Читать книгу The Tower of Living and Dying - Anna Spark Smith - Страница 24

When they had all left, Orhan went to his books, tried to work. The ancient tomes of the Imperial ledgers. Give himself something else to worry about.

Any fool could assassinate someone, if they really put their mind to it, as the history of Irlast so often proved. Making things better. That took effort. That was the work. March Verneth is dying. So what? The weary business of remaking the world, that must still go on. This city is dying, the richest empire the world has ever known, her beggars wear silk and satin, eat rotting scraps off plates of gold. Immish and Chathe and the other great powers laugh at us and do not bother to cover their mouths. Sorlost is a dead man’s dreaming. A useless heap of crumbled rock. Weak and defenceless and worn down. But I, Orhan lied to himself every night in the dark, I am a capable man, a learned man, I can change that.

Several streets had been destroyed in the rioting that had followed the attack on the palace. Fine, lofty shops and town houses, and, behind them, tenement buildings with broken-down walls and ceilings, floors running with human sewage, whole families crammed into single windowless rooms. ‘Tear them all down,’ Orhan had ordered, ‘rebuild them, clean them up.’

‘And the cost, My Lord Nithque?’ Secretary Gallus had asked him.

‘Levy a tax on something. Appeal to the goodwill of the high families. Borrow it.’

‘And the cost of expanding the Imperial army, My Lord Nithque?’

‘Levy a tax on something. Appeal to the goodwill of the high families. Borrow it.’

‘We do not need an expanded army. We do not need to rebuild a few ruined houses. This is Sorlost!’ the Emperor and the Emperor’s High Lords told him curtly, when he suggested any of these things.

The outbreak of deeping fever in Chathe had flared up again. Worse than before. The gates must be closed again to Chathean travellers, trade would suffer, everyone from the hatha addicts in the gutters to the High Lords who refused to fund his army would complain.