Emperor of Thorns

Now Fayed laughed out loud. ‘My people have ruled here four thousand years.’ His voice so dry it almost creaked. He waved at the thin man who carried on without pause.

‘A chain of civilization stretching back unbroken across millennia. And you come here ragged, empty-handed? Only through the knowing of the mathema do we recognize you as king. It is true that charts render small what may hold many lives, but in our map room Renar may be found only after careful search and can be covered with the thumb.’ He made the appropriate gesture, as if squashing my kingdom like a bug. ‘Whereas a man may scarcely cover Liba with his hand.’ The thin man spread his fingers. And with the hand still raised, open and turned toward me, ‘There is a saying in the desert. Don’t reach for friendship with an empty hand.’

‘What would the Earl Hansa pay to have you back, boy?’ Fayed’s croak from the throne.

I made the least of bows. ‘My hand only looks empty, Ibn Fayed.’ I didn’t know what my grandfather might pay, but I guessed Fayed would ask for more than coin. Even if I survived the negotiations, to return dragging such a failure with me would undo any ties I had made in Morrow.

‘What then does it hold?’ the Voice asked.

‘Tell me, Excellency, did you need your magicians to tell you I was coming?’

The Voice bridled at being questioned, anger written into the sharp lines of his face. Fayed made the briefest wave and the answer came, calm and without offence. ‘Hamada is a fortress that needs no walls. Only by caravan can the dunes be crossed. And rest assured that all who travel the salt roads are known in this palace before they come in sight of the city. Known by name and feature, their cargo known, down to the last fig in their saddlebags.’

‘And if you knew of my approach you would know also of my travelling companion,’ I said.

‘Marco Onstantos Evenaline of the House Gold, Mercantile Derivatives South. A Florentine banker.’

‘He is waiting at your gates, Caliph. Why is he here?’

Again the wave to quell his Voice’s objections. When a man doesn’t bother to keep secrets from you, you know that you’re in trouble.

‘He comes to claim against a contract. Our payment for an old debt sunk off the Corsair Isle. Though the Florentines had agents aboard and had taken the monies into their care they say that under the agreed terms no payment is properly transacted until docked in Port Vito.’

‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘And although his visit is not welcomed or encouraged, you afford him the protections and diplomatic privileges agreed for the clans under empire law.’

‘Yes.’

‘And those old agreements might allow him a secret fig or two in his saddlebag … Perhaps you should bring him in and I could show you what’s in my hand …’

The Voice had no answer. A long silence, nothing but the wafting of feathers as Ibn Fayed considered. The faintest of nods.

‘He will be summoned.’

Our audience proved less private than advertised for no further order was issued. And yet I assumed it was being acted upon.

‘An interesting cat you have there, Excellency.’ I don’t count small talk amongst my skills but we couldn’t just watch each other for the next ten minutes waiting on Marco.

‘A leopard,’ the Voice replied. ‘From the interior.’

A long pause. I’m really not good at idle chat.

‘So you’re destroying all the Builders’ works? I’m interested in hearing the reasons why.’

‘It is no secret.’ The Voice looked uncomfortable even so. ‘The caliph’s proclamations have been called out after prayers across Liba for close on a year now. This new wisdom came to him in a dream at the end of the Holy Month. On the Day of A Thousand Suns there came a dawn so bright that many of our ancestors who died that morning could not see the way to paradise. They sought the darkness of their machines to hide from that unholy light. But they became trapped there, djinns, haunting the relics of their past. It is out of mercy that we act. We break open their prisons and set them free to ascend to their reward.’

He delivered his lines with conviction. Whether he believed them, or whether he could have made a great actor, I didn’t know.

‘Let us hope those trapped souls understand the mercies that you heap upon them,’ I said. ‘And whose idea was it? Some scheme out of the mathema?’

‘Mine.’ Ibn Fayed laid the claim from his throne, his hands closing into fists.

A distant, hollow sound, repeated, and again. I glanced back along the silk runner to see the doors open. Marco Onstantos Evenaline stepped through, in his blacks as ever, but with his hat in his hand. He must have been plucked from the line shortly after we passed him and have followed in our footsteps.

We all watched his slow advance across the width of the hall. Ibn Fayed really did have a hell of a throne room. It occurred to me that a large portion of the Haunt would fit into it, and certainly the entirety of the villages of Gutting and Little Gutting.

At last Marco drew up alongside me, looking pleased for the first time since we met. The absence of his trunk had changed him, he stood taller, more proud.

‘Ibn Fayed, Caliph of Liba, Lord of the Three Realms, Water-Giver, welcomes Marco Onstantos Evenaline of the House Gold, Mercantile Derivatives South to his humble abode.’

‘As well he should,’ Marco said. ‘Though courtesies will prove no shield from the consequences of his actions.’

‘You dare?’ The Voice may have spoken an alien tongue but the volume and tone drew ten curved blades from the scabbards of the imperial guard.

‘Harsh language to use over an unpaid debt, Marco?’ I did my best to ignore the glittering steel a foot to my left, the guardsmen having included me in the insult. ‘By the look of things I would say the caliph is good for it?’ I didn’t wave my arm at the opulence of our surroundings, concerned that someone might lop it off.

‘You wallow in ignorance, Jorg of Renar, like a pig in filth. It will please me to see you burn.’

‘Marco! I thought we were friends?’ I tried not to smile but I was never the actor.

He looked away from me toward the throne. ‘Ibn Fayed, you are sentenced to die. All of Hamada is forfeit.’

Two long steel bolts appeared in Marco’s chest, jutting out at diverging angles. I took a moment to recognize them as projectiles, fired from some overlarge crossbows that must be concealed in galleries above us.

Marco staggered half a step and raised his hands. ‘Die.’ Joints crackled as he formed a fist. It put me in mind of that scorpion in the Hills as I unwound it. For a heartbeat he hypnotized all of us, stood there impaled on those bolts, his hat rolling on its brim at his feet. Fist slammed into palm.

And nothing.

Though perhaps it seemed brighter for a second, as if the sun had peeked out from behind clouds.

Marco pounded fist into palm a second time. ‘No!’ He swept us with a wild gaze, looked down at the shafts in his chest, and collapsed.

‘This is what is in your hand?’ the Voice asked. ‘A madman?’

‘Look out of your window, Ibn Fayed.’ I pointed west.

A sharp clap sent one of the guards running to haul open the shutters.

The man pulled on a concealed rope and the screens parted, the brightness of the day dazzling us. For long moments we stood blinking in the desert light, trying to see into the brilliance of the outside world. And there it rose, boiling upward over the dunes, a fierce column of orange and black, fire threaded with night, opening into a inferno, mushrooming above the sands, and above that, impossibly high, a white halo of cloud spreading, outpacing the flames.