The Braided Path Omnibus by Chris Wooding

Author:Chris Wooding [Wooding, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780575121928
Google: Uwg1AgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00H6SIV00
Publisher: Gollancz
Published: 2011-04-05T07:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

The Blood Emperor Mos tu Batik stormed through the marbled corridors of the Imperial Keep, his brow dark with fury. His beard, once close and tidy, had grown unkempt, the patches of grey more pronounced. His hair was a mess, hanging in draggles over his eyes and damp with sweat. Wine had spilled on his tunic, and his clothes were wrinkled and pungent.

There was madness in his eye.

Days and nights had blended into one, an endless half-consciousness swamped in alcohol. Sleep brought him no rest, only terrible dreams in which his wife rutted with faceless strangers. His waking hours were spent in a constant state of suspicion, punctuated by sporadic outbursts of rage, directed either at himself or at anyone else near him. He was spiralling slowly and inexorably into mania, and the only escape from the torture was intoxication, which provided a small surcease but only made him more bitter afterward.

He had taken enough. Now he meant to have it out, once and for all. He would not stand by while he was cuckolded.

There would be a reckoning.

It had started long ago, before Eszel the flamboyant poet. He had come to realise that, in the long nights he had spent alone while spite gnawed at his soul. He remembered other times, when Laranya had wanted to pursue her interests and he his, and how he had indulged her in whatever she wished. Times when he had been disappointed that she was not waiting for him when he returned from a particularly harrowing day in the council chamber. Times when she had laughed and joked with other men, who seem attracted like moths to a candle, drawn by the brightness and vivacity of her. He remembered the jealousy then, the seeds of resentment burrowing into a soil made moist by his natural inclination for domination. Among the delusions and venomous slanders that he had persuaded himself to believe in those lonely hours, he had found nuggets of truth.

He had come to realise that he wanted Laranya as two different people, and that she could not be both. On the one hand was the fiery, wilful and entirely insubordinate woman he had fallen in love with; on the other, the dutiful spouse, who would be there when he wanted her and be absent when he did not, who would make him feel like a man because a man should be able to control his wife. One of the reasons he had fallen in love with her – and stayed in love with her – was because she would not bend to his will, would never be meek and submissive; it was because she galled him that she challenged him and kept his interest. His first wife Ononi had been the model of how a woman should be, but he had not loved her. Laranya was impossible, would never be tamed no matter how he tried, and she had both captured his heart and poisoned it.

It was the child that had turned things bad.

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