Ylo stopped at the foot of the two steps and looked up at Shandie, who was visibly pale, even in the gloom. Eshiala had both hands to her lips.
Softly—”Sire . . . Your grandfather has passed away.” Shandie nodded. He turned and reached out to his wife. Ylo felt an illogical twinge of annoyance.
Eshiala rose from her chair and stepped to her husband’s side. Even in that near darkness, Ylo could see the wonder in her face. She bent and kissed the new imperor, who reached up to put an arm around her.
Now what? Ylo turned again and located the chief herald; and beckoned him over impatiently.
Shandie said quietly, “The imperor is dead. My Lord, I fear we must adjourn this.”
The old man had been growing more and more incoherent even before this sudden change. Now he just stuttered. “Highness . . . Sire? . . .”
“You will be needed,” Shandie said hoarsely, “for the proclamation.”
They had all been expecting it for months, but now it had happened their minds could not take it in. Emshandar had ruled the world for fifty-one years. His departure left a hole in all their lives. Hardly anyone could remember the Impire without Emshandar IV. Ylo was picturing the iron-bound chest he called Battle Plan and wondering if there was anything he had forgotten to include. Everything anyone had been able to think of was in there waiting to be dated and sealed-announcements to all proconsuls and praetors and legates, Ionfeu’s nomination to the Senate, a million others. There was sure to be something missing, of course.
And all over the hall, everyone else must have guessed the news and be struggling to adjust. From now on the name Emshandar would not mean a wily old relic spinning webs but a dynamic young man with fresh ideas and new advisors—a young man who ironically had succeeded while actually sitting on the throne. If he lived to the same age as his grandfather had, he would reign for over sixty years.
Then a sudden light blazed in the Rotunda.
5
The White Throne glowed within a nimbus of white fire that made its ivory carvings seem to writhe. A man stood before it, on the low dais. He was very short, gray-haired, and grotesquely thick. He wore shabby workers’ garments and heavy boots, and he glowed also.
He bowed.
Shandie was on his feet in an instant, returning the bow. The Rotunda buzzed like a beehive.
“Do it now, Imperor!” the newcomer roared in a voice like grinding millstones. The deep tones reverberated from the dome above. “Hurry! There is not a moment to waste!”
Ylo’s scalp prickled—the warlock of the north . . . Raspnex. “Do what?” Shandie mumbled, caught off guard. “Proclamation and enthronement! Hurry!” The occult light seemed to brighten and take on an urgent reddish tinge.
Ylo looked at the chief herald, who was standing with his toothless mouth open and an expression of complete idiocy on his ancient features.
No soldier he!
Ylo sprang past him and up the two steps to Shandie’s side. Hastily recalling the words on a hundred parchments he had approved, he swung around to face the warlock and the assembled crowd.
“By the Grace of the Gods!” he yelled at the top of his voice, hearing the echoes roll. “Emshandar the Fifth, Rightful Imperor of Pandemia, Lord of the Four Oceans, Fount of Justice, Enhancer of the Good! Gods Save the Imperor!” He had omitted about a dozen other titles, but they were unimportant rigmarole.
He leaped to the floor in a single bound, even as the congregation roared in reflexive echo, “Gods Save the Imperor!” He grabbed the shield and buckler from the table and raced back up the steps.
Shandie took them, pushed past Eshiala, and turned to face the east. He slammed the ancient sword against the shield. Clank! Nothing happened.
Ylo stepped back down to the floor, wondering what he had just written in the history books.
Shandie waited perhaps three heartbeats, then he was around to the back of the throne, facing south.
Clank! went the sword and buckler. Again nothing.
West . . .
Shandie struck the shield a third time.
Just for an instant, a rosy glow suffused the Red Throne. A dark shape stood before it—huge and hulking, white-haired and pale-skinned. An ancient female troll, she bowed to Shandie. And was gone into darkness.
Two of the wardens had acknowledged him as imperor. It was enough. The ceremony had been lightning-fast, but legally Shandie had succeeded.
He dropped the sword with a clatter to put an arm around Eshiala. His other arm raised the shield, as if to cover them both. All eyes swung around to the north again, to the dwarf.
“Take your wife and your child and begone, for the city is no longer safe for you.” Sepulchral echoes rolled and he boomed even louder, to drown them. “The Protocol is overthrown and Chaos rules the world!”
With an ear-splitting crack, the four thrones of the wardens exploded. Colored fire blazed momentarily on the four platforms, brightening the hall, reflecting from the glass and snow of the dome. Men cried out as they were struck by flying fragments, while a rubble of gold and stone and ivory rattled and bounced across the floor. The dwarf had vanished and the Rotunda was pitched into darkness and terror.
Unhallowed ground:
Like strangers’ voices here they sound,
In lands where not a memory strays,
Nor landmark breathes of other days,
But all is new unhallow’d ground.
—Tennyson, In Memoriam, CIV
TEN
Wild bells
1
For forty days the King of Krasnegar had been riding with the west wind at his back. Horse after horse he had ridden to exhaustion, triple-posting, sometimes four-posting, thundering along the great highway, bound for Hub, and yet the foul weather had delayed him. He was thirty-five years old and had lost the uncaring endurance of youth. Numb in his soul and sick to death of riding, of bedbugs and bad food, of rain and cold, he had not dared tarry. Winter fields and gloomy cities rolled past unending. Post followed post. Once in a long while a royal courier would overtake him, but no one else did.
He dreamed of humble, sleepy Krasnegar, of warm firesides, of Inos and his children. He reminded himself sternly that he was doing all this for them also.
Never in his life had he felt a greater urgency, yet he did not know what he feared. Night and day the dark premonition in the east overhung his thoughts, a constant invitation to despair. As he moved over the continent, the source gradually shifted toward the north, confirming that it was rooted in Dwanish, but he still did not understand that evil foreboding.
Stranger even than that, though, was the eerie stillness in the ambience. In his youthful experience as sorcerer and demigod, he had seen that alternative plane of existence alive with flames and flickers of sorcery—or heard it sing, rumble, and moan with sorcery, for the observer could choose his metaphor as he pleased. Now it was dark and silent.
Very rarely he picked up a tremor, usually brief. Only twice had he been close enough to risk a glance of farsight to identify the source. The first had been an elderly rake propositioning a young man in a saloon and the second a portly chef seasoning a sauce. Mere geniuses, both of them, with power so weak that they might well be unaware that their talents had an occult element to them.
Where had everybody gone?
Was he the only sorcerer left in the world? Or were all the others hiding, as he was hiding?
Sorcerers he could understand. Sorcerers and some mages could sense the ambience as he could. Like him, they would have noticed the quietness and sensed the evil portents, and held back their own powers to listen. But the two-word adepts and the one—word geniuses—they could not have felt the danger, so they could not have taken cover of their own volition. They had been silenced. Who could have done such a thing, and for what reason?
The shieldings remained, for the Impire had been home to sorcery as long as anyone could imagine, and occult shields took centuries to decay. They showed up easily to farsight. Some of them had outlasted the buildings they had covered and now guarded only a copse or a vegetable patch. Twice he had taken refuge within such an invisible haven to use power: healing his weariness, mending his clothes, replenishing his purse. He could still make gold—in small amounts—but it took all the effort he could summon. That meant he must rattle the ambience savagely as he did it. It wasn’t very good gold, either.
Sleazy inns, spavined horses, sun and rain and wind and cold . . . winter was no time to journey posthaste across Pandemia. On a chilly morning three weeks before Winterfest, Rap rode into the outskirts of the capital’s sprawling suburbs as snow began to fall from a morbid sky.