periods but they never really discussed Sabal again. The early excesses of Empire seemed to be bound inextricably in his mind with Nantara s death, and he skirted them in conversation as soon as they arose. And then, there was that whole fucking dynasty angle to worry about Archeth was old enough now to be admitted to the Council of Captains, to take on her own role in the subtle steering of Yhelteth affairs that served the Kiriath for a mission, or a means to other ends, or maybe just a hobby. There was, her father told her repeatedly, important work to be done.
So forget Sabal the Conqueror, because his son was on the throne now Jhiral I, a diffident, gentle boy Archeth had grown up playing tag with through the gardens and corridors of An-Monal and the palace in Yhelteth and the succession was far from assured. Flaradnam and Grashgal spent quite a lot of the next few decades quashing usurpers, safeguarding borders and laws, hammering and tempering the newly minted Empire into something resembling a permanent tool of policy for the region.
And after Jhiral, there was Sabal II, seemingly a solid reincarnation of his grandfather s brutality and cunning and military prowess. At An-Monal, they all breathed a collective sigh of relief, and stood back to give him sword-room.
And then Akal the Great, perhaps the best of them so far.
And now Jhiral II. Hers to handle alone, for her sins. She sometimes wondered she was wondering now why she fucking bothered.
But old habits die hard.
She cleared a final twist in the milky, veined stone corridor the shrieking hit her full in the face, she did her best not to flinch and went under the heavy marble cowl of the entry arch, out onto the Honor promontory.
The execution party didn t pick up on her arrival at once all attention was focused inward on the business of the day, and anyway with the noise the condemned were making, she could probably have ridden in on a warhorse in full armor and still not have been noticed. She counted about twenty men in all executioners and apprentices in the somber gray and plum of their guild, a couple of robed judges, there to see sentence carried out, and then a scattering of whichever strong-stomached nobles felt they needed to curry a bit of imperial favor right now.
The Chamber of Confidences.
Under other circumstances, it was a radiant, beautifully rendered space. The Honor promontory was one of three blunt marble tongues Honor, Sacrifice, Courage, the old Yhelteth horse-tribe trinity extending at regularly spaced intervals from the otherwise circular walled circumference of a closed ornamental pool fifty yards across. Sunlight fell in through cunningly angled vents in the high dome of the ceiling the marble blazed and shone where it took the rays directly. Elsewhere, reflection off the water put cool, rippling patterns of light and shade on the walls. A tented raft of rare woods and silks was ordinarily anchored in the center of the pool, a private retreat for the Emperor you could reach only by poled coracle, because you certainly wouldn t survive the swim.
But the raft was currently moored tight to the Sacrifice promontory, well out of the way. Well, you wouldn t want to get blood on that silk. Take forever to get the stains out. And four of the convicted traitors three men and a woman were already afloat, shoved out a safe distance from the promontory on their execution boards and drifting farther away.
Archeth tried not to look at what was happening to them.
She focused on Jhiral s back, the sumptuous imperial ocher and black of his cloak among the clustering matte palette of the executioners garb. She held down a shudder swore she d never again try to quit the krin cold.
My lord.
Hopeless the shrieking drowned her out. The fifth man was thrashing and flailing as they dragged him to the manacles on the last remaining board. She thought, with a sudden freezing through her veins, that she might know him. Though beneath the marks of lash and heated irons, the distorting terror in the features, it was hard to tell for sure.
She cleared her throat something seemed to be sticking in it and tried again, louder.
My lord!
He turned. Heavy silken sweep of the cloak across the marble flooring, handsome features a little clouded, brow furrowed like a man struggling with accountancy he had no real taste for. His voice carried effortlessly. He was used to this.
Ah, Archeth, there you are. They said you were on your way. But as you ll see I m a little busy right now.
Yes, sire. I see that.
The last execution board was an old one, gray wood swollen and split from repeated immersions, manacle screw plates spotted with lichen-orange rust. The board looked, she thought, not for the first time, like a generous wedge cut from some huge mold-coated cheese. Broad at the top end so the victim s head stayed a good couple of feet above the waterline, tapering to a narrow end at the bottom so tortured and manacled feet would lie submerged, leaking slow tendrils of blood into the water.
The pool dwellers were smart Mahmal Shanta swore he d once seen them using lure tactics to entice seal pups off beaches in the Hanliahg Scatter and they knew well enough the sound of the underwater gongs lowered into the pool when there was to be an execution. They d have squeezed in through the submarine vents in the base of the chamber that morning, would have been waiting below the surface ever since.
They d be ravenous by the time the first board hit the water.
And then she could no longer beat the perverse urge, she could not keep her eyes away. Her gaze slid out to the water, to the four boards already floating there with their dreadful, shrieking, red-slippery writhing cargo.
In the wild, a Hanliahg black octopus would have wrapped tentacles around surface prey this large and dragged it deep, where it could be drowned and dealt with at leisure. Defeated by the bobbing wood and the manacles, the creatures settled for swarming the boards, tearing at the chained bodies with frenzied, suckered force, biting awkwardly with their beaks. So skin came off wholesale, gobbets and chunks of flesh came with it, finally down to the bone. Blood vessels tore in the case of a lucky few, fatally. And occasionally, a victim might smother to death with tentacles or body mass across the face. But for most, it was a long, slow death by haphazard flaying and flensing. None of the creatures was bigger than a court-bred hound they could not otherwise have squeezed in through the chamber s vents and even their combined efforts were rarely enough to make a merciful end of things.
Jhiral was watching her.
She forced herself not to look away the spray of blood, the up-and-down flail of tentacles like thick black whips, the soft, mobbing purple-black shapes hanging off the wood and flesh, crawling across it. Her gaze snagged on a wild, wide-open human eye and a screaming mouth, briefly blocked by a thick crawling tentacle, then uncovered again to shriek to shriek, to shriek
She turned to meet Jhiral s gaze. Locked herself to the casual poise it took to do it. Slowly, Archidi, slowly. Held his eyes, held the moment like a knife blade, loose for the throw. Warrior trick funnel the noises away, to the edges of your attention, like the pain from minor wounds when the battle demands you gather yourself.
Jhiral gestured impatiently.
So?
We have found a new Helmsman, my lord. It talks of threats to the city, to the Empire.
A new Helmsman? Jhiral s brows kicked up.
A new one?
Just so, my lord.
Jhiral glanced back at the last condemned man, the frantic scrabblings he made against his captors as, finally, they managed to get him to the board. The Emperor seemed to be pondering something. Then he looked back at her again.
Archeth you would not by any chance be trying to avert punishment for your old pal Sanagh here, would you?
So.
The bloodied, screaming features the memory popped into place like a brutally relocated shoulder joint. Bentan Sanagh. They d hacked his hair off in the dungeons, of course, and he was haggard with suffering. And
