognize: not wood or metal, not ceramic or cloth. Little bumps nobbled its surface, and when he squeezed hard enough it gave slightly beneath his hand, and he felt warmth from inside of it.

The doctor came over to him and squinted at his eyes. She held up a black stick with a light nestled in its tip. “Look at me. Straight at me. Don’t mind this. They say the actor Gwyn Jones is a martial artist.”

“What is that?
Martial artist?”

“Someone who has studied the art of fighting, not just the craft of it. I’d like to see the two of you spar together. He won a number of tournaments, of—well—contests, say when you race a horse. Surely you fence together and see who comes out the winner?”

“I always did,” Aleksi admitted humbly. “Come out the winner. That’s what Vyacheslav often said to me, that most men are blind to the saber, that they only use it to cut with and kill with, but that the saber is like a Singer’s lute, that it could itself sing. He said I was a Singer, that I had made a long journey, but that my instrument wasn’t tales and song but the saber itself, just as the saber had been his instrument in his time. So he taught me.”

“You are a Singer? A shaman?”

He shrugged. “I never went to the gods’ lands, if that is what you mean. But I learned from him as much as there was time to learn, about the—
art
—of saber.” He grinned. “I like this word,
martial artist.
You khaja are always surprising me. I thought you weren’t civilized.”

Dr. Hierakis laughed and withdrew her light from his face. “That’s all. What news from the council?”

Aleksi also liked her brusqueness and the way she came straight to the point and never hemmed and hawed about the least detail. “The main army, with Bakhtiian, rides to Karkand. Sakhalin rides south. Grekov and Vershinin ride west past Karkand. Nadine will ride north to escort the prince back here.”

“Oh,” said the doctor.

“Will he know this before she arrives?” Aleksi asked.

Dr. Hierakis laughed. “Yes. We have a way of talking that can send a message faster than the fastest horseman can ride. You see the image of Morava, there?” He nodded. “That isn’t an image modeled out of the memory, but a real image, sent to us by Marco Burckhardt from half a kilometer away from the palace. He sent it this morning.”

Aleksi regarded the image of Morava. The view looked down the long avenue that led to the front of the shrine. He could just make out the sweep of white stairs framed by thin black pillars that led to the huge doors embroidered with tracery and fine patterns. “But, Doctor,” he said, “if you can send messages so quickly, why not show Bakhtiian how to do this thing as well? If his generals could speak together like this, then imagine what they could do.”

“Oh, I can imagine it,” said the doctor. “But we’ve done too much already. Casualties are high, of course, but deaths are low. We’re saving and healing a much higher percentage of the wounded than would have survived without my training. And yet, and yet, I can’t just stand by and watch them die, knowing that with a little knowledge they could be saved. What of the khaja living in the army’s path? But I can’t reach them. I can’t reach everyone. Not yet.”

The doctor often talked to herself like this, to him and yet to herself and to some unnamed audience which Aleksi supposed was both her conscience and the absent prince, with whom she shared more than simple friendship and loyalty. He knew some vital issue troubled her, but he had not yet puzzled out what it was. And if she and the prince did not want to share this swift messenger they hoarded between them, after all, why should they? They owed Bakhtiian nothing. Aleksi did not think they were Bakhtiian’s enemies, but neither did he think they were Bakhtiian’s friends. Allies, perhaps, because of Tess, but it was an uneasy truce. They were only here because Tess was here. Even Bakhtiian knew that. They needed no alliance with Bakhtiian, and certainly with such machines, they had nothing to fear from him, however powerful and vast his army might be. Jeds was a long ride away, according to both Tess and Nadine, according to Bakhtiian himself.

But if Tess left, if the prince and Dr. Hierakis convinced her to go, Aleksi had long since promised himself that by one means or another, whatever he must do, he would go with her.

A
T FIRST THE COLOR
gray, like a fog, sank in around them. Fog lifted to become mist, and through the mist towers appeared, rising up toward the sky in such profusion that they might have been the uplifted lances of the jaran army, one hundred thousand strong.

But to call them towers did them no justice. Not one tower looked like any other tower. Each possessed such striking individuality that even from this distance—from this relative distance, seated on the floor and staring into the three-dimensional field of Hon Echido’s
ke’s
representation of the palace of the Chapalii Emperor—David could distinguish some characteristic in each tower his eye had time to light on that set it apart from the others. Why had they chosen to do that? So many and yet each unique? David thought of the Chapalii as so bound by the hierarchy of their social order that he would never have guessed that they valued diversity.

“The Yaochalii reigns forever.”

Was that Echido talking, or a voice encoded through the image building in front of them? David couldn’t tell. The image itself wore such depth and reality that he could easily imagine himself actually transported there, staring at the city from high above. He recalled the emperor’s visit to Charles and Tai Naroshi—or their visit to the emperor. Maybe he
was
there. The thought made him giddy.

“For time uncounted, years beyond years, has the Yaochalii reigned, and so will he reign, for time uncounted, years beyond years.”

It was hard for David to judge distance because of the scale and the slowly turning field of the image, but in any case, the city was huge. Of course, it wasn’t actually a city; it was the palace of the emperor, a megalopolis by human standards and yet devoted entirely to the emperor and his business. Had it once been a real city? As the Chapalii Empire had expanded out into space, had it been abandoned bit by bit, or had the emperor decreed it so and forced the evacuation? The Chapalii home world of Chapal was the emperor’s world alone now. Or at least, so the Protocol Office said. No other cities existed there, although this one was itself the size of a small continent.

“The Yaochalii holds his gentle hand over vast territories. The docks of Paladia Minor flow with ships. Merchants spin the heavens with their web of commerce. Lords preside with wisdom over their houses. Dukes administer justly. The princes are at peace. Each lord, each duke, each prince, sends a woman of his house to build a tower for the Yaochalii’s pleasure, so that the emperor may rise in the evening and see a thousand thousand lights set upon his earth to rival the thousand thousand lights that are the markers of his domain in the heavens.”

Beside him, Maggie covered her mouth with a hand and muffled a cough. Night descended on the field. The towers burned in brilliance, each one a star, reflecting the stars above. Great tiers of darkness blanketed the interstices between the blazing towers, and as the field lightened into day again, David recognized these as concourses and avenues and colonnades and gardens and labyrinths and ornamental terraces and every kind of engineering marvel, laid out in breathtaking extravagance and detail, more than he had modeled or imitated or—perhaps, just perhaps—dreamt of in his extensive studies.

“In these days comes the Tai-en Mushai to Sorrowing Tower. Thus does he choose to walk on his own feet into Reckless Tower, and so by his actions does he bring himself to Shame Tower. Thus does his name pass through the rite of extinction, and his house is obliterated forever.”

“Under which emperor did this happen?” asked Charles out of the darkness on the other side of the brightening field.

“All things happen under the eye of the Yaochalii, Tai-en,” replied Echido.

“What was the emperor’s name? Was he related to the Yaochalii-en who now graces the throne? What princely house did the emperor of that time come from?”

“I beg your pardon, Tai-en. Once a prince becomes emperor, then he becomes the Yaochalii-en. He has no other name. What he was before is lost to him. All he had before is lost to him. He brings nothing with him, nor does he leave the throne with anything but his shroud. Thus is each emperor the same, and thus is the line of the Yaochalii unbroken.”

“What about his family?” Maggie asked.

“The Yaochalii has no family. He is the Empire. All of us are his house.”

“But—what if he was married? Had children? Siblings? A favored steward?”

“All that he had before,” repeated Echido, as if it were catechism, “is lost to him.”

Marco whistled under his breath. “That’ll teach you to have ambition,” he said softly. “There’s not much advantage in it, is there, if you have to give up everything to become emperor?”

Maggie gestured with her right hand toward the glorious city shifting before them in the field, although the movement was lost to everyone but David and Marco, who sat on either side of her. “Everything but that.”

“Still,” said David, much struck by this revelation, “I’ll bet it’s a lonely life, Mags.”

“Very human of you, David, but how do you know they have the same motivations and emotions that we do?”

“Sorry. My stock in trade is anthropomorphism. What about the names for the towers? Sorrowing. Reckless.”

“It’s a translation. Who knows what they really mean in Chapalii?”

“Spoilsport. Though it would be nice to have Tess—” But he broke off.

The scene changed. The city melted away into spinning fractals which then formed themselves into the heartachingly beautiful blue and white and muddied continental brown of a carbon-oxygen-nitrogen world: Rhui, rotating in the heavens.

“Though no male may know,” continued Echido, “still, some say that it is here on this planet that the Tai-en Mushai meets his fate, dying before his years unroll into their fullness, holding to himself his secrets, and his shame, and his reckless heart.”

“So we can’t get a date?” asked Charles.

“A
date.
I beg pardon, Tai-en, but this term
date
is one whose meaning I am unfamiliar with. Perhaps you mean the sweet, oblong, edible fruit of the date palm, a tree named
phoenix dactylifera
in your scientific lexicon. It grows in tropical regions and bears clusters of
dates
as its fruit.”

“Never mind.
Ke,
perhaps you understand my question.”

The female had a peculiarly reedy voice with distinct tones whose cadences David found difficult to follow. “Tai-en, this low one does perceive the meaning you grasp for. This low one has assisted the craftsman Rajiv Caer Linn in reconstructing the data banks of the Tai-en Mushai’s network, but as you are both males, this low one can proceed no further in the particular matter you explore now.” On a whistling breath, her voice ceased. After a moment, it started up again. “If one of the females of your party wishes to discuss this particular matter with this low one, then this low one will broach with her subjects fit only for a female’s constitution.”

“What in hell is she talking about?” murmured Marco.

“Maggie?” said Charles.

“Yes.” Maggie jumped to her feet and slipped away into the darkness. A breath of air brushed by David’s face. Evidently Maggie and the ke had gone beyond the long chamber they all sat in now, back between the pillars into the white room that concealed the entrance to the control room. Above and around them hovered the field, projected out above and surrounding the two rectangular countertops that none of the humans had understood until now. They were field generators for the huge imaging three-dimensional field at which humans and Chapalii stared, watching Rhui turn and implode and reemerge as the palace of Morava, the Tai-en Mushai’s secret retreat.

As if they walked themselves, they came up the avenue bounded on the sides by precise gardens of translucent statues and flowering vines and above by four jeweled arches. The great doors glided open—David ached to know the mechanism by which their massive bulk swung so smoothly outward—to reveal the grand concourse. Along the upper half of the walls, a procession of creatures tangled with plants drew the eye along with it to the distant end. These reliefs seemed grown of some living crystal; they grew and changed as David walked down the concourse. A lion grew wings and a snake’s tail and transmuted into a gryphon. A sinuous, tentacular alien
Spai-lin
curled in on itself and became a multifaceted snail wreathed in vervain. Through grand corridors and intimate salons they passed. All was alive as it must surely have been during the Mushai’s residence. The dome lit when they entered, drowning them in the depths of a nameless sea populated with grotesque amphibious creatures. In a vast hall, a stellar map spread out along the floor in a mosaic of intricate tiling, and the map rose as light into the empty air. It was as if he walked as a god into the vast depths of space, as into an ocean as black, splintered with light and chasms of shadow, as the other had been sea-green. He strode through the spinning universe, and the music of the spheres hummed like a chorus of drowned bells in his ears.

With great relief, David came to a room where he could sit down and rest. Except, of course, he already sat cross-legged on the floor, next to Marco. Dizziness swept him as the movement and the stillness collided and merged. He let out all his breath and felt Marco slump at the same time, two sighs in concert. Glorious.

“Thank you,” said Charles. His voice shook with emotion. Charles showed emotion so rarely in his voice, these days, that each time it startled David anew, to recall that Charles still lived in there; he had simply given up most of himself in order to assume the role he had to play.