A man in a green jacket, bright in the afternoon sun. The sun- light flashed on his buttons. Flanked by men in gold armour. The sunlight flashed on their swords. The gates opened smoothly. Orhan watched them march towards the front doors.

The man in green stopped before the pearl doorway. Shouted clear and slow. “A message for Orhan Emmereth, the Lord of the Rising Sun, Servant and Counsellor of the Emperor, Warden of Immish and the Bitter Sea, the Nithque of the Asekemlene Emperor of the Sekemleth Empire of the Golden City of Sorlost. Attend, My Lord!”

So the Emperor summoned him again. Of course. Orhan considered putting back on the blood-stained clothes he’d been wearing that morning. Cut a fine and pitiable figure, wife and son’s body fluids bathing his favourite coat. Maybe tear it a bit in the hem and the sleeve lining, make it look battered, muss up his hair and get Darath to knock him about in the face.

“My Lord?” The door keep, with a pale frightened face. “My Lord, a message—”

“From the palace. Yes.” Darath stirred in his chair opposite, where he was sitting trying to read. “I’ll come.” Eyes met Darath’s. “No. As I said before. Alone.”

“Orhan—”

“Send a message, if Bil wakes, or …”

Darath stood up. “Don’t order me around, My Lord Emmereth. I’m richer than you are. Even got a faint stream of semi-divine blood, which is more than you can say. And you’re not even the Emperor’s Nithque any more. Are we walking, or taking the litter? I’d suggest the latter. Marginally safer that way. I don’t want too much spit on my coat.”

Thank you. Thank you, Darath. Oh Great Lord Tanis, thought Orhan, oh Great Tanis I am indeed grateful, for You are indeed sometimes kind.

He went to see Bil and the baby. Bil still lay sleeping. The baby was sleeping, he bent and kissed its face. Darath was waiting by the door for him. Looked at him with an unreadable face.

“I do love you for more than the beauty of your cock, remember, Orhan,” Darath said.

They went out accompanied by Orhan’s guards, and Darath’s, and those the Emperor had sent. So many men with drawn swords. The servants—the surviving servants—no, most had survived, he could not think like that—seemed to hang around the corridors as they passed. Orhan found himself shaking. His head was hurting him, his body rang with tiredness. After-effect of shock and terror, like the dregs of wine. I am the victim here, he kept thinking. As Celyse says. Or it was nothing at all. March died of heat flux. Two of my guards just suddenly ran mad.

The people in the streets stared at the litter. He felt their eyes through the silk. “Traitor! Murderer! Blasphemer!” Everyone would know something had happened this morning. Everyone would know where he was going, with guards in gold armour at his heels and head. Whispers. Jeering. A few attempts even at a cheer. A great hero! An arch traitor! A master of intrigue! A gullible fool! He himself had lied so many times about that night he no longer had any idea what had occurred. They were Immish sellswords. They were dead bodies. I hired them. I killed them. I remember. Except that he kept seeing those beautiful terrible gaping eyes.

I saw him, Orhan thought. I saw Amrath. I stood and looked at him face to face.

Great Tanis lives in His house of waters. The Emperor lives in a palace of dreaming. The demon is loose in his tower of joy and despair. From the fear of life and the fear of death, release us. Great Tanis, Lord of All Things, hear me: I don’t want any more of us to die.

“Stop it,” said Darath, nudging him in the ribs.

“Stop what? What?”

They were almost at the palace. Its dome gleaming in the light. Gold and silver and white porcelain. The bare blind windows, through which a boy who was Amrath the World Conqueror had fallen in shards of brilliantly coloured glass.

“Your face, that looks like you’re about to open your throat in the street. You’re shaking like a leaf, Orhan. Stop. Try to pull yourself together a bit. Please.” Darath took Orhan’s hands. “Please, Orhan. Try to look like you think we might survive.”

And in through the gates of the palace, where once he and Darath had marched with a troop of men behind them to save the Empire from decay. Up flights of marble stairs, through wide corridors painted with flowers, past open doorways giving on to empty dusty rooms. Past the hallway off to Orhan’s suite as Nithque.

Yesterday. He was last here yesterday. It felt like a thousand years.

The doors to the throne room were closed as they always were. Beautiful new carved cedar wood, still with the slight smell of metal and glue from when they were made. Men and women danced beneath a golden sunrise, trees spread forth cooling branches, birds sang in a hymn to the dawn. Eyes and faces peered from the borders. Dead bodies piled invisible just off scene. Great Tanis. Great Tanis. Ah, God, Great Lord, be merciful. Help me, please. Be kind.

“Stop.” Darath squeezed his hand. “Breathe. You’re trembling.”

The doors opened. Smooth and slow. There beyond the blaze of lamplight. So bright there were no shadows. Walls of gemstones dazzling to the eye. Confusing, like stepping into pure colour. Patterns that made no sense, that moved and shifted until they had no ending, things moving in them, never quite visible, too many angles, too few, walls and floor and ceiling all the same, no depth, no space in the world. Walking forward felt like falling. Or climbing. Walking upside down. The room was huge as the space between the heavens. Flat and tiny like the page of a book.

Orhan had seen it built. Agreed its design principles. Argued with the craftsmen over the price. He’d watched a boy of six stick tiny tiles down into wet mortar, his face screwed up, already half blind. Like the doors, it still smelled faintly of glue and hot metal and men’s hands. His skin crawled. Cold sweat running down his clothes. Utter terror as he stepped forward. This room, this room is the power of life and death and the God. The centre of the world.

At the end of the room, floating in the jewels, the great golden throne. Hard to look at, like it had no shape. But the eyes were pulled to it, even as the patterns moved. Painful. It hurt to look. It hurt to look away. The greatest power in this dying dreaming mummified dust city. The centre of the centre of the world.

“You are dismissed as Nithque,” the Emperor had said to him in this room yesterday. “I do not believe these stories. Of course I do not. But I cannot have you as my Nithque, now, even so. Pray to the God that there is nothing more.” And all his hopes in ashes, there, in those words, everything that he had tried to do, all his crimes for naught.

Darath and Orhan knelt. Darath bent his body forward, awkwardly angled, back curved. Orhan knelt upright, back perfectly straight but head deeply bent. Like a man offering up his neck to the blade. One of only two men who had the right to kneel upright before the Asekemlene Emperor, the Eternal, the Ever Living, the radiant dawn light of the Sekemleth Empire of the Golden City of Sorlost.

The other man was March Verneth’s heir.

Everything seemed designed so neatly to remind them all of everything.

Orhan held the formal pose of his status a moment longer, then prostrated himself fully, face flat on the floor. Stronger smell of glue and workmen’s bodies. The sharp cold stones pressed on his forehead and nose.

Silence. Dark before his eyes, sparks of colour from the gems as the lamps burned. He could feel Darath beside him. Uncomfortable, unpleasant pose. Still as statues, and his heart pounding and his head hurting and the fear and shock thrumming through him like the beat of a deep drum. Yesterday, he’d last been here. Yesterday. It’s just a room, he thought. He’s just a man. I almost succeeded in killing him. I saw this room in blood and flame. The gems were cutting into his knee caps. Darath shifted, trying to hold still. I’ll have the marks of diamond tiles on my forehead, Orhan thought suddenly, when if ever I’m bid to rise. God’s knives, whatever possessed me? Why didn’t I choose carpet, or Chathean seamarble, or a layer of smooth cool beaten gold? To be condemned to the fire with the marks of floor tiles embossed on my face …

The Emperor said, “Raise your heads,” in his thin voice.

“March started it!” Orhan wanted to scream. “He tried to kill me first! I didn’t know about the boy! I didn’t know!” He pushed himself up carefully back to kneeling. Heard Darath’s knees creak. The Emperor sat on his throne looking down at them. A youngish man with a puffy face and a puffy stomach, dressed in black that drained the colour from his skin. Orhan kept his eyes fixed carefully on the bones of his eternal neck. Never look at his face. Never. Apart from that one mad night. “I didn’t know they were led by a demon!” he wanted to scream. “Tam strung me along! I didn’t know! I didn’t know! I did it to save the city! I thought it was for the best!”

“The Lord of the Rising Sun. The Lord of All That Flowers and Decays.” The thin voice paused a moment. “I did not summon Lord Vorley, I think.”

Darath said, “My Lord Emperor, light of all the world, glory of the Empire, radiance of the dawn that sweeps away the dark of night. You did not. But Lord Emmereth’s business … is my own.”

“Is it?” Orhan could feel the Imperial eyes tracing between them.

“Yes, My Lord. It is.” The Emperor was eternally alone, without wife or child or parent or lover. And so in all his thousand thousand years of living, he would never understand love, or companionship, or loyalty to one’s heart.

Pitiable, then, Orhan thought. So raw and lonely. I have Darath. My sister. Bil. My son. Even Amrath seems to have found his Eltheia, unfortunate though that may be for Darath and myself.

“Very well, then. You may even be right.” The Emperor made a gesture. A pause, then the sound of footsteps approaching across the jewelled floor. Walking slowly. The click of heels on the gems. The Imperial guards behind the throne shifted very slightly. Tensed. A figure came down to kneeling on the other side of him, slowly and uncomfortably, with a creak of knees. Orhan could not move his head to look at the new-comer, visible only as a flickering of gold and scarlet in the corner of his eye. But it was obvious who it must be.

“Raise your head.”

Eloise Verneth did so, awkwardly poised in a deep bow. Darath’s knees creaked again.

“My Lord Emperor, eternal glory of our eternal city, joy of the Empire, the dawn sun before whom the world turns its face in joy.” Eloise’s voice was afraid.

“Lady Verneth. Lord Emmereth assured me only yesterday of his shock and grief at your son’s untimely death. Lord Emmereth sadly agreed that he could no longer continue in his role of Nithque. The city is in turmoil, filled with vile lies. You asked me to dismiss him. I dismissed him. I had ordered you both to behave yourselves. I had believed this business at least was at an end. You told me it would be at an end.”

One should not tremble at a thin petulant voice saying such things.

Eloise shuddered. Her hands twisted against her dress. “My Lord Emperor … I …” She sounded genuinely, deeply afraid. “Concerning … what happened today, my heart grieves for Lord Emmereth, rejoices that Lady Emmereth and her child live. I give thanks to Great Tanis for His mercy.” And she did, indeed, Orhan thought, she did sound grieved. The note of fear dropped for a moment. “Given that I know, better than any, deeply and painfully and raw in my heart, what it is to mourn a child’s death.”

At least your child had forty years of life behind him, Orhan almost thought. The room fell silent. Darath’s knees creaked. Everybody weighing up everything, the Emperor trying to think where to go.

Eloise was weeping. Orhan saw that from the far corner of his eye, the tears wet on her face. The Emperor saw it, he thought. The Emperor was frightened by her tears. By the love and grief in this room.

The Emperor said carefully, “Lord Emmereth and Lord Vorley rescued the Empire from great peril. Far greater, it now seems, than even they knew. We all owe them thanks and praise. Your son, Lady Verneth, began this, I believe. I was displeased by his actions then. I am equally displeased by what has happened now.”

Eloise seemed to flinch. “My Lord Emperor …”

“Lady Verneth. Your son’s death was unfortunate. It was deeply”—the head turning towards Orhan—“deeply to be regretted. I mourn for your loss, and your grandchildren’s. I fervently hope such a thing will not occur again. As I told Lord Emmereth only yesterday. Lord Emmereth’s household has now also been the victim of a cowardly outrage. This too I fervently hope will not occur again. Am I clear?”

You hope? “Thank you, My Lord,” Orhan said loudly. Trying to keep the tremor from his voice. “I fervently hope the same, and am certain Great Tanis will hear us and so grant us our hopes.”

“Thank you, My Lord Emperor,” said Darath. “I am assured Lord Tanis will hear us and feel moved to grant us peace. We mourn Lady Verneth’s loss, and Lord Emmereth’s, and rejoice that you pray such a thing shall not befall us again. You grant us the gift of peace, for the God will grant your prayers.”

“Thank you, My Lord Emperor,” said Eloise. “I am certain that you are right in all that you pray for.” She seemed almost confused. “Peace in which to raise my grandchildren. One of them so newly wedded. That is all I ask. Peace and safety for my grandchildren and their children after them.”

“A blessing, that he lived long enough to see them begun,” said Darath. “An honour, to share the wedding rites with him as bride and groom’s kin. A tragedy, that he did not live long enough to see these hopes realized.”

These absurd rituals. Twisting, writhing games. They talk like a man farting in his sleep, the great families. As Orhan had once overhead Janush say.

The Emperor made another gesture, nodded his head almost imperceptibly at Eloise. She bowed down, rose, vanished backwards out of Orhan’s vision. He heard her footsteps slow and awkward as she walked backwards to the door. A long silence while they all waited. A big room, bigger even than you’d think until you had to wait through someone formally walking out. Finally the doors must have closed. The Emperor moved again, Orhan saw him swallow, the knob at the base of the Imperial throat jumping. Site of a man’s soul, the Chatheans believed.

His knees were aching so badly. Gemstones so hard on his shins. Poor Darath’s back must be near breaking. Trying to keep looking at the Emperor’s neckbones and not at his podgy stomach or between his Imperial legs. The Emperor made some other gesture. To Orhan’s surprise and alarm the guards trooped slowly out.

The Emperor said, “Rise.”

Orhan and Darath got up painfully. The blood rushing back into Orhan’s legs hurt. Hot sand dance from toes to knee caps, skipping across his skin. Darath’s bones cracked loud. They both kept their heads respectfully downwards, still staring with fixed attention at the Imperial neck. The Emperor swallowed and the site of his soul jumped.

“Lord Emmereth. Lord Vorley.”

“My Lord Emperor.”

“My Lord Emperor.”

Another jerk of the throat. “A letter arrived this morning. From a source of reliable information, I am told. A man in Ith who was a member of Leos Calboride’s deputation to me here. A man who was also a part of Selerie Calboride’s deputation to this new King of the White Isles. A man who swears on his life that the new Queen of the White Isles is the High Priestess of Great Tanis Who Rules All Things whose body you showed me in a silver box. He saw her close up, here and there. Says that her face would be hard to forget. And then … Lord Tardein my Nithque showed me another letter, Lord Emmereth. One now quite a few days old. From the same source. One of the Secretaries showed it to him. After he had asked for it several times.”

The blood draining from Orhan’s face. Darath shifted beside him.

Darath, of course, didn’t know about the letter Gallus had shown to Orhan.

And Orhan had ordered Gallus to burn it.

“The King of the White Isles! Here! Drew his sword on me! Claims I cowered and wept at his feet! The sacred title of the Chosen of Great Tanis, on the filthy lips of an Altrersyr demon slumped insensible in his chair! And you knew! All this time, you knew!”

Trying to find anything inside him he could speak. A rock on his tongue. A worm in his belly, gnawing at his heart. Beside him, Darath seemed to burn.

Orhan said, “My Lord Emperor, I … I did read the letter, My Lord Emperor. The … the Secretary Gallus showed it to me. He was concerned. We agreed … it was lies. Absurdities. I still … I still cannot believe. My Lord Emperor—”

The Emperor’s throat jerked again. “I could have you executed for High Treason, Lord Emmereth.”

A knife blade.

And why did he think first of the child?

“I am persuaded by Lord Tardein, however, that I should in my mercy spare you,” the Emperor said. “Lord Magreth, also, believes that it would be rash to punish you. My people need stability, as I told Lady Verneth. These claims are absurd. Lies. And even if they are not—I defied Amrath when he came for my city, did I not? Drove him off. Sent him away. I protected my people against Amrath’s army once. The doings of some petty barbarian who claims descent from him are of no concern to me or to Sorlost. Are they not? If the Altrersyr king came to my palace, he did not harm me. I defeated him. I am the Sekemleth Emperor of Sorlost and thus he failed to lay so much as a finger on me.”

Orhan bowed his head. “You defeated him indeed, My Lord Emperor.”

“You are spared, then, Lord Emmereth. In my mercy, I will spare you.” That weak, foolish, terrifying voice. “But. But. Lord Tardein and Lord Magreth, they will be watching you. I shall be watching you. Both of you.” The Emperor shifted on his throne. A new idea in his voice. His own idea, a sudden flash of Imperial brilliance, Orhan thought. “Lady Verneth will be watching you.”

Darath moved his head. The Emperor said, “Well?”

“You are glorious in your mercy, My Lord Emperor,” Orhan said.

“You are kind beyond all kindness, My Lord Emperor,” Darath said.

Orhan thought: Cam Tardein and Samn Magreth are merciful and kind beyond all things.

The Emperor said, “You will remember everything I have said to you. And you will be thankful I am a merciful man.”

They prostrated themselves again, faces pressed into the jewelled floor. Darath’s knees creaked. Orhan’s neck felt like someone was strangling him. His head was pounding, his legs shook, the sick feeling in his stomach like his entrails were full of molten lead. Silent rage radiated off Darath. Hot dry wind from which there was no possibility of relief. They remained prostrate on their faces for forever, until the Emperor bade dismissively for them to leave.

“Remember I have been kind,” the Emperor said. “The Emperor cannot be deceived, Lord Emmereth, Lord Vorley.”

Rose with another crack from Darath’s knee bones and from Orhan’s back. Walked backwards carefully, heads bent to look down at their feet. Hot sand dance down Orhan’s legs.

When they got outside the palace, Darath said, very, very slowly, “I think perhaps we need to talk, Orhan. Don’t you think?”

What could he say to that? Orhan said, very, very slowly, “Yes.” He looked away. “I’m sorry, Darath. There’s nothing else to say.”