Seventy-Seven Vicious Princes

  Rank 6: Great Lord. The Great Lords do not need your love, nor your loyalty. They don’t even need your obedience. They don’t expect it. How could they?  They want your awe . This is how they survive: cultivated unassailability. Not of the men and women (who die like anyone dies) but of the Fourteen, and the Seventy-Seven. As well oppose the rain or the dark. As well rage against death than against the Great Lords. Imagine Zarkany burnt to the ground or slid into the sea–do not imagine it without the Council. Bring one down and sixty-two salivating suzerains line up to fill the seat. Kill one and take their patent and their place. Why wouldn’t you? Do you know what you’d be throwing away? So the bulwark has held for centuries. But Keve Kornel (Fourth Great Lord of the Day Council) has noticed the spiderweb faults in the foundation. The hellish exhalation of the Fabrication district. The nascent eighth ward. The constant cancer-growth from which the Council fancies itself deta...

Rank 3: Gentlewoman. It’s good to be a prince. Life is a song. Theft is sport. Soma has trouble understanding why everyone is so eager to overcomplicate things, but it certainly makes her career easier. Princes crowd around darkened tables in secret cellars, all guttered candles and twisting plots and furrowed brows. Soma is upstairs, stealing their candelabras. A songbook’s worth of ditties have been composed about Soma Sinaros.  Gems in her Pockets ;  The Laughing Prince ;  When Soma Came to Astrabek ; and the unspeakably tawdry taproom hit  Polishing Gems , which would leave an orthodox prince flushed and furious. Soma has memorized all of them. Her carpet-draped, redolent home in Fallaburg is full of uneaten grapes, half-tuned lutes, and a magpie melange of stolen shit. Some of it is useful, some frivolous, some from lordly manors and some from commoner businesses. If you give her a few minutes she could probably remember which is which. She hosts smoky, musical ...

Rank 4: Courtier. Unsparing (adjective) 1: not frugal: LIBERAL, PROFUSE unsparing generosity . 2: not merciful or forbearing: HARD, RUTHLESS An unsparing satire.  An unsparing critic. An unsparing prince. Vanda the Unsparing is one of Zarkany's most prolific money-lenders. Vanda the Unsparing is aptly named. They began as an accountant-knight for the House of Fangs, as its old military grandeur dangled over the cliff of penury. They pulled it from the brink with such adamantine focus that they were made heir. Vanda the Unsparing does not love gold, or even like it. If power came from carrots (which makes more sense to Vanda the Unsparing than useless, soft metal) they'd bedeck themself in tubers. Vanda wants to hold your heart in their hand and decide when it beats. Your money is their consolation prize. Beliefs Morality is God's to decide and partition. We mortals shouldn't distract ourselves with it. A prince has no excuse to come to me for lending; the deck is stacke...

Rank 5: Lord The House of Amber Arpad Budai’s mother was gentle and kind. But she dreamed too often, and too boldly, and Zarkany is no place for the dreams of a glass-blower’s daughter. When his fellow nobles make awkward conversation with him at the parties into which the Prince of Amber muscles his way, they hazard sometimes a guess that Arpad–risen as he is from the deprivations of Chalktown into the halls of the princes–is living a dream come true. But Arpad Budai is not his mother; he is not gentle or kind, and he never dreams. Arpad Budai’s father was tall, broad, and strong. Arpad would be, too, if his father had lived, and if his mother hadn’t taken the bottle as her consolation. But he didn’t, and she did, and Arpad Budai is not his father; Arpad’s physical heritage was overwritten by the starvation’s stunting quill. Hunger robbed him of at least a foot. He walks like he's as tall as nature intended. Arpad became the Prince of Amber two weeks ago, by slitting the throat of...

Rank 4: Courtier. Cintia Nemeth is the eye in a storm of bachelorettes, giggling fops, and court scandal. Her immediate impression puts one in the mind of a painted sky lantern. Gorgeous, conspicuous, paper-thin, and entirely weightless. Catch her at a ball and speak to her for an hour and neither of you will have said anything at all. She has worked tirelessly to cultivate the talent. She’s an excellent dancer, a talented chanteuse, and a much-extolled lover. All of this she approaches with a falcon’s eye–crisp, clear, and detached by miles. Cintia’s a thin lacquered candy coating on a lead bullet. In the back of the carriage at the end of the night, on the ride home alone (always alone) she is still as death. When Cintia moved into Torchglow (as the House of Torches has dubbed its tacky villa in Blood Ward) she tore the four-poster bed from the prince’s chamber and replaced it with a dueling platform and a rack of rapiers. She sleeps on an unfurled mat on the floor. Beliefs With enou...