Stands a Shadow Read Online Free Page A

explaining the more exotic items displayed there. Deajit sampled a small spoonful of lobster meat, then tried a mouthful of jellied marrow from a snow mammoth. He nodded his head in appreciation.
    Ché paused, and sought the cover of an alcove containing a bronze life-sized statue of Nihilis. With the First Patriarch’s strikingly dour features looming over him, features more famous now than when he had been alive, Ché removed a small vial from a pocket in his robe. He unscrewed the lid and tilted it upside down with his forefinger upon the opening. Carefully he closed it again, then dabbed the wet finger across his lips. For a second, the scent of something faintly noxious came to his nostrils, and then it was gone.
    Deajit was wandering into one of the side rooms along the main hallway, glass still in his hand. Passing a table, Ché snatched up a glass of wine too, and followed him inside.
    A viewing gallery ran around the upper half of the room. Ché stopped at the rail where he could see Deajit in the corner of his eye, then looked down on a smaller conference taking place below. A few dozen priests were in attendance, most of them strikingly young. Their faces were keen as they listened to a man speaking before a tall mosaic map of the Empire. The priest appeared to be discussing the two-handed approach to governance.
    Deajit sipped his wine and listened to the talk below. A few other priests lingered in the gallery, watching or muttering quietly amongst themselves. Ché remained where he was. He was careful not to touch his own wine, or indeed to lick his own lips.
    Of their own volition his eyes flickered over the details of the map, for he was a lover of such works.
    He observed the preponderance of white that represented the nations under Mann dominion, a whiteness that had spread across most of the known world like an encroachment of glacial ice. Then he studied the warmer pinks of those who still stood against it: the League of Free Ports in the southern Midèr ē s, isolated and alone; Zanzahar and the Alhazii Caliphate to the east, sole suppliers of blackpowder from the mysterious, secret lands of the Isles of Sky; the smatterings of small mountain kingdoms in the Aradères Mountains and High Pash.
    He knew he would soon be venturing to one of those nations shaded in human pink, where he would be accompanying an invasion, of all things, to aid in the defeat of a people whom the Empire had branded their most dangerous of enemies; though Ché suspected it was more to do with their grain and mineral wealth than any real threat they might pose, not to mention their arrogant stand of defiance against the ideology of Mann. Still, it would be a chance to escape the confines of Q’os, all its fanaticism and paranoia and games of power that were the life blood of the imperial capital, and all the petty little tasks of murder that had remarkably become his life.
    Ché looked to the window that ran along the far wall at the level of the viewing gallery, gazing out north over the slumbering metropolis of Q’os. A few skyships ranged over the scene, their propulsion tubes leaving trails of fire and smoke across the starry skies. Below them lay the island city, a great handprint of glittering lights and manmade coastline pressed upon the black quilt of the sea.
    Ché traced the outline of the island-sized hand, until his attention came to rest on the First Harbour – that stretch of water between the thumb of the island and its forefinger, where pinpricks of night-lamps glimmered in the darkness; the fleet that would carry him off to war as soon as the command was given.
    ‘As Nihilis taught us,’ the speaker below him was saying, ‘and as we have practised and refined over the years of our expansion, to rule absolutely is to rule on the one hand with force, and on the other hand with consent. People must become complicit in their own submission to Mann. They must come to understand that this is the best and truest way