"Lord of Emperors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)

PART II THE NINTH DRIVER

CHAPTER VII

Men and women were always dreaming in the dark. Most of the night's images fell away with sunrise, or before if they harried the sleeper awake. Dreams were longings, or warnings, or prophecies. They were gifts or curses, from powers benevolent or malign, for all knew-whatever the faith into which they had been born-that mortal men and women shared the world with forces they didn’t understand.

There were many who plied a trade in city or countryside telling those troubled by visions what they might signify. A small number saw certain kinds of dream as actual memories of a world other than the one into which the dreamer and the listener had been born to live and die, but this was treated in most faiths as a black heresy.

As winter turned towards spring that year, a great many people had dreams they were to remember.

A moonless night, late in winter. At a watering place in the far south, where camel routes met in Ammuz, near to where men had decreed a border with Soriyya-as if the shifting, blowing sands knew of such things-a man, a leader of his tribe, a merchant, awoke in his tent and dressed himself and went out into the dark.

He walked past tents where his wives and children and his brothers and their wives and children slept, and he came, still half asleep but strangely disturbed, to the edge of the oasis, a place where the last of the green gave way to the endless sands.

He stood there under the arc of the heavens. Under so many stars it seemed impossible to him, suddenly, to comprehend their number in the sky above men and the world. His heart, for no reason he could understand, was beating rapidly. He had been in a deep sleep moments ago. Was still uncertain how and why he had come to be out here now. A dream. He had had a dream.

He looked up again. It was a mild night, generous, spring coming. Summer to follow: the burning, killing sun, water a longing and a prayer. A trace of a breeze flicked and eddied in the soft darkness, cool and reviving on his face. He heard the camels and the goats behind him, and the horses. His herds were large; he was a fortune-favoured man.

He turned and saw a young boy, one of the camel herders, standing not far away: on watch, for the moonless nights were dangerous. The boy's name was Tarif. It was a name that would be remembered, become known to chroniclers of generations yet unborn because of the exchange of words that followed.

The merchant drew a breath, adjusting the drape of his white robes. Then he gestured for the boy to approach and he instructed him, speaking carefully, to find the merchant's full-brother Musafa in his tent. To wake him, with apologies, and advise him that as of the sun's rising Musafa was to take command of and responsibility for their people. That he was particularly charged, in the name and memory of their father, to be mindful of the well-being of his absent brother's wives and children.

"Where are you going, lord?" Tarif asked, becoming immortal with a handful of words. A hundred thousand children would bear his name in years to come.

"Into the sands, "said the man, whose name was Ashar ibn Ashar. "I may be some time."

He touched the boy on the forehead, and then turned his back on him, on the palm trees and night flowers and water, the tents and animals and movable goods of his people, and he walked out alone under the stars.

So many of them, he thought again. How could there be so many? What could it mean that there were so many stars? His heart was full as a water gourd with their presence overhead. He felt, in fact, like speaking a prayer, but something stopped him. He made a decision that he would be silent, instead: open to what lay all about him and above, not imposing himself upon it. He took a fold of the garment he wore and drew it deliberately across his mouth as he went.

He was gone a very long time, had been given up for dead by the time he returned to his people. He was greatly changed by then.

So, too, not long after, was the world.

The third time Shaski ran away from home that winter he was found on the road west out of Kerakek, moving slowly but with resolution, carrying a pack much too large for him.

The patrolling soldier from the fortress who brought him back volunteered, amused, to beat the child properly for his mothers, in the obvious absence of a paternal hand.

The two women, anxious and flustered, hastily declined, but did agree that some measure of real chastisement was required. Doing this once was a boy's adventure, three times was something else. They'd attend to it themselves, they promised the soldier, and apologized again for the trouble he'd been caused.

No trouble, the man said, and meant it. It was winter, a bought peace silencing the long border all the way from Ammuz and Soriyya to Moskav in the freezing north. The garrison in Kerakek was bored. Drinking and gambling could only amuse one so much in a place as hopelessly remote as this was. You weren't even allowed to ride out and chase nomads or find a woman or two in one of their camps. The desert people were important to Bassania, it had been made explicitly, endlessly clear More important, it seemed, than the soldiers themselves. Pay was late, again.

The younger of the two women was dark-eyed, quite pretty, if distraught at the moment. The husband, as noted, was away. It seemed reasonable to contemplate a return visit, just to make sure everything was all right. He could bring a toy for the lad. One learned these tricks with the young mothers.

Shaski, standing between his two mothers just inside the fence around their small front yard, looked up stonily at the man on the horse. Earlier that morning, laughing, the soldier had held him by his ankles upside-down in the road until-blood rushing dizzily to his head-Shaski had named the house where he lived. Told to say thank you now, he did so, his voice flat. The soldier left, though not before smiling at his mother Jarita in a way Shaski didn't like.

When questioned by his mothers in the house after-a catechism that included a vigorous shaking and many tears (from them, not him)-he simply repeated what he'd said the other times: he wanted his father. He was having dreams. His father needed them. They needed to go to where his father was.

"Do you know how far that is?" his mother Katyun shrieked, rounding upon him. This was the worst part, actually: she was normally so calm. He didn't like it at all when she was upset. It was also a difficult question. He didn't really know how far away his father was.

"I took clothes," he said, pointing at his pack on the floor. "And my second warm vest you made me. And some apples. And my knife in case I met someone bad."

"Perun defend us!" his mother Jarita exclaimed. She was dabbing at her eyes. "What are we to do? The boy isn't eight years old!"

Shaski wasn't sure what that had to do with anything.

His mother Katyun knelt down on the carpet before him. She took his hands between her own. "Shaski, my love, little love, listen to me. It is too far away. We do not have flying creatures to carry us, we have no spells or magic or anything to take us there."

"We can walk."

"We can't, Shaski, not in this world." She was still holding his hands. "He doesn't need us now. He is helping the Kings of Kings in a place in the west. He will meet us in Kabadh in the summer. You will see him then."

They still didn't understand. It was strange how grown people could fail to understand things, even though adults were supposed to know more than children and kept telling you that.

He said, "Summer is too long from now, and we mustn't go to Kabadh. That is the thing we have to tell father. And if he is too far to walk, let's get horses. Or mules. My father got a mule. I can ride one. We all can. You can take turns holding the baby when we ride."

"Holding the baby?" his mother Jarita exclaimed. "In the Lady's holy name, you want us all to do this mad thing?"

Shaski looked at her. "I said that. Before."

Really. Mothers. Did they ever listen? Did they think he wanted to do this alone? He didn't even have any idea where he was going. Only that his father had gone one way on the road out of town, so he had gone that way himself, and the place he was at was called Sarantum, or nearly that, and it was far. Everyone kept saying that. He had understood that he might not be there by nightfall, walking alone, and he didn't like the dark now, when his dreams came.

There was a silence. His mother Jarita slowly dried her eyes. His mother Katyun was looking at him strangely. She had let go of his hands. "Shaski," she said finally, "tell me why we mustn't go to Kabadh."

She had never asked him that before.

What he learned, as he explained to his mothers about the dreams and how he felt certain things, was that other people didn't. It confused him, that the pull to go away, and the other feeling-the shape of a black cloud hovering whenever they said the name Kabadh-was not something either of his mothers shared, or even understood.

It frightened them, Shaski saw, and that scared him. Looking at their rigid expressions when he finished speaking, he finally began to cry, his face crumpling, knuckles rubbing at his eyes. "I'm- I'm sorry, "he said. "For run- running away. I'm sorry."

It was seeing her son in tears-her son who never cried-that made Katyun realize, finally, that there was something very large at work here even if it was beyond her grasp. It was possible that the Lady Anahita had come to Kerakek, to this insignificant fortress town at the desert's edge and had laid her finger on Shaghir, their darling child, Shaski. And the Lady's touch could mark a human being. It was known.

"Perun guard us all, "Jarita murmured. Her face was white. "May Azal never know this house."

But he did, if what Shaski had told them was in any way the truth. The Enemy knew Kerakek already. And even Kabadh. A cloud, a shadow, Shaski had said. How should a child know of shadows like that? And Rustem, her husband, needed them in the west. More north than west, actually. Among the infidels in Sarantium, who worshipped a burning god in the sun. Something no one who knew the desert could ever do.

Katyun drew a breath. She knew there was a trap here for her, something seductive and dangerous. She didn't want to go to Kabadh. She had never wanted to go there. How could she survive in a court? Among the sort of women who were there? Even the idea kept her up at night, trembling, sick to her stomach, or brought dreams, shadows of her own.

She looked at Jarita, who had been so very brave, hiding the blackness of her grief at the tidings of Rustem's elevation in caste, his summons to the court. The summons that meant they were to find her another husband, another home, another father for Inissa, little Issa.

Jarita had done something Katyun didn't think she herself could have done. She had let Rustem, the husband she loved, go on his journey thinking she accepted this, that it even pleased her, so that his heart might not be troubled in the wake of such great tidings as he had received.

In Perun's name, the things that women did.

It didn't please her. It was tearing her apart. Katyun knew it. She could hear Jarita in the dark at night, both women awake in the small house. Rustem ought to have seen through the deception, but men-even clever men-tended to miss these things, and he'd been so greatly caught up in healing the king, and then the caste elevation and his mission to the west. He had wanted to believe Jarita's deception, and so he had. And in any case, it was not as if a man could refuse the King of Kings.

Katyun looked from Shaski to Jarita. Rustem had told her the night before he left that she would have to do the thinking for the family, that he was relying on her. Even the students were gone, to other masters. She was on her own with this, as with all things now.

The baby cried from the other room, waking from her afternoon sleep, swaddled in her wooden cradle near the fire.

Kerakek. Kabadh. The Shadow of Black Azal. The finger of the Lady touching them. Shaski's…feelings about these things. An understanding coming, late, of how he had always been… different from the other children they knew. She had seen it, actually, had resisted. Perhaps in the same way that Rustem had resisted knowing how Jarita really felt: wanting to believe she was happy, though it might wound his pride. Poor Jarita, so delicate and so beautiful. Sometimes there could be flowers in the desert, but not in many places and not for very long.

Sarantium. Even larger than Kabadh, they said. Katyun bit her lip.

She hugged Shaski and sent him to the kitchen to ask the cook for something to eat. He hadn't had his breakfast yet, had left the house in the dark while they slept. Jarita, still white-faced as a priestess on a night of the Sacred Flame, went to the baby.

Katyun sat alone, thinking hard. Then she summoned a servant and sent him to the fortress with a request that the garrison commander be so good as to honour them with a visit when time allowed.

Boredom. A sense of injustice. A peace bought with gold. They all came together for Vinaszh, son of Vinaszh, in that winter of bitterness.

He never used to find it tedious here in Kerakek. He liked the desert, the south: it was what he knew, the world of his childhood. He enjoyed the visits from the camel-riding nomads, going out to drink palm wine with them in their tents, the slow gestures, silences, words doled out as carefully as water. The people of the sand were important here, buffers against the Sarantines, trading partners bringing spices and gold from the distant, fabled south on the ancient camel routes. And they were advance troops in any war.

Of course some of the desert wanderers were allied with Sarantium and traded there… which was why it mattered so much to keep those tribes that favoured Bassania happy. The soldiers didn't always understand that, but Vinaszh had grown up in Qandir, even farther south: the nuances of Ammuz and Soriyya and the nomads were no mystery to him. Or less of a mystery than they were to most men: no one could truthfully say they understood the peoples of the sand.

He had never nourished visions of himself in a more prominent place or role. He was a garrison commander in a world he comprehended well enough. It had been, until recently, a life that pleased him.

But this winter the court had come to Kerakek, and a good part of it-with the king himself-had lingered as an arrow wound healed, and the ripples that followed upon the deaths (some deserved, some not) of princes and royal wives subsided.

Vinaszh, who had played no small part in the events of a terrible day, had found himself altered after Shirvan and the court left. The fortress seemed empty to him. Bleak and echoing. The town was what it always had been… a dusty, eventless cluster of little homes. And the wind kept blowing from the desert. He had dreams in restless nights.

A disquiet had entered into the soul of Vinaszh the commander. The winter stretched like an uncrossable abyss, day passing, day passing, painfully slow, and then darkfall. The sand, which had never bothered him in his life, he now noticed all the time, everywhere, slipping through cracks in windows and under doors, into clothing, food, folds of skin, one's hair and beard, one's… thoughts.

He had begun drinking too much, starting too early in the day. He was intelligent enough to know that this was dangerous.

And it was as a consequence of all of these things that, when the doctor's servant climbed the winding path and steps up from the town and delivered that household's request for a visit when time allowed, time did allow, almost immediately.

Vinaszh hadn't the least idea what they wanted. It was a change, however something new in the blank, stolid routine of the days. That was enough. The doctor had left a while ago. He'd been planning to spend some days in Sarnica, Vinaszh seemed to remember. Depending on how lone; he'd lingered there, he might even be in Sarantium by now. The doctor's women were pretty, he recalled, both of them.

He sent the servant back with a coin and word that he'd be down the hill later in the day. As it happened, it was easy to be agreeable when the request came from the household of a man about to be elevated in caste and summoned to the royal court by the King of Kings himself. Honour beyond belief, really.

Not that Vinaszh, son of Vinaszh, had been summoned anywhere, or promoted, or honoured, or… anything at all, actually. Not that anyone in the court had paid the least attention while they were here to whose idea it had been to intervene in that mighty company and-at considerable personal risk-urge the summoning of a local physician to the king's bedside that dreadful day earlier this winter. And who had then assisted the doctor and killed a murderous prince with his own blade.

It had crossed his mind to wonder if he was being-however unfairly-punished for the flung blade that stopped a treacherous son.

It could be. No one had said this, no one had even spoken to him, but someone like the round, shrewd vizier might say that his continued existence after such a deed was-or ought to be-seen as gift enough. He had slain royalty. Blood of the Great King's blood. With a dagger drawn and thrown in the presence of the king, the sacred Brother to the Sun and Moons. And yes, yes, he had done that, but he had been ordered to be on the alert for danger when Murash came back to the room. It had been an act of absolute duty.

Was he to be abandoned, forgotten here in the desert, for having saved the life of his king?

It happened. The world of Perun and Lady could not be said to be a place where just rewards held sway. The presence of Azal the Enemy meant that this would always be so, until Time itself came to an end.

Vinaszh was a soldier. He knew this to be true. The army was rife with injustice and corruption. And civilians-perfumed, sensuous court advisers, sly and unctuous-could choose to block the paths of honest, rough soldiers for their own reasons. It was the way of things. Not that understanding this made it easier to be enduring the process, if that was what was happening.

His father had never wanted him to go into the army. Had he remained a merchant down in Qandir, none of this would ever have come into his life.

He would have sand in his wine cups and bed and wouldn't care.

Men changed, Vinaszh decided, it was as simple-and as complicated-as that. It seemed that he himself had now changed. Things happened, small events or large ones, or perhaps time passed, nothing more than that-and you woke up one morning and were different. There had probably been a time, he thought, when Murash was content to be a prince of Bassania, son of his great father.

Difficult thoughts for a soldier. It would have been better to be in the field with an enemy to face. But there was no one to fight, nothing to do, and the wind kept blowing. There was sand in his cup right now, grit in the wine.

He ought to have been recognized for what he'd done. Truly, he ought to have been.

Some time after midday he went down the hill, riding towards the doctor's house. He was received by the two women in a front room with a fireplace. The younger one was really quite lovely, very dark eyes. The older was more poised, did all of the talking, her voice modestly low. What she said, however, took Vinaszh's thoughts abruptly from his own affairs.

Fate, chance, accident? An intercession of Perun? Who would presume to say? But the simple truth was that the soldier son of a merchant from Qandir, who happened at that time to be commander of the garrison at Kerakek, was a man more than a little disposed towards accepting such things as the woman told him that winter afternoon. The nature of the world was far beyond the grasp of men, everyone knew that. And here in the south, near the desert peoples with their inscrutable tribal rites, reports like this were not unknown.

At one point they sent for the boy at his request and Vinaszh asked him some questions, then they sent him back out again. He had answered readily enough, a serious child. He was happiest in his father's empty treatment rooms now, one of the women said, almost apologetically. They allowed him to play there. He was almost eight years old they said, when Vinaszh asked.

He declined their offered wine, accepted a cup of herbal tea instead while he considered what he'd learned. The nomads had tales and names in their own languages for people such as this child might be. Vinaszh had heard such stories, even when young. His nurse had enjoyed telling them. He had seen a Dreamer himself, once, on a desert journey with his father: a glimpse, as a tent flap fell shut too slowly. A large-bodied, soft man among a lean people. No hair on his head at all. Deep, parallel scars on both cheeks, he remembered.

The woman's story, therefore, was not one he was inclined to dismiss out of hand, but aside from finding it interesting, he remained unsure of what, exactly, they expected of him, why he was being told this, and so he asked. And so they told him.

He laughed aloud, in startled dismay, then fell silent, looking from one mother's still, grave face to the other's. They meant it, he realized. They really meant it. He heard a sound: the boy was at the doorway. He hadn't gone to the treatment rooms, after all. A listening sort of child. Vinaszh had been one himself. Shaski came out when they called to him and he stood by the beaded curtain of the door, waiting. Vinaszh stared at him.

Then he looked back at the older of the two mothers, the one who'd done the talking, and said, as gently as he could, that what she asked was simply out of the question.

Why?" said the younger, pretty one, unexpectedly. "You take merchant parties west sometimes."

This was true, as it happened. Vinaszh, an honest man, and confronting attractive women with earnest, steady gazes, was compelled to agree.

He looked back at the boy. The boy was still waiting, in the doorway.

The silence was unsettling, actually. In it, Vinaszh addressed an unexpected question to himself: why, indeed? Why was it out of the question to provide them with an escort? There was no law being broken if wives wished to follow their husband on a journey. If the man was angry when they arrived that was, surely, their problem, or his. Not the escort's. Vinaszh had to assume that the doctor had left his women with sufficient finances to pay for a journey. And once they all ended up at court in Kabadh, issues of money would become trivial for this family. They might be useful people to have in his debt. No one else seemed to feel indebted to Vinaszh, after all. The commander resisted an impulse to scowl. He sipped his tea, made the mistake of looking back at the boy again. The grave, watchful face. Waiting for him. Children. The boy ought to be playing, outside or somewhere, surely.

Under any normal circumstances, Vinaszh considered, there would have been nothing he'd have wanted to do about any of this. But this winter wasn't… normal.

And the the too-obvious trust in the boy's eyes arrested his thinking. He contrasted it with his own state of mind of late. He was in danger of drinking away the reputation he'd built up for himself over the years. Bitterness could destroy a man. Or a child? He sipped his tea. The women watched him. The boy watched him.

As commander of the garrison it was within his power to assign soldiers as escorts to private parties. Merchants, usually, crossing the border with their goods in a time of peace. Peacetime didn't mean the roads were safe, of course. Normally the mercantile parties would pay for their military escort, but not invariably. Sometimes a commander had his own reasons for sending soldiers across the border. It gave restless men something to do, tested new soldiers, allowed a separation of those showing the tensions of being too much together for too long. He'd sent Nishik with the doctor, hadn't he?

The garrison commander of Kerakek didn't know-there was no reason for him to know-the arrangements proposed for the younger wife and daughter. If he had, he might not have done what he did.

Instead, he made a decision. Reversed a decision, actually. Swiftly, precise now, befitting his rank. Made a choice that might have been considered by any detached observer to be folly on a grand scale. As he spoke, both women began to cry. The boy did not. The boy went away. They heard him a little later in his father's treatment rooms.

"Perun guard us. He's packing things," the younger mother said, still weeping.

The folly of Vinaszh, son of Vinaszh, resulted, at the end of that same week, in two women, two children, a garrison commander (that was the point, after all, and his second-in-command could use the experience of a period in control), and three chosen soldiers setting off on the dusty, wind-swept road towards the border of Amoria, bound for Sarantium.

As it happened, Rustem the physician, oblivious as all travellers must be to events behind them, was still in Sarnica on the day his family set out after him. He was buying manuscripts, giving lectures, would not leave that city for another week. They weren't, in fact, very far behind him.

The plan was for the four soldiers to escort the women and children and do some inconspicuous observing of their own as they went west and north through Amoria. The physician would have to deal with his family when they reached him. It would be his task to get them all to Kabadh when the time came. And it would be the women's problem to explain their sudden presence to him. It might be amusing to see that first encounter, Vinaszh thought, riding west along the road. It was curious how much better he'd felt the moment he made the decision to leave Kerakek. The doctor's women, the child, this request-they had been a gift of sorts, he decided.

He and his three men would simply go north with this small party and turn around, but the journey, even a winter journey, would be so much better than lingering in the sand and wind and emptiness. A man needed to do something when the days darkened early and his thoughts did the same.

He would send a written report to Kabadh when they returned, containing whatever observations they had made. The journey could be couched, described, represented as something routine. Almost. He would decide later whether to mention the boy. There was no hurry with that. For one thing, the fact that such people existed didn't mean this child, Shaghir, son of Rustem, was one of them. Vinaszh had yet to be persuaded of that. Of course, if the child wasn't what his mother thought he was, then they were all making an absurd winter journey simply because a small boy missed his father and was having bad dreams because of it. Best not, for the moment, to think about that, Vinaszh decided.

That proved easy enough. The energy of travel, of the road woke dormant feelings in the commander. Some feared the open spaces, the rigours of travelling. He wasn't one of them. Setting out on a day so mild it seemed a blessing of Perun and the Lady upon the journey, Vinaszh was happy.

Shaski was very happy.

Only as they approached Sarantium, some time later, would his mood change. Never a talkative child, he'd been in the habit of singing sometimes to himself as they went along or to calm his infant sister at night. The singing stopped about a week north of Sarnica. And shortly after that the boy grew entirely silent, looking pale and unwell, though voicing no complaint. A few days later they would finally reach Deapolis on the southern bank of the famous strait and see black smoke across the water, and flames.

In Kabadh, in his glorious palace above the gardens that hung as if by miracle down along the slope to the lowest riverbed, with contrived waterfalls running through and behind the flowers, and trees growing upside-down, Shirvan the Great, King of Kings, Brother to the Sun and Moons, lay with one wife or another that winter or with favoured concubines, and his sleep was disturbed and restless, despite drinks and powders administered to him by his physicians and priestly incantations at head and foot of his bed before he retired for the night.

This had been going on for some time.

Every night, in fact, since his return from the south, where he had almost died. It was said quietly-though never in the presence of the Great King himself-that dark dreams before dawn were not infrequently an aftermath of great peril survived, a lingering awareness of a near visitation from Azal the Enemy, the touch of black wings.

One morning, however, Shirvan awoke and sat straight up in his bed, bare-chested, the mark of a fresh wound still red at his collarbone. His eyes fixed on something invisible in the air, he spoke two sentences aloud. The voting bride beside him sprang from the bed and knelt, trembling, on the richly textured carpet, naked as when she had entered the world of Perun and Azal's undying conflict.

The two men honoured with places in the king's bedchamber at night, even when he bedded a woman, also knelt, averting their eyes from the shapely nakedness of the girl on the carpet. They'd learned to ignore such sights, and to keep silent about what else they saw and heard. Or, most of what they saw and heard.

The eyes of the King of Kings had been like cold iron that morning, one of them was later to say admiringly: hard and deadly as a sword of judgement. His voice was that of the judge who weighs the lives of men when they die. It was considered acceptable to report this.

The words Shirvan spoke, and was to say again when his hastily summoned advisers met him in the adjacent room, were: "It is not to be allowed. We will go to war."

It is often the case that a decision avoided, wrestled with, provoking intense anxiety and disturbed nights, seems obvious once made. One looks back in bemusement and consternation at the long hesitation, wondering what could possibly have deferred a resolution so transparent, so evident.

It was so with the King of Kings that morning, though his advisers, not sharing his winter dreams, required matters to be put in language they understood. It was possible, of course, to simply tell them what to do without explaining, but Shirvan had reigned a long time now and knew that most men did better when they grasped certain ideas for themselves.

There were two facts, really, that compelled a war, and a third element that meant they had to do it themselves.

One: the Sarantines were building ships. Many ships. Traders to the west and spies (often the same men) had been reporting this since the beginning of autumn. The shipyards of Sarantium and Deapolis were resounding with the sounds of hammers and saws. Shirvan had heard this hammering in the darkness of his nights.

Two: the queen of the Antae was in Sarantium. A living tool in the hand of Valerius. A different kind of hammer. How the Emperor had achieved this (and Perun knew Shirvan respected the other ruler as much as he hated him) no one had been able to say, but she was there.

These things, taken together, spelled out an invasion of the west for any man who knew how to read such signs. Who could now fail to see that the vast sums of gold Valerius had paid-two instalments now-into Bassania's coffers were designed to keep the eastern border quiescent while he sent his army west?

Shirvan had taken the money, of course. Had signed and sealed the Eternal Peace, as they named it. He had his own border problems, north and east, and his own difficulties paying a restive army. What ruler did not?

But the King of Kings needed no dream-reader now to unveil for him the meaning of his nights. The charlatans might have tried to tell him the sounds of hammering, the images of fire and the restlessness flowed from the arrow wound and the poison in his neck. He knew better.

The poison that mattered had not been on his son's arrow, but was lying in wait: the venom lay in how much power Sarantium would have if Batiara fell into its grasp. And it might. It could. For the longest time he had almost wanted the Sarantines to go west, believing they would never succeed. He didn't think that any more.

The lost homeland of the Empire was fertile and wealthy-why else had the Antae tribes moved down there in the first place? If the golden Strategos, hated Leontes, could add that richness to Valerius's treasury, give him wealth and security in the west, no troops tied down in Sauradia, then…

Then how much more beleaguered would anyone sitting the throne in Kabadh feel?

It could not be allowed to unfold in that way. There was poison in all of this, deadly and absolute.

Some in that room might have hoped, wistfully, that a portion of the Sarantine money, if diverted to Moskav, could pay for a summer of unrest in the north, forcing Valerius to keep a part of his army back, undermining his invasion.

An idle thought, no more than that. The fur-clad barbarians of Moskav could as easily take the offered money and sweep down upon Mihrbor's wooden walls, within Bassania itself. They attacked when they were bored, where they chose, as they smelled weakness. There was no sense of honour, of proper conduct among those savage northerners, so sure of their safety in their wild, vast land. A bribe, an agreement would mean nothing to them.

No, if Valerius was to be impeded, they would have to do it themselves. Shirvan felt no compunction at all. No ruler who truly loved and guarded his country could be expected to be stopped in this resolve by something so trivial as a treaty of Eternal Peace.

Once a decision was made, Shirvan of Bassania was not the sort to waste time pondering such nuances.

An excuse would be created, some concocted incursion along the northern border. A Sarantine border raid from Asen. They could kill a few of their own priestly caste, burn a small temple, say the westerners had done so, breaching the sworn peace. It was the usual thing.

Asen, which had been burned and looted and bartered back and forth half a dozen times, would be the obvious target again. But there was more in Shirvan's thought, there was something new this time.

"Go farther west," the King of Kings said to his generals, in his deep, cold voice, looking at Robazes first and then the others. "Asen is nothing. A coin for exchanging. You must force Valerius to send an army. And so you will go to Eubulus itself this time, starve and batter it. And bring me back the wealth that lies within those walls."

There was a silence. There was always silence when the King of Kings was speaking, but this was different. In all their wars with Valerius and his uncle before him and Apius before him, Eubulus had never been taken or even besieged. Neither had their own great northern city of Mihrbor. The battles between Sarantium and Bassania had been entirely about gold. Border raids to north and south for plunder, ransom, money for the treasuries on each side, payment for the armies. Conquest, the sack of major cities, had never been an issue.

Shirvan looked from one of his generals to another. He knew he was forcing them to change the way they thought-always a risk with soldiers. He saw Robazes, as expected, grasp the implications first.

He said, "Remember, if they are going to Batiara, Leontes will be in the west. He will not be at Eubulus to face you. And if we draw enough soldiers from his army of invasion because they must go north to meet you instead, he will fail in the west. He may… die." He said that last very slowly, giving it time to register. They needed to understand this.

Leontes would be west. Their scourge. The too-bright image of terror in their dreams, golden as the sun the Sarantines worshipped. The military commanders of Bassania looked at each other. Fear and excitement were in the room now, a slow dawning of comprehension, first awareness of possibility.

Awareness also came, after, of certain other things. How this breaking of the peace would put those Bassanids in western lands-merchants, most of them, a handful of others-desperately at risk. But that always happened when a war began, and there weren't so many in any case. Such considerations could not be permitted to alter anything. Merchants always knew there were risks in going west (or east, for that matter, into Ispa-hani). That was why they charged so much for what they brought back, how they made their fortunes.

As Shirvan gestured his dismissal and the gathering made obeisance and began to break up, one other man did venture to speak: Mazendar the vizier, who was always licensed to do so in the presence of his king. A small, round man, his voice light and dry as the king's was grave and deep, he offered two small suggestions.

The first was about timing. "Great King, did you propose we attack before they sail west?"

Shirvan narrowed his eyes. "That is one possibility," he said carefully. And waited.

"Indeed, my dread lord, "Mazendar murmured. "I see a glimmer of your mighty thoughts. We can do that, or wait until they have set off for the west and then cross the border for Eubulus. Leontes will be pursued by fast ships with panic-stricken tidings. He may be ordered to send some of his fleet home. The remainder will feel exposed and disheartened. Or he may press on, always fearing what we do behind him. And Sarantium will feel utterly exposed. Does the King of Kings prefer that, or the other approach? His advisers await the light of his wisdom."

Mazendar was the only one of them worth listening to. Robazes could fight, and lead an army, but Mazendar had a mind. Shirvan said, gravely, "It will take us some time to assemble our army north. We will attend upon events in the west and make our decision accordingly."

"How large an army, my lord?" Robazes asked the soldier's question. He blinked in astonishment when Shirvan gave him a number. They had never sent so many men before.

Shirvan kept his expression grim and hard. People should see the countenance of the King of Kings and remember it and report it. Valerius of Sarantium was not the only ruler who could send large armies into the world. The king looked back at Mazendar. He had spoken of two suggestions.

The second concerned the queen of the Antae, in Sarantium.

Listening, the king nodded his head slowly. Was graciously pleased to agree that this proposal had virtue. Gave his consent.

Men went forth from that room. Events began to move at speed. The first signal fires were lit at darkfall that same day, sending messages of flame from hilltop to fortress tower to hilltop beyond, in all necessary directions.

The King of Kings spent much of the day with Mazendar and Robazes and the lesser generals and his treasury officials, and the afternoon in prayer before the palace's ember of the Holy Fire. At the dinner hour, he felt unwell, feverish. He spoke of this to no one, of course, but reclining upon a couch to dine he suddenly remembered-belatedly- the unexpectedly competent physician who was to be coming to Kabadh in the summer. He'd ordered the man to Sarantium in the interval, until after his necessary elevation in caste. He'd been an observing sort of man; the king had sought a way to utilize him. Kings needed to do that. Useful men had to be put to use.

Shirvan sipped at a bowl of green tea and then shook his head. The movement made him feel dizzy and so he stopped. That doctor would have left for the west already. For Sarantium itself. An unfortunate place to have him now.

It couldn't be helped. A ruler's own health and comfort surely had to give way to the needs of his people. There were burdens that came with royalty, and the King of Kings knew them all. One's personal concerns had to yield at certain times. Besides which, there simply had to be more than one effective doctor in Bassania. He resolved to have Mazendar initiate a proper search… it was not something he'd ever done, in fact.

But one grew older, good health became less sure. Azal hovered with black wings. Perun and the Lady waited for all men in judgement. One didn't have to… rush to them before-times, however.

A thought came to him as the dinner ended and he retired to his private quarters. His head was still hurting. Nevertheless, he sent for Mazendar. The vizier appeared almost immediately. It seemed to Shirvan at times that the man lived his life poised on the other side of a door, so swift was he always to appear.

The king recollected to his vizier the thought Mazendar had voiced in the morning, about the Antae queen. Then he reminded him of that physician from the south who was in Sarantium, or would be soon enough. He'd forgotten the man's name. It didn't matter; Mazendar would know it. The vizier, by a very great deal the quickest of those around him, smiled slowly and stroked his small beard "The king is truly brother to the lords of creation," he said. "The king's eyes are as the eagle's eyes and his thoughts are deep as the sea. I shall act upon this, at speed."

Shirvan nodded, then rubbed at his forehead and finally had his physicians summoned. He didn't trust any of them very much, having had the three deemed best killed in Kerakek for their own failings, but surely those here at court were adequate to preparing a concoction of some kind that could ease this pain in his head and help him sleep.

They were, in fact. The King of Kings did not dream that night, for the first time in a long while.