There was only one throne in the Gebbi Zimballa. For that reason, Issa sat on the topmost of the seven steps that led to the dais on which the throne was mounted. On those steps were carvings that, like the ones on the chair itself, had been diminished by time to mere scratches in the stone. Issa paid scant heed to the record of history upon which she rested. She sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, which she had pulled close to her chest. Her eyes were drawn to the shadows cast by the torches that were the only illumination in the chamber.
The few furnishings left in the throne room were familiar enough, despite their great age. But the shadows they cast seemed somehow sinister, like hands with grasping fingers pressed against the wall.
Makah, the Emperor’s cheetah, lay curled like a house cat at Issa’s side. The cheetah’s eyes stared unblinking at the entrance to the chamber. If the spotted cat saw the shadows, it paid no heed to them.
With a slight shudder, Issa looked away from the shadows. She and the Emperor were alone in the old throne room. A retinue of soldiers was posted outside the door, and throughout the rest of the old palace as well. They, as well as the Emperor and Issa, knew if they were forced to fight here, it was likely to be their last battle.
Issa looked up at Alemeyu. The firelight cast no shadows on his gold-chased armor. Instead, the muted illumination rendered to him a radiance that she would, at another, less-fraught time, have admired. However, that luminescence did not reach his eyes.
Alemeyu was staring beyond Issa, and beyond the shadowy walls of the throne chamber. He could have been looking into the future or, perhaps, the past. Or he might have been looking into himself.
Whatever the Emperor was seeing, it displeased him. Beneath the golden helmet that crowned his head, Alemeyu’s brows were knotted in a frown.
“I wish we had more news,” Issa said, for not other reason than to break a silence she was beginning to find oppressive.
Her voice caused Alemeyu’s head to snap forward, then back, as though he had suddenly awakened from a deep slumber. His brow smoothed, and his mouth turned upward in a fleeting smile.
“Considering what we have heard so far, I’m surprised you would say that,” he told her.
That comment brought a smile in return from Issa – also fleeting. At the beginning of the invasion, a succession of runners had come from the city. The descriptions of defeat and destruction they brought with them fell like stones in Issa’s heart, as well as Alemeyu’s. Then the messengers stopped arriving. And that, in itself, bore a meaning that was ominous.
It was Alemeyu’s brief smile, along with the tension that accompanied their long wait, that then caused Issa to say words she never imagined would ever spill out of her mouth ... words she had never wanted anyone – including herself – to hear, despite the truth in them.
“Alemeyu,” she said. “I am sorry I could not give you – and the Empire – an heir.”
The Emperor looked at her in silence for a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity. As she returned his gaze, Issa was reminded of the day they had wed – an elaborate ceremony attended by the Degen and Imba Jassi, with Jass Gebrem pronouncing the ritual words that bound them to each other until she or the Emperor died, or one of them put the other aside.
Alemeyu had put three previous wives aside because they had not been able to continue the line of Issuri. Issa’s predecessors had been well compensated, but they lived in tacit, unofficial exile from the Degen Jassi. They no longer even resided in Khambawe. Their continued presence in the court and the city would have been an affront to the Emperor’s current consort, and an embarrassment to him.
On the day they were wed, Issa had vowed that such a fate would never be hers. I will bear him a child, she told herself fiercely. I will ....
But as the years passed, no heir was born. And before the Fidi came, before the Uloans came, she had known that before long, the Emperor would put her, too, aside.
Then Alemeyu spoke.
“The fault for that is not yours, Issa,” he said. “It is mine.”
3
As the voice that guided them had instructed, the Uloans halted well out of the view of any watchers on the walls of the Gebbi Zimballa. Without torches, and clad for the most part only in their dark, spider-scarred skin or, in the case of the jhumbis, smooth clay, they were invisible to all but the keenest eye. And the sounds of their leaders’ murmured conversations did not carry to the ears of the palace’s defenders.
The invaders listened closely to their guide. Then they fell silent ... and waited. A few moments later, the dark mass of the Uloans wavered subtly, like a shimmer of heat on a plain at the height of the dry season. And then they moved forward, making no attempt to conceal themselves.
They marched quickly across the remaining stretch of ground, making no sound other than the soft crunch of their feet against the flowers. Anyone watching from the ramparts could have seen them. And many of the soldiers whose sole duty was to defend the Emperor and Issa were gazing directly at the invaders coming toward the old palace. Yet they saw nothing ... heard nothing.
The walls of the palace were riddled with pits and cracks ... easy hand- and foot-holds for a determined climber. And the Uloan invaders were nothing if not determined. Like a swarm of spiders, they scaled the palace’s exterior. They left the jhumbis behind. But the walking dead would soon have their own part to play.
Only when the Uloans made their way over the ramparts did the soldiers finally become
