Free Gods of Nabban by K. V. Johansen

was an echo of the emperor in the same imperial colours; Rat, who was called Lau in the palace, was the woman who held her parasol.
    Captain Anri of the Wind in the Reeds did not watch the prisoner, but the courtiers. There were others, who looked like slaves of the court and carried no obvious weapons, but whose eyes watched all about. One of the princess’s ladies was such. Diman.
    The wizards of the imperial corps wore many-layered court gowns too, but their outer one was a deep, clear blue. They worked by rote and book and dared nothing that had not been well-tested and attested and set down.
    No priests. The priests of the Father and Mother were not in favour at court these days. The last attendants at the shrine of the Father in the palace gardens had quietly withdrawn to some hermitage after Yao’s death. Otono’s anger had at least been confined to destroying the shrine and ending all imperial gifts to the thousand others throughout the land.
    Rat touched the amulet she wore about her neck, against her skin. A hidden trinket, a river-stone with a hole worn through it, strung on a leather thong. Comfort. Promise. Not of a god, as the barbarians of other lands might wear amulets of their gods when they went travelling far from the land of their birth and their folk. Promise of the memory of a god.
    The prisoner whimpered, wailed, wordless. The sound trailed away into sobbing, then dissolved into screams as the executioner’s assistants laid hands on his raw flesh again. They bound him to the brass rings set into the stone table that was the only man-made structure other than the wharves on this islet, which lay just beyond the sandbanks and breakwater walls of the lagoon.
    To be disembowelled alive, gutted like a fish and unpacked, spread out for the gulls and ravens . . . that was what was meant by a traitor’s death. He screamed and screamed in his animal terror, not yet touched with the knife.
    The emperor’s bodyguard, the full troop of eight giants, none under seven feet tall, stood ranged behind Otono, a half-circle about him. For a moment, as if in the corner of her eye, half-seen, and yet not seen at all, there was light, gathering nowhere and everywhere, as if it might pour through from somewhere, make—someone, the prisoner, the executioner, the emperor, someone or anyone—a blazing beacon of flesh, a fire shaped in human form.
    There was no time to gather any defence against it, to know what it might be, breaking into the world, where it might unloose itself. All in a heartbeat.
    There was a great shout that bypassed the ears.
    A sound like thunder, and the rock beneath her feet lurched. Branched lightning struck, searing the eye. Not from the blue sky; it arced over the table, snapped between rocks. The earth heaved. Waves leapt, flinging spray into the air from the far side of the isle. The executioner lay dead, a charred sprawl, smoking. The table was shattered and fallen. She could see the bare and bloody foot, that only, of the condemned man, a lightning-broken shackle beside his ankle. The rest of him was hidden behind the shattered table from which he had been spilt. The emperor lay flat on the ground among his guards and his wizards and his ladies. All that, Rat saw in a single flash as she fell sideways, deafened, blinded, but sound returned in voices screaming. To lie stunned, to gather her wits, to try to comprehend . . . no time. Move. Act. She crawled to where she could look again.
    They were stirring all about her, the fallen flowers of the court, the bright silks, the guards in gilded scale and silk-swathed helmets. They clambered like clumsy, uncertain kittens on all fours, mewling. The emperor’s parasol-bearer sat up on her knees and wailed, pawing at the emperor, who flopped all limp and slack as she hauled him into her arms. Foolish woman. She should be giving thanks to the Old Great Gods she was spared.
    The emperor was certainly