The Emperor of the Sea was not content.
Neither were his armies, which had grown substantially as he made his way around the Baltrean, swollen with warriors from other lands whose heads were stuffed with dreams of glory and plunder. Axis seemed invincible. After Kirixia fell to him, almost without a fight since its ruler had fled before the armies of Eben had even gotten there, he lingered to rest on the sunny Baltrean shores. As always, he left as much unchanged as he could in the lands he conquered. For most, daily life continued much as it had before; only the faces of authority were different. He chose a careful combination of alien conqueror and pragmatic locals to restore peace and preserve order. Aware that an empire begins to crumble the moment the emperor turns his back, he did what he could that was shrewd and prudent to maintain it. Then he turned his back, for his first love was war.
After every campaign, no matter how distant, he returned to Eben. He was most careful with it, since he had almost lost it once. There, while he attended to its affairs, his thoughts would inevitably stray beyond the boundaries of Eben, of his empire, to find his next battlefield. His army, well paid and sheltered between wars, waited patiently for him to decide. It was becoming a fearsome thing, that army of Eben; it was as complicated to handle as an empire. The queen hated it when it took Axis away from Eben, and feared it when he brought it home. It had become a great killing machine, a monster that ate entire kingdoms. If Axis failed to provide for it, it would consume Eben. So she complained to the king, who listened gravely to his wife, and answered simply, “Then I will find it new worlds to conquer, and it will never turn on me.”
It was full of strangers, the emperor’s army, foreign faces and languages, customs, experiences, warriors who were newly part of the empire and inspired by the young emperor’s astonishing victories. Kane, who fought its battles with it, who drifted at night from campfire to campfire, a stray shadow listening to comments, complaints, tales, recognized it as a source for Axis’s new worlds. Thus, from a warrior born in Kirixia, whose father had been a trader, she heard of an immense, fabulous kingdom east of the Baltrean, full of exotic beasts, untold wealth, and poetry as old as the world.
When, in Eben, she recognized the signs of restlessness in the Emperor of the Sea, she told him what she had heard.
They lay together, as usual during their most important councils of war, in the placid palace beside the Serpent.
“Does this land have a name?” Axis asked. Around them, the palace was hushed and dark; a single stand of candles showed them one another’s face.
“It’s called Gilyriad.”
“Gilyriad. I’ve never heard of it.” He dropped kisses like warm rain in the crooks of her elbows, in the hollow of her throat. “Does it really exist?”
“I will find out,” Kane promised.
She had her ways, which she only explained to Axis if he asked. He rode the twin dragons of empire and war; he had little time to wonder about her sorcery. It existed; she used it for his purposes; it was too complex for him to comprehend, and so he rarely asked. When he did, her answers were frustratingly vague. How could she travel across a battlefield in a breath, so that if he said her name or thought it, there she was beside him?
“I feel you call me,” she said. “I take a step.” But how? “I make the shortest path to you.” How did she find the shortest path? “I eliminate everything that isn’t you.” How, he asked incredulously, can you eliminate a battlefield? She tried to explain. “It goes elsewhere. Like a pattern on a cloth when you fold it. One end is you, the other end is me. When you lay the cloth flat, we are far apart across the pattern. When you bring one end of the cloth to meet the other, there is no longer any distance between them. The pattern is still there, but no longer between us. It is elsewhere. We are together.”
In this fashion she traveled to other places: the docks on the delta where the Serpent flowed into the sea, for instance. There she listened and questioned until she found a trader who claimed to have traveled to Gilyriad. He showed her seed pods that, crushed, became richly scented spices. He showed her cloth of a strange airy weave dyed unusual colors, and pottery glazed with unfamiliar patterns. He held fine-grained aromatic wood to her nose and opened elegantly wrought chests full of uncut jewels and disks of gold stamped with the faces of rulers she did not recognize.
She brought one of the disks back to Axis.
“A coin,” she told him, “from your next conquest.”
He studied the face on the disk: a proud, hawk-nosed, disdainful profile. “I will need a map,” he murmured, “to show to my generals.” He laid the coin in her hand, closed her fingers over it. “When I am Emperor of Gilyriad, spend this in the marketplace on a piece of cloth with a pattern on it that goes elsewhere when we lie together.”
She smiled. “I will spend it on a map of the world. Not even that can separate us.”
If, she reasoned, the maps of the world she knew showed only the world she knew, then the maps in the world of Gilyriad would show the world as it was known there, which might indeed encompass lands unknown in Eben for the emperor to conquer. She continued her search among traders and sailors, for they roamed farther than the merchants’ ships could go in the sheltered Baltrean Sea. She learned of long, arduous trade routes over mountains and plains east of the Baltrean, where tribes of nomads and vast herds of peculiar animals roamed on paths formed over countless centuries by their ancestors. Thus the world changed its shape in Kane’s mind, stunningly and irrevocably. In the mind of the young girl on the bank of the Serpent, the world had been exactly the size and shape of Eben. Now it was shifting rapidly into something unimaginably huge and complex. Axis wanted to lead his army across that complexity and conquer whatever kingdoms he had missed. He depended upon Kane to show him the way.
She bought maps where she could get them, from sailors along the shores of the Baltrean. A couple she stole, for the trade routes leading to rich, exotic cities were the well-kept secrets of wealthy merchants. She laid them side by side in Axis’s secret chamber, where he walked barefoot among them, studied them silently for a long time. Then he looked at her. She felt her throat swell at the expression in his eyes. In that moment they both knew that the world at his feet belonged to him.
Out of the mountains of Kol
The Emperor’s army poured like water
Onto the plains of Gilyriad.
Like the stars,
Nameless, countless,
Like the endless drops of rain
Were the masked faces of the warriors of Eben.
The trumpets of Gilyriad sounded,
Bone and brass shouted across the land
Like the battle-cries of fierce beasts
Rushing to meet their doom.
And doom it was for Gilyriad, after three days, or thirty days, or ninety days and ninety nights of constant battle, depending upon which poet wrote of it. On his march from Eben to Gilyriad, Axis’s army had indeed grown like a river, as nomadic warriors and mercenaries streamed into it. Kane fought always at Axis’s side through the long battle. Even she lost track of time, for they scarcely slept, and her powers could light up a battlefield even at night. The victory was never in question. But the proud ruler of Gilyriad did not easily give up the land his ancestors had held since the beginnings of language to this masked raider who came out of Nowhere.
The Lion of Eben
Raised the severed head
Of the King of Gilyriad by his hair
To let him look
One last time at his land.
A great cry echoed across the plain
From the mouth of the dead king to his people:
“Bow low, touch your mouths to the dust,
For this is the Emperor of the World.”
Actually, the King of Gilyriad was on his feet with his head on his shoulders when he surrendered his army and his kingdom to Axis. He killed himself not long afterward, unable to endure his humiliation. Axis sent his sons to govern remote areas conquered by Gilyriad during its long history. They became minor princelings themselves; Axis had them carefully watched through their lives, for any signs of rebellion and revenge. He himself did not return to Eben for nearly a year. He explored his new acquisition and dealt with its governing bodies. On Kane’s advice, when he did return to Eben, he left a great part of the immense swarm that was his army in Gilyriad.
While Axis was putting the realm in order, Kane gave deep and careful thought to their situation. Gilyriad was a sprawling, fertile land, well able to contain the emperor’s army. Camped near a wealthy city, it was well fed and kept in order. By then, contrary to the fears of the Queen of Eben, it was fiercely and passionately devoted to the emperor, for he had made it, in a few short years, the matter of legend and epic. Axis’s army would have followed him anywhere.
He expected Kane to tell him where.
She traveled through Gilyriad with Axis, staying in the great palaces and cities. While he set his governing bodies in place, she spoke to scholars and explored libraries. For this she used interpreters who had once been sailors or caravan leaders, wanderers who had come to the end of their roads in Gilyriad. Very few people had ever heard of Eben before they suddenly found themselves under its rule. The scholars showed her ancient texts, tried to find ways of explaining them. She demonstrated her powers; illumined, they produced even older words, and took her to meet local witches, sorcerers, and healers. She learned odd, stray things from them. Mostly she offered them gold in return, for they were a wild, scruffy lot underappreciated by those who consulted them.
Sometimes she spent entire days in the sumptuous gardens, listening while scholars and interpreters read to her. The histories and epics they read were of long-dead heroes, kingdoms with little left of them but their names. They showed her maps of the world according to Gilyriad. A great ocean lay to the east; it had no beginning and no end. No one who ventured forth to find the other side of it had ever returned. Therefore there was no end. Kane nodded solemnly. The ocean went on forever, gradually flowing into the stars, which also went on forever. All that existed lay flat, like a great cloth. All intelligent people had believed, until the emperor had come out of the Gates of Nowhere, that the pattern of the earth on the fabric of existence was roughly the size and shape of Gilyriad.
Now that they realized their error, the scholars asked Kane to change the shape of the world for them. She drew them the world as she knew it, though she made Eben about ten times bigger than it was so that Axis’s victory would be more credibly explained. Thoughts washed back and forth in her head, images that their language summoned. The endless sea that flowed into stars. The world lying flat like a cloth. The explorers looking for the end of the world who went out and never returned, presumably still sailing around the stars… In her mind she reached out to the flat cloth of existence. She touched it, ruffled it, so that pieces of the pattern that had been an inch apart were now touching. She folded one end against the other; places that had not known of one another’s existence were now face-to-face. Stars rained out of the sky, touched the earth. The sea that had no end suddenly found itself a shore.
And all her explanations to Axis about how she moved across distances resolved themselves into one word: Time.
There, in the tranquil gardens of Gilyriad, as Axis made his peace with his conquered people, she glimpsed the true beginnings of his empire.
The Lord of Time
Who opens the Gates of Nowhere
Everywhere at his whim
Knows no boundaries.
No kingdom is safe.
Lock your gates.
Guard your walls.
Bury your gold.
Never sleep.
He will unlock your gates.
He will shatter your towers.
He will take your gold
And give you sleep in return.
That sleep that has no language,
No dream,
No time,
No end.