"The Goblin Emperor"

[fiefoe]

Katherine Addison's underdog emperor story is a nice slow burn, and builds to a satisfying finish. Maia isn't heroic, but he has both empathy and a good head on his shoulders, which is pretty refreshing after all the GoT stuff. The world building is just right too, with airships and meaningful knots and witnesses for the dead.

• “Serenity,” Csevet said, bowing, and held open the door for Maia to enter the Untheileneise Court. [So so grateful for the audiobook narrator Kyle McCarley‎, who made those proper nouns sound so naturally exotic.]
• Maia tilted his head back to regard his cousin where he leaned, not quite lounging, against the wall. “Do not presume, cousin, when thou hast warned me of presumption so cannily.” A great many things were at that moment made worthwhile, as he watched Setheris gape and splutter like a landed fish. Remember, he said to himself, a poisonous pleasure.
• Atterezh bowed, released Maia from his draperies, and departed. Maia observed gloomily that thus far the life of an emperor seemed chiefly to involve sitting in a small room and watching other people come and go.
• Weeds thronged the cracks between the paving stones of the walkway from gate to temple, and the grass in the graveyard had grown so tall that the tops of the gravestones appeared like small, barren islands in a tempestuous and brittle sea.
• half cease-fire, half alliance—maintained between Parliament, Corazhas, and Judiciate, supporting the emperor between them like the legs of a fragile and argumentative tripod, but he had never had more than the narrowest crack of a view of them. Now, suddenly, he was surrounded by—almost drowning in—a brilliantly colored panorama: the clamoring House of Commons, the disdainful House of Blood, still resentful all these centuries later that they had to negotiate with men who were merely elected; the delicate internecine feuds of the judiciars, no fewer than eleven of whom had sent letters by the pneumatic, each with language more impenetrable than
• when Chavar arrived, indignant, slightly out of breath, and trailing secretaries as a peacock does his tail. Chavar said, “And what will happen if the inquiry should need to cross jurisdictional boundaries? We have seen that happen occasionally—there was a case of theft in which the guilty party was a bargeman, for instance—and it was … badly handled. There were satires”—which he said in the tone another man would have used for the word “cockroaches”—“
• He spoke with an accent Maia did not know, which seemed to chip the edges off all the words in its rush and tumble, for Dachensol Habrobar used five words in the time it took Maia to say one.
• “So that if you are careless, yes? If you are careless and you are walking in the Duchess Pashavel Gardens and perhaps you are tossing your signet idly from hand to hand, though it is not what we recommend, Serenity. And as you toss it—oops!—there it goes into the ornamental pond and before you can even think to wade in after it, there it is eaten by an ornamental carp, which the Pashavada import at great expense from somewhere in the west and how they keep them alive we often wonder. So you come to us in despair and embarrassment, and yet all is not lost, for we have kept the type.”
• “The Barizheise do not use signets, but each avar has a device which he uses on his war banners. That of the current Great Avar is the sea serpent the Barizheise call the Corat’ Arhos, the ‘Cruelty of Water.’
• faintest hint of a lisp brushing her sibilants. But the deeper clarity of her voice smoothed her speech into art as radiant as blown glass.
• Maia caught not one of their names, his memory already water-logged and sinking beneath the weight of the evening’s cargo.
• Reflexively, Maia read Setheris’s gestures, like a man reading a coded message to which he has memorized the key. Cold anger, nervousness, an underlying smugness of certainty. Despairingly he thought, I shall never know anyone as well as I know Setheris, and said in reply, “Cousin.”
• Maia nodded to Csevet’s inquiring look, and then waited while Csevet went to investigate. It was not an emperor’s place to find out anything for himself.
• The reminder that other lives had tragedies without reference to his own was both salutary and painful. He said, “We would visit her, if it is allowed.”
• assured him as the three of them stood up again. “We wished only to make our case that the matter should be decided by the Corazhas and not merely … Nedaö, what is the word?” “Veklevezhek,” Min Vechin said. “It is a goblin word, and it means to decide what to do about a prisoner by staking him below the tideline while you argue.”
• He bit the words back and looked next to the Witnesses vel ama, the Witnesses who gave voice to the literally voiceless; there was one for the river and one for the game preserve that had become embroiled in the dispute. Neither Witness spoke at length.
• As he traced the course of the Upazhera with one finger, that thought abruptly upended itself: If I must make at least one of them unhappy, and if it cannot be determined that any one disputant deserves to be made unhappy more than the other two, then the only answer is to make all of them unhappy. And if he was not trying to juggle three sets of competing and conflicting demands, the solution was easy.
• We further stipulate that the Dorashada and Nelozho Township will form a cooperative militia to patrol the Veremnet against the poachers and bandits which apparently haunt it. And finally, we stipulate that the Dorashada and Nelozho Township in cooperation, each bearing an equal share of the cost, will build a bridge over the Upazhera; each will appoint a toll collector, and the toll monies will not go to Thu-Cethor, but first to the maintenance of the bridge and second to the relief of the poor of Nelozho. Both these endeavors are to be in place and demonstrated to the prince’s circuit rider before midsummer.”
• Pashavar laughed, like a crack of thunder; Maia realized that these two men were genuinely friends, and they were doing him the honor, and the great kindness, of letting him see their friendship.
• “So did our mother,” Maia said. “We think it enough to inflict marriage upon our empress.”
• displeased. “We have thought you were too rule-abiding to be a good ruler—a paradox, you see—but perhaps we were wrong.” “But you’re the Witness for the Judiciate!” Maia protested, which made everyone laugh. “We said rule, not law,” Pashavar said tartly. “There is a difference, Serenity. An emperor who breaks laws is a mad dog and a danger, but an emperor who will never break a rule is nearly as bad, for he will never be able to recognize when a law must be changed.”
• The Emperor of the Ethuveraz cannot become vengeful, for once begun, there will never be an end of it. Ulis, he prayed, abandoning the set words, let my anger die with him. Let both of us be freed from the burden of his actions. Even if I cannot forgive him, help me not to hate him.
• Beneath the drape was a model of a section of a river—of the Istandaärtha. There were tiny houses on one side and pasture on the other, with little black-and-white dairy cows grazing on green velvet. The road on each side was paved with tiny quartz pebbles, smooth and gleaming like cobbles after rain. The river banks were rocky, with twisted verashme trees showing defiant golden-red blossoms. The river itself was brown and roiling, rendered, he thought, with silk and clusters of fish scales. At one point, a tree trunk surged angrily out of the water; he was amazed at the impression of movement and ferocity, at how deftly the model-maker had conveyed the power of the Istandaärtha. And in the center of this marvel, the focus and anchor, was the bridge. To Maia’s eye, instantly adapted to the delicacy of the world the model showed, it was a massive thing, a brass and iron monster, four great square towers, two on each bank, throwing out arm after arm toward each other until they met and clasped claws in the middle. He saw, with a jolt that was not surprise, that the spars of the bridge had been engraved to suggest the claws he had fancied. He leaned closer and saw the ugly, benevolent faces of four tangrishi at the top of each tower.
• He was too entranced by the model. As he looked closer, he could see that there were tiny people among the houses: a woman hanging laundry, a man weeding his vegetable garden, two children playing hider and seeker. There was even a tiny tabby cat sunning itself in a window. On the road toward the bridge, a wagon pulled by two dappled horses had stopped while the driver rummaged for something beneath his seat. Looking to the other side of the river, Maia suddenly spotted the cowherd among the cows, and he barely restrained a crow of delight. The cowherd, goblin-dark, was sitting cross-legged beneath the only tree in the pasture and playing a flute so carefully rendered that each fingerhole was distinctly visible.
• Maia watched as the two ends of the bridge reached slowly and yearningly for each other, knowing he was as wide-eyed and entranced as a child listening to a wonder-tale and in that moment not caring. The bridge was more marvelous than any amount of imperial dignity was worth. He watched especially closely as the claws clasped again, seeing the jointed spurs curl around each other into an unbreakable hold.
• “How could you have?” Maia said. “We admit, it does not improve our picture of Dach’osmer Tethimar that he would stop on his way to murder us to indulge in petty gloating, but certainly you could not be expected to discern that he would go from petty gloating to murder.”
• “It is the nature of all persons to hold on to power when they have it,” Shulivar said. “Thus it stagnates and becomes clouded, poisonous. Radical action is necessary to free it. And if you look, you will see that it is already working. If I had not done what I did, a half-goblin such as yourself would never have gained the throne of the Ethuveraz.” Maia opened his mouth, then closed it again. On that point, Shulivar was right. “I can already see the changes,” Shulivar said. “You do not hold on to power as your father and grandfather did. You are not afraid to let it go. And you have new ideas, ideas that no emperor before you has ever had.”
• “Does it matter?” said Shulivar. “I regret all the deaths, but I repeat. It had to be done.” He bowed his head, the first gesture toward conventional etiquette which he had made. “There is nothing more to say, Serenity. Truly.” It was a dismissal, and Maia was too horrified to argue with it. He nodded to Ishilar, and Shulivar was taken away.
• “Yes, thank you. She would not be what she is if she had ever had something given her that was a burden equal to her strength. One hears people say it all the time—‘she should have been a son to her father’—but it is true. If she had been a son, she would have had a duty that went beyond children. And that duty is not congenial to everyone.”
• He was pleased and impressed by Vedero’s arrangements on her flat bit of roof. She used the adjacent chimney both for warmth and as a windbreak, and she had a squat brazier in the shape of a toad to mark the opposite corner of her observatory.
• The eclipse was beautiful and fascinating; all four of them ended up taking turns with Vedero’s telescope—a remarkable thing engraved like a unicorn’s horn.
• “An automaton? Of a unicorn?” “Yes. Steam-powered—by a pipe from her furnace at the moment, for while she can get it to raise and lower its head, she has not yet figured out how to make it walk, so it does not matter that it is tethered to her study wall. She uses it as a coatrack—as she is very short, it is convenient for her to have a coatrack that will duck its head.”
• “When he said you could not be our friend. For if he meant by that that we could not be fond of you, or you could not be fond of us, then he simply lied. It is nonsensical. It denies the truth, which is that we—” He broke off, dropped formality as deliberately as smashing a plate. “I am fond of both of you. If I were not, how could I possibly bear to spend half my life in your company? And surely the same must be true in reverse. At least, I hope it must.”