“On their own, you are correct,” said Talquist patiently. “But think more broadly, Fhremus. Consider with whom the Lord Cymrian is allied, and what you know of his activities. Not long ago, the entire top of one of the inner peaks of the Teeth exploded—all of the Western Command felt the reverberations. A mountain peak, Fhremus—it was not a volcano, no lava flow was reported. Do you have any idea of the power required to blow a mountain peak into shards?” Fhremus didn’t, but he understood the implication. “The Bolg king is developing powerful explosives,” he said, “and so are we. I don’t understand what that has to do with the mechanical walkers for the lame, m’lord.” Talquist’s smile became cruel. “It disturbs me that the commander of the entire nation’s army cannot put pieces together better than that, Fhremus. Think back for a moment; you returned to Jierna’sid at great haste not in response to my summons, but because of what you had heard in the streets—is that not so?” The commander’s face went rigid. “That’s all right, Fhremus—if I were you, and had been informed that the regent emperor had been the target of a titanic stone assassin, a statue twice as tall as a man that moved under its own power, and had destroyed half a brigade as it waded through them on its way into Jierna Tal, I would have come in all due haste as well. I assume you have seen the carnage firsthand; although the streets had been cleansed of the human litter by the time you arrived, you must have seen the shattered carts, the broken gates, yes?” He gestured to the newly repaired wall in the staircase leading up to the southwestern parapet. “Yes,” said the commander. “Touched as I am by your concern for my well-being, I am happy to assure you that not a hair on my head was harmed. Would that I could say the same for the eighty-eight troops and uncounted bystanders.”
“How—” The regent raised a hand, and the soldier lapsed into silence. “I thought by now you knew that my ascension to emperor was foreordained by the Creator,” Talquist said haughtily. “The Scales themselves anointed me; I am divinely protected, as I believe I mentioned to you before.” His dark eyes took on a wicked gleam. “There are many things you do not yet know about me, Fhremus—and many more which you do not realize I know about you. But trust in this— Sorbold, the land we both love, is in more capable hands than you realized.”
“Indeed, m’lord,” murmured Fhremus. He took another swallow of the single malt. Talquist’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Come,” he ordered. “I will show you what our enemy is capable of, both in power and intent—and what we are preparing to do about it.”
He rose, turned, and strode to the inner reaches of his chamber. The commander leapt to his feet and followed him, leaving his glass on the ornately carved table, where the dregs caught the light of the waning sun in the bottom like a stain of drying blood.
22
It did not particularly surprise Fhremus to learn that the recesses of the Emperor Presumptive’s chambers held a series of vaults and tunnels; the dynasty of the Dark Earth and the dynasty of the Forbidden Mountains before them, the rulers of Sorbold for more than seven centuries, had built into Jierna Tal as many mysteries and escape routes as they had fashioned into the empire itself. He had occasionally been allowed entry into such hidden places in the time of the Empress Leitha, but had not been shown this series, in what had once been her bedchamber.
He kept his face expressionless as the layers of drapery and tapestry were pulled aside, revealing each time a thicker, more metal-bound door, each with a subsequently more complex and difficult system of locks. Whatever the regent emperor had locked away in his chambers must have been either of great value or great danger, he reasoned, something that had apparently only been shown to a select few. He was not certain whether to feel honored or threatened.
When he entered the vault behind the final door, he decided he needed to embrace both impressions. Fhremus had heard enough from his troops to recognize what it was that he was seeing; still, it took him a moment to make the connection between the tales of horror that had been told to him and what he was witnessing within the emperor’s own chambers. Talquist set his glass down on a side table, drew back a heavy velvet drape, and revealed an alcove in the corner of the room. There within, standing on its own, was an immense statue of multicolored stone, veins of purple and vermilion and green running through what looked like wet clay drying at the edges to the color of sand. It was a statue of a soldier, of primitive garb and manufacture, one of its hands roughly hewn as if a tool or weapon of some sort had been torn from its palm in the course of its curing. Its facial features and hair were similarly roughly carved, and it was crowned with an armored helm that Fhremus recognized as in the style of the ancient indigenous peoples of the continent that inhabited Sorbold in the time before written history, before the Cymrian era of the Illuminaria, when most of the accounts and chronicles of the world had begun to be written down, inscribed on great scrolls and kept in libraries.
The statue was perhaps ten feet at the apex, its arms and legs muscular and thick in the crudeness of its carving, with none of the features of human limbs save for knees and elbows. Its eyes were hollow, absent of pupils, and it stared at the ceiling, its hands at its sides.
Fhremus had had such a statue described to him, not long before, in the breathless voices of his own soldiers. They had each told hint tales of such a mammoth titan lumbering down the main thoroughfare of Jierna’sid, murder in its intent, as it waded through a throng of defending soldiers, crushing them like wheat beneath its feet. It had dashed wagons and horse carts, broken through gates and barricades, until it made its way into the palace of Jierna Tal itself.
He had come back to the palace in all due haste at the reports, hoping to find the emperor alive, believing the possibility of him to be uninjured slim. Instead, he discovered the damage to Jierna Tal to be minimal, mended in most places, including the corner of the emperor’s own chambers, and the emperor in excellent health, with no apparent injury, none the worse for wear. Upon beholding Talquist for the first time since he heard the reports, he began to wonder if they had been the product of hallucinations. Until this moment.
“That’s not, er, the statue—”
“Yes, indeed,” said Talquist smoothly. “It is, in fact, the titan of animated stone that just a sennight ago burst forth into the streets of the city, crushing soldiers and destroying everything in its path. A beautiful thing, is it not?”
“If you say so, m’lord,” said Fhremus, not knowing what else to say in response. The Emperor Presumptive chuckled. “You have to at least admire the handiwork of our enemies, Fhremus, even if you don’t appreciate their intentions. I have to admit when I saw it from the balcony I was sore distressed, not knowing what forces of nature could have come together to allow such a thing to exist. But in my time as a merchant I have seen many oddities, many strange things in many lands, and more than anything else I have seen weapons in all shapes and sizes— poisons that you would never believe to be toxic, hidden in the softest of silk, blades so unobtrusive that you would not even notice them before you bled to death, traps so ingenious that even the most vigilant of guards would not see them before plunging to his death or being crushed beneath a block of immense stone—so there is very little that surprises me anymore, Fhremus. Thank the Creator that I’m in His favor, that as His anointed one I’m under His protection. Otherwise Sorbold would be leaderless again, as we so recently were after me death of our beloved empress and the crown prince. Who knows—perhaps you would once more be at another Colloquium with the counts of the major provinces again looking to disband the empire and absorb the smaller lands into their own.”