The report was two sentences long, and the emperor was reading it for the third time.
The village of Verren on the western border has fallen. There are no survivors.
Rhaellion Rey Galland set the parchment down and turned back to the map. Across the great map that covered the study wall, the empire lay silent in the lamplight. There was a time when looking at this map had given him strength. Now, each time he looked, he only counted the places where it bled.
In the west, the region marked in red ink grew a little larger every week. Oliar still held, but the villages around it were being wiped from the map one by one, and every report ended with the same two words. No survivors. Rhaellion laid his finger on the point where Verren stood. A small border village; one garrison, one shrine, a few hundred households. Last night that point had been a place. Tonight it was only a name.
He remembered the rest of the report and his brow tightened. They had burned the fields. They had filled the wells with stone.
Savages plunder, the old commanders would say, and leave it at that. But plunderers do not fill wells. Filling a well takes time, takes labor, and yields no spoils. Whoever did this wanted no one ever to return to that land. This was not rage. This was arithmetic, and Rhaellion sensed that he could not yet see the whole of the equation. The feeling sat in his stomach like a cold stone.
He returned to the desk. The parchments of the night lay piled upon it; news distilled from communication crystals, relayed tower to tower, carried road by road. From the north had come Larkan's report, three days late as always, and as always written in flawless language that said nothing at all. The rebels had been driven back, casualties were being assessed, the wall garrisons had been reinforced. Rhaellion could have written those sentences without reading them. The duke was a fool, but the letters that came out of Larkan were not foolish, and that mismatch had sat like a small splinter in the emperor's mind for years.
The report from the south was shorter. Anvil ships had turned back two more grain convoys off the coast of Parna. The merchant folk of the leaden seas were standing in an empire's path for the first time in their history, and Rhaellion knew what that meant. Anvil did not gamble. Anvil calculated, and its calculations no longer favored Gallant.
And Ryugen. The emperor picked up his spies' latest report, read it, and put it down. The raiders had not touched his coasts in ten years. In ten years not a single sail had been sighted, and that silence had cost him more sleep than all the raids together. Now their shipyards worked day and night, great-hulled vessels slid into the sea one after another and vanished northward, toward where the maps ended. No one knew where they went. Rhaellion did not fear an unknown enemy. What he feared was the possibility that his enemy no longer cared about him at all.
The emperor rubbed his eyes and walked to the window.
Helios slept. Two million people slept beneath white stone and golden domes, believing their empire immortal. In the distance stood the dome of the Sun Temple with that pale golden glow that never died, even when every other light in the city went out. Rhaellion's great-grandfather had been crowned beneath that dome. His own father had been buried beneath it. And Rhaellion, in the last years of his fifty-seven, stood at this window every night with the same question.
In my reign?
A thousand-year empire. A whole age founded on Arturio's blood and carried on the shoulders of twenty generations. And the history books were merciless; they passed over nineteen generations of a millennium in a single line and gave whole volumes to the generation of the fall. Rhaellion would not be that volume. Whatever it cost, he would not be that volume.
There was a soft knock, and the old chamberlain entered. He carried a single parchment, and on his face was that stone expression a man wears when he has served a palace for forty years and brings bad news.
"Your Majesty. From Miria. Under the Duke's own seal."
Rhaellion took the parchment, broke the seal, and read. It was a long report, but the emperor's eyes stopped on a single line.
In the northern baronies, gatherings have been observed around a person whose name I dare not commit to writing.
The emperor folded the parchment slowly. A person whose name he dared not write. Miriam was a careful man, and careful men did not put the name of an emperor's exiled son to paper.
Rhaellion closed his eyes, and for a moment, a very short moment, he saw his wife's face. On her deathbed, gripping his hand with the last of her strength. Promise me, she had said. That child stays far from this palace. Rhaellion had kept his word, and for fifteen years he had been unable to ask why it had been demanded of him, because the only person who could answer was gone.
Now that child had grown somewhere, become a man, and was gathering men around him. And around Rhaellion's throne stood the three empty chairs of his three sons.
Illness had taken the eldest; an illness that would not heal and could not be named, one that had brought every healer of the tower to its knees. Otto and Caelius he had buried within the same year, and after that year the palace had never recovered its old voice. The emperor had not wept for his sons. Emperors did not weep. But since that year he had not set foot in the eastern wing, in the corridor where his children had grown up, and the only one who had noticed was probably the old chamberlain.
"Is there anything else, Your Majesty?"
"No. Go and rest."
The chamberlain bowed and left. Rhaellion looked at the map a while longer, then took up one of the lamps and left the room.
The palace corridors were empty at this hour. The guards turned to stone as he passed and breathed again once he was gone. Rhaellion walked toward the western wing, walked without admitting his intention even to himself, and stopped before his daughters' apartments.
Light seeped from under the door. A voice came from within; young, lively, stumbling here and there. His younger daughter was reading aloud.
"...the timber convoy from Kisabra is twelve days late. Third-quarter output from the Baloran mines is below last year's. On the tax rolls from Tiamut... sister, are these truly what you want to hear before sleeping? Let me send for a bard."
The second voice was lower, slower, and it was smiling. "Bards tell me tales. You are reading me the truth. Go on. The grain report next."
"The grain report is three pages."
"Then you will read three pages."
Rhaellion stood before the door for a long time, lamp in hand. His elder daughter listened to grain reports the way other people listened to lullabies, and the emperor did not know what she was searching for inside those reports, but he knew she was searching for something. That child's mind worked faster than every clerk in the palace. Had her legs been able to carry her, half the empire would be resting on her shoulders today, and Rhaellion would not stand alone at that window in the night.
But her legs did not carry her, and the nobles had reached the point of debating whether to hand the empire to a bastard rather than set a crown upon a body they deemed flawed.
The emperor did not knock. His hand rose, stopped a few fingers from the wood, and came down again. He did not want to interrupt the voice inside; that was what he told himself, and it was not entirely a lie. He turned and walked quietly back the way he had come.
Dawn was near when he reached his own chambers. He did not sleep. He took the sword from its stand, drew it from the scabbard, and in the middle of the room, as he had done every morning for forty years, he began the first of the forms. The steel made no sound as it cut the air. Along its edge, for an eye that could see, there trembled a gleam darker than the morning light; the gleam of a strength honed by years and never dulled by the palace. Since his youth, Rhaellion had believed that one day he would have to defend his throne with a blade. Growing old should have weakened that belief.
It had grown stronger.
As he finished the last form there was a knock, and the chamberlain's voice came through the door. This time there was something strange in it.
"Your Majesty. Tower Master Ogmios is waiting in the audience hall. He arrived before dawn." A short silence followed. "He says he has a solution for the western problem."
Rhaellion slid the sword back into its scabbard and looked out the window, at the sky beginning to redden above the temple dome.
Ogmios's solutions. The emperor had feared very little in his life. But a man he did not trust appearing at his door at the exact moment of his need stood at the very top of the list of things an emperor ought to fear.
"Tell him to wait." he said. "I'll be leaving in a little while."