One man pulled free of the other with the sound of rent cloth in the sudden silence. He whirled about and a knife flashed in the sun. The captain roared an order and drew his sword, but the knife man sprang at his opponent. There was a grunt and a cry. Azkun held his breath as he felt a fire erupt in his chest and burn down into his guts.
Darkness hovered in the air about him, he looked through two sets of eyes, his own and the red hazed eyes of a man who lay in a widening pool of blood on the ground. His heartbeat was slowly timing away the measure of his life. Two of the guards grabbed the knife man.
Clutching the pain in his chest Azkun slid from his horse and staggered to the man on the ground. The oblivion of death yawned, waiting to swallow him, waiting still.
But he knew what he had to do. He was not powerless before it.
The knife projected from the man’s chest and blood trickled from it in a relentless flow. His breath gurgled in his throat. Azkun could feel blood in his lungs.
Someone behind him, Althak he thought, cried “Don't touch him” but he ignored him. The knife seemed to grate against his own ribs as he breathed. It filled his awareness and only on the periphery was he conscious of the ring of anxious onlookers and the black chasm of death.
Not this time.
He drew out the knife, feeling every inch of it and gasping as it ground against bone. The man shuddered and lay very still, his breathing no longer sounded. Behind him the crowd let out a vast, collective sigh.
But he was not dead, not yet. The chasm of death still leered at him nearby, but it had not taken him. Through clotted lungs, his own lungs, Azkun forced breath. With his own life he refused death, in the name of the dragons. It seemed hours that he knelt beside the man, his hands covering the wound and his will battling with darkness. He was unaware of the crowd now, unaware that the guards had forced them back to form a wide circle and that Menish had told the captain not to hinder Azkun.
“Let him try”, he had said.
Azkun knelt there alone except for Tenari and another woman who wept beside the victim.
At last the man drew a slow, hesitant breath. Azkun felt the pain in his chest grow sharp as the wound was moved but his breath was clear. Another breath, the man’s eyes flickered open and the crowd sighed again. The woman looked at Azkun, astonished.
She said something to him in Vorthenki that he did not understand, but he caught the word ‘Kopth’ and nodded. At that her face lit with joy and she cried out to the crowd.
“Azkun,” it was Menish at his side. “Come on, we must leave here at once. Is he really-?”
“He is alive. The dragons saved him.”
The voice of the crowd began to rise. Someone shouted ‘Kopth’ and the others turned the cry into a chant.
“Come on!”
Azkun remembered the sacrifice only a few days ago.
“They will kill for me again.”
Menish nodded. It was what he had feared himself. Vorish had forbidden the sacrifice, but who listens to an Emperor when a god is speaking?
“Climb onto your horse, hold up your hand for silence and point to me. I'll speak to them for you. This will take some delicacy.”
The guards who had held back the crowd before for Azkun faltered under their pressure. They too wanted to see this man who some said was Kopth himself. Azkun flung himself onto his horse and pulled Tenari up behind him. Even as he did so people surged forward, crowding about him, chanting, catching and kissing his feet. They called to him, many with pleading in their eyes, the kind of pleading that provokes promises.
He raised his hand for silence as Menish had told him to and pointed to the King.
“I speak for the man you're calling Kopth. His name is Azkun and he comes from the north. You have seen him save a man from death today. He commands you to kill no longer. You are not to sacrifice to him. If you kill anyone it is as if you kill him.” Here he paused to let his words reach them. “I repeat, do not sacrifice. Keep the Emperor's law.”
This caused a murmur that ran through the crowd like fire. But they parted as the company urged their horses along the avenue.
Before them now loomed the great walls of the palace. At the end of the avenue the walls were pierced by an enormous arch hung with vast bronze doors. They must have been a fifty feet high and they shone in the sunlight with beaten images of birds and beasts. Above the arch, carved in the stone, was a rayed disc with a face on it. The image of Aton.
As they approached the doors swung silently open. More mounted guards with Ammorl surcoats emerged with lances and surrounded them, forcing the following crowd back from the gates. Their horses clattered forward over the stone into the blackness beyond the archway and the gates closed with a massive boom behind them.
Chapter 15: The Emperor
The palace of Atonir held many memories for Menish. He had first come here as a small boy with his father on a state visit. It was a long journey for a child but the roads were good.
In the years when Sinalth occupied the throne he had made that journey several times trying to encourage the Vorthenki warlord to better government, and sometimes pleading with him for something like decency.
Sinalth was not so bad, but Thealum was a monster and Menish did not come in those years. Instead he had raised Vorish in Anthor, and together they had raised an army to push Thealum into the sea.
Menish had done what he could but Vorish would have done the job alone if necessary. He always got what he wanted. Always.
They passed through three courtyards before dismounting at the inner stair. Menish looked up as he climbed off his horse, wondering, as he always did, how the inner courtyards could be open to the sky in a building that was like a mountain and they were inside it somewhere near the base.
But the palace was peculiar like that. It contained one great courtyard that seemed large enough for a small army to manoeuvre in. The stairs took you higher than they had any business doing so that after taking a few short flights of steps you might look out a window and find yourself hundreds of feet above the city.
Somehow all of the apartments, regardless of where they seemed to be had a charming little courtyard with a balcony facing south. There were halls, rooms of state, gardens, towers, stables, kitchens, fabulous bathrooms and a host of other rooms required for the functioning of the empire. Keashil’s song had said that there were rooms that had never been entered since it was built. This might be true, there were large sections of the palace that, as far as Menish knew, had never been used.
The inner stair where they left the horses was white polished marble and they swept up to an impressive doorway. Their escort accompanied them up the stairs while the guards led the horses away. Keashil and the other women left their litters and went on foot.
At the top of the stairs Menish paused and looked back. A broken sword hung on the wall beside an inscription. It was here that the Invaders had finally hewn down his sister with thirty of their own dead at her feet.
Through the doorway they found more stairs. The walls and ceiling here were painted with birds and winged beasts. Again Menish paused at the top of the next flight of stairs, this time to look at a roughness in the smooth marble of the floor. He had been little more than four years old when he had first climbed these stairs with his father. The statues had frightened him and he had cried out and buried his face in his father’s cloak. His father’s laughter had told him to look again at the figures, and only then did he realise that they were not living.
Looking as if some magic might turn them from stone to living flesh at any moment, Gilish and Sheagil had stood before him there on the stairs. To a young boy used to the rough art of Anthor they were impossibly life like. Gilish had taken a step down the stairs and held Sheagil’s hand as he half turned towards her and laughed at some ancient jest. Sheagil smiled demurely back and held her free hand in a curious gesture, as if she had been pointing at something.