It was the hour of the jinn when a four-masted galleon flying the banner of Principus sailed into Dorud’s port on cold, southerly winds. Given that I’d witnessed the angel with my own eyes, it disturbed me how accurately their banner portrayed him. One round eye, a bulbous squid body, and the tentacles of an octopus — it was all depicted in disdainful detail on that fluttering, Sargosan standard. Whoever had devised it knew how abominable their angel was and yet had still chosen to love it. Did Ethosians even realize how unsettling their gods were?
The galleon itself was unsettling enough. Its hull of wood and steel stood so high, it resembled an armored titan on the waves. Its gunports — enough for sixty cannons — leered down at my mudbrick city. It was a far more imposing beast than the galleys of my own navy, which was in dire need of attention. Sadly, we did not have much lumber amid the dunes of Dorud.
Like the angel he must’ve adored, the man who climbed off the galleon had one working eye. He wore a close beard, though it had a few holes in it. He was richly dressed — for a westerner — with a sailor’s sunburns across his forehead and cheeks. He even wielded a decent command of Paramic, though he struggled with the guttural sounds, like I did. And he had nothing interesting to say, prattling on about trades and deals and opportunities — for him and me. He invited me to sip ginja on his deck, which I declined without humor, preferring to buttress my reputation for temperance rather than indulge with the most well-armed merchant I’d ever met.
After the brief encounter, I returned to my office, lit the incense burner, and shut the door. A candle throbbed softly in the corner niche, casting my shadow upon Grand Vizier Barkam.
“Who was that man?” I asked.
Barkam rubbed his emerald ring. It was the only one I’d allowed him to wear. “You can keep your other rings,” I’d told him, “but then I’ll be keeping your fingers.” He no longer wore the diamond, ruby, and pearl.
“I know him as a trader and explorer,” he said.
“Why does a trader need sixty gunports?”
“He is a military man, as well.”
Just what I’d feared. These Sargosans had brought trouble to the islands east of here, contesting Kashanese suzerainty. Though they’d left the Nawab of Koa in charge, it was well known he did their bidding and not Shah Babur’s. With a Crucian armada assembling at Dycondi, it seemed unsafe to allow powerful allies of the Imperium to free roam through waters I controlled.
“You should let him get on with his business,” Barkam said, fluffing his pure, white caftan. The tenacious vizier had struggled to adjust to the plainer colors and simpler fabrics I’d enforced upon my court, but I appreciated that he was trying.
“By what logic ought I to allow an Ethosian warship through my waters?”
“By the logic of prudence. We have enough enemies as it is. If you provoke the Sargosans now, they’ll seek to strangle your reign in its crib. And they’ve a lot of gold to buttress your enemies and buy off your friends, especially with the bankers of House Seth favoring them.”
I did not worry about men with gold. I worried about men with gold, guns, and ambition. “I have heard that Sargosans now wield great influence at the High Castle in Hyperion — that they are the puppet masters of Crucis.” Aicard had said so during our meeting in Merva.
As Barkam shifted on the floor cushion, his olive-oiled head glinted in the candlelight. “I have heard the same. But that doesn’t mean we should blindly antagonize them. We are not yet ready to face them, nor do they seem eager to make an enemy of us, given that we control the Wahi Canal — their lifeline to the East Islands.”
“Then who is behind the Crucian armada amassing in Dycondi, if not them?”
“It could be an influential Exarch, or the Patriarch, or even the Imperator himself. My contacts are busy finding out more.”
Yes, his spies were a most useful resource. It was one of several reasons I hadn’t perched his head on the Emerald Palace gate the night I seized it from him.
A knock sounded on the door.
“Sultan, there is a woman here to see you,” said the Abyad standing guard outside, whom I’d selected and trained myself.
“A woman?”
“She claims she is your wife.”
The Grand Vizier stood with the swiftness of a younger man. “We can talk more about the Sargosans when you’re done meeting her.”
Why would Lunara have come here?
Barkam gave her a good, shin-to-shoulder glance as he left the room — as if I wouldn’t notice. She entered and removed her eye mask. Sea green irises, deep enough to drown in, glowed in the waning candlelight.
The flutter in my heart filled me with dread. “Why have you come here?”
Her skin was paler, as if Sadie’s warmer color had faded and Lunara’s icy complexion now reigned. Even her hair, once red as fire, now had the hue of embers glowing well past their time.
Lunara pulled a piece of papyrus from the pocket of her jade caftan. She handed it to me with jittery fingers.
“Micah knows where your son is,” was written in Sirmian, the handwriting strange and sinuous.
“What is this?” I swallowed my rage at seeing the name of the man who murdered my daughter and destroyed my home. “Speak, or have you taken a vow of silence, like an Ethosian nun?”
“It is difficult to say what I am feeling.” That was still Sadie’s voice, though she spoke with the same barracks accent as I did and not Sadie’s palace lilt.
I could not show this strange woman the childhood softness I felt toward her. I could not trust her. I never should have trusted her, from the first.
“It might be well past midnight, but I’ve pressing matters to attend to. A sultan never sleeps. Explain why you trekked through your tunnels just to hand deliver me this note.”
Lunara paced between my desk and the fresco of Saint-King Nasar at the head of his motley army of believers. It was one of the few frescoes in the Emerald Palace that I liked, which is why I’d chosen this room for my office.
As she passed me, I grabbed her arm and pulled her to attention. Her skin was cold, even through the wool of her caftan. Had Sadie’s fire burned out?
“I am not playing, Lunara.” I held up the paper. “What does it mean? Is it referring to who I think it is?”
Her pupils trembled as she nodded. “At first, I did not want to believe it. I kept telling myself it could not be true.”
“Go on.” I recalled how she’d struggle to explain things whenever her thoughts outraced her tongue. Like the time she discovered a new recipe for halva — a mango-flavored one from Kashan — back when we were both fresh in our youths.
“The more I thought about it, the more I realized — this note was meant for me. For us.”
“Us?”
“It says exactly what it means, Kevah. Our son is alive. And Micah knows where he is.”
Barkam had told me that Micah the Metal was dead. That Imperator Josias had hung his head outside the entrance to Hyperion’s largest cathedral.
“What are you saying?” I did not know what to feel or think. Did not know whether to take her seriously or regard her as mad. “I have it on good authority that Micah is dead.”
“Yes. But our son is not.”
“You said he was. You told me—“
“I know what I told you. But what if I was wrong? What if the devs are right?”
“So a jinn gave you this?” I squeezed the paper. “A trick. A manipulation.”
“I considered that.” She clutched my wrist, pulsing her tender chill up into my hand. “There is one way to find out whether it’s true or not. But I won’t do it unless you agree.”
“A way to find out if our son is alive?”
Lunara nodded. “We ask Micah.”
“We ask a dead man?”
“We bring him back, just how I was brought back.”
I laughed, though it was the least funny thing I’d ever heard. “Isn’t it obvious? The devs want you to bring an evil man back for their own evil ends, and they’re using our son to pull at your heartstrings. It’s a lie.”
“But what if it’s not? What if, when I gave the boy to the Palace of Bones, it did whatever it did, and then it spat him back into our world?”
I wanted to dig my nails into her neck for painting that dreadful image with her words. How dare she take my son away from me and then sacrifice him to evil? And now — poisoned by well-deserved guilt — she wanted to bring Micah back and fulfill some dev’s scheme?
Why did I ever love her? Was it because I knew no one else’s tenderness? Was it because she’d blinded me back when all I could see was her?
“Micah the Metal is dead. Our son is dead. Leave it, Lunara.”
As soon as those words left my tongue, something whispered in the dark, roiling sea of my heart. I’d failed to kill Micah in Labyrinthos, despite firing shot after shot at him with Jauz’s gun. I even fired the fucking Tear of the Archangel at him. It had been eighteen months since that fateful duel, and yet it felt like yesterday and a thousand years ago, both. Where did he go after that? What did he do?
And how in the coldest hell did that bastard finally die?