They've had no small bother about all this, and see! They've laid down flowers for the Treaty Bride.'
A whole street of flowers, in fact: the last approach to the gardens was buried in blossoms, a thousand yards of yellow scallop-shell blossoms with a honeyed scent, poured two inches deep and bordered with rosewood. Children from the mob had been allowed past the guards and stood with eager handfuls, presumably to toss at the Bride. It seemed a crime to walk on the flowers, but that was clearly the idea.
'Isporelli blossoms, Excellency,' said the king's chamberlain from behind them.
'Are they? Pitfire!'
His little outburst turned heads. Isiq had not seen isporelli in fifteen years, nor wanted to. They were his late wife's favourite.
'You may thank Pacu Lapadolma for this intelligence,' said the king, as they trampled beauty flat. 'She has exchanged letters with our Mistress of Ceremonies for the better part of a year, now, and helped out in many particulars.'
The girl in question walked just behind Thasha's entourage, on the arm of Dr Ignus Chadfallow. Isiq could hardly bear to look at Chadfallow, a favourite of the Emperor and, until yesterday, Isiq's best friend. Better to look at Pacu, lovely Pacu, daughter of a general and niece of the Chathrand 's owner. She was sixteen, like Thasha and the tarboys, and already a widow. She was also Thasha's Maid-in-Waiting. Thasha had once remarked that the girl could as easily have done her 'waiting' back in Etherhorde and spared them months of misery: she and Pacu did not get along.
'She has generosity of spirit,' Isiq had retorted. 'She loves Arqual as passionately as any man in uniform. And she believes in the Great Peace. I heard her say as much to her aunt.'
The Great Peace. He had believed in it too. Desperately, although in secret, for a soldier of Arqual was not expected to waste his energies imagining peace with the enemy he had been trained to destroy. Isiq had been born into a world of chaos and fear. He could not remember a time when the spectre of war, and annihilation should the war go badly, had not hung over his family. Defending Arqual against the Mzithrin, and the numberless small foes and revolutionaries that boiled up from the marshy edges of the Empire, was the noblest life he could have chosen. The only life, by damn. The only choice you could have lived with, once you knew you had it in you. He was a soldier of Arqual, and even if he sat out the rest of his days in the court of this foppish King Oshiram he would never truly be anything else.
Half a century in the service. Half a century of struggle and bloodshed, maimed friends, fatherless children: he saw now that they had all built to this moment. Treaty Day. The Great Peace. Millions were waiting for it to begin.
And it was all a monstrous sham. Peace was the furthest thing from the mind of his Emperor, as Thasha and her friends had grasped before anyone. For chained in the bowels of the Chathrand was a deposed king of the Mzithrin, the Shaggat Ness, a madman who thought himself a god. His twisted version of the Old Faith had seduced a quarter of the Mzithrini people, and inspired a doomed but hideously bloody uprising. When the Mzithrin Kings at last crushed the rebellion, the Shaggat had fled in a ship called the Lythra — right into the jaws of Arqual's own navy.
The Lythra had been blown to matchsticks. But the Shaggat, and his two boys, and his sorcerer: they had been plucked from the waves alive, and whisked off to a secret prison in the heart of Arqual.
He was the most dangerous lunatic in history, east or west. For forty years now the world had thought him safely drowned. And for forty years Arqual's guild of assassins, the Secret Fist, had been infiltrating the Shaggat's worshippers. On Gurishal, the fanatics' war-blighted island of exile, the Secret Fist had stoked their faith, encouraged their martyrdom, assassinated the moderates among them. And above all, it had spread a false prophecy of the Shaggat's return. Those gods-forsaken wretches! They might have abandoned their cult and rejoined the Mzithrin by now, if only we'd let them be!
Instead, the spymaster Sandor Ott had prepared them for a second uprising, even as Arqual and the Mzithrin prepared, with the greatest sincerity, for peace.
If you want a lie to fool your enemy, test it on a friend. The proverb was surely Ott's cardinal rule. Even the highest circles of the Arquali military (of which Isiq was indisputably a part) had been kept ignorant. And the blood-drinking Mzithrinis: they had taken the bait in both hands, as King Oshiram's prattle made clear.
'They've loaded three ships full of presents, Isiq. Sculpture, tapestries, fiddles and flutes, a whole spire from a ruined shrine. A petrified egg. A miraculous talking crow. All for Arqual — the ships as well, mind you. And they're sending artists to paint your Emperor Magad. I gather they're dying to know what he looks like.'
'The world changes swiftly, your Highness,' mumbled Isiq.
'It does not seem very swift to me — one day I will show you the City of Widows — yet I understand you, Isiq, I declare I do. Peace is our destiny, and we who have lived to see these days must rejoice. The future! How welcome it is!'
A few decades without a bloodbath, and he thinks it's for ever. But how could anyone have guessed the sheer, foul audacity of the plan? For the prophecy Ott had spread among the Shaggat's faithful came down to this: that their God-King would return when a Mzithrin prince took the hand of an enemy soldier's daughter. Isiq was that soldier, and Thasha the incendiary bride.
Horror and betrayal: and that was before the sorcerer entered the game.
Isiq waved to the mob, despair gnawing his heart like some ghastly parasite. Who among them would believe, even if he screamed it, that as soon as his daughter took Prince Falmurqat's hand the Great Ship would set sail — not for Etherhorde, as they'd pretend, but for the depths of the Nelluroq, the Ruling Sea, where no other ship left afloat could follow her? That by crossing that chartless monstrosity of ocean, resupplying in the all-but-forgotten lands of the southern hemisphere, and returning far to the west of Gurishal, they would do the impossible — sail around the White Fleet, that impenetrable naval wall, sweep down on Gurishal from the Mzithrinis' blind side, and return the Shaggat to his horde? Preposterous! Unthinkable!
So unthinkable that it could just come to pass.
No, King. Do not welcome the future, do not hasten it. A cracked mirror, that is all it will prove: a desert where we maroon our children, a broken image of the past.
The Cactus Gardens were the pride of Simja. Tended by a guild of botanical fanatics, they stretched over four dry acres in the heart of the city, a patch of earth that had never been built upon. There were cacti tall as trees and small as acorns, cacti that climbed and cacti that wriggled along the ground, cacti disguised as stones, or heavy with armoured fruit, or bristling with six-inch spikes.
At the heart of the garden rose the Old Sentinels: two rows of ugly, blistered, thousand-year-old plants that groped like tortured fingers at the sky. Between them walked Isiq and his daughter, hand in hand, alone. The procession had swept on without them, into the Royal Rose Gardens next door. Their eleven minutes had begun.
'Failed,' said Isiq.
'Stop saying that,' said Thasha, pulling a wayward spike from her gown. 'And pick your feet up when you walk! You never used to shuffle along like a clown.'
'I won't waste these last moments bickering,' he said. 'Nor will I ask you to forgive me. Only to remember, to think of me now and again, should you somehow-'
Thasha put a hand to his lips. 'What a silly ass you are. Why won't you trust me? You know I have a tactical mind.'
Isiq's brow furrowed. Despite his best efforts he had dozed off briefly in the night. One moment he had been seated on a bench in his cabin, his great blue mastiffs snoring at his feet. The next she was kissing him awake, saying that the Templar monks had drawn their boat alongside the Chathrand, waiting for her. A new steadiness had shown in her face, a resolve. It had frightened him.
Now between the monstrous cacti he pressed her hand to his chest.
'If you have devised some plan, you and Hercol and those mad-dog tarboys, it is for you to trust me. Reveal it now. We'll have no other chance to speak.'
Thasha hesitated, then shook her head. 'We tried, last night. You started shouting, remember? You forbade us to speak.'
'Only of madness. Only of running, or fighting our enemies head-on, or other forms of suicide.'
'What if suicide's the answer?' she said, looking at him fiercely. 'No marriage, no prophecy come true. It's better than anything you've come up with.'
