14 - What I thought would be an innocuous two-tenth audience

Whatever life-altering personal matter an Imperator/semanakraseye might have his mind riveted by, the course of politics does not pause. The Imperial election was not two and a half moons away, and who did I have? Three Arkan lords, none of whom seemed Imperial material, and Kallijas, who feared no warrior but was terrified of an empire’s worth of responsibility, having never been raised even to dream of it, and was working his heart out boning up because at heart he felt no amount of work would suffice. Of course he’d have me, but not for long… well, maybe longer than we’d thought, but even so, he would not have me close.

It was with this in the back of my mind, since it was always there, that I welcomed a young Arkan writer into my office for what I thought would be an innocuous two-tenth audience.

You might actually recall the name he gave—Minakis Akam—since he’d published several articles in the Pages. Their depth of thought had been striking to me. He was a journalist of scholastic bent with a special interest in politics and a knowledge of the workings of the Marble Palace that was surprising in one who, as far as I knew, had never been there.

I had actually met him before, in the library of the university of Terera, of all places, where he was researching Yeoli-Arkan relations in the time just before the War of the Travesty. I hadn’t given much thought as to what age he must be, guessing vaguely his thirties or forties, and so was astonished to find he was not more than seventeen. I told him he had a magnificent future ahead of him, and we mentioned the idea of dinner, but he was called away before I could invite him.

One other thing had struck me about Minakis right from the start; he was familiar, but I couldn’t place him. I was certain I’d seen him before, and it itched like a bug-bite in my mind all through our library conversation. “My father used to take me to the Mezem now and then, so perhaps there,” he said, when I brought it up, and we left it at that.

Now he wanted to talk to me about the topic of his treatise, though there were historians in Yeola-e who were far more expert than I; probably, I guessed, he just wanted my name among the references, and if he was willing to go to the trouble to get himself on the audience list and then wait for six months, he deserved it. It would be a short, intelligent relief from the usual “Please do such-and-such for me, Imperator, please please please!” audiences.

Minakis was slender, bespectacled and bright blond like Skorsas, his hair cut rule-straight at the exact fessas length in a time when most Arkans pushed the hair laws as far as they could, knowing we didn’t particularly care how long they wore it. His eyes were the pure Arkan blue that painters strive for, almost as bright as the apex of a cloudless sky. They reminded me of Kurkas’s, actually, a thought I put out of mind. He moved gracefully, even a little muscularly, for a scholar. There it was again, though, the moment he came in, the familiarity; it was as if a voice were telling me, you know this youth, and not just from Terera. In one gloved hand he held a book wrapped in brown paper; he laid it on the desk to do the prostration.

“Gehit,” I said. “Have a seat.”

“Thenk yeh, Yeh Whose Wit is the Wisdom of the World,” he said softly, in the broad fessas accent I remembered, but much more formal now that I was Imperator again. “This lowly one brought a gift. Beggin’ yar forgiveness for the impropr’ty...” He pulled off his gloves, opened the book and ran his bare palms and fingers over several randomly-picked pages.

“You don’t need to do that,” I said. Trust a student of Arkan politics to know about paper-poisons.

He looked up at me and smiled slightly. There was a certain sweetness in it that I absolutely knew in my bones. A Lakan would say I knew him in a previous life. “H’its still a good idea, Yeh Whose Life is the World's Blessin'. If yeh trust me, then f’r yar watchers.” He tilted his head toward the big one-way mirror that hid the trap-booth with my office-guards, fingers on the switches for the spring-darts in the walls. Sliding his gloves back on, he lay the book carefully on the desk and pushed it across to me.

It was very heavy for its size. Under the wrapping was a solid gold cover with the Aan sunburst on the front. Like the Imperial Book—another copy? But with the gold? Minakis was extremely blessed with resources… but did he think I wouldn’t have had a copy made?

Then, when I touched the gold with my fingers to open the book, it sang.

†

We are a benighted world. Fallen millennia ago into bare subsistence, and the scrabbling ignorance that goes with it, we claw our way finger-width by aching finger-width over the centuries towards civilization, or at least what our knowledge-starved minds imagine civilization is. But here and there, traces of the old great technology remain, like diamonds in a sea of coal dust, carefully guarded, often claimed by royalty, such as the crown of the Tor Enchian kings or the Arkan temple where the Imperator does the Ten Tens—or else in plain sight but as impossible to reach as a dream for the primitives we are, like Shamballa, the star that rises when all others set, north of Bravhniki.

And sometimes it is kept secret, out of fear it will be stolen, perhaps, or somehow diluted by people outside some self-appointed inner circle knowing about it. So it has been with the Imperial Book; I am the first Imperator who has ever written publicly about the nature of it, and I’m sure many if not all of the previous Imperators would curse my name. But to my mind, just as the best ideas arise out of minds full of diverse knowledge coming together and teaching each other, we will regain what we lost fastest if everyone knows about all of it.

So, the book sang, or more exactly, made a warble like a deep-voiced bird, I whipped my hand away, both Minakis and I jumped back in our seats, and the snap, hiss and tiny thump of a spring-dart into his arm came just an eye-blink faster than I could make the “don’t!” sign to the people in the trap-booth. He lay back in his chair with the look of astonishment still on his face, and I could only hope he heard my apology before his azure eyes rolled back into his head and closed.

†

There is an antidote for Arkan stun-drug that can instantly bring a person out of the unconsciousness caused by it. It’s expensive, but Minakis was unconscious through my slowness of mind, so I felt I owed him.

I had him carried into one of the parlours close by. Of course Krero was all questions, and I stonewalled him. I somehow had a sense I should keep quiet what had happened, that there was sacredness and secrecy about it. I felt I should not let go of the book either, so I kept it under my arm. In unconsciousness, for some reason, Minakis was even more familiar.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, as his eyes flickered open. I put his glasses into his hand. “You were as surprised as me. My mistake.”

Stun-drug leaves an awful headache after you wake up, even if you get the antidote; long since, I’d had Kaninjer make up a remedy for it. “A few drops of this under your tongue,” I said, “and it gets much worse for a moment and then goes away fast. Take it and brace yourself.”

He took the drops, weathered the storm and relaxed. “I have a friend waiting outside,” he said. “A Yeoli—his name is Gannara—if he saw me carried out he’ll be worried.”

“He didn’t,” I said; I’d had him carried the back way that no one in the waiting-room could see. “Gannara?”

“Gannara Melachiya,” he said. “One of the tichevengal.” I’d noticed in Terera too, how good his Yeoli pronunciation was.

When we’d taken Arko, we’d found to our horror that Kurkas had searched out in Yeola-e two ten-year-old boys who strongly resembled me, and had them made to resemble me even more, even to the scars. Using them as his toys, he played out his hatred of me. We’d freed one of them when we’d taken the Marble Palace; the other had been sent out of the city with Kurkas’ fourteen-year-old son Minis and his fifty-strong escort of Mahid, the black-clad clan whose stock in trade is ultimate loyalty, from which Imperators traditionally draw their highest-ranking spies, assassins, torturers and concubines.

The two boys had not been the only tichevengal, or Little Chevengas, as they came to be called; there’d been a score in total brought to the city, the other eighteen going to various nobles, friends of Kurkas. Their parents had banded together, successfully requested public funds from Assembly to help in their search, and tracked all down all but four.

The moment I’d got Irefas, the Arkan spy and secret investigation bureaucracy, back into one piece, I’d set them to search for Minis and his Mahid. The quarries were devious, though. After four years, the agent assigned to it, Perisalas Shefenkas (as a freedman he’d spurned his old owners’ surname, and when I’d elevated him to fessas as one of a batch of deserving men, he’d adopted my given name as his surname) had nothing but a few leads that had run cold. The most interesting part was that Minis had split off from the Mahid two years or so back—when he was around sixteen—and seen both his tutor and his betrothed, who had been sent with him, back to their homes in Arko.

But his Little Chevenga had stuck with him, even after writing his shadow-parents, who’d moved themselves and their merchanting business lock, stock and barrel to Arko to search for him. The girl who’d been slated to marry Minis knew the Yeoli boy’s real name from hearing Minis address him by it—Gannara—and, using that, Perisalas had identified him through the parents’ society as Gannara Melachiya of Asinanai. He was already somewhat famous, from the big posters with a movingly-etched portrait that his parents had put up in port cities all over the Miyatara as well as in the empire; his face with the big sad black eyes that looked far too much like mine had been taken up as a symbol of Arkan abuses in general.

Gannara Melachiya is waiting outside my office? As I was trying to grasp this, it came to me that Minakis’s broad fessas accent was gone. He was speaking in the softest Aitzas instead, the kind of Arkan you’d expect from royalty. Like the vast boom of a huge gate slamming, the whole thing came to me: why Minakis knew so much about the Marble Palace, why his eyes were the same blue as Kurkas’s, why he had the Imperial Book—the original—and why I felt so certain I'd known him before. It was good we weren’t in a place with a trap-booth, else I’m sure the look on my face would have got him spring-darted yet again.

“Minis,” I said.