Star shook its head. “Clothing, Dolls, and pellets, is all. Dolls and pellets require mage-craft, and of course, we must be able to supply the Emperor and his courtiers with clothing on demand. The fabric comes from the City. Most things come from the City, to the Receiving Annex.”

They turned a corner, and spread out before him was something he would never have expected.

An immense market-garden, full of vegetables and fruits.

“The Palace gardens only supply the needs of the Palace,” Star explained. “These gardens and others like them supply the needs of the City. When the poor were sent to the south, their homes were torn down, and the open land turned into the gardens. It is very efficient.”

The rest of the tour took place in silence. And now Kordas realized where a lot of the smoke and stink was coming from. Metal smelting facilities, tanneries, dyers, fullers, butchers . . . almost everything needed to supply the Palace, and to supply the people who still lived in the City, was made in the City. When they crossed a narrow river, though, Kordas thought he was going to choke. It was an open sewer.

“Oh gods big and small, that reeks. Where are we getting our water from?” he gagged.

“It is from a series of wells, and it is treated and purified for the Palace,” Star said. “I do not know where the people of the City get theirs.”

He hoped for their sake it was also from wells, and not from the canals, or that . . . sewer. Wells far away from the dreck that flowed under the bridge that took them back to the Palace.

The City proved to be achingly empty, though he suspected that some of those who were not “the poor” had seen the way the wind was blowing, and found a way to make their livings elsewhere, before the Emperor decided that they, too, should be sent to the southern border and the endlessly hungry war machine.

All he needs is enough people here to keep the Palace supplied and the legions supplied with specialist items, and to provide cheering crowds whenever he makes a parade. And he doesn’t need a parade all that often. He has afternoon Court and appearance dinners when he chooses, after all. Fawning courtiers, people jockeying to get his attention, whenever he chooses.

He turned the horse’s head back toward the Palace a lot sooner than he had expected to. He had seen enough for new plans to form already, and the sooner he could get some unwatched thinking-time in, the better. There was a truth emerging from all of this, and it seemed to be the greatest exploitable flaw of the Empire. Kordas’s heart pounded, because it felt as if nobody in the Emperor’s City realized it existed. None of them.

They fixate upon conquest, power, and betrayal.

What is trusted is dismissed from their attention.

—