18 - The Imperial Book

I didn’t have a chance to examine the Imperial book until that night.

The first twelve pages are a machine. An ancient machine, worn by time, so that some parts of it half-work, and others not at all. No one lives who knows how to repair it, and likely no one ever will. I cannot prove it, but I think it comes from before the Fire; I can’t imagine how it couldn’t.

In my life I have seen many things that I would have thought were impossible, from the clear-as-air glass of Arko to the single-wing to Megan Whitlock’s transmuting, for an instant, into a demon. But always someone had been able to give me some explanation for it that I understood. The Press, for instance, works because of its complexity, being made of so many parts that fit and thus move perfectly together—you can see them—and what Megan did I understood as a power of mind, like my weapon-sense.

The Imperial Book, though, I could only conceive as magic, like aspects of the Ten Tens.

I pored over it that night with Minis and Gannara (they were inseparable). To him it had always been a mere book, the first twelve pages blank; but he told me his father had told him that in the right hands, it was alive. “I know sometimes sounds would come from his office that people would either listen to... or flee from. Sometimes it sounded like musicians. But it was always silent for me.” I laughed inwardly, imagining Kurkas finding out that mine were the right hands.

There was something on the first page that looked like words in some script I didn’t know, but they moved, flickering fast along the page, upwards. The second and third pages had nothing; from the fourth page came sounds, which made me jump despite his warning me of them. They’d stop, I learned, if I took my finger away, and start again if I touched the page. There were voices, in language I didn’t know, music on instruments I’d never heard, a voice singing that sent shivers of beauty all over me. I found I could choose, by where on the page I touched with one finger. That was when I truly understood it was a machine.

“Minis... how old is this, do you know?”

“My father said it was the Imperial Book from the beginning, when we were a small village here. From when a star fell and gouged out the great bowl.”

“The beginning of all the Ages of the Arkan calendar?”

“Yes. When we were cast out of heaven.”

“So... seventeen-hundred, less fifty one... sixteen-hundred and forty-nine years. At least. Perhaps more.” There was a sound like thunder, the howl of a wolf, wild and free music with a strong rhythm, depending on where I touched. I tried it with different fingers; it didn’t matter. I got him to try, then Gannara; it wouldn’t work.

“It knows you,” Minis said. “It recognizes you as Imperator.”

“How can a book know a person?”

An idea struck me. “Neither of you saw me do this.” I took off the Imperial Seals, earning a gasp from Minis, and touched the page again. It still worked. I didn’t go so far as to ask either of them to put on the Seals and try it, though.

“How can a book do everything else it does?” said Minis. “It knows you.”

The fifth and sixth pages had nothing; on the seventh there were images that appeared only on my touch. A sun with rays, not unlike the Aan family sigil; had they been inspired by this? A creature like a mechanical dragon-fly; a man, distant and impressive; two square steel towers, each releasing a plume of black smoke… how old were these scenes, what did they mean? The eighth page was blank; the ninth had a very simple image of a sandtimer, turning over and over, and a man’s voice that asked a simple question in a tongue I’d never heard before. No one will ever answer him, I thought, until the end of time. I touched that page all over, to no avail. I could feel the voice in the paper, as if it were the skin over a person’s throat.

On the tenth page was an image of the Marble Palace so ancient that most of it had not yet been built, and there was no eagle carved into the cliff behind it. It had a dome of pure glass, though, as perfectly shaped and clear as a soap bubble. I shivered again, with the things that had once been possible for people, that no longer were. Here and there, the picture was annotated in writing I could not read.

“We may never know what any of this means, as long as we live, and have to accept that,” I said, as much as to myself as to Minis and Gannara. I touched the page all over, but the picture was inert, an ordinary picture. The eleventh page had another inert picture, that I didn’t understand: circles, lines and dots, perhaps some sort of code. Minis had no idea. “The last page, the twelfth, will be a portrait of my father, as I told you—just to warn you. Younger than you ever saw him. He showed me it once. But when I open it, it’s blank.”

“Thank you,” I said, and turned the page, braced to see Kurkas’s face. The face I did see there, no amount of bracing could have prepared me for. I slammed the book shut, gasping. It was mine.

Minis said nothing, in the Arkan style of sensitivity, thinking the face of my old torturer was giving me a turn. I took several deep breaths, then opened to the page again. It was still me, in my Imperial office clothes, by the collar, peering straight outwards, with a look as if I’d been caught in a moment of curiosity. Usually, with a portrait, there are brush-strokes, or the artist’s feeling painted into the face, the artificiality that comes with artifice; this was like looking into a mirror that had frozen me in time. It was day-lit, as if through the skylight in my office, and every hair, every mole, every fading scar, the precise shade of my eyes in that light as I knew from the mirror, was absolutely perfect.

Minis and Gannara stared awestruck too. Then it faded away, and into its place came Kurkas, equally perfect, but young, just as Minis had said. He hadn’t been much wrinkled when I’d known him, but in this portrait he had the tight chin and thick hair of youth. Then it too faded, and was replaced by that of another Arkan man with the brilliant blue Aan eyes.

“My grandfather,” Minis said. “I know it from his portrait on the Grand Allee wall.”

“All-Spirit,” I said. “It’s the Imperators… working backwards.” Next was an older man wearing the seals, with a boy: “Regent Idiesas and Imperator Itasas,” Minis told me.

“I’ll stay up all night if I have to,” I said, “to see how far back this goes.”

He knew the names only so far back. I just kept count. The ninth Imperator had blood on his hands, under the seals. “Succeeded by assassination?” I asked Minis. I’ve forgotten the name he told me, but the throne had gone to a cousin line.

Over the ages their clothing and hair changed from style to style: different collars, different cuts of shoulder; for a time one color would be the Imperial fashion, and then another.

What was behind the faces varied, though it was always indistinct, as if seen though unfocussed eyes; sometimes it looked like a wall of a Marble Palace office, sometimes the Temple.

At eighty Imperators, I asked Minis, “How long was their average reign, roughly?”

There’d been reigns from an eight-day long to eighty years; the average, he thought, was about twenty. “Then we’re seeing sixteen-hundred years ago… it might go back before you came down from the stars.”

I shifted my hand absently, and the book spoke again, a few short words. By trying a few more times I found it was if I touched the bottom sword-side corner. “Raikas—I mean Chevenga, can you do that again?” He couldn’t help but sometimes revert to the first name he’d known me by. “I just slightly understood part of that, I think. It’s a number.”

By trying it on each page, he made it out: they were dates of the start and end of each Imperator’s reign, in very archaic Arkan, by the Haian calendar. “On Haiu Menshir, they say they have kept the old one from before the Fire,” I said. “This gives credence to that.”

It had Kurkas’s end and my start date wrong—4980, this year, instead of four years before when I’d actually become Imperator. It was so late I was almost too tired to think of the obvious answer. “You had the book for those four years… it’s when the book goes to a new Imperator. That’s always, or usually, been on his ascension before.”

The ninetieth Imperator was pictured in front of a wall that looked like the steel faibalitz floor in the Marble Palace; the ninety-first was close-shorn and wore a steel collar that was a perfect circle, wide around his neck, as if it had held some sort of helmet; the cloth falling from it was scorched. His eyes were agonized.

The ninety-second looked calmer, against the steel wall again; the ninety-third had indoor plants behind him. His shirt was perfect white, with a cloak or tunic over it that was dark with stripes the width of thread, and a scarlet kerchief so narrow it was almost a strap knotted stiffly under his chin. He wore a golden pin with the symbol of a house-boat on water on the end—same as I had on one ring of the Imperial seals. He was the last, because the picture that came up after his was mine again, the one scarred, black-curled ruffian among all these flawless and golden haired Arkans.

I closed the book, and set it carefully down on the table, and we all sat in silence for a time.

“I had very careful instructions in how to maintain this book,” Minis said, finally. “Now I know why. And why it had to come home to you.”

Home to me? As if I were somehow worthy of such a thing? I wasn’t sure whether to laugh, or weep, from the nameless emotion that comes from sheer immensity.

“If you don’t mind me saying, semanakraseye,” said Gannara, who I thought I had taught to call me by name, “you look so tired you’re about to fall over. You should sleep.” Minis nodded his head Arkan-style in agreement.

They were right, of course. I took the book into my hands again. “I should have a satchel made for this, to carry it with me all the time. If the palace caught fire, I’d already have it to take out with me. I’d give my life to save this from destruction.”

Before he’d handed it to me in the office, he’d taken it out of a wrapping I hadn’t noticed; now he drew it out of his pocket and unfolded it. It was like silver so thin it was transparent, and could bend and fold like cloth, but shone like metal.

“My father said this was proof against fire,” he said, “though I’ve never had the nerve to test it.”

“I wouldn’t either,” I said. “This is the most valuable thing in the entire world... and I don’t mean value in gold chains. If it were lost... we wouldn’t even understand what we were losing.”

We wrapped the book carefully, and I wished them goodnight, and crept into bed to sleep with it in my arms. Niku, Kallijas and even Skorsas were fast asleep. Tired though I was, I lay for a while awake, with the ninety-first Imperator, the scorched one in the circular neck-piece with his eyes full of anguish, haunting my thoughts.

I wanted to ask him, who are you? What happened? Why the sadness that I see in you, across the centuries? What would you tell me, if you could? The Imperial Book had a voice, but had not been built, alas, to give him one. No one would ever know, for all eternity.




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