“She was just a lonely girl then,” Alestine went on as the young future empress played her beautifully sad music. “Lost in a court of privileged, scheming idiots who would quite happily have seen her dead. I’ve often thought divine blood was more a curse than a blessing. So much promise, so much more music to give to the world, all swallowed up by the fate her blood made for her. But, the young are ever prone to the hope, perhaps the delusion, that their fate can be changed.”
Lizanne watched as a young woman emerged from the jungle and bowed to the woman at the pianola, who immediately straightened into a much more attentive posture. The younger Alestine was also easy to recognise, but in this memory she wore the white blouse, black waistcoat and skirt of a Corvantine court attendant, and a low-ranking one at that. “It’s the upper c minor again, I’m afraid,” Azireh said, tapping one of the pianola’s keys. “A little tinny, don’t you think?”
“My musical knowledge was only functional,” the older Alestine told Lizanne as her younger self opened the lid of the pianola. “I knew enough to repair instruments but not play them with any skill. My primary duty in the Sanctum was fixing the various toys and automata with which the noble children amused themselves. The ‘Fiddly Girl,’ they called me, amongst other things.” She gave a fond chuckle. “Awful brats the lot of them, apart from one.”
At the young Alestine’s bidding Azireh repeatedly tapped the key as she worked away at something in the pianola’s innards. Lizanne was no expert but couldn’t detect more than a fractional change in the pitch. “I found out later she used to loosen the strings herself,” the older Alestine said. “Just so she would have a reason to talk to me.”
“That seems perfect, my lady,” her younger self said, closing the pianola lid and dropping into a low curtsy. “If you’ll excuse me.”
“Wait a moment,” Azireh said. “I’ve been working on a little something and would so like your opinion. My lady attendants wouldn’t know a decent tune if I strangled them with it.”
She began to play without waiting for a response, the same composition as before but now executed with expert clarity and precision. Lizanne found it much more affecting than that recreated by the solargraph’s chimes, music that seemed to reach inside her, forcing her mind to explore the most vibrant memories, good and bad. It was both an unnerving and intoxicating experience, and, judging by the changing expression on the young Alestine’s face, one she shared in full measure. Up until now her face had maintained the same incurious, carefully neutral mode common to servants of long standing. Now she stared at the young woman before her with rapt fascination, a single tear tracing down her cheek.
“Love is always a surprise,” the older Alestine said. “Don’t you find? Whether it creeps up on you over the course of years or reaches out to snare you in an instant. The moment is always a revelation and it can happen in the space of a heart-beat, or the time it takes to play the most wondrous music a foolish young woman had ever heard.”
She looked away and the memory swiftly merged back into the jungle. “I do believe it’s time for another turn of the spit,” she said, moving back to the fire.
“You were lovers,” Lizanne said, finding the notion scarcely conceivable. A servant and a princess trysting in the Imperial Sanctum. “If you had been discovered . . .”
“Oh we were, make no mistake about that.” Alestine gestured for Lizanne to take the other end of the spit and together they turned the meat, the fire hissing and popping as grease flowed from the cuts. “We weren’t even particularly discreet. It wasn’t uncommon for nobles to indulge themselves with the servants. There was an unspoken tolerance for such things, life in the Sanctum being so monumentally dull. But not for us. For what we had was not mere indulgence, and that made it dangerous. For a time we were left in peace. Azireh had me assigned as her personal attendant and we lived in happy seclusion in our own little palace. She composed her music and I designed and constructed my toys, then came the Regency Wars.”
The sound of rustling plants came again and Lizanne looked round to see the entire clearing morphing into a grand ball-room. Huge chandeliers of glittering crystal hung from the ceiling above a dance floor streaked in blood from the many corpses that covered it. There were men and women, infants and elderly, all dressed in the finery befitting the various ranks of Corvantine nobility. From the pattern of the blood spatter Lizanne deduced this massacre had been carried out with the blade rather than the gun.
“The Coronation Day Purge,” Alestine said, sprinkling a little salt on the roasting meat. “At least half of the upper tier of Imperial aristocracy wiped out in a single day. I won’t go into the tedium of what led up to it. Suffice to say a bunch of malcontent inbreds wanted to seize power from the ruling bunch of inbreds. The result was the Regency Wars, which began with all this. Azireh survived, thanks to me. I dressed her up in servant’s clothes and we managed to escape the Sanctum. We took refuge in my grandparents’ house, which could have been a costly mistake, it being an obvious place to look. Luckily, her uncle found her before anyone else did. He heaved her up onto a horse and off they went. We barely had time to say good-bye and I didn’t see her again for five years. When I did, this is what they had made of her.”
The ball-room shimmered and shifted into an even grander room of cathedralesque proportions. Tall windows rose on each side and huge pillars supported vaulted ceilings of such height they were wreathed in mist gathered from the thousand or more people below. They were all kneeling in abject supplication, heads pressed to the floor and arms outstretched as they paid obeisance to a figure seated on a dais. Lizanne was barely able to recognise Azireh under the mask of alabaster paint that covered her face, her features bunched by the weight of the bejewelled crown atop her head. More than that was the new hardness to her eyes. These were the eyes of her statue, the eyes of a woman who had seen and done terrible things, too many to remain that same young woman who had once sabotaged her pianola just for the chance to talk to someone she thought she might love.
“Emperor Azireh I,” Alestine said. “Quite impressive isn’t she?”
Lizanne saw that there was one figure amongst the multitude who was not kneeling. Alestine stood at the rear of the huge vaulted chamber, clad in a plain muslin dress as she stared at the newly crowned empress that official history would record as an emperor. “This was the last time you saw her,” Lizanne realised.
“Yes.” Alestine didn’t turn from her cookery, crouching to add some more wood to the fire. “I was surprised to receive a formal invitation to the coronation, somewhat frightened in fact. But I went, nevertheless. How could I not? And I didn’t kneel, which was noticed but by then she was already so feared none would dare voice an objection. After the ceremony a chamberlain gave me an envelope. Inside was a large amount of money and notification that I had been commanded by the Emperor to undertake a research expedition to the continent of Kilnahria. There was also a note in her own hand, just one line: ‘Find me treasure.’”
The coronation faded into the green wall of the jungle as Alestine took a knife and cut a portion of meat from the haunch. “I do believe this is close to done,” she said, biting off a morsel before offering it to Lizanne. “Don’t you think?”