I flee back into the room where Farzaneh’s corpse lies, huddling next to bloodied teeth and eyes. It’s better than seeing the broken bodies down there.
I face No-Name. ‘What you speak of cannot be true. It makes my work fornothing. Who will give me orders? I always follow the clan!’
‘The emperor is dead.’
‘No.’I shove her to the wall until we are nose to nose. The anger, it flashes as keenly as the night of my parents’ deaths. ‘He’s not dead. He’s in me.He has always been in me!’
‘Pathetic slave,’ she sneers, ‘the fear you feel is your own. He cannot punish you.He is dead. He was no noble emperor. Your Older Brother warned you.’
Is that why Eliyas turned against us, leaving the shelter of the clan’s lies? I think about the girl I became. She was willing to kill for her emperor because she’d been taught to look at her opponents and glimpse only empty monsters. She had followed orders. She’d had purpose. She unabashedly liked her purpose. She was one amongst an empire of many. She was me. I’m terrified that I liked it.
No-Name continues. ‘Powerful rulers can topple. And the emperor has.’
‘Because he wasmurdered.’
No-Name frowns. ‘Khamilla, you have a habit of creating things that are not there and removing things that are. You made yourself forget Babshah Khatun, the khan, your milk-siblings – even Eliyas, after your brother became a traitor to you. Haven’t you ever wondered what other horrors you’ve forgotten?’
‘Do not say their names,’ I beg of her, but she carries on ruthlessly.
‘If you had the chance to see the emperor in the flesh,the true emperor, would you?’ No-Name asks.
My head throbs, the skeins where the soul meets the heart of the mind aching. I take laborious breaths as if Qabl monks guide me. Darkness swirls at the edge of my vision and, like parchment, I tear it from its corner.
My eyes open. No-Name merges into the countenance of the emperor: his sharp, handsome, but cold face. My father leans close, thumb caressing my chin. ‘Little bird,’ he greets me.
A whimper escapes me. Suddenly, I am a child again before her dada. A dada she misses. A dada she loves dearly.
‘Dada,’ I echo but the honorific tastes wrong. ‘You are alive. You are here.’
He looks powerful. Exactly as I remember him. But then his thumb presses harder and harder. Sharp pain reverberates beneath my jaw.
‘You are hurting me,’ I whisper.
‘Should I not return what you dealt me?’ He bows his head. ‘Tell me, who killed me?’
A mental test. ‘Sajamistan,’ I answer.
His image wavers in the chamber. ‘You are wrong. But when are you not? You forget things, even when your hands are coated in blood. You time-blank to protect your coward self.’
My feet stumble back.
He nudges closer. ‘Try again.’
My skin burns. ‘Do not say anything,’ I plead.‘Please.’
‘I speak as I will. I accepted your uma into my empire. I raised you from nomadic barbaric stature to nobility. I fed you with my hands. I trained you. And you repaid me with blood.’ My eyes flicker shut. The emperor yanks my collar to meet his dark expression, wielding a vendetta that death cannot cheat. ‘Mydaughterkilled me. Say,I killed the emperor. I did not teach you to kill in shame, I taught you to kill with pride.’
And the words burst from me.
‘I killed you.’
The admission settles like dust. I killed my own father.
My knees drop to the ground beside Farzaneh’s corpse. And the memory jumbles out like a ghoulish lesion, skin torn, inviting infection.
It has always been the emperor lurking in the depths of my thoughts, judging my actions. Hissing at me to obey. The night of Eliyas’s execution and then Warlord Akashun’s invasion with Sajamistani forces, I remember now.
Uma had been surrounded by the Sepahbad’s soldiers while the capital descended into chaos. On the hill, I shoved the emperor away to reach Uma. And I did it again. I was angry. I felt it in the way my hands shook, the way my blood boiled, my head pounded. But I was not in control. I released slivers of nur, piercing his flesh against the tree, and turned away. I had wounded him. I hardly realised that I killed him.
