We Shatter

By M.C. Burnell

The capital has been reclaimed, the throne saved, but the empire’s trials are only beginning. Sathriel is caught between the problems created by reawakened sorcery and the cult of zealots determined to end magic. Necavos has taken his place in exile and struggles to find purpose in her new life, unless that purpose is to wage war on her brother.

In Ophana, the cousins are coming into conflict, and the sorcerers search for an alternative while Koloeph faces an unexpected enemy. The witch strives to understand the nature of the coming conflict. Searching for a glimpse of their foe’s identity, she’ll come face-to-face with her gods. Alongside her champions, she will start asking questions that may unravel a mystery three thousand years old.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M.C. Burnell
• Release date: Jan 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005618117

M.C. Burnell

M.C. Burnell had the good fortune to be born to a couple of bon vivants with a Renaissance approach to intellectual curiosity, who taught her how to taste wine, build a campfire, and think in terms of geologic time before she flew the nest. Since then, she’s acquired a degree in English literature and a J.D. She makes her home in the city of Chicago with her husband.

Book preview

The city slumbered on a night as moist and still as they always were. At this latitude, the sun did not vary in its course, rising at the sky’s waist from a pillow of mist off the trees at the same time every morning, setting into a bed of fog at the same time every night. This deep in the jungle, there wasn’t much by way of weather: it was raining or it wasn’t, a pattern too constant to constitute seasons the way people in coastal or temperate regions thought of them.

So it was hard to say what it was about this night that made it feel as if the world held its breath.

Amidst the decrepit ruin that had once been and technically still was the capital city, exhausted citizens had finally gone to bed, able to sleep soundly for the first time in weeks. The plateau was better lit to the east, where a stunning profusion of tents made it difficult for sentries to walk their rounds without catching their feet on stakes or ropes. The area where they paced was flooded by lamplight, but they were the only ones waking; even the thousands and thousands of horses picketed along the stone-topped island’s northern cliff dozed, legs cocked and heads hanging.

The insects were busy, but everyone else rested. Able to relax at last as the world that had seemed to be disintegrating righted itself. If everything was far from settled, a catastrophe that had come to feel inevitable had been checked. And yet.

Ha’ere woke in the late watches, feeling as if she had been shaken. Her eyes snapped open, slumber’s foggy remnants shredded by alarm. She felt quite certain another person was physically present in her room and had grabbed her by her shoulder, jostling her until she shook free from sleep’s embrace. She sat up with a gasp, heart dashing itself against her ribs while her eyes ran a circuit of the shadowed chamber, and another and another. She never found anyone near her, though.

She wasn’t truly by herself; space was too dear for people who had as little money as she did to pay for privacy. She was sick of solitude and didn’t mind. At the moment, all that mattered was the steady cadence of her companions’ breathing: she was the only one here who was awake.

Unable to shake the sense of doom, she cast back the clinging sheet she’d slept beneath and rose. She went to the lone window, which was open; she’d seen neighborhoods in this country where every single window in every single building had glass panes in it, but this place was too poor to afford such fancified modernities. Had you been able to shut the windows here, you would swiftly stifle anyway.

She didn’t know what had spooked her, and nothing outside was giving her a clue. She could see very little of the city from her vantage and there were no lights still burning in this area. The red moon and green moon shared the sky, seeming to gobble up the light. A distant glow impinged upon her senses; she caught hints of it here and there reflected against the sides of buildings facing in the right direction, but nowhere was the light directly visible.

The air was too still, moisture settling on the skin like an omen. She stood there for a long time, staring out at what she could see of the city through the huge, leafy bush below the window, telling herself it had been a nightmare. But she didn’t feel like she had been dreaming: she felt like someone had awakened her. As if to warn her she must run from something or—

A heavy percussion shook the ground beneath her feet, and her sixth sense, the part of her attuned to the heartbeat of everything, screamed.

Or to bear witness.

There was a moment, infinitesimal but discreet, when she knew something was wrong but reality hadn’t caught up to her premonition. The sound of sorcery swelled, its rainbow spectrum rising in stirring chorus. She even had time to tell herself she shouldn’t be alarmed or even surprised; she knew Sathriel and Bayam were nearby and turning on pyramids was what they did, the only wonder was that it had taken them so long to get around to it.

Then the sound stuttered strangely. The flaw couldn’t come from the heartbeat itself, which humanity didn’t have the power to tamper with, but the volume swelled and dampened in sudden succession, like a hiccup. Like hands had clamped across her ears, only to let up again.

It dropped off right before the explosion, and an icy frisson spread across her skin. She heard a crash like a thousand bolts of lightning striking. A shockwave went through the city, and she staggered and fell, then couldn’t tell if she had been knocked down or just fallen from distress.

The earth beneath her rumbled, and she could hear a rocky clattering in the near distance. Lights were kindling all over town, screaming people running outside to find out what had happened. In the room behind her, everyone was up, bumbling around in the dark and bumping into each other. The sound of tumbling rock just went on and on until it felt like the world must be crumbling into the unspeakable abyss that was the Barrachite afterlife destined for sinners.

The sun was coming up by the time she found out what had happened. She was sitting in the kitchen by then, crammed in shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone else who was renting a patch of floor from this family, cradling her third cup of tea in hands that felt cold in spite of the balmy temperature. Soldiers were doing the rounds, reassuring people that the emperor was fine, but Ha’ere noticed how skittish they were.

That the pyramid had exploded seemed to be a fact, but it didn’t look like anyone had a theory what had caused it to. Three thousand years, it had stood sentinel on this city, declaring Barrecheh’s might to every horizon. People had forgotten, though, that it wasn’t just a symbol of power: it was the power itself. By its nature dangerous.

Ha’ere had known, and she couldn’t shake the sense of culpability; she wasn’t trying. As soon as she finished her tea, she excused herself and went back to bed. No one complained or put questions to her like they found the action odd. Very few people in the capital had been sleeping soundly in recent weeks.

She had arrived in Rai Selu just in time to be besieged with the rest of the city’s population. First a battle that precipitated out of thin air, then the stunning news that the emperor had vanished. She’d been hauled outside like the rest, twitchy Timerian soldiers scowling at them while cabinets were ransacked in the building at her back and beds upended in search of a person whose face they’d never seen. Whom they wouldn’t recognize if she was right in front of them.

Had Necavos surrendered herself, they would have assumed it was a prank and turned her roughly away, you had to think.

Ha’ere knew what the woman looked like and why they were having such a hard time finding her, but she’d sat on the knowledge for weeks. Afraid to do something with it, lest her chosen course of action prove disastrous. The last time she leapt forward and took a hand, she was too hasty about it, first throwing Sathriel at the pyramid and then running away from him.

Leave aside how much it had sucked to be tortured, to say nothing of the fact that she might never have made the Kinship aware of her existence. If they’d talked it over, they could have come at all of this with a strategy. It was hard to characterize Manulmanar’s fate as a tragedy, but there had been better ways to address the corruption.

At the rear of the house, she sat down on the pallet she was renting. She rubbed the tips of her fingers against the balls of her thumbs as she wondered what she meant to do; resolve was all well and good, but you couldn’t set off walking until you picked a direction. Her mistake hadn’t been haste, she decided, so much as a desire not to involve herself. She’d wanted to remain at arm’s length and she saw now that she couldn’t. When she held herself at a distance, she could only push events into motion, not steer them.

Forget one city: Sathriel and Bayam could have died last night, one of them or both of them. What became of the world if the people who would help prevent the apocalypse didn’t make it to the showdown?

She was going to have to talk to her champions.

Okay, Ho’et, she said as she stretched out on her back on her rented bed. This is going to take some doing, I hope you’re still in a generous mood.

***

The visions wouldn’t start until that night, the shocking experience of going to sleep only to find oneself awake again, living events too real to be a dream and too strange to be believed. A voice from nowhere talking through the haze of their own and others’ memories. Resolving into a small person, pretty in an unassuming way. Projecting above all a grim determination that she wore like an armadillo’s plates.

She would drag them in against their will and force them into one another’s skin. She would say, This is who this person is, this is why they did what they did, can you not relate? Whether it was last-ditch hope or willful optimism, she would strive to make strangers intimates and enemies, friends.

But all of that was some twelve hours in the future. For now, the only stories they knew were their own. If they were aware of each other’s existence at all, they could only guess at one another’s motives.

Noon found Sathriel and Bayam picking through the massive fan of broken stone and shattered trees along the valley’s floor, struggling to make sense of it. The day was brightly sunny, temperatures sweltering, the turgid air heavy. Neither of them had gotten any sleep; they had scarcely gone to bed, and Sathriel had still been tossing restlessly, when the world tried to fall out from under him.

I almost want to say it was broken.

He glanced at the young man next to him, smears of dirt on his cheeks that had turned to paste in the humidity. Oh?

When he saw that Sathriel was looking at him, he turned away, picking a seat on a larger boulder and dusting off his hands. A slave appeared at his elbow to offer him a cup of tea, and Bayam regarded the woman with such wary indecision, it wasn’t clear he would accept the drink.

Sathriel went to join him on what looked to be a block of the pyramid itself; its edges were square where they hadn’t broken and the stone was paler than the forest’s skeleton. Its like dotted the rubble of macerated black rock, dark jungle soil, and broken trees. Here and there, you might spot a smaller block of luminous marble or polished schist from what had been the palace.

While they drank their tea, they gazed up at what remained of the building where Sathriel had lived the first fifteen years of his life. Roughly half of it was gone, and the catastrophe had nearly had them: Bayam had managed to stop the chain reaction tumbling the mesa’s flanks away, but only just, and he had halted its progress at their door. He had shored the hill up since and felt tentatively confident it would stay where he had put it, but it had been a close-run thing. Portions of the emperor’s apartments had been lost. Another second, half a heartbeat, and it would have taken them.

"I mean, we could see it was broken…"

You think the breakage was more significant than we realized. The damage wasn’t just cosmetic, something was wrong with the machine.

Bayam scratched at his filthy, sweaty hair, stiff with masonry dust so it stood out from his scalp the way Sathriel’s did naturally. You said something once about how they’re outside town. At the time, I figured it was just easier. They’re so big, if they were inside the cities, think how much extra wall they would have had to build to encircle the things. Now I’m thinking you may have been onto something.

The machines themselves are dangerous, Sathriel murmured.

We can see it for ourselves.

From this distance, he couldn’t make out much detail, but he vividly recollected what his home looked like now: the empress’s bedroom and nursery, the family dining room, all gone. The door in the eastern wall of the emperor’s bedroom, which had given access to a private garden, now gave access to the sky.

Bayam had reacted in time to save the two of them, but people had died last night. Very few of Rai Selu’s citizens had been taken, because there were no residences between the palace and the ramp leading up the mesa’s eastern face; their allies had been camped to the north and west of the palace, because what Bayam did to make that ramp had eaten up too much of the open space, there hadn’t been much land left that wasn’t already occupied by the pyramid.

Still there had been soldiers posted on the approach. There had been people sleeping in the portions of the palace that plummeted into the hole created when the pyramid exploded. A few larger blocks had landed on the palace roof and punched holes in it, crushing people in their beds.

This was all very sad. And shocking, and terrible. They had spent all morning wandering around down here in the heat and the dust, though, trying to make sense of the disaster, and what he felt more than anything was exasperated. "Why now, after all this time? Even if it was busted, it was just sitting there being harmless for a thousand years."

Sathriel. Bayam waited until he was certain Sathriel was looking at him, paying full attention to his words. "I heard it trying to wake up. I was still awake when it happened, I’m certain what I felt. It turned on, and only when it tried to start working again did it fail."

How could that be? Nausea struck him and one hand went to his left thigh. Was this my doing? I took a cut in the first battle, it wasn’t bandaged properly… He hadn’t wanted to let a healer look at the injury because it felt like a dishonor to his fallen soldiers did he not bleed alongside them. Had this frivolous tribute damned the survivors?

Bayam had heard his distress and was scowling at him. "Of course not! Think about how much blood you’ve spilled. The suffering you’ve endured to force this system back into working order. Suddenly it starts leaping to work for you with no effort on your part?"

Then what? Was it something you did when you worked all that sorcery close to it? After he said it, he felt as if it sounded like an accusation, and he pulled back. I didn’t mean that how it came out. You saved us all. The credit may go to Sulamar, but you’re the one who won that battle. You can’t be blamed if something unpredictable came of it.

His sorcerer shrugged that off. That’s kind of you, but it wasn’t me. I was preoccupied with you, there wasn’t room in my head for pyramids. Don’t take it the wrong way.

How do you mean?

The kid flashed an apologetic grimace before turning his eyes onto the rubble-cloaked vista, bathed by the tropical sun. Like he thought it best they not be making eye contact when he admitted this. I’ve been waiting for you to react since Cha Gobeli. Get over the shock and actually feel something. I was with you when we entered the palace, I saw your face. I saw you looking for her. That was when it finally became real. Coming home and her not being here. I— He fell silent when Sathriel stood up. Sire?

A buzzing filled his ears, as if he’d borrowed Bayam’s ability to hear the pyramids. It didn’t try to turn itself on. You’re right: if that was possible, it would have happened somewhere, sometime in the last thousand years. Someone turned it on and it wasn’t me.

A pause, thrumming with weirdness. You can’t be thinking it.

It’s not likely, but every other answer to the riddle is impossible.

But she’s—

How do we know? No one ever saw a body.

You think she was a prisoner after all? Why would they not have told anyone?

He dropped heavily back onto the rock that had been his seat, hunching forward and hiding his face in his hands. He had thought he was angry the previous night, but Bayam was right: it had been an explosion of grief, of pain too deep to hold inside. It was nothing like the rage now scalding him.

He felt as if his soul had been cut, hard and fast. Not the slow, seeping wound that was loss: something had been amputated. Last night, he had thought he was angry at her, but he had never actually blamed her. It hadn’t been her fault. He hadn’t been fast enough, other forces had intervened. Only now did he see that she had made a choice, a choice he could neither abide nor forgive.

Sathriel? Bayam seemed to sense that it wasn’t sorrow gripping him, that he wasn’t suffering and didn’t want comforting: he hadn’t scooted closer to him on their stony seat but twisted around to crouch at his feet. He made no effort to touch him, as if he sensed this might be dangerous.

She can’t have been. A prisoner. The words emerged flat, thin. Leeched of substance like the papery corpse of a dead insect. They wouldn’t have made a secret of it, I’m sure of it. If they had control of her, they would have used her to give their coup legitimacy. They would have trotted her out the moment I showed up, tried to make her order me to stop.

"But… you don’t think she’s dead."

There’s a third alternative: they never had her in custody. They never explained themselves because they didn’t have the answers either. The emperor wears a mask, they thought she was a man. All she had to do to escape was take it off and she would vanish.

You can’t be saying she was here. Last night.

He let his hands drop, sitting up straight. He looked around, but the sunlight seemed too bright and he couldn’t see a thing beyond its glare. I think she was.

Did she try to kill us?

He sank his hands into his hair, scrubbing at his scalp as if he could force some order on his turbulent thoughts. She can’t have known what would happen, we didn’t. Still, she did it on purpose.

I’m not sure I understand.

"She did it on purpose, Bayam. He drew a shuddering breath, striving to take himself in hand. She’d heard reports, enough to put a few pieces together. She had her suspicions about you and me, and how the pyramids played into it. Why was it only last night that she tried? With her capital in the hands of her enemies, with an occupying force inside our home, she waited until last night to find out whether she could make use of sorcery. She didn’t know enough, it was too dangerous, she knew that going in. So what changed yesterday that made her feel as if any risk was tenable if it could put a weapon in her hands?"

Bayam never answered, but he must understand. The truth was too obvious. He must be holding back because it was too cruel and he couldn’t stand to be party to it.

For reasons he couldn’t readily articulate, Sathriel found his kindness intolerable. He needed the terrible words to be said, he needed the thought to be spoken aloud and given flesh. "I came back. After nine years of exile. I came home with my heart broken, planning to avenge her, but she was fine all along.

When she saw I was home, that struck her as a crisis. She flung herself into the abyss on the basis of a hunch, which she knew was too risky two days ago. Anything was preferable to climbing out of whatever hole she’s been hiding in and asking for my help.

Why would she do that? his sorcerer asked guardedly.

I thought we were a team, he murmured, but we never were. That was just a myth.

It was Sinshan Patience who taught him that they must be unified, but of course it wasn’t that simple. No wonder his father had always had so little patience with him: it had been his plan that the two of them work in concert to forward the interests of their family, but that was what he thought was best, not how he truly felt in his secret heart about how the children of an emperor should be expected to behave. He had told them they came into being wrapped trustingly in one another’s limbs, but what he truly believed was that they were wrestling.

Necavos saw us as rivals. It’s why he loved her more, even though it wasn’t what he claimed he wanted. I was more obedient, but what man wants as son a simpleton? A weakling, willing to be pushed away from a throne? He laughed bitterly. He often commented on my lack of ruthlessness. I was dutiful to a fault, and there were days when that was enough, but the disdain was never far beneath the surface with him.

He laughed again as it occurred to him that the crypts had been dug beneath the eastern wing, and his parents’ remains must be jumbled amidst the smashed trees and broken masonry under his feet. He stood, raising his voice as he turned in a circle. Do you hear, Father? I’m finally up to speed. I understand that she’s my enemy, our entire conspiracy was a labyrinth she fabricated to keep me busy. Only one of us can be emperor and ultimately— Only one of them could live, but he couldn’t voice that thought and choked on it. He didn’t care that it was grim, that it might shock the people listening to him: he cared that it was true.

He had heard it said that hate and love were two faces of a coin, but it had never made sense to him. Now he had proof that he’d been right to be skeptical. He had never loved anyone like he loved his sister and he had never hated anyone this much either. But the one had not replaced the other like a coin flipped face to tail; even understanding how totally she had betrayed him, how little he had meant to her when stacked against her ambition, how ready she had been to use him and manipulate him, like a tool, like an implement, the love was still there.

Maybe love could fade, but it couldn’t simply be wiped away because one learned better. He couldn’t make himself another person; he couldn’t make the last twenty-five years of his life not have occurred in all their misguided, heartfelt loyalty. Hatred had not taken love’s place, it had simply moved in on top of it. That they didn’t easily cohabitate changed nothing.

He couldn’t stand the thought of hurting her or giving orders that led someone else to hurt her in his name. He didn’t want to find her; the thought of facing her was unimaginable. He was so angry, it was all he could do to move and think under the force of it, the way Bayam spoke of the power of the pyramids, and what if he couldn’t control himself, face to face? What if he lashed out?

He wanted…

He wanted…

He wanted never to lay eyes on her again, lest he be forced to find an end to that sentence.

Sire? Bayam asked quietly.

Come. He had sat down again, he had no idea when, and must stand. It’s time to talk to our servants.

He walked as swiftly as he dared along the shifting mass of rubble underfoot, his sorcerer scrambling in his wake. You think they knew?

Some of them must have.

They were abetting her.

Well probably, she probably never really lost control of the palace even with the Timerians here. These people know us, they have since we were born. Taking the mask off would have disguised her from the interlopers, not people who already know her.

We need to make sure they’re not still serving her.

Just so. Her rule was at an end the day she went into hiding, but she’s been trying to have it both ways. It’s time to make sure people understand she’s no longer in command.

***

They returned to the mesa via the southern stair, where their fallen soldiers had been retrieved since the battle, the blood washed away by last night’s rain. Bayam was too concerned about Sathriel to feel elated that the man had finally realized what useless parasites his blood-relations were. It was hard to imagine how painful that must be, for a soul as loyal as his to comprehend that others didn’t work the same.

You would never call Sathriel naïve, but still, it wasn’t his way to use people. Bayam had never known him to ask anything of others he wasn’t willing to give himself. How awful the revelation must have been, that the people closest to him had considered his devotion a means to an end.

They walked amidst a crowd, soldiers who had come along to watch over them, hovering slaves carrying canteens of tea and parasols. Bayam cast a look at them as he wondered how long they would be staying here. Life on the run had often been uncomfortable; he hadn’t enjoyed eating travel rations, and the way he kept losing his shoes was downright miserable. It had had its moments, though, and Rai Selu had him dwelling on those memories. There were so many people here, virtually none of whom they knew. Every single one of them with an agenda they expected the emperor to pursue for them.

Within the palace, Sathriel couldn’t stand to delay in order to wash up, so they made their way to the throne room still sticky with sweat and coated in dust. By the time they reached that smothering space, people were converging from all quarters. Not only the people Sathriel had commanded to attend him, but the aristocrats residing in the palace, come to investigate what was happening.

Among them were the Shias of Borosan and Sulamar, and Bayam’s gaze would linger on them, both watching their emperor thoughtfully. He didn’t like them: they made him nervous. Desysyn of Sulamar had come here from as far away as it was possible to be and still be in the empire, and he had picked up dribs and drabs of other people’s underlings along the way, but no allies of any substance.

He had not sent word to prosperous Andosuria as he went; he had not sent messengers to Robasoti as he flew past its borders; he had passed through Sabatiera and Tegulianes without contacting their leaders. It seemed obvious that what few outsiders he brought with him had chanced to note him as he traveled and insisted on accompanying him. It was entirely their doing, and he had had no part in it.

Sathriel had told him last night in private that the man had acted in the way he had because he didn’t want to share any gratitude that might accrue to his actions. He wanted to be the person who helped his emperor more than anyone else, because he had a favor to ask, possibly several of them. Vedan of Borosan was only different in the scope of the assistance he’d been able to provide.

It had been different as recently as a year ago. All of them had been struggling. Even the few aristocrats who managed to hang onto their influence or their money knew themselves to be isolated, islands in a sea of Timerians. Their situations precarious.

Suddenly, they’d gone to war and won. They were beating their enemies back on all fronts, and as they dared to depart their domains, to take risks that had felt insupportable yesterday, expectations changed. They were starting to think there might just be a tomorrow—something they hadn’t been sure of for a while—and if there was going to be a future, they wanted things from it. If their emperor was a force to be reckoned with, rather than a figurehead, they wanted him to give those things to them.

The emperor wasn’t interested in them today. His attention was all on the bureaucrats and slaves still entering the room in response to his summons, those who had survived Necavos’s dramatic exit. Bayam took a seat on the dais beside the throne, and he noticed that people were watching him. He frowned and hoped that they were scared of him.

We have arrived at a theory on the cause of last night’s catastrophe, Sathriel announced, and a hush fell instantly. For those of you who don’t yet know, the empire’s sorcery is made possible by the pyramids. They’re actually machines, built by our ancestors with science we lost in the intervening centuries. They’ve been dormant for a thousand years, but the blood of the world-and-sky will reactivate them. I mean that quite literally: I have been turning the things back on by bleeding on them.

A murmur of interest spread through the crowd as the observers whispered in the ears of the people next to them.

This is troubling to me, the emperor resumed, turning his left arm to display the nest of scabs in various stages of healing all over his forearm, because I was lying in bed last night thinking about my dead brother when Rai Selu’s pyramid tried to come awake. This leaves me wondering, he sat forward suddenly, how many of you knew Necavos was alive all along, hiding in the palace.

The mood in the room was confused as people traded looks, but there were definitely a few of them keen not to make eye contact with anyone.

Sathriel must have noticed, but at the moment, he had eyes only for one large soldier with a crooked nose in the uniform of the palace guards. I know you knew, Tagero. You’ve been weird since I got back, you can barely stand to look at me. I thought you were upset about Necavos, I thought it was grief and you were blaming me. You can’t look me in the eyes because you’re lying, and lying is a thing good people don’t like doing.

Bayam wasn’t sure what he expected, and started when the man sagged as if all strength had left him. He went to his knees, touched his brow to the floor, and stayed that way like he never meant to move again. His voice emerged muffled, but it was deep and carried. We didn’t know. He was there and then he just wasn’t, we didn’t know what to do but wait until he explained himself. He came back just in time for you to liberate the palace, and then instead of greeting you, he vanished. I thought he must be… waiting for his moment. Like to talk to you. Some time when you were by yourself…

The revelation struck Bayam like a shock: the conspiracy. If these people hadn’t known, still they had known enough to wonder. Sathriel had pursued his rebellion with the same lack of energy Necavos exerted in pursuing him, and the people who lived in the same building with them since their birth would have to have been puzzled by the falling-out. The entire empire had been in the dark as to the precise nature of their feud, but the mystery would have been rather more concrete for the people who lived alongside them: there hadn’t been a fight that they had seen, so where had the enmity come from so suddenly?

Sathriel had seen it too and sat forward again, resting his elbows on his knees. You knew us all our lives. Anyone Necavos trusted with this secret must have, you’re the only people he would have taken into his confidence. Only the people who had known her before she donned the mask would see the emperor in a young woman, he meant.

Sire, if I might say, I’m confused, Desysyn interjected. This man just confessed that he knew your brother was here, in hiding, even if he did not know precise details of his whereabouts. He was waiting for him to isolate you, he just told us so. Yet you seem to be contemplating pardoning these people for standing by while they waited for someone to murder you.

Well, it’s an interesting situation we find ourselves in. It had been a laconic, knowing thing to say, but Sathriel’s voice was bright and sharp, verging on hysteria. These people watched us grow up. They raised us, they know us better than our parents ever did. They know which of us is an idealist and which of us is a ruthless, manipulative son of a bitch who cares more about ambition than family.

They thought he would come to you after we went to bed, Vedan supplied. After hiding like a coward, waiting for you to put your life at risk, send your men and ours to die to liberate the capital, he would creep out of the hole where he was safe and demand you give the throne back to him?

Before last night, I might have been stupid enough to do it, Sathriel replied.

Few things are more painful than learning that the people around us don’t live up to our standards, the Shia of Borosan murmured, his Sulamari counterpart echoing him. Bayam watched them, eyes narrowing.

Sathriel had already put his eyes back on the servants. The question then becomes: do you understand that I’m emperor now? Do you accept that I’m here, that your loyalty is to me, that my brother is nothing but a selfish murderer?

Sire, what choice did he have? The old soldier sounded pained. We had too little warning. We were overrun, they were already in the palace.

I’m not talking about the battle. That was no one’s fault but the Timerians, we were always going to go to war with them. Anyone who died, died a patriot, restoring the throne.

This was precisely the sort of noble, uplifting sentiment Sathriel was prone to express thoughtlessly, but these people didn’t know him or hadn’t seen him since he was a boy, and Bayam watched the startled way they reacted to it. They drew in breath a little deeper, stood up a littler straighter, and looked at the world around them differently as they thought: maybe I am better than I thought I was, maybe I can accomplish great things. The emperor believes in me.

He’s talking about the pyramid, he supplied, because ugliness was better coming from him. "I felt it turn on after we had gone to bed. I’ve witnessed this half a dozen times by now, it doesn’t happen by accident.

Everyone who died last night—it was fifty-one people, someone said?—everyone who died, Necavos killed. I assume that was the point: he didn’t have the strength to fight the emperor himself, so he tried to destroy the palace. If I hadn’t been there… You’ve seen the damage, or heard about it: I stopped the collapse at the emperor’s actual door. Necavos tried to murder his own brother, he very nearly managed to, and instead, he just killed a bunch of people who were innocent of anything.

It was almost certainly untrue that this had been deliberate: they knew considerably more about the subject than Necavos could and they hadn’t predicted that the pyramid was broken or that it would explode. They would have lit the thing up themselves in all ignorance, had there not been so many other matters demanding their attention. Still it was true she must have reached out toward this power because she was searching for a weapon, and Bayam would do worse things for his emperor than bend the truth.

Some of the people watching them were crying now, as they came to understand that the leader they had put their faith in had betrayed them. Sathriel stood so suddenly it made him jump. I don’t know what to do with you. I get that my brother put you in a bad position, but I’ve been gone for nine years. To come home after all that time and find people I think of as family ready to abet him in attacking me…!

He quit the room abruptly, not finishing the thought, and although there was no catch in his voice, his pain was evident. Most of the servants were on their knees and many more of them were weeping openly. The captain of the palace guard was still on the floor, face hidden.

Bayam was left to scramble after his emperor, and it was the length of a corridor before he caught up to him. When Bayam fell in at his side, the emperor said quietly, Do you think it took?

People were pretty upset. I don’t think it crossed their minds that obeying him might come at a cost to you. You really think it matters to them?

Anyone who knew enough to understand that she was still around knew all our secrets, more or less. They knew us when we were nothing more than little feet kicking the insides of our mother’s stomach. They fed us, they sat up late with us when we were sick. They were the people who knew where we hid when we got upset and what bribes would tempt us to come out. The soldier, Tagero, I’m alive because of him. I hit my head when I was little and almost drowned in the fountain.

If you want to spare them, that’s your business. It feels like a very you thing to do.

Whatever that means, the man muttered.

I understand why you feel like they were trapped, like they didn’t have a good option. They were hoping the two of you would sort it out, so they didn’t get caught in the middle. But…

Yes?

Can I say something?

Sathriel gestured with one hand, inviting him to speak.

You need to do something hard. Something that makes a statement. This was about the servants, but those aristocrats watched it happen. They need to know you’re not to be trifled with.

I had those people executed.

Something scarier. Something that makes them not want to be your enemies.

Sathriel took him by the back of the neck and gave him a shake. Everyone who took part in that battle saw what you did. What better threat do you think I need?

Still.

Still what?

He rolled his eyes. I’m loyal to you, I do what you tell me. You’re the one who makes the decisions, and if you forgive people who lie to you, if you let the accomplices of would-be assassins go free because they were in a bad position, what’s to stop anyone else from messing with you if they think they can apologize and get away with it?

I’ll think about it, was all the answer the emperor would give him.

***

They parted ways in the emperor’s chambers, because Sathriel wanted a bath and Bayam wanted to brood. He let the younger man go without further words of caution, but the conversation stayed with him as he washed himself. You only had to be in Bayam’s company any length of time to perceive that he conceived of loyalty as an absolute. It was only natural that he looked upon anyone less devoted as an enemy.

Sathriel refused to contemplate a future in which the devotion of a friend so steadfast became a liability, but it was worrying. He had to hope Bayam had meant what he said about allowing Sathriel’s opinions to guide him. There were people who would cave when you threatened them, but there were as many who would dig in their heels and dare you to do your worst. There were people who regarded the issuing of threats as a form of villainy, even a sign of weakness, and would be decided against him if he came to look like a bully.

It was his plan—Well, his sister would have called it half-assed and his father would have called it weak. In any case, he wanted to see how far he could get, treating honorably with people and asking them to meet him in the middle. Being honest and inviting others to show him the same courtesy. He felt like he’d already made all the statements he needed to make in Cha Gobeli.

Once clean, he quit the bathing chamber that was one of the few rooms left in this apartment. He found himself drawn to the door in the eastern wall of the bedroom that had become his, where you could take maybe one conservative step into where the garden had been before the ground ended. It made an incredibly dramatic visual statement—what had been was not anymore—but he wasn’t sure how the declaration ended. You couldn’t just take something away without putting anything in its place, but it was Necavos who made the break with yesterday. Sathriel didn’t have a plan in place for what came next, except in the most narrow sense that he wanted for the infighting to end.

He had been standing motionless in the doorway, hands braced on the frame. He wasn’t sure what made him turn around, but when he did, he wasn’t by himself. Three animals stood just beyond the door leading into his bedroom, brightly lit because a lot more light was coming in through the bedroom than had used to. A jungle cat, a wading bird with feathers of black and scarlet, a scruffy monkey with a bright blue stripe in its fur.

They looked at him and he looked at them, and the moment stretched. There was never an instant when he thought: These creatures are uncanny, because that knowledge had arrived fully-fleshed in his head the instant he laid eyes on them. They were too still for wild animals, shut up indoors in the presence of a human. There was too much going on behind the eyes they had fixed on him. They weren’t just looking at him because he was there, he was sure of it: they were contemplating who he was and what it meant.

Hello? he said finally.

So this is why you saw me.

His gaze fixed on the cat, medium in size with big brown circles on its tawny pelt and massive ears. That it could speak felt natural to him. His brain didn’t immediately turn up a card, but then it hit him. A fuzzy memory, colors too vivid, flames startling against the dark of night. Everything spinning gently, in a way that had been fun at the time but was slightly unsettling to remember. Procalias, right?

It inclined its head regally. You are the emperor’s blood?

He frowned. "I’m the emperor."

Not, the monkey said immediately. Emperor is a girl, we met her.

Necavos abdicated. End of story. Now can someone catch me up?

Sire, we are the seraphim of your family.

Huh, he said, because honestly, how did you respond?

One day we went to sleep, it’s all we know.

And woke back up, oh, two months ago?

Yes, sire! How did you know?

He couldn’t recall that a distraction had ever been more welcome and this was fascinating anyway. He sat down on the floor in front of them, then couldn’t resist and reached out to stroke the bird’s silky feathers. He regretted the impulse even as he was doing it, but then the heron didn’t shy away like it should have: it leaned into the caress as tamely as a housecat. It took a few mincing steps closer to him, too, so it could fold its long legs and settle to the floor at his knee.

I know because I brought you back, I think. I’ve been turning the sorcery back on, and the timing’s too perfect: the two things have to be connected. But I’m confused. I thought all the seraphim must be in Achepari Naru, helping the gods.

We were a gift to the emperor, the cat told him. The Grand Boiki created us to serve.

This was far beyond the scope of anything he had thought sorcery could accomplish. In its own way, it was humble—magical pets were a far cry from engineering highways, for example—but it didn’t jibe with anything he’d seen Bayam do. Made you. With magic.

So she said.

This was here?

It was not in Sapat Senusir, no.

Sorry, I meant the empire generally.

"Well it wasn’t then."

He extended his free hand to the cat, and it came closer too, flopping onto the floor at his opposite knee with a grunt. He rested his hand on its shoulders, amazed by how real it felt, the tickle of its fur against his palm, the pads of muscle atop bone. You’re saying the territory has been conquered since. The person who made you wasn’t Barrachite, this ‘Grand’ person was some brand of foreign witch. Then we conquered them. They made us a gift to convince us not to, then we did.

That is what happened.

But you’re still here.

We were made to be loyal to your family. We cannot use our magic against you or defy your will.

His eyes went to the monkey, which had made no move to approach. Its eyes were going back and forth between its two compatriots and its lips had drawn back to bare its teeth, a reluctant grimace easy to recognize on its human features. You can want to, though, he thought.

That’s why you were so surprised I could see you in Procalias: you were supposed to be invisible. It just doesn’t work when the person who’s looking is me.

Yes, sire.

You said you met Necavos.

The heron and ocelot inclined their heads while the monkey watched him warily. When he met the cat, it was perched on a roof watching a building burn, a fire that had kindled and been extinguished both with eerie speed by means that were mysterious. Quite as if magic had accomplished it.

An attack very much like the one that proceeded it in Brumail. Its victims blamed a Warlock-Baron, but that had struck him as unlikely at the time. When you lined it up alongside the arson in Sohera Kuba, the thefts of goods across the empire all targeting Timerians, it seemed improbable a foreigner was responsible. Foreigners had no reason to differentiate one Barrachite from another and the attacks had been surgical, the fires confined to specific buildings. No aristocrats had been injured, no civic property damaged.

It was Necavos, he said, as the stunning truth broke over him like a wave. "She sent you to destroy holdings all over the empire. Set things on fire, steal goods." All of which had been blamed on him, but it wasn’t their fault.

Thinking about Necavos made him want to kick and scream, smash a few of the furnishings, but there was something about these creatures. Something sedative. They were magical, intelligent, and the story how they came into being was heartbreaking, but they felt like pets. It felt like he was playing with his pets and a tight knot that had been coiled in the