“Very well, sir,” Caret’ax growls. “Will you need some furniture sent up?”
“No, thank you, Caret’ax. We’ll be fine here.”
The caveman looks around the completely bare room. “If you say so, sir. Good night.”
He gets into the elevator.
“Get some sleep,” Mareliux calls to him. “We’ll need you in the days ahead.”
The doors close.
“Oh,” I suddenly realize. “This is the tower you showed me from that first place, before the fireworks and the missile.”
“It is,” Mareliux says and squeezes me harder. “The tallest building on Khav.”
“We should be pretty safe here, then.”
He sniffs my hair. “My love. You speak Khavgrese very well now. I’m astonished at how fluent you are.”
“Vera helped me,” I tell him. “She’s seen me learn many things before, so she knows exactly how to teach me in the fastest way. She knows me better than anyone, except you.”
“Perhaps,” my prince says. “But I know you through the Syntrix. No AI can compete with that. Not even Bellatriz. Now come along. I want to show you something.”
I look out at the palace, where the lights have come on, an ocean of light that stretches to the horizon on many directions. “Where can we go from here?”
He takes off his sword belt and places it on the floor. “You may take some time off, Bellatriz.”
“Oh,thankyou,”the sword AI says with clear sarcasm. “How did you know that staring at a stone floor from up close is my dream vacation?”
Mareliux obviously wants some real privacy, so I take off Vera and put her a safe distance away from Bellatriz, right next to the window so she can see out. I don’t want her bullied by that sword AI.
We go back into the elevator. “Now, they say that Aderianux was crazy,” Mareliux says as he touches the wall panel. “But he had something that many emperors never had. Perhaps you will be able to guess what that was.”
I don’t really notice the elevator moving, but I think it drops a small distance, like one floor.
The doors open into a dark space. We step out, and a warm light comes on. It’s a living space, made to be as comfortable as possible for one person. There’s a big armchair of an alien design, but it looks comfortable and inviting. There are tables and a big bed, as well as simple decoration. The floor is covered by soft carpets, and the walls are full of artworks of many different types. Four of them in particular catch my eye. They’re hanging side by side, and they shimmer with movement despite clearly being completely still.
They’re not photographs and not videos, but they shimmer with woven light. Each picture is a portrait of a person, the same quickly shifting through different ages. They start with round babyfaces and then flick smoothly through the same Khavgren’s face as it grows and matures. I’ve seen similar things online, but those are nowhere near as smooth and as fine as these. They’re not screens, but seem to be made from thousands of hyper fine fibers that move and only become visible where they intersecteach other. There are three faces, two girls and one boy. The fourth picture is of a couple of adults, and it’s not moving like the three others. The couple are dressed in Imperial robes, and the man is smiling as he holds the woman to him with one arm around her waist and two tentacles around her shoulders. One of them is naughtily curled around her breast outside the clothing, and the woman is turning her face up and smiling.
“Aderianux?” I ask and point to it.
“And Empress Bavinet,” Mareliux confirms. “That’s not an official portrait, as I’m sure you realize.”
“It’s just a picture that they liked,” I agree. “It looks like they wereposingfor an official one, and by the end they loosened up and looked like that. It’s cute. They look like they had fun together.”
Mareliux lifts his eyebrows. “Not bad, Umbra. That’s how it was made, by all accounts. I’ve never seen a portrait of any other Imperator look like that. They’re always serious and stately. But I found this place when I was exploring the palace as a child. I doubt anyone else knows about it. The elevator has no button for this floor. Only a curious child will play with the control panel and then stumble upon a combination that takes him to a secret place.”
I look around the room. It’s big and comfortable and nice, but there are no windows. “So is this where he would relax when he wasn’t looking down on his palace from the tower?”
“I doubt Aderianux himself was here much. But he decided to have this place made, of course. Because, as I said, he had something of great value that most other emperors would kill for.”
I look up at the double portrait. “A wife who loved him.”
Mareliux turns his head, raising his eyebrows in surprise. “Is this female intuition, or am I giving you the answers to my riddles through the Syntrix without knowing it?”
“Just a guess,” I admit. “But that picture is very telling.”
“Intuition, then. Yes, the empress loved her emperor, despite his eccentricity. So whenever he went up the tower to keep lookout, she came up in this tower with him. She stayed up there until she got tired of the view, and then she went down here. To still be close to him, you understand. She was the only person in the galaxy that Aderianux would trust. And his trust was well placed. She never plotted against him. Instead she played the Court politics that he disliked and kept him safe that way.” He gives me a sideways glance. “I always thought the stories of their love were exaggerated and silly. Now I know they may well have been perfectly true. It is my guess that they were likely Soulbound without telling anyone about it.”
