Path of Revenge by Russell Kirkpatrick Page A

Lenares turned back to her battered desk and continued to arrange the small collection of leaves she carried with her at all times. A deeply troubled Mahudia had checked her notes that afternoon and discovered a transcribing error she had perpetuated for at least fifteen years.
    From that day on the girl blossomed, learning to interact with others in at least a limited fashion, showing a talent for cosmography so rare as to have been thought extinct in this secular age. She grew taller than the other girls, adding to her otherworldly appearance. Her plain, sorrowful face had changed with her personality, becoming progressively more expressive.
    Until today.
    ‘Oh, Lenares, what has happened?’
    An almost imperceptible shake of the head was the only reply.
    The tears did not stop, even after Mahudia washed and dressed her new cosmographer, just as she had done every day for two years after they’d first found her. Until the day Lenares had spoken in that acolytes’ class. The hour allowed them by the Emperor had long passed before the cosmographers made their way from their quarters to the Talamaq Palace. Lenares wept the whole journey, almost unconsciously it seemed, a picture of desolation. Mahudia worried more about her protégé’s state of mind than about how the Emperor, notoriously capricious, would respond to their lateness. After all, the Emperor was most likely to censure them at worst. Hopefully. The world would be deprived of far more if Lenares’ talents were lost.
    A thick heat haze squeezed down upon the city, making the spires and minarets appear out of the gloom as though from the sleeve of a trickster. Were the cosmographers merely standing in the morning heat they would sweat; hustling daughterwards across the Third of Glass the perspiration poured from them. To their right the plastered houses on Money Hill, above the worst of the haze, shimmered in the heat. The usual crush around Gold Souk and the money exchange forced them through two dark, noisome alleyways, the second of which brought them back to Hadrami Avenue. Another five minutes and they reached the cobbled Avensvala, the wide avenue encircling the Talamaq Palace, panting and puffing like blown horses, irretrievably late. The three golden rizen-stone towers of Talamaq loomed out of the haze like impatient sentries, ready to rebuff their excuses.
    As they were admitted by unsmiling guards to the Garden of Angels, the girl muttered something.Mahudia heard it as much through her skin, holding the girl’s cold, thin hand in hers, as through her ears. Patience. Lenares often repeated herself.
    When the words came again, the Chief Cosmographer had to bend to catch them, delivered as they were without inflection, on the edge of hearing.
    ‘The hole in the world. It is coming. To the garden.’
    The self-styled Philosopher-King, the Emperor of the Amaqi, ruler of the known world, remained motionless on his bench despite his burgeoning impatience. He refused to rub his aching buttocks. His favourite spot in the entire garden, the place he visited to forget the troubles associated with ruling an empire, would not be sullied by his anger.
    His two Omeran bodyguards matched him for stillness, though only because they did not have the intelligence to be distracted. The perfect guards.
    Torve, his beloved companion, hovered discreetly a few paces away, bent over a rose.
    ‘What do you think I should see planted in the new bed, Torve?’ The Emperor prided himself on his green fingers.
    ‘Given the poor quality of the fertiliser, ma great sor, we should think carefully about which specimens might grow.’ Torve lifted his dark, inhuman face from the pure white rose he cupped tenderly in his hand. ‘Perhaps some kind of spikegrass?’
    The Emperor laughed. ‘Excellent choice. Fool’s Felt, then?’
    ‘Ma great sor, Fool’s Felt is too long-lived for that bed.’
    The sally drew a smile from the Emperor. Clever beast, clever indeed. An Omeran with