Chapter 9
Rian left the room and walked the corridor. Whether someone had cleared the way in advance, not a single person passed through it.
The throne hall where the Emperor kept his residence still lay some distance off. As he walked, he turned over what sort of man the Emperor was.
All he knew was what the histories had set down, and nothing more. Even that, though, was enough to take the measure of the man, at least in outline.
Wilhelm Liakis von Drakess.
Born a bastard, he had slaughtered every brother with a claim on the succession and taken the throne a usurper. No sooner was he crowned than, seeking to steady the chaos within, he chose the opposite course and manufactured an enemy without. He declared war on the neighboring kingdom.
At the time the whole world pointed and called him mad. The outcome proved him right. Three years after the war began, he led his army into the enemy capital and unified the land by force.
At the victory feast he named himself Emperor, making plain that his hunger for conquest had not yet gone cold. The kingdoms around him began, slowly, to watch him with wary eyes, but the Empire was already several moves ahead of every nation of its age.
He raised up trades the world had scorned, blacksmiths among them, and offered ground and welcome to the other races who had lost the contest and hidden themselves away in the wilds. In doing so he brought about a drastic surge in military might.
Unlike the other kingdoms, where birth fixed the limit of a life, the Empire set no ceiling on how high a man might climb so long as he had ability, and so the strong gathered beneath him in droves. Within a few decades the Empire had risen to the strongest nation in human history, ruling the largest territory mankind had ever held.
The Emperor was a man of maddening competence. And at the same time—
...a man every bit as cruel.
While the thought ran on, he found he had already reached the entrance of the throne hall. The stone gate, engraved with a fire-breathing dragon, seemed to show some part of the Emperor's own face.
"From here, you must go on alone."
At Khalifa's word he opened the door and stepped through, and two figures came into view. One was a knight with a sword at his side, staring hard this way. The other was an old man standing with his hands clasped behind his back.
...The Emperor.
Strangely, he was not seated on the throne. He had come down from it and was looking up at the seat. At the sound of the door he seemed to realize someone had entered, and he turned, slowly.
"So this is the first time we meet face to face. Hero Rian. Hmm... should I say I'm pleased to meet you?"
The first thing Rian felt, meeting him, was that the man looked older than he had expected.
He had heard the Emperor was only just into his early sixties. His face, though, was gouged with deep lines, as if the weathering of the years had struck him harder than it struck other men.
That was all his appearance could tell. The Emperor's eyes wore something like boredom, and yet that was not the whole of it. Mixed in was a feeling so deep its nature could not be read.
"...Hard to say."
Rian answered late, after a brief pause. The knight watching at his side drew his sword.
"Insolence! How dare you address him so freely, as if you were his equal—!"
There was no time to react. The Emperor raised a hand and checked him, and the knight shut his mouth, sheathed the blade, and dropped to one knee.
"Do not interfere. You are the one cutting into a conversation that isn't yours to interrupt."
"...I apologize."
"And if he is the Hero, he has that right. Isn't he the savior who guards the whole of the East by himself?"
He turned the words toward Rian.
"I'll apologize in his place. I hope you'll forgive the rudeness. The knight-commander's loyalty simply got the better of him."
"......"
Rian watched the Emperor in silence. This was not a man, he thought, who would let a subordinate act on impulse. Whatever he had just been shown, there was intent behind it.
But guessing at that intent was no easy thing. The face never changed, expressionless from first to last, and there was no telling what moved behind it.
Then I'll do it my way.
There was no need to move exactly as the other man wanted. Rian had never cared for the habit of stalling and sounding a man out from every side.
"Emperor. Let's get to the point. I'll ask you outright."
"...Very well. Let's hear it."
"Why call me all this way, giving up the unification of the continent you were after? What on earth..."
He hesitated, then said it. From the moment he left the kingdom until now, it was the question he had turned over and over, and never found an answer to.
"What is it you want, that you'd treat me this well when I'm as good as your enemy?"
Had the question struck home? For a short while the Emperor only stared this way, saying nothing.
"......"
At the end of that brief silence, he parted lips he had kept firmly shut.
A Few Dozen Minutes Earlier.
The Emperor sat leaned back upon the throne, both eyes closed. He came to himself at the report that the Hero had left the guest chamber and set out for this place.
"...Right. It's about time I prepared to receive him."
Bracing a hand on the armrest, he rose and slowly came down the steps beneath the throne.
Reinhardt, ever the loyal knight, hurried over and took him by the arm.
"Your Majesty! Why are you on your feet? You ought to have stayed seated!"
"Don't ask the obvious. How am I to stay seated while I receive an honored guest?"
"......"
Reinhardt clenched his teeth where no one could see. Through the uniform, the arm under his hand was terribly thin.
It had not been this way only a few years past. Even at the height of things, when the Emperor declared the conquest of the East, he had been healthy enough that worries of this kind were needless.
"...I cannot understand it. Why go so far? He is the great enemy who shattered the Empire's dearest wish. His strength I grant, but the moment we take him in, the secret ambition of unifying the continent will not merely recede. It will be gone for good. Why do you mean to recruit him?"
At that, the Emperor slowly opened his mouth.
"...We have to face reality. What must be admitted must be admitted. I failed."
Reinhardt burst out, his voice thick.
"Failed?! You began as the bastard of a minor kingdom and raised an empire history will never see twice! If Your Majesty is a failure, then who in all this world—!"
"Reinhardt."
At the sound of his name he shut his mouth. The Emperor began to speak, quietly.
The tone was even, but a bitterness he could not hide seeped through it.
"...and I failed. In that moment I became the loser. Past glory is nothing. In the end, what history remembers... is only the victor who stands last."
He had gone from victory to victory without a single defeat, and so the loss cut all the deeper. One step. Nothing more than a single step farther, and he could have closed his hand around everything. He would have been remade into an undying presence, remembered and looked back upon even after ten thousand years.
That was what it felt like, to tumble down the slope in the instant before the summit and watch the goal draw away.
"Even so, I couldn't let myself sink into despair. The subjects of the Empire look to nothing but my back."
He was the Emperor who had founded the Empire on the creed of the strong's supremacy, and yet he knew the truth of it. The Empire had grown great not because the strong existed, but because the weak had sacrificed.
"They aren't fools..."
The subjects had not endured that sacrifice because they lacked strength. There was the principle that the capable would be treated as they deserved, and the faith that devotion would be repaid in kind. That was why they had labored for the Empire.
"Because I'm obliged to answer what they expect of me."
The Empire had to pay the vast reparations born of defeat in the eastern war. Worse, the total mobilization, undertaken on the assumption of victory, had ended in loss, and industry across the realm stood on the brink of collapse.
Between the reparations and the fight to stave off bankruptcy, the treasury had been scraped bare. And as if that were not enough, the descendants of the ruined kingdoms, those who had bowed their heads beneath the iron fist, crept forward the moment the Empire took a wound within, angling to restore their realms.
Misfortune piled upon misfortune.
The fortress of steel, which he had believed would never fall, was shaking.
"So of course I ought to admit I was wrong, rather than stand on a pride that does nothing."
"...I cannot accept it! Your Majesty—!"
"Enough. There's no point arguing over who's right and who's wrong. I may have been right until then. From the moment I lost, I was the one in the wrong."
The Empire, which had set strength above all else, had enjoyed its greatest age upon that creed. But because they had been born of the law that the strong devour the weak, a hard limit existed in reverse. The moment they faced a stronger enemy, everything they had built lost its meaning.
"The age has changed. The era when force and war settled everything is over."
Hero Rian. The living darling of the martial way. His appearance had changed the current. Those who had until now thrown their weight about as the strongest on the continent bowed their heads before the coming of a true absolute, and so long as he watched with both eyes open, no further war would be permitted. An age of peace had arrived.
Strength was no longer an absolute value standing above all else.
And so, taking the lesson of defeat as his ground, he had tried to tear up the Empire's foundations and lay them anew...
"...You know what came after."
"...Yes."
Reinhardt answered heavily. Had that course worked, His Majesty would not now be taking the years' toll several times over.
The generals of the army showed their opposition openly, as if they could not give up the glory won through decades of war and victory repeated. When the military, once his firmest foundation, withdrew its support, the Emperor's power could only weaken of itself. And with imperial authority so diminished, there was no way through the vast crisis bearing down on the Empire.
"However I thrashed, I couldn't escape ending as a ruined sovereign. One who wasn't satisfied with founding a nation, overreached, and ran the Empire into the ground. And to a man like that there came a hope that may well be the last."
"Your Majesty..."
"I can't let this chance go."
Early dawn. Even then, woken from a sound sleep by Khalifa's sudden word, what rose in him at her news was not irritation, and not dismay. It was joy, and nothing else. He could not have said how long he sat in that room, swept under by the thrill of it. It felt like days spent fallen in a deep pit, and then, in the instant before death, a rope let down from the sky.
Hero Rian. He was the incarnation of martial power, one who did not trespass upon the Empire's creed of worshipping strength, and at the same time a symbol of peace, the man who could help the Empire step into the age to come.
The reason things went wrong between him and the East was those kings and their incompetent handling, wasn't it.
It was a chance Khalifa had forced into being, aiming at a gap thin as a thread and staking the risk to do it. If he lost Rian now, Rian, who had come all the way to the imperial palace to shift his allegiance to the Empire, through some mishandling of the moment, then he was not fit to be Emperor.
"For the peace of the Empire, I'd roll in a field of dog shit. Set beside that, this is nothing at all."
"...I was a fool."
"So long as you understand. See that the plan we spoke of yesterday is ready."
He turned his back toward the throne.
"It seems he's arrived."
A good deal of time had passed while they talked. Beyond the doors of the throne hall, a presence could be felt.
Before long the door opened, and a single set of footsteps sounded. They were Rian's. He had been waiting with his hands behind his back, and when the steps stopped he turned and spoke.
"So this is the first time we meet face to face. Hero Rian. Hmm... should I say I'm pleased to meet you?"
He needed the man's goodwill, and still he had not spoken to him with deference, because courtesy of that kind might well have worked against him.
He set himself in the other man's place. They had been at odds, and the Emperor of a great empire ruling half the continent comes forward from the first with extravagant courtesy? Even if he himself had been the Hero, suspicion would only have grown. There was another aim as well. He meant to draw plain, unceremonious speech out of Rian, and to do it naturally.
"...Hard to say."
The instant Rian's short answer ended, Reinhardt flared.
"Insolence! How dare you address him so freely, as if you were his equal—!"
Before the other man could answer in any way, he raised a hand at once to check the knight, and spoke.
"Do not interfere. You are the one cutting into a conversation that isn't yours to interrupt."
"...I apologize."
"And if he is the Hero, he has that right. Isn't he the savior who guards the whole of the East by himself?"
He turned his gaze back, fixed his eyes on Rian, and went on.
"I'll apologize in his place. I hope you'll forgive the rudeness. The knight-commander's loyalty simply got the better of him."
It was a way of showing, cleanly and without making a show of it, that he respected the man.
"......"
But it seemed an awkward little farce of acting had never stood a chance of fooling a Hero who had weathered every hardship there was.
Rian stared this way in silence, his eyes narrowed. Beneath the Emperor's clothes, sweat began to soak his body.
At the end of the silence, the man opened his mouth.
"Emperor. Let's get to the point. I'll ask you outright."
"......"
He swallowed. Before he knew it, his throat had bobbed.
As expected, the man was no easy mark. Had he seen through every move on this side?
"Very well. Let's hear it."
But it didn't matter. He had never once thought, from the start, that this would come easily.
For this very moment, how many nights had the Empire's finest hands gathered and stayed awake? Hundreds of questions he had anticipated sat ready in his head.
And yet.
......?
At the last of it he looked at Rian with eyes gone slightly astray. He could not understand.
...Treating him well? Why would he say that?
It was true that he meant to treat the man with every care. He had sat with the chancellor for hours at a stretch, set on placing in his hands everything the Empire could give without going bankrupt.
...But I haven't given him anything yet?
The intent was real enough. They had only talked. He had not yet done a single thing for him.