Now he stood above that crowd on a balcony with the family and executors of the condemned, and wondered how many of the commoners below came to rejoice in the suffering of one of the ruling class, for a change. Pestilence—or infestation—aside, there were hundreds in the square. There might have been thousands, were it not for the demonspawn.
Most of the crowd wore ghost white—or “white,” anyway, some scrap of natural fabric bleached as pale as they could make it with stale urine or stranger concoctions—but Hong-la wasn’t the sort to be fooled by a public face of mourning. Oh, some would feel pity for the doomed prince, he was sure. And some would feel kinship to him, no matter how wretched their own status, because if one thing about human nature was universally true, it was that there was always somebody who was willing to support an oligarch in contravention of his own best interests. But there were plenty in the crowd who bore the marks of the law’s draconian intervention in their lives: a man with his lips severed there, a woman wearing a hook in place of her right hand here. And those—or at least many of those—would be here to watch a prince burn, and imagine for an afternoon that someday it might be all princes.
Barriers and soldiers kept the crowd at a distance that Hong-la estimated might be safe, once the flames rose; it would not be comfortable. He guessed he would feel the heat even here, on the palace balcony, and half-pitied the courtiers in their endless layers of robes.
And the emperor? Hong-la watched Songtsan-tsa from the corner of his eye, noticing the gray, set face and the lift of the emperor’s chin.
A man who would burn his own brother might deserve to feel the heat of those flames. But given Songtsan’s expression, Hong-la suddenly wondered if perhaps he actually believed his brother guilty of the murder of their mother. If that was so, it would mean that Songtsan had not, as Hong-la had assumed, poisoned the dowager himself and hung the frame around Tsansong.
And that … was politically interesting.
The empress, by contrast, appeared utterly cool and sorrowful in the colors of a gloaming sky, as if she had performed her mourning already. Either she believed in her junior husband’s guilt or she was a consummate actress.
Among all that white splashed with red, she—and, Hong-la assumed, he himself—stood out like ravens in a crowd of doves.
She leaned sideways for a word against her senior husband’s ear. The wizard turned away.
The sun had already drifted below the shoulders of the mountains, leaving the city below still brightly lit, though indirectly now. Within the embrace of the Steles of the Sky, twilight was a lingering affair. Hong-la could still make out the silhouettes of several hawks circling against the blue twilight. One soared high enough that the last rays of the sun illuminated its pale belly.
The imperial company had not been summoned to the balcony until preparations for the execution were complete. Hong-la did not have long to wait before a surge in the crowd below alerted him—and the others—that events were proceeding. Imperial guards with their splinted armor bound in white cords came forth from the palace courtyard, lining the route left open for them by the barricading soldiers with another rank of bodies, three deep. They must have nearly concealed the next cadre of guards from the eyes of the crowd, and though Hong-la’s view from the high balcony was unobstructed, he could not imagine that anyone on the ground could clearly see the doomed prince.
Tsansong walked calmly in the midst of his killers, his head high and his hands unbound. He wore green, the shade of jade and early summer, a leafy iridescence visible even from this distance giving evidence of expensive imported silks. Cries rose from the crowd—jeering, an echoing hiss of half a thousand angry voices that rumbled in the cavity of Hong-la’s belly like the wrath of dragons—but the prince did not respond. It could have been the smoke of the torches that left Hong-la’s eyes burning. He thought rather it was exhaustion.
Tsansong’s executioners paralleled him inside the hollow box of guardsmen. A common criminal mounting the scaffold would have been pelted with dung and rotten food, but the soldiers must have searched the crowd before allowing them to assemble. No foul missiles arched through the air now, and Tsansong-tsa reached the pyre unsullied.
The guards peeled away then, in precise formation and lockstep surrounding the square base of the latticed pyre. Tsansong did not check his step, though he ducked his head a little as he climbed. There must be steps built into the pyre, because he ascended smoothly, and the executioners followed.
The wood looked seasoned and dry. It would burn with little smoke to hasten the prince’s end and ease his suffering. Hong-la wondered if Songtsan-tsa would have arranged for his brother to be garroted before the torches were applied.