Read The Merchant Emperor for Free Online Page A

Emperor Presumptive said. “I do indeed want to have some time with them this evening before tomorrow’s festivities occupy me completely. Will you have supper and libations sent up here? I will be down directly to welcome them. Have them wait in the entryway.”
    The protocol officer bowed and hurried back down the staircase.
    Talquist turned quickly to the titan.
    “Make your decision, Faron,” he whispered. “If I have your agreement, I will conduct my business with these two powerful allies here in the Great Hall, where you can be a silent witness to it, assuming you can be silent. If not—”
    I will be silent.
    “Good. Then I shall return with them momentarily. And while you wait, you might want to contemplate what you might need to do to deepen this new voice of yours. It’s rather embarrassing, frankly.”
    Talquist turned again and trotted down the wide stone staircase, whistling, his good mood restored.
    *   *   *
    The titan watched until the Emperor Presumptive had descended out of sight.
    Then, within the massive chest cavity of the statue, the recently insulted voice spoke, though it would have been inaudible to any human ear. It was not a feminine voice, but it had a woman’s tone of comfort, of seduction.
    He did not perceive me, Faron. He merely thinks you have matured.
    Deep within that same cavity came a wordless agreement, different from the voice.
    Then the voice spoke again. There was a definite excitement in its words.
    Good; this is good. Do not chafe under the mantle of servitude, of obedience—trust me, when the time comes, Talquist will come to heel . Once we reveal to him what we know about the child he seeks so desperately, he will grant us whatever we wish. You and I will lead his army to take the Firbolg mountains.
    And then it will all begin.

4

    THE OCCUPIED CITY OF SEPULVARTA
    Fhremus Alo’hari, supreme commander of Sorbold’s land force, stood atop the wall that overlooked the Krevensfield Plain and the larger panorama of Roland to the north, shielding his eyes from the bright sun of morning, thinking.
    Fhremus was not generally a pensive man; he had risen to command slowly, working his way through the ranks, not because of some grand undertaking or highly visible act of bravery, but rather a consistent reliability and staunch loyalty. He had been raised in a military family with many generations of service to the Crown, four of those generations specifically devoted to the late Empress Leitha, who had reigned for three-quarters of a century, and had taken, upon her death almost exactly one year before, the long-standing Dynasty of the Dark Earth with her.
    Not that this vainglorious ending had been her idea. Her one and only heir, the grotesquely corpulent Crown Prince Vyshla, had managed to die within an hour of the empress; he had actually died first, but his death’s significance paled in comparison with hers. Their synchronous endings erased several centuries of their family’s dominion over the vast, forbidding nation that Fhremus loved, and set the stage for a battle of wills between, in the absence of any other royalty, the lesser nobles of the largest of the city-states of Sorbold, the Mercantile, the Church, and the army itself, which Fhremus had represented at the conclave that met prior to the Weighing.
    Fhremus had been pleased with the outcome of the conclave, the decision to keep the empire united, rather than dividing it into city-states, as the nobility had pushed for, a decision made by the Scales, the enormous set of weighing plates that had long been the decider of contested questions in Sorbold and, in fact, many of what had once been the Cymrian lands. It was an old instrumentality of deep lore and magic from the Island of Serendair, brought in pieces on a ship with the refugees of the Third Fleet that had landed on Sorbold’s southern maritime border known as the Skeleton Coast, a treacherous, mist-shrouded coastline that had been the graveyard of