Chapter One

Gather

Visions like images glimpsed through heated glass.

You see vast armies clashing across a hazy vista, girdled within the fiery distortions consuming the margins. You see war chariots crashing to earth and fire-breathing dragons swooping above them, wafting in obsidian smoke. You see an eidolon of feminine perfection walking across the roiling waters of a boiling sea. She peers at you with eyes that are impossibly brilliant in the vermilion light.

And then she speaks in a voice so sweet that it can only belong to a lover, whispering, “Scatter.”

■■■

Enk Gueye jerked into consciousness, wheezing, struggling to weather the spasms that rocked his sweat-slicked body. He thrashed, an insect dangling from spider silk, swinging and twisting above oblivion. Blood flushed heat through his extremities, steeped his chest in raw emotion. Like the Great Flood that had shorn asunder the world in Deep Antiquity, the nightmare had come. All at once. Without warning.

Now its shadowy remnants filtered through his mind, and terror wafted from his skin. Nightmare and memory mingled. The voice in the dream had sounded like Inanna’s own. . . .

His lungs drew in tiny wisps of air.

A hairline crack ran across the ceiling.

Enk peered up at it, gasping and exposed behind watery eyes. An errant moonbeam pierced midnight pools to illuminate the flaw. It skittered this way and that, sketching half loops across a once perfect surface.

Merka, his household’s last remaining servant, entered the unlit bedchamber with a candle and a jar of ointment, adhering to a ritual established after his first asthmatic episode. Luminous even in the feeble light, she lowered herself onto the bed, placed the candle on the table and leaned over him. Her sheer, white nightgown tightened across her large bosom.

He inhaled sharply.

She was a striking figure, possessing a nun’s serene countenance, two full lips stressed into what looked like genuine concern, arms so deeply pale that he could see the veins pumping blood within them, and a single streak of blue ran through the golden hair at her temple—evidence of someone with a touch of the Naunak bloodline in her ancestry.

The young scion of House Gueye averted his gaze from the pointed majesty of Merka’s rounded mounds, still fighting his constricted lungs. His eyes burned and his loins tightened with an aching need.

Merka’s cool hands slathered soothing ointment onto Enk’s chest. He returned his gaze to her breasts, his breathing now slower. Deeper. At Dilgan’s Grand Academy, members of the Second Estate, young nobles like himself, all told tales about laying with their former wet nurses. It was a rite of passage, to hear them tell it.

I love Inanna . . . and only her.

As if to prove the hollowness of this claim, Merka’s fingers tracked their way down his abdomen. Each point of contact germinated an inkling of heat within him.

“You’ve grown so big,” she said, her lips quickening with the lure of ripened fruit. “It seems mad to think you once suckled at my breasts. You were so small then, just a tiny babe. I was always so terrified of dropping you, did I ever tell you that?”

He met Merka’s eyes, her lustrous blue eyes, felt her soft hand tighten around his throbbing flesh. Inanna is gone, her smile seemed to say, she’ll never know. His heart leapt. His body trembled.

Merka . . . unraveled, and he saw, saw through her veil of skin into the grooves of her mind. She had planned this little seduction, planned it for weeks to help soothe the ache of Inanna’s leave-taking.

No boy should lose his sweetheart to the Immortal-Emperor, not even for a night, she had thought.

Enk gasped, overwhelmed by the depth of her devotion. She matched his inhale, her body quivering. She loved him, he saw it like golden lantern-light pitched against the dark fiber of her being. There was no guile here, no perversion. This was. . . .

The baying sound of a woman’s raucous moans seeped through the walls of his bedchamber, snuffing out the warmth from the very air. Mother and her latest lover. He sensed his cheeks flare with shame, felt himself soften in his former wet nurse’s grip.

“That will be all, Merka,” he said in a voice as cold as a frozen tundra.

She flinched, her expression of pain etched by candlelight. The hurt was gone from her face in an instant, hidden behind a mask of blankness, but he could still see it in her eyes, a weeping wound on something that once glittered bright.

Merka stood, a wraith of wrath despite her outer calm. “I wonder what it must feel like to be chosen as a Tribute of Flesh? How can any other man compare when you’ve surrendered your maidenhood to the Helmsman of the Holy Ark, to the Holy Immortal-Emperor himself?”

Enk blinked fresh tears from his eyes and watched Merka leave the same way she had entered, with jar and candle. Alone in the dark, he listened to the whorish moans of his mother. And his skin pimpled with the understanding, no one can hurt you more than those you love.

No one.

■■■

Enk awoke in the predawn glow, his head abuzz with a vague sense of what had happened the night before. Coughing into the crook of his elbow, he lurched from his bed, passed shelves bulging with leather-bound books, and drew back the curtains from his bedroom window.

He peered out across Dilgan’s cityscape, and ignoring the large homes that lined the cobbled street outside the walls of his townhouse, allowed his gaze to shift to the Cobalt Gate, an ancient construct nestled in the gloam and haze of immense mountain peaks. One of the Four Great Gates that connected the Gilgian Empire to the Ancient World.

The heart-clenching balk shone with an azure sheen, the golden lens upon which all of the light of the rising sun converged, only to pillar the Shade, Dilgan’s worse districts, in an obscene and unholy glow.

The young scion of House Gueye blinked away tears. It all looked the same. He had lost the love of his life, yet no fires consumed buildings. No lightning struck rooftops. Nothing had changed, but everything had. A dark carriage ambled past, its horses neighing as they moved through a small patch of fog.

I’m all alone.

He turned from the window to a plump chair, covered with linen of the same chintz-style, woodblock pattern that graced the room’s wallpaper, and dropped onto it. He wet his lip and reviewed the previous night’s events, then followed it up with a shake of his head.

No. He must have imagined that part. It was not possible to read another person’s thoughts.

His throat tightened, constricted by a sense of dread. He did not believe that, not really. He remembered how it had felt to peer inside Merka’s mind.

Something cold seized his heart and squeezed. He closed his eyes as the old wheezing returned to rattled his chest, clutched his hands into fists and counted his breath:

One.

He strained beneath the power of another asthmatic attack, rocked on the chair, his entire body knotted and quivering.

Two.

For a time, all he could do was struggle to breathe, but he was more than familiar with the torments of his ailment. It had plagued him since he could crawl, had confined him to his bed when children his age laughed and played, had forced him to grow strong in other ways.

The scion of House Gueye opened his eyes. Across from him, his wardrobe stood ajar, stuffed with finely embroidered coats, breeches, and boots. Yet despite their regalia, most, if not all, were secondhand items, gifted to him by Ilima, Inanna’s older brother. His eyes settled upon a ruined toy, peeking out through some discarded shirts at the back of the wardrobe—a wooden soldier riddled with cracks and splinters.

Forcing himself to begin his day, he dressed in a silver coat, bedecked with gold and fined with sable. Once there would have been servants to wash his face and brush his blond hair, but those days were long gone, so he did them himself.

“It’s just another day,” he told himself as he stared into a small mirror, pressing thumb and finger to a yellowish bruise on the side of his face. “Nothing has changed.”

Enk buckled on his sword-belt and left his room, feeling as though he were adrift on wild and turbulent winds. He wandered his home the way a stranger might, seeking clues to what sort of people would inhabit such a place. The hallways on the third and second floor were so worn and weathered as to seem abandoned. Cobwebs knotted the corners of ceilings, white sheets draped tables and chairs, and closed doors concealed dust-filled chambers from his eyes. It was only on the ground floor that the mansion’s former grandeur still pulsed true, throbbing like the last light of a dying volcano. Its warm glow welcomed his panting form with gold-framed paintings and spotless floors as he descended the last step of a winding staircase.

In the dining room, he found Merka bent over a long table, arraying forks and plates for the morning meal. She glanced over her shoulder and studied him. Aside from the wrinkles around her eyes, she looked even more beautiful by the light of day. A nymph haloed in the pale rays cast through the long windows of the gallery.

He forced a smile and approached the table.

She greeted him warmly, but her words from the night before hung naked between them, a red-dripping blade:

“How can any other man compare when you’ve surrendered your maidenhood to the Helmsman of the Holy Ark, to the Holy Immortal-Emperor himself?”

Merka pulled a scarlet-cushioned chair back from the table, and he took the seat, blinking against a sudden cutting pain, her remembered words wounding anew.

He sat in seething silence. It was the truth of her words that hurt the most. He was doomed, doomed to ever remain in the shadow of the Immortal-Emperor, in his own mind and the mind of the woman he loved. How could he even begin to compete with a man who was old before the Empire was even an idea, a man who had been chosen by God?

“Enk. . . .” Merka began, only for her voice to falter.

He peered down at his empty plate, avoided her gaze, listened to her sigh then saunter away. His eyes lost focus, and images billowed up from the deep recesses of his mind, memories, like golden leaves scuttling free from the branches of an unseen tree. Merka perched on his rumpled bedside, her voice raised in a soothing aria. Countless afternoons clustered beneath a massive oak. Warmth and kindness radiating out from her to comfort what was broken and unmended. . . .

“How long. . . ?” Enk cleared his throat. Merka had remained by his side when all the others had left. She loved him, had always loved him. Whatever animus she had turned against him last night had been borne out of hurt. Out of his rejection of this love.

“What. . . ?” Merka asked from somewhere behind him.

“How long since I last heard you sing?” He turned around and found her standing with her hand on the doorknob and her head cocked to the side. “Feels like forever. Once this place was filled with your songs.”

“Enk . . . you’re sixteen.”

“Your point?”

“Don’t you think you’re a little old for lullabies?”

He lowered his gaze. “I’ll never be too old for lullabies, not from you.”

“Oh, Enk.” She rushed him, tears lacquering her eyes.

Enk jerked, taken by surprise as his former wet nurse clutched him to her bosom. For an instant, his fingers clawed his sweaty palms, then he relaxed into her embrace.