Farlander

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Divine Assurances In the windowless antechamber of the arena known as the Shay Madi, Kirkus watched his mother holding court before the priests gathered about her.

Her two years as Holy Matriarch of the Empire had begun to take their toll on her, in spite of the Royal Milk she paid for so handsomely to sup each morning. The noticeable lines across her forehead could only come from frowns generated by worry, though here today, in public, his mother preferred to smile, and smile often.

This visible aging had been the first thing Kirkus had noticed upon his return from the state progress with his grandmother, when laying eyes on his mother for the first time in many months. It had been the first thing he had commented on, bringing a laugh to her lips and a gentle kiss to his forehead.

Save for the priestly fine-link chains of gold that dangled from the lobes of her ears to her nostrils, and the light-reflecting sheen of her shaven skull, his mother might have been the madam of some bawdy city brothel at the high point of a comfortably busy night. Sasheen's plain face was flushed from the heat of so many bodies crammed together in close proximity, the many gas-lights in sooty alcoves along the walls, and the lack of any breeze coming through the sunlit portal in the wall behind her that led out to the imperial stand. She stood with one hip aslant, a bent wrist resting on her pelvis. Beneath a chin held high her heavy breasts thrust through the white cloth of her robe.

Alluring but dangerous, was the first thought that came to the minds of most men. She was, perhaps, the only thing Kirkus knew about his father – in as much as she indicated this man's taste in bedfellows.

The male and female priests thronging the room talked amongst themselves, except for those gathered closest to the Holy Matriarch herself. These listened respectfully to Sasheen but spoke in their turn with a lack of formality common to the High Priests of Q'os, and which had surprised Kirkus on the first occasion he had attended the court of the previous leader, Patriarch Nihilis. Kirkus had expected a greater degree of pomp and ceremony, as was shown during official ceremonies of state.

Instead, the high priests of Q'os acted like uneasy comrades involved in a grand and impossibly ambitious conspiracy: the ruling of the entire known world no less. What deference they chose to show to their Holy Matriarch arose not simply from their respect for her position, having risen as she had to the leadership of Mann as though from nowhere, but from awe at her readiness to snuff out any least sign of disloyalty, as manifested in the deaths of so many of their former colleagues.

A threat they remained close to even now, in the form of her two massive bodyguards, their eyes masked by goggles of smoky glass so none could tell where they looked, and their hands sheathed in poisonous scratch-gloves.

Kirkus only half-listened to what his mother or the others had to say. This wasn't an official gathering of court today, only an afternoon of leisure here at the Shay Madi, in which members of the higher caste took the opportunity to socialize while watching entertainments in the public arena. Still, they were men and women of lofty positions and they could not help but continue manoeuvring for advantage amongst themselves.

Kirkus allowed such petty concerns to wash over him as he chomped the soft flesh of a parmadio fruit, quivering at each spike of narcotic pleasure as he crunched down on its bitter pips. Occasionally his eyes would rove the room, and study its occupants as they inhaled from steaming bowls or imbibed cooling liqueurs. But always, his gaze would end up watching the large double doors at the far end.

Lara would not be appearing today, he suspected. Indeed her latest lover, General Romano, had arrived by himself, and was now standing in a corner in deep discussion with General Alero. Even as Kirkus studied the young general, the man turned his head and locked eyes with him across the distance of the room.

Something of hatred passed in the look between them.

Romano was nephew to the last Patriarch, and considered the leading prodigy among one of the oldest and most powerful families within the order. Young Romano was the foremost rival to Sasheen's position, though it was understood he would wait for her reign to come to an end before making his own attempt at the leadership, a time when Kirkus himself would be expected by many to assume the position of Patriarch; in her own way, Lara could not have chosen herself a new lover placed more firmly against Kirkus than this one.

Across the chamber Romano inclined his head towards Kirkus. Kirkus bowed in response, his eyes guarded.

Lara would have come with Romano, if she was coming at all. Obviously she was still avoiding Kirkus. His latest public outburst, in the upper baths of the Temple of Whispers on the day after his return, had been an embarrassment for them both.

He had hoped that, upon seeing Lara again, he could be calm and mature about their situation. He felt he had developed that much, at least, during his ventures abroad. Instead, as soon as he laid eyes on her, his body had suffered some overwhelming reaction of shock, so that, standing there in his tower, stunned as she walked by him without the merest glance in his direction, Kirkus had found himself shouting at her departing back, his voice so shaken with rage that it took long moments for him to decipher exactly what he had said.

'I will require your consent soon, Matriarch,' the priestess Sool was murmuring to his mother. 'It is little more than a month now before the anniversary of the Augere el Mann.'

Kirkus swallowed around a painful lump in his throat. He dragged his gaze from the closed doors at the rear of the chamber, and refocused his attention on the general conversation around him.

The priestess Sool had her head bent low, playing the loyal subservient, as always, though Kirkus sometimes suspected otherwise. 'I will need to know if our plans for the commemoration are suitable. After all, this is the year in which we commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Mannian rule. Perhaps you have some ideas yourself.'

'Oh, don't hark on so,' replied his mother with a throw of her hand, the other holding her robes hitched over one extended thigh, cooling off. 'I leave all such decisions to you and your people, you know that. Believe me, I have other things to concern myself with just now.'

'Yes,' said Sool submissively, her head dipping a fraction lower. 'I suspect I may have heard of them. This new petition of Mokabi's: another invasion plan for the Free Ports. The old warrior grows restless in his retirement, no doubt.'

'As always, your ears hear only whispers borne on the wings of boredom.' There was impatience in his mother's tone, and a weariness that Kirkus noticed ever more often these days.

'Still. Even so…' Sool continued, then checked abruptly.

Kirkus was laughing at her. 'It is just as well you and my mother are the closest of friends,' he quipped. 'Who else would listen to both your nagging?'

Sool smiled, though it may have been a grimace. 'Your mother gave birth to you in her time,' she said. 'You might show some respect, young pup.'

His reply was another crunch of seeds between his teeth. He did not say what he might have said next.

Kirkus had watched this interchange with interest. In her own subtle way, Sool had been like a maternal aunt to Kirkus as he was growing up, or at least as much as any woman could be maternal within the order, where such bonds were nurtured by loyalty and necessity – certainly not love and seldom kindness. As a boy, Kirkus had lived in the Temple of Whispers, in the extensive apartments of his mother and grandmother, one of them the latest glammari, or chosen consort, to Patriarch Anslan, the other a long-trusted advisor in the ways of the faith. Sool had often visited the women there, sometimes accompanied by her daughter Lara. On summer evenings, Sool would tell them stories from the past, he and Lara, as they sat together on the balcony of his personal chamber, with the many animals he had collected over the years squawking and clattering in their cages, while evening light hung like a shroud over the city of Q'os below them.

From that high vantage point perched on the flank of the Temple of Whispers, the full shape of the island-city was visible to the eye. On the coastline to the east, a natural protrusion of land stabbed diagonally into the sea; to the north could be seen the four manmade landfills that so closely resembled fingers: all the Five Cities, as they were known collectively, each teeming to the water's edge with buildings. As a child, Kirkus had scanned the landscape from east to west: it was possible to see the island as shaped in the form of a great open hand, its palm facing skywards, its end-digit of land truncated to represent the shortened little finger of the followers of Mann. He had never bored of this sight, as a boy, perched there at the city's very heart.

On those long-ago warm evenings, Sool had recounted her tales in a harsh whisper, as though her words were precious things that needed guarding. She had told him of the time when her own mother and his grandmother had been young women working secretly for the cult during that time of famine and pestilence known as the Great Trial, each of them wild at heart, kindred in spirit, their recruitment into the order the result of having a lover they both shared without contention.

Both had taken part in the Longest Night, that evening which had followed the destruction of the city by fire. Acting as a pair, they had murdered one of the city's highest-placed officials, living in opulent splendour in his palace while the city lay in ruins and starvation all around it. They had both witnessed the frenzied execution of the girl-queen, indeed had taken their own small part in it. They had knelt prostrate and panting at the feet of High Priest Nihilis himself, as he was anointed first Holy Patriarch of Mann.

Sool had told him and Lara these things, and many others, proud it seemed of the closeness of her family and his, of their rise to power together. It was only when he was older that Kirkus learned of other sides to these stories. He recalled his grandmother, half broken after a purging, lying on her bed speaking out in some kind of delirium, grasping Kirkus's arm to detain him as she told him of the murder of her oldest friend, Sool's mother, for falling from the ways of Mann.

It had now been over a year since Kirkus had last seen Sool in the flesh. As he faced her in the close press of the antechamber he saw her as though through the eyes of his own boyhood self, and wondered when they had lost that special connection that he had cherished secretly as a child. He assumed, perhaps, it had been since he and Lara had parted ways, but on deeper reflection he knew it to be much longer than that. Since he had grown up, he realized – when he no longer needed such people in his life as this kindly matron.

I cast this women aside, Kirkus thought, as he gazed into her blue eyes, and she into his. And all the kindnesses she ever showed me.

Kirkus raised his hands up to his chest and then held them outwards, in an acknowledgement of concession. The woman blinked in surprise.

Beside him a clearing of a throat. It was Cinimon, high priest of the Monbarri sect – that cult within a cult who declared themselves inquisitors and defenders of the faith so fervently that they frightened all others. The man spoke in a voice like the shifting gravels of a flood stream, his expression all but unreadable behind the sagging burden of the many piercings that adorned his face.

'It is true, then?' he asked of Sasheen. 'Mokabi thinks he can crack the Free Ports at last?'

Sasheen tilted her head to consider the question. 'So he believes, though we have barely found time to look into his proposals yet.' She shot a glance at Sool. 'I meet with my generals soon to discuss the matter. You will, of course, be the first to hear of our findings.'

'We have also the Zanzahar question to decide upon,' muttered little Bushrali from behind the rim of his goblet, High Priest of the Regulators, and clearly drunk already. 'This quibbling over grain and salt prices can lead to no advantage for us. If we do not lower our prices, and the Caliphate extends its safe waters two hundred laqs towards the Free Ports, as they threaten to do, then this war of attrition may become a war without end.'

Cinimon shook his head, his heavy facial piercings clinking together as his black eyes shone from amongst within. The priest's arms and legs remained bare under his plain white cassock; they rippled with slivers of precious metals buried beneath the skin, slivers that ran like a host of snakes all the way down to his ankles and into his sandaled feet – as though, at any moment, they would break through the skin, and wriggle free on to the ground as living things. 'We should make our own demands of the Caliphate,' the priest grumbled. 'We should insist that they cease selling to the Free Ports the very grains we sell to them. It is altogether obscene. They no longer even try to hide the practice.'

'Make such a demand and we risk an embargo,' whined Bushrali, pausing to place a hand over his wine-stained lips to cover a belch. 'And where would we be then, without a steady supply of black-powder?'

'So be it, then,' interrupted Kirkus, intrigued enough at last to contribute to the discussion. 'Perhaps it is time we tested this monopoly of Zanzahar, and saw how long they survive without our grain. I have studied the figures as much as anyone has. I am not so certain they speak of only one outcome.'

'Well spoken,' agreed Cinimon, and his mother too eyed him with interest, though said nothing.

Bushrali showed his irritation by waving his goblet about, a slosh of red wine arcing across the marble floor like pearls of blood. 'The figures are accurate, young master. Our stockpiles of blackpowder would run dry long before Zanzahar would be forced to seek grain, salt and rice from elsewhere. You think they would allow things to be any other way? You think they ration us our supplies of black-powder simply because they do not like to trade it? They know to the nearest garan how much we have stockpiled throughout the Empire. They know how much we use each month against Bar-Khos and elsewhere. They even know when a store of our powder has become aged beyond use.

'Who is it, do you think, my Regulators are working so hard to thwart? Rebels and heretics maybe? Aye, indeed so, for each week we pass hundreds of such traitors into the hands of Cinimon's Monbarri after we ourselves have finished with them. But I say this to you: at least half the reports I read concern the El-mud alone. The Night Wing has eyes and ears everywhere, and we have yet to find a way to neutralize them.'

The man stopped as he noticed the glow of anger in Kirkus's eyes. He seemed at last to remember who he was addressing, for he suddenly flushed, his bald scalp deathly pale in contrast to his burning face, and glanced towards Sasheen and the two bodyguards that flanked her. The man bowed low. 'Forgive me,' he said to Kirkus. 'I seem to have drunk too much, and lecture a man as though he was still a boy.'

Kirkus, continued to glare, enjoying watching the little man squirm. It was Cinimon who finally broke the silence amongst them.

'I would think, Bushrali, you should be the last to admit to such a deficit in your capacities.'

'I do not water the truth like some,' he retorted. In a more measured voice, he addressed Kirkus once more. 'These desert men of Zanzahar have been making an art out of shadow-play and intelligence for a thousand years now. You cannot hope to dupe them for long. The agents of the El-mud are the true reason for Zanzahar's monopoly. We could not even commit to an invasion of the Caliphate without their knowing it. To talk of such things, even here in this room full of only the most loyal, is to say too much.'

'Which is why it is merely talk,' interrupted Sasheen herself, smoothly. 'We have no intentions for Zanzahar, either now or ever.' And she sounded sincere in her words, though even then Kirkus could see that his mother was not entirely telling the whole truth. His grunt of disbelief drew a flash of warning from her eyes. He quickly hid his smile by taking another bite of the parmadio.

'Maybe you forget the history lessons I was so ardent in having schooled into you?' she reproached him. 'How Markesh fell when they brought an embargo down on their heads, for seeking out the Isles of Sky and its sources of blackpowder for themselves?'

He knew the history well, but he would not rise to the bait. He continued chewing, and watched his mother as she watched him.

'Without cannon, their enemies devoured them over the course of a decade. You should remember this, my son. Markesh was hardly weak. Their merchant empire was so influential that even now all of the Miders shares their common tongue of Trade. If not for them, we would all still be using iron tubs for cannon, and hollow sticks for rifles. And still, they fell. You really think we are so immune from such a fate?'

'We are Mann. They were not.'

'We are Mann, yes. But we are not invulnerable. Perhaps, during your recent cull, you should have remembered that also, hmm?'

She said no more, not in front of the others, at least.

Kirkus tossed the core of the parmadio to a passing slave, wiped his hands on his robe. He said nothing more as the conversation turned to different topics.

His mother had been livid upon his return, angry to the point of striking him, when she had found out how he had slain the wearer of a seal during his cull.

'You think they will not try to reach him, even here?' Sasheen had yelled at his grandmother.

'We have contingencies against that, if they do,' he had heard his grandmother reply through the heavy door he listened at. 'Calm yourself, child. We did not rise so high by fearing the likes of the Rshun. Such worrying is a weakness. You must purge yourself of it.'

Kirkus himself had experienced no such worries at first. The Cull had transformed him, in some way. His normal everyday arrogance had settled into something deeper instead, so that he had felt a rightness in every action he performed, whether small or consequential. He knew, with every touch of his fingers, that he had taken life with these same hands. He had bent his will to the task, and it had not been so difficult after all. At long last, Kirkus had experienced a brief taste of the divine flesh.

On his arrival home at the Temple after their grand progress, he had half expected Lara to be waiting there to see this new-grown man standing before her, and for her to come rushing into his open arms in a deeply satisfying display of regret and tears. The very last thing he had expected had been a continuation of their old hostility.

After this freshest blow of rejection, Kirkus had found himself becoming increasingly reclusive in his personal chambers, turning his other friends away more times than not. He began to dwell on the image of the seal hanging about the dead girl's neck. Stories came unbidden of the Rshun, of the impossible myths that surrounded them. He found eddies of fear often rippling in his stomach, till his new-found sense of power began to diminish.

There would be other culls, and purges too. He would feel that power again, and practise the wearing of it until he became it entirely. But still, he felt that gnawing worry as he lay awake at nights, listening to the closing of distant doors, the silences that were not silences at all but a cacophony of sounds too subtle for him to hear.

Kirkus looked down at his hands and felt the tacky sweat of them. His nostrils seemed clogged with the dust of the arena outside, borne within.

I must wash, he thought.

He turned to make his excuses to leave, but saw the priest Heelas approach from the entrance leading to the imperial stand, the man shrouded in the lace hangings for a moment as he passed through a haze of sunlight into the antechamber within. 'Holy Lady,' announced his mother's caretaker with a bow. 'The people call for you.'

The chatter in the room fell silent. Indeed, the sound of the crowd had now risen to a percussive chant that Kirkus could feel in his stomach.

'Then let us go and please them,' said Sasheen, her smile brightening in an instant.

Kirkus wiped his hands against his robe again, and sighed as he followed her outside, the high priests trailing behind them.

At the appearance of Sasheen, a hundred thousand voices roared approval from the stands of the vast arena. She raised a hand aloft to acknowledge them, and for a moment Kirkus forgot his personal grumbles as he felt a rush of excitement rising within him.

It was cooler in the imperial stand reserved for the Holy Matriarch and her high priests, the sky above it cloudless and bright. On the sandy floor of the Shay Madi arena, a host of naked men and women huddled together in chains, looking like the refugees from some natural devastation. They were heretics from around the Empire, caught in the act of practising the old religions – a furtive sign made to one of the spirit gods, a prayer to the Great Fool – and informed on by a neighbour or even by their kin.

Their ranks included the poor, too; the homeless and the crippled, those who could barely fend for themselves let alone thrive. These were people seen as failures in the eyes of Mann, parasites and carrion all, as far from the divine flesh as they could be.

One by one, they were being branded by white-cassocked members of the Monbarri, Cinimon's dour inquisitors, their heavy piercings hanging darkly in the sunlight. Some would be sent from here to the salt pans of the High Char, to serve out the rest of their short lives in heavy labour. But most would become slaves within the Empire's cities, as manual labourers or even sex workers. The useless would serve as sport for the crowd's entertainment here on the arena floor.

The work of branding quickly ceased, now that Sasheen stood with both arms held aloft. The Monbarri stood ready with their loops of rope and smoking irons, sweating from their exertions, and waiting for her spoken words. The crowds fell to silence around them.

Sasheen called out in a high clear voice that rebounded around the other stands of the arena. She told the crowds what they wished to hear most from their Holy Matriarch: how, in their devotions, they were all of Mann together; how in their loyalty they had built this great empire as one. They were the victors in life, she declared, for they had helped spread the true faith, and when death came to take them they would all be victors still.

All of it nonsense, Kirkus knew, as he gazed out over the herded masses; though still he swelled with pride in the force of the moment. His gaze dropped to the arena floor, and hungered after the white flanks of the naked women huddled in a flock at its centre, each stood facing inwards as though to hide her shame and to shield her eyes from their surroundings. Kirkus could hear their exhausted sobbing, and in the distance, the shrill cry of gulls in the bay of the First Harbour.

His mother suddenly gripped his wrist, startling him as she jerked it into the air and shouted his name out to the crowds. Another roar sounded.

Kirkus felt a moistness in his eyes. The soft sting of goosebumps upon his flesh. He was filled once more with Mann, with a sense of his own self-importance.

His divinity.