revolution was impossible. And so the high families had assaulted Zila with force far beyond anything Xejen or the townsfolk had expected, caring nothing for the sanctity of non-combatants or the structural damage to one of Saramyr’s most important settlements. If they had not been able to breach the wall, they would have burned Zila to embers or smashed it flat with explosives.
Rebellion was unacceptable. The people of Zila had learned that now, and they would learn it again and again over the next few weeks. The message would carry. The Empire was inviolable.
But to the Barak Zahn tu Ikati, it felt like trying to blow life into a cadaver. The Empire, to him, had died long ago. He had been instrumental in the planning of last night’s attack, but his contribution had been emotionless. He did not burn with zeal for the preservation of their way of life like Barak Moshito tu Vinaxis did, or the generals sent by the other high families.
Yet he had felt that way once. Before Mos usurped the throne, before Anais tu Erinima was killed. Before his daughter died.
It was midday when he walked from the doors of the scorched keep, down into the plaza where the last of the Ais Maraxa dead were being cleared away, their slack limbs and gaping faces sundered by scabbed wounds. The congealed blood on the crescent flagstones was cooking in the fierce heat, a sticky and sickly-sweet odour that cloyed in the back of the throat. The grey and shattered streets of Zila had dried already, and now they were dusty and quiet, a maze of bright sunlight and harsh black shadow in which cowed men and women skulked and would not meet his eye.
He was a lean, rangy man, with spare features and pox-pitted cheeks that had become lately gaunt and hollow. His trim, prematurely white beard hid most of it, but not around his eyes, where the toll of his long suffering was easy to see. Over fifty harvests had passed him by, but none had been as hard as the last few. Not since Lucia was lost.
The moment of their meeting was engraved upon his memory as if it had happened yesterday. He had lived it every day since, recalling over and over the fundamental shift that he had experienced when he first laid eyes on the Aberrant child. Suddenly he had been aware of a level of feeling that he had not known existed, something deeply primal and irresistible in force, and he knew then what a man must know when he watches his wife give birth: an overwhelming introduction into the mysteries of the wonderful and terrible bond between parent and child. He saw her, and he knew. Every instinct blared at him at once: she is yours.
She knew, too. It was in the way she threw her arms around him, and he saw it in those pale eyes, and in the gaze of pure betrayal she gave him as tears welled in them.
Where were you? they asked, and they tore his heart into pieces.
The fact that he had not known he had a daughter did not make it any easier for him. Of course, her age and the time of her birth corresponded with the short, tempestuous affair he had conducted with the Blood Empress all those years ago, but then he had known that Anais had still been sleeping with her husband during that period, and when it was announced that she had become pregnant it had simply seemed impossible that it might be his. The idea had occurred to him only briefly, and then been dismissed. If she suspected it was Zahn’s issue, he was certain that she would have either told him, or poisoned it in the womb without ever letting anyone but her physician find out that she was with child. They were the only politically expedient courses of action. When she did neither, Zahn reasoned that it was nothing to do with him: he had already surmounted the bitterness that he had felt when she had broken off their dangerous relationship, and was happy to be out of it now that an heir had become involved. Children were simply something that Zahn had no interest in. Or so he thought.
But in that instant when they had met, the grief and loss and regret crushed him. He felt like he had abandoned her at birth.
He had retreated from the Imperial Keep, stunned by what had happened, but