The Goblin Emperor (11 page)

After a time, he felt a deeper rhythm, the rhythm of the stone and water, not the rhythm of his words and heartbeat. He breathed into this deeper rhythm, let it teach him a new mantra, a wordless mantra that waxed and waned, ebbed and flowed, moon and stars and clouds, river and sun, the wordless singing of the earth beneath it all like the world’s own heartbeat. He laid his palms flat on the stone beneath him and listened in quiet rapture to the mantra of the world’s praying.

It drained away from him gradually, until he was again aware of his body, stiff and cold and cramped and thirsty. He got up, almost falling when his numb legs would not support him. He staggered, stretched first one leg, then the other, then hobbled to the niche in the wall, where he drank another handful of water and then plunged both hands into the bowl, gasping a little with the icy shock of it. But it grounded him, cleared his head. He walked a slow circle around the chapel, then another, flexing his feet against the cold stone.

He was on his third circuit when he realized the chapel was getting brighter. For a moment, he was simply bewildered, as if he were watching a second sun rising in the sky; then he realized the light came from the Archprelate’s candle, and the weight of stone and obligation above him all but forced him to the ground. At least the light had given him warning of their approach. He straightened his shoulders, forced his ears up, composed his face. When the Archprelate appeared beneath the lantern, Maia was standing calmly in the middle of the floor, spine straight, chin up, and the sick thud of his heartbeat audible only to himself.

The Archprelate bowed; Maia bowed in return. Behind Tethimar he could see Beshelar and Cala, reminders that not everything that awaited him was threatening or onerous. Maia’s heart lifted, and he knew he had been right to choose his First Nohecharei as his guides.

They returned as silently as they had come; this time Cala followed Tethimar, and Beshelar was in the rear. Maia stumbled once, near the top of the stairs, but Beshelar steadied him before he fell.

After Tethimar had closed the pilaster, he bowed and left them to prepare for his own part in the coming ceremony. Cala and Beshelar escorted Maia up to his chambers, where the edocharei waited to take him in hand, Telimezh standing watchful behind them.

Cala and Beshelar bowed and effaced themselves, but Maia barely noticed them leave, the edocharei clustering around him like black-liveried butterflies. They divested him of the jewelry and the keb and shepherded him in to take another bath, this one less ritual and more comforting. Maia relaxed into the hot water, which seemed both to wash away and to deepen his experience in the living rock of the vigil chapel. His time sense remained suspended, like the remission of a tertian ague, but the water was tepid when he opened his eyes and found Nemer saying apologetically, “Serenity, it is time.”

They dried him and dressed him: snow-white linen; white stockings and white court slippers; white velvet trousers; a white silk shirt; and over it not the ordinary quilted jacket but a long white robe, quilted and brocaded and by far the most beautiful item of clothing Maia had ever worn.

I shall grow weary of white before long,
he acknowledged ruefully, but for now he was entranced.

Avris combed his hair as before, but this time braided it into a great knot at the base of his skull, with long thin plaits, braided with white ribbons and strands of pearls, hanging down his back. Then the Dachen Mura were brought out again, and this time Maia was arrayed entirely in opals and pearls: rings, bracelets, earrings, necklace. He was spared the diadem, because the Ethuverazhid Mura, the imperial crown, awaited him like some monstrous bridegroom.

The edocharei did not hurry. When they released him, and he returned to the outer chamber, the clock on the mantel read nine o’clock.

Three hours,
Maia thought, but Chavar demanded his attention before he could decide whether that was too much time or not enough.

Now began another set of rituals, the oath-takings. First were his nohecharei: Cala, Beshelar, Dazhis, Telimezh. They were now bound to him until their deaths, and past, for they would be buried with him—as his father’s nohecharei would be buried with their emperor tomorrow.

Then came the Corazhas. Maia had, he felt, the easy part; he had only to sit in a heavy and uncomfortable chair in the audience chamber that was the first floor of the Alcethmeret, and accept the hands that were held out to him. It was the Corazhas, the Witnesses, who had to remember the long, archaic formulas of the oaths and repeat them without stumbling. Given the length of Varenechibel’s reign, none of them was old enough to have given the oath more than once before.

Nine Witnesses made up the Corazhas, each of them ruler of his own small empire. The Witnesses knelt, and Maia received their oaths and wondered how many of them meant the loyalty they professed, how many of them, like Chavar, were loyal still to Varenechibel’s memory. After them, the Adremaza and the Captain of the Untheileneise Guard swore; the captain, robed and masked and armored as both prelate and knight of Anmura, frightened Maia slightly with his ferocity.

The five princes entered next, and Maia, growing light-headed from nervousness and lack of food, remembered of them only the haunted eyes of the Prince of Thu-Athamar. Maia leaned forward when the prince had given his vow and said, very low, “Neither blame nor guilt belongs to you, so do not hold them so closely.” The prince seemed more startled than reassured, but his look quickly became thoughtful, and he was still frowning slightly, his eyes distant, when the princes filed out.

Maia had been dreading the oaths of the Drazhada only slightly less than the coronation itself. The widow empress; his half sisters Nemriän and Vedero; his half brother Nemolis’s widow and three children; his half brother Ciris’s fiancée; and last in line, Arbelan Drazharan, Varenechibel’s first wife, put aside for barrenness thirty years ago, but never released from her ties to the House Drazhada. Both Csoru and Sheveän, the Princess of the Untheileneise Court, were giving her offended sidelong glances, which Arbelan affected not to see.

Arbelan was in her mid-sixties, a tall, proud woman still, with brilliant blue eyes. Beside her, Csoru looked even more doll-like, while Nemriän and Sheveän seemed callow, petulant girls. Stano Bazhevin, Ciris’s fiancée, was a nonentity, just another white-faced woman in black. Only Vedero held her own.

The Archduchess Vedero Drazhin was a big woman, two inches taller than Maia himself, broad in the shoulder and hip. Her hair was smooth white silk, her eyes the Drazhadeise gray. Her features were strong but good and her presence one of tremendous dignity. Black did not become her, and he could see by the grayness of her face and her red-rimmed eyes that she had been weeping and had scorned to hide the evidence. He liked her the better for it, though he feared from the look she gave him that she did not like him and would not care whether he liked her or not.

The oaths were properly given, and Maia heaved a small, inward sigh of relief. The oaths were no more than a formal deterrent to troublemaking, but they were better than no deterrent at all. Fourteen-year-old Idra, the new Prince of the Untheileneise Court and Maia’s own heir, seemed to mean them sincerely, and Maia dared to smile at him. Idra did not quite smile back, but his eyes lightened. Idra’s sisters, Ino and Mireän, were too young to understand fully what they did, but they placed their small hands in Maia’s confidently and without hesitation.

The women were a different matter; Nemriän, Csoru, and Sheveän clearly disdained him. Stano was frightened of him. Vedero he could not read; her face was as impassive as marble. Arbelan seemed amused, if anything, although that might have been aimed more at Csoru’s territorial bristling than at Maia himself.

Chavar was the last person to take private oath to the new emperor, having been up to this point acting as the representative of the dead. Chavar’s broad hands were hot in Maia’s, and he swore the oath in a perfunctory growl, as if he neither respected nor believed the words he spoke.

We will have conference of this,
Maia thought, but this was neither the time nor the place for those words. He watched Chavar broodingly as the Lord Chancellor organized the procession to the heart of the Untheileneise Court: Maia and his nohecharei, both First and Second; the princes; the Witnesses; the Drazhada of Varenechibel’s line: all herded into line with the Captain of the Untheileneise Guard and the Adremaza, and Chavar in the lead.

I like this symbolism not,
Maia thought, walking in a square formed by the nohecharei.
It says that the emperor follows where the Lord Chancellor leads. I do not, nor do I intend to.
He knew that Chavar was in fact representing the old emperor, guiding his successor to crown and throne—
but then, I do not wish to follow my father, either,
he thought and had to repress a smile.

The procession wound its stately way through the Untheileneise Court; the courtiers were all already in the Untheileian, the hall of the Ethuverazhid Zhas, but servants and secretaries lined the corridors, watching, and when they passed through the great public courtyard, it was packed with people from Cetho and the surrounding countryside, come to catch a glimpse of their new emperor.

It was also bitterly cold; at first, Maia thought the spots in front of his eyes meant he was about to faint, but then he realized it was snowing. He managed to lean close enough to Telimezh to whisper, “Isn’t it early in the season for snow?” and to hear Telimezh’s whispered response, “Yes, Serenity.” And then they were back inside and approaching the doors of the Untheileian. It was midnight.

The Untheileian was a long, tall-windowed room with magnificent stained glass, visible now only as brighter splotches of color along the walls. The courtiers filled it in well-disciplined rows, all of them dressed in full court mourning, faces white and eyes glittering in the gaslight. Maia suffered an uneasy fancy that they, like a pack of wolves, would descend on him and tear him limb from limb. But they only watched.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a pair of dark faces in that pale, gleaming sea, and he knew they must be Ambassador Gormened, who claimed kinship, and his wife. He could not turn his head to look, but he found himself comforted—not for any trust he placed in the ambassador, or in Barizhan behind him, but for the much-needed reminder that there was, in fact, a world beyond the Untheileneise Court. He walked steadily up the hall, and the procession dispersed behind him as Drazhada, princes, Witnesses, Adremaza, and captain all found their appointed places. The Archprelate waited on the dais, standing in front of the tall ivory throne, with the Ethuverazhid Mura cradled in his hands. The nohecharei took their positions at the two great torchières that flanked the dais, and Maia walked the last ten feet on his own, more aware than ever of being eighteen, skinny, dark, and never the heir that Varenechibel had intended.

He climbed the five steps of the dais and bowed to the Archprelate. The Archprelate bowed in return; what Maia could see of his face behind his mask was at least not judgmental. He asked the binding questions, and Maia swore his answers. “Then kneel for the last time, Edrehasivar Drazhar,” the Archprelate said, allowing his voice to rise to a shout, “and accept the crown of the Elflands!”

Maia knelt. The Ethuverazhid Mura, a heavy, archaic circle of silver set with opals, pressed down upon his head. He stood again, trying not to let his knees shake, and turned to face the Untheileian.

En masse, and beautifully, the assembled courtiers bowed; some of the women curtsied, and he wished he could see their faces clearly enough to mark them, for they would be enemies of Csoru Zhasanai and he desired to know them better. But the court blurred before his eyes, and the first half hour of Edrehasivar VII’s reign was a stubborn struggle not to faint.

Then his nohecharei surrounded him again, and he was able to return by a much shorter route to the Alcethmeret, where the edocharei made a fuss and insisted on feeding him soup before they would allow him to crawl into bed.

Maia lay in the great canopied bed of the Emperors of the Elflands, staring up into the darkness at the Drazhadeise cats he knew were there, although he could not see them. Cala sat in the corner, he knew, peacefully guarding him. He was exhausted, feeling pressed against the bed by the weight of his own body, and yet sleep would not come. When he closed his eyes, the day jumbled behind them in such a confusion of images that he had to open them again. He remembered the tranquillity he had felt in the vigil chapel, but it was as elusive and chimerical as the sleep he could not find.

He lay and stared up into the darkness, and when at last sleep found him, he did not even know it, for his dreams were as dark and silent as his bedchamber.

9

The Report of the Witnesses for the Wisdom of Choharo

In the morning when Maia looked out, the roofs of the Untheileneise Court were dusted with snow. “Most unseasonable,” Esha said primly when he noticed the direction of Maia’s gaze.

Now that he was crowned, no longer merely the emperor-apparent, Maia could not stay in what he had come to think of as the safety of the Alcethmeret. He did not, Csevet assured him, have to use the Untheileian except on state occasions, but it was customary for the emperor to hold audiences in the Michen’theileian, and despite the funeral of Varenechibel IV that would be held that evening, audiences (Csevet said firmly) the new emperor must grant.

“The government has ground to a halt,” he said, seated at the foot of the dining table, immaculate and poised as always. “It must be pushed into motion again, Serenity, and you are the only person who can do that.”

“I suppose I am,” Maia said under his breath.

“Serenity?”

“Nothing. To whom do we grant audiences today?” The words came out in a snarl, and Csevet drew back, his ears flattening.

“Serenity, we did not mean to offend you. We thought only to help.”