EMPEROR AURELLIOUS.
I didn’t know all the emperors—history wasn’t my favorite subject—but every child of Lunar Island knew Aurellious.
This was the emperor against whom Wellebourne had raised an army of the undead. I could not escape his legacy even here.
Emperor Aurellious defeated Wellebourne in the end, although Wellebourne came closer than any other man in history to destroying the Empire. From the date on the plaque, it was still in the glow of Wellebourne’s hanging that Aurellious had commissioned this mosaic.
Squinting up at it now, I could make out the rough design carved into the dull material. Whatever these bits of pale stone were, surely colored glass would have been cheaper and prettier.
I was close enough now that I could touch the porous material. I reached for it with my right arm, my fingers bumping along the rough, broken bits. I had been a medical student at Yūgen for a year; I had studied skeletons. I recognized the material in the mosaic.
Bone.
With a calm I didn’t know I had, I touched a piece with my left arm, the one made of shadow. It felt . . . familiar. It reminded me of how it felt to touch my revenants, but something was missing. The sense was faint, but undeniable. This was human bone.
With new understanding, I gazed up. These bones were old—two centuries old. They had been crushed to bits and carefully arranged on the wall to shape the figure of an emperor who stood in the triumphant pose of a god.
There was no golden light clinging to these old bones—the souls of the dead were long gone, the life bleached out of them like the marrow that had dried up under the sun. But even if the souls were freed, it was still disgusting to see the bones of the dead so disrespected.
And for what? The mosaic was barely recognizable now, just the outline of an emperor, himself long dead.
Remembering the fresco of Oryous and how he stood upon skulls, my eyes drifted down to the ground. Sure enough, I could see the outline of Emperor Aurellious’s feet, and, scuffed from years of wear, the rounded outlines of rows of human skulls created a base for the emperor to stand upon.
I knelt down, touching the skulls with my shadow hand. They were varying sizes—one small enough to be a child’s. These were people, not wall decorations.
It was one thing for a god to stand atop death, triumphant. It was a totally different thing for a man to, even if he was the emperor.
I could see why Wellebourne had wanted to overthrow him. Emperor Auguste seemed, at best, foolishly idealistic, at worst simply inept. But this mosaic was proof of Aurellious’s cruel disregard for humanity. Perhaps if Auguste were like this man, I would join Bunchen’s rebellion and be the general of an army of the undead.
I wondered if Auguste would make himself out to be lord over death after he hung me. Surely this was the only reason the gods-fearing people of Miraband had allowed this mosaic to be made. The skulls didn’t represent death, not like the fresco in the church hall. They represented undeath, and Aurellious’s triumph over the necromancer. Apparently it was fine to decorate a building with human remains if you were making a point about defeating someone who had built an army with human remains.
This sort of “art” would never exist in Hart or any of the villages. We still remembered the stories of our grandparents and great-grandparents. We still pressed iron circles over the graves of those we loved.
I turned my back to the mosaic, and to Emperor Aurellious.
From this vantage point, I was better able to see the square and the streets lined up around it. The odd pointed intersection that broke the uniformity of the courtyard held a triangular building, and I noticed a sign hand-painted on the wall identifying it as Corner Street.
The building was four stories high, but all the windows on the third and fourth stories were boarded up, and the second-story windows were empty of glass. One had the ragged remains of a curtain, the wind causing the cloth to billow over the street like a tattered flag.
I headed across the courtyard and pushed open the only door that wasn’t barred on the building after no one answered my knock. “Hello?” I called, my voice choking on the dust.
Nothing.
I considered the possibility that I’d come to the wrong location, or that the collector had long since moved on.
The building looked as if it were about to cave in. Crates and cloth-covered boxes lined the walls, each with an inch or more of grime covering them. The wooden floor bowed beneath my feet. “Hello?” I called again, louder, a little desperately.
A man emerged from a small door I’d not noticed before. He was wiping his hands on a piece of cloth that seemed far too dirty for the task. His eyes raked over me, up, down, up again.
When he smiled, I saw that he was missing one of his canines. “About time you got here.”