The Steel Remains

Menkarak exploded. “Enough! She’s an infidel, a faithless stone-worshipping northerner who would not convert when the hand of the Revelation was extended to her in friendship, and who persists in her stubborn unbelief deep within our borders. The evidence is plain—she has even torn the kartagh from her garb to blind the eyes of the faithful she dwells among. She is steeped in deceit.”

“Well now, that is a crime, Archeth,” Jhiral said reasonably. “And crimes are usually committed by those with criminal inclination. Are you sure that this woman had nothing to do with the raid?”

Archeth hesitated. “There’s no evidence to co

“Yet Pashla Menkarak here says you incited her to perform outlandish rites on the bluff overlooking the town.”

“Well.” She affected an icy disdain. “His holiness was not actually present when we went to the bluff, my lord. So it’s hard to see how he could know. Perhaps he suffers from an overactive imagination.”

“You blackened whore!”

And the world seemed to rock briefly on some unseen axis around her. The krinzanz slugged in her veins, pounded for release. Her palms twitched. Almost, her knives were in her hands.

But she heard the rustling murmurs run through the courtiers as well, saw the way even the urbane Jhiral blinked, and she knew Menkarak had overreached himself. Knew that in some hard-to-define fashion she’d won whatever ritualized combat Jhiral had wanted to see here.

She went in for the kill.

“It’s also hard,” she said evenly. “To imagine where his holiness learned his court ma

From among the crowd on the right hand of the throne, a senior invigilator detached himself and came forward to Menkarak’s side. He took the younger man’s arm, but Menkarak shook it off angrily.

“This woman,” he began.

But Jhiral had had enough, at least for one day. “This woman is a valued adviser to the court,” he said coldly. “And you have just cast aspersions on her character that may require answer before a magistrate. You came highly recommended, Pashla Menkarak, but you disappoint me. I think you had better retire.”

For one insane moment, it looked as if Menkarak might defy the Emperor’s command. Archeth, watching keenly, saw something in his eyes that was at best poorly moored to any sense of self-preservation. She recalled Shanta’s words to her on the ridge overlooking Khangset. They say it’s a whole new breed coming through the religious colleges now. Hard-line faith. She wondered if that included aspiration to martyrdom, something the Revelation had flirted with on and off in the past but hadn’t seen much of recently.

The senior invigilator muttered intensely at his colleague’s ear and his fingers sank into Menkarak’s arm just above the elbow, this time with talon-like tenacity. Archeth saw the moment pass, saw the defiance in Menkarak’s eyes go out like a doused campfire. The younger invigilator went down on one knee, perhaps forced there by the clawed grip on his arm. He bowed his head.

“My deepest apologies, majesty.” The words didn’t quite emerge from between clenched teeth, but the tone was ragged—Menkarak sounded like a man slightly out of breath. Archeth surprised herself with a sudden spurt of fellow feeling for the man. She knew well enough the greasy, soiled feeling behind that bent knee and struggling voice. “If my zeal to serve the Revelation has in any way offended you, I beg your indulgence for my lack of courtesy.”

Jhiral played it for all it was worth. He sat forward, rubbed at his chin in kingly reflection. Assumed a stern expression.

“Well, Menkarak, that indulgence is not really mine to give.” A blatant lie—in the context of the throne room, all and any failure in decorum was a direct insult to the Emperor, whether he was present or not. “Your offensive comments were, after all, to my adviser here. Perhaps you could abase yourself to her instead.”

More grabbed-breath gasps around the hall. The senior invigilator looked startled. Menkarak’s head came up out of the bow in disbelief. Jhiral held the moment like a long note on the horse bugle he was famed for playing with such virtuoso skill. Held it, expanded it.

And let it collapse.

“Well, no. Maybe not. That’d be extreme, I suppose. Perhaps, then, you could just take your disagreeable presence somewhere it won’t offend again.” Jhiral nodded at the senior invigilator, voice hardening. “Get him out of my sight.”

The senior invigilator was only too happy to comply. He practically dragged Pashla Menkarak back to his feet and then, bowing repeatedly, away down the hall to the doors at the far end. Jhiral watched them out, then he rose without ceremony—a minor breach of etiquette that his father, too, had been fond of using to upset the court—and raised his voice to cover the whole throne room.

“Leave us. I will speak to Archeth Indamaninarmal alone.”

It took a minute or less to clear everyone out. One or two hung back, throwing curious glances at the throne; there were a few men among them whose concerns ran a little deeper than palace sinecure, but they were a minority, wi

Faileh Rakan had not moved, awaiting direct command from his Emperor as befitted his rank among the Throne Eternal. And it seemed Mahmal Shanta wasn’t going to be sent home, either—he’d begun to back away, but Jhiral caught his eye and made a tiny beckoning gesture with a cupped hand.

The brush and rustle of expensive clothing faded into the hall outside; the doors banged closed. Quiet settled into the throne room. Jhiral gusted a long, theatrically world-weary sigh.

“See, that’s what I’ve got to contend with these days. These new graduates from the Citadel, I’m going to have to do something about them.”

“Only give the order, majesty,” said Rakan grimly.

“Yes, well, maybe not right now. I’ve no desire for that kind of bloodbath in the run-up to the Prophet’s birthday.”

That’s right, my lord, we had better avoid a bloodbath. Krinzanz pushed the words forward on her tongue; it was a conscious effort to hold them back. Not least because, given the choice, the vast peasant mass of the Yhelteth faithful might just decide that fuck it, they’ve had enough, they’ll damn well take fanatical adherence to the tenets of the Revelation over venal exploitation of the throne and top-down decadence. Give it a whirl and see if it doesn’t deliver for them.

And when it doesn’t, of course, it’ll be too fucking late.

She remembered street battles in Vanbyr, the advancing lines of imperial halberdiers, the screams of the ill-equipped rebels as they broke and were butchered. The shattered homes of collaborators and the lines of shaven-headed captives afterward. The shrieks of women dragged out of line at random and raped to death by the side of the road. The ditches piled with corpses.

After the savagery of E

She rode through Vanbyr and tasted her own lie like the ashes in the air.

And now here was Jhiral, contemplating the same thing in his own capital.

“Perhaps, my lord, we’d do well to analyze the new tendencies in the Citadel and aim to block them at a legislative—”