Ogmios knew that emperors used waiting as a language. Rhaellion made him wait exactly forty minutes.
The Tower Master spent the time at the window of the audience hall, watching the city and counting. It was habit; whenever his mind stood idle, it took inventory. The masts rising from the harbor were fewer than last month. The line of oxcarts before the granaries had grown longer; so the unsold harvest was still piling up. And the morning bell of the Sun Temple had rung only twice, though the rule was three. Small things. But empires did not fall to great blows; they fell to the sum of small things, and no one kept that sum better than Ogmios.
The door opened. Rhaellion entered wearing not his ceremonial robe but the plain tunic of his morning drill, and that was a message: I will waste no ceremony on you. Ogmios bowed; precisely as much as required, not a finger more.
"Your Majesty."
"Master." The emperor did not sit. That, too, was a message. "A man who arrives before dawn is either very frightened or very eager. Which are you?"
"Neither, Your Majesty. Merely sleepless." Ogmios laid the leather file from under his arm on the table and opened it. "No one survived Verren, that much is true. But a caravaner bound for Verren lodged there the night before the attack. He speaks of what he saw while fleeing west. My men took his statement last night."
Rhaellion lifted the parchment and read. Ogmios knew exactly which line the emperor's eyes would stop on, because he had placed that line at the center of the file with his own hands.
The man who walked before the army had hair white as snow. And his eyes, the gods as my witness, were violet as amethyst.
The emperor's face did not change. But the hand holding the parchment stayed in the air one breath too long after he finished reading. Ogmios recorded it. He knows. Of course he knows.
"Rumor exaggerates," Rhaellion said at last. He set the parchment back in the file. "A frightened caravaner sees every color in the dark."
"Of course, Your Majesty. I thought the same." Ogmios closed the file. "Which is why I had the statement sealed and destroyed before it could reach the clerks. Palaces leak. And some words, once leaked, can never be gathered back."
They were silent for a time. Both men were thinking of the same word, and neither said it. The unspoken word stood in the room like a third person.
"My chamberlain says you have a solution," the emperor said. "Let us hear it."
"My solution is for the council, Your Majesty." Ogmios inclined his head slightly. "Forgive me, but the worth of this solution lies in how it is heard. If I present it to you in a private room, it is a proposal. If I present it before the council..." He paused a moment. "...it is a hope. And right now the empire does not need another army. It needs hope."
Rhaellion looked at him for a long while. Ogmios did not stir beneath the gaze; he had known that look for years. It was the look a man used when weighing a tool he did not trust, and Ogmios took no offense at it. Tools take no offense.
"Noon," the emperor said, and walked to the door. "I am convening the council."
Upon the dome of the Great Council Hall was painted the founding of the empire; Arturio Galland before the walls of Helios, sword raised to heaven. From his place beside the columns Ogmios studied the dome, and the usual thought came again. The painter drew the walls wrong. The eastern bastion did not yet exist in that century. No one ever noticed. People loved to look at their founding legends. They did not love to see them.
The hall was full and loud. The envoys of the twenty great houses, the lord of the treasury, the army's commanders, the aged legate of Solaris, and the crowd of provincial nobility; all speaking at once, none listening. Ogmios listened. Listening was his trade.
The lord of the treasury held the floor, and his voice had begun to crack. "...the granaries are full, my lords, yes, full! But a full granary means an empty coffer! Anvil's ships have turned back a third convoy at Parna. The southern markets are closed. The grain rots in our hands, and the legions' payday comes round again every month. I cannot pay a million soldiers in spoiled wheat!"
"Then march the soldiers west and let them earn their pay!" A fat count with lands on the Kisabran border had surged to his feet. "Verren has fallen! Who is next? My lands? What do you think lies behind Oliar, my lords? We do!"
"Oliar holds," said an old marshal of the army, but there was a weariness in his voice that even he did not believe.
"Verren held too!"
The hall roared again. Within the noise, Ogmios read the faces one by one and entered them into the ledgers of his mind. The count is afraid; his land lies on the road of the front. The marshal is tired; he has seen two wars and cannot carry a third. The treasury lord is honest; the most dangerous kind. The legate of Solaris has not spoken a word; Solaris no longer listens, it takes notes. Every man had a price, every fear had a use. To Ogmios's eye the hall was not a council but an instrument waiting to be tuned.
And above it all sat Rhaellion on the throne; silent, as if carved from granite. The emperor did not speak, because he was the last man in this hall who stayed silent when he had nothing to say. Ogmios respected that. To underestimate Rhaellion would be the deadliest mistake in this game, and Ogmios did not make mistakes.
The count was still shouting. "...and the people are talking, my lords! Every refugee caravan from the west is a caravan of rumors! Do you know what they tell in the market squares? A demon, they say! A demon whose spells unravel, whose arrows melt! My soldiers are afraid before they have even fought!"
There, thought Ogmios. The door is open.
He rose.
When the Tower Master rose, twenty shouting men fell silent. That silence had taken him years to earn, and Ogmios never wasted it. He did not walk to the rostrum; he spoke from where he stood, in a low voice, because a low voice forces men to lean in and listen.
"The honored count is right," he said. "And the honored treasury lord is right. And the marshal as well." He surveyed the hall slowly. "You are all right, and that, precisely, is the catastrophe. Because a problem in which everyone is right cannot be solved with armies. Sending one more legion west is wrapping gold cloth around a bleeding wound. The problem is not the number of our soldiers, my lords. The problem is what the people still believe."
"Belief does not fill bellies, Master," said the treasury lord.
"It is the only thing that does." Ogmios turned to him. "A soldier does not die for his wage; he dies for what he believes. A farmer sows only so long as he believes we will guard his harvest. The count's soldiers do not fear the demon; they fear that the empire cannot stop him. And the only medicine for fear..." He paused, and the pause held the hall's breath. "...is hope."
"And you would sell us hope, mage?" A young noble laughed from the back rows. "Do you distill it in that tower of yours?"
A few men laughed with him. Ogmios smiled too; a patient, almost gentle smile. This boy's father owes me. His voice should not be so loud. Noted.
"No, young man. Hope is not distilled." The smile vanished. "Hope is remembered. And there is something this empire must remember. Fourteen centuries ago, when this continent lay in an age a thousand times darker than ours, when mankind stood at the edge of extinction, whose sword founded this city? Look at the dome, my lords."
Twenty pairs of eyes rose, unwilling, to Arturio's fresco.
"Higher," said Ogmios. "Arturio founded this empire, yes. But the city Arturio took, who founded it a thousand years before him? In whose name was the first stone laid? You all know the legend. You heard it from your grandmothers. The one called from another world, who raised the city of the sun, who led mankind out of the dark..." He released the word into the hall, and the hall spoke it for him. The whisper ran along the benches like a wave.
The Hero.
"A fairy tale," said the marshal, but his voice was not certain.
"Perhaps." Ogmios shrugged. "But the rite of that fairy tale still lies in the tower archives, marshal. For a thousand years no tower has dared attempt it, for its cost is heavy and its success..." he allowed himself an honest hesitation, "...not assured. I am prepared to lay that cost upon my own tower. If we succeed, one of the legend's blood will stand upon this empire's walls, and the rumor of the hero will drown the rumor of the demon in the west. If we fail..." He surveyed the hall one last time. "...the people will see that their empire attempted everything for their sake. Both outcomes serve us, my lords. And at this moment there is no other proposal in this hall that wins at both ends."
The silence stretched. Then the Kisabran count slowly sat, and the treasury lord looked down at his papers, and the young noble said nothing. Ogmios turned to the throne without waiting, and bowed.
"The decision, of course, belongs to His Majesty."
Rhaellion's grey eyes weighed him. The whole hall had turned toward the emperor, and Ogmios knew where the weight of all those eyes would push the man on the throne; for he had carried that weight into this hall with his own hands.
"The tower will bear the cost," the emperor said at last. His voice was stone. "And you, Master, the cost of failure as well." He rose. "Prepare the rite."
The hall surged to its feet and bowed. The murmur spilled through the doors into the corridors; by evening the whole city would be talking, and within three days, every province. Ogmios stood motionless, head bowed, eyes on the floor, and in that brief moment when no one could see, he allowed himself a smile.
Hope is dry grass. It burns well.