The Goblin Emperor (10 page)

With the entire Untheileneise Court in mourning, the halls were nearly deserted, though normally, Telimezh told Maia, the courtiers would be promenading in favored corridors until midnight at least. Those few whom they encountered bowed hastily and profoundly. They would not look Maia in the face, but he was aware of their eyes on his back until he had passed out of sight.

The Othasmeire of the Untheileneise Court, the Untheileneise’meire, was a vast white edifice, a dome supported on pillars like the trunks of ancient trees. The gaslights, in their antique faceted globes, cast strange shadows among the pillars. It was cold, colder even than the frigid open rooms of the Alcethmeret.

The tombs of the Drazhada circled the walls outside the ring of pillars, a wide double-row of sarcophagi, too many to count and yet not enough to complete the circle around the dome. The location where Varenechibel’s tomb would be built had already been marked off, although the marble was still in a quarry among the islands of the Chadevan Sea, and the space was heaped with flowers—mostly silk at this time of year, but there were a few bouquets of chrysanthemums gently shedding their petals among the artificial roses and lilies.

The tombs of Varenechibel’s second, third, and fourth wives were in the outer ring: the Empress Leshan, the Empress Pazhiro, the Empress Chenelo, each of them dead before her thirtieth birthday. The stylized bas-reliefs on the lids of the sarcophagi gave no real impression of what the empresses had looked like, much less what kind of people they had been. Maia ran his fingers over the white marble nose and cheek of the figure on his mother’s tomb, a gesture as symbolic and meaningless as the figure itself.

He knelt then, putting his veil back, aware of but ignoring Telimezh and Dazhis, who were standing stiffly by the nearest column. He had nothing to say, no offering to make, only the feeling, deeper than words, that he had to pay honor to his mother before the great public honor that would be paid to his father. He wondered if his mother would have been proud or sorrowful at his sudden elevation. Sorrowful, he thought; exalted rank had brought her nothing but grief and pain.

Finally, he whispered, “I am here.” It seemed the only thing worth saying. She was ten years dead, and all the things he had wished to say to her, all the things he had dreamed of saying during the cold years at Edonomee, seemed now like the pitiful whining of a child.
Even an she heard,
he thought,
it would but grieve her.
He clasped his hands and bowed to the tomb, determined even in this desolation of white marble to do her honor.

He stood, lowered his veil, realized there was one thing still to say. He touched the incised strokes of her name and said, low but clear, “I love thee still.”

He turned then and left his mother’s tomb, walking back toward where his nohecharei waited for him in the light.

8

The Coronation of Edrehasivar VII

The preparations for the crowning of the Emperor Edrehasivar VII began at six o’clock on the morning of the twenty-third. He did not break his fast, and would not until after he had been crowned. He bathed in water steeped with herbs; the scent of the herbs caught in the back of his throat and made his eyes sting. While Dazhis observed, Esha and Nemer dressed Maia in a long, white, sleeveless and shapeless garment called a keb, an archaic piece of clothing used now only for initiations among the mazei and clergy, and for coronations. Maia, used to tight-fitting trousers and padded jackets, found it unnerving; the rituals proscribed wearing anything beneath it, and he felt rather less clothed than he would have in a nightshirt.

Then Avris combed his hair patiently and thoroughly, teasing all the tangles out of his unruly curls until they hung sleek and dark and wet down his back. Esha opened a secret panel in the wall of the dressing room and brought out a heavy oak casket, which held the imperial court jewels. Some pieces had been lost with the late emperor, he said sadly, and new would have to be commissioned, but those were only the Lesser Jewels, the Michen Mura. The Greater Jewels, the Dachen Mura, never left the Untheileneise Court.

Maia suffered himself to be adorned. Rings for his fingers, silver set with jade and moonstones; bracelets like manacles, silver set with dull cabochon emeralds; a series of rings for his ears, more pale-green jade; a necklace of moonstones and cabochon emeralds that clasped tight around his throat; a silver and moonstone diadem. He declined when Nemer offered him a mirror; he would not recognize himself, and he did not want to see what he was becoming. He was afraid he would recognize his father.

In the outer chamber, Cala, Beshelar, Telimezh, Csevet, and Chavar were waiting, along with the Archprelate of Cetho, the Adremaza, and the Captain of the Untheileneise Guard. They all knelt at Maia’s entrance. Then they stood again as Dazhis crossed the room to stand beside Telimezh, and Chavar and Maia clasped hands, right to right and left to left; Chavar asked the three ritual questions, the truth of Maia’s answers to be witnessed by the Adremaza and the captain.

Chavar asked the questions: the time of his birth; the true name of his father; the augury of favor. Maia answered them: the Winter Solstice; Nemera Drazhar; Cstheio Caireizhasan, the Lady of Stars. He felt like a prince in a wonder-tale; he could remember his mother telling him countless stories in which the hero had to answer those same questions, although in wonder-tales, the augury of favor was framed differently. He could hear his mother’s soft Barizheise voice saying,
Whose child art thou?
and his own voice, answering delightedly,
The star’s child.

He shook himself back to the present as Chavar asked a question not in the wonder-tales: “By what name will you be known?”

“Edrehasivar,” Maia said. “Seventh of that name.”

Chavar had never asked him what name he intended to take, and although it had been no secret, clearly the Lord Chancellor had not bothered to keep himself informed. Or perhaps he had not believed Maia would go through with it. The ritual stumbled to a halt as Chavar stared at Maia, the words visibly forming:
Are you quite sure?
Maia met Chavar’s eyes levelly and repeated, as if he thought only that Chavar had not heard him, “Edrehasivar. Seventh of that name.”

This time, Chavar made the correct response, and the Adremaza and the Captain of the Untheileneise Guard spoke the words of witnessing. Chavar released Maia’s hands.

The next part of the ritual belonged to the Archprelate. He was not the same Archprelate who had officiated at Chenelo’s funeral, for the old Archprelate had died two winters ago, the coldest winter in living memory. The new Archprelate was named. Teru Tethimar; for this part of the ceremony, he was not masked—a gesture of equality between archprelate and emperor—and Maia saw that he was young for his position with an ascetic’s face and a stubborn jaw. He had a beautiful voice, a tenor as clear as spring water, and he spoke the words of the cleansing and releasing as if he meant them.

The ritual released Maia from his old life, leaving him free to take up the strands of the new. For now, he was in between worlds. It was a time, as the Archprelate said, for purification and tranquillity, and he asked Maia, the words heavy with their freight of ritual, whom he would choose to serve as his guides to and from the vigil chapel where he would spend these hours between casting off his former self and garbing himself to greet his new being.

Maia did not hesitate. “Cala Athmaza and Deret Beshelar,” he said.

The Archprelate stopped with his mouth half open.

This time, Chavar exploded, “Serenity, you cannot—!”

Maia said, “You will not tell us what we can and cannot do, Chavar.”

The silence was thick with consternation, a roomful of men suddenly afraid to move. Maia continued, quiet but stubborn, “I trust them.” They had gone with him to the Ulimeire; it felt necessary that they should join him on this pilgrimage as well.

Tethimar, quicker-witted than the still spluttering Chavar, collected himself and bowed agreement. Cala and Beshelar came to stand by Maia, one on each side, almost their normal positions except that now they stood even with him, rather than one pace behind. Tethimar said simply, “Follow me,” and Maia, Cala, and Beshelar followed him, leaving the others standing like actors bereft of a play.

The Archprelate led them silently down the stairs of the Alcethmeret and across its inlaid marble floor to the pair of pilasters, three sets off from being exactly opposite the doors to the rest of the Untheileneise Court, where there was a candlestick, already lit, waiting prosaically on the floor. Maia did not see exactly what Tethimar did, where exactly he pressed, but one of the pilasters gracefully fell into the wall, revealing a narrow, dark passage, to which the pilaster itself served as a bridge. Tethimar went first, then Beshelar, then Maia, and Cala brought up the rear. The painted wood was cool and slightly gritty under Maia’s bare feet, the stone of the passageway shockingly cold.

The passage bent sharply back and forth; Maia guessed it followed the walls of the palace rooms. They had not gone far, however, before the passage ended in a staircase, a tight, steeply descending spiral, its central pillar so narrow that Maia could almost join his hands around it. The Archprelate’s candle cast only barely enough light, and there was no banister, nor any hand grips. Maia braced his hands against the pillar on one side and the wall on the other and proceeded with vertiginous caution. The heavy jewelry fretted him; it made his hands feel strange and clumsy, and he wished he could just take it off and leave it here on the stairs for the ghosts and spiders. He curled his toes so hard against the worn, slick edges of the steps that his feet began to ache. Neither Tethimar and Beshelar ahead of him nor Cala behind him seemed to be having any particular trouble, and he resented them for it in a tired, childish way.

They reached the bottom of the staircase, passed through an antechamber no larger than a broom cupboard, and entered the vigil chapel. It had a pointed vault, unlike the domes that Maia was used to, and on the walls were painted the devices of the gods, both the seven with which he was familiar and many with which he was not. The cold, bare, stone floor was so freshly scrubbed that it was still damp in places. A small spring bubbled up in a niche beside the arched opening to the antechamber; it tumbled over the edge of its natural bowl and disappeared into a hole in the floor. Maia could faintly hear it becoming a river somewhere in the dark below.

A lantern hung in the tall arch of the doorway; Tethimar reached up and lit it with his candle. He said, his beautiful voice quiet and grave, “The water is sanctified. You may drink it. We will return at sundown.” And he, with Cala and Beshelar following, turned and began to climb the stairs back to the world above. Maia locked his throat against the impulse to call them back, to beg them to stay, not to leave him down here alone in the dark. The lantern light mocked him, a taunting reminder of the light of the world. He shut his eyes so that he would not have to watch the light of the candle recede, and counted slowly to one hundred. When he opened his eyes, he looked around at the cool darkness, this well of silence, the weight of rock and loneliness, and thought,
This is what it is to be emperor.

He drank a little water, mostly to wash the taste of panic out of his mouth, then sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor and began patiently and without emphasis to think about his breathing.

He had been too young when his mother died to inherit much of her Barizheise mysticism, but she had taught him the few small, simple things that a child’s bright butterfly mind would hold to. Setheris, who professed the fashionable agnosticism, had no patience for what he called “flummery”; Maia had clung to the fragments of his mother’s teachings mostly out of defiance. As he grew older, he discovered that he could use the breathing exercises she had taught him to calm himself, or to combat his fear and boredom when he was being punished for infractions of Setheris’s rigid rules. He had missed the habit over the past two days, but there had never been—

He lost his rhythm, almost choked, realizing in a new and heavily visceral way that he had lost his privacy permanently. He assumed—desperately hoped—that there was some compromise allowed for sexual activities, but emperors did not have privacy. Even behind the grilles of the Alcethmeret, the servants would be there, and if not the servants, the nohecharei, and although their function was largely symbolic in this day and age, their presence was not. He imagined losing his virginity under Beshelar’s critical eye and was seized by a lunatic fit of shrill, painful laughter. But even when he calmed again, that cold lump of truth was still lodged in his throat: he could not get privacy without demanding it, and he could not demand it without explaining his purpose. The court would not care for a mystically minded emperor; they might well take it as proof that Varenechibel’s bitter calumnies had been true.

Perhaps canst meditate with one other in the room?
he offered, aware of his own doubtful tone, like a man offering a screaming child a sweet.
Cala would not laugh, nor would scorn thee nor bear tales.
But he could not imagine it.

He settled himself, inhaled deeply, exhaled, and began again the patient contemplation of his breathing. His mother had taught him a prayer that could be used as a mantra:
Cstheio Caireizhasan, hear me. Cstheio Caireizhasan, see me. Cstheio Caireizhasan, know me.
One did not ask for more than awareness from the Lady of the Stars; hers was the gift of clear sight, not of mercy or protection.

He let himself sink into the mantra’s rhythm. As a child, he had recited it faster and faster until it degenerated into a gibber of nonsense. Chenelo had giggled with him over it, but then said gently that the point of the mantra was not to finish it, nor to say it as many times as he could in five minutes. “The point is to
be
in it,” she had said, and although he had not understood her then, he did now. He let go of all the things that were not himself and the mantra and the cold silence of the vigil chapel. Periodically, he got up to pace the circuit of the room, touching the wall gently beneath each god’s device, and to drink a handful of the water, which, cold and slightly metallic, began to taste to him like the tranquillity the Archprelate had said he should seek.