She’d smiled at him. That brilliant smile he’d later come to hate. “I’m right here.”
“Will you come back?” he’d said. “To the Mitat? Will your mother let you?”
Her smile did not change. “I am a little old for those kinds of games now. We all are.” She patted his shoulder. “I know my mother spoke to you. She was right. We are not of the same class. It is one thing to play in the dirt as children, but we are too old to close our eyes to reality. Besides.” She tossed her hair. “Different things are important to me now.”
Kel could hardly breathe. “What kind of—things?”
“It’s no concern of yours,” she said breezily. “We must both grow up. You, especially, ought to make something of yourself, Kellian.”
And she was gone. He watched her for the rest of the night—giggling, flirting, smiling. Clearly untroubled. Just as she was now, as she laid a hand on Falconet’s shoulder, laughing as if he had just made the best joke in the world.
Perhaps it was better that she had changed, Kel thought. The old Antonetta could hurt him. The person she had become all those years ago could not. She could not be a gap in his armor, a place of weakness. That was all to the good. He knew the limits of what was available to him, he thought; he had learned them painfully through the years. How could he blame Antonetta for knowing the same?
In the dream, a man was toiling up a long and winding path cut into the side of the cliffs above Castellane. Dark water crashed in the harbor below, exploding into pale foam whitened by the moonlight.
The man wore long robes, made colorless by the night, and a sharp wind whipped at his face. Lin could taste the salt, sharp as blood in his mouth. Could feel the hatred in his heart—cold and bitter and brutal. A hatred that stole away breath, that felt like a vise gripping the chest, crushing and destructive.
The man reached the high point of the cliff path. He looked down at the steep fall below. At the sea, coalescing into a terrifying whirlpool, spinning and vertiginous. If one fell into such a whirlpool, one would be sucked down into darkness before one was even able to scream.
From a pocket in his robes the man drew a book. Pages fluttered in the wind as he raised it over his head and threw it. It hovered for a moment, white as a gull, before plunging downward. It struck the whirlpool, where the waters spun it like a dancer before drawing it down and down . . .
The man stood watching, shaking with rage. “Be thou forever cursed,” he hissed, over the sound of the sea. “Be thou loathed in the eyes of the most holy forevermore.”
Lin sat bolt upright, gasping, a firestorm exploding behind her closed lids. Opening her eyes, she saw not a churning black sea, but her own bedroom in her own house, lit dimly by the blue glow of dawn.
She willed herself to slow her breathing. She had not had such a dream—so vivid and unpleasant—for many years. Not since the death of her parents, when she had dreamed each night of their bodies abandoned on the Great Road, picked over by crows until only parchment bone was left.
She slid out from beneath her coverlet, careful not to knock any of her papers to the ground. Her neck ached, and her hair was wet with sweat. Opening a window cooled her skin, but she could still see the ocean behind her eyelids, still smell the cold salt on the air.
Lin’s medical satchel hung on a chair by the door. She fetched it, and began to rummage through it for a sleeping draught, something that would calm her. It was odd, she thought: What she had seen in her dream was not objectively horrifying. It was more that it had felt so terribly real. And that she had not been herself, Lin, in the dream. She had been someone else—watching a man consumed by hatred, icy and acidic. An Ashkari man, for he had spoken their language, though he had made the words sound ugly. What would someone have to do, she thought, to earn such loathing? And what did it have to do with the book—was it the book’s owner that the man had hated so much?
Stop trying to make sense of it. It’s just a dream, she told herself, and then her fingers closed around something cool and hard. Her heart gave a jolt. She drew her hand out of the satchel and saw, rolling in her palm, a hard gray orb.
She sank down with her back against the wall, staring at it. Petrov’s stone. It could be nothing else. The feel of it, the weight in her hand, was familiar; as she gazed at it, she seemed to see smoke swirling in its depths. Now and then it formed itself into shapes that seemed almost recognizable, almost like words . . .
But how had it gotten into her satchel? She recalled Petrov jostling against her as he’d opened the door of his flat. He was clever and careful. He could have dropped it into her bag, but why? Because of the men coming up the steps? Was he hiding it from them?
She sat and wondered, gazing at the stone, until the aubade, the morning bell, rang out from the Windtower Clock, signaling the start of the working day and the end of the watches of the night.
The greatest lesson that we, citizens of the Empire, can take from the time of the Sorcerer-Kings is that power should not be limitless. It is for that reason that, when an Emperor is crowned, it is whispered in his ear by a priest of the Gods: Remember that you are mortal. Remember that you will die. For when we die, we face Anibal, the Shadow God, who judges our actions in life, and any abuse of mortal power will result in eternity in Hell.
But the Sorcerer-Kings had no Gods. And the One Word bestowed on them a great power. Yet that power was limited by mortal strength. Magic required energy, and too great a spell could exhaust the magician, even unto death.
It was then that the Sorcerer-King Suleman invented the Arkhe—the Source-Stone. It allowed magicians to store energy outside themselves. Such energy came from many sources: from a drop of blood fed to the stone each day to more violent methods; the murder of a magic-user provided great power, which could be stored within the Arkhe.
The world darkened. The Sorcerer-Kings grew in murderous ambition. They began to look past their borders and covet what their neighbors had. Why should I not be the greatest? each asked themselves. Why not the most powerful?
Thus was the world nearly destroyed.
—Tales of the Sorcerer-Kings, Laocantus Aurus Iovit III
CHAPTER SIX
It was almost noon. Kel was looking at Conor. Conor was looking at himself in the mirror.
“I dislike this bandage,” Conor said. “It’s destructive to the integrity of my ensemble.”
Kel, sitting on the arm of the sofa, sighed. It appeared Lilibet had noticed Conor’s injuries, after all. The Royal Surgeon, Gasquet, had arrived that morning, woken them both up, and insisted on bandaging Conor’s hand before the Dial Chamber meeting.
“I doubt anyone will notice,” Kel said now.
Conor made a noncommittal noise. He was looking at himself in the pier glass that hung against the east wall. He generally dressed outrageously for Dial Chamber meetings, as if certain that could liven up the proceedings. Today, however, he had chosen to wear shades of black and silver: black velvet cloak, black silk trousers, tunic of silver brocade. Even his crown was a plain silver circlet. Kel was not entirely certain that Conor intended to take the Dial Chamber meeting seriously, but at least his clothes would.
“You see,” said Conor, “my outfit is black. This bandage is white. It destroys the symmetry.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I can’t believe you didn’t chase off Gasquet. Aren’t you supposed to protect me?”