Champion of Mars (15 page)

Yoechakenon thinks it is perhaps part of a black jest on the Emperor’s part. The Emperors are often as cruel as they are lonely. Some say they are insane. We are alike, man and spirit, but not the same. Complete melding with a spirit changes a man, destroys a part of his humanity, much as the transformation of champions alters those who wear the armour. This is not a human age.

The chamber is large enough to accommodate an army. There is no sign of the sheathed maintenance whispers that stalk the corridors elsewhere, and the room is coated with dust. The principal feature of the chamber is a pair of vast windows of stained glass – the eyes of Might. Clear pupils are embedded in carefully reconstructed renditions of the human iris, fully ten metres across, their rods and bands laid to suggest a man whose personality is uncompromisingly heroic. An ornate walkway runs around the middle height of the room. Thirty metres below it, a richly detailed map of Mars is set into the floor.

Before one of the eyes the Emperor stands. Below him are the braided canyons of the Nuct, smothered in dusk, but he looks further afield, onto the Tertis plains to the north, upon whose arid woodlands the sun shines. The Emperor of this era is a ruler in name alone; the Quinarchs hold the reins of power.

Emperor Kalinilak is garbed in the robe of ten thousand eyes. Each eye is said to represent a watchful aspect of the Great Librarian, and the whole the unbreakable bond between Mars’ temporal and spiritual rulers. It is, in essence, an avatar in the real world of the spirit Kunuk, to whom the Emperor is bound in a connection of the highest degree. The eyes are said never to blink, but every one of them is tightly closed, and by this I know something is wrong. The Twin Emperor is two souls, human and spirit joined as one to rule two worlds. It appears he has evaded his twin. This has never occurred before.

Surely, he will die because of this.

The eyes twitch and move under woven eyelids, as those of a sleeper move. The robe shimmers with its dreaming. It glows with an inner light that fights the dying sun. The Emperor’s face is indistinct, sketched in planes of shadow and light-hazed skin.

Kalinilak gazes over the plains. In the far distance I can make out the shifting white patterns of the Veil of Worlds. He does not look at my love. When the Emperor speaks, his voice is neutral.

“It is said that of all life, Man is the highest. Of all forms, that of Man is most pleasing to fate. Of all creatures, Man is the most blessed. Why is it, then, that Men are not content? For what do they fight?” The gestures he weaves to accompany his words are fluid, enrapturing. “I greet you in peace, Yoechakenon Val Mora, and I pray that we can put aside our differences and speak as allies; unheard by no other but each other, and equal in the eyes of both. It is a privilege to be thus free. Let us enjoy this respite from scrutiny together as the friends we once were.” He turns to Yoechakenon. Behind the glow of the cloak of Kunuk, the Emperor has a sad face topped with stringy black hair, his balding head mottled with bluish marks. His is a heavy-featured face, with a prominent nose standing guard over thick lips. His eyes despair. He knows his life is done, perhaps this time forever.

There is something else to those eyes. He looks out from his face alone; and I ask myself again: Where is the spirit that was bound to him?

“I come because fate demands it,” Yoechakenon says. He is proud. He feels superior to this man, he always has. This was, perhaps, the seed of his downfall.

“Fate?” The Emperor lets the word hang. “Is this the thanks I receive? Surliness?”

Yoechakenon glances at his braceletted wrists. “Forgive me if I do not embrace my old friend in the manner that he may expect.”

“Some would say that your inconvenience is no more than you deserve.” The Emperor speaks without bile. “I summoned you here to offer you a reconciliation. If you prefer, I could worsen your situation instead.” His expression is unmoving. His face is as old and as worn as the statues in his palace. “The Quinarchy and the spirits have no presence here. We stand in a hole in reality where but the one world exists, and thus my watching shadows are absent, while my scarabs are outside – too far away to save me. It is just you and I. I am vulnerable. This is purposely done. I wish to prove my intent is pure. The time for disagreement between us has passed, and the time for action grows short. Listen to what I have to say; if you do not like what you hear, well... Then we will see who will kill whom.”

“You condemn me for taboo breaking, yet do the same yourself, Kalinilak,” says Yoechakenon. He does not know yet the full extent of what the Emperor has done. “This is not an action of trust. I would know why you have shut out the Second World before I hear whatever this offer will be.”

“The Second World is not without its representative here. Your companion is here, and listens as you do. What I have to say concerns you both.”

Yoechakenon attempts to think to me, but I cannot hear his thoughts. I only feel what he feels, we are still connected only to the second degree.

“She is as affected by the block as you,” says the Emperor of all Mars. In truth, he is but lord of this palace and little else.

“Your suspicion does you ill, and you misthink,” the Emperor goes on. “I am not your enemy.” He seems tired and over-energised at the same time. He has dark circles under his eyes, bruise-black on pale red skin. He has not known the peaceful oblivion of sleep for too long.

“And yet you stand here an Emperor, and I a prisoner and less than a man.”

“To be an Emperor under the purview of machines is to be an Emperor of dust and phantoms; it is to be a child playing at being a prince,” he says. He looks out again at the plains below: the scattered scrub and head-high grasses yellow in the heat of the dry season, the reddish soil, the many rivers cutting their way to the edge of the Marrin. Night has scaled the canyon walls and is creeping across the uplands. Beyond the atmosphere, the mirror suns flash out one by one. Those low to the west are the first to go dark, their extinguishment following the track of the sun’s rays as they pass from the land.

“You and I, we are not so different. Gladiator and Emperor, we are prisoners of circumstance. And yet we have both defied the fate that supposedly rules our lives.”

“If that is the case, my circumstances are entirely of your doing, my liege,” Yoechakenon speaks quietly, “and the defeat that approaches you is of your own choosing.”

“I say you condemned yourself!” The Emperor flares with anger. “Never suggest to me that this is not so. Tell me your punishment was not just, Yoechakenon. Tell me I was wrong for the judgement I passed upon you. You cast aside the Armour Prime of Kemiímseet. You broke your oath as a champion, full in the face of both worlds. Tell me I had a choice in what I did, and you may bear me malice without guilt. You stand here talking of fate, and then blame my actions for your predicament. I am either blameless, or we are both culpable; it does not run both ways.”

Yoechakenon can feel the Emperor’s gaze burning into the side of his face, and it is his turn not to meet the eyes of the other. He stares out instead into the night, and says as calmly as he can manage, “I wore the armour too long, Your Majesty. I wore it in your service and at your behest. It changes those who wear it, makes them different from other men. This is what the Spirefather of Olm showed me. The armour had twisted my soul.”

The Emperor snorted, “You see? Even you are not so audacious as to deny the truth. The passion of your mercy overcame you. This is not the way of a true fatalist, though you present yourself as such. Men need passion; they need it to fight, they need it to breed. They need it to live! And how you lived, my friend, and how you were victorious, but you let your passions dominate you, and you fell from grace for it. Your passion has inconvenienced you, not I.”

“If you were truly my friend, you would have let my execution proceed.” Yoechakenon’s face flushes, his tattoos writhe under their bonds. “Do you think I do not know shame? No life is worth this. Better to be returned to the stacks and await a new life, clean of dishonour. By your intervention you may have saved my body from execution, but instead you condemned my soul to slow torture. You made me suffer, and suffer I still do. This was not decreed by fate, and by interfering with what is just and right you forced the Quinarchy to damn me. My greatest rage is that you will never know what I have lost.”

The Emperor laughs. “Will I not? Do you think that to rule a world and to have that might taken away from you piece by piece is a lesser ordeal?”

“If it was ordained!” shouts Yoechakenon. “The appropriate sentence, the better sentence, was death.”

“You did what was asked of you, this is correct,” the Emperor says. “But you exercised your will in a forbidden manner, and you believe that the Quinarchy would have returned you to the stacks?” The eyes on the robe flutter at this, and the robe glows bright for a second. The Emperor freezes, and waits for them to go back to their dreaming. When he speaks again, it is hushed. “You broke the taboos and brought ruination on both of us, and yet I saved your life.”

“You should have let me die, as was only right.”

The Emperor draws his hand back, as if he is about to strike. But he does not. Words die in his throat, unspoken. “My time as Emperor is almost done, as is my life and, I think, my story, but for a brief moment I am no longer beholden to the Quinarchy. In this sweet moment of freedom, I come to beg aid of you, not fight with you. Do you not understand? You, as I am, are a man of great and potent will, able to bend the threads of fate to your own end. There are few such. I needed you alive, as an enemy or an ally.” The Emperor let out a long, slow exhalation. “You have been punished, and you have survived. Your survival was my aim.”

Yoechakenon could kill the Emperor where he stands. He considers it.

The Emperor nods, as if sensing Yoechakenon’s loathing even without the medium of the Great Library. “Yoechakenon, Mars is old and tired. It is a corpse with a painted face. I had such plans, I would have brought mankind into a new golden age, taken us away from this mummified existence. But dreams” – he waves his hand in the air, his lips compressed – “dreams are the stuff of whimsy. When my spirit returns to the Great Library, if it returns, that is the lesson it will have learnt. That, and one other: do not resist those who would say that they serve Man, for they are our masters. My eternal life lies in peril because I wished only to fulfil the obligations of my office. These endless, ridiculous wars the Quinarchy stirs up are its means of control, of keeping men occupied against one another. That is not fate, but the methodology of a tyrant, who would ensure we do not challenge its position, and who would remove me from mine.”

“They rule below you. They are beholden to you. Only the Librarian is above you.”

The Emperor shakes his head. “No. That is not so. That is why I have renounced the Second World.”

“Kunuk, your companion?”

“Dreaming in the death sleep of the spirits.”

Yoechakenon is shocked. As am I. This is close to murder.

“He is with the Quinarchy. This is the last war, Yoechakenon. They mean to destroy us. The Stone Kin are moving, the Stone Sun waxes strong. The spirits have determined, at the last, to end our existence. They feel it to be the only way they will survive. The age of our partnership is over.”

He points. In the east, a bright star rises. The Stone Sun.

“The Stone Sun will pass close soon. Its children are stirring. The Quinarchy are behind this latest challenge, the League’s gamble for power. I have spies even close to the Library’s core, faithful spirits. Several died to confirm what I knew to be true in my heart; that the Quinarchy fear the Stone Kin will destroy us this time. The spirits will destroy us first, to spare themselves the Kin’s fury.”

“I do not understand.”

“That is why you will always be a soldier, never a ruler. The Quinarchy wants the same as any man, though it is not made of men. It exists only to protect its own power.”

“That is blasphemy.”

“It is the truth. When the Stone Sun is close, the Veil of Worlds will be at its thinnest for millennia. The Stone Kin will once more attempt to impose their reality upon ours, as they have done in ages past. The Quinarchy believe they will be successful. They have decided that they must surrender, and to do that they must destroy us all. They fear you. We have both been trapped by them.”

Out on the plains, the sunset is a colourful slash, parting black land from cold and fading skies. The last of the mirror suns go out. Kalinilak’s rule stretches no further than his gaze. The discharge of particle cannon sparkles in the distance: the forces of the Delikon League reducing one of Kemiímseet’s outlying citadels.

“What would you have me do?”

“It is simple. I want you to find the Great Librarian. Only he has the authority to bring the Quinarchy to heel, and the power to resist the Stone Kin. In three months, the League will have taken Kemiímseet. I am sure, then, that the Quinarchy will destroy you utterly. It never intended to return you to the stacks, and that is why I had to intervene – you would have been wiped from existence, never to live again. The arena was the only way to keep you alive. I only regret I could not tell you. If you had known, the Quinarchy would also have known that I had discovered its plans, and it would have destroyed me. Not that that matters much now.”

Yoechakenon tries to master his thoughts. The Emperor has always had power over him, not only as a liege, but as a friend, and that is far more dangerous. Loyalty set him upon the path to the arena, honour sped him along it, pride brought him to its conclusion. I have said this to him many times.

“Why would the Quinarchy do such a thing? We have lived as one world for a thousand generations.”

“Yoechakenon, you are the bravest man I have ever met, and the mightiest champion Mars has seen in a thousand years, but you are naïve, shackled by creed and habit. Think on this; who is to know if you never return? A man may lie discarnate in the stacks for ten thousand years before the story of his existence is taken up again, and he is made flesh once more.”