26 - The Moon Broke Into Pieces

I got caught up with one of my essays for my tutor, and I’d tell him I wasn’t inclined to do the other two pieces, even though I’d done all the reading. I couldn’t make the words come, they swam in front of my eyes and I ended up doodling bloody images, swords and axes and severed limbs all along the edges of my essay, instead.

Dinner that night was a display of layers. I was supposed to be developing the Imperial bulk and did my best. The singer was in fine voice, though I noticed he moved a little stiffly. My father wasn’t usually enthusiastic enough to make his lovers sore, so his good mood was likely to last somewhat longer than just a day or two.

I caught His gaze on me a time or two and kept my eyes on my plate, looking up only through my eyelashes. He seemed satisfied with me and I thought it might be because He thought I was showing more how much like Him I was.

I was oddly disconnected from things and didn’t know what I truly was feeling. I unlocked the door and wandered through the stacks of the Imperial archives, alone because I wanted it. I pulled a leather-bound volume off the shelf, blew the dust off. It was 350 years old and I looked at the old pieces of vellum, spidery handwriting on it, the ancient old Imperial seal shining in one corner. It was hard to make out what it was about, since I wasn’t used to deciphering the handwriting, dust rising as I turned the pages. I sneezed and shut the book, thrust it back into its space. One day I would be shut up and folded away into my slot in the God’s library, I thought, and wondered if my soul would be a book they would want to read over and over or just let pile up dust. That made me smile to myself. Tobeas wouldn’t like that idea. He’d think it was disrespectful to think of the Gods as having libraries of souls.

From the Staerin floor the staircase is a semi-spiral and I slid down its banister, narrowly missing a servant who was polishing the landing. I ignored the man’s gasp and hopped onto the next banister which wasn’t as much fun, not only because it was a straight down slide with a right-angle turn but it went down to the Mahid quarters under the stern eyes of my ancestors, the largest painting, Third Ilesias, called The Great, in the Imperial Battle armour with the Battle Flag over his head. I looked up at him and then down.

One of his old titles, long ago erased from Arkan memory had been ‘Friend of Haiu Menshir’. There were old letters where he had apparently in gratitude for some healing he’d received; he’d donated a whole wing to the University on Haiu Roru.

The way the painting faced always made me think he was keeping an eye on the Mahid. Their family quarters were on the lower level and their halls weren’t white marble but gray, with black floors. Every door was the same dark red wood. They had no carpets or tapestries so the stone gave off its damp chill evenly day or night, no matter what the weather outside. The lamps were all plain alcohol, burning blue, with bluish glass shades, giving every face a grayish pallor.

All the fittings were silver or darkened silver, giving very little shine to anything. I usually only came down here to get some speed with my skates because I didn’t have to swerve around little carpets everywhere. Sometimes in the middle of the night it was too much trouble to find enough servants to move the rugs upstairs. The Mahid quarters were a place designed to mimic a tomb, an entrance to Hayel, certainly. Not a place for any feeling, living thing. I was reminded of 2nd Amitzas’s smile as he gutted the okas.

I sat on the bottom step, wondering about Mahid, wondering about myself. He was related to me, or rather I to him. Imperators were very close to their Mahid and had been interbreeding with them over the years. I was the product of the genital squeezings of my father into a Mahid concubine. Probably chosen very carefully for beauty and perfection of form and strength. I had a very strange vision of the Mahid girls being looked over like slaves or cattle in the market; or doing competitions of strength and limberness but that was the stuff of back-alley, hard core, knuckle-sucking pornography. It was probably just her appearance that had made her a concubine.

It was only chance that I was conceived instead of wasted against the sheets or into her mouth and consumed. It was only chance that He chose me as his Heir. I didn’t even know how many, if any, of the current crop of Mahid boys were my brothers.

I wandered down to 1st Amitzas’s office. The Imperial Pharmacist wasn’t there but must be very close because it was unlocked and his desk light glowed under its green shade. His cubby was dark and close because of all the wooden filing cabinets lining the walls, the dark wood polished by generations of Imperial Pharmacist’s gloves. He had all his current files locked away tight, the meticulous record of what my father had commanded over the years, carefully alphabetized. His library, locked behind clear glass shelves, looked horribly fascinating.

“Poisonous Plants of the Arkan Sea Vol. I and II. Venomous Insects. Care of Reptiles.” I pulled my finger along, smudging the glass, as I read to myself. “Studies of the Effects of Pain on Human Physiology. Breaking the Human Animal. Haian Surgeries – Effects When Anaesthetic is not Effective. Writings of the Broken.” That was certainly the most interesting shelf. My eyes stopped short on a book with a pink cover and white lettering. 1st Amitzas was reading “Passionate Nanny?” Umm. I would never have considered that he might have a vice. Next to it was a blue cover... “Enchain My Wild Heart." "The Aitzas Paramour.”

That was strange enough to make me uncomfortable. One might have been chance but three were a collection. The Imperial Pharmacist, the most feared man in all Arko next to my father and he read light romance novels? I shuddered and went over to his desk to drag his hard chair over to the lightning snake’s tank, and sat down. I put my chin on the tabletop to stare at the snake.

He kept it for its venom, and made some of his potions and decoctions from it, as well as the poison teeth for Mahid operatives, or poison pills. It was as fast as saikaid, the poison that could drop a man where he stood.

The ceramic warmer under the table, to give the snake heat, felt pleasant on my knees. It made 1st Amitzas’s office the most agreeable room in the Mahid quarters. On the branch inside, the snake was striped red and yellow along its body, and its head a triangle wedge that just looked dangerous as it stared back at me from its loops along the branch. The eye shone silver. I tapped on the glass and jumped back as it smacked its nose against the glass, leaving a smear of venom behind. I knew it would, but still jumped back. It always startled me.

“Spark of the Eternal Light.” It was the old Mahid’s dry voice. He was perfect, as any first of the Mahid would have to be, moving silently as a young man. “How may I assist you?”

“Hi, Amitzas.” I pulled myself back from the serpent and turned to look at him. “I came down to look at your snake.”

“It belongs, Spark, to your father, not to me. It is a useful creature, if misunderstood because of its nature. It is deadly because of how it was born but is, however, innocent of malice.”

I didn’t want to listen to anyone lecture me, even on something as interesting as the snake. “Have you fed it lately?”

He stood, perfectly still as one of the columns higher in the building, his faultless white robe not even trembling at the bottom, his spectacles glinting in his desk light. “Yes, Spark of the Eternal Light. Yesterday. It does not require more food until two eight days from now. Perhaps not even then.”

He was, in his way, trying to get rid of me; trying to bore me away. I got up and wandered back upstairs. It was late enough that my nurse would be hunting for me and I supposed I should at least try to sleep, though I did not want to. I never remembered my dreams but if I had them they had me in a sweat, the bedclothes unpleasant in the mornings.

I went back up to my rooms and had my skates laced on, telling my servant of chambers to tell my nurse I was skating the halls. The night lamps were lit by now, the moon not yet high enough to shine through the sky windows. The sound of my skates, a higher note than on the slightly rougher street lanes, echoed off the walls. I was moving fast enough that I had to dodge around servants. They were used to me doing this enough that they lifted trays or didn’t flinch under whatever load, raising their polishing rags on poles, and long dusters up higher, for me to duck under if I so desired.

One of the pure white, long-haired cats my father favoured lay stretched along a chaise back and I ran a high-speed stroke along its back and it flailed down onto the cushions, its hissing fading behind me. I hopped over a couple more of them lying stretched out in my way, but all they did was flatten their ears. A kitten pounced out of its hiding place at me and I left the puffball meowing its complaint at having missed me, behind. None of the dogs were allowed free run of the halls, at night, so I ran over no tails nor developed a yipping train of excited lapdogs the way sometimes happened during the day.

Why was my father, after choosing me in such an unorthodox way, after not marrying some aitzas beauty to be the mother of Heirs… why did He want me to be more traditional? When He believed I was like Him? It made no sense to me at all.

Muunas Triumphant hall was dim but open enough, with no display pedestals. I turned some long circles around the hall under the High God’s gaze. I did ten full circuits before ducking away from Muunas’s gaze through the corridor under his sword hand side. I ended up in the Hall of Ancestors for a while and skated up and down in front of Sinim’s tomb.

There were fewer and fewer servants in the halls as beads fell in the clock and I got faster and faster… I leapt up on the Red Staircase’s handrail, not particularly caring that the fall off the steep side was more than a single floor, my skates screeching and spraying sparks till I jumped off the end, just before the lion statue at the bottom, and skittered down the last three steps before going off down the Silianas level. It was all green marble from Twenty-Seventh Joras’s conquests just to the north, some of the oldest in the Palace.

I was so tired now, but I couldn’t seem to stop. Why? Why did He choose me? What thing did He see in the red, newborn blot I must have been? He saw only Himself in me. There were no answers in the faces of the statues, no comfort in the stone hands, outstretched from the deep shadows around me. Human faces as empty as those of the Gods, or the beasts.

Panting, I flung myself onto a chair covered with the long-haired elephant cushions, my skates propped up on a leather footstool shaped like an enormous sea turtle, and stared at the moon just showing now in the sky window. “Mother Selinae,” I addressed it. “I know I’m not supposed to talk to you. But I don’t know what to think anymore…”

The moon twisted and broke into pieces. I took a deep breath but couldn’t cry out because the moon was bleeding. Then it went dark and when I blinked and rubbed my eyes I thought I saw the silver ring that was the pommel of Raikas’s sword but it was only the moon shining white as it always was, my feet moving as if I were running. I knuckled my eyes again, realizing my feet were still moving.

“Wha… what?” Binshala unlaced my skates, bent over so she did not have to bend her old knees. “Spark of the Sun’s Ray, this one would suggest that the child of elemental light needs his strength and perhaps might suggest that one sleep in his own bed?” She had a scented cloth over her one arm and wiped my feet clean as she freed them from the heavy skates.

I put my bare feet down on the cool stone. “Oh. Ummm. Nurse. Was I asleep? Yes. I’m coming.”