“We used to be a much larger city,” said Gaudaric wistfully. “Three times as many people lived here when the Salt Sea was still fresh, before the desert came.”
Jame remembered the scrollsman Index’s words as reported by her cousin Kindrie. “That was during Rathillien’s Fifth Age, some three thousand years ago, correct?”
“Just so. Now the outermost rings are mere ruins, their stones quarried to build up the innermost. Kothifir is a shell of what it once was.”
As they approached the city’s heart, the edges of buildings were rounded off more and more until the towers became ovals, their summits disappearing into the clouds. These last appeared to be privately owned, probably by rich merchants and minor nobility. Certainly, they were more ornate than their fellows. Gardens now occupied the spaces between them while vines climbed their walls and balconies blazed with flowers.
The avenue swerved again, and debouched on the edge of a central plaza filled with more stalls and teeming with shoppers. Here, all the avenues met—Jame counted seven. Over the noisy throng, in the center of the square, loomed the only round tower she had yet seen in Kothifir, although it was aggressively asymmetrical. With its recessed floors, it looked a bit like an inverted tornado ascending into the clouds, with a dizzying twist to its structure. It was made of white and pink marble. Carved roses climbed its window frames and the balusters of its circling, open spiral stair, giving it a lacy, almost insubstantial appearance.
“That’s the Rose Tower,” said Gaudaric proudly. “You’ll find His Magnificence at the top of it.”
Jame thanked him, promised to look in on his shop, and pushed through the crowd to the foot of the spiral stair.
The lower floors were occupied by servants. Jame passed doors and windows opening into domestic spaces, kitchens billowing with fragrant herbs, bedchambers mostly empty at this time of day, and watch rooms where guards sat playing at dice. Children ran up and down the stair shouting to each other, shouted at in turn by their harried mothers. Tradesmen came and went.
Her legs ached by the time she left the bustle of life behind and neared the level of the clouds. They appeared solider than they had from the ground, and darker. Soon she was enveloped in their twilight world. Thinner patches revealed other towers curiously drained of color.
Now the mist was growing lighter above her, and a moment later she emerged into dazzling sunlight beating fiercely on the fleecy backs of clouds. The latter slowly circled the Rose Tower and spread out to a hazy horizon—again, something that she had not seen from below. Here the tallest structures ended in glistening domes and spires, or in rooftop gardens.
Another turn of the stair brought Jame to two pikesmen guarding the way.
“I have an appointment with His Magnificence, King Krothen,” she told them.
They looked down their noses at her. Perhaps Krothen chose his servants for their height, or for the length and hairiness of their nostrils.
After a pause and a sniff, however, they let her pass.
Here was a floor with filmy curtains blowing out the windows. Through them, Jame glimpsed an apartment of almost overwhelming elegance. Krothen’s?
Another twist of the stair, and she found herself at the top of the Rose Tower, in a circular room some seventy feet wide. The floor was paved with pale green, golden veined chalcedony. Petals of pink marble carved so fine that the sun glowed through them made up the walls. A thin, hot breeze edged around the overlapping folds. It was like being in the heart of a giant, overheated rosebud sculpted out of stone.
Through this roseate light scurried servants, carrying musical instruments, bowls of flowers, and tray upon tray of delicacies. Half-naked acrobats tumbled among them, disregarded. Clowns pranced.
Others more somberly clothed stood like pillars amidst this rout, ignoring it. Some appeared to be officials; others, foreign emissaries. One was a thin, elderly man in a midnight blue robe spangled with silver stars. Jame recognized a high priest when she saw one. After all, Krothen was a god-king.
Where, however, was he? Presumably, taking a break from his duties. When he arrived, perhaps he would recline on that dais piled high with silken pillows near his high priest.
Then the mound shifted.
A head perched on top of it, wearing a snowy turban. Heavily lidded hazel eyes regarded her speculatively across the room out of rolls of fat. Beneath that, rosebud lips pursed over a fringe of ginger beard which in turn was mounted on too many chins to count. Trinity, was that all him, beneath that sprawl of white damask? He shifted again and released a muted, subterranean fart. Incense covered the smell, but not that of so much overheated flesh.
Krothen, God-King of Kothifir, selected a candied slug from a plate held out to him by a lackey and popped it into the moist hole that was his mouth. As he chewed and swallowed, Jame saw that the dais on which he reclined hovered a foot above the floor and that the hems of his robes floated about him as if in a slow ocean current. Here was a god-king indeed.
An emissary clothed in layers of white lace stood before him, impatiently waiting to capture the monarch’s wandering attention.
“Ahem,” he said. “Sire, we understand that you have a complaint against our fair Rim city of Gemma.”
“Yes.” Krothen’s voice was a surprising nasal tenor, as if all of that fat had pinched his throat into a thin pipe. “Gemman raids on our trade caravans have increased of late. We understand that your governing council now sells letters of marque to such enterprising bandits.”
“They have official sanction, yes, which you refuse to recognize.”
Krothen opened his eyes as wide as their surrounding rolls of fat allowed. “My dear man, we never agreed to any such code.”
“You should. It would be the civilized thing to do, given that it guarantees humane treatment for any captives.”
“But we never raid you. Given that, why should we consent to being robbed?”
“At least let us ransom our captive raiders.”
“Ah, but Gemma has nothing that Kothifir wants.”
The emissary was turning red in the face with anger and frustration. “Someday your arrogance will be your downfall.”
“Perhaps. In the meantime, any raider whom I catch will be hung from the thorns of my tower to the delight of the citizenry and any passing crow.”
“And that is the message I should carry back to my masters?”
Krothen selected another morsel. “Carry what you please,” he said, chewing with his mouth open.
The Gemman gave a stiff bow and retreated.
Jame was the next visitor in line. She cleared her throat nervously.
“Er . . . Sire, my brother, Lord Knorth of the Kencyrath, sends his greetings.”
She gave the rolled parchment that contained her credentials to the majordomo, who handed it to a servant, who passed it to another, and another, and another. The high priest fastidiously flicked back an embroidered cuff to receive the scroll and presented it to his master. Krothen passed it from one plump hand to the other without looking at it, then to a lackey and so on around the circle, left to right, end over end, hand to hand, flip, flip, flip.
Now what? Jame wondered, receiving it back, its seal unbroken.
A commotion arose on the stair behind her.
Servants and minor priests alike hastily retreated to the edges of the room. Jame also withdrew, to be on the safe side. A contingent of ladies entered, one veiled, another in servant’s attire. They were led by a noblewoman so haughty in her bearing that it took a moment to realize that she was very short, almost a dwarf, mounted on very high heels. Trailing after them all came a handsome young man, heavily made up and dressed in a frilly robe.
“So, Nephew,” growled the short noblewoman in a surprisingly deep voice. Jame realized that this must be the redoubtable Princess Amantine, first lady of the court. “I understand that you have refused yet another match. Your half-sister Cella is, of course, heartbroken.”