The Merchant Emperor Read Online Free PDF

by the gods he didn’t believe in, full of magic and treasure hidden beneath dry vaults of richly colored windblown earth. While he didn’t believe in gods, Talquist did believe in magic, and to him there was nothing so magical as the desert sky darkening into night, sprinkled with sandy grains of diamond dust winking in the clear air as the stars appeared, one by one, from behind thin clouds.
    He remained in reverent silence as the sun slipped through the aquamarine veil at the horizon and beneath the world’s rim. The stars grew brighter, changing the colors of the city below him from the flat brick red visible in the midday sun to the flame-colored shadows that reflected off the stone buildings from the watchfires and forges smoldering at all times of the day and night. As beautiful as he thought the capital city of Jierna’sid was in daylight, it could not compare to the glorious sight of it at night, when the sounds of martial preparations and military cadences echoed off the walls and cobbled streets, blending with the incessant clopping of horses’ hooves, the clattering of wagon wheels and shouts of regimented discipline and drunken merriment into one building symphony of impending war.
    From his many years at sea as a merchant plying the trade winds the world round, he was knowledgeable of the stars and their movements in the heavens. He turned his gaze to the southwest and waited patiently for the evening star to appear.
    After a moment it did, twinkling brightly.
    As he knew it would.
    Talquist looked down at the scale in his hands. It was an ancient thing; that he’d known from the beginning. The moment he had found it, wedged in the bones of an old ship buried in the sand of the Skeleton Coast, a graveyard of things coughed up by the cold sea, he’d been aware that it was something far more special than he’d ever seen in all his travels, something more powerful than he might ever hope to fully understand. There must have been magic in it, for no one else might give it a second glance; it appeared to be little more than the scale of a giant fish or the slough of dead skin from the hide of something enormous. From almost the moment he touched it, his life’s obsession became the quest to discover exactly what he was holding. Talquist sighed, remembering those almost carefree days on the open sea, in search of answers to his endless riddle. He had whored himself out to anyone who might have answers to that riddle, but had discovered little.
    Finally he had come upon a reference to it in the ruins of a water-soaked tome in the Cymrian museum known anecdotally as The Book of All Human Knowledge . The fragile manuscript had identified his treasure as a dragon scale from a deck of scrying used by an ancient Seren woman named Sharra, and had noted its name as the New Beginning. None of the powers of the scale, however, had survived the book’s immersion in the sea, so he had had to discover its uses himself.
    One thing he found on his own was the effect starlight had on the object.
    Idly, Talquist held up the scale to the horizon where the evening star gleamed. What had appeared solid a moment before—a rough gray piece of oval carapace with a finely tattered edge scored across its concave surface—turned suddenly translucent, the etching of a throne in the center visible even in the dim light of dusk. A purple flash skimmed across the surface, then vanished as the scale became clear, with but a mere outline able to be seen. As many times as Talquist had seen the effect, he never ceased to be amazed by it, especially given that after a moment his own hand, and eventually the rest of him, would follow suit, turning ethereal enough to render him all but invisible, too.
    It had been an extremely useful tool in furthering his ends.
    With his musings came an overwhelming sense of loss. From the moment he had discovered his treasure, it had almost never left his body, tucked in the custom-made pocket of his