Chapter 2

The Army of Admirable Cause was dying. Imperial forces led by Brass Knife had driven it back against the river and set the forest upwind of it ablaze. Now Brass Knife’s archers were shooting at random into that mass of choking, blinded men, with every shaft finding a target. The Firstborn was blinded, also. Last night, he had gone on his knees to Brass Knife, begging him to give the Army a few more days to return to allegiance. Refused, he had returned to the peasants, who would have done better to have called themselves the Army of Lost Cause, or the Army of Starvation. He wept again with them. Very soon he would die with them, although that meant less to him than …

Someone was speaking.

“Firstborn! Urfather! Holy One!”

The prisoner pulled his mind forward a few centuries and forced open crusted eyelids. He tried to smile. “I thought I was, er … Sunlight now?” His voice was a croaky whisper that even he could barely hear.

The man kneeling over him gasped with what sounded like true relief. “Yes, no, not to me, Holy One. We have doctors. We have food and warm bedding. The blacksmith is coming to release you.”

The Firstborn tried to lift his wrist, but pain stopped him. The flesh there had been abraded by the manacle until it was ulcerous and infested with maggots. The rest of him was little better after months of semistarvation and lying on stone, which in places had rubbed through his flesh to the bone. His body and clothes were falling apart. When winter came, they had given him a single, louse-infested blanket, thin as paper.

“Which do you need first, Holy One?”

“Warm soup? May I bless you?”

“When I have earned it, Urfather.” The speaker was familiar now, one of the clerks who had read out the Emperor’s questions. He was elderly, at least fifty, with a graying mustache whose droop seemed to express unhappiness and … guilt. … No, more like worry. He was going to get his precious robes dirty. There were soldiers in the background and now the workman with his tools.

“What date?” Sunlight’s lips and mouth felt cracked like desert mud.

“Two nights past the full of Wolf Moon.”

“Another year,” the Firstborn muttered.

“The Year of the Nightingale.”

The year that the Firstborn must die, if the omens spoke true. It would be soon. It was a wonder that he had survived these four months of torment.

“The warden ascended?”

The clerk twitched in alarm. “You know, Urfather?”

He didn’t like them calling him that when he was young. “I knew when I first saw him that he would not tarry long in this world. How?”

“The winter sickness. Just seven days past, he began coughing and took to his bed. He has not spoken for three days. We were waiting, and just minutes ago the doctors said that he had released his spark. I came as fast as I could, Holy One.”

“But much faster than you should. I am grateful.” The prisoner was so incredibly weak that his eyes were watering like a child’s. He was only a child, of course. That explained much.

The manacle was struck off his wrist with a clang and he cried out at the pain. Soldiers closed in to lift him and lay him on the bed, as the doctor directed. His head was gently lifted and a bowl of water held to his lips. Someone began washing his feet and legs. He gave up the effort of talking for a while.

It all came back. The people of the town had known he was being held in here. He could recall hearing musketry, but a long time ago. No one had spoken to him in an age, except to read out the Emperor’s stupid questions. Renewed hope was the best of medicines. By the time he was sitting up against a pile of cushions and had sipped enough soup to warm him but not enough to make him ill, he was ready to ask questions.

The clerk was so typical that the Firstborn could have written his life story. Whatever his background—and his indeterminate accent suggested a widely traveled childhood and, therefore, a mandarin father—he had entered mandarin training and failed one of the early examinations. Barred from further progress, he had been literate enough to be employed as a clerk, and that he had remained all his life. Here he had remained, in Four Mountains, working in the office of the warden. Mandarins were moved to new postings every two or three years so that they could never build a local power base, while the petty bureaucrats beneath them stayed on. Theirs were the palms to grease to grease the wheels; they knew where the bones were buried, and who to see for what. Now his superior was dead, so he was nominally in charge of a great fortress, probably of the town also, and of the most valuable prisoner in the Good Land. But why was he ignoring the instructions the Golden Throne had given his predecessor? That was very much out of character.

The helpers and soldiers withdrew, so that only the clerk remained, plus an unexplained skinny youth, more boy than adolescent, who crouched low on his haunches just inside the doorway, almost as if he wanted to be invisible or should not be there at all.

“Your name?” Sunlight asked the clerk.

“I am Clerk of Records, acting as warden until the Son of the Sun can send one worthy of that position.” It was typical that he thought of himself as a title and not a name.

“My mother, Eminent One?” What was her name? Ah, yes, Quail.

“She comes to the gates every morning and asks to be let in to see you. She is ignored. Someone leads her away at sunset. … People in the town must be feeding her and giving her shelter.”

They left her outside the gate all day in the middle of winter? Why had the late warden not thought to drag her in and flog her before the prisoner’s eyes?

“Will you have pity and let her in today?”

The clerk looked abashed, as if caught out in great sin. “I have already done so, Holy One. She is being fed and decently clothed and has been told that she may see you later, when you feel stronger.”

“And the people of the town?”

“Bad news, Urfather.” The clerk wrung his hands and the silk of his sleeves made noises like trees in the wind. “When you stopped appearing on the rampart, they tried to force the castle gate. … And some were shot.”

“Human stupidity,” the Firstborn muttered under his breath. “Nothing greater under Heaven. And then?”

“And then the scholar started sending the boy out in your stead. But it seems your mother told them that it was not you. … Not many come to watch now; those who do come jeer and boo.”

“Forgive me!” wailed the boy at the door. He threw himself prostrate on the flagstones. “Holy One, forgive me!”

Sunlight glanced quizzically at the clerk and then said, “Come here, then. No, don’t wriggle like a snake. Stand up, walk over here with your head up. … Now put your buttocks on the floor and cross your legs and look at me. Look at my eyes! Now, what’s your name?”

The boy still couldn’t meet his gaze. Trembling, he stared down at his own twiggy legs. “M-M-Mouse, Holy One!”

Sunlight suppressed a smile and again looked at the clerk, who shrugged.

“The boy did not want to, but the warden had him beaten if he refused. He is not much to blame, Urfather.”

“I don’t think he’s to blame at all. Mouse? No, you must look at me. Good. You are not at fault. You did nothing wrong, and if you did, I forgive you absolutely. Can you smile? Try. Try much harder! That’s better. Go and sit on that rug. You will stay and talk with me after. Now, Scholar, what—”

“I am not a scholar, Holy One.”

“Tell me your name.”

“Shard Gingko, Holy One.”

“Tell me, Clerk of Records Shard Gingko, how much has the town offended the Son of the Sun? They threw stones, tried to force the gate, what else? Have they raised banners, or injured any of his guards? And how many townsfolk were hurt when the guard opened fire?”

“Injuries unknown,” Shard Gingko said. Three dead townsmen had been left behind as the mob fled from the muskets. There had been no reprisals, no more insurrection than he had already reported.

The Firstborn could think questions easily enough, but it was still an effort to make sense of answers. No Emperor in all eleven dynasties had been able to tolerate loss of face, and any complaint that could not be ignored would always be stamped out with brutal repression. In this case, though, unless young Absolute Purity was feeling bloodthirsty, he could blame the town’s unrest on the errors of an incompetent warden fortunately already ascended beyond imperial reach. If he did feel bloodthirsty, then there was absolutely nothing that Sunlight could do now to prevent an imperial massacre.

“How long until noon?”

“An hour or so,” Shard Gingko said.

“Then I can greet my mother now. And perhaps eat a little more. But at noon, I want her to go out on the rampart, and I want Mouse to go with her. Will you do that for me, please, Mouse?”

Shocked, the boy nodded. “Anything, Urfather.”

“I’m not strong enough to walk yet. But they can’t see your face clearly from where they’re standing, and if my mother is with you, they’ll accept you as the real Firstborn. And later, she will go out to the gate and tell the people I am alive and well, and they will return to obedience.”

“It shall be done, Urfather,” Shard Gingko said.

“And when you write to Sublime Mountain … Have you written yet?”

The acting warden did not quite manage to hide a shudder. Reporting bad news could destroy a man. “I felt that determining the state of your health was more urgent, Holy One, so that I could report on it.” A typical master of ambage, he was—never a straight answer. “Besides,” he added, “The roads are so bad that even imperial couriers cannot get through.”

“When you do write, you may tell the Lord of the High and the Low that I have answered the first question for you. You must say I did it for you personally, to reward your correct behavior.” That likely would not save the clerk from the Emperor’s wrath, but it was all the thanks Sunlight had to offer.

Eyes wide, Shard Gingko nodded.

“What was the first question? I forget.”

“‘Who made the Portal of Worlds?’”

The Firstborn sighed. “Ah, yes. It’s a very childish question. The answer is, ‘Whoever made the world,’ of course.”