Awakening (10 page)

He was sure, quite sure, that what had woken him after eighteen years was the Earth herself, speaking though tremors in her crust transmuted by the dripping into a
musica
that had told him that finally, after fifteen hundred years, the gem of Spring had been found.

Which mattered to him especially because, if he could find a way to possess it for himself, his youth and life would be extended even further. Spring was the genesis of life and he needed it.

So the days had drifted and now the time had come to call for help.

He knew that what he faced was nothing less than a pain beyond what most mortals ever know.

The pain of his whole body reclaiming life.

The pain of mortality itself.

The pain of being born: primal and terrible.

He listened to the
musica
a final time; he tried to hum, he tried to scream, and then, letting himself slip at last into mortal pain, he raised the cadaverous forefinger of his right hand in the dark from the decayed leather on which it rested. It quested blindly for the button, flexed what weak muscles it still had and held it down for those few seconds that were all his wasted strength allowed and then let go.

Nothing happened immediately yet he was satisfied it would soon enough. His rotted mouth exhaled another foul breath of long, vegetative sleep, through teeth not stronger nor more fragrant than the vilest cheese. Those eyelids, whose white, stubby lashes were caked with congealed rheum, still struggled to open into darkness and still failed.

A pale tongue flicked at thin dry lips.

Then Emperor Slaeke Sinistral’s head, its hair greasy and thin, its ulcerous skin taut and weeping, turned slowly to one side, listening.

Still the eyes would not open.

The left side of the mouth bubbled and saliva broke forth, not quite clean, leaving a trail down the chin until it slipped, maggot-like, into his beard and nestled there.

Finally . . . a sound.

The turning of a well-oiled key, the metal on metal of one bolt and then another, a sliver of yellow light beneath an opening door, the moving shadows of feet and then, breaking the dark like a sharp and shining axe of gold cutting through the blackened hull of some great ship, a shaft of light raced right across the Chamber, right to where the Emperor lay, head turned towards it, eyes sensing light at last, eyelids straining to open.

Sinistral turned his head away lest he be blinded after so long in darkness. The door opened wider and more light flooded past him into the Chamber beyond. The door was quietly pulled to but not quite shut, so the light faded until all that was left was the thin line beneath the door. It was enough.

Lashes pulled apart and a single eye, dark and imperious, stared out. It slowly focused and finally saw the rain caught by the light from beneath the door. The Emperor saw a hundred thousand slowly falling golden pearls.

It was most beautiful.

The Emperor tried to speak but could not.

He heard the sound of footfalls coming across the Chamber towards his chair.

A hand touched his and a voice spoke.

It said, ‘Welcome back my Lord. You have been much missed.’

The Emperor tried to smile but could not; again he tried to say something, but could not.

All he could do was utter a hiss of joy.

‘I shall go now, Emperor, and summon your beloved. She will tend to you and see you safely back to health and life . . .’

The drumming of the rain instilled within the Emperor a calm that made him weep. He breathed, deep and slow.

His other eye was opening.

The subtle rain turned three-dimensional.

The Emperor’s head turned and he said, ‘Tell her . . .’

‘Yes, Lord?’

‘. . . that I . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘. . . have need of her.’

‘I shall my Lord.’

The hydden who had responded to the Emperor’s call, and for now the only person who knew he was awake, was an official named Niklas Blut.

His formal title was Commander of the Emperor’s Office.

He was, de facto, the second most important person in the Hyddenworld, though nobody, including Blut himself, saw it that way. Even so, at only forty, Blut was still remarkably young for such responsibility.

But then he was a very remarkable hydden. As a sixteen-year-old he had scored the highest marks of any entrant in the Imperial triennial examinations in logic, mathematics, science and literature and gained a well-paid post as a civil servant. At age seventeen his enemies proved that he had made unlawful access to human literature and other resources. When he was eighteen he was found guilty of possessing a printed article entitled:
The truth about Emperor Slaeke Sinistral’s strange longevity: its history, cause and likely outcomes.

It had been sent unread, as such material always was, to the Emperor’s Office. For to be found in possession of such an article was treasonable. To read it was a capital offence.

Blut’s crime was much greater: he had written it.

He was put under sentence of death for which the Emperor’s signature was needed.

Slaeke Sinistral, intrigued to learn that the ultimate sanction was being applied to so young a hydden, stayed the execution to give himself time to read the article.

He did so with an astonishment that was soon replaced with growing alarm. If anyone else discovered the truths Niklas Blut had exposed, the Emperor’s position might be for ever undermined.

Niklas Blut’s crime was to dare try to answer a question that had been on everybody’s mind for decades: how did Slaeke Sinistral stay so young? Could he possibly hold the secret of eternal youth which had eluded the many who sought it in every age? If he did, what was it?

Blut began by stating the simple truth: the Emperor looked to be in his mid-thirties but the records very clearly showed that he had been alive for more than a century and a half and there was no one anywhere, however old, who remembered him as being anything other than the age he still appeared to be.

True, he grew tired and ill sometimes and disappeared from public view, but he always came back, revivified.

All sorts of rumours arose from this, including the possibility that it was not the same Sinistral who ‘reappeared’ as the one who had previously ‘disappeared’.

What Blut had done was to look at the records going back a century and a half, plot Sinistral’s periods of ill-health and his disappearances, and relate them to certain cosmic events and movements of the Earth. He had delved into the old historical records and found compelling evidence that certain individuals, human and hydden, appeared to have had powers beyond the ordinary and that some of these had lived to an extraordinarily old age.

Each had been secretive, each prone to periods of illness and retreat, and each had returned to their normal lives renewed, refreshed, and, in every respect, younger than their chronological age.

His conclusion was simple: since such powers and such cases of longevity had occurred only since the legendary creation of the gems of the seasons by Beornamund of Brum, they were probably directly related to the gems themselves. The fact that there were so many stories and rumours connecting particular gems with these individuals gave credence to Blut’s ideas, if not proof positive.

As for the case of Slaeke Sinistral, Blut postulated that he had in his possession the gem of Summer, and it was to his occasional exposure to this gem that he owed his continuing youthfulness.

All perfectly true, but never stated so clearly by one of his subjects before. That was not all.

Blut had worked out something else, and it worried the Emperor that others might learn of it.

The use of the gem to delay physical ageing, Blut argued, came at a cost. Each time the Emperor submitted his body to the gem’s fierce light, which he did strapped down in the dentist’s chair, because the experience caused so much pain and violence to his internal organs, his period of rejuvenation afterwards was shorter and the subsequent period of recuperative sleep longer. That explained why the Emperor’s absences grew ever more frequent and extended.

But Blut had even gone so far as to calculate the point at which the gem of Summer would become ineffective because the Emperor would enter a period of sleep so long that his physical body, even if carefully maintained, likely would not survive it. Even if it did, on waking his physical decay would be so rapid that, unless he had a system in place to get him back to health again, he would die before a new rejuvenation could take effect.

As the Emperor read this terrifyingly accurate assessment of his situation he knew he had to kill Blut to keep his secret, or employ him to help keep him alive.

There was much else in the young hydden’s paper that the Emperor wished to learn more about. Not least how it was that Blut had worked out the way in which the Emperor came to possess the gem. Again, his argument was spot on.

Everyone knew that one of the great hydden geniuses of the last two hundred years was the mysterious ã Faroün, lute player and architect, artist and mystic. Blut believed that he had been the possessor of the gem of Summer before Sinistral. Ã Faroün was Sinistral’s teacher. On his passing, which occurred when Sinistral was in his mid-thirties, the Emperor-to-be had taken possession of the gem and the rest, quite literally, was history . . .

Having read the article Sinistral had thought about it for several days before deciding on the action he must take.

He had summoned his three most senior staff, who stood in obedient silence before him.

He was used to such silence. Tall, blond, well built, with intelligent eyes that could glitter with dark intent as easily as his face could wrinkle in mirth, the Emperor was intimidating.

‘How many have read this document?’ he asked the then Commander of his Office.

Sweat broke on the Commander’s brow.

‘Myself alone, Lord, but I felt I had to,’ he said nervously. Sinistral looked around at his staff and nodded slightly and dismissed the other two.

Then he shrugged.

‘A pity,’ he said.

‘Lord,’ said the Commander desperately, ‘Blut’s paper is a fabrication, it is nonsense, and I have already forgotten what it said . . .’

‘Unfortunately it is not nonsense and I cannot believe you have forgotten what it said. Nor can I live in the knowledge of that fact.’

Sinistral summoned his Fyrd guard. He knew the official could not be allowed to remain alive. The secret he knew gave him a power he must not have.

When the guards came the Emperor nodded towards the hapless Commander and said, ‘Execute him.’

‘Yes, Lord.’

‘Here where I can see. I need to know he has not talked with anyone.’

‘Yes, Lord,’ said the senior guard, arming his crossbow. ‘Now?’

‘Now.’

The Emperor had stood up, turned his back, and stared at the view until he heard the click-bang of the crossbow bolt being fired.

‘A pity,’ he said again as the body was removed. ‘He was an intelligent administrator and effective servant to the Empire. Give him an honourable funeral. Now . . . I shall have to find another to replace him.’

He had already decided to interview Blut, not simply to answer certain questions but to see if he might be groomed to administer his Office.

The Emperor commanded that he be brought to the Imperial headquarters in Bochum, north-east Germany. The interview was private.

‘So . . . you’re Niklas Blut?’

‘Yes. One of them.’

‘There are more?’

‘My uncle. A butcher.’

‘Do you know why you’re here?’

Blut shrugged, the question did not interest him. The answer had to be surmise. He liked facts and calculation.

‘No.’

‘Can you guess?’

‘Anyone can guess.’

The Emperor was not used to this kind of repartee. His officials treated him with a respect bordering on fear. Blut appeared fearless. Or perhaps he was simply ingenuous.

He stared at Blut who stared back at him.

The young civil servant was not much to look at. He was of average height, pallid, and the possessor of an annoying pair of spectacles which hooked so tightly round his ears that their oval glass pressed against his eyelashes. How he could see properly out of them Sinistral had no idea.

As the silence deepened Blut was moved to take off these gold-framed spectacles, wipe them with his kerchief and put them on again, pulling them tight once more to nose and eyes.

Sinistral found that he was looking into two mirrors simultaneously, whose facets diverged from each other and sent oval reflections dancing all around the room. These seemed an extension of Blut’s bright, intelligent, blue-green eyes, sharp nose and firm mouth and added – rightly so – to the impression he gave close-to of extreme intelligence. Which Sinistral already saw was indeed the case.

His file showed him to be an able administrator and a brilliant researcher.

‘You realize that researching the source of my youth is treasonable?’