Mightier than the Sword

  “But you sent me to investigate.”

  “I wanted you out of the way.” Her voice was strained but level. “I knew your uncle didn’t have long. If you’d been at Court, they’d have killed you. You were safe in the north.”

  “It never occurred to you that I’d figure it out.”

  “No. You’re smarter than I gave you credit for.” She picked up her sewing, put it down again. “What made you realise it was her?”

  “Things she said, and the way she said them. And I knew it had to be the books the raiders were after, because paper leaves a distinctive kind of ash, and there wasn’t any like that. And there was nothing worth having at Cort Maerus except books, and they went there anyway. Once I knew it was books, it had to be her or Stachel, nobody else cared enough. And it wasn’t Stachel, because he wanted something else. So it had to be her.”

  I’d never seen her look like that before. She looked old, and frightened. A few days before, she could have had me killed just by nodding.

  “Let her go,” she said, “for my sake. Please.”

  My poor friend Stachel, who pleaded with me, his trousers soaked with piss. “I can’t do that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  THE STEELNECK TRIBUNES found the books in a disused cistern. There was a reference to it in an old book, but the entrance had been cleverly bricked up and disguised, you’d never haver known it was there if you didn’t know exactly where to look. But I’d copied it out for them, and they went straight to it. The cistern was a huge space; filled right up with books, so she’d have had to find more storage if she’d carried on. The rarities were in her bedroom, in a cedar linen-press, with a newly-fitted padlock.

  I sent her a bottle of poison, but she didn’t use it. She told her maids that she knew my aunt would save her. When the time came, they had to drag her to the block and hold her down, a little old lady, my aunt’s age. She died pleading, cut off in mid sentence.

  I have this habit of killing people for doing what I want to do. One of my first official acts as emperor was to found three Imperial libraries, in the City, at Lonazep and at Beloisa. I appointed a commission of the world’s best scholars to catalogue every library in the empire, to find out precisely what we’ve got, and get copies made so that there’s one copy of everything in each of the three. It’s been ten years and nobody seems to be in any great hurry, except when I shout and make a fuss. The one in the City will be called the Ultor Library, in honour of my uncle, who didn’t learn to read till he was twenty-three and never willingly opened a book in his life.

  Among those who pleaded for Svangerd’s life was my wife. If I spared Svangerd for her sake, she said, my aunt would love her for it and we’d have no more aggravation out of her. Politically—

  I told my wife, who knew she could never have children but didn’t tell me, that my aunt would love her just as much for trying.

  TEN YEARS; IN eighteen months, it’ll be the longest reign in two centuries, and yet it feels like I’ve barely started. I can’t say I’ve done anything in particular. We beat the Sashan, I suppose; nine battles, of which eight were victories and one was a horrendous defeat, and now the border’s more or less where it’s always been, and there’s a treaty. I still lead from the front, because I’ve got to, and general Rabanus is always right beside me, to grab my arm and stop me running. I have good people around me and they run the empire as well as it’s reasonable to expect.

  My aunt has been abbess of Cort Doce for five years now. I don’t think she likes it there, but I bet she runs a tight ship. I send her blankets and nice things to eat, but I simply can’t find the time to visit.

  YOU'RE READING THIS, so it must have survived; been kept, and copied out, and copies made from the copies; it must have a home on a shelf in a library somewhere—possibly one of my three, or maybe they were all burned to the ground years ago; you’ll know about that, and I won’t, I’m delighted to say. This book has no right to survive on its merits, just as I had no right to survive on mine. We made it this far because my aunt’s husband, an illiterate savage called Ultor, won a civil war, in which a lot of innocent people died and a great many beautiful and irreplaceable things were lost. As my aunt said, I represent continuity. All I have done and can do is tend the guttering flame; and if that flame sets the house on fire and burns down the City and the whole world, I guess that’ll be my fault too.