Five Hundred Years After (Phoenix Guards) Read Free

for some fifteen hundred years, turned to His Majesty and announced, in his droning voice, “A messenger from Her Highness Sennya, Duchess of Blackbirdriver, and Dzur Heir.”
    His Majesty was just then amusing himself in a customary way, between bantering conversations with various courtiers: He was attempting to make himself angry, then sad, then happy, in order to make the Orb, which rotated above his head, change color. He was, as usual, achieving only indifferent success, wherefore the Orb glowed with the pale red of annoyance, which changed instantly to a delicate green as, at the Lord Brudik’s announcement, he looked up with an expression of mild interest.
    “Ah,” he said. “From Sennya.”
    “That is it, Your Majesty,” said Brudik.
    “Well,” said His Majesty, trying to remember if he had ever heard the name Sennya, and, if so, in what context, “then, let the messenger come before me.”
    As the worthy Seb steps up to address the Emperor Tortaalik, we will
permit ourselves to quickly sketch the changes that have occurred in the outer, and, to some extent, the inner character of His Majesty since we last had occasion to bring him to the attention of our readers, which was at the beginning of his reign, in the history of The Phoenix Guards .
    The Emperor, we should note, had changed but little in appearance. He had begun to paint his fingernails, forehead, and ears (all of which on this occasion were a bright red that set off the gold of his costume), and he now wore diamonds on all occasions, in the form of rings, bracelets, earrings, headdress, and necklaces; but neither his face nor his physique had undergone any transformation excepting only the addition of a few lines in the former and a bit of settling in the latter. Our readers will remember his delicate skin, of which he took greater care than ever, bathing every day in scented oils; his pale blue, narrow eyes; and his fine, yellow hair, which was of medium length and curled inward below his ears.
    As for those aspects of his character which are not readily visible, we may say, with the perspective that only distance brings, that the fundamental shift in his personality had begun some four hundred years earlier, when he was forced to exile his sister for taking part in an attempt to introduce poisons into his drink through certain specially prepared goblets which were impenetrable to the mysterious powers of the Orb, although not, as it turned out, to the more mundane abilities of Gyorg Lavode. In point of fact, it is certainly the case that Tortaalik’s sister had been the chief mover behind the entire affair, which information His Majesty did his best to suppress, although whether out of affection for his sister, a desire to limit the scandal, or for other reasons entirely, we will not speculate. But he had certainly changed since then, becoming gradually, over the course of the next few centuries, at once whimsical and morose, devoting much effort to idle amusements, and much time to doing nothing whatsoever, this pursuit being occasionally interrupted by sudden and short-lived periods of intense interest in the doings of the State of which he stood at the prow.
    Of the many changes in the makeup of the court, the two most significant were the retirement of His Discretion, the Duke of Wellborn, and the appointment of Jurabin to the position of Prime Minister, which, in combination, gave His Majesty the inclination and the leisure to pursue his own amusements, such as they were. The reader may rest assured that, if these two changes have more far-reaching effects than we intend to describe at this moment, we will discuss them as occasion warrants.
    The messenger, Seb, to whom we now have the honor of returning, performed the proper obeisance before His Majesty and said, “I bring you, Sire, greetings from the holdings of Her Highness, Sennya, and I bear her
wishes that Your Majesty will deign to hear the message she has done me the honor to