Chrysopolis: the City of Gold. Twenty generations of conquerors had enriched the capital of Macaria, turning what was once just another port along the Sea of Dolphins into the greatest city the world had ever known, home to a million souls. It was here where the grand river Cocytus ran at st into the sea, and where the road to Sarrania at st ran out of solid ground. Trade caravans from across the continent stopped here, and ships den with hundreds of tons of grain filled the great Chrysopolis harbor.
There was a distinct odor to Chrysopolis, one found nowhere else in the world, and one which filled Shirrin with the oddest mix of nostalgia and hatred. There were, of course, the urban smells, of sewage ditches and sweat, of pigs and oxen and all the attendant products thereof; but the vast wealth and splendor which pced Chrysopolis above all other cities in its own estimation brought with it other scents. The richest of the rich, the Senators with coffers glutted by vast tracts of sve-run nd, could pay for their house-sves to trail behind them as they walked, burning incense wherever they went. The pure white stone of the paces and vils, imported from distant Kemtry for its beauty, emitted a distinctly bitter scent at all times, growing stronger with rain and sea-spray. On every street corner it seemed there were petty alchemists shouting out about their love potions and cure-alls for sale, and to Shirrin’s finely-tuned senses they stank of improperly-mixed reagents. All of Chrysopolis was saturated with the airs of greed and excess, and Shirrin was going to destroy it.
But at that particur moment, there was little to be done to that end. Shirrin was in a cart pulled by two horses, its boxy body unadorned and its windows barred with iron bars. Its insides were fit for a queen, fine linen bnkets and pillows strewn about, but the externals made it quite clear that it was the transportation of a high-ranked sve. The crowds let loose hoarse roars of triumph as she passed them, yelling profanity at the conquered queen, but she paid them no mind. They would pay for their iniquities in time, same as all the others.
The victory procession must have trailed at least a mile. Much of it was simple imperial posturing, Peleus in his armor with the scales made from silver and gold and a helmet decorated with the feathers of tropical birds, fnked by a thousand cataphracts all vishly decorated. The legions showed off their perfect marching formations, blocks of men measured out six by ten just so; the banners of Trabakondai tribes fluttered in the sea-breeze above them. Perhaps that which was most appealing to the mob was not the show of militarism, for militarism was the ground of those wealthy men who were the carriers of the bde, not the receiver of it. No, the greatest shouts came at the passing of the shows of war-loot. In great wagons the Macarians showed off all that they had stolen from Shirrin’s people: fine steel armor and helmets and swords, rings of red-gold and copper torcs pried from the fingers and throats of the dead and dying.
The great Sarraniai road, going from east to west, was the chiefest artery of travel within Chrysopolis, entering at the Pton Gate and terminating along the southern arc of the harbor, where the rgest grain-ships would habitually dock. At a width such that six wagons could travel fnk-to-fnk, it cut a straight line through Chrysopolis for almost four miles. That meant that for almost three hours, Shirrin had nothing to do but sit upon her linens, watch the mob scream obscenities at her image, and hate.
Shirrin was gazing into her p in silent contemption of the future when, at an order from their driver, the horses pulling her cart lurched to a stop. She crawled towards the exit, and when at st the door was unlocked and thrown open for her exit, Shirrin could at least step into the hands of her captors with a modicum of dignity.
Only a modicum, of course. For the sake of presentation she had been disallowed from choosing her own attire; instead the guards had pced her in a fool’s approximation of the garments of a barbarian queen, the long dress with the plunging neckline and the heavy boots, rings on her fingers and cords around her neck. That she had been allowed to keep her medical charm was the only mercy on offer. There was a great steel colr around her neck, with no chain attached, and as soon as her feet touched stone, a soldier seized each wrist.
They were at the agora, now, the pce where the great Sarraniai road met its rather less influential cousin, the nameless Main Street which went from the coast in the north to somewhere off in the farm-fields to the south. There, at the intersection, was a huge diamond of open cobbles, surrounded by great cathedrals, high ptforms, and long colonnades through which senators could debate politics and agree about the exchange of wealth. Shirrin noticed immediately the sole change in the agora since she had st seen it, twelve years prior: one of the temples, the Temple of Sicaria the Mother, had been torn down. In its pce, a fourth chapel to the Golden Lord was being built
Peleus was preparing to give a speech, presumably exalting himself for his victory and sprinkling in just enough begrudging acknowledgement of his supposed love for his people to convince lesser men that he cared. Typical self-aggrandizement, really. It only made sense, then, that the greatest symbol of his victory, the ensved queen of his enemy, would make for a good accessory. Shirrin knew this calcution well, and to her shock she found that she could not even hold it against Peleus, as she did so many other things. The soldiers led her up the steps to the ptform, across the stones behind where Peleus stood, and Shirrin felt very little.
Peleus was not alone atop that ptform, of course, even discounting the sves and soldiers and other such folk who held no significance in their presence. At his side was General Eteocles, dressed in the uniform of a common soldier. Peleus was a tallish man, though not quite so tall as Shirrin; his strength was quick and powerful. Eteocles was his right hand and appointed successor, a popur sort of fellow with a broad, squarish figure and a bull’s neck. He was a perfect follower, clever enough and yet nearly bereft of independent ambition. She hated him severely, and as she approached him the memories which fshed like lightning strikes upon the dark pins of her mind made her wish that she could reach out and take his life there and then.
It had been Eteocles, not Peleus himself, who had been in command of the soldiers who had ambushed her. Once she had been driven from the pace by accusation and conspiracy, Eteocles’s men had pursued her far to the north, to the very border with the Trabakondai. Only then, when she thought she was safe, did they attack. They slew her final defenders, dragged her across the dirt and mud by the hair, and in the dark of the wood they visited great and numerous indignities upon her. Only when she was left bleeding from countless wounds, dazed and so badly beaten that Eteocles and his cronies thought her surely dead, did they leave her be, to die alone in a far-off forest. She had crawled through a dozen miles of mud, felt her teeth spill from her jaw and her eye drip onto her cheek, before at st she was visited by the agent of her salvation.
And then Shirrin returned, all at once, to the present. Eteocles did not know who she was, and even if he did wish to harm her, her strength had increased thousandfold since then. Someday she would have her revenge; but first she needed to py her part.
And py her part she did: with a slouching gait designed to feign the broken shards of nobility, she stood behind and to the side of the Emperor as he spoke at length of his great achievement. Slowly, surely, as he droned on and on to the vast approval of the crowd gathered below, Shirrin’s attention began to wander. Her hatred towards both the Emperor and his chief general burned bright in her mind, but there was another silent accessory to Peleus’s showing of imperial grandeur. Her name was Athan, and once Shirrin realized that she, too, stood upon the podium of conquest, Shirrin’s thoughts turned in an altogether different direction.
Athan was a princess of Macaria, descendant of one of the great noble houses that had made cims upon kingship before the ascendancy of the Emperors. She was at once foreigner to Chrysopolis and native: for her house made its base of power in the rich river valleys a week’s travel to the north, and yet, due to her betrothal to the future Emperor, she had lived in Chrysopolis all her life. It was an imperial tradition, that the wife of the Emperor always be a daughter of one of the noble houses. Peleus’s mother, Empress Thalia, had been much the same.
Athan was also, in Shirrin’s estimation, the most beautiful woman in the world. She included herself in that statement. Once, a very long time ago, Shirrin had written poetry about her beauty of figure and gentleness of character. Her skin was rich and delicate as parchment paper, her eyes verdant emeralds, her hair bck silk. When she was happy, the brilliant gleam of her smile spread happiness all throughout the room, and when she was unhappy it was the most piteous sight in all of the world. Even standing still and silent while her foul husband speechified, her stillness and silence was perfectly posed, the folds of her silken dress hanging from her arms and down her sides as though carefully pced by the stroke of some divine sculptor.
Shirrin’s heart suddenly thumped against the inside of her breastbone as she remembered more and more of her time with Athan. Rage and vengeance plotted had caused her to fixate upon the greed and fickleness of the Chrysopolitan crowd, the vile scheming of Peleus and his cohort. But Athan held none of those qualities. And yet she had shackled herself to Emperor Peleus just the same.
Shirrin felt vaguely ill, a discomfort in her stomach that would not leave. But swiftly and forcefully she shoved it aside, and her reminiscences about Athan as well. Athan was part of the machinery of the empire; her beautiful figure fed upon the produce of sves and the poor. Shirrin focused on the task at hand, projecting an aura of perfect dignity marred by perfect helplessness. With her heart hardened and her focus sharp, the speech passed by in no time at all. Shirrin was taken back to the carriage, and as the crowds and soldiers alike dissolved back to where they had come from, Shirrin herself was brought to her new home: the Imperial Pace.
The Imperial Pace was a monument to human sin, excess made manifest. None still alive knew how many sves had toiled for how many years to construct it, and none knew how many of them had lost their lives, but there could be no doubt that it was in the thousands. The complex extended over an area rger than a rich equestrian’s farm field, row upon row of low bunkhouses for the servants, huge complexes of chambers for visiting dignitaries and noblemen from the furthest reaches of the Empire. The pace’s chapel was the second rgest in Chrysopolis, and could seat thousands under a huge domed roof, yered with pting of brass and gold. At the center of it all was the Emperor’s abode, a great block of a building nine stories tall and made of white marble. There dwelt Peleus himself, the Empress, and the hundreds of sves and guards which waited on them day and night.
Shirrin was one of those sves now, though higher in Peleus’s service than most, and she had her own assigned suite. First, of course, there was the evening meal. Reclining on a couch of silken covers, waited upon hand and foot, Peleus would devour course upon course of fruit and mb and fine wheat bread, though as a show of his temperance he would abstain from sweet cakes and mashed beans. Shirrin was invited to partake as well, and the brute concerns of hunger forced her to do so. But unlike Peleus, her mind was not on the meal itself, nor on the endless jokes and conversations of the various nobles who happened to be in attendance.
No, Shirrin’s attention fell naturally upon the far wall of the vast banquet hall. There, suspended from a pair of hooks, was a sword. It was a long-bded sword, the sword of a cavalryman, though Shirrin knew all too well its effectiveness on foot. The shape of the bde, though odd, did not reveal its true power: the bde was steel with a slightly bluish tint, and the hilt was wrapped not in leather, but in bck wood with silver iny. The strangest part of the bde was no doubt the crossguard, unusually wide, made of overpping scales of material with sharp edges that would threaten to cut the wielder were they unmindful.
The sword was named Bdethorn. It had been the symbol of the Emperor, of his power and rule, for twenty generations. When Shirrin had left Chrysopolis, it was rare indeed for the sword to leave the Emperor’s side, let alone for it to be hung upon a wall and forgotten. She ground her teeth at the sheer disrespect.
Once Shirrin had had her fill, she asked to be dismissed. It was the smallest credit to Peleus’s character that his obsession with control did not extend so far as to deny her that. A pair of soldiers escorted her up to her new chambers on one of the upper floors. It was a luxurious suite for a sve, having a separate bedroom, sitting room, wardrobe, and toilet, being thus rger than the homes of the vast majority of Chrysopolis’s inhabitants. She was sure that the chambers of the noblemen and of the Imperial family were far more vish, decked all about with silk and cloth of gold, but it could not be said that Shirrin’s furnishings of walnut and cedar, linen and wool, were not themselves rather vish.
There was also a bell by the door, the ringing of which would allow Shirrin to summon a lesser sve for the purpose of bringing her nearly any thing her mind could invent. A sve commanding sves, what fancy.
The door was locked behind Shirrin; only when the sun was in the sky would she be allowed free reign of the pace grounds. This did not bother her. She soaked in the sensorium of the pace, the way the wood floors felt under her feet, the way the neverending business mumbled through the walls. She stripped out of the ridiculous outfit she’d been forced into and, searching the wardrobe, assembled something for herself. It was, perhaps, an overly-masculine getup. But the tight ces of the doublet would certainly emphasize her bust, and so long as she was careful her trousers would not reveal anything. Once she was wrapped up in a cloak for warmth, Shirrin at st had time to think.
While the sunlight through the windows of her room slowly faded into nothing, Shirrin spent the evening in a contemptive state. Her thoughts were allowed to wander. Again and again, like a lost man who stumbles repeatedly upon the same ndmark, they turned to Athan. It had been twelve years since st she had id eyes upon the princess, now Empress; that the fme of passion still burned within Shirrin’s breast was an unexpected outcome.
Shirrin might have taken it as a worrying omen; if the human heart was so unpredictable, then what chance did she stand of carrying her pns to fruition? But she banished that thought. Twelve years of preparation would not be so easily unmade. Pn upon pn upon pn dwelt within Shirrin’s mind, and she pondered them, the way a child will ponder the stones by a riverbank, picking them up one at a time, turning them over, then setting them back down or trying to skip them across the water’s surface. There was much work to be done.
And then the time of preparation came to an end. Night had settled over Chrysopolis. So Shirrin went to the window, sliding it open with a swift motion. She shut her eyes and felt the cool, wet wind upon her face. Then, climbing onto the sill, she gazed out upon the city. A thousand little lights, rush-lights and torches and firepces, all illumined the stone and metal, and made easy the process of marking out each destination on the journey to come. Once she was sure, Shirrin pushed off the wall, and leapt into the open air.
A bck raven flitted over the rooftops of Chrysopolis, hunting for carrion.
SaffronDragon
