The Carpet Makers by Eschbach Andreas

Author:Eschbach, Andreas [Eschbach, Andreas]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2013-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

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The Emperor’s Archivist

ONCE, THIS HAD BEEN his realm. Once, when the Emperor was still alive. Back then, silence had reigned in the great marble halls containing the documents of the glorious history of the Empire, and he had not had to hear any sounds but the shuffling of his own steps and the rush of his own breathing. Here he had spent his days, his years, and had grown old in the service of the Emperor.

The most exalted hours were when the Emperor himself came—came to him here in the Archive he guarded for the Divine One. He always had the giant steel entry doors thrown wide open and all the lamps brightly illuminated, and then he waited on the lowest step of the semicircular staircase until the Emperor’s sedan drove up. And after that, he stood modestly in the entry hall, somewhat to the side, near one of the columns; he kept his eyes directed humbly toward the floor, and his greatest reward was when the Emperor walked past and nodded regally at him, just slightly, but in view of everyone else. Nodded to him, the hunchback. To him, Emparak, his most faithful servant. To him, who knew the Empire better than any other mortal.

But then the new lords had arrived and degraded him to a messenger boy, to an unprivileged administrator of an unappreciated heritage. Just good enough to polish the costly marble, to clean the glass cases, and to change the burned-out lighting elements. How he hated them! Deputies of the Provisional Council for the Investigation of the Imperial Archives. They could come and go as they pleased, could rummage through all the documents and archive cabinets, and defile the silence of millennia with their bickering chatter. Nothing was sacred to them. And when they spoke to him, it was always in a manner that made it clear that they were young and beautiful and powerful, and he was old and ugly and powerless.

Of course, it was intentional that they stationed two women right here in front of him. They wanted to humiliate him. The women dressed in the new fashion, the fashion of the Rebellion, which revealed much and suggested even more. And they always pressed so close to him that even with his shortsighted old eyes, he couldn’t miss seeing the curves of their seductive bodies, close enough to touch, but still unattainable for a limping old cripple like himself.

Just now they had arrived, unannounced as usual, and had spread out their papers in the Great Reading Room, the center point of the Archive. Emparak stood in the shadow of the columns in the entryway and observed them. The red-haired woman sat in the middle. Rhuna Orlona Pernautan. How they put on airs, these rebels, with their triple names! Beside her stood the woman with blond hair that never seemed to end; as far as he understood it, the assistant to the redhead. Lamita Terget Utmanasalen. And they had brought a man along whom Emparak had never seen before.

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