Lord of Emperors Read Online Free PDF

find his own riding gloves.
    RUSTEM HAD BEEN TERRIFIED when he entered, overwhelmed, summoning all his reserves of composure so as not to show it. He’d almost dropped his implements, feared someone would see his trembling hands, but the captain of the guard had moved quickly to take them. He’d used the formal movements of genuflection to speak a calming invocation in his mind.
    After rising, he’d been more blunt than he ought to have been, asking the courtiers—and the vizier and a prince!—to leave the room. But he always used a manner of crisp efficiency to suggest authority beyond his years, and this was no time or place to deviate from his customary methods. If he was to die, it hardly mattered what they thought of him, did it? He asked the commander to stay. A soldier would be unfazed by bloodshed and screaming, and someone might have to hold the afflicted person down.
    The afflicted person. The King of Kings. Sword of Perun. Brother to the Sun and Moons.
    Rustem forced himself to stop thinking in that way. This was a patient. An injured man. That was what mattered. The courtiers left. The prince—Rustem didn’t know which of the king’s sons this was—paused in front of him and made vivid with twisting hands the threat of death that had been with Rustem from the moment he’d left his garden.
    It could not be allowed to matter. All would be as had been written.
    He’d cast the Ajbar powder into the fire to bring the room in tune with more harmonious presences and spirits, then crossed to the bed to examine the arrow and the wound.
    And he had smelled kaaba there.
    His mind reeling with shock, he’d realized that the smell had jogged a hovering awareness, and then a second one had emerged and left him very much afraid. He’d sent the commander hurrying for gloves. He needed them.
    If he touched that arrow shaft he would die.
    Alone in the room with the King of Kings, Rustem discovered that his fears were those of a physician and not a lowly subject now. He wondered how to say what was in his mind.
    The king’s eyes were on his face now, dark and cold. Rustem saw rage in them. ‘There is a poison on the shaft,’ Shirvan said.
    Rustem bowed his head. ‘Yes, my lord. Kaaba. From the fijana plant.’ He took a breath and asked, ‘Did your own physicians touch the arrow?’
    The king nodded his head very slightly. No hint of anger diminishing. He would be in very great pain but wasn’t showing it. ‘All three of them. Amusing. I orderedthem to be executed for their incompetence, but they would each have died soon, wouldn’t they? None of them noted the poison.’
    ‘It is rare here,’ said Rustem, struggling to order his thoughts.
    ‘Not so rare. I have been taking small amounts for twenty-five years,’ said the king. ‘Kaaba, other evil substances. Anahita will summon us to herself when she wills, but men may still be prudent in their lives, and kings must be.’
    Rustem swallowed. He now had the explanation for his patient’s survival to this point. Twenty-five years? An image came into his mind: a young king touching— fearfully, surely—a trace amount of the deadly powder: the sickness that would have ensued . . . doing the same thing again later, and then again, and then beginning to taste it, in larger and larger amounts. He shook his head.
    ‘The king has endured much for his people,’ he said. He was thinking of the court physicians. Kaaba closed the throat before it reached the heart. One died in agony, of self-strangulation. He had seen it in the east. A method of formal execution. Amusing, the king had said.
    He was thinking of something else now, as well. He pushed that away for the moment, as best he could.
    ‘It makes no difference,’ said the king. His voice was much as Rustem had imagined it might be: cold, uninflected, grave. ‘This is a lion arrow. Protection from poison doesn’t help if the arrow cannot come out.’
    There was a tapping at the door. It opened and Vinaszh