The Throne

The Throne stands in the deepest hall of the Iron Palace at Ironhold, 60 metres below the surface, its vault carried on 87 basalt pillars, each of them 18 metres high. The pillars are ground so smooth that there is no chisel-mark to the touch, and nothing to show how they were raised.

The hall is a strange one: the brighter the lamps are lit, the darker it grows inside, as though the stone itself were drinking the light. The palace attendants who keep the lamps therefore have a rule handed down from their forebears — the lamps are lit only in a single ring along the wall, fixed at 12 of them, and one lamp more makes everything about them darker. The rule is written in the Household Miscellany; the column for the reason is empty.

Only the Throne gives light of its own. The back of the chair is woven of very fine lines, and those lines are the God-Era script, set so close together that they are like a cloth that breathes, giving off a very faint silver light. The light does not illuminate anything around it; it stays on the surface of the chair-back, and three steps away it cannot be seen at all.

Not many people can go into that hall. The Royal Guard hold as far as the door of the hall, and inside the door belongs to the Household. The attendants sweep it once every ten days, going in pairs, one sweeping and one watching, and once they have finished they may not go in again that day. A few scattered taboos have come down through the generations: no turning your head inside the hall, no stopping on the steps, no backing out with your back to the chair. None of them is written into the codified palace rules; they pass from mouth to ear among the attendants, and the voice drops when they are passed on.

Whoever sits on that chair is the king. A man of the highest blood who has not sat on it can still only stand below the steps at a ceremony. The order of an accession is therefore very plain: the Church recites the rites text, the heads of the houses take their ranks, the new king climbs the seven steps and sits down. The whole thing takes less than a quarter of an hour and has not changed in four hundred years — written as 400 years, which is how the archives of the Bureau of Military Affairs at Ironhold and of the Pontificate both record it.

There is a line in the old law that nobody likes to bring up: the Throne calls names. Whoever it calls has to answer. As to what happens after answering — most of those who could bring themselves to ask are no longer here.