Chapter 02. The Jade Emperor
Sael's voice didn't carry the way the Emperor's did. He wasn't using projection magic. He was just a man standing outside a tailor's shop, speaking loudly enough to be heard, and something about that seemed to confuse the street more than anything else had.
The quiet that followed had... a texture to it, if that made any sense. A couple of merchants near the fountain had frozen mid-transaction, coins still in hand while the tailor had come to his window and was pressing his face against the glass. Oh, and there was also woman across the street holding a child on her hip with one arm and shielding her eyes with the other, squinting up at the sky and then down at Sael.
Off to the side, near the corner of a bakery, a young man in a flat cap was writing furiously into a notebook, and beside him, a woman with ink-stained fingers was doing the same thing. Journalists. That was one of the newer professions to emerge in recent years, people whose entire occupation was to observe things and then write about them for printed broadsheets distributed the next morning. Sael didn't fully understand the economics of it, but the demand was apparently real.
They were both writing very fast.
The Jade Emperor had gone still in the air, and his sword had stopped turning.
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN, NO?"
Sael quickly looked at Margaret, and she looked back at him. He wasn't sure what he was hoping to find in her expression — confirmation, maybe, that the question was as strange as it sounded. The man had asked him to fight. He had said no, and he was not aware of any ambiguity in that exchange.
He considered, briefly, asking whether the word meant something different where the Emperor came from. But the street was full of people, and the man was still floating above the rooftops in full ceremonial regalia, and something told him that this was perhaps not the ideal moment for sarcasm.
"I... don't feel like fighting anyone today," Sael finally said. "I've been traveling and I only just got home."
A beat passed... then another.
The Emperor descended enough that the gilded dragons on his chest became visible in detail and the jade in his crown caught the afternoon sun properly. He was still a good thirty meters up, but the projection magic had dialed back, and when he spoke again his voice was closer to conversational.
"I know what no means," the Emperor said. "I am asking whether you understand who it is that stands above you."
"Why, yes. You were quite thorough about that part."
Margaret made a sound beside him. Very small. If you didn't know her, you might have mistaken it for a cough.
The Emperor's jaw shifted just so. The wind that moved his robes picked up, and the pearl-strung tassels on his shoulder plates swung wider. For a moment Sael thought the man might simply come down and start things without permission — some people did, when they reached this point in the conversation — but the Jade Emperor was not, it seemed, that kind.
"I have traveled," the Emperor said, and the patience in his voice was beginning to sound like something that cost him, "from the Emerald Throne. Across the eastern sea. Seventeen days. To stand before the man that the world calls the greatest archmage in history, and to test that claim in honorable combat."
"I don't claim that," Sael said.
"Others claim it for you."
"Yes, well." Sael put his pipe between his teeth. "That's not really something I can help."
The journalist in the flat cap had run out of page and was flipping frantically to a new one.
Edric, behind Sael, hadn't moved. Mara had her hand over her mouth and young Jonn was staring at Sael with his eyes and mouth wide open. And Mira... well, Mira was tugging at her father's sleeve rapidly, without looking away from Sael.
"Father," she whispered, and tt was not a quiet whisper. "Father. Father."
"I know," Edric whispered back. His voice was thin.
"That's the mister."
"I know, Mira."
"That's Sael the Great, Father."
"I — yes. I'm getting there."
The Emperor said nothing for a long moment. Then he began to descend.
The emerald robes caught the air and spread as he lowered, and the jade crown threw chips of green light across the facades of the buildings on either side. His sword settled at his hip. His boots — Sael noticed them now for the first time, black leather stitched with silver thread — touched cobblestone with barely a sound.
Then the crowd parted.
Bodies shuffled. Feet scraped. A man holding a basket of apples pressed himself against a wall and then, apparently unsure whether that was enough, also held the basket out to one side, as if it too deserved its own personal space.
And the Emperor walked through them.
That was the thing about him. On the ground, without the projection magic and the floating and the sky-voice, the man was... present. Enormously, unavoidably present. He moved through the crowd the way a river moves through a valley, which is to say that the landscape simply arranged itself around him and he seemed not to notice.
But he did notice. He noticed the woman with the child on her hip and gave her a brief and surprisingly warm nod. He noticed the old merchant still clutching his coins and touched two fingers to his own chest in what was clearly some kind of formal greeting. He even noticed a boy of maybe twelve gaping at him from behind a cart, and he stopped and said something Sael couldn't hear, and the boy's face split into a wide grin.
He did not seem to be performing. That was what Sael found himself thinking as he watched the man cross the distance between them. Or if he was, it was the sort of performance that had been practiced so long it had become the person. People greeted him along the way, bowed or called out or pressed hands to their chests, and he returned every one of them without breaking stride, until he came to a stop in front of Sael.
He was quite the tall man. Much taller Sael, who had to adjust his line of sight upward in a way that was, frankly, mildly annoying. The Emperor's face was broader up close, his cheekbones high and sharp, and his grey eyes were pale and sharp, with vertical pupils like a cat's, or more accurately, like a dragon's. Which was odd. If the Jade Emperor were a dragon, Richter would have mentioned it. And even odder was the implication that a dragon would choose to shapeshift into something other than a dragon. They didn't do that. It was, as far as Sael understood it, something close to a point of pride.
Oh, and he smelled like sandalwood and sea salt, which meant the seventeen days of travel were probably true.
"My master always told me to be wary of you," the Emperor said. His voice was normal now. "I could never tell if he was serious. But now that I am close..."
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on NovelFire. Report any occurrences.
He trailed off as his gaze dropped from Sael's face to his chest, and stayed there. The pale grey eyes with their strange vertical pupils narrowed, and he was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, the easy composure had thinned, just slightly, at the edges.
"I have never," he said, still looking at Sael's chest, "seen so much mana concentrated in a single being."
Sael said nothing.
"It is extraordinary, it fells like... standing beside a giant furnace." The Emperor's voice had gone quieter as he looked back up at Sael's face. "I came here hoping to see what kind of reality-breaking magic a mage of such a caliber could perform. I find myself even more eager now."
Sael considered all of that, but one thing retained his attention more than the others.
"Your master?"
A grin suddenly spread across the emperor's face.
"You fought him," the Emperor said. "In the Age of Heroes. During the Ash Campaigns." He paused for a moment, his grin widening, and it felt like pride filled his expression. "He was called the Beast of the Heavens."
Sael went still and frowned for a moment.
"Enarion?" He said. "Enarion was your master?"