Chapter 358: To the Empire (2)

“How did it come to this?” Helia murmured as she walked toward the Empire’s capital.

The quickest lawful path into the Empire was not a petition stamped by a dozen seals or a courier’s sprint through the night. It was simpler and, for her, almost absurdly available. Ketal would act as her attendant.

Helia was the Sun God’s Saintess; among the living, only a handful could present themselves at the imperial gate without prior ceremony. She was one of them. She could notify the gate on the day and be received that same day, and because of who she was, she was permitted one or two attendants to accompany her within the lines of her duty. She would use that worn and legal path to bring Ketal through the wall that would close on any other.

“Please,” she said softly, and she kept her eyes forward as the gate road straightened, “keep the forms. Silence is enough. I will answer every question.”

“I understand,” Ketal replied, and a low laugh warmed the words. “I will try.”

Helia did not tell him that the soft humor in his voice made her more anxious, not less. She set her foot on the last stretch of flagstones and carried a steady pace to the gate. At the end of that walk, they reached the entrance to the capital.

The guards who kept that mouth watched her come and knew her by face and seal. One of them stepped down from the lintel’s shade and bowed his head with a quiet economy.

“Saintess of the Sun God,” he said. “Welcome to the capital of the Empire.”

“I have come to seek audience with His Imperial Majesty,” Helia said. “May I enter?”

“For you, there is no difficulty,” he answered, and then he hesitated. His gaze slid past Helia’s shoulder to the figure a pace behind her. “However. Who is that?”

“He is my attendant,” Helia said.

“In the past, you came alone,” the guard said. “You did not keep an attendant at your side.”

“This time I required aid on the road,” she answered, and she let the words fall with the same plainness she used when she read a prayer.

The guard’s eyes narrowed. Suspicion did not flare; it cooled, as if he were testing steel rather than sniffing smoke. He studied Ketal’s posture and the line of his mouth with a workman’s concentration.

“You keep a barbarian as an attendant,” he said.

Helia’s eyes dimmed for a breath. The way he said it told her he knew nothing of Ketal, not even by rumor. She smoothed her face and replied as if she were repeating catechism.

“To the poor, opportunity. To the lacking, instruction. To the foolish, mercy. Those are the doctrines of the Sun God,” she said. “A lone barbarian came to the continent. I took him in and began his reformation.”

They had agreed on the frame during the walk. The words came without stumble, even though they made a tight twist in her stomach.

“He travels to the capital to widen his sight,” she continued. “One attendant for a Saintess is not an excess.”

“That may be,” the guard said. The line of his brow did not ease. His half-lidded look weighed Ketal in silence long enough to feel like a span, and then he spoke again. “I will ask him directly. Saintess, please step back.”

“What?” Helia said before she caught herself.

She had not expected him to press through her to the attendant. She moved to interpose, but the guard had already fixed Ketal with the kind of gaze that tried to strip a man down to the hinge.

“Is the lady’s statement true?” he asked Ketal.

His eyes did not leave Ketal’s face. He watched the corner of the mouth and the lay of the shoulders. He counted blinks, compared breath to stillness, and listened for the flat echo of a rehearsed lie. Helia kept her breath measured and her hands still, but she could not silence the quick shake she felt inside.

If there had been time, they would have rehearsed this exact moment. However, there had not been time. The decision to use the path had been made, and then they walked. If Ketal misstepped even slightly, the capital would close its mouth, and the day would end on the wrong side of the gate. She bit her lower lip once and let it go.

In the quiet that followed, Ketal answered.

“The lady’s words are true,” he said.

Helia’s eyes widened. His voice was not the one he used in the field or on a kill line. It was softened and warmed; it sounded like a man who had spent a long season in reflection and had come away with humility bruised into him. He went on in that same measured tone.

“I was, by nature, an ignorant barbarian,” he said. “I believed in my arm’s strength and in nothing else. I believed a world had value only where force measured it. So I came down from the North and did what I could to set weight where I thought weight belonged.”

He turned his head and looked at Helia as if seeing the moment she entered the story.

“In that time I met the lady Helia,” he said. “Because I was foolish and unlearned, I spoke against her. I asked whether her god would truly protect her. I profaned with an ignorant mouth.”

The voice carried the precise weight of apology that comes too late to be useful and still matters. Even Helia, who knew exactly where truth ended and story began, felt the brief shock of wondering whether she had lost a day somewhere and actually lived that conversation.

“She did not punish me,” Ketal said. “She taught me. She said that ignorance is not a sin; the refusal to teach is the sin. So she took me in.”

Ketal did not raise his voice, yet the weight of his words pressed heavier with each passing moment until even the guard instinctively lifted a hand, as if to soften the oppressive force that filled the air.

“I could not accept it at first,” Ketal said. “I refused instruction. I did wrong after wrong. Yet she did not give up. Because of her care, I began to understand the world, and in time I learned. I cried out within myself. I am wrong. I am a fool.”

“Compose yourself,” the guard said, at last a little flustered by the sincerity, and Ketal looked at Helia with a frank gratitude that would have matched a rescued man at the foot of a rope.

“She is my benefactor,” he said. “She is the master of my life and the one who saved me.”

Helia’s face threatened to slip. To hear herself called the owner of this man’s life had the taste of lamp oil and ash. She knew who he was. She knew what he had done. To pretend he served at her heel until she smiled was a distortion that made her skin crawl. However, the guard did not know these things. He nodded as a man nodded when a story landed neatly on the shape he expected.

“So it was,” he said. “Lady, is his account correct?”

“It is,” Helia said, and she forced the word out past her teeth as if she had to press it through.

The guard listened, watched her mouth, and then finally allowed his suspicion to stand down. His look at Helia turned from testing to curious, almost admiring.

“You are the Sun God’s Saintess,” he said. “You suit the name. To reform a barbarian who lives by fist and ignorance is no light thing.”

“All grace belongs to the Sun God,” Helia said. The formula steadied her.

“Please wait,” the guard answered. “I will report inside. There should be no obstacle.”

He opened the small door in the leaf of the gate and stepped through, and when the wood closed, Helia let out the breath she had held. Ketal’s smile had the shape of a man pleased by a neat cut.

“It went well,” he said.

“It did,” Helia said. “You act better than I would have guessed.”

What he had shown at the threshold had felt genuine enough to sway even her for a heartbeat. She had braced for stiffness and found instead a performance so clean that she scarcely saw the seam. It surprised her, and it also unsettled her.

Ketal shrugged as if the matter were light. “I was not acting.”

“Not acting?” she repeated.

“I embellished a little,” he allowed. “But the feeling was real.”

Gratitude, joy, praise, and reverence were never things he borrowed for the sake of a gate. They were emotions he had carried within him long before he ever set foot on this path, kept hidden from the world and revealed only when he chose to let them surface.

“I see,” Helia said.

Understanding that left a shiver down the base of her neck. Ketal moved with force, but inside that force, he kept a constant worship of the thing he called fantasy, a regard that outpaced even what she had been granted by ordination.

“I see...,” Helia murmured.

“Hm? It feels as though some distance has suddenly grown between us.”

“No, not at all. That must be your imagination,” Helia added quickly.

The guard returned.

“Permission has been given,” he said. “Enter.”

They followed him beneath the arch and set their feet on the capital’s stone.

Ketal’s step had a poised eagerness that Helia could feel even behind her shoulder. He had come to look upon the Empire, and the Empire rose to answer the look.

The capital was immense. Everything wore the polish of constant care. The streets were swept as if a thousand brooms followed every foot. No dust lay on sill or rail. No scrape showed on door or hinge. The lines were geometric, the planes were clean, and the view down each long avenue lay like a blade laid flat to show the edge.

Helia walked a dozen lengths and then slowed. She turned her head and called back to the guard with a frown that she did not bother to hide.

“Where are the people?” she asked the guard. “On my last visit, the streets were not full, but I saw faces. I have not seen a single one since we passed the gate.”

It was early morning. Even so, a city this size should have shown a market’s first carts, a baker’s door, or at least the sweepers who kept the frontages bright. The guard’s answer was a straight wall.

“It is not a matter that needs to concern you,” he said.

Helia took that rejection without a second question. She did not like it, but the Empire did not move because a Saintess disliked a sentence. Ketal lifted his chin and looked up the length of the avenue, and interest cut across his mouth like the beginning of a smile.

This is...,

Ketal murmured inwardly.

“It never ceases to amaze me,” the Abomination said within Ketal.

Without saying another word, Ketal walked with a smile. They passed through the capital’s stillness and came to the inner palace. There, they were given rooms, one for the Saintess and one for her attendant. Ketal lay back on the bed, not to sleep but to let his body settle into the building’s bass note.

A knock came shortly after. He opened the door, and Helia stood there with a measured face. He stepped back and gave her the room. Before she spoke, she drew a thin veil of holy power and pinned it to the walls so no outside ear could collect their words.

“Have you confirmed it?” she asked in a low voice. “What do you think?”

They had come to the capital to know whether the Empire had been touched by a being from the Demon Realm and, if touched, how deeply. Ketal did not answer the question.

“It is good that we came,” he said. “The smell is strong.”

“Smell,” Helia repeated, and the word did not seem like it should belong to this conversation until he nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “A thick scent. It crawled here from the Demon Realm. It is here now.”

The worst case stepped out of the box and stood in the room. Helia gulped and steadied herself against it.

“Do you know where it is?” she asked. “And can you tell me what state the capital is in?”

They needed to know the degree of rot. They needed it to decide whether to cut a limb or brew a wash. Ketal answered with the same easy plainness.

“The question is wrong,” he said. “The capital is not in a state. The capital

is

it.”

“What...?” Helia said. The word fell out and scraped her tongue.

“The outer walls,” Ketal said. “The pavements we walked. The houses we passed. This palace. These walls and floors. The bed and the coverlet. The table and the chair. All of it is part of that thing.”

***

Helia’s face set. She did not know how to make the thought stand upright. She asked the only follow-up that her mind could shape.

“You mean,” she said.

“It would not be wrong to say that this place lies within that creature’s body,” Ketal answered. “We are, in a sense, sitting upon its back. To think we are resting atop the body of one of the Oldest Ones—such luxury was rare even among those Inside”

Ketal sounded almost pleased to name it, and that made her blood go cold. She rose too fast and nearly upset the chair. Grace gathered in her hands to ward and to protect.

“There is no need to overreact,” Ketal said gently. “It cannot do anything to us at once.”

“How?” she said, and the word came rough.

“Think of a small insect on your arm,” he said. “You do not notice it for a minute, even though it sits there. We are the insects. Unless we start tearing and burning, it will not notice.”

He knew that the Primarch could feel Ketal’s weight, but he had already closed himself down to a quiet at the core. The trick he had learned from Karin served him better here than almost anything else he had taken from the Outside.

“The Primarch can likely sense me if it pays attention,” he said. “But I have folded my power. I could not hide my power when I was in the White Snowfield, but now I can. This is good.”

Helia could not match his calm. She made herself speak.

“So the Empire,” she said, “belongs to the Primarch.”

“It does,” Ketal said. “And not since yesterday. It has been so for some time.”

The truth landed without heat. Helia swayed and caught her balance with both hands on the table’s edge. She forced the world to stand still long enough to put a question into it.

“What should we do?” she asked him.

“There is nothing to do now,” Ketal said with a small lift of his shoulders. The discovery did not anger him. It did not knock him off his line. It only disgusted him.

“So it crawled out,” he said softly. “It can die for that.”

The words were spoken with a smile that did not reach his eyes. The effect raised the hair along Helia’s arms.

“For the moment,” he continued, “we will do nothing. If we stir too hard, it will notice. We will sit still. First, we meet the Emperor.”

“Yes,” Helia said. “We do not know what state His Majesty is in.”

If the Emperor had been eaten, there might still be a way to cut him free and lace him back together. If anyone in the world could attempt it, it would be Ketal, who carried the touch of the Demon Realm in his own marrow. Helia held to that thought with both hands.

Ketal glanced at her, his expression flickering with a brief, unreadable look. He understood her thoughts well enough, yet his intentions held none of the quiet mercy she hoped for.

There was no use in breaking the strand of composure she had only just tied back together. He kept that to himself and held his tongue.