Andrew Kochett
The Heavenly Lords Ambassador. A Kingdom Like No Other. Book 1
Illustrations by Yulia Shcherbina
© Andrew Kochett, текст, 2023
© Юлия Щербина, иллюстрации, 2023
© ООО «Издательство «Эксмо», 2023
Prologue
Man only exists when he is capable of changing his world. Destruction is the highest form of change. Truth is only born of struggle, and only by killing can a man show who he really is. Show us who you are! he finished writing and looked out of the window. Evening descended, warm and soft. Weary from the day, the celestial body spread its gold-embroidered vestments across the horizon and prepared for its nightly ablutions in the Infinite Ocean. A thin ray of sun fought its way through the thick branches of the trees and landed on the face of a young man bent over a piece of parchment, but the celestial messengers efforts were in vain. It had prepared for this meeting, and it would gladly have told the young man of the wide meadows where the suns followers capered until it was completely dark, of a pair of dolphins that frolicked in the warm, milky waters of the Misty Sea, far to the south, as they chased after a Capotian merchant ship bearing west. But it was thwarted in its quest, for the young man turned in annoyance, squinted, and bowed his head lower over his writing table, which was made of wood that was as black as coal. The work that had engrossed him for the past several months left him no time to enjoy the beauty of life around him. He was writing in traditional Herandian script, but without the carelessness and indifference that marked the official style of the imperial bureaucracy. Quite the opposite: each letter was set on the parchment with neat attention, and the author often set aside his quill pen and, resting his unshaven cheek on his fist, closely read over what he had written
I want this book to tell the story of my father, Unizel Virando. He is a famous man, but does anyone know him as a human being?
The first thing we know about a person is his or her name, but everyone reads that name differently, giving it their own meaning, gazing at it like a mirror in hopes of seeing their own familiar feelings and desires. That being the case, I will write about the things that are important to me. How and why did my father become the man he is today? How does he live, and what thoughts come to him when he looks at the world we see around us? What people has he met on his path, and how have they changed his understanding of the world?
My father and I are very different people, but when I listen to his stories, it always seems to me that I would do exactly as he did if faced with similar circumstances. I suppose this gives me the right to add my own elaboration to those events about which, for various reasons, I cannot know the full truth.
My book describes people in this empire, but it also touches on people from wondrous, far-off countries. Much of what happened to those people did not concern my father directly, taking place without his immediate involvement. Still, just as droplets of spilled mercury finally come together, the fates of all the people who ever saw, knew, or fought with my father will come together as something whole and unbroken something that could be called Destiny. Each character in this story of his life has added a grain of knowledge, love, hate, or suffering, and all of it has now come down to me.
When I took up my pen, I knew that my fathers stories and memories alone would not be enough to bring his world to life. If I hope to relive his life from my own point of view I must have deep knowledge of Dashtornis, the Known World. The archives in our capitals library are still being put together, but they are always open to me, and I am glad of the opportunity to access the wisdom contained therein.
To avoid confusion, I will do my best to present proper names and certain other concepts in the classical Herandian transcription. The original text would certainly be more interesting to the serious researcher, but my book is not a scholarly work, despite the fact that it concerns knowledge of the world and of oneself. I must warn the reader not to expect scientific precision in the names of people and places. Virilan names, for example, are not pronounced exactly as I give them here. And while it is natural for residents of the empire to have a first name and a last name, Virilans have no last name at all. Instead, they have two first names, one of which is given by the parents at birth and the other is chosen by the Virilan when he or she reaches adulthood. Another difficulty is the fact that many sounds (such as the soft k and g) are absent in the Virilan language. Virilans are simply incapable of making these sounds, just as we risk breaking our tongues when we try to pronounce even the simplest phrase in Arincil. The fact that my father speaks these and many other languages fluently most of them learned from books alone is proof of his linguistic talents which, unfortunately, were not passed down to me.
And finally, the most important question: who is this book being written for? My father is a shrewd man. He has studied so many people over the course of his life that understanding his own son gives him no trouble at all. For this reason, Unizel Virando did not bother asking me what I was writing about. Instead, like snow falling from a clear sky, he paid an unexpected visit to my small estate, leaving me no chance to avoid him. Casually taking his seat right on the table where I do my work, my father stared at my parchment with a vague, secretive smile in his sky-blue eyes. I must admit that my heart began to beat faster than usual, and my guts were gripped by cold. I expected him to criticize me, to point out mistakes I had made, to demand that I rewrite or remove certain parts, but he did none of these. No, my father seemed to enjoy taunting me. The sun slipped past its noonday peak, and still he said nothing. He seemed to draw out all the life force I had put into my scrolls, giving nothing in return. All torment eventually comes to an end, though, and this time was no different. My father suddenly looked up from the parchment and turned to me. His eyes were full of understanding.
I hope you realize that it would not be a good idea to publish this? As always, his manner was sleek and perfectly polite.
I let my breath out with a tremendous sense of relief. I had prepared myself for this question long ago. Of course, Father. I
Then can you explain to me why you have wasted so much time on this? You are no longer a boy wondering who he will become when he grows up. You bear the weight of an incredible responsibility, a mission that passes to you as my only son. When I see what you have been doing instead of learning the things you will need to know
I think of that constantly! But Father, isnt your own destiny perfect proof of the fact that, by following the dictates of his own heart, each man eventually arrives at his own Hour of Truth? I am writing this book for my children, so that they may know the story of the head of our family. These seeds of knowledge, when thrown into the future, will bear the fruit of wisdom and provide a strong foundation for our family and our empire!
Are you saying that this will be a book to be read at home?
Exactly. It is a book and a textbook and a memory aid all in one. I swear that everything set out in these scrolls will remain our familys secret forever!
My father snorted skeptically and shrugged. He looked out the open window, where the cool breeze from the river was shaking the arms of the trees and the nimble squirrels were stealing delicacies from the altar honoring our ancestors, which stood under a large oak.
I could tell my father did not have much faith in me. Or perhaps he did have faith, but secretly wanted to change his own mind. I would have to think quickly to save the situation.
Father, I am like you in everything. Think back to how it all started. Thirty years ago. An evening just like this one. Enteveria, the capital of the great Herandian Empire. The archives of His Heavenly Majesty, master of everything under the sky
Part I. From Shadows into Light
Chapter 1. Burdened by Hope
The young falcon had been gliding masterfully for over an hour in the winds soft embrace on that evening in May. Ash-colored wings spread wide, he cast a knowing eye over the city that lay beneath him. If the residents of the boundless Herandian Empire had worshipped a more mundane deity instead of the Sun, they would have paid less attention to birds, who were on familiar terms with the bright face of the sky. It was a grave sacrilege to kill birds, and yet something had to be done to protect the Emperors palace and the heads of the statues (and those of regular citizens) from the power-drunk pigeons. Only the falcon that holy guardian of the Heavenly Throne had the lawful right to reduce the population of blue-winged bandits, and for this he was doubly revered by the residents of Enteveria.
The imperial archives suffered frequently from the pigeons excesses. The squat, somewhat ominous building was reliably protected from non-avian troublemakers by its position inside the first circle of the Great Imperial Chambers, but attacks from the air posed a continual threat to the appearance of the largest storehouse of knowledge in all of Dashtornis. The situation was made worse by the fact that the archive was built two hundred years ago under Emperor Nazalio, who was a great lover of constructivist experimentations and essentially rebuilt the citys historical center. His Heavenly Majesty was careful to draw the attention of his architects mundane thinkers all of them to the obvious fact that the storehouse for such valuable manuscripts chronicling the great deeds of his heavenly ancestors simply could not take the form of a rough, rectangular prism of Seregad marble that would seize even the most marginally refined person with despair at the mere sight of it.
It cost the architects a great deal of effort to convince His Majesty not to tear down the almost completed building, which would have destroyed an extensive network of basements that provided the perfect conditions for storing especially valuable manuscripts, with expensive mechanisms for dousing fires and a special system of mirrors that allowed weak but natural sunlight to reach even the farthest corners of the unshakeable citadel of the wisdom of past ages. The chief architect, Cordius Palio, saw the imperial archives primarily as a fortress, a carefully guarded treasure house that could withstand direct assault, flood, fire, and riots.
He often intoned on the subject: This structure will stand for a thousand years, and our descendants will be surprised and delighted to find a path into the world of those who laid the foundations of our great empire!
It would have been uncomfortable to argue with the Emperor, however, so Palio agreed to a bit of architectural slight-of-hand and added an ornate but false colonnade to the front of the building and a gallery of statues of Herandias most learned men to its roof.
These statues earned Palio a place among the most frequent subjects of estevels brought by the archives contemporary workers (estevels were scraps of paper bearing curses against ones enemies; for a small fee, supplicants could use a primitive lens to ceremoniously feed the paper to the suns rays, thereby subjecting the target of the curse to the power of the heavenly deity). Pigeons dropped piles of excrement on the statues heads and the roof of the archive with such ferocity that the Emperor, observing the building from a vantage point on his main balcony, became indignant at this flagrant insult to the imperial gaze.
There are rumors that the Sun is sending his servants to show his wrath with our Lord, said a handful of the Emperors helpful advisors.
Let us call on the falcon, the protector of the Heavenly Throne! That will show everyone that the Lord of the Sky is on your side! said others.
As a result, specially trained falcons had guarded the sky above the archive and the palace for almost two centuries, ruthlessly tearing to pieces any winged violators and putting a stop to dangerous unrest in the minds of the Heavenly Emperors subjects. City residents loved to watch the handsome bird soaring through the sky, and the young man on the front steps of the archive was no different. To get a clear picture of what this connoisseur of free flight looked like, imagine an old man, shriveled and decrepit from years of working in the archives, lungs corroded by the ever-present dust, eyes weakened by the half-light, back bent as a sign of membership in the gloomy caste that is called bookworms. If you have enough imagination, suppose for a moment that even this pitiful specimen was once a blooming youth. Taken together, those two images provide a fairly precise rendering of how other people saw Unizel Virando. Very few people actually knew his name. At the archive, where he was employed as assistant to the senior master in the foreign manuscripts section, everyone simply called him Uni. His close friends called him Little Uni not because of his short stature, but because of the naïve, scattered look in his blue eyes, which he inherited from his mother, and his excessively polite, even timid, manners.
Tossing the golden curls away from his forehead, Uni kept his eyes on the proud hunter. He felt a melancholy envy of the birds unchained freedom and graceful flight. For a young man who spent most of his time in the archives musty vaults, the falcon was a visible symbol of something bigger and more important. It called to him, but what it seemed to offer was fatally unachievable.
A man stepped out of the archives front door. Uni, stop gaping at the birds. Barko is waiting for you. Get moving! The man filled his lungs with the fresh air of late spring, saying his final goodbyes of the day to the dusty spirits of imperial wisdom.
Coming, Master Gergius! Uni said with an inadvertent sigh. He hurried up the rest of the steps and, once again, surrendered his body to torture at the hands of the dismal spirits of the painfully familiar underground vaults. The most dangerous of these fearsome creatures was his superior, senior master Barko. He was fearsome in his stubborn refusal to forget about the existence of his young assistant for long periods of time, thereby preventing Uni from studying the archives contents to his hearts content.
It would be untrue to say that Uni hated the archives old (and sometimes gloomy) walls. Quite the opposite, when he first entered that narrow world four years prior, he realized with delight that fate had given him an incredible gift. The labyrinthine halls of the archive held his body like a prison, but his spirit, fed by the contents of a mountain of secret scrolls and codices, found a path to an entirely new and unknown world of knowledge. The archive contained books on every subject. Anything published anywhere in Dashtornis whether by the timid hand of a scribe or by the lifeless block of a wood press eventually found its way here, to the main archives of the Heavenly Empire. The Arincilian jungles, the deserts of Mustobrim, the deep forests of Torgendam, and the teeming cities of Capotia the whole world, more than one could see in a lifetime, revealed itself in wonders, dangers, and the strange customs of foreign people. With access to so many books, Uni taught himself the languages of many of these strange, yet fascinating people and spent hours imagining the conversations he could have with them, pretending to be a fierce warrior from Arincils House of the Eagle, or a brave captain working on a merchant fleet from Capotia, or even a shaman from a wild barbarian tribe roaming the plains of the Great Expanse.