Lord of Emperors Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 ordered them 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 the garrison commander returned, breathing as if he'd been running, carrying dark brown leather riding gloves. They were too thick for easy use, Rustem saw, but he had no choice. He put them on. Unlaced the thong of the case that held a long thin metal implement. The one his son had brought out to the garden for him.
He said an arrow, Papa.
    "There are sometimes ways of removing even these," Rustem said, trying not to think about Shaski. He turned to the west, closed his eyes and began to pray, mentally tabulating the afternoon's omens, good and bad, as he did so, and counting the days since the last lunar eclipse. When he had done the calculations he set out the indicated talismans and wardings. He proposed a sense-dulling herb for the pain of what was to come. The king refused it. Rustem called the garrison commander to the bedside and told him what he had to do to keep the patient steady. He didn't say "the king" now. This was an afflicted man. Rustem was a doctor with an assistant and an arrow to remove, if he could. He was at war now, with Azal the Enemy, who could blot out the moons and sun and end a life.
    In the event, the commander was not needed, nor was the herb. Rustem first broke off the blackened shaft as close to the entry wound as he could, then used a sequence of probes and a knife to widen the wound itself, a procedure he knew to be excruciatingly painful. Some men could not endure it, even dulled by medication. They would thrash and scream, or lose consciousness. Shirvan of Bassania never closed his eyes and never moved, though his breathing became shallow and rapid. There were beads of sweat on his brow and the muscles of his jaw were clenched beneath the plaited beard. When he judged the opening wide enough, Rustem oiled the long, slender, metal Spoon of Enyati and slid it in towards the embedded arrowhead.
    It was difficult to be precise with the thick gloves, already blood-soaked, but he had a view of the alignment of the flange now and knew which way to angle the cupping part of Enyati's device. The shallow cup slid up to the flange through the flesh of the king-who had caught his breath now, but moved not at all where he lay. Rustem twisted a little and felt the spoon slip around the widest part of the head, pressing against it. He pushed a little further, not breathing himself in this most