After the banquet he travelled with Bil back to the House of the East in the new green litter, quiet and tired in the dark. The city swirled around them, people singing and dancing and fucking in the streets. In the Court of the Fountain two men fought, white silks blossoming with blood. In the Court of the Broken Knife a woman wept beneath the faceless statue, a tiny candle flickering at her side. Bil pulled the curtains closed, and the figures became ghosts, their shouts far off.
‘It was kind of you,’ she said. ‘To come home with me.’
‘I— ’ I might go on to Darath’s house, Orhan almost said, but didn’t. Taken over an Empire, stabbed and then tortured a man he’d known since he was a child, but still couldn’t manage the full and exhausting complications of his wretched personal life. If he could just bring himself to really dislike Bil, it would be so much easier.
‘I’m sorry Sterne’s dead,’ Orhan said suddenly.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Truly?’
Bil drew herself more upright, folding her hands over her belly where the tiny child lay. ‘No. Truly, it’s horrible and I miss him. Truly, I feel utter grief at his death, and I can’t even mourn him properly, because then people will know. Truly, I hate you for getting him into things that killed him. Your lover knew what was happening and survived, and you get to sit next to him at dinner and smile at him. You sent mine to his death.’
‘Yes.’
‘But now I’m the wife of the Nithque to the Emperor, and my child will inherit wealth unbounded, and my father has finally stopped looking at me as though he wants to weep with apology every moment.’
‘Again, yes.’
The litter halted as a great crowd of revellers surged past them in the narrow street, their shapes moving like shadow puppets on the silk walls of the litter. Voices called, drunk and singing: ‘Who’s inside?’
When they heard it was Lord Emmereth, the voices took up a cheer. Bil squeaked as the litter rocked a little, people crowding close. Their guards shouted and threatened, the people cheered again and moved on.
Orhan smiled wryly. ‘I wonder how long that will last?’
He slept late the next day, like everyone else in the city apart from the wretches clearing up the mess. From the look of the crowds last night, that would be work worthy of a poem. The Song of the Red Morning, in which the poet’s hopeless love for a woman is compared to the never-ending task of shovelling filth from the city’s streets. Orhan bathed and dressed, smiling at the memory of the ragged cheers for the Emmereth name. That hadn’t been heard in Sorlost for centuries.
Back to the palace after lunch, things to arrange and rearrange. Would this get boring, turn to a yearning for his quiet life of refined pointlessness? He’d barely had a chance to read a book since that night, only endless reports. Must have been the only sober man in the city last night too.
He sat down at his desk, unrolled the map of Irlast and looked at it yet again. The Sekemleth Empire, edged in gold leaf, Sorlost a gilt blob at its centre. So pathetically small! A badly drawn dragon flapped to the east of the city, Chathe and Theme hemming them in to the west and north. Immish very large and bright, her borders already redrawn. Little room to manoeuvre, Orhan thought gloomily. The great Treasury ledgers were no better, a long list of debts, deficits and uncollected revenues exquisitely written in golden ink. Orhan’s hands traced carefully over the beautiful embossed leather of the covers: the books were reportedly bound in human skin. He opened one, took up a pen and slashed through a number of annual payments, one apparently made to himself, two to Darath. March’s stipend, for his role as ‘First Lord and Viceroy of Riva’, had better stay as it was for the moment. Orhan didn’t even know where Riva had been.
Costs, costs, more costs … How could it be so expensive to run a palace effectively inhabited by one person? Builders’ bills coming in; a load more furniture to purchase; a large number of widows’ pensions to put into payment now too. Best to keep the newly-bereaved on-side. Darath’s joke about the money-lenders came back to him: a really clever man would have got rid of all the paperwork as well as the bureaucracy, and started again with a literally blank page.
A quiet tap on the door: one of the palace secretaries, a youngish man with a narrow dark face and black hair flecked with gold, holding a large scroll.
‘My Lord Nithque.’
‘Gallus.’ Orhan couldn’t help liking the man. Efficient, helpful, bright, good-looking, cynical.
‘The letter to the Immish High Council, My Lord.’
Orhan took the scroll and unrolled it. Beautifully written, the seal of the Empire set in gold on the bottom, so heavy it almost tore at the silver tissue it was written on. ‘That was quick work,’ he said approvingly. Scanned over the text. All correct, and the man had tidied up his syntax in a couple of places where he’d struggled to find the right words.
‘I’ll get the Emperor to sign it as soon as he’s awake.’ Which wouldn’t be for hours. ‘No, wait, I’ll sign it myself.’ A clear signal of a new regime, changes. Strength. ‘Then it needs to go by fast courier to Alborn.’
It was a letter of formal apology. The Sekemleth Empire held Immish in no way responsible for the recent outrageous events against the life of the Eternal and Ever Living Emperor and the High Priestess of the Lord of Living and Dying, Great Tanis Who Rules All Things, and had been assured the High Council was doing all it could to root out the conspirators clearly active within her borders. Any hostilities expressed by the subjects of the Sekemleth Empire against Immish persons or their property were purely the private actions of a people grieving and enraged by the attempt on the life of their beloved Emperor and the attack on the Temple of their God, and should in no way be taken as suggesting an official hardening of the Empire’s relations with Immish. No compensation would therefore be payable. The Ever Living Emperor did, however, express sorrow for any individual’s losses. As no official action had or was being taken against any citizen of Immish, any goods and possessions left abandoned in the city of Sorlost or its environs were considered forfeit and rendered the possession of the Imperial Treasury.
‘It’s quite … strong,’ Gallus said as he took the letter and sealed it.
Orhan stamped it with the Imperial crest of a winged lion. ‘It’s meant to be strong. But if you read it carefully, there’s nothing Immish can actually object to. Their assassins did try to kill our Emperor and bring down our city.’ The scope of that lie in itself, he hoped, sent some kind of a signal: the Sekemleth Empire was tired of petty games and internal intrigues.
Gallus nodded thoughtfully. ‘I’ll send two couriers, My Lord. Good horses. I know the men to choose.’
Orhan smiled. ‘Good.’
Gallus’s eyes flicked to the books on the table. ‘The Treasury ledgers, My Lord?’
‘Indeed. Remarkably depressing reading. The recent entries have seen a marked decline in the quality of the handwriting, too.’
Gallus paused for a moment, then said quietly, ‘If My Lord wishes … I can help him with where the money is going. Who some of the payments are to. Which are more necessary than others.’