The emperor’s poison-tester was tall, gaunt, and feared. She swept like a vulture through the emperor’s court, shoulders hunched, smelling faintly of burned oil. Twice each day she tasted the emperor’s food, and the court watched to see that she did not fall dead before them.
Officially she was his Glory’s poison tester. But those who spoke ill of the emperor were wont to fall ill themselves, to sickness that made their bodies twist and writhe. The emperor called it the wrath of the gods, cast upon the disloyal. The entire court agreed.
Still, few spoke to her.
Except for Amra, a diplomat from Sunamey, who was jovial to everyone, cordial to her. He sat in the poisoner’s laboratory one evening, watching the sun set above the domed spires of the city and the sand dunes beyond.
He nodded to a copper pot which the emperor’s poisoner set to boil. “Who’s the lucky fellow?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.”
Amra was a stout man of middling years. Sunamey was in the east, but he dressed in the Imperial fashions: a trim beard in a crescent moon around his face, and robes as bright as poppies.
“Perhaps you will give me three guesses,” he said.
“Amra. The walls have ears.”
The poisoner had lank dark hair and a sallow face, as though all the sunlight she saw was through the laboratory window. The laboratory was high in the northmost tower, close to the emperor’s quarters, so that the poisoner could be called upon all times of day or night, whenever the emperor was hungry.
Amra said, “Come, Serash, the walls do not care for idle gossip.”
“Nor do I.”
Serash set a lid upon the pot, to let the Madonna berry boil and distill. She didn’t know who it was for. Maybe the emperor would tell her tonight.
“You, though, do not mind the walls.” She plucked at Amra’s sleeve, Imperial fashion. “Better than Sunamey, eh?” He had been at court for years. This harvest season he’d gone back early, to pay his respects to the winner of a bloody revolt, but he was at court again before the grain was stored.
Amra laughed and looked aside. “They say you do not mind. That you can slip through stone when the sun is down and visit unsuspecting men in their sleep.”
“To breathe death into their faces.”
“Most likely.”
“Better that than crawl into their beds.”
Serash stepped away and stirred the Madonna berry. Her tongue flitted out, tasted the spoon. Amra raised his eyebrows.
“Tell me that is pretense, Serash, and you will swallow charcoal and throw it up when I’m gone.”
Serash shook her head. “It’s not. But don’t you try it.”
“Why would you do that?”
“They say that if you take a little poison, your body learns how to fight it. Then you take a little more, and then a bit more yet. Eventually, you can swallow a vial full of death without flinching.”
He stroked his beard, watching her. “And can you?”
“Me?” She put the spoon down slowly. “I have so much time to waste, alone. What do you think?”
“So there are some poisons,” said Amra, “Which would spell the death of any man, even the emperor, but would not harm you at all?”
Her lips thinned to a line. She did not say no.
“Which you would not even feel?”
“That’s a very strange question, my friend,” the poisoner said.
“My apologies.”
“Perhaps you can tell me the gossip instead.”
And so he did, while she ground fine powders and crushed dried leaves, and always washed her hands between. In spite of this, filth crept beneath her nails. There was a purple stain across her palm that no amount of scrubbing could erase.
Eventually Amra took his leave, and Serash went to her bedchamber. She lit a silver oil lamp and undressed before a tall gilt mirror, commissioned for her by a late lord whose name she didn’t remember. Beneath her black robe, her skin was spiderwebbed with ink. Geometric patterns spiraled up her spinal cord. They curled around her ankles. The ink was said to burn like branding irons if ever she left the palace without the emperor’s permission.
It didn’t. But then, the times she left, the emperor had not noticed.
Upon her pillow was a small white scroll. The poisoner spread it over one bony knee and groped for her lamp.
There was a single name written in cipher. The strokes were harried and dark; the young scribe’s hand, since the elder scribe drank tea spiked with arsenic last moon. The emperor had suspected the man of treason.
Serash worked through the cipher, speaking each sound aloud.
“Amra Turin Werrei.”
But why?
Serash tossed and turned all night.
Why now, when Amra had been a regular at court for years?
Serash rose before dawn to tiptoe into the emperor’s quarters. The low-ceilinged bedchamber was wide enough to hold a small court, and ornate rugs hung on the wall muffled every sound. The drapes, dyed with purple that came from tens of thousands of tiny sea snails, were drawn back to wash the room in predawn light. A dozen highbloods were assembled, speaking in whispers, waiting for the emperor to rise.
Serash frisked the emperor’s robe for powders and passed it to two courtiers, who owned many vineyards and a mine of gold and copper. They held the robe for his Glory to step in to; their wives would slip the emperor’s shoes onto his feet. Serash tasted his wine, and a prince of conquered Kallin went to one knee to present it.
The emperor, sleeping, was a handsome man. The line usually between his eyebrows was absent; his sharp features were peaceful. His sheets twisted around his legs, as though he had been plagued by nightmares.
As if on cue, when the first ray of dawn struck his Glory’s face, the emperor stretched, catlike, and opened dark, piercing eyes.
The assembled crowd sank to their knees upon an intricate silk rug. Serash, with her head bowed, could spot Amra in the back. Few foreigners were ever granted the privilege of appearing in this room. Maybe his Glory was not pleased with Amra’s sphere of influence, and Amra himself had no idea.
Surely that was it.
The vial of Madonna berry was in her pocket now. Were Amra any other man, she would slip it into his wine when the courtiers broke their fast.
The morning meal was the ideal time to do it. Madonna berry did not work so fast that Amra would fall dead at the table. The pains would hit him in the day, and he would excuse himself. The vomiting would come next, when he had retired to bed. He would thrash and cry out. He would be dead by nightfall.
And yet Serash delayed.
Madonna berry was new to the Empire, a gift from a prince in the scrublands in the north. Perhaps it did not work as fast as promised. That was what she could say.
Amra found his way to her laboratory in the middle of the day. She had wine in a cabinet, and water, and mint tea. She could offer some so easily.
“What brings you here.”
“Come, Serash, we both know you enjoy my company.”
Serash was extracting liquid from the corpses of little red frogs. They smelled sweet, like sugar, and also like acid. The frogs, unheard-of in the Empire, were a gift from the people who built pyramids in jungles filled with a thousand horrors. One bite of a frog would induce fever, chills, and vomiting. The body would cramp up, the muscles would seize, and the heart would stop beating in an hour.
“How fares the emperor in Sunamey?” Serash asked. “Or, what is the word—king?”
“Tyrant, more like,” Amra said.
Serash threw him a quick look. He seemed as carefree as always, elbows propped on her table, eyeing her red frogs. Perhaps, she thought, that was why the emperor wanted him dead: perhaps his Glory did not like the new ruler in Sunamey. Nothing to do with Amra, who had been in the Empire when the rebellion occurred.
“He does very well,” said Amra. “In fact, the men are happier, every one. There is an oath they swear in every village square that says so.”
Sunamey took that from the Empire, Serash did not say. Instead, she cleared her throat, and spoke carefully. “Since you like him so well,” she said, “I suppose you would be happy to return there. That they would welcome you.”
“They will,” said Amra, “quite soon.” He turned one of her vials over in his hands, then smiled and deliberately set it down. He straightened his cuffs. “But there is something I must do first.”
“Which is?”
“My daughters were wedded to highbloods of the old regime,” Amra said, leaning back. “The new king allowed them to live, and for this I am very grateful.”
“They cannot come here.”
“I do not think so, no.”
“Amra.”
He looked at her. Serash’s heart was pounding in her throat. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out.
“Serash, why do you do what you do?” Amra asked, suddenly. “They say you like the taste of death, that you crave the moment when a man’s eyes turn to glass. But I think that there is more.”
She touched her hand, the end of a tattoo on her left wrist. It wasn’t the tattoo that chained her. The emperor knew where her brothers lived.
“I do what I do out of love for the emperor,” she said.
“Ah. Of course.” Amra stood. “I am not so lucky as you, to serve a man so good and pure.”
“The emperor is more than a man,” Serash said softly.
“Yes. Yes, indeed.”
He strode toward the door.
Serash watched him disappear. She stood in silence for a long time after.
Then she set aside her frogs and entered her sleeping chamber. She opened a chest at the foot of her bed, filled with lavish robes and jewels, gifts from nobles hoping to buy her mercy. At the bottom were fine bottles, capped with gold and copper, that once held perfume. She’d since filled them with something else entirely.
For the emperor’s poisoner crafted more than draughts to induce suffering. She knew which part of poisons slowed the heart and stilled the lungs. She’d thought through how to pull those parts away, lessen their effects, distill them from the parts that made the body shrivel. She spent a lot of time alone.
She hadn’t tried the bottle which she drew out now, as long as her pinky finger, the liquid viscous and murky. But she thought it would work.
If she disappeared, the emperor knew where her brothers lived.
But if she were to die, there was no vengeance to be taken.
She had always assumed, in the back of her mind, that Amra would be the one to oversee her burial. To place a black shroud over the shape of a body and inter it in the ground. To sneak her living body, heartbeat slowed and breathing damped, to somewhere safe, so that she could wake and escape.
She could do it for him. All the time he’d spent upon her, what had it been for?
A bell chimed in the laboratory, once and then again. It signalled the emperor’s summons.
Serash pocketed the sleeping draught and rushed to the sound. Beside the window was an array of bells, silver and copper, tin and gold, one for each room the emperor might call her to. A little silver one still vibrated. Serash tapped it once in answer and hurried from the room.
“Your Glory.”
The emperor was seated on a low sofa in an alcove of his bedchamber, two highbloods beside him. His robes were sewn with thread-of-gold, and mercury glittered on his high cheekbones. His Glory hunched over a game of chess, the pieces carved out of opal and onyx, and he did not look over as Serash went to one knee. One of his guards, a man as large as a bear, pointed her to a water pitcher and a glass goblet.
Serash ran her finger down the insides of the goblet, but the glass was clean. She filled it from the pitcher and tasted it, then bowed her head and presented it to the emperor.
She suspected that he did this because of all his subjects, he feared her most. He needed a poisoner to ensure his rule, but how to deter her from poisoning him?
He promised that her tattoos would burn past all sensation if he should die before her. Her brothers, and their wives and children, would burn too. The lord who owned the land they tilled had standing orders to that regard.
“Leave us,” the emperor said, and the two highbloods bowed. Serash was backing away, too, when his Glory added, “Siph.”
She stopped. He drained the goblet and hurled it at her.
Serash did not duck. The goblet flew over her shoulder and shattered against the wall. She flinched and his Glory was on his feet, pushing her bodily against the wall, glass crunching under his slippers. The emperor did not look strong, but he was, especially when it took all Serash’s willpower not to resist.
“I gave you a name last night,” the emperor snarled. “Why is he still walking?”
His hand curled around her throat and Serash gasped, “He will be dead by morning. Emperor.”
His Glory’s lip curled. The furrow between his brows deepened. “Tonight, Siph.”
“Tonight.”
He let her go, and she sank to the floor. The broken glass cut her knee as she bent to kiss his robe. Her hands were shaking. She made sure that he saw.
After she crawled from the room, Serash dusted the glass shards off her robe. This was not the emperor angry. This was any given day.
Some said that truly, the emperor was a cool, collected man, and his tantrums were engineered to inspire fear. Serash disagreed. His Glory had always been this way, and not since his father died of a cobra bite had anyone corrected him.
Serash searched for Amra, to deliver the sleeping drought, let someone see his drugged body, and carry it away. She didn’t know where to start, since he always came to her. She was called back to taste the emperor’s pine nuts—the glass had been swept up—and then again for tea, so her search never went far.
Amra was absent from the evening feast, however. Perhaps her warnings had rung true, and he was far from here.
The vast hall was lit with braziers and filled with burning incense. Highbloods gathered at low tables, upon thick rugs and silk cushions; the tablecloths and tapestries were a clash of a thousand patterns. Musicians played zither and flute, and anjrita dancers spun about the room. Serash lingered in the shadows behind the emperor’s throne, coming forward to taste delicate flowers, fresh water, spiced wine; pita and sauces; grapes, though she didn’t know how those could be poisoned.
The emperor glowed before his kingdom. He truly was handsome. The dark-eyed girl on his right and the lord on his left smiled at his jokes, frowned when he mentioned that traitors abounded.
“They are everywhere. Mark my words. Even you, sweet Ashi, may turn on me.”
In response the girl, Ashenza, stroked his cheek, and he brushed her off. Her dark eyes were wide in the torchlight.
Serash had checked Lady Ashenza’s clothing for weapons, powders, or vials. Nothing, as always, although that would not save her from suspicion. Serash wondered idly how Ashenza would die.
Servants came with plates of steaming meat soaked in red tal sauce. Serash swooped in and scooped a mouthful from the emperor’s plate. Always his own plate; his Glory feared someone would dust the ceramic with poison.
The meat was hot and spicy, sugary and bile-sweet. It burned down Serash’s throat.
There was another reason the emperor called on Serash, not merely whichever servant happened to be nearby — not only did this protect his Glory from her, but it gave her good reason to make sure there was no poison. Just in case she was not loyal.
The emperor watched her, but Ashenza leaned forward to spear a piece of meat.
Serash’s throat was burning. A funny scent filled her nose, rather like the dried skin of the little red frogs.
Serash leapt toward Ashenza, knocking the meat from her hand — lucky thing the emperor was paranoid and hadn’t tried to eat. Someone shouted — the emperor? — but Serash was stumbling away from the throne, sticking two fingers down her throat, praying her stomach would convulse enough to bring it up.
“Attack on the emperor!”
“The poison-tester is dead—”
“Bar the doors!” the emperor roared, somewhere far away. “No one leaves this room!”
Servants were rushing toward her. A woman flipped her over, and someone else was holding Serash’s hair as she spewed red meat onto the fine carpets.
Her vision blurred, and she didn’t realize she was falling until her wrists hit the ground. Someone tugged her shoulder, and someone else gripped her beneath the armpits and began hauling her away. Her slippers skidded on the rugs until one of the burly guards — she could make out the black of his vest — lifted her feet, and the emperor must have made an exception for her, for she was taken from the great hall into a side corridor, one ceiling bleeding into another, harried voices fading. Serash closed her eyes. Her mind was spinning.
The frogs—those frogs—were from a distant land, a gift made to the emperor’s own hands, and from his to hers. No one else had even seen them.
No one except Amra.
The apprentice in the medica forced charcoal down her throat, and milk, and she threw that up too. They brought her to her room, lit incense in the windows and placed oranges at the foot of her bed, then left her to rest. There had been little poison in her system to begin with. One bite, diluted in the food. Just enough to kill a man.
What the whole plate would have done, she could not say.
She was weak but conscious when the emperor arrived.
He shooed the nurses with a brisk motion, and Serash imagined those long-fingered hands wrapping around her throat. A fitting punishment; this would not have happened if she had killed Amra in the morning.
Amra. She did not know what to think.
The emperor paced to her bed. His crown was missing, and his hair fell in dark coils about his narrow face.
“I have eaten nothing but bread and water, Siph.”
“Your Glory,” Serash croaked. She tried to rise, so as to bow, but he pushed her down.
“Do you know who did this?”
Serash could not meet his eyes, so she stared at the crease between his brows. Truly was it Amra, who knew that she, Serash, tasted the emperor’s meals? His only hope in getting to the emperor was to find a poison slow-acting enough that it would hit Serash and the emperor both too late to do anything about it. The frog was a foolish choice indeed. Anyone other than Serash would have merely fallen dead.
“Tell me,” the emperor said.
Serash opened her mouth and choked back a fit of coughing. Her throat was tight and painful. “When you catch him, your Glory, I will make him suffer.”
“It was Amra al-Turin Werrein, was it not?”
Serash closed her eyes. She nodded yes.
Stupid ploy, Amra.
The emperor looked out the window, to the east. “I will send his head to our Sunameyan friend in a basket.”
“Imagine,” Serash said softly, “how the king in Sunamey will writhe, waiting for news of his unfortunate assassin. The waiting will grate on him, worse in its way than knowing that his plot failed.”
Her words in her throat were dry. She was pleading for a friend already dead to her.
Had all the times Amra visited merely been to win her affection, so that she would hesitate if she were told to kill him?
“How will he die?” she asked.
The emperor shrugged. “I do not truly care.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Why does everyone always try to kill me?”
Serash held her breath.
“An ordinary man can trust his wife and sons and daughters,” the emperor went on. “His entire village comes to help in times of famine. Why is it that I can trust no one?”
“You can trust me, your Glory,” Serash said. “I would die before you willingly.”
He made a gesture as though brushing off dust. “Enough.”
The emperor turned to go.
“How did you know it would be him?” Serash asked.
“The king of Sunamey is copying my footsteps,” the emperor said, turning back. “It is what I would do, if I were in his shoes.”
Serash knew the secret passageways, but Amra had never learned. They caught him in a servants’ corridor, dressed in ill-fitting burlap.
“Better that the king in Sunamey stays up at night,” Serash whispered to the emperor, at the side of his bed, when a runner brought word of Amra’s capture. She was on her feet, though shakily. Well enough to taste the emperor’s honey wine. “Clawing his hair and beating his servants, consumed with fear that the greatest emperor this side of the crystal sea has figured out his plot. Better that than if he knew his doom for certain.”
She didn’t know why she was saying so. What did she care where Amra’s head was sent, after he tried to murder her?
The emperor was not listening, for Lady Ashenza lay beside him, stroking the fine hairs on his chest.
The runner asked, “Shall we bring the traitor up, your Glory?”
“Might as well bring the court.”
His Glory meant it for a joke, but in truth the court was trickling in, lining the halls, their whispers carrying like spirits. It was midnight. Amra’s escape had not lasted twelve hours.
When the guards dragged Amra in, he looked the worse for wear. The passage from the servants’ corridor had bloodied his nose, and his left eye was swelling fast. There was flour rubbed into his salt-and-pepper hair, and nicks on his chin from clumsy shaving.
He was not a trained assassin. He was a diplomat, pressed into a plot by a faraway king.
Amra did not meet her eyes. Serash could not look away as the guards dropped him like a sack before the emperor, and when Amra knelt to kiss where the emperor’s robe would be, the emperor kicked him sharply in the mouth.
“Your Glory, please!” Blood ran crimson down his chin. He seemed to be melting to a puddle on the floor. “He — the tyrant in the east— he would kill my daughters—”
The emperor chuckled coldly. “You ask for mercy now?”
The court tittered, creeping in the door, and the sound echoed down the hall.
To her surprise, the emperor beckoned Serash forward. There were two vials in her pocket, still, one or the other meant for her friend.
“Does your Glory wish him to scream?”
“No. Let no word of this reach Sunamey.” The emperor’s voice rose slowly, addressing the highbloods gathered down the hall. “We will let their so-called king wait. Perhaps I will invite him here, to congratulate him on a plot well… executed.”
Amra shuddered on the ground.
Serash swept forward. Which vial to reach for? She did not know if the emperor would want Amra’s head preserved, to give to the Sunameyan king, if its absence would be noted. She did not know if Amra’s sentence was deserved.
She bent over him, like a massive, skeletal bird of prey, but her fingers fumbled. Her fist closed on nothing and Amra leapt for her like a cobra. His soft hands grasped her shoulders and his blood smeared on her cheek, his lips against her ear: ”I thought you showed the frog on purpose—”
Then the guards jerked him off, and Serash squawked, stumbling back. She knew what he meant: she ground the frogs after speaking of poison that she could withstand, and he thought she was telling him that the frogs would not harm her. That was why he stole one and used it in place of a better poison. Or at least that was what he said.
It was a lie. It was a lie. She could read nothing in his eyes.
Serash was hesitating too long. Amra thrashed in the guards’ hands. They wrangled him to his knees, forced his head back, opened his jaw like an animal.
Serash’s legs moved without her willing it. She was looking down on her oldest friend, who lied to her from beginning to end.
The vials had jostled in her pocket, and she did not know which was which. Her fist closed on one at random. She drew out a deep purple liquid, which slipped from one end to the other as she turned it in the torchlight.
Slow death, then, fate had chosen for him.
She uncapped it but her fingers slipped. Was it weakness from Amra’s poison? Amra’s eyes rolled toward the vial of Madonna.
Serash came forward. The guards holding him went stiff. The court leaned in as one, and Lady Ashenza gasped. Serash could feel the emperor watching.
She pushed the vial into her pocket and took out the viscous grey one. In a breath she forced the stopper and emptied the draught of sleep down his throat.
Serash jerked herself back. Amra shuddered, and writhed, and then was still.
They did not keep the traitor’s head.
The tall guards carried the corpse past the assembled court, and the poison tester trailed behind like a carrion bird. No one would know where the traitor was buried, so that no dissenters to the emperor’s glorious rule could sanctify the grave.
The gravediggers worked by the light of a crescent moon when a tall, thin figure appeared hours before dawn. The stranger shooed the gravediggers away. They went. Those who traded in the emperor’s secrets did not ask questions, lest they fall ill.
They came back to find the grave filled in. They did not dig it back up in search of the body.
The instinct to kill the gravediggers was hard to quell. Who could they tell? An offering of wine was all she needed to silence them. They would go to bed happy and their wives wouldn’t mourn til morning.
But Serash hadn’t killed without orders in a long time. She resisted.
The whitewashed houses looked different at night, when one was walking alone. Rats skittered through the alley. Fish guts rotted by the roadside, as the cobbles shifted to wood, a port stretching out to sea.
Hauling a body like this was really beneath her. She hadn’t done this since she was an apprentice.
Serash reached the end of the pier, and a rowboat splashed out to meet her. A grinning, toothless man held out a pockmarked hand. He had withered since last she saw him. His name had once included many holdings, until the emperor became convinced that the man plotted against him.
Serash had let her poison slip, that time. Now she and the boatman were friends, of a kind.
She hefted Amra’s breathing body toward the rowboat. The man said, “You promised—”
“This will grant you two more months.” Serash passed him a vial the size of an egg. “When he wakes, he’ll write to me. I’ll know it’s him by what he says. Then you’ll get your antidote in full.”
The boatman scowled, but he helped her set the body in.
“Throw him over the sides, and you’ll die.”
“When have I returned ill on a promise?”
On the bottom of the rowboat, Amra’s eyes fluttered. Serash wondered if he had known that she would save him. If he had only used her.
If it even mattered.
The little craft dipped and rose, retreating with the tide.
She stood on the end of the dock until the rowboat disappeared into the night.
Amber Velez graduated from MIT with a bachelor’s in creative writing and mechanical engineering. Her work has appeared in the MIT Technology Review, Broken Pencil Magazine, and Drunk Monkeys Magazine, among others. She worked in a chemistry lab for a summer, but never poisoned anyone.