Kyrosh bowed deep and left, face impassive. Once outside the door, his voice could be heard like the crack of a whip. Other doors banged; the household came to life, a well-ordered panic. Vorus seldom rose this early.
Arkamenes is on the march from Tanis with twenty-five thousand foot and five thousand horse. Artaka has declared for him, and Gushrun is his creature. But that is not all. He has brought an army from over the sea—Ten Thousand Macht heavy spearmen, mercenaries under a general named Phiron. Arkamenes plans to raise up Jutha against the Empire, and carry battle into the Land of the Rivers. He seeks nothing less than the throne itself.
The letter had been three weeks on the road. They must have killed a dozen horses to get it here so quickly. From old Astiarnes, one spy amid hundreds, thousands, which had been planted down the years in every alleyway and upon every highway of the Empire. But Astiarnes was not from the Royal Corps of Spies. He was retired. In his own youth, Vorus had used to boast sometimes that the Great King had a hand in every pocket. But they had missed this, somehow. A Macht army. Mercy of God.
The dresser came in, along with the muddled maid bearing bread and honey and a poached egg. Vorus smiled at her bewilderment. “Leave it here, Bisa. This morning, I eat on the wing.”
This was the finest time of the year to be in Ashur. The Imperial capital lay on both banks of the Oskus River, and the water was full and high, a gleam of blue and silver instead of the midsummer brown. Ashur had been laid out in a grid, maybe four thousand years before. Vorus had studied on it, and believed the city to be twice as old; but always built on the same pattern. Imperial Ashur. Her walls were a hundred and fifty feet high, and sixty pasangs long. In their shadow lived some two million people. Kefren of all castes, Juthan by the scores of thousands, common Asurians, Arakosans, Yue, Irgun, Kerkhai. They were all here.
Dominating the skyline were what might first appear to be a pair of steep-sided hills in the midst of the city. These were Kefren-made tells, mounds of brick and stone reared up century upon century until they now loomed like mountains over the flat river-plain below. Upon these ziggurats were the Palace of the Kings and the high fane of Bel, as the Kufr chose to call their God. Each was a city within a city, and there were priests and slaves who had been born on both yet had never left either. The brick which supported these phenomena had been faced in dark blue enamel, laced with traceries of gold, and the walls of each were surmounted by battlements topped in silver plate. On the summit of the Temple ziggurat, the face of the Fane itself was covered in plates of solid gold, so that it caught the setting of Araian, the sun. Her beams were snared here at sunset by the grim teeth of the Magron Mountains to the west, but her last light was always caught by the temple walls, a beacon set ablaze by her farewell, a promise of her return. It was for this reason that the Fane ziggurat had been built, with tolerances of a few fingerspans.
The temple predated the palace, but those who dwelled in the latter had been making up for lost time over the last few millennia. The top of the palace ziggurat was perhaps fifteen taenons, and of those, ten were covered by the structures of the palace itself. The remainder was a green-walled park, a garden as big as five farms in which the great cypresses of Ochir had been planted, along with poplar from Khulm, plane-trees from the Tanean coast, and date palms from the Videhan Gulf. Springs welled there, turning into clear streams that coursed around the roots of the ancient trees. These were not natural but torrents of pumped water, serviced by an army of Juthan slaves who inhabited the bowels of the mountain-ziggurat. Thousands of them laboured there in the dark so that the trees of the Great Kings might drink. Thousands never saw daylight, but were born, laboured there, bred their replacements, and died, and above them the serene parks and gardens swelled and bloomed under the sun.
In the lower city, the real city, as Vorus often called it in his mind, the teeming population went about its business with little or no thought of those in the ziggurats above. They revered the concordats of the priests, they were awed when the Great King chose to make a processional down the wide space of Huruma, the Sacred Way, but by and large they were intent on buying and selling, on eating and drinking and procreating, the same as any other creature with a brain in its head that walked the earth. And Vorus loved them for it. He loved the close-packed streets of the lower city, the shadowed canopies of the stallholders, the dark alcoves of the artisans where one might walk by and be showered in sparks, the spice-merchants, the carpet-bazaars, the metal-workers’ plinths. He loved the slave-yards, where snivelling creatures of every race and type and colour were on display. He loved the packed busyness, the life, the arrogance, the insistence of this place. It was his city—he was more at home here than in any other place upon the teeming face of Kuf. No matter that he had been born in a snowbound mountain village of the Harukush; this was his home, had been for going on twenty-five years. He was no longer Macht. He was the servant of a Great King who ruled an Empire rooted in history—great, bloody, and enduring history. And he knew that he would fight to his death for it to remain that way.