Chapter 178: Only His Eyes
The inner palace did not sleep these days. It waited, the way a house waits when there is a dying man in the best room and everyone under the roof has begun, in spite of themselves, to listen for the moment the listening can stop.
Tianyu came up through its layers with his head a little bowed and his step gone soft, a young man hollowed by grief rather than wine, and the watchers who would have turned any other soul away at this hour found they had no heart to do it to this one.
The guards at the inner doors crossed their spears more from habit than belief.
"Your Highness. The hour, it is not..."
"I know the hour." His voice came quiet, and a little broken, pitched for men who had stood a long cold watch over a dying king and had fathers of their own somewhere. "Forgive me. I cannot sleep. I keep thinking there will be a morning soon when I am not allowed to do this, when I will have all the sleep in the world and no one left to bring it to." He looked at the doors instead of the men, as though the wood itself were hard to face. "Let me sit with him a while. That is all I want. I would like what is left of my father while it is still here to be wanted. It is the one thing left that a useless son can do for him."
The spears lifted. One of the men said something low about His Highness being a good son to come at such an hour. Tianyu thanked him by name, and meant it about as much as he meant most things.
Inside the antechamber a physician dozed over a tray of cooling needles, and a night nurse came to her feet with a startled bow. He raised a gentle hand before she could find her voice.
"Leave us. Please." A sad, kind curve of the mouth. "I will not keep him long, and I would like the room to ourselves while I do. Whatever you would do for him this next hour, I can sit and hold his hand in your place. Surely the heavens grant a son that much."
They went, grateful in the way exhausted people are grateful to be handed permission to rest, and the door to the inner chamber swung shut behind him with the heavy, final note of good wood in a rich house.
And Wei Tianyu was alone with his father at last.
The grief left his face the way it always left it, with no effort at all, and what stayed behind was the smooth, pleasant, attentive nothing that was the whole truth of him.
He crossed the chamber, past the standing screens and the braziers banked low against the dawn chill, to the great bed at the heart of the room.
The bed was a monument. Black wood carved with nine dragons climbing toward a single sun, draped in imperial yellow, broad enough to sleep a whole family, built to frame the most powerful man beneath heaven in the full measure of his glory.
The thing lying in the middle of it had been that man, once.
Emperor Tianheng had filled a doorway in his prime. He had snapped a rebel general’s spine across his knee at forty and raised his Qi to a height that left the ground restless when he chose to let it show.
What lay against the yellow bolsters now was a long grey ruin, the flesh sunk in against the bones, the heavy hands fallen to slack claws on the silk, the breath dragging in and out of him in a thin, patient rasp that was the loudest thing in the room.
The chamber smelled of bitter medicine and sandalwood smoke laid over something beneath it that no incense in the palace had ever quite managed to cover, the smell of a body surrendering its tenancy one room at a time.
The black hair had gone wholly to grey, the proud jaw hung slack, and the strength that had held an empire upright had drained from his limbs and left them where they lay, dead weight wearing the rings of a living god.
Only his eyes were alive.
They shifted as Tianyu drew near, hauling across the canopy and down, the one piece of him left under his own command, and they found their son and locked onto him.
They were not the soft, far-drifting eyes of a man dying gently in his sleep. They were aware. Wholly, terribly aware. Behind them a mind as keen as it had been the day it signed its first death warrant lay sealed inside a body that had become its coffin, and as they came to rest on Tianyu, a heat rose into them that would have flattened cities if the rest of him could only have followed it.
Rage. Pure, helpless, boiling rage. And beneath the rage, in the place his father surely believed it did not reach, something Wei Tianyu found a great deal more nourishing.
Fear.
His father had always read a room faster than any man standing in it. He could read this one. He understood, lying there in the wreck of himself, that the youngest and softest of his sons had not crossed the sleeping palace at dawn out of love, and he could do precisely nothing with that understanding but let it burn behind his eyes.
He looked down at the whole of it without hurry, at the ruin and the rings and the furious living eyes trapped in the wreck of the face, and he smiled at his father with a tenderness that touched every part of his own except the part that lay behind it.
He drew the lone chair to the bedside, unhurried, lowered himself into it, and leaned in close, the way a loving son leans in so a failing man will not have to spend his strength to hear.
"So." The voice was soft and warm and almost too pleasant, the voice the whole court had agreed years ago that it need not take seriously. "How are we feeling tonight, dear father of mine?"
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