NEKROS: Husband To Ruin

The Emperor's Joke

The wrapped object was a key, attached to a slip of paper with four words I didn't quite recognize.

Ikaros Inn, Room seven.

That was all, not even a name, explanation, no indication of what I would find when I got there or whether opening the door would be the last thing I ever did. 

I sat with it in my palm for a long time on that barge, the river moving under me and the woman in gray gone again as silently as she'd appeared, and I thought about the particular kind of trust required to walk into a room you've been handed a key to by a stranger.

Then I thought about the alternative, which was walking into Varek's court with nothing but a penknife and a dead man's letter.

I put the key in my coat.

Kalephis announced itself two days before you even arrive.

First came the smell — stone dust and forge smoke, Then the roads changed, packed dirt giving way to broad Imperial stone.

Then the traffic thickened — merchant carts, military columns moving in both directions, pilgrims on foot with Eidyn Church tokens around their necks, all of them flowing toward the same point like water finding a drain.

I left Thessaly's barge at the Iphikara junction as agreed, dropped her the extra half drachma she hadn't asked for since the journey, and walked the last day on foot. Better that way, arriving on foot meant arriving unremarkable.

The city gates were sixty feet high and decorated with the Imperial seal in hammered bronze — the Kaleth sunburst, eight rays, a throne at the center. 

Two guards checked papers at the gate, which was standard routine. 

I handed Varek's letter to the guard on the left.

He read the first three lines, looked up at me, looked back down at the seal, and his entire posture changed, into something more careful careful.

"Wait here," he said.

I waited for about twelve minutes, then a different man came — a court functionary in pale blue robes, young, carrying a leather folder, looking like he had been interrupted from something more important and was irritated about it.

He looked at me from top to bottom.

"You're the proxy?" he said. 

"Kyros Nekros," I replied. "Third prince of the Valeborn line. I believe the Emperor is expecting me."

The functionary looked at his folder and then looked at me again. The disbelief hadn't left but something else had joined it, something that in a more self-aware man might have been pity.

"Follow me," he said.

The Ikaros Inn was in the merchant quarter, three streets east of the palace complex — the kind of establishment that catered to people with money who didn't want to be seen spending it. 

Clean floors, no questions, rooms let by the week. The innkeeper took one look at my key and handed me a second one without a word.

Room seven was on the top floor. I climbed the stairs with one hand near my penknife and opened the door carefully, from the side.

A man was sitting at the table inside. Middle-aged, lean, dressed in traveling clothes so deliberately ordinary they had to be intentional. 

On the table between his hands was a file bound in oilskin.

"Close the door," he said.

I closed it and stayed near it.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"My name doesn't matter, what matters is what's in this file." He pushed it across the table toward me without standing. "Sit down, Nekros. We have perhaps four hours before Varek's court summons you and we need you to understand what you're walking into."

"I already know what I'm walking into."

"You know the surface of it." He tapped the file. "Sit down."

I sat and pulled the file toward me and opened it.

The first page was a diagram. A map of the Kaleth court's power structure, annotated in three different colors of ink. Names I recognized, connections I hadn't known, financial threads running between noble houses and the Imperial treasury and — there, in red — the Ekklesia Apokryfa, the Church's hidden order, with lines running directly into the palace itself.

"How far does the Church reach into Varek's court?" I asked.

"Six of his twelve senior advisors," the man said. "His head of intelligence, two generals and his eldest son's personal secretary, which means they have eyes on the succession."

I turned to the next page. A detailed account of every previous attempt to broker peace or alliance with the Calamities in the last two hundred years. Every one ended the same way, dead envoys, burned delegations. The Calamities were not interested in the Pantheon's politics and they communicated that disinterest with finality.

"The proxy marriage idea," I said. "Whose was it originally?"

"Not Varek's, he adopted it. It was proposed to him by the Ekklesia Apokryfa eighteen months ago. They told him it was a diplomatic gesture, a show of good faith toward Moira."

"And he believed that."

"He believed the part they didn't tell him." The man folded his hands. "The Church doesn't want this marriage to happen any more than Varek does. They proposed it because they needed a candidate to send — someone expendable, someone with no political value, someone whose death at Moira's hands would give them justification for a holy war against the Calamities. A formal Church crusade to cleanse what they call divine aberrations."

"They want me dead," I said, "so they can use my death as a reason to destroy the Seven."

"Correct."

"And Varek?"

"Varek wants you dead because you exist, you are the last of a bloodline that the Pantheon itself classified as a threat. As long as you breathe, there is a prophecy that breathes with you." He looked at me steadily. "You were never just a proxy, Nekros. You were always the point."

I closed the file and sat with that for a moment — not the danger of it, I had known the danger since Vethara, but the scale. The Church and the Emperor, the prophecy, the Seven and a dead kingdom's bloodline, all converging on one meeting in a palace I hadn't entered yet.

"Who are you," I said again, slower this time. "Not your name, who sent you."

The man was quiet for a while. Then he said, "People who have been waiting a very long time for the Hollow Vessel to stop running."

The Imperial court received me at the sixth hour. The throne room of Kalephis was built to make people feel small, high vaulted ceilings painted in gold and black, columns twice the height of men, guards stationed every ten feet in full ceremonial armor that served no military purpose but communicated overwhelming force with precision. The floor was polished white stone that reflected your own face back at you as you walked, slightly distorted, slightly wrong.

I walked it alone, the functionary had handed me off at the door.

Varek IV sat at the far end on a throne. He looked at me, like you look at a rumor you hadn't expected to arrive in person.

Around him, his court watched. Twelve advisors in formal robes, military officers. Church representatives in Eidyn white, all of them watching me walk that long white floor.

I stopped at the appropriate distance and did not bow. A prince of the Valeborn line bowed to no foreign throne, it was a technicality. Technically, I was still a prince, the Valeborn line was still a line as long as I was standing in it.

I saw at least three people in the court register the absence of the bow. I saw Varek register it too.

"Kyros Nekros," he said. "You came."

"Your letter was very clear, Majesty."

"It was." He leaned back slightly. "I confess I expected someone... larger."

There was a Light laughter from the court. 

"I've found size mostly decorative," I said. "It announces your arrival but rarely improves it."

The laughter stopped. "You understand what you are being asked to do," he said.

"I understand what I'm being told I'm being asked to do," I said. "I'd like to hear it directly from you, if it pleases the Emperor."

There was silence around the room, people were very still.

"You will travel to Moira's domain as a representative of Kaleth," Varek said carefully. "You will present yourself as a legitimate suitor, you will undergo the binding ceremony according to Eidyn marriage law." He paused. "And then whatever happens, happens."

"Whatever happens," I repeated.

"The Plague Weaver has never permitted a suitor to survive her touch. You will be no different, but the gesture will have been made. Kaleth will have demonstrated good faith toward the Calamities. That is worth something politically."

"And if I survive?"

The throne room went absolutely silent.

Varek looked at me for a long moment, then he smiled. 

"Then you will be," he said slowly, "the husband of the Plague Weaver, and we will all deal with that together."

More laughter erupted, louder this time. 

I smiled back at him. "When do I leave?" I asked.

"Three days," Varek said. "We will prepare you appropriately."

"I look forward to it."

I turned and walked back across that long white floor, my own face looking up at me from the polished stone, slightly distorted.

Behind me, Varek was already speaking to someone in a low voice. I caught two words before the distance swallowed them.

Two words that told me the man from Room Seven had been right about everything.

"...make sure," Varek said.

Make sure.

Not make ready, not prepare him. 

I didn't look back. I kept walking, steady and unhurried, until the throne room doors closed behind me.

Then I stopped.

Because standing in the corridor directly outside, dressed not in gray this time but in Imperial court robes — blue, the color of Kaleth administration — was the woman from the barge.

She was embedded in Varek's own court, she had been here the whole time.