“Who are you?” Arko asked, even though he had an inkling.
“You know who I am, Arko Hark-Wadi. I am Suten Anu. I am—or I have been—the First Ray of the Sun, right hand of Tolemy Five, the living god among men. Or I would have been, if such a person had ever existed.”
Arko nearly choked. “You’re speaking treason. Or you’re mad, one or the other. What have you done with the emperor?” he asked, though the answer hung on his lips.
The old man gave a mirthless laugh and set an overturned chair upright. He sat down on it and sighed with gratitude. “There have been many days when I wished I were mad, when I wished I could believe as everyone else does. Madness seems to be our national occupation in Sola. Sanity, on the other hand, is a tremendous weight. It’s a relief even to tell you this much: there is no emperor. There hasn’t been, not for centuries. Den was the last.” He took another deep breath and blew it out again. “You can imagine how long I’ve waited to say those words. Since my father said them to me, really.”
Arko considered the chamber, wondering if this were all some terrible joke, a diversion meant to entertain before he went to see the emperor. But no one was there—only stones, and dust, and decay.
“No one knows what happened or why the Soleri vanished,” Suten said. “There are no records or witnesses. There is only this shattered throne room. A scene of destruction preserved for each Ray to witness. We don’t know who destroyed the chamber, or how the destruction was achieved. There are no bodies, and no bones. We have only the testimony of the first Ray, Ined Anu. He was the Father Protector of the Dromus during the War of the Four, the first great revolt, when the lower kingdoms banded together and rebelled against us.
“Two hundred years ago, when Ined’s armies routed the Harkan rebels and liberated Solus at the end of the war, when the Empyreal Domain was liberated, they waited for the Soleri to return. A month passed, then another, but there was no sign of the emperor. Ined waited, but it was soon apparent that the emperor’s family was not returning, and since Ined did not know where the Soleri had gone, he could not seek them. No one knew where they hid except the Soleri themselves, and their servants, and none of them ever returned. The gods had abandoned him. But Ined Anu knew the empire needed stability after decades of war, that we needed our gods back, and so he reinstated the rule of Mithra’s children. He sealed the Shroud Wall, closed off the Empyreal Domain, and established the Ray of the Sun as a conduit to the Soleri and named himself to the post. We do not know who destroyed this chamber, perhaps it was the Harkans—it may have been burnt when the rebels arrived in Solus, but what evidence we have is conflicting and lost to time. My predecessors searched for answers, I searched for answers, but found none. Whatever secrets the Soleri had, they took with them. They are gone.”
He pushed himself up and beckoned Arko to follow him out of the throne room. “I’ll show you what is left.”
Through the centuries of dust they went, crossing through a set of double doors into a long set of rooms where lavish feasts must have once taken place, where ladies would have paraded in their richest clothing. The rooms were still full of tables where no one sat, hung with alabaster lamps that gave off no light. As he made his way, Arko stumbled over a broken sword, an upturned bowl. They passed an ancient well with its rope rotted, its handle rusted, a distant repository where scrolls rotted on aging racks.
They took a passage up a set of blackened treacherous stairs, leading to a long gallery that must have once been richly lined with carved wood. Now the panels lay on the floor in pieces, eaten by termites, by rats. They passed through bedrooms where the beds had turned to dust, the heavy woolen tapestries still hanging to warm spaces where no one slept, no one dreamed, no one made love. No sound except their own footsteps, their own breathing. The old man chortling to himself as if it were all a great joke. Perhaps it was.
But the realization hit him with the force of truth: the old man was not lying.
There was nothing here. No center to the empire. No authority. No emperor. There hadn’t been an emperor in centuries.
It was a lie, all of it. The emperor, the royal family, the empire itself … A lie.
It seemed like hours had passed before they saw daylight, but there it was up ahead—a bright ball of sunlight streaming in through an open door. The two men shaded their eyes and stepped out of the inner sanctum, back into the world above, and shut the door behind them.
Outside the inner palace, in the Empyreal Domain, there was no evidence of the emperor’s absence. The stony yards were swept clean, the trees trimmed, the flowers pruned. A gleaming temple sat hard upon the inner wall, and near it a warren of workers’ homes, and guardhouses. Everything was well kept and in order. Suten explained that the Empyreal Domain was populated entirely by men and women of the Kiltet—a service cult, one that had existed for centuries. Suten’s acolytes culled servants from the villages of Sola. It was an honor and privilege to be chosen for the role, to live behind the Shroud Wall, within the domain of the god-emperors. Like the women who had bathed Arko, the citizens of the domain were all deaf, dumb, and mute. Their tongues were cut out and they were taught neither to read or write.
The cult considered its sacrifice a divine offering, but Suten admitted outwardly that it was nothing short of barbarism. Another necessary evil, he called it. The Kiltet maintained the gardens and trails, the high walls and temple exteriors. Stable boys mucked the stalls while gardeners trimmed the hedges and gathered grain and leeks, endive and onions.
“Dear gods,” Arko murmured. “They don’t know, do they?” The sun was high in the sky. The air was quiet, the Shroud Wall blocking out the noise and chaos of the rest of the city.
“Perhaps they suspect,” Suten said, “but whom could they tell? No one can leave the domain.”
“But there must have been thieves or spies—men who scaled the wall?”
“Of course no wall is impenetrable. Over the centuries, many have tried to enter the domain, most failed, but a few have succeeded. When they crossed the boundary, they saw nothing but date palms and rye grass. One spent the night hidden among the goats before the Kiltet found them. None have found the emperor’s true domain. It is buried beneath us and the inner chambers are forbidden to the cult.”
“But they do not wait on anyone, so they must suspect something?”
“The men and women of the Kiltet believe that only ethereal servants, creatures that can bear the light of the Mithra-Sol, serve the Soleri. When your life is predicated on a series of lies, one more mistruth is easy enough to accept. I’ve lived the better part of my life propping up one lie or another.”