The Ember Child (The Godsbane Book 1) by Anthony Mitchell

Author:Anthony Mitchell [Mitchell, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-06-11T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

THE CHAIR

i

Standing at Coren's right hand, Tirana cast his gaze around the vast domed chamber of the Chair, studying the faces of the assembled men. There were near two hundred of them crowding the semi-circular rows of wooden benches opposite, their eyes riveted on the central dais, where Emperor Coren sat placidly on his throne. The senators ranged from the middle-aged through to the wizened, all of them older than the fresh-faced thirty year old they called Emperor. They watched Coren with eyes that gleamed with envy and pride and awe. There is hatred too, thought Tirana, marking the faces of those less subtle.

Tirana sighed. These are the days I truly miss the arena, he thought. Out on the sand it was brutally simple. A man met his enemies face to face, both sure in the knowledge of what was at stake. It was not so easy at the Chair, where the waters ran a little murkier. Here the opponents might dress in robes of white and preach the merits of nobility and honour, painting themselves as the most civilised men of the most civilised society, but in truth they were far more deadly than any gladiator Tirana had ever faced.

Corruption ruled the senate and most of the men filling the wooden benches bore an insatiable hunger for wealth and power. They would cajole and charm both allies and enemies alike, all the while honing the blade with which to cut them down. Such men thought nothing of betrayal, and these ones had the power to kill with a single word.

Yet it was in this arena that the Emperor excelled. Coren could have the senate purged at a whim if he chose to, but it was by no mistake that he surrounded himself with the most ambitious and ruthless men Lucia could offer. 'Why do you allow this?' Tirana had asked him in a moment of weakness. 'Why allow such liars and sycophants into the inner sanctum of the Empire?'

'Empires are built on the dreams of such men,' Coren had replied with a wry smile. 'They all wait for the one slip that will allow them to rise up and overthrow me, to cast my name and all my deeds to dust, but if I can keep my footing, if I can use their ideas for the greater good, then the world will remember me as the greatest man who ever lived.'

And the world will remember it, thought Tirana, confidently. For never has a boy built an Empire the way you have.

Coren had risen to power at the age of sixteen, overthrowing his tyrant father in a brilliant coup by convincing two of his father's most trusted advisors to pledge themselves to his cause. Coren had gained their loyalty by selling them the same dream he would sell Tirana a decade later. By eighteen he had conquered the city states of Pelonia, and by twenty-five he had crossed the southern sea to the continent of Ancora, forging the largest Empire the world had ever known.

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