“You’ve got the hero of Wodford and Gradis,” Marcus said, tapping himself on the chest. “So in a fair fight, you’re fucked.”
Geder
The thaw hadn’t reached Camnipol, but the court had returned. The first group tacitly fleeing the strife in the east was joined by the more traditional grandees who’d spent their winter in the King’s Hunt. Cyr Emming had presided over the hunt itself, relying on his position as Geder’s advisor even more than on the dignity of his titles. Now that he’d come back, he seemed pleased to continue being the social center of the court. Geder was pleased to let him. Despite that, not all balls and feasts could be avoided.
Since the wars began, Camnipol had seen a great influx of wealth from the conquered. Asterilhold and Sarakal and Elassae had all given up their treasuries and the adornments of their temples along with their land and freedom. Emming’s grand ball was lavish beyond anything Geder had ever seen. Distilled wine poured out of statues of gold and pearl, spilling as much onto the floor as into the cups. Slaves sat in contorted, uncomfortable positions to act as living chairs and divans for the high families of the court. The food was rich and greasy, meats and butters and cakes thick as jelly. After two seasons of starving, Geder didn’t have the belly for it.
The silk banners that hung from Emming’s vaulted ceiling listed the names of conquered cities. Suddapal and Inentai were among them. And the guests… court fashion was famed for changing year by year, and now was no different. Some few still wore the oversize black leather that Geder himself had made popular, but more had adopted the newer look based, it seemed, on feathers and bone. Sanna Daskellin in particular wore a gown fashioned from ravens’ feathers and a cape of tiny bird bones sewn together with dark thread. She clattered when she moved.
Braziers in the shape of Timzinae bodies bent in pain stood among the guests, the light from their fires licking out of their mouths and eyeholes. The smoke they gave off smelled of incense and burning sap. Reed instruments and viols filled the air with exotic music inspired by the new lands under Antean stewardship and the Kesheti rhythms associated in the court’s collective mind with the goddess.
His own chair stood on an elevated dais so that he could look out over it all. The whirl of bodies and darkness, smoke and gold and gaiety. Geder stayed as long as he could stand it, making small conversations with men and women, many of whom were newer at court than himself. Tiar Sanninen, newly Baron of Eccolund. Salvian Cersillian, cousin of the former Earl of Masonhalm, and her daughters. Lady Broot, whose every word and gesture was hoping for happy news of her family in Elassae. Happy words that Geder didn’t have to offer.
Everything about the court made it seem a fabric of excess and fear. The laughter, too wild. The joy, too desperate. It was as though the court in general had caught a fever and was pretending that it hadn’t. The buzz of desperation and despair this seemed designed to drown out… well, perhaps that was only Geder’s own.
He made his curt excuses to Emming, handed back his half-finished flagon of wine, and called for his carriage. Aster was there somewhere. Dancing, most likely, with the girls of his cohort. Well, he was the prince. He could do that. Should, even. Someone should wring a drop of being carefree out of the world.
The streets of Camnipol in twilight were oddly beautiful and quiet after the too-lush feasting rooms. The air smelled clean and clear and like the presentiment of rain. There were few trees outside the gardens of the great houses, but here and there splashes of green ivy spilled up grey stone walls, their leaves defying the cold. Hardy, thick-bodied finches had joined the sparrows and crows of the winter. Geder leaned out the window of his carriage as it rattled toward the Kingspire and let the breeze of his passage cool his face. The banner of the goddess fluttered high above, draped from the doors of the temple. Lights flickered up there as well. Basrahip and his priests, performing their rites or eating rice from simple bowls or simply sitting together. Geder didn’t know. If the trek up those stairs weren’t quite so awful, he might have joined them. Instead, he took comfort where he had before. His library.
The books perfumed the desk with dust and sweet paste. The light of a dozen candles warmed the leather-bound volumes and parchment scrolls, the codices and maps and fragile paper sewn together with twine. Geder’s stomach gurgled and shifted with the unaccustomed too-rich food of Emming’s feast, but he didn’t call for water or a cunning man. It would have meant talking to someone, and even ordering a servant to do his bidding was more energy than he could manage just now. He was ill, after all, whatever the cunning men said.
He sat on a large chair, the light spilling over his shoulder and onto the pages of a third-age history of Far Syramys by a likely mythical Dartinae poet who went by the name Stone.
Among the civilized lands, Far Syramys is a conjuration of the possible, the birthplace of soft dreams and harsh mysteries. What we hope and wish and spin from fantasy, we place there. In Far Syramys, we say, the women walk naked and unashamed through the parks, their sex available to any who ask. In Far Syramys, cunning men have deepened their arts until the cures for all diseases are known, though the price of cure is sometimes obscure and terrible. In Far Syramys, the forges make steel that will never lose its edge; the farms, pomegranates that will sustain a man for a week with only a handful of pips; the looms, cloth so fine and beautiful that the wearer of their silk will disappear from mortal sight.
Among the rough and uncivilized hills of the true Far Syramys, there are indeed great and hidden cities. There are indeed women and men of surpassing beauty. The Haunadam and Raushadam make their homes there, with bodies and minds as unlike the others of the thirteen races as an apple is from a walnut. But Far Syramys’s dreams of itself are nothing like our dreams of it, and the traveler who dares it should be warned of all that has happened there before.
Geder fell into the words like he was falling asleep. Or else waking up to some other life. He imagined himself in the court of the Grand Agha, sitting on the floor and drinking tea with poets and hunters. Or trekking through great caverns beneath Sai where the waters ran yellow and red, and drinking them was death. Or seeing the Uron Tortoise wandering the northern desert with a city of thousands riding unnoticed on its vast shell. He longed for it all, even as he knew that in practice, it would all be awkward, tiring, and uncomfortable if it was even real. But then it wasn’t really those places that left him empty and hungry and rich with need. It was the Geder Palliako who could take joy in them. That better version of himself who belonged there.
When the Kurtadam servant girl appeared at the door, her eyes wide and the pelt on her face twisted into a grimace by her anxiety, Geder was almost happy to be interrupted. Not quite, but almost.
“L-lord Regent? My lord?” she said, her voice high and piping.
“Yes?”
“I apologize, my lord, but there’s—” she choked on the words. Her hands balled in fists and she looked down, her mouth pressed tight. His heart went out to her. Poor thing was so sure she was going to be in trouble.
“It’s all right,” he said, his voice gentle. “I don’t bite. Least not often. What’s the issue?”
When she spoke, her voice was smoother, calmer. Still rich with fear, but not throttled by it. “The Baron of Watermarch has come, my lord. He asks your urgent presence.”
Geder closed the book and laid it aside. “Show him in, then,” he said. “And let this be a lesson to you… what was your name?”