“TALASSERES?” SAID A voice.
It wasn’t the first time Tal had dreamed about Sethennai. It wasn’t even the first time he’d woken from such a dream immediately ready to kill someone.
It was the first time Sethennai had actually been there when he’d opened his eyes, though. His dark eyes were soft with concern, and he was brushing Tal’s cheek with the back of his fingers, and for a moment all Tal’s more pressing questions such as why am I still alive? were annihilated by an overwhelming fury.
“You,” said Tal. He jerked away from Sethennai’s hand, drawing his knees to his chest. “You were Keleiros all the time, you motherfucker, you—”
“Well, obviously, yes,” said Sethennai. “I’m sorry, of course, I suppose I should have told you—”
Tal found he did not give a shit about any of this. He saw Sethennai watching him with a kind of indulgent caution, as if Tal were someone else’s dog, and behind that, endlessly, he remembered Tsereg falling to the ground, their eyes as flat and dead as stones.
He struggled to his feet, up out of the shallow grave he’d been lying in.
“You’re in remarkably good shape, given how close you were,” said Sethennai, rising to face him. “And in general, you look well—”
“Shut the fuck up,” said Tal. “You might as well have killed them yourself.”
“Who?” said Sethennai, with genuine confusion.
Tal punched him. It wasn’t his best punch of all time. He hadn’t planned to do it, so the angle wasn’t great, and his arm was half dead from lying in the grave. It still connected with Sethennai’s shoulder, a flat and heavy impact like punching a slab of solid oak, and Sethennai still stumbled back, startled.
Under other circumstances, this might have made Tal feel better, in a notice me now, you prick kind of way. Now all it did was add to the weight of grief a twist of panicked guilt and horror. He backed away, not knowing what to do with his hands, which felt awkward and alien to him.
Sethennai rolled his eyes. “You’re lucky I wasn’t shielded,” he said. “You mean Tsereg, I take it.”
“I should have known it was you,” said Tal. “Right away. Getting a teenager to fight your battles for you. You can’t resist.”
“It was Tsereg’s battle too,” said Sethennai, mildly. “They wanted the Empress dead, and so did you. They wanted to help make a better world. They knew that it might mean their death. You brought them to the Citadel yourself, and you’re lying to yourself if you think you didn’t know what you were getting them into. Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s worth fighting about who has a stronger handle on Tsereg’s best interests, since in point of fact, they are not dead.”
Tal clenched his fists at his sides, silent because he didn’t trust himself not to lash out again. At last, with enormous effort: “Then where are they?”
Tsereg was curled up against a rib of stone, like a castaway sleeping in the wreckage of their ship. They were dusted all over with ash, buried in it to the knees, hair and skin and clothes all ghostly white. When Tal shook them, he only detached a cloud of dust. They didn’t open their eyes. Their eyelids and lashes were thick with powder. Tal stopped shaking them, suddenly afraid that they might be nothing but ashes settled into the parody of a mortal form.
“But I saw them die,” said Tal. He lifted them in his arms, loosing another cascade of ashes that prickled his nose and mouth. They were certainly light enough. “I saw them fall—”
He regretted speaking it out loud. It made it too real, undeniably something he had really seen, not a nightmare.
“I don’t doubt it,” said Sethennai. “They are an exceedingly powerful mage. Amazing they’ve lived so long without training.”
Tal adjusted Tsereg’s weight in his arms. Could he feel a heartbeat through the ash, or was it his own pulse? Tsereg didn’t stir or sigh as a sleeping child normally would. It was like carrying a bundle of wet paper.
“Hey,” he muttered into their ear. “You’re not dead. You’d better not be. You’re fine.”
The space shifted around them, reconstituting itself into an actual room, with walls and a ceiling.
“I do wonder where Oranna found them,” Sethennai murmured. “But the Unspoken does pick a winner from time to time.”
He doesn’t know, thought Tal. Oranna never told him. For perhaps the first time in their association, he knew something Sethennai did not. He felt like he’d swallowed a marble. This cold, undeniable secret was in him, and he didn’t know what to do about it.
He said nothing, still cradling Tsereg, letting Sethennai focus on reassembling the throne room. Tal saw the outlines of doors and even windows, such as the God-Empress’ throne room had never had, with sunlight pouring in.
Sethennai didn’t know. How would he react if Tal told him? Would he be happy about it? Indifferent? Would he be stricken with guilt to know he had put Tsereg at risk? That was almost good to imagine: that if it was his own child, he might learn what it felt like to regret, and that if Tal told him, then he might get to see that realisation.
Tsereg lay limp and motionless. Without their usual scowl it was too easy to imagine the skull under the ash. Then they moved in his arms, and took a breath that stirred a wisp of dust from their upper lip, and their brow creased, forming its usual deep notch of displeasure.
Abruptly he realised that he didn’t care how Sethennai would react. Tal wasn’t going to tell him. It didn’t change who Tsereg was. If Sethennai hadn’t already recognised that they were worth something, then he didn’t deserve to know.
The throne room was almost back to normal now, flooded with the light of dawn. The guests were standing around in loose crowds, their party clothes ragged, their expressions somewhere on the spectrum from bewilderment to defiance, giving way to a thin and halfhearted hope as they saw who was standing on the dais before the throne.
Chancellor Sethennai! was the whisper. The people of Tlaanthothe remembered. Tal saw his mother among them, in a gaggle of other Charossai. They were looking at Tal too, standing at Sethennai’s side in victory, just as he had always imagined it might happen. He had to resist the urge to hide his face in Tsereg’s shoulder. After so long on the run, a crowd of people looking at him made his hackles rise. The old vision of triumph felt so far away it might have been someone else’s fantasy.
“Thank you, everyone,” said Sethennai, with a nicely judged humility. “I knew you hadn’t forgotten me. It’s all over now. Your patience and tenacity are rewarded. You’re all safe.”
For a moment it seemed this might really be true, and then there was the sound of running feet and a group of soldiers in ceremonial armour parted the crowd and pushed through to face the dais. They were Thousand Eyes, doing their very best to exude confidence and menace, but unable to disguise the uncertainty hanging around them like mist. It was true what they said about cutting off the head of a snake, then.
“Pretender—” said Cherenthisse, at the head of the group.
Sethennai parted his hands and smiled. A whole sequence of snake names came hissing off his tongue like sparks from a whetstone. “I am no impostor. I am your God-Emperor. I am Iriskavaal’s last incarnation. Will you turn away from me?”
The Thousand Eyes stood looking at him. They had formed up into perfect rank and file, but there was still a sense of milling about.
“I offer you free choice,” said Sethennai. “You have your freedom, granted in recognition of your faith and your service. Your lives are yours to use as you will. Leave if you wish. I hope you will stay, but I will bear no grudge against any who leaves, and all who stay will keep their rank, their privileges, their position of honour and confidence among my Thousand Eyes. To each of you I say, take your time, consider your choice, be assured that my love and gratitude are yours always.”
The Thousand Eyes glanced at each other. Perhaps they had expected to be the ones who would offer a choice—surrender or die, surrender and die anyway, that was about what you usually got from the Thousand Eyes—and this had taken the wind from their sails.
Sethennai clearly had a whole lot more speech to make. Tal had worked security for plenty of Chancellor’s addresses in the past, and he knew Sethennai was capable of going on almost forever, regardless of whether he’d had time to prepare remarks. Tal’s arms were beginning to ache. He wondered if there was a chair where he could put Tsereg down, but in the presence of so many snakes, he was reluctant to let go of them.
So he stood there waiting while Sethennai went on and on about loyalty and honour and citizenship, and everyone seemed to drink it in, and Tal felt an unaccustomed stab of the emotion known as pity. They all wanted to believe it. He could see his mother, overcome with an almost impossible relief, leaning on the shoulder of a younger relation. They thought it was over, the long tyranny, the cruelty and despair. They thought Sethennai was here to save them.
He was tired, he realised, the sick, numb tiredness that sometimes followed after a fight, when all the spark drained away and you were left feeling no better for having won and survived.
There was no sign at all of Shuthmili, or of Csorwe’s body.
He heard his own name and looked up. Sethennai was smiling at him, a genuine and encouraging smile.
“The sash, Tal,” he said, very quietly, so that nobody else would hear, a kindly reminder of something Tal should have remembered.
The ceremonial sash of Tlaanthothe was still, somehow, crumpled in Tal’s pocket. Everyone was watching. A Thousand Eye stepped up on the dais and reached out helpfully to take Tsereg off Tal’s hands. Tal made a strangled noise and drew back, clutching Tsereg to his chest, though his shoulders were now aching so badly that he would have quite liked to put them down.
He felt the assembled eyes on him, every gaze like a physical touch. This was clearly something Sethennai had stage-managed from the beginning. The only part Tal had actually been intended to play was enacting this little coronation, and Tsereg’s presence was making it awkward.
If he’d had the presence of mind, he would have said something or run away. Later he would wonder why he hadn’t. He laid Tsereg carefully down on the ground at his feet, and retrieved the sash, and—oh, god, Sethennai wasn’t just going to take it from him, Tal had to put it on him. He looped the green silk band over his head and smoothed it down over his shoulders. It was impossible not to look at his face. If Sethennai had smiled at him, it would have been easier to hate him. Instead he gave Tal a searching look, curious, almost worried.
“Not long now,” Sethennai mouthed.
Tal nodded, and turned back to face the crowd, and managed a kind of smile.