Guy Gavriel Kay - Lord of Emperors: Book Two of the Sarantine Mosaic

Praise for Lord of Emperors

Kay is a storyteller on the grandest scale... Kay has complete control of all he creates... Kays prose is sure footed and poetic.

Time (Canada)

Detailed, richly textured, and endlessly fascinating...[Kay] is a magnificently talented writer...A truly splendid novel.

Chronicle-Herald

Powerfully written and compulsively readable.

Macleans

Lord of Emperors is vintage Kayrichly written, exploring themes of art and power, interweaving alternate history and high fantasy to create a strange yet familiar world.

Winnipeg Free Press

His Sarantium (and the road to it) is an intricate and highly detailed creation populated by a legion of memorable and sharply delineated characters.

Toronto Star

Complex and compelling... Every aspect of Lord of Emperors reveals a master at work ... As with Sailing to Sarantium, Kay has constructed Lord of Emperors as a literary mosaic of great intricacy and delicacy, for all its adventures, its courtly intrigues, its confrontations with death and various powers... Now complete, The Sarantine Mosaic takes its place as a major historical fantasy, one which redefines the possibilities of and sets new standards for the genre... Simply not to be missed.

Edmonton Journal

This is some of the finest writing to arise in the last decade in any genre, high culture be damned.

The Vancouver Sun

A fantastic story, touched with magic... Lord of Emperors is a feast of riches... Kay has created in The Sarantine Mosaic a world that stands on its own past and present. [Characters] are alive and vibrant and fascinating.

The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)

Essential reading for all Kay fans.

Kirkus Reviews

Of breathtaking scale and accomplishment... Kay has wondrously stripped away the illusions of perception without judging, and beneath is deeper understanding.

FFWD

Kays books ring with authenticity. They are literate and imaginative and work on many levels. History aficionados will delight in the small and telling insights Mr. Kay brings... while other readers will simply delight in the grand sweep of the story, the rich characterization, and Mr. Kays sheer gift with language... [Lord of Emperors] is very satisfying and no exception to the success of the rest of Mr. Kays work.

Charles de Lint, Ottawa Citizen

PENGUIN CANADA

LORD OF EMPERORS

GUY GAVRIEL KAY is the author of ten novels and a volume of poetry. He won the 2008 World Fantasy Award for Ysabel, has been awarded the International Goliardos Prize, and is a two-time winner of the Aurora Award. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages and have appeared on bestseller lists around the world.

Visit his Canadian website at www.guygavrielkay.ca and his international website at www.brightweavings.com.

ALSO BY GUY GAVRIEL KAY

The Fionavar Tapestry:

The Summer Tree

The Wandering Fire

The Darkest Road

Tigana

A Song for Arbonne

The Lions of Al-Rassan

The Sarantine Mosaic:

Sailing to Sarantium

The Last Light of the Sun

Beyond This Dark House
(poetry)

Ysabel

Under Heaven

L ORD OF

E MPERORS

BOOK 2 OF THE SARANTINE MOSAIC

GUY

GAVRIEL

KAY

PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2000
Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2000, 2003, 2005
Published in this edition, 2010

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (OPM)

Copyright Guy Gavriel Kay, 2000

Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists
94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publishers note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Kay, Guy Gavriel
Lord of emperors / Guy Gavriel Kay.
(The Sarantine mosaic; bk. 2)

ISBN 978-0-14-317459-2

I. Title. II. Series: Kay, Guy Gavriel. Sarantine mosaic ; bk. 2.
PS8571.A935L6 2010 C813'.54 C2010-900611-9

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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For Sam and Matthew,
the singing-masters of my soul.

This belongs to them, beginning and end.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T he Sarantine Mosaic is animated by and in part built around a tension in the late classical world between walls and wilderness. For my own introduction to this dialectic (and how it shifts), I am indebted to Simon Schamas magisterial Landscape and Memory. This is also the work that introduced me to the Lithuanian bison and the symbolism surrounding it, giving rise to my own zubir.

The general and particular works cited in Sailing to Sarantium have anchored this second volume as well, and Yeats remains a presiding spirit, in the epigraph and elsewhere.

I should now add Guido Majnos quite wonderful The Helping Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World. On Persia and its culture, books by Richard N. Frye and Prudence Oliver Harper were immensely useful. For table matters and manners I was aided by the Wilkins and Hill text and commentary on Archistratus, along with works by Andrew Dalby and Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat. Attitudes to the supernatural are explored in books by Gager, Kieckhefer, and Flint, and in a collection of essays edited by Henry Maguire for the Dumbarton Oaks research facility in Washington, D.C. Dumbarton Oaks also provided translations of Byzantine military treatises, papers presented at various symposia, and some evocative artifacts in their permanent collection.