Blood of the Emperor by Tracy Hickman Page B

warehouse door into the evening. He was already late for the council meeting but his thoughts were elsewhere.
    Soen might be obligated to the truth and to his race, Drakis clung to his obligation to the pilgrims and army that followed him, but Ethis had his own obligations that he shared with no one.
    Soen’s analysis was excellent and his advice good but Ethis had formulated a plan of his own as he gazed at the map—one that could spectacularly serve his own duty to his Queen and crumble the foundations of the Empire in a single stroke.
    All he had to do was convince his Queen to permit the impermissible.
    And keep Soen from finding out about it.

    Drakis stood once more at the edge of the subatria garden. The stars now appeared overhead but it was the faint blue light of the Aether Well that gave the space its dim, ghostly glow.
    Drakis tried to hear Mala’s voice, wishing for her council or some guidance but he was answered only by silence. If her spirit had been here it seemed to him now to have left and gone far away.
    He was alone.
    The entire world had robbed him. The elven Empire had robbed him of his dignity, his family, and his past. The faithful pilgrims had robbed him, too, of his freedom, his private hopes, and his future. The prophecy had even robbed him of his identity and remade him into a legend. Together they all had a hand in robbing him of Mala.
    Yet standing here in the broken subatria, Drakis knew there was one thing the great, nebulous They had not taken from him in all their conspiracies of fate.
    He owned his own soul.
    It raged within him, screaming at the world that had so cruelly abused him. He held fast to his pain and his outrage. It burned with purifying fire and clarifying light.
    And he believed that if he must endure it, then everyone else must endure it with him.
    “Drakis, do you know who you are?”
    The memory drifted up into his conscious mind unbidden from the place deep within him where it had lain dormant, buried beneath the House Devotions that had enslaved him seemingly a lifetime ago.
    He looked up at her with large, tear-filled eyes. He was a boy, hurt and fragile. His mother—his true mother—knelt in front of him.
    “It does not matter what they tell you, what they force you to believe.” She held him firmly by both shoulders, her eyes locked with his own in earnest instruction. “They can take everything from you but yourself.”
    She laid her hand on his heart.
    “Do you know who you are, my Drakis dear…here inside where they cannot touch you?”
    Drakis caught his breath.
    The memory faded behind his thoughts.
    He realized that he did not know himself at all.
    All his life, others had told him who he was supposed to be, which he suddenly realized was an entirely different thing. During the long nightmare of his Aether-enslaving Devotions to the Empire, it had been his elven masters who had told him and molded him into who they wanted him to be; an Impress Warrior fighting their battles for causes that were not his own. He had no coherent childhood that he could recall—even the memory of his parents and family were a confusion of different people at different times. Then the dwarf had broken the bonds of his Devotions and he knew his past was a fraud, an invention created to keep him docile and compliant to the will of his elven masters. Yet even when he was free, his identity lay with others—with the dwarf filling his mind with words of the ancient prophecy and with Belag, who so desperately wanted to find meaning in his brother’s death that he clung to his faith in Drakis as though he had been personally sent by the gods to save him. Their journey into the ancient lands of humanity he had intended as proof against his identity as the Man of Prophecy but it had ended in tragedy and with him even more firmly hailed as the fulfiller of prophecy than before. Now the Council of the Prophet and their followers all wanted him to be someone he was not.
    But, he