‘We’ll be splitting into the different squadrons, taking different routes in. We leave the tents here.’ There was a chorus of half-ironic cheers. ‘If we can come back for them, we will. I’d like to come out the way we came in to pick them up. But the payment includes money for new.
‘If anyone is caught, you’re on your own. You’re a small band of labourers looking for work in the city. Villagers turfed off your land by your local bigwig and thinking the streets of the Golden Empire are still paved with gold. Thieves. Murderers. Wandering bloody musicians for all I care. What matters is that you’re alone, and know nothing about any other groups of men on the roads. Got it?’
The men nodded, rumbled acknowledgement. Skie dismissed them and tramped back to his tent, signalling to the squadron leaders to join him. The men fell to sorting and stowing the gear, organizing small travel packs, engaging in a final buying, selling and bartering of oddments and goods. A large pit was dug in the sand. It was carefully lined with the tent cloths, then the tent poles were carefully arranged above. Skie’s tent and its meagre contents went in last, before another layer of tent cloth and a final covering of sand. A stone was placed on top as a marker.
Marith thought: it looks like a grave.
‘We’ll never come back here to get it, of course,’ said Alxine cheerfully. ‘And even if we do, some bastard will be bound to have moved the stone. But it keeps you hopeful, pretending we’ll be picking them up again anytime soon.’
They began moving out, very small against the great expanse of desert. Heading down into the farmlands, the townlands, the fields and houses, the human world.
Heading down into the great city, the undying, the eternal, the city of dreams, Sorlost the Golden, the most beautiful, the unconquered, the unconquerable, the decaying capital of the decayed remnant of the richest empire the world had ever known.
Marith rubbed his eyes, and sighed, and walked slowly. Tobias walked slowly beside him, watching his face.
Somewhere far off in the distance, something that might have been a hawk screamed.
Chapter Four
The Imperial Palace of the Asekemlene Emperor of the Sekemleth Empire of the eternal city of Sorlost the Golden is clad in white porcelain. Its towers are gilt in silver, its great central dome in gold. Its windows are mage glass, shining like sunrise. Its courtyards are hung with yellow satin, its balconies are carved of gems. Its gates are ivory and whalebone and onyx and red pearl. Its walls enclose lush silent gardens of lilac trees where green flightless birds dart and sing. Tall marble columns create cool loggias, opening onto perfumed lakes to create shaded bathing places of pale sand and dark water, purple irises and silver fish. Lawns run down to tangled bushes with flowers that smell like human skin. Apples and apricots and cimma fruit grow in profusion, perfect and uneaten; when the trees are not in season, servants in black turbans hang brightly painted wooden fruits from their boughs. The fruits were jewelled, once, but these were sold or stolen long ago. It is commonly known as the Summer Palace, though there is no Winter Palace and never has been one. Sorlost is a city without seasons: perhaps some ancient incarnation of the Emperor in the youth of empire once thought it fitting of his status to make a differentiation that is not needed and cannot indeed exist. Perhaps a Winter Palace was planned, once, before time passed too quickly and money was borrowed that could not be repaid and building works were delayed and abandoned and forgotten, in the richest empire the world has ever known.
A beautiful building. Sorrow radiates off it, and corruption, and hope. The centre and symbol of an empire of dreaming, where men live in the dry desert and count their meaning only in gold. An absurdity. Of course an absurdity. An Emperor who rules forever, in a palace built on sand. A thing sacred to eternity, dead and rotted, encrusted with dust. A hive of insects crawling to achieve divinity, the sublime pointlessness of absolute rule. No one cares. No one wonders. Time ceases. Dust settles. The Empire and the Emperor and their servants go on.
This is Sorlost, the eternal, the Golden City. The most beautiful, the first, the last. The undying. The unconquered. The unconquerable.
The mummified heart of an empire of dust and desert villages, half forgotten by half the world.
In a small room at the top of one of the silver towers, two men were talking. The room was furnished in green and silver, small round windows giving a view of the whole sprawling city beneath. The pale evening sky already lit with the first stars. In the west the sky would be fading crimson. Such melancholy! And always a perilous time, this borderline between the realms of life and death. The younger of the two men shivered despite the heat. A rational man, but he hated the dusk. A bell tolled, the room sat still and tense, then the bell tolled again. Night comes, he thought. We survive. The room seemed immediately darker. Shadows falling in the corners, twisting on the green-grey walls.
On one wall, a map caught the lamplight, the world picked out in a mosaic of tiny gems. The Sekemleth Empire gold and yellow diamonds. Immish looming over them to the east, its borders shiny bright. Allene to the south smiling peacefully. Chathe and Theme squatting west and north. Immier a sad empty whiteness, Ith in shadow, the Wastes done in floor scrapings, Illyr carefully hidden behind a lamp sconce. The rich terrifying lumps of the White Isles at the far eastern edge glaring over at them all.
The younger man looked at the map. Shivered again. Looked away.
A joke, that this room was where they were meeting. That damned map staring at them.
‘A cup of wine?’ the older man asked him. Without waiting for an answer, he poured pale wine from a crystal bottle into two porcelain cups. He was pale like the wine and dressed in silk. His hair was grey and receding, thin curls clinging to the sides of his head; his eyes pouched and tired, his nose long and broad. His hands were delicate, small in proportion to his wide body, bitten fingertips above several large old rings. His hands shook slightly as he placed the bottle back on the table.
The younger man was dark-skinned and slender, his hair long and black, his eyes brown. He took a small sip from his cup. ‘It’s an excellent wine,’ he said.
‘You think so? I personally find it a little dry. It’s fifty years old, the estate no longer produces, I’m afraid. The cask was originally broached for the Emperor’s birthday, but he didn’t like it. Bad taste, I’d say. But what does one expect from a man brought up by fishmongers?’
‘That his adviser should have corrected his tastes better?’
‘How can they? He knows everything about taste, having such a superb knowledge of all possible varieties of dried fish.’