Veiled Empire by Nathan Garrison Page A

This frustrating ignorance was only made worse by the change happening in the mierothi around him. Change that he knew nothing about.
    And his desire to ascertain its heart raged in him like an infection.
    Voren picked up the quill once more, but the muse remained firmly fled. Rather than dip in the stone inkwell on his oak writing desk, he placed the feather down again. He was, after all, just lingering in anticipation of his appointment. What need to mar any more fine pages?
    So instead, he paced. For nearly half a toll, his sandaled feet wore ruts along a well-trod path of white-marble tile, until finally, blessedly, the hinges of his door began squealing.
    Voren bowed. “Emperor Rekaj, how good of you to join me on this fine evening.”
    Rekaj strode in, a haughty smile already plastered across his visage. Voren’s heart sank. That look rarely meant good news. So much for the direct approach.
    “Voren,” said the emperor. The name dripped off his tongue like poison. “What, exactly, is so fine about it?” He gestured out the window, where thick clouds rolled down the cliff’s side, blocking all sight beyond the palace grounds.
    Voren presented a nonplussed smile. “Merely being polite, of course. I assure you, no disrespect was intended.”
    “Yes, well, we all know what they say about intentions, good or otherwise.”
    Voren opened his mouth to reply but closed it again when Rekaj turned away and strode deeper into his chambers. He silently thanked Elos for the reprieve. It gave him a few moments to reformulate his strategy, which, so far, had been failing miserably.
    He waited with patience honed from over nineteen hundred years of practice, as the emperor moved about Voren’s receiving chamber, passing a contemptuous gaze at everything his eyes fell upon. A bare hand, scale-backed and clawed, waved at the four statues grouped in pairs between the central pillars.
    “Such . . . craftsmanship,” Rekaj said. “It’s almost as if, with a touch of color, they could come to life . . . stand among us once more.”
    Voren bowed his head slightly. “By your own grace were the finest stone artists in all the lands commissioned for the work.”
    “ ‘Lands’ indeed. I had almost forgotten that this continent once consisted of over a dozen nations. And all of them protected by these, your people’s greatest ‘heroes.’ ”
    Not the word I would use to describe them. They may have all began as paragons of virtue, but how they ended . . .
    Voren’s memories awakened, of their own accord, as Rekaj stepped up to peruse each statue.
    Analethis, the Champion. He faced a hundred tyrants and felled each one with naught but his blade and the light of freedom in his soul. Until, that is, he ended up replacing one of them, carving out his own kingdom of blood and fire, which sent a third of the civilized world into turmoil.
    Murathrius, the Mediator. He had a tongue of quicksilver, which bridged many a conflict with a lasting peace. But in response to a perceived slight, he whispered false tales of the queen’s infidelity to the king of Panisalhdron. The king slew her and her entire house, plunging the nation into a civil war that lasted a hundred years.
    Heshrigan, the Arbiter. She founded the League of Justice, who traveled the world over, providing unbiased judgment in disputes great and small. And quickly wore out their welcome. Eventually they began forcing their own, perverse brand of justice on any and all, falling out of grace with even the Valynkar High Council. Heshrigan herself was accused, at the end, of more than a thousand murders, deaths she claimed as righteous executions.
    Rekaj fixed his gaze on the last statue. He pressed his face so close that his breath brushed cloudy residue across the polished surface. He brought a hand up, almost as if he intended to caress the chiseled face. “Well,” said the emperor. “I don’t think either of us can ever forget such a figure as this.”
    Ah, yes.