The Emperor’s Library
Book Three
The Game
Frederick Kirchhoff
Dron Press
Smashwords Edition
Revised
Copyright Frederick Kirchhoff, 2011
Cover Art Copyright Frederick Kirchhoff, 2011
All Rights Reserved
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of its author.
Author’s Note
The Game is the third book in The Emperor’s Library. It recounts events that occur roughly twenty years after those in Book One, The Flight from Kar, and Book Two, The Tritargon. A fourth book in the series, The Clavis, will treat occurrences one hundred years later.
Chapter 1
A shaft of sunlight through the open door created a yellow trapezoid on the floor. It seemed perfectly still, but Jon knew that it would make its way across the stones and eventually disappear amidst the jumble of mismatched chairs piled up against the far wall. If he watched the patch of light intently would he be able to observe it moving? But the particles of dust dancing in the sunlight soon drew Jon’s mind beyond even so minimal a question. He had work to do—there was always some task at hand—but wasn’t idleness as good a use for the afternoon as any other? Doing nothing, thinking nothing. His life had come to little else, so why not enjoy it? But then a shadow crossed the floor. Looking up, Jon saw Dan standing in the doorway with a stupid grin on his face. Shit, he’s back again. But, even as he imagined those unspoken words, Jon knew that what really annoyed him was less Dan’s reappearance than his own pleasure at seeing him once more. After weeks of solitude, he needed someone to talk to—but why did it always have to be Dan?
Jon looked away, making a point of ignoring Dan’s arrival. It was an empty gesture, but what other response was possible? He couldn’t very well appear happy. That would only encourage Dan to take further advantage of him.
“You wanted me to come back, didn’t you?” Dan asked. “The last time you said you were glad to see me. You stood right over there next to the big table—the one that’s too heavy to move to the second floor--and told me you’d missed me.”
Jon remembered nothing of the kind, and had no reason to think Dan was asking a serious question. Nevertheless, he tried a serious answer. Without rising from his chair, he turned his head to face Dan.
“The fact is, you’ve got it dead wrong. I’m not glad to see you. Just the opposite.” The words felt cruder than he’d meant them, but he doubted Dan would notice.
Dan shrugged his shoulders. If Jon was going to be difficult, he could play that game, too.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asked, folding his arms across his chest and lifting his chin a fraction of an inch. “I’ll go away if that’s what you’d like. Say the word and I’ll never come back. I can do it, you know. You may think I can’t, but I can—if you push me far enough. I didn’t have to come back this time. I could have stayed with Evan. He begged me to stay with him. He cried his eyes out begging me to stay.”
Jon tapped his fingers on the arm of the chair.
“I don’t care what you do,” he said slowly.
Dan smiled broadly, making a show of his three gold teeth, one below, two above.
“You say you don’t care, but I know what that means. It means you can’t bring yourself to tell me to go away. And that’s because you like having me here. I know you do, even though you’re too proud to admit it. Without me, you wouldn’t have anyone to peck at. Peck, peck, peck—just like a chicken. You may pretend to enjoy being by yourself and all that, but you like having somebody here—especially when it’s me. Sure, both of us need a vacation once in while—but a vacation is only fun because you know you’re going home when it’s over.”
Dan lied when it suited his purposes; he was unabashedly lazy; and he was always wandering off with someone he’d met at one of the dives he frequented—usually men a few years older than Jon (a fact that perplexed Jon). But for all his dopiness Dan wasn’t stupid. Jon had discovered that a long time ago. Dan never let Jon get away with anything. Far from allowing Jon to peck at him, he pecked at Jon; and Jon couldn’t help admiring that ability. Not that there was anything about Dan that reminded him of a chicken.
“Well, since you’re here,” he said, getting up from his chair, “you can help me carry the new chest upstairs. It’s over there, next to the table.”
Those words constituted a welcome home, but Dan was smart enough not to rub in his victory. Besides, he was curious about the acquisition Jon had referred to.
“A chest? We don’t usually get chests. People don’t usually like to get rid of the things they use to hold their junk. You can hide things in a chest, and most folks have stuff they want to keep out of sight. Where’d you get it?” he asked.
“The usual—a man emptying his attic so he can rent it out for three times what it’s worth. He was here yesterday afternoon. ‘People don’t like this heavy stuff,’ he assured me. ‘They prefer modern furniture; it’s more cheerful.’ I asked him why he expected me to buy something I’d have trouble reselling, but he didn’t get the point. He said he’d heard I paid cash for things like this, looking at me like I was an idiot for throwing away good money—a view I must have confirmed by paying him two silver pennies for the chest. But he wouldn’t have bothered to bring it here if he hadn’t had a hunch it had value for somebody.”
“Let’s take a look.”
With a quick movement, Dan knelt next to the chest and ran his fingers over the wood. In the past two decades, Jon had watched him grow heavier—the way sensuous people do—but without losing a boyish sexuality in his movements. In contrast, Jon imagined himself as an old man, with angular features and graying hair. But a less biased observer would have been surprised at how little Jon had aged over the past decades. Even with flecks of gray, he looked no older than thirty, and most people now took it for granted that Dan was the older of the two.
“It’s real zimbar—the last of the old trees,” Dan murmured with unfeigned excitement. “You can tell it from the grain. And look at the carvings—they almost flow out of the wood. This baby must be at least two hundred years old. Morgan III, I’d call it. Yep, that’s what it has to be—see the way they shaped the handles?”
Dan had an uncanny knack for dating furniture. He may have acquired his taste from Jon, but he’d gone beyond him when it came to chronology. Building on what he knew about history, Jon had taught himself to identify the main periods of Imperial design. But Dan had learned the trade at a faster rate. It had come instinctively, which puzzled Jon, since Dan shared little of his interest in the past. Yet he couldn’t deny that a good part of their success was due to Dan’s acumen.
Success was a relative term. Jon took grim pleasure in the fact that they barely got by, for their earnings from the furniture and accessories they sold only marginally exceeded the money they laid out in acquiring them—a problem magnified by Dan’s reluctance to put any of his share of the profits back into the business. Jon expected him to act like a partner, but Dan considered himself a free agent. The four-year age difference between them might have excused this behavior twenty-three years ago, but Dan still behaved like a kid whose help was a gift rather than an obligation, and nothing Jon said or did discouraged Dan’s pretense of giddy youth—even when he was approaching forty.
“And you were able to get this for two silver pennies?” Dan asked incredulously.
“That’s all he wanted.”
Dan slapped his thigh.
“What a fool. This chest is worth a hundred times that much. But I bet I could have gotten it for less. Was two silver pennies the first price he quoted?”
“Yes.”
“See—exactly my point. You shouldn’t let people get the better of you that way. If only I’d come home a day earlier.”
“He didn’t get the better of me. You’ve already said that the chest is worth a hundred times what he asked for. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but I wouldn’t sell it for less than a gold ducat—especially with the carvings and the inlay. Did you see the inlay?”
Dan rolled his eyes—a gesture he’d learned from Jon.
“Of course I saw the inlay. It was the first thing I noticed. I wouldn’t have called it a Morgan III if it hadn’t been for the inlay. Do you take me for a moron?”
“Not when it comes to dating furniture,” Jon admitted. “The only trouble is finding someone willing to pay what it’s worth. Most people who show up here are expecting bargains. It doesn’t occur to anyone to offer a fair price.”
“What about your antiquarian buddies?”
“None of them have any money—and if they did, they’d be in competition with us for pieces you can pick up dirt cheap from sellers who don’t have a clue to their value.”
Dan put his hand on Jon’s shoulder and grinned broadly.
“Do you know what that means, old boy? It means you’ve got to educate the people who don’t know a Morgan III from an Idriss. Once they see how beautiful the old workmanship is, they’ll come up with the cash. But you’ve got to show them what’s beautiful—they can’t see it themselves. I know that for a fact. You taught me to see, didn’t you? You’ve got to point out that a chest like this is a one-of-a-kind object, commissioned by an aristocrat or a fat-cat merchant who could afford the best. Buyers get off on hearing that kind of thing. It makes them feel special. They want to think they deserve to own a treasure from the past, and you have to make them believe that’s what they’re doing when they fork over the ducats.”
He squeezed Jon’s shoulder affectionately.
“The problem with you, Jon, is that you hate convincing someone to buy a thing. You expect them to walk in the door, fall in love with a three-hundred-year-old vase, and beg you to sell it to them. But it doesn’t work that way. You have to make people hot to buy what they’d never have noticed on their own—the way a whore gets clients by batting her eyes and wiggling her tits.”
“But we agree these things are worth saving—don’t tell me you haven’t said so—and someone who doesn’t appreciate what he’s buying is unlikely to take care of it.”
Dan released Jon from his grasp and walked a few steps away before turning back and looking squarely at him.
“Who says he doesn’t appreciate it? You’ve taught him to appreciate it by saying all the right things. Do you think a man who goes to a whore doesn’t enjoy what she does a lot more than he enjoys his own wife? A whore teaches you what you’re supposed to want; a wife can’t do that—you can’t make a man want what he already has. So who do you think gets his money? He doesn’t pay his wife for a fuck, but he’d better pay the whore.”
“You know an lot about whores.”
“They’re my friends. I stop by to chat and they tell me the tricks of the trade.”
“So that’s where you learned it.”
“Where I learned what?”
“To act like a whore.”
Dan smiled. He’d heard this before, too, and he had no intention of letting Jon get the better of him.
“You like it well enough when I go down on you. Don’t tell me you don’t like it. Where’d you think I learned to suck cock—going down all the way to your balls and letting up at just the right moment to prolong the pleasure? Not from anybody’s wife.”
Jon had a strong desire to change the subject. He hated to admit how much he enjoyed Dan’s blow jobs. And all he had to do with lie there.
“If I followed your advice, I might be able to convince some lout that he wants to buy a vase and take it home as a trophy, but that doesn’t mean he’ll ever appreciate it.”
“What’s the difference? Want? Appreciate? They all boil down to the same thing.”
“They don’t all boil down to the same thing—unless it’s for one of your precious whores. The man who sold me the chest was right. Most people prefer modern work. They like the lighter woods and the clean lines that make one piece look much the same as another, and they like the thought that their furniture looks like everybody else’s furniture. You may be able to talk someone into believing there’s snob value in owning a table made during the reign of the Emperor Idriss, but that doesn’t mean he really likes it better than a brand-new pine table he could buy at one of the workshops across the river.”
Dan’s eyes twinkled. Jon knew he’d made a mistake in trying to reason with him. It always got him into trouble.
“If you’d come down off your pedestal for a minute and a half, you might see the truth in what I’m telling you. Let’s face it, Jon. You think you’re better than everybody else. You don’t want to sell ordinary people your tables and chairs because you’ve convinced yourself that they’re not good enough for them. But we’ve had this argument a hundred times. I’m tired of trying to give you advice. You don’t give a piss for what I have to say. You don’t give a piss for me, when it comes down to it. My advice isn’t good enough for you, and I’m not good enough for you either. You’ve never said that—you’ve never had the guts to come out and say that—but I know it’s what you think deep down inside.”
Jon was used to these charges. When Dan came home after one of his escapades, he’d divert attention from his own behavior by focusing on Jon’s shortcomings. And there was usually enough truth in what he said to preclude a simple response. If Jon agreed that Dan wasn’t good enough for him—which was undeniably true, given the history of their relationship—Dan would take his words as an admission of arrogance. On the other hand, if Jon rejected the charge of snobbery, Dan would construe that as a sign of absolution. What Dan refused to understand was that Jon could be aware of his own flaws while at the same time disdaining the human race in general and Dan’s promiscuity in particular. Yet why the promiscuity bothered him, Jon didn’t understand himself. He had no foolish notion of fidelity. Besides, he’d never requested Dan to promise anything like that. On the contrary, he’d made a point of stressing Dan’s freedom to do as he pleased. So why should he care about Dan’s adventures in the alleyways and dark corners of Kar? Was it because Dan acted with a freedom Jon never allowed himself?
But Jon had learned that the safest response to Dan’s accusations was to ignore them. There was no way he could get the better of someone so averse to the claims of logic. So what was the use of prolonging the conversation?
“You’re right about one thing. We’ve had this argument a hundred times.”
He knew Dan would interpret this acknowledgement as an effort to be conciliatory.
“You need me to help out with something?” Dan asked.
That question, too, was part of the protocol of homecoming.
“Well, as I said a few minutes ago, you could start by giving me a hand taking the new chest upstairs; and once we’ve done that, you might want to clean it. Its beauty will be more apparent to potential buyers once you’ve gotten the grime off. And then, when you’ve finished with the chest, you could help me rearrange this room and the one behind it. It’s beginning to look like a junk store down here.”
“I’ll make a deal with you, Jon. I’ll clean the chest, if you rearrange the lower floor.”
“Is that your idea of a fair division of labor?”
“Who said anything about a fair division of labor? Anyway, you’re the one to blame for the mess down here. You put too many pieces on display, and it only confuses people. If they’re coming here for art, the last thing they want to see is clutter—like all those chairs you piled up against the wall. Besides, the fewer things you show, the more you can charge for them. When customers see a room stacked to the ceiling with furniture, they take it for granted that you’re desperate to unload it. But one or two pieces artfully arranged in a bare room give an impression of great value. You’ve been in this trade over twenty years, and I’d swear you haven’t learned a thing about buying and selling.”
The downstairs was crowded, but, except for those chairs, which Jon had been planning to move to one of the upper floors, it wasn’t “piled to the ceiling” as Dan claimed. Still, what he said made sense. Dan had a better head for business than Jon, but he seldom followed through with his ideas, and that meant few were carried out. The street-level rooms would remain crammed because Dan had no interest in helping Jon move anything to the second or third floor and because Jon himself was used to the way the rooms looked. Besides, Jon told himself, Dan wasn’t necessarily right about customers. The confusion might make them think they were detecting treasures underestimated by the proprietors—although Jon had to admit that few such clients passed through their door.
As far as the volume of business was concerned, the inescapable problem was their location in the maze of large, mostly empty waterfront buildings north of the palace. It was a district many avoided—Dan talked to the whores because whores were among their few neighbors—and it was inconveniently far from the southern quarters of the city where most of their potential customers lived. But location was the one thing about which nothing was to be done. Argath had managed to transfer ownership of the property to Jon, but with the understanding that the warehouse was not to be sold—at least not as long as Argath himself was living in Kar.
“I don’t want people asking questions about how you got your hands on this building. It was all above board, I can assure you of that, but it wouldn’t do to start them talking. One thing leads to another, you know. But once I’m out of the way, it won’t matter. No one’s going to be looking for ways to tarnish the image of a deceased Prefect.”
And that was all Argath had been willing to tell him. Jon had suspicions—the property of criminals was supposed to pass to the Chosen—and he’d heard rumors about the previous owners of the warehouse—rumors of smuggling and dealing in bama leaves, the drug of choice in Kar, especially among those who’d migrated from the region surrounding Tarnak, where the bama shrubs flourished in the coastal hills. Conveniently for the smugglers, there was a steady, entirely legal trade in the leaves used to brew mala tea. There may even have been a botanical kinship between the two plants; both flourished in the same climate and the mild pleasure derived from mala may have been a distant cousin to the hallucinogenic euphoria provided by the more powerful drug. In appearance, the two leaves were easily distinguishable; nevertheless, it was not difficult to secret bama within the large shipments of mala that made their way to Kar along the Great River. Under the Emperors, it hadn’t been illegal to sell bama leaves, but there’d been a tax on them, and evading the tax had been profitable. Now, when the Chosen prohibited their sale altogether, the profits were even greater, although the trade was more dangerous. It was still relatively easy to buy old leaves, but, once they dried out, the effect was less potent. Fresh bama on the other hand was now hard to come by—or so Jon had heard. He’d never tried it himself, but he was sure Dan had. Dan had done just about everything.
Unlike its largely wooden neighbors, their warehouse had been built of granite blocks, shipped in at a prosperous time in the city’s history. Narrow where its second story projected over the water, the building widened toward the back, and here a third level and later a small fourth level had been added, not of stone but of wood—haphazard additions to the massive structure that formed their base. Yet for Jon the fourth floor was the best part of the building. Here, rising above their surroundings and accessible only by an outside staircase so steep it was almost a ladder, Jon and Dan had established their living quarters—a large room open on all sides to the sunlight. Once, Jon suspected, it had been an office, but the smuggler merchants had left it empty, and Jon, with help from Dan, had turned it into a place for sleeping and eating.
During the summer, the daylight hours were hot up there, so they spent their time on the ground floor, but at night the air cooled and you could always catch a breeze from some direction. And in winter, the daytime warmth of the fourth level was appealing, although on unusually cold nights you needed two blankets to keep warm. But it wasn’t for these reasons that Jon had come to love their upper room. It was for the sense of isolation it provided. High above the confusion of the city, he enjoyed the thought that, while he may have dwelt in the heart of Kar, he lived a life free from its entanglements.
To the South, the bright blue rooftops of the Imperial Palace rose above the dull buildings before him. To the North, a sea of houses disappeared into the hazy river valley. But to the West, on a clear day, he could make out hills beyond the crenellations of the city wall; and to the East, closer to home, he saw the river, cutting a straight line through the city from south to north, and the sixth bridge, only a few steps from the warehouse.
Jon enjoyed the irony that he and Dan had ended up at this spot. He’d never spoken to Dan about their initial encounter, and he had no reason to think Dan had ever connected one of the men he’d found beneath the bridge with the judge who’d sentenced him the following night. After all, there must have been hundreds of fleeting encounters in Dan’s life. Jon had kept that secret to himself, just as he’d kept from Dan everything else deeply important to him. His mistake had been telling him about John—but even then he’d had the sense to say as little as possible. That was the way their relationship had begun and that was the way it had continued. Jon hadn’t planned to make a life in Kar with the boy he’d ordered flogged in the Imperial Square. Yet circumstances had made him responsible for the boy’s well-being, and circumstances had also left him in Kar. After all that Argath had done to help him, he couldn’t very well leave the city. He was trapped here as securely as he’d once been trapped in the Valley of Women. But if the Imperial City was a cage, it was a larger cage than the valley—so large it was almost possible to believe in the illusion of freedom.
In darker moments, he compared Dan to the facial brand that Teachers in eastern towns applied to thieves. He’d seen men and women who’d fled to Kar and attempted to remove the brand; the result had been a scar that revealed their crime as surely as the brand itself, only exacerbated by the second crime of trying to escape a sentence. Attempting to cast off Dan would have been like that. No one else might have noticed—there the comparison broke down—but Jon himself would have known what he’d done, and that was enough. Dan was part of his being now, and just as a man grows inured to bearing a brand, Jon had grown used to Dan.
What he had trouble understanding was why Dan was drawn to the very men Jon despised—fat merchants with perfumed hair and petty officials intoxicated with their own self-importance. Dan knew what Jon thought about such people. Was he deliberately demeaning himself in Jon’s eyes? Or was it Jon he was demeaning?
One such man had bought Dan his gold teeth—a carpet merchant who’d taken Dan home to live with him forever—and, if it hadn’t turned out to be forever, it had been a longer affair than most. Nine months passed before Dan slipped back into Jon’s life as nonchalantly as if he’d been absent for an afternoon. Those three teeth were the only property Dan had ever brought back from one of his affairs—unless you counted the parrot he’d returned with five years ago—a green and yellow bird named Tiger that now shared their fourth-floor aerie. Tiger was supposed to be Dan’s bird, but Jon ended up caring for it. Still, Tiger bit Jon whenever he let down his guard, while he never bit Dan, no matter how roughly Dan tickled the downy feathers on his breast.
However Tiger’s fidelity was an anomaly. Eventually, something went wrong in every one of Dan’s relationships. He blamed the men he’d taken up with for turning out to be losers—“I was crazy to be taken in by a man like that,” he’d say. But Jon doubted his explanations—and of course he never asked for the precise details.
Argath laughed at Jon for putting up with this behavior. He’d married the dancer the he’d once taken Jon to meet, and Jon suspected himself one of the few people in Kar who knew her pas, for, once she’d become the Prefect’s wife, she’d taken to dressing in the strictest Chosen style, wearing one of their little square hats whenever she left home and allowing no hint of an ankle to show beneath her expensive robes. Argath approved of this transformation. He had to worry about his reputation now, and a wife who was above suspicion suited his purposes—as did the five children she bore him in rapid succession. Fatherhood was, after all, a value cherished by the faith.
“You should get a wife,” Argath told him. “You need someone you can count on when you need her. If you want boys, they’re always available. Every queer in the Empire hightails it to Kar. But you ought to try a woman, Jon. You don’t know what you’re missing. And a wife will treat you a lot better than Dan. It beats me how you ended up with him. You could do a lot better than that—if you want, I could fix you up with one of the new recruits. There are at least three sissies in the latest batch, and one of them has as pretty a face as you could hope for. I have to confess, if I went in for that kind of thing myself, I’d be tempted.”
Jon had thanked Argath for the offer, but he hadn’t taken him up on it—which was no more than Argath expected. His friend Jon seemed intent on going through life in a state of mild depression. He’d have liked to’ve been able to help him, but Jon wanted nobody’s help. Argath counted himself lucky to have convinced Jon to accept the warehouse. He still wondered how he’d managed it.
***
So now Dan was upstairs cleaning the chest. Some goop had been spilled on it years ago and allowed to harden, and he was trying to remove it without harming the finish. Customers—especially the ones with money—expected things to be clean, but they also expected a two-hundred-year-old chest to look like it was two hundred years old. Jon could hear Dan humming to himself—a sure sign he was intent on his work. But Jon wasn’t fooled by this spurt of effort. Dan always threw himself into the business the first two or three days after one of his unexpected returns. But this phase wouldn’t last as much as a week—it never did.
Then, suddenly Dan came bounding down the stairs.
“Hey, Jon. Tell me something. Did you look at the chest carefully?”
Dan’s question meant he’d missed something important, but Jon wasn’t going to admit that without evidence.
“Of course.”
“Did you look inside it carefully?”
“It was empty, if that’s what you mean.”
Dan folded his arms triumphantly.
“So you didn’t see the false bottom?”
That wasn’t what Jon had expected.
“It has a false bottom?”
“Another example of why you can’t get along without me, Johnny Boy. Yes, it has a false bottom.”
“Were you able to open it?”
“Do you think I wouldn’t have been able to open it?”
This time it was Jon’s turn to shrug his shoulders.
“So what was in it?”
“What makes you think there was something in it? I only said it had a false bottom. I didn’t say anything about something being hidden there.”
“Dan, you wouldn’t be so obnoxiously happy if you hadn’t found something in that chest.”
“I don’t know why you think it’s obnoxious to be happy. But if you want to see, you’ll have to come upstairs.”
No longer pretending not to be curious, Jon followed Dan up the wide staircase that led to the second floor. When he saw what had been hidden beneath the false bottom—a book in a leather cover roughly the age of the chest itself—he knelt down and carefully opened the binding. To his surprise, the vellum pages inside were much older than the cover and their spidery writing transcribed a language he couldn’t identify. Could it be the same as those four books in the Imperial Library that no one had been able to read? It was impossible to tell. Turning the pages, he saw that the book also contained illustrations, hand drawn in faded ink with even more faded patches of color. He hoped these would at least give him an idea of the subject, but the pictures were as mysterious as the language surrounding them—lines and circles that composed nothing he could recognize.
“Well, Smart Guy, what the hell is it?” Dan asked.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Jon admitted.
“Are you going to turn it in?”
That was a difficult question.
Returning to Kar after Jon’s banishment, one of the first things they’d discovered was that the Great Teacher had commanded a thorough search of the city for books. Jon assumed he’d been looking for the missing contents of the Library—he’d never forget the Teacher’s disappointment at those empty shelves; and from what he’d been able to find out, many books had been turned in or confiscated. But the Teacher had yet to find whatever it was he’d been looking for, and so he had never remanded the order to turn in any books that might appear in the city. And, unlike many other standing orders, this one was strictly enforced. For that reason, Jon had refused to buy books when they were offered him, on the grounds that he’d be legally bound to give them up to the Chosen—although thus far no book had been offered in which he had any particular interest.
The funny part was, he knew exactly what happened to the books that were turned in to the Chosen. The Teacher—or someone close to him—examined them and then referred them to the civil authorities. Argath had a back room full of odd volumes—there must have been over three hundred—and he’d allowed Jon to have a look at them—even to take home and read, with the understanding that he’d return them at some unspecified time in the future.
“He may ask about them someday,” Argath explained, “and I don’t want to have more than one or two missing. You know, you can never anticipate what to expect when you’re dealing with the Great Teacher.”
Most of the books Jon had looked at—or borrowed—had been family histories, interesting because they provided a glimpse of earlier times. But there were also a few accounts of travel, and those he read carefully before returning them to Argath. And one had been a volume about the history of the Empire that he’d neglected to return at all.
However the book Dan had found in the chest wasn’t like any of these. Although he was unable to decipher its language, Jon was sure it was uniquely valuable. The false bottom to the chest had been made to fit it precisely, and such workmanship would only have been lavished on something its owner treasured—and wanted to hide from prying eyes.
“No, I think we should hold onto it,” he told Dan.
Dan liked that idea. He always liked a chance to break one of the regulations of the Chosen.
“Where do you want to keep it?” he asked.
“In the chest, of course. It was made for that purpose, wasn’t it?”
Dan raised a forefinger.
“But that means we can’t sell the chest.”
“Isn’t that obvious?”
Dan raised the other fingers of his hand and bowed his head.
“Your obedient servant, Sire.”
Jon was pleased to have found a reason not to sell the chest. Dan had been right in telling him he didn’t want to sell anything—but not out of arrogance. At heart, Jon was a museum keeper, not an antiques dealer. And that, perhaps, was the key difference between him and Dan when it came to the business. Someone long ago had ordered this beautiful chest made in order to preserve a mysterious book, and that meant there was a reason, not to sell it—much less to hand it over to the Chosen—but to keep it as safe as possible. For Jon found himself drawn to the chest in a way he had trouble describing. Its false bottom revealed an unexpected new world, like a secret window opening onto an alien landscape. In a small but real way, Dan’s discovery had changed everything in his life—or so Jon felt as he looked down at it. Since his return to Kar, Jon had carefully avoided taking any action that could be considered a risk. He wanted no attention directed at him by the religious authorities. But keeping this book was taking a risk. The danger was not great, of course, but it was nonetheless a danger, and the thought excited him.
“Let’s take the chest upstairs. We need a place to keep our blankets during the summer. We can put it at the foot of our bed. There’s more than enough room for it and it will look good there.”
“All the way to the top?”
“Why not?”
“Hauling it up the outside stairs is going to be a bear. Zimbar wood isn’t light.”
“We can do it. Two men managed to carry it here from across the city. Three flights of stairs should be possible.”
“Whatever you say, Boss.”
Dan, he admitted, was nice enough on the days when he was trying to be on good behavior. And tonight, Jon was sure, he’d make a special effort.
Chapter 2
It hadn’t been Jon’s idea to collect these artifacts. He’d returned to Kar with no determined plans, but, once in the city, he’d gone looking for Argath. Not at military headquarters, where Argath retained his office, despite the fact that, strictly speaking he was no longer performing a military function; there, he would likely be recognized, although he was back to wearing his hair at Forester length and his dark clothing resembled nothing a ranking member of the Chosen would have worn in public. Instead, leaving Dan behind, Jon had returned to the tavern where he and Argath had eaten regularly. The waiter, who’d always treated Argath as a guest of honor, showed no recollection of Jon—or at least Jon out of uniform—so Jon was left to fend for himself, taking the first seat that became available and stretching out his meal in the hope that Argath would show his face. But no Argath appeared, and the same was true for the second night. But the third night Argath arrived almost as soon as Jon, towing along a lumpish aide he was treating to dinner.
Jon was sure that the aide wouldn’t recognize him in his civilian clothes, but with Argath it would be different. He was adept at identifying individual faces even in a large crowd, and it didn’t take long for Argath to acknowledge him—not that anyone else would have noted his glance and the subtle movement of his hand that told Jon to stay put. He let the aide linger over his dinner without appearing eager to close the evening, but once the aide rose to leave, Argath sent him on his way, explaining that he had a few words to say to an old friend.
Jon could even make out the syllables “No cause for you to wait.”
“We can’t talk here,” Argath had told him in the midst of conventional greetings, and outside the tavern Argath had said a loud goodbye while quietly instructing him where they should meet the following day.
“Tomorrow works?” he’d asked.
“Tomorrow’s fine.”
“Morning’s are best. The Chosen watch my every move. After all these years, they still don’t trust me. But the dangerous ones are never suspicious in the morning. It takes them at least until the early afternoon to reach their stride. I’ll be able to give you only half an hour—and that’s stretching it. You can’t believe how busy I’ve become. But I’ll tell you all about it—at least as much as I can in so short time.”
Following instructions, Jon had met Argath the next morning at a teashop near the South Gate. They were the only men in the place—the rest were women from the neighborhood who came here to gossip. It was the last spot Jon would have chosen—wasn’t it self-evident they didn’t belong here?—but Argath had known exactly what he was doing. Beyond the waitress, no one paid the least attention to them. The shop was near enough to the gate that an occasional stranger must have been unexceptional; the regulars simply blocked them out.
“I thought you were dead,” Argath had told him, edging his large body into the small chair.
“So did I.”
Jon had then provided enough of the details of his capture, trial, and banishment to explain how he’d managed to return to Kar.
“They actually held a trial?” Argath had asked.
“They thought I was somebody important.”
“But you were—you were the High Commander’s Aide—and you saw the old man die. I wouldn’t believe a word of what you’re saying if a few other survivors hadn’t made it back. Those little men with green fire—it sounds like a story you’d tell children to make them go to bed on time—but you were there and saw it happen. You always were a lucky guy, Jon. From what I can piece together, you’re lucky to have walked out of that place alive.”
“I didn’t walk out. They carried me—back into the valley, where they locked me up for three months.”
“It’s incredible. But why did you come back in disguise? You’re still a Disciple of the First Degree. They can’t take that away from you.”
Jon leaned forward.
“I don’t want the title, Argath,” he said quietly. “Not after what happened to the Commander.”
That wasn’t the real explanation, but he hoped Argath would find it adequate.
“Seeing him die that way—it kind of broke you up?”
“You could say that.”
Argath sighed.
“I think I know what you mean. He was a hard man to get close to, but once you came to know him, there was something you had to respect. He meant a lot to me—I don’t have to tell you that. I owe everything I have to that man, and he never expected anything in return. Never anything personal, you understand. It’s strange to think of him gone—even after so many months.
“So now you want to start over again from scratch?”
“Yes.”
“But you still have all that money the Teacher gave you. With so many gold ducats, you shouldn’t have trouble making a new beginning.”
“Unfortunately, I’ve lost most of them.”
Argath was genuinely horrified.
“How could you have let that happen, Jon? You’re too smart to have done something foolish with your money.”
“My foolishness isn’t the problem. I took some of it with me when I left Kar, but I left the better part of the Teacher’s reward with the army counting master.”
“Then all you have to do to recover it is to appear at the counting office first thing tomorrow morning. If there’s any question of your identity, I can attest to it. You’ve been listed among the dead and missing, you know. But I can take care of changing the records.”
“You forget what I just told you, Argath. I want to make a new start. I don’t want the Chosen to know I’ve returned to Kar. If I present myself at the counting office, they’re sure to discover my presence. You said that I’m listed among the dead and missing; then that’s where I want my name to stay.”
Argath shook his head sadly.
“It seems like a very foolish thing to me to give up so much wealth for little reason. And if neither you nor any of your relations claim it from the army before the year is out, you can say good-by to it for good.”
‘Then so be it.”
Then Jon had changed the subject by asking Argath what was going on in his own life. There was still confusion about the disposition of the army. The Northern Commander had stepped in to take charge, but he had no clear idea about what he wanted to accomplish. In fact, with the death of the High Commander, quite a bit had unraveled.
“The Great Teacher’s living here now,” Argath had explained. “A few weeks after you and the Commander gave him his tour, he moved into the palace—but without telling anyone in advance. I mean anyone of us here in Kar. It happened over night without warning and the first thing we heard was an announcement saying he’d assumed quarters in the Imperial Palace. But the oddest thing is the way he’s shut himself up in there. I thought it would be like the old days—I wasn’t here, but I’ve heard about people coming and going to see the Emperor and the Emperor himself on his balcony acknowledging the crowd, only now it would be the Great Teacher. But nothing like that has happened. Once, when a crowd started to form in the Imperial Square—it was after news of the High Commander’s defeat had come in—we got an order to bring the army to clear the place. A couple of men who resisted got hurt, but after that nobody’s assembled on the square—except for the public punishments, of course. And even then, when you’d expect the Teacher to give his blessing, we haven’t gotten a peep of him.
“The palace itself has become a riddle. Only a few of the big guys are permitted inside, and the people who work there aren’t allowed to go and come. Once you’re in, you’re in for good, it looks like—except for the Acolytes and a few people like that at the top of the chain of command.”
Argath signaled the waitress for another pot of tea—he drank tea with the same gusto he drank wine; then he leaned forward confidentially.
“You know, as soon as it was announced that the Teacher had moved to Kar, I thought he’d take over running the city. But that hasn’t happened either. The army is still in charge, and, given the new Commander’s attitude, it looks like I’m the only one who cares about what goes on here. Lately, I’ve just been giving orders. I don’t have the authority, but people carry them out—the men are used to me, you understand. Still, the whole thing’s bound to explode one day or another. If I had any sense, I’d move back to my hometown—I’ve got a bit of savings. But I don’t want to leave Kar. You know how much I love this city.”
“Yes, I know that, Argath. You were the one who introduced me to it.”
“You love it, too, don’t you?”
“I guess so. At least I came back.”
“But without your ducats, how will you live?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Argath pursed his lips for a moment.
“Let me think about it. I might come up with something. But I can’t stay now—there’s so much to do.”
“No rest for the weary.”
“You’ve got it.”
Argath tossed a coin onto the table and made his way out, leaving Jon to finish the second pot of mala tea.
***
Two weeks later, Jon had received a message instructing him to meet Argath on the sixth bridge at ten the next morning. He hadn’t told Argath where he and Dan were staying, but that had clearly been unnecessary. He decided to bring Dan. It would be in everyone’s best interests to understand the situation. He’d given Dan instructions about the subjects he should keep his mouth shut about, but while they stood on the bridge waiting, Jon had second thoughts. Dan was certain to reveal something about events at Bent Lake that Jon would have preferred to keep hidden. Argath knew Jon had come from there, but he had no idea that Jon had been an intimate friend of the Empress Zoë.
“If he’s late there’s no telling how long we may have to wait,” he told Dan. “Argath has a lot on his plate. There’s probably no use both of us cooling our heels here. If I were you, I’d go back to the inn.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“I thought you’d be bored waiting. And you’re likely to be even more bored with Argath. He’s an old friend, and when old friends get together they talk about things of no interest to anyone else.”
Dan took the suggestion as a challenge.
“No, I think I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind. It’s funny, you know, his asking to meet you at this particular place.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing—it’s just that this was where they arrested me. And you can’t tell me you don’t remember. It was the night we met.”
“I remember seeing you at headquarters, but I wasn’t with them when they made the arrest. I was having dinner with Argath at a tavern on the far side of the palace.”
“But you must have known where they nabbed us.”
“Only that it had to do with some bridge. So this is the place?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you do it?”
“Underneath—down there. You want me to show you?”
“No, I don’t need to learn any more than I already know about your depravity.”
“You don’t call it depravity when we do it now.”
“That’s different.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Because it’s not in public where everyone can see us.”
“Under this bridge at night, there’s not much anyone can see. I think I’ll take you there—tonight maybe. You might enjoy the experience—providing nothing’s changed from a few months ago.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think you’d enjoy it?”
“I don’t think I’d do it—and I’m sure I wouldn’t enjoy it.”
“The trouble with you, Jon, is you’re too prissy. You’d enjoy life a lot more if you loosened up.”
Jon was saved from responding by the appearance of Argath, who showed no surprise seeing Dan.
“So you came back, too,” Argath said to him. “Life with the blind man wasn’t good enough for you?”
So Argath had known about that as well, Jon thought. Was there nothing you could keep from him?
“It wasn’t the blind man,” Dan explained. “He was a pretty nice guy—a real nice guy when you come down to it. And his wife was nice too—not as nice as he was, maybe, but OK for the kind of person she was. I just didn’t like the place where they took me. Nothing going on there, if you know what I mean.”
Argath found this amusing.
“Well, we can discuss that another time,” he said. “It was an odd coincidence your running into Jon there. I’d like to hear more about it. But today we need to get down to business. There’s something I want to show you, Jon—and you, too, Dan, if you’re interested.”
“I’m interested,” Dan assured him.
“That’s good.”
Argath had taken them to the warehouse, which he’d unlocked with a large iron key. Inside, not far from the door to the alleyway, a variety of objects were stacked haphazardly; however, the rest of the room was empty.
“Look at this stuff,” he told them. “Do you think you can do anything with it?”
Adjusting to the dim light, they saw that the objects near the door were an assortment of furniture and housewares—tables, chairs, vases and jars, rolled up carpets, mirrors, cooking utensils, stacks of plates, lamps—everything you could think of.
“I had them bring this from a building we were tearing down to clear space for an addition to the army headquarters—a new eating room for the officers. The workmen were planning to haul it to the east dump, but it seemed too good to throw away. I know nothing about the value of such things, but I thought they might be worth more than rubbish.”
So that was the way it had begun. Construction was going on all over Kar, and some of the older buildings were filled with priceless treasures. It was Argath’s idea that they get their hands on as much of it as possible while people were giving away roomfuls of old furniture to anyone willing to cart if off.
“Most of it’s junk. Even I know that. But not all of it, and one of these days people are going to wise up to the fact that there’s value here. You’ve seen the way they’re remodeling the old houses—stripping off the carving, painting everything white. But that can’t go on forever. Somebody’s going to start a fad for the old stuff, and when that happens everybody and his brother’s going to want to have an antique chair or soup tureen—to show what good taste they have.
“My thought is that you—you and Dan here—could start your own collection, and when people are ready to buy, you’ll be able to sell it to them.”
He walked across the room and opened a shutter. A stream of daylight passed through the barred window.
“Even this old hulk of a building’s going to be valuable someday—although probably not in my lifetime. There’s not much trade by water anymore, and most of these warehouses are empty. But not many of them are built the way this one is. The new buildings can’t hold a candle to this stonework. The walls must be three feet thick—just take a look at it—see for yourself.”
While Jon examined the stonework, Argath walked over to Dan and spoke to him in a quiet voice.
“Would you step outside for a few minutes? I need to say something to Jon. I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s kind of a personal thing—between old friends. I was sure you’d understand.”
As soon as Dan had left—more curious than annoyed—Argath turned to Jon.
“This building just happens to be unowned at present,” he told him, “but I could see to it that the deed was put into your name. Don’t ask me for the particulars. It would all be entirely legal—no danger to you in the least.”
“Why not put it in your own name?”
“The way things are going right now, that might be risky. Many people know Argath—I’ve become a public character, you know—but few know you, Jon—and those who used to know you take it for granted you died in battle. Even if they passed you on the street, it wouldn’t occur to them that you were the man they once saw in uniform with the High Commander. And besides,” he added, looking around the room, “I wouldn’t know what to do with it.
“Despite your unwillingness to claim your ducats at the counting office, you still have some money, don’t you? Or did they take it away from you?”
“I still have money. But there isn’t much of it left. We used it to make the trip back to Kar—Dan doesn’t like to sleep out of doors—and now the inn we’re staying in is costing us more than a little.”
“Which is exactly why you should want to move into this place. It’ll be free, and I’ll see to it that the taxes are minimal—even waived for the first couple of years. And I’ll assist you as much as I can in getting the business going—steering clients your way and that sort of thing. Right now I have a bit of power in this city. It may disappear any minute, but as long as I can help you, I’ll do whatever’s possible. But I’ll have to keep at a distance. I wouldn’t want people thinking I had anything to do with this place—other than the fact that a old friend happens to own it and that I happen to visit him on the odd occasion.”
“Why are you doing this, Argath?”
“Let’s say it’s for old times’ sake, old friend. Remember all those dinners in the tavern?”
“I’ll never forget them.”
“Neither will I. I remember the day you first came to my office with that jerk adjutant from the Southern Army—I forget his name.”
“Aziz.”
“Aziz, yes, that’s it. I wonder what became of him.”
“I suspect he was killed when the Emperor’s army made their midnight attack. If he’d been one of the ones who ran away, he’d have found a way to get back to Kar by now.”
“Yes, that’s what must have happened. Poor man—he seemed so full of himself when he brought you to see the High Commander. I couldn’t resist deflating him a bit.”
“You mean he could have stayed and seen the High Commander?”
“If I’d let him. The old man gave me quite a bit of discretion. But what’s done is done. The point I wanted to make had nothing to do with Aziz—it had to do with you. Do you recall the conversation we had after I’d sent him away?”
When the High Commander was living, Jon noted, Aziz would never have referred to him as the old man, but now he’d done it twice.
“Of course I remember it.”
“Well, what you don’t know is that I’d never been so open with anyone before. I just had this sense you were somebody I could be frank with—and that you wouldn’t use anything I said against me. Damned if I know why I felt that way, but I did. That was why I took you out to that restaurant. For all the Commander cared, I could have treated you to a bowl of soup at the corner stand. That was his idea of a good dinner. But I decided to make an evening of it and try to get to know you better, so I took you to a place I went to myself, and that was the beginning of our friendship.”
Could the tritargon have had something to do with what Argath was telling him? He’d been reaching out to the adjutant in order to discover what he could about the High Commander. Could Aziz have sensed that and interpreted it as an invitation to friendship? But these were questions he’d never be able to answer now.
“So it’s agreed?” Argath asked him eagerly. “You’ll take over the warehouse—it’s already yours, you know. Anyone checking the title to the property would find your name—Jon of Bent Lake. I hope that’s all right.”
What could he say but yes?
“Let’s get Dan and go over the place,” Argath said. “And, by the way, it’s not a bad thing that you’ll have someone to work with you. Two people are always better than one—especially when it comes to moving furniture. There’s a second level just as big as this one—even bigger, if you count the narrow part that juts out over the river—and above that two more. The top two floors aren’t as well constructed and don’t have thirty-foot ceilings like the original building—but you’ll see.”
When Jon called Dan, the boy appeared in an instant. He must have been standing just outside the doorway. Jon always remembered that he’d been grinning.
***
The initial year had been difficult. They’d run out of money after the first six months. But Argath had finally brought them a customer—the wife of a moneylender, who was looking for a small table “to remind her of the past.” Dan had taken her under his wing, and she’d bought not only a table but also two chairs and a small cabinet.