The Phoenix in Flight (41 page)

They bowed, the protracted obeisance of the utterly sincere.
Even the kyvernat, technically his superior, with the power of life and death
over all on the ship, was abashed before him.

“Now go.” He turned back to face the altar and waited, rigidly
still, until the door hissed shut behind them. Then he crossed the huge room at
a run, barely making it to the lavatory before his stomach revolted and he was
wrackingly sick.

He rinsed out his mouth and washed his face, still nauseated
from the blinding headache. He studied his face in the mirror. Its normal dusky
tone paled to a dirty chalk, his eyes red, the veins in his forehead distended.

The gift
of the Panarchists.
He remembered the
strange woman from the College of Synchronistic Perception and Practice who had
tested him and discovered his t’kinetic ability. He remembered also his
disappointment at its weakness—not for him the tearing out of an enemy’s heart
or the crushing of his larynx. He could barely move a piece of paper or divert
the path of an insect, even after the extensive training she had given him.

But they also taught me subtlety.
It was the Ulanshu
Kinesics, the art of using strength against itself, that first opened his eyes
to the equations of power. And he remembered the final audience with the
Panarch, before he returned to Dol’jhar.
“Brute force can only kill, it
cannot conquer,”
Gelasaar had said, his blue gaze intent, as if searching
Anaris’s soul to determine how much was Panarchist, and how much still
Dol’jharian. The Panarch spoke quietly, using none of the formal honorifics, as
if laying aside his rank to speak heart-to-heart, but to Anaris’s eyes his
power had still shone through, like the heat from an unquenchable furnace.
“I
could have reduced Dol’Jhar to a flaming pyre, inhabited only by the restless
dead, with no one to placate them—but what would that have gained me? I prefer
the scalpel to the bludgeon; a lesson your father has yet to learn.”

Anaris straightened up slowly.
A lesson that will destroy
my father in the end, for he is but a blunt instrument in the hands of destiny.
He smiled at his reflection.
So, Gelasaar, perhaps it should be
your
ghost to whom I sacrifice, once I sit upon the Emerald Throne.

The Emerald Throne.

Anaris would have liked to recover for an hour or two, but
he could not risk showing any sign of weakness. He had to get down to the
planet, for Eusabian had summoned him to witness the assumption of his
vanquished enemy’s throne, and the judgment of his defeated foe.

Anaris would see Gelasaar again, not in a position of power,
but in its lack. How would Gelasaar Arkad wear defeat?

Anaris left the lavatory and paused before the altar. The
candles flickered from his movement, the shadows in his grandfather’s eye
sockets shifting eerily. Even his father was helpless against the superstitions
of Dol’jhar. Indeed, they were an essential part of his power.

Favored of Urtigen.
Anaris laughed, and winced at the
pain. That was something else he owed the Panarchists—owed, in fact, the
now-dead youngest son, whose inferiority Anaris had exerted himself at first
entertainingly, and then (he recognized only after he left) obsessively, to
force him to acknowledge. Brandon had retaliated with an escalating series of
practical jokes. It had been one of the most complex of his irritating pranks
that had purged Anaris once and for all of his belief in the afterlife, freeing
him to turn those beliefs against his father.

Thank you, Brandon. I do appreciate the irony of your
having set me free. A shame you are not alive to be brought to appreciate it.

Now, despite Anaris’s command, the word would spread.

Best of all, no word would come of this to his father. Who
would dare his wrath at the suggestion that the shades of the ancestors favored
his son?

Anaris leaned forward and snuffed out the candles. Then he
caressed the skull, smiling mirthlessly, and left to summon the shuttle.

o0o

Eusabian stood before the Phoenix Gate of the Emerald Throne
Room, his hands on his hips, staring up at the colossal doors before him.
Inlaid into their surface in a complex mosaic of precious metals and minerals
was the image of a Phoenix enwrapped in flames, its eyes gleaming in ecstatic
triumph. He had waited for this moment for twenty years, and he savored each slowly
passing second.

Not long ago he had landed with his vanquished enemy in
train. Shortly he would humble Gelasaar hai-Arkad in the center and symbol of
his power, but first the Lord of Vengeance and Avatar of Dol would take
possession of the Emerald Throne at the heart of the Mandala.

He nodded to the guardsmen standing alert at either side of
the massive doors. They swiveled, marched to the center of the portal, and
grasped the enormous handles. Hidden engines subtly hummed as the guards
pulled, and the doors slowly swung open. Each leaf was over a meter thick, yet
the doors’ height balanced the proportions, rendering them fine-drawn.

He strode through the still-opening portal and stopped
abruptly, held against his will by the majesty and authority of the room before
him. It was the biggest interior space he had ever seen, had ever conceived,
its distant corners lost in a confusion of color from the impossibly tall
stained-glass windows that rose rank upon rank in the distant walls, reducing
their bulk to a weightless lacework that mantled the room in a mystery of
light. High overhead, a galaxy of lamps sprang to life, creating a perfect
simulacrum of a starry sky, leaving Eusabian with the dizzying sense that the
room was of infinite height. The light from above infused every part of the
chamber with clarity while leaving the enigmatic colors from the windows in
command. Banners and blazons of every description hung from the walls and below
the lights, a glory of history and a forest of legend.

Yet despite its overwhelming scale and the multitude of
ornaments, everything conspired to draw Eusabian’s eyes irresistibly to the
center and focus of the room. Even the pattern of the thick-strewn stars and
nebulae above redirected his attention to the Throne on a vast dais in the
center of the space, an emerald glory transfixed by a beam of light from an
unseen source. He suppressed a shiver of awe and strode forward.

As he drew nearer, the Emerald Throne resolved into a
graceful, organic form, alive with flickering internal light, that seemed to
grow up out of the polished obsidian dais. The Throne and the architecture of
the space surrounding it formed the undeniable impression of a tree so vast
that only a part of it could fit within the hall, its roots plunging deeply
into the foundations of the Mandala, the heart of the Thousand Suns; its
branches, perceived through suggestion and design, upholding the sky and
bearing aloft the stars.

Eusabian had studied his enemy in the long years of his
paliach, determined not to repeat the mistake that had almost destroyed him
after Acheront. He had scrutinized the symbolism and ritual of government that
upheld the Panarchy, the carefully nurtured mysteries cultivated by the
Magisterium and the College of Archetype and Ritual; for he knew that in the
symbols by which someone rules, you perceive the ruler’s soul, strengths and
weaknesses.

But now, confronted for the first time with the actual
embodiment of those mysteries, his mind recoiled from the formidable reality behind
the symbols. Before him stood the Tree of Worlds, whose invigorating sap
informs and infuses all creation. The one who had been consecrated to sit upon
it was the health of the Thousand Suns, and its health his.

Behind him the doors swung fully open against the walls with
a resonant boom that Eusabian perceived more through his feet and skin than
through his ears, and the enthrallment shattered.
I am the Lord of Vengeance
and the Avatar of Dol. My ancestors ruled in Jhar D’ocha when this island was a
wilderness, and the blood and lineage of Dol’jhar has proved its primacy with
the overthrow of my enemy.

He strode forward and climbed up the stairs of the dais. As
he approached the Throne, he could see in the distance behind it the towering
Gate of Aleph-Null, whose aspect is transcendence. To the left and right loomed
the Ivory Gate and the Rouge Gate: autonomy and actuality. At the Throne he
stood, just breathing, held rapt by the shimmering highlights moving subtly in
its viridian depths. Turning about, he looked back at the open Phoenix Gate,
whose aspect is irreversibility. Then, reveling in the action with every part
of his being, Eusabian seated himself in the Emerald Throne.

o0o

Anaris had never liked the Throne Room. Nothing on Dol’jhar
had prepared him for his first experience of its vast scale, and even now,
years later and fully grown, he felt diminished, almost invisible as he
approached his father, bowed deeply, and then took his place standing to the
right.

Perhaps it was different for one who sat in the Emerald
Throne, something he’d never dared during his fosterage in the Mandala.
Certainly, his father seemed unaffected, but it was always difficult to discern
what Jerrode Eusabian thought.

The Lord of Vengeance sat stiff-backed in the Throne, booted
feet planted apart, hands gripping its carven arms, the lines in his face harsh
in the wash of color from the stained-glass windows and the simulated stars
above. The somberness of his demeanor was enhanced by the unrelieved black
garb, stark against the shimmering viridian depths of the Throne, that
Dol’jharian tradition required for the humiliation ritual of a formal
vengeance.

Looking down the long double line of Douloi in resplendent
raiment that stretched away toward the distant Phoenix Gate, Anaris recalled
the glory of formal Court presentations, beyond anything that Dol’jhar’s
relative poverty could support. He suppressed the urge to laugh at the image of
one of his ancestors posing before a mirror and declaring that not only did black
make one look threatening, it kept one’s wardrobe expenditures to a minimum. He
remembered his luxurious wardrobe, acquired as a hostage, with sharp regret.

This I will say of you, Gelasaar
, Anaris thought as
he turned his gaze back to his father.
You were generous
to your
prisoner
.
If you survive this encounter here today, you will not meet
with the same generosity in Jerrode Eusabian
.

Eusabian’s face lifted in a barely perceptible tic, and
Anaris heard a spattering of faint clinks from the harnesses of the Tarkan
guards behind the Douloi. He looked back at the Phoenix Gate.

Ah. There he was, the Panarch Gelasaar, former ruler of the
Thousand Suns, his age-pale hair haloed by the light from the Phoenix Hall
behind him.

Anaris hadn’t expected to see cringing or fear. Inwardly he
awarded the old man credit for the way he walked toward the Throne with easy
grace, apparently oblivious to the demeaning gray prison garb and the
neuro-spasmic collar around his neck.

But there was something unexpected going on as the two men
approached. Gelasaar hai-Arkad was not a large man. He was actually no taller
than Barrodagh, who walked at his side, every line of his scrawny body taut
with suspicion and wariness. So how was it, Anaris wondered, that Gelasaar
seemed to grow taller, as though the hall now clothed him visibly in the
authority and power that had once been his, while Barrodagh seemed to shrink,
in violation of the laws of perspective?

It’s a trick of the light
, Anaris thought,
scrutinizing the two men carefully. He twisted his head to spot the source, but
was defeated by the eye-tricking depths above him, unstable with figure-ground
shifts between the constellations of a night sky and the ghostly branches of a
great Tree. With a mental shrug, Anaris decided he could investigate the
ambience controls at some later date.

As the Panarch passed his Douloi, they bowed deeply, the
motion and the susurration of their clothing suggesting wheat stalks bending
before the wind in a summer field. Near the head of the line waited a trinity
of Kelly, their snake-like head-stalks in constant motion. Barrodagh jerked the
spasmic controller up closer to his chest as he shied away from their
triplicate echo of the Douloi bows. Anaris grimaced, shifting his gaze away
from the slithery motion of their head-stalks. He breathed lightly to avoid the
burned-fodder scent of their bodies.

At the base of the Throne the Panarch halted and raised his
face. There was no sound now but a faint booming, almost like a heartbeat, that
Anaris supposed was the vast hall’s natural resonance. The Douloi watched, some
betraying unease in the angles of head, all helpless. They had been searched
down to the bone, every one, and each of the Tarkan guards standing behind them
held weapons at the ready.

Let the duel begin
, he thought, shifting his
attention to Barrodagh, whose eyes flicked back and forth between the Avatar
and the Panarch, one hand clenched white-knuckled on the controller as he made
a peremptory gesture with it toward the other side of the throne from Anaris.
There two immense Tarkans with red brimless caps on their scarred, shaven heads
stood, light glinting from the two-handed broadswords they gripped, points
down. Between them was the
en’jha-turik
abasement rug of a lord’s
paliach.

The Panarch turned his way, regarded Barrodagh with a
furrowed brow, as if trying to bring him into focus. They stood eye to eye. The
Bori was probably twenty years younger, but his face was as lined as that of
Gelasaar hai-Arkad.

“Go,” Barrodagh commanded. “As you were told.”

He began to raise the controller in what was meant to be a
threatening gesture, but Gelasaar turned his back before he could complete it,
and walked the few steps to the small circle of red silk, stepped onto it, and
turned around.