Nevertheless, he did his duty.
'All right,' said Hatch, when he had extracted from Scorpio Fax the very last bit of usable information. 'I'll take this news to Na Sashimoko. I'll try to get you an imperial pardon. In the meantime, I suggest you hide yourself away in the Combat College, out of sight of your fellow revolutionaries.'
With that, Fax fled, and Hatch set out for the imperial palace of Na Sashimoko.
At the palace, he would demand an audience with the emperor; and, once that audience was granted to him, he would report on the revolution which was brewing, and… did he dare? Yes! He would appraise the emperor of his own financial difficulties, and ask the emperor, quite frankly, for money – either as free gift or loan.
Such was Hatch's plan, though he did not have much hope of success, for the Silver Emperor was known for his tight fist. One of Plandruk Qinplaqus's favorite sayings was that 'power is its own reward'; and in accordance with that saying he advised those who were closest to his heart to regard the air they breathed as the greater part of their corporeal reward. Furthermore, the emperor had long maintained his most savage punishments for the corrupt, and was never willing to turn a blind eye to those who discovered ways to enrich themselves by subtlely exploiting their positions.
The emperor's stinginess was not without reason, for, as emperors went, he was far from being rich. Though the imperial silver mines were reputed to produce prodigious wealth, their output had been grossly exaggerated by the speculative. The emperor's finances were supported largely by taxation, and Parengarenga was essentially a poor land, its people few, its soil infertile and its distances vast.
Thus the ruler of the City of Sun practiced a financial frugality scarcely to be distinguished from miserliness, and it was hard to say that the emperor was wrong in this. The state possessed no cornucopia for the generation of wealth, hence any benevolence shown to one citizen must necessarily add to the burdens of others. Nevertheless, Hatch had quite come to the end of his own resources, and so was determined to ask for charity.
Though Asodo Hatch was tolerably well paid as a captain of the Imperial Guard, and though he was able to supplement his income by marketing things bought inside Cap Foz Para Lash with his Combat College pay, he had nevertheless been brought to the point of ruin by one simple fact: the price of opium.
His wife was ill; she had cancer. Her disease was terminal, incurable. The only treatment was pain relief, and the only adequate source of such relief was opium, ever the most sovereign of drugs for the relief of suffering.
Yet opium was sourced – well, Hatch was not sure where it was sourced, and he had not been able to find anyone who was. It came from a particular kind of poppy, that much he knew. But the flower in question was not cultivated in Dalar ken Halvar. Rather, opium came to the city by way of trade – brought from Yestron, some said, while others claimed Argan to be its source.
The drugprice had brought Hatch to the brink of financial disaster, and left him helpless to rescue his sister from the consequences of her irresponsibility.
So, as Hatch made his way to Na Sashimoko, he was full of thoughts of his own personal struggle, and these thoughts were scarcely diminished by his meeting with a detachment of the Imperial Guards who were armed as if for war. Hatch had a hurried consultation with the leader of this detachment, and was told that Dalar ken Halvar had just received word of an uprising amongst the slaves of the silver mines which lay ten leagues to the south.
The slaves were making their revolution in the name of Nuchala-nuth.
'That is terrible,' said Hatch. 'Terrible, terrible, terrible.'
But he said it for the sake of form, for the pressures of his own personal life were such that right at that moment he felt that all Dalar ken Halvar could have burnt to the ground without adding to his worries. In fact, if the moneylender Polk were to be burnt with the city, then his worries might be substantially reduced.
Nevertheless, having met with that detachment of Imperial Guards, and having received their alarming intelligence, Asodo Hatch quickened his step as he hastened on toward the imperial palace of Na Sashimoko.
Chapter Fourteen
The Silver Emperor: lord of Parengarenga and master of Dalar ken Halvar. He goes by various names, including Plandruk Qinplaqus, and is reputed to be a wizard of the order of Ebber, possessed of powers of mind over mind. If truly such, then he is a Manipulator whose Powers are analogous to those of an Enabled asma of the Nexus. Analogous – yet different. For the asma is but a machine, its functions fully explicated in the Book of Specifications, whereas every warlock is a creature linked in alliance with uncouth entities from the realms of mystery.
In the days of its power, the Nexus seldom colonized any cosmos so Permissive as to permit the miracles of the Gods Minor and the thaumaturgical feats of mage, shaman and sorcerer.
Consequently, it made no serious effort to produce a Predictive Paradigm which would explain the otherlogic of magic.
The scientists of the Golden Gulag, however, living as they did in a cosmos so Permissive as to be only marginally stable, were in an ideal position to research those processes so often described as Synergetic Improbability. They had made some considerable progress toward understanding the ominous ambiguities of the Realms of Power when the Chasm Gates collapsed, precipitating a power struggle which shortly led to the wars of destruction in which the Gulag was utterly destroyed.
And so alone upon the sands
Two weapons bleed.
Yet while they bleed
In equal isolations sits -
Seated, yes, but just as lone -
A man who never dares a knife
Yet never lives without a blade
A skin away from striking.
This chair least comfortable of all:
Its purchase, peace:
And all slaves sounder sleep, though one and all In fantasy desire that seat.
On the heights of the minor mountain of Cap Ogo Blotch, the northernmost of the great rocks of Dalar ken Halvar, stood a building of whitewashed stone. That building of whitewashed stone was the palace of Na Sashimoko, that Shrine of Thrones (or, in the mouths of some, that Shrine of Shrines) from which the Silver Emperor ruled the City of Sun and the realms of Parengarenga.
Despite its eminence, the palace owed nothing to the silver science of interior decorating. Here slovenly decay had the rule, and had ruled for centuries if appearances were anything to go by.
It was undecorated – indeed, parts of it were unfinished. But when Hatch called in at the Treasurer's office, he entered another world entirely, a world dominated by immaculate order and an auditor's precision.
The Treasurer, Nambasa Berlin by name, was a hard man, and ruthless. His ruthlessness was exemplified by his noseless state.
In his youth, Berlin had fought a rival for the favors of a beautiful young woman, and had persisted in fighting on to victory even after getting his nose bitten off. Unfortunately, the woman in question had then decided that she liked a third party much better than either of the two fools who had fought over her; but Berlin had benefited much from having the ruthless resolution of his courage confirmed to both himself and the world at large at such an early age.
Hatch, however, did not like him, even though Hatch often admired those who were brave, and courageous, and ruthless in their resolution. In fact, Hatch had cause to hate him, for Berlin had made him contribute two years worth of savings toward the costs of the campaign to retake Malic Milvus. Right now, Hatch had a grievous need for money; and he was sure his circumstances would not have been so straitened had he not lost so much in paying for the costs of the abovementioned campaign.
For his part, Berlin disliked all the 'purple filth' as he termed the Frangoni. Nambasa Berlin was one of the Chem, the wealthy and hence Real upper-class of the people Pang, and the sexual rival who had bitten off his nose
