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CHAPTER

Fifty-Nine

T HE EMPEROR HAD a habit of arriving in the middle of the night. The prison guards had grown used to his visits, and no longer felt embarrassed to be caught half asleep on the job. Tonight, the Old Bear was in a reflective mood. Had it really been fifteen years? He shook his great, craggy head in astonishment. Fifteen years, imagine that. He clapped his good hand to their shoulders, and thanked them for their service. He did not ask them what they planned to do with their retirement.

“How is our friend?” This was how he always referred to the man in the final cell. Our friend.

The guards shrugged. No change. For the first five or six years the prisoner had gone through terrible cycles of hope and despair. There had been a few pitiful attempts at escape, and many attempts at suicide. He had lost his mind for a while. He used to show interest in things—books, painting—but that had faded over time. He had a pet bird for a year or two, but it died. He stopped eating after that, they had to force-feed him for a month. That had been bleak.

It was all bleak. If they had known what the job would entail, and how long it would last, how they would never again leave the confines of the Hound palace, or speak to anyone except the emperor, and the day watch, then they would never have agreed to it. Obviously.

A few years ago, a member of the day watch had hanged himself in the office with his belt. He’d left a note pinned on the noticeboard. No guards here, only prisoners!

The exclamation mark, that was the bit that stuck in the mind, for some reason.

“I’ll speak to the girl first,” the emperor said.

The guards were mystified.

“The girl,” the emperor repeated, irritated. The one brought down here yesterday. Red ribbons in her hair. Claimed she’d met the Bear in a dream.

They knew nothing about a girl. “You’d have to ask the day watch, your majesty,” they said, and the emperor frowned, and said, “Ah.”

There had been no sign of the day watch when they’d arrived for their shift. No day watch, and a freshly scrubbed floor.

The emperor took the key from them, and thanked them again for their service.

The more daring of the two followed him down the corridor, to the last cell. “Your majesty. What will you tell our families…”

The Old Bear put a hand to his heart and gave a vague, benign smile.

The guard was still thinking about that smile when the Samran Hounds arrived to slit his throat.

The emperor closed the cell door behind him, and locked it with a sharp click.

The prisoner lay slumped, defeated in a corner, an iron mask clamped to his head. Two narrow slits for his eyes, and one for his mouth.

“Good evening, my friend,” the emperor said.

The prisoner—a giant of a man just like his visitor—shrank back further into the corner, mute with terror.

The emperor took off his crown and sighed with relief. Here, he could be free. The spell he lived under could be broken. Soul Stealer, the Dragons called it. The darkest of all spells, feared and forbidden. But they were a fretful, unimaginative lot, the Chosen.

The emperor had renamed it the Chameleon Spell.

He spoke the words that would release him—a line from The Song of the Forest . “Ripples in the long grass, and a tiger is revealed.”

The emperor’s hulking form blurred and narrowed. His craggy features softened, his weather-beaten skin turned to a smooth, golden brown. Old scars vanished and a new one appeared, cutting through his straight black brow. Dark brown eyes. Black hair, streaked with grey.

The spell was reversed. The Old Bear was gone. He was himself.

Andren Valit. The Golden Tiger of Samra.

And, for the past sixteen years, ruler of Orrun.

He cracked his shoulders and smiled his own smile. A wonderful, magnetic smile. The air itself seemed drawn to him.

He righted a chair that had been kicked to the floor. High-backed, with leather restraints on the arms and legs, and a strap for the neck. “Come,” he said.

The man in the iron mask pulled himself to his feet and lumbered forward. He looked incongruously fit and strong. In the early days it had taken three guards to hold him down. He had roared. How he had roared. Now he sat meekly as the emperor fixed him in place. The restraints were no more than a precaution. There was no fight left in him. Only spaces, where the fight had been.

“There,” Andren said. “Now we may both relax.” He studied and tested the man’s body, as if he were buying a horse. “Good, good. They’ve kept you in excellent shape.”

The man’s eyes, through the narrow slits of his mask, were vacant.

“I shall remove your mask now,” Andren warned.

The man made weak noises of distress. His hands clenched against their restraints. The three middle fingers of his right hand were missing.

“I know, I know,” Andren murmured in sympathy. He took a key from around his neck, and unlocked the mask. His own hand, freed from the Chameleon Spell, was intact. Long, elegant fingers. “Eight,” he laughed, as he lifted the mask free. “I always forget how heavy this is.” He settled it on the floor with a clank, and stepped back.

“Gedrun,” he said.

Bersun’s brother made a guttural noise. His tongue had been cut from his mouth the day he arrived. But in all other ways he was the emperor. The life model, from which Andren shaped his own performance. The Chameleon Spell demanded a live subject. With Bersun long dead, Gedrun was the closest Andren could get to the original.

“I have not come to study you today,” Andren said, pulling up his own chair. “Rest easy.”

Gedrun sagged. His head weaved and rolled, so used to the iron mask weighing it down.

“I have good news. Tomorrow, my son Ruko shall take the throne. You understand?” Andren grasped Gedrun’s hand. “It is almost over.”

Gedrun began to weep.

Andren was moved. “You do understand, don’t you? Ah, I am glad to bring you comfort at last. My poor, innocent friend. This should have been your brother’s fate, not yours. Bersun was a great warrior, but he was a terrible emperor. He would have torn Orrun apart. He did not have the skills, the temperament. Is my own reign not proof of that? Even constrained as I have been by his character, his ill-founded ideas,” Andren mimed his wrists, bound together, “I have given Orrun sixteen years of peace. Where he would have brought only division. Our sacrifice was not in vain, my friend. Together, we saved an empire. And soon, with my son’s help, I shall build a new one.”

He sat back, and ran a hand through his short black hair. Rubbed his jaw, his cheekbones. Knowing himself again. A transitory pleasure. As he traced the contours of his face it began to sag beneath his fingers, skin softening like wax.

Every spell casts a shadow. To be another man, he must lose himself.

A fear came then into Andren’s eye, and with it a hunger, a need for reassurance.

Gedrun understood very little these days. But he knew that look, and what came next. He moaned in dread, his eyes wild.

“Forgive me,” Andren said, voice slurring as his lip drooped. “This will be the last time, my friend. You have my word.”

He drew his chair closer, and placed his hands on either side of Gedrun’s face. Dug his fingers deep into the skin. “Give to me your greatest treasure,” he chanted. “I shall use it well. Give to me your greatest treasure…”

There was so little of Gedrun left, within the shell of his body.

Andren took it all.