Chapter Eight

Charity had met the Head Librarian twice; once, when she’d asked her father to give her a little help with her studies and once, again, when Johan’s strange powers had emerged from wherever they’d been hiding. She had never really understood why the Grand Sorceress had given Elaine No-Kin the job, although she supposed as a Privy Councillor there must be more to her than there seemed. But the position would have ideally suited someone from one of the Great Houses ...

Now, the Head Librarian was following her like a dog following her master, shaking with the force of the internal struggle in her mind. Charity shuddered in sympathy; the oaths she’d sworn to the Emperor nagged at her mind, but at least they weren’t infesting her thoughts and warping them into helpless servitude. She still had freedom of thought, even a considerable amount of true freedom, as long as she didn’t disobey or defy the Emperor. The Head Librarian would be nothing more than a puppet in a scant few hours.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered, “but resistance was futile.”

“He’s mad – worse than mad,” the Head Librarian said. Her voice sounded harsh, broken. “What were you thinking when you pledged yourself to him?”

“I was thinking that I wanted to survive,” Charity snapped back at her. Intentionally or not, Johan had robbed her of her confidence. “He would have killed me as easily as he killed the Grand Sorceress.”

“It might have been better if you had been killed,” the Head Librarian said. “He’s a monster.”

Charity nodded in bitter agreement. She’d watched Emperor Vlad – her thoughts wouldn’t allow her to call him anything else – ever since she’d sworn her oaths and she’d seen hints of the monster he was, lurking below the surface. He’d brought soldiers to the Golden City, given orders for them to clear the streets using whatever methods were necessary ... and humiliated a pair of female Inquisitors. It was madness, but he’d done it anyway. She’d been left with the uneasy thought that she’d sworn endless loyalty and obedience to a madman.

“I had no choice,” she said.

“There’s always a choice,” the Head Librarian said.

“Shut up,” Charity hissed. The Head Librarian’s mouth closed with an audible snap. “I don’t have to listen to your ... to your condescension!”

She cursed her father and both of her oldest brothers under her breath. Why couldn’t her father have given her proper training? By all the gods, why hadn’t he disowned Jamal after the third or fourth complaint about his behaviour and declared her the Prime Heir instead? She could have had months, perhaps years, to learn how to handle the family magic and the skills of being a Family Head, rather than having to improvise when the world blew up in her face. Now ... now, to all intents and purposes, House Conidian no longer existed as anything other than an adjunct to the Emperor. Her younger siblings would have no choice but to follow her lead.

It was better than having her mind slowly worn down, she told herself. But only by degree.

They reached the holding chamber and opened the door, revealing a surprisingly luxurious room. Charity sighed, recalling how some of the bad boys of High Society were placed under house arrest rather than being held in the Watchtower, then motioned for the Head Librarian to walk into the chamber. She obeyed, her muscles moving oddly as the spell gripped her mind tighter and tighter. Charity watched as she reached the centre of the room and stopped, dead. The spell would hold her there until it had completed its task ...

“You may move freely, as long as you do not leave this apartment,” Charity said, feeling another flicker of sympathy. Who would have thought that such a mousy little girl could hold out against such a spell? Or show the nerve to defy the Emperor on his throne? “What does the Emperor want with you?”

“He wants power,” the Head Librarian said. “And I can give him power.”

“But you can’t resist forever,” Charity said. The Emperor had gloated that the spell his Inquisitors had orders to use would eventually burn through the strongest mental defences, no matter how much magic the victim had to burn. “The spell will leave you a vegetable. Why not give him what he wants?”

“That’s your oaths talking,” the Head Librarian pointed out, snidely. “It isn’t enough for him to claim your obedience, Charity. He wants you to be his mindless supporter too.”

Charity felt a hot flush of anger. What did the Head Librarian, a girl of no family, know about the obligations that bound her to the Emperor? Or what she’d had to do to hold the family together, now her father and oldest brother were effectively dead? The vultures had been gathering, pecking at the corpse, when she’d gone to the Imperial Palace. There had been no choice, but to ally herself with the Emperor. The family needed a powerful protector.

“Shut up,” she snapped, again.

Charity fought hard to keep a grip on her anger. She could issue any orders she liked, she knew, and the Head Librarian would obey. The spell would see to her obedience. But she knew, too, that Johan had turned so violently against his family because they’d mistreated him, when they thought they could. There was no point in humiliating the girl facing her, not now. She would belong to the Emperor soon enough.

“Stay here,” she said. “Do not leave this room.”

She turned and marched out of the door, then banged it closed behind her. There were a handful of bolts on the door – the only thing that marked it as a prison – and she slammed them shut with every sense of satisfaction. The Head Librarian would remain bound until her defences were completely gone, whereupon she would be helpless. She would never have the ability to think for herself again.

Good, Charity thought, vindictively.

A pair of guards appeared at the end of the corridor and she waved them forward. “Guard this door,” she ordered, when they eyed her suspiciously. They weren’t guardsmen from the Golden City, but part of the force the Emperor had brought with him from his homeland. “No one is to enter or leave without the Emperor’s permission.”

They looked surprised that she was issuing orders – in their homeland, women were never permitted to issue orders to men – but they did as they were told. Charity nodded to herself, then hurried back down the corridor, heading towards the Throne Room. A small army of enslaved workmen were already at work, taking down the portraits of various sorcerers of renown and replacing them with ancient paintings of past Emperors, all over a thousand years old and worth more than a house in the Golden City. She paused as she caught sight of one of them and smiled as she realised just how closely Emperor Vlad resembled his long-gone ancestor. Perhaps, if the paintings had been placed in a gallery and made open to the public, someone would have remarked on it a long time ago.

She hurried past the workmen and into the Throne Room, where a small line of suppliants were bowing before the Emperor. Most of them were tradesmen, responsible for binding the Empire together into a coherent entity; the remainder were magicians who ran their own businesses, rather than working directly for the Grand Sorceress or one of the Great Houses. Jamal had always sneered at them, but their father had pointed out that the businessmen often had specialities and freedoms that the Great Houses couldn’t afford to overlook. Her brother had not been impressed.

“Lady Charity,” the Emperor said. He looked down at the suppliants. “You may all wait in the antechamber.”

None of the suppliants looked very happy, but they knew better than to argue. Anyone who wanted to disagree with the Emperor only had to look at the statue of Light Spinner to change their mind, or have it changed for them by one of their companions. The Emperor was likely to be even less patient with dissent than the Grand Sorcerers, who had often considered it a wasted week if they couldn’t kill or humiliate one person personally. Even Light Spinner had had to make a few examples of idiots willing to question her in the early days of her reign.

Charity went down on both knees and lowered her gaze as the Emperor looked back at her. It was strange, part of her mind noted, how it was becoming increasingly hard to remember that there had been a time before the Emperor. Had it really been less than a day since he’d taken the Golden Throne? Everything before the moment he’d sat down seemed almost like a dream, even though she knew it was all too real. The oaths might be twisting her mind ...

... And the truly frightening thing about the whole concept was that she wasn’t scared of the thought.

“Your Majesty,” she murmured.

“I have sent messengers to the remaining Great Houses,” the Emperor said. His voice was rich with amusement, amusement he didn’t bother to try to hide. Powerful he might have been, but he lacked the bloodline of any of the Great Houses. They’d always looked down on true outsiders. Now, they had to do homage to the man they’d scorned. “They will assemble in the Blue Tower, where you will speak my words to them.”

Charity blinked in surprise. “You won’t speak to them yourself?”

“Let them get used to the idea of bowing before me,” the Emperor said, firmly. “You will carry my words to them.”

Her father would probably have understood instantly, Charity reflected. It took her several minutes to work her way through the multitude of possible meanings. The Emperor might be sending her as his messenger to underline her new status as his ... assistant, or he might be showing his contempt by sending her, rather than going himself. Perhaps he wanted to do both, she told herself. Or maybe he just didn’t want to be bothered with the Great Houses any more than strictly necessary. He had to know they would resent his rise to power.

They’re not going to like it at all, Charity thought. At least they knew where they stood with the Grand Sorcerers.

The Emperor smirked at her, then started to outline what he wanted her to say. None of his words were very compromising, although he did manage to hint that he would recognise the Great Houses as being part of his court if they behaved themselves. Charity shuddered to think of what her father would have said, if faced with such demands, but there was no way she could refuse her orders. Instead, she bowed her head, then rose to her feet and backed out of the Throne Room. Turning her back on the Emperor would have been an unforgivable insult.

She turned the moment she entered the antechamber, then walked through the maze of corridors towards the giant doors that opened into the gardens. Even the Emperor had only a tiny garden – it wasn’t worthy of the name, compared to the lands her family had owned before they’d moved to the Golden City – but it was larger than any other private garden within the city. The Golden City was just too cramped to allow even the aristocracy to clear large spaces of land for themselves.

Snow was drifting from high overhead as she stepped through the doors and out into the open air. She cast a warming charm around herself, then hurried towards the Blue Tower, safe and secluded at the other end of the gardens. The sight took her breath away as she stumbled through the snow; the tower was made of stone, but sheathed in blue marble. Rumour had it, if she recalled correctly, that one of the previous Grand Sorcerers had used it for secret liaisons with his conquests, which had included every aristocratic or magical woman in the Golden City. Charity rather doubted it; Jamal might have been a complete idiot when it came to women – and their parents had often required a great deal of very expensive soothing – but the Grand Sorcerer wouldn’t have time to chase every woman he saw. He wouldn’t have any time for ruling!

Inside, it was warm and surprisingly – or perhaps not surprisingly – comfortable. Charity shrugged off the snow that had settled on her robes, then looked around at the handful of powerful magicians facing her. Most of them came from families that were old when the Empire itself was young, tracing their ancestry back over thousands of years. A couple were dirt poor, but still strong in magic and land. And bloodlines ... she knew her father, with his eye for a good deal, might well have tried to marry her to one of their sons. Or even to the Family Head himself.

“I thank you for coming,” she said. “The Emperor is most pleased.”

She kept her face expressionless with an effort. She’d never faced powerful aristocrats like these before, not on her own. All she’d been expected to do, when her father had hosted guests in their house, was look pretty, do as she was told and try to catch their eyes without being too forward about it. And she hadn’t been particularly good at it.

“The Emperor,” Lord Falcate said. She vaguely remembered him being a Privy Councillor under Light Spinner, which had made him one of the most powerful men in the Empire. “Do we really have an Emperor?”

“The Golden Throne has accepted him,” Charity said, bluntly. “None but the Imperial Bloodline may sit there and live.”

“Yes, we know,” Lord Falcate said. It was one of the first things children were taught, even the magic-less kids who barely had a year or two of schooling before they went to work. “I do not believe it, though.”

“I swear that it is true,” Charity said.

“We all felt the shift in the magic,” Lord Ahlstrom said, tartly. “We must concede that an Emperor has finally resurfaced.”

Charity took a breath. “I have already pledged myself to his service,” she said. “As such, I bring a message from him to you.”

She frowned at their expressions. No doubt they’d hoped to loot House Conidian before she managed to secure all of the family’s property, which would have included the children. Her younger siblings were too young to marry, but not too young to enter into marriage contracts that would have given their prospective parents-in-law too much influence and power over their lives. And over what they could claim as their share of their family’s former assets ...

... But if she was working for the Emperor, they would be safer leaving what remained of her family alone.

“The Emperor is grateful for your service in keeping the magic-users of the city under control,” she said. A pleasant statement and a threat, rolled into one. No one could hope to forget that it was the Inquisitors who kept magic-users under control. “As such, he is prepared to renew your Charters of Power, which were drawn from the early days of the first Grand Sorcerer. However, he requests proof of your goodwill and loyalty.”

“I hope he is not expecting us to swear any unlimited oaths,” Lord Ahlstrom snapped.

“No, My Lord,” Charity said. “He is requesting that you – that each of the magical families – hand over a child, someone who can be trained to serve the Emperor.”

And serve as a hostage, she thought.

She shivered. It wasn’t an uncommon practice for hostages to be exchanged, particularly when two rival families tried to come to terms despite years of mistrust and outright hatred on both sides. Charity had half-expected to spend a year or two in the house of a rival family herself, when her father had been negotiating a complex long-term agreement with them. But, in the end, the talks had broken down. She’d been relieved, if she recalled correctly. A later breakdown of the agreement would have meant her certain death.

“The Emperor wants one of our children?” Lord Ahlstrom demanded. He sounded shocked at the mere thought. None of the Grand Sorcerers had insisted on taking hostages. “Is he mad?”

“The Emperor wishes to have nothing but good relations with you,” Charity said. As far as she knew, that was actually true. “However, you will have to accept the supremacy of the Imperial Bloodline.”

She paused. “Those of your children who go to work in the Imperial Palace will also have access to the Emperor,” she added. “They will have the chance to seek positions of power.”

They looked doubtful, but accepting. It was unusual to hand over a hostage without receiving another in return, yet the Emperor was on a fundamentally different level from any of the Great Houses. And besides, law and custom allowed the hostages plenty of leeway to write to their families. There would be a chance for them to try to manipulate the Emperor, as the years wore on. It wasn’t a bad bargain ... as long as they were prepared to toe the line. If they weren’t, the hostages would be the first to die.

“I will present my young daughter,” Lord Ahlstrom said, finally. “She will take up a place in the Imperial Palace.”

Because she’s your fifth child, Charity thought cynically, as the others made similar promises. None of them offered a senior family member. The firstborn children, the Prime Heirs, would never be used as hostages, even if there were no other candidates, but even second or third children had their uses. You might mourn her death, but it wouldn’t damage your family.

“Thank you,” she said, out loud. “The Emperor will be pleased.”