Even she, who had seen so much, and who had even seen this before, struggled to keep her voice steady. The wondrous vision never became less astonishing or intimidating. “I don’t know. Maybe it is a vision of the distant past, a place that once was. Maybe it is a vision of the future, of something that will become. Maybe it is a remnant of sorcery, a sorcerer’s whim woven into this lattice. An indulgence that has never faded.”

“Why?”

“Why do people have whims and fancies? You tell me, eater of every honey cake in the house.”

“But they taste so good,” he said as he recovered from the shock. “This illusion doesn’t look wicked. Does it look wicked to you?”

“It looks alive, doesn’t it? A city we can’t touch because it is only shadow and light.”

“I’ve never seen a city. Have you?”

“The intendant once traveled to the Peaceful Essence of the Divine Tranquility on the Heart Rock of the Empire.”

“Can’t we just call it the capital city?”

She elbowed him lightly. “A deputy courier must not be heard using such a disrespectful term. The intendant wrote a poem about it afterward. ‘There is no end to the flow of the waters of this life, by sun and by moon, by dark and by light, by dawn and by dusk, the avenues pulse and beat, for we are the blood in the veins of the empire, always moving and never at rest.’”

Shadow and light poured up and down the valley within the hazy night, never at rest. The moon kept on its path, as the moon must, traveling west across the zenith. It neared the edge of the circle created by the scaffolding.

“We have to get down to the pavement before the moon leaves the lacework,” she said quietly. “But you mustn’t tell anyone what I’ve shown you, Kem. Not even Joef. Promise me.”

He nodded gravely. “I promise, on my honor and in my mother’s memory.”

7 THE SOLE FRAGILE DEFENSE

DURING THE REIGN of the beloved third emperor, known as the Peony Emperor, the crown prince drank once too often from the cup of suspicion. When the emperor died, the crown prince inherited as the Honeysuckle Emperor. Most of her siblings died of one accident or another in quick succession. Those who survived were locked into a special wing of the imperial compound built for this purpose.

The Honeysuckle Emperor had a younger brother by the same mother. As a courtesy to her benevolent and respected mother she put out one of the brother’s eyes to make him ineligible to rule and placed him in charge of the newly expanded Imperial Order of Wardens. Afterward, by means of these wardens, she spread her vines throughout the empire so she might hear or see any whisper of treason against the Tranquil Throne.