The Judging eye

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Iothiah

Psatma Nannaferi sat in the dust, rocking to whispered prayers, her crooked hand held out to the train of passers-by. Though she counted their shadows, she took care not to probe their eyes, knowing that whatever moved them to give, be it pity, the bite of guilt, or simply the fear of an unlucky coin, it must be their own. The blessed words of the Sinyatwa were clear on that account: "From seed to womb, from seed to furrow. The right hand cannot give to the left…"

To give was to lose. It was an arithmetic with only one direction.

This was the miracle of the Ur-Mother, Yatwer, the Goddess of Fertility and Servitude, who moved through the world in the form of more and more and more. Unasked for bounty. Undeserved plenitude. She was the pure Gift, the breaking of tit for tat, the very principle of the birthing world. It was She who made time flesh.

Which was why Nannaferi realized she had to move. More and more the copper talents came to her palm, rather than to those other beggars raised beside her. More and more they landed with a knowing clink, a momentary hesitation. One young girl, a Galeoth slave, even gave her an onion, whispering, "Priestess-Mother."

It always happened this way, even in cities as great as Iothiah. The human heart was ever bent on exchange. Even though people knew the purpose of the Beggar's Sermon, they were still drawn to her once the rumours of her presence spread. They felt the pinch of their offering, and assumed that this made it Gift enough. If you asked them whether they were trying to purchase the Goddess's favour, they would insist they only wanted to give. But their eyes and expressions always shouted otherwise.

Such a strange thing, giving, as if the arms of beggars could be the balance of the world.

So Nannaferi would be forced to move, to find someplace where anonymity could assure the purity of the offerings she received. To take from those angling for dispensations was a kind of pollution. And more importantly, it saved no souls. For adherents to the Cult of Yatwer, ignorance was the royal road to redemption.

She undid the veil from her old and cratered face, pocketed the coins in her sack-cloth robe. As though to verify her conclusion, three more coins plopped into the dust before her, one of them silver. Excess generosity was ever the sign of greed. She left them in their small oblong craters. Other Yatwerian priestesses, she knew, would have taken them, saying waste not want not or some other trite blasphemy. But she was not one of the others-she was Psatma Nannaferi.

She grabbed her cane and with shaking elbows out began to hoist herself to her feet…

Only to be struck to her knees.

It began as it always did, with a curious buzzing in the ears, as though dragonflies swarmed about her head. Then the ground bucked and flopped like cloth thrown over fish, and watercolour haloes swung about every living form. And she saw her, though she could not turn to look, a shadow woman, spoked in sun-silver, walking where everything and everyone exploded like clay urns, a silhouette so sharp it cut eyes sideways. A hand reached out and pressed the side of her hooded head, irresistibly gentle, forcing her cheek down to the pungent earth.

"Mother," she gasped.

The shadow held her, as though pinning her below unseen waters. "Be still, child," it said in a voice that crawled like beetles up out of the heart of things. It seemed that she would crack open, that her marrow would climb out and wrap her in a newer skin.

"Your brother has finally arrived. The White-Luck Warrior has come."

The hand leaned down upon her, a sun-swallowing mountain.

"So soon?"

"No, my love. On the anointed day."

Her body was but a string tied about an infinite iron nail, woollen tailings that trembled in an otherworldly wind.

"And the D-D-Demon?"

"Will be driven to his doom."

Then the roar vanished, sucked up like smoke from the opium bowl. The blasted streets became a wall of onlookers, peopled by vendors, teamsters, harlots, and soldiers. And the shadow became a man, a Nansur caste-noble by the look of him, with concerned yet gentle eyes. And the hand was his hand, rubbing her poxed cheek the way you might massage a sleeping limb.

He does not fear to touch-

"It's okay," he was saying. "You were seized, but it's passing. How long have you suffered the Falling Disease?"

But she ignored him-and all the others. She clawed aside his hovering hands. She fairly beat herself a path with her cane when she clambered to her feet.

What did they know of giving?

The city of Iothiah was ancient. Not so old as Sumna perhaps, but certainly older than the Thousand Temples-far older. As was the Cult of Yatwer.

The recently built Chatafet Temple in the northeast of the city was where most of Iothiah's faithful congregated to worship, mourn, and celebrate. By all accounts, it was one of the most successful Yatwerian temples in the Three Seas, bolstered by the ever-growing number of converts among what had been, until the First Holy War, a largely heathen population. But for those initiated in the greater mysteries of the Cult, it was little more than a point of administrative pride. The true importance of Iothiah lay in the funerary maze of the Ilchara Catacombs, the great Womb-of-the-Dead.

The once famed Temple of Ilchara had been destroyed by the heathen Fanim, its marble and sandstone looted over the centuries of their tenure. Now it was little more than a gap in the rambling network of tenements surrounding it. All that remained were gravel heaps hazed by desert scree. Here and there ragged blocks rose pale as ice from the shag of grasses. Sandy tracks marked the paths taken by generations of playing children. Were it not for the black banners stitched with Yatwer's sacred sign-a harvest sickle that was at once a pregnant belly-nothing immediate would have identified it as hallowed ground.

Psatma Nannaferi led her sisters across a flower-covered mound toward the Catacomb entrance. Their sandalled feet swished through the grasses, adding a strange melancholy to their sporadic conversation. Nannaferi said nothing, concentrated on holding her head high despite her bent back. It seemed she wore her revelation rather than the black-silk gowns of her holy station, so palpable it had become. She could feel it billow about her in winds that only souls could sail. Immortal attire. She was certain the others glimpsed it, even if their eyes remained ignorant. They glanced more than they should, more quickly than they should, the sidelong appraisals of the envious and overawed.

Even scarred and diminutive, Nannaferi was and always had been imposing, a will of oak among hearts of balsa. In her youth, the senior priestesses never failed to overlook her when doling out the reprimands they used to confirm their superior station. Others they scolded and whipped, but they always passed by the "Shigeki pox-girl," as they called her, in silence. Small as she was, she seemed a weight too great for their flimsy nets. Something about her eyes, perhaps, which always seemed fixed on their tipping point. Or her voice, whose flawless edge called attention to the cracks and twists in their own.

Gravitas, the ancient Cenieans would have called it.

No one dared hate her, for that would have carried too much admission. And all respected her, for that was the only ingress she allowed, the only way to avoid suffocating in her implacable gaze. So she rose through the layered hierarchies of the Cult of Yatwer the way a stone dropped through flotsam. In twenty short years, she became the Matriarch, the Cult's titular leader, answering only to the Shriah in Sumna. Fourteen years after that, she was declared Mother-Supreme, a station outlawed when the Thousand Temples brought the Cults to heel long ago but maintained in secret for almost sixteen centuries.

A broad trench yawned before the priestesses. Forced to descend the earthen ramp in single file, they momentarily crowded the edge, flummoxed by the delicate question of precedence. Nannaferi ignored them, reached the bottom before the first of them had dared follow. A band of armed men, local caste-menials chosen for their fanatical zeal, fell to their knees as she strolled into their midst. She glanced across their sun-shining backs, nodded in approval as each murmured the ritual invocation, "Hek'neropontah…"

Gift-giver.

Gift-giver, indeed, she silently mused. A Gift they could scarce comprehend, let alone believe.

She paused before the entrance, knelt to one knee so that she might taste Goddess-earth.

Aside from excavating the ancient gate, the Cult had done nothing to undo the sacrilege wrought by the heathen. Looters had stripped the black-marble panels with the friezes depicting the Goddess in her various guises, Sowing, Tilling, and Harvesting, and they had pried off the bronze snakes that had wound about the flanking columns. They had taken little else otherwise. According to local lore, the Fanim had been loath to enter the Catacombs, especially after the Grandee charged with mapping its depths had failed to return. Apparently the Padirajah himself had ordered the place sealed, calling it in his accursed tongue Gecca'lam, or Pit of the She-Demon.

They were as wretched as madmen, the heathen, and as deserving of pity, their delusions ran so deep. But one thing, at least, they saw with admirable clarity.

The Goddess was to be feared.

Even the Elder Scriptures, the Higarata and The Chronicle of the Tusk, gave the Goddess short shrift, so drunk were the poets on masculine virtues. The reason was obvious enough: Yatwer, more than any of the Hundred, celebrated the poor and the weak, for they were the growers and the makers, the toiling multitudes who carried the caste-nobility like a foul slime upon their backs. She alone celebrated them. She alone held up her hands to grant them a second, more shadowy life. Celebrated and avenged.

Even her brother War, it was said, feared her. Even Gilgaцl shrank from Yatwer's bloody gaze.

And well he should.

Planting her cane before her, Psatma Nannaferi strode into the shadow of the ancient sandstone lintels. She entered the worldly womb of the Ur-Mother, descended into the company of her long-dead sisters.

The subterranean cemetery wound deep beneath the ruined foundations of its namesake temple, level wheeling beneath level, making a vast drum of the earth. The lantern-light revealed an endless series of brick-vaulted recesses, each packed with urns, some so ancient the script they bore could not be read. For thousands of years, since the days of the Old Dynasty, the ashes of Yatwer's priestesses had been brought here to slumber in holy community.

The Womb-of-the-Dead.

Psatma Nannaferi could sense the awe in her sister high-priestesses. They shuffled after her in small, solemn clots, the young assisting the old, the awestruck walking in a kind of stupor, as though only now delivered to the truth of their calling-and so seeing their sham piety for the vanity that it was. Only the bitch that posed as the Chalfantic Oracle, Vethenestra, dared affect boredom. Heavens forfend an oracle who has not seen it all.

Take-take-take. It was a wickedness, a pollution, that knew no bounds.

It was the very essence of the Demon.

Nannaferi held on to this passion as she guided them into the void that was the Charnal Hall. Her middle anger, she sometimes called it, where her judgment smouldered just enough to singe the hearts of the weak. Everything was sinful, everything was accountable; this was simply the truth of an unruly and disordered world. The Goddess was surfeit, the Goddess was wilderness, only beaten with hoe and plow into the feeding of the world. Nannaferi was the hoe. Nannaferi was the plow. And before these entombed proceedings were completed, her sisters would find themselves weeded and tilled… fertile soil for the White-Luck Warrior.

There was no vanity in her task. The Goddess had made her into the rule with which the world would be measured-no more, no less. Who was Nannaferi to take heart or pride in this, let alone question the why and wherefore? The knife, as the Galeoth saying went, was no greater for the skinning.

Only more doused in blood.

She told them to space their lanterns throughout the vaulted hollow, then directed them to take seats about the immense stone table in the chamber's heart: the legendary Struck Table, where the Ur-Mother herself had once chastised her wayward daughters. Nannaferi took the place of the Goddess, so that the cracks that sundered its ancient planes radiated from her withered breast. A fissure seemed to fork and vein its way to each of her sisters, which was good, she thought, for she would be the light that revealed the fractures in them all.

She sat perfectly immobile, waited patiently for the last of their conversations to fade. Several present had only recently arrived from across the Three Seas; there were more than a few old enmities and friendships here, interrupted by appointments abroad. Since friendship was one of the Goddess's most blessed gifts, she tolerated their banter. It was a rare thing, she knew, to find oneself in the company of peers when you reached the highest echelons of the Cult. Loneliness was ever the cold price of authority, and it showed in these women. Eleva, in particular, seemed desperate to speak.

But the pall of enormity was quick to silence even her. Soon all twelve sat with the same rigid austerity as their Mother-Supreme: the Oracle and the eleven High Priestesses of the Cult. Everyone save the Matriach, Sharacinth-a fact that none could have missed.

"Only once since the time of the heathen," Nannaferi said, her voice throat-smoky with age, "has the Struck Table been convened. Many of you were here that day. It was a joyous time, a time of celebration, for at last the Cult had regained this place, our Great Goddess's earthly womb, where the long line of our sisters dwell, awaiting their Second Birth in the Outside. At that time we celebrated the Shriah and his Holy War, thinking only of what we might regain. We did not see the Demon that slumbered in its belly, that would possess it, transform it into an instrument of oppression and blasphemous tyranny."

She allowed her outrage to twist this final word.

"We did not see the Aspect-Emperor."

She slapped her cane of sacred acacia flat on the table. Her sisters jumped at the crack. Then she reached into her gown, whose silken folds seemed almost moist where they bunched against the bent joints of her body, and withdrew a small sphere of iron, no larger than a dove's egg, ringed with indecipherable script. She raised it high between thumb and forefinger, gingerly set it on the table before her…

A Chorae. A Holy Tear of God.

As though following some irresistible logic, the women's gazes moved in perfect tandem from the Chorae to her face. To be addressed in such a bald manner was shock enough: The Inaugurals, the ceremonial rites and prayers of initiation, were mandatory on such occasions. Now they stared at her in outright astonishment. They were beginning to understand, Nannaferi noted with grim satisfaction.

Their Goddess girded for war.

"But first," she said, resting her right hand on the shaft of her cane, "we must deal with the matter of the witch."

With the Chorae before her, the implication was plain: She meant one of them.

Several gasped. Maharta, the youngest of their number (and a political concession to Nilnamesh), actually cried out. Sharhild, with her piggish eyes and radish cheeks, watched with the expression of bland stupidity she always used to conceal her cleverness. Vethenestra, of course, nodded as though she'd known all along. What kind of Oracle would she be otherwise?

A hush fell upon them, so complete it seemed they could hear the dead ashes breathe.

"B-but Holy Mother," Maharta fairly whispered. "How could you know?"

Psatma Nannaferi closed her eyes, knowing they would be globes of crimson when they snapped opened.

"Because the Goddess," she murmured, "lets me see."

Shouting clamour. The clinking thump of a stone stool falling. Eleva leapt to her feet, her arms outstretched, her eyes and mouth shining sun-white, her hair and robes boiling in some intangible tempest. An uncanny mutter fell from the arches, the walls, from the circumference of all things seen-a voice that crumpled thought like paper. Sharhild flew at her, knife out and stabbing, only to be tossed back, thrown like soiled clothes into the corner. Spectral walls parsed the Charnal Hall, the ghosts of cyclopean bricks. Screams rang through the closeted deep. The priestesses scrambled, scattered. Shadows twisted about the hinges of things.

The thwack of iron on wood. A blinding incandescence. A sucking roar.

Moans and small cries of disbelief rose through the sulphurous reek. Maharta sobbed, crouched beneath the eaves of the Struck Table. "Eleva!" someone cried. "Eleva!"

"Has been dead for days," Nannaferi spat. She alone had not moved. "Maybe longer."

The cane tingled in her hands, as if still shivering from the impact. Using it, she walked up to the fallen witch, stared down at the cracked statue of salt across the floor. An anonymous girl, forever frozen in anxious, arrogant white. Buxom. Improbably young.

With an involuntary groan Nannaferi knelt to retrieve her Chorae from the powdered floor. Her blessed Tear of God.

"They hunt us with witches," she said, her hatred warbling through her voice. "What greater proof could we have of their depravity?"

Witches… The School of Swayal. Yet another of the Aspect-Emperor's many blasphemies.

Several stunned heartbeats passed before her sisters collected themselves. Two helped Sharhild back to her seat, full of praise for the old Thunyeri shield-maiden's ferocity and courage. Others crept forward to look at the dead witch who but moments earlier had been Eleva-one of their favourites, no less! Maharta continued crying, though she had been shamed into snuffles. Vethenestra resumed her seat, cast blank looks of apprehension about the Table.

Then, as though once again answering to some collective logic, they erupted in questions and observations. The low-lintelled ceiling of the Charnal Hall rang with matronly exclamations. Apparently Vethenestra had dreamt this would happen a fortnight ago. Did this mean the Shriah and the Thousand Temples scrutinized them? Or was this the work of the Empress? Phoracia claimed to see Eleva touch a Chorae not more than three months previous in Carythusal, during the solstice observances. That meant the witch had replaced her recently, did it not? Sometime close to the secret summons they all received…

But how could that be? Unless…

"Yes," Nannaferi said, her tone filled with a recognition of menace that cleared the room of competing voices. "The Shriah knows of me. He has known of me for quite some time."

The Shriah. The Holy Father of the Thousand Temples.

The Demon's brother, Maithanet.

"They have tolerated me because they believe secret knowledge a valuable thing. They accumulate conspiracies the way caste-merchants do ledgers, thinking they can control what they can number."

A hard-faced moment.

"Then we're doomed!" Aethiola abruptly cried. "Think of what happened to the Anagkians…"

Five assassins, convinced they were enacting Fate, had attempted to murder the Empress on the day of her youngest son's Whelming. It had been a failure and, more importantly, a blunder, one that had threatened all the Orthodox, no matter what their Cult. The rumours of the Empress's revenge were predictably inconsistent: The Anagkian Matriarch had either been flayed alive, or sewn into a sack with starving dogs, or stretched into human rope on the rack. The only certain thing was that she and all her immediate subordinates had been arrested by the Shrial Knights, never to be seen again.

Nannaferi shook her head. "We are a different Cult."

This was no vain conceit. With the possible exception of Gilgaцl, none of the Hundred Gods commanded the mass sympathy enjoyed by Yatwer. Where other Cults were not so different than their temples, surface structures that could be pulled down, the Yatwerians were like these very halls, the Womb-of-the-Dead, something that could not be pulled down because it was the earth. And just as the Catacombs had tunnels, abandoned Old Dynasty sewers, reaching as far out as the ruins of the Sareotic Library, so did they possess far-reaching means, innumerable points of entry, hidden and strategic.

Wherever there were caste-menials or slaves.

"But Mother-Supreme," Phoracia said. "We speak of the Aspect-Emperor."

The name alone was the argument.

Nannaferi nodded. "The Demon is not so strong as you might think, Phori. He and his most ardent, most fanatical followers march in the Great Ordeal, half a world away. Meanwhile, all the old grievances smoulder across the Three Seas, waiting for the wind that will fan them to flame." She paused to touch each of her sisters with the iron of her gaze. "The Orthodox are everywhere, Sisters, not just this room."

"Even the heathens grow more bold," Maharta said in support. "Fanayal continues to elude them in the south. Scarcely a week passes without riots in Nenciph-"

"But still," Phoracia persisted, "you haven't seen him as I have. You have no inkling of his power. None of you do! No one kno-" The old priestess caught herself with a kind of seated lurch. Phoracia was the only one of their number older than Nannaferi, at that point where the infirmities of the body could not but leach into the soul. More and more she was forgetting her place, overspeaking. The intermittent impertinence of the addled and exhausted.

"Forgive me," she murmured. "Holy Mother. I–I did not mean to imply…"

"But you are correct," Nannaferi said mildly. "We indeed have no inkling of his power. This is why I summoned you here, where the souls of our sisters might shroud us from his far-scyring eyes. We have no inkling, but then we are not alone. Not as he is alone."

She let these words hang in the sulphur-stained air.

"The Goddess!" sturdy old Sharhild hissed. A bead of blood dropped from her scalp to her brow, tapped onto the pitted stone of the table. "We all know that She has touched you, Mother. But She has come to you as well, hasn't she?" The dread in her accented voice outlasted the wonder, seemed to hone the sense of mountainous weight emanating from the ceiling.

"Yes."

Once again the Charnal Hall erupted in competing voices. Was it possible? Blessed event! How? When? Blessed, blessed event! What did she say?

"But what of the Demon?" Phoracia called above the others. The sisters fell silent, deferring as much to their embarrassment as to her rank. "The Aspect-Emperor," the prunish woman pressed. "What does she say of him?"

And there it was, the fact of their blasphemy, exposed in the honesty of an old woman's muddled soul. Their fear of the Aspect-Emperor had come to eclipse all other terrors, even those reserved for the Goddess.

One could only worship at angles without fear.

"The Gods…" Nannaferi began, struggling to render what was impossible in words. "They are not as we are. They do not happen… all at once…"

Her eyes narrowed in fatuous concentration, Aethiola said, "Vethenestra claims-"

"Vethenestra knows nothing," Nannaferi snapped. "The Goddess has no truck with fools or fakers."

The Struck Table fell very still. All eyes followed the wandering crack that led to the Chalfantic Oracle, Vethenestra, who sat in the tight pose of someone at war with their own trembling. For the Mother-Supreme to refer to any of them by name was disaster enough…

The woman paled. "H-Holy Mother… If I–I had cause to dis-displease you…

Nannaferi regarded her as if she were a broken urn. "It is the Goddess who is displeased," she said. "I simply find you ridiculous."

"But what have I-?"

"You are no longer the Oracle of Chalfantas," she said, her voice parched with regret and resignation. "Which means you have no place at this table. Leave, Vethenestra. Your dead sisters await."

An image of her own sister came to Nannaferi, her childhood twin, the one who did not survive the pox. In a heartbeat it all seemed to pass through her, the whooping laughter, the giggling into shoulders, the teary-eyed shushing. And it ached, somehow, to know that her soul had once sounded such notes of joy. It reminded her of what had been given…

And those few things that remained.

"Awa-await?" Vethenestra stammered.

"Leave," Nannaferi repeated. There was something about the way she held her hand, an unnerving gestural inflection that implied destination rather than direction.

Vethenestra stood, her hands clutching knots of fabric against her thighs. Her first steps were backward, as if expecting to be called back, or to wake, for she looked at them with a stung and stupefied glee, a face that had forgotten what was real. She turned to the black maw of the entrance. Each of them felt it, an ethereal squeezing, a wringing of empty air. They blinked in disbelief, gazed in horror at the issue. Ribs of menstrual crimson wound like smoke through the dark. Glistening curlicues, twining into nothingness.

Oblivious, Vethenestra crossed the threshold. But she didn't so much step into the shadows as step out, as though she were no more than her image, twisting away in directions indescribable to the eye, like a pool soaked out of existence. One heartbeat she was, and the next she was not.

Something like speech seemed to rattle in the corners beyond their hearing-or perhaps it was a shriek.

Silence. The very air seemed animate. The excavated hollows that surrounded them, hall after honeycombed hall, hummed with emptiness, the deadness of space. Watching her sisters, Nannaferi could see it slacken the last of their eyes, the comprehending, the standing underneath what they had lived the entirety of their shallow lives. The Goddess, not the name they used to sugar their lips, not the vague presence that tickled their vanity or itched the underbelly of their sins, but the Goddess, the Blood of Fertility, the monstrous, ageless Mother of Birth.

Here, lending her fury to the blood dark.

Without warning, Maharta fell to her knees, pressed tear-streaked cheeks to the soiled floor. Then they were all kneeling, all hissing or murmuring prayers.

And Nannaferi spoke to the ceiling, crooked hands held out.

"Your daughters are clean, Mother…

"Your daughters are clean."

They were abject now, staring at her with mewling eyes, adoring and horrified eyes, for they saw now that their Goddess was real, and that Psatma Nannaferi was her chosen daughter. Maharta hugged her about the thighs, bent to kiss her knees. The others crowded near, trembling with wonder and zeal, and the Mother-Supreme pressed closed her unpainted lids, savoured the rain of their gentle touches, felt corporeal and incorporeal, like someone invisible finally seen.

"Tell them," she said to her sisters, her voice hoarse with the passion to dominate. "In whispers, let your congregations know. Tell them the White-Luck turns against their glorious Aspect-Emperor."

They had to take such gifts that were given. Even those beyond their comprehension…

"Tell them the Mother sends her Son."

Or that would see them dead.

Momemn…

Kelmomas liked to pretend that the Sacral Enclosure, the octagonal garden situated in the heart of the Imperial Apartments, was nothing less than the roof of the world. It was easy enough, given the way the surrounding structures obscured the expanse of Momemn to the west or the great plate of the Meneanor to the east. From almost any position along the colonnades or verandas overlooking the Enclosure, all you could see was the long blue tumble of the sky. It lent a sense of altitude and isolation.

He stared at the greening sycamores, their crowns nodding in a chill wind that could scarce reach him where he sat on the balcony. The grand old trees fascinated him. The wending lines of trunks parsed into great hanging limbs. The leaves twittering like minnows in the sun. The arrhythmic back and forth against iron-bellied clouds. There was a power to them, a power and a stillness, that seemed to dwarf the staid background of marble columns and walls and shadowy interior spaces stacked three storeys high.

He would very much like to be a tree, Kelmomas decided.

The secret voice murmured, as though proposing lame solutions to an all-conquering boredom. But Kelmomas ignored it, concentrated instead on the sound of his mother's fluting dialogue. By lying on his belly and pressing his face against the cold polish of the balustrades, he could almost see her sitting at the edge of the East Pool, the only place where the Enclosure opened onto the expanse of the Sea.

"So what should I do?" she was saying. "Move against the whole Cult?"

"I fear Yatwer is too popular," his uncle, the Holy Shriah replied. "Too beloved."

"The Yatwerians, yes-yes," his sister, Theliopa, said in her spittle-laden, words-askew way. "Father's census figures indicate that some six out of ten caste-menials regularly attend some kind of Yatwerian rite. Six-out-of-ten. Far and away the most popular of the Hundred. Far-far. Far-far."

The pause in Mother's reply said it all. It wasn't so much that she reviled her own daughter-Mother could never hate her own-only that she could find no reflection of herself, nothing obviously human. There was no warmth whatsoever in Theliopa, only facts piled upon facts and an intense aversion to all the intricacies that seal the intervals between people. The sixteen-year-old could scarce look at another's face, so deep was her horror of chancing upon a gaze.

"Thank you, Thel."

His older sister was like a dead limb, Kelmomas decided, an extension into insensate space. Mother leaned on her intellect only because Father had commanded it.

"I remember what it was like," Mother continued. "I shudder to think how many coppers I tossed to beggars, thinking they might have been disguised priestesses. The Goddess of the Gift…" A laugh, at once pained and rueful. "You have no idea, Maitha, what a salve to the heart Yatwer can be…"

Piqued by the undertones of anxiousness and melancholy in her voice, Kelmomas craned his head, pressed against the marble posts until his cheeks ached. He saw her, reclining in her favourite divan, little more than a teary-eyed silhouette against the glassy expanse of the pool. She seemed so small, so blow-away frail, that he found it difficult to breathe…

She needs us, the voice said.

Just then his nursemaid, Porsi, arrived with his twin brother, Samarmas. Popping to his feet with little-boy effortlessness, Kelmomas skipped from the veranda into the redolent gloom of the playroom. Samarmas's grin ate up his angelic face the way it always did, turning him into a leering childhood version of an Ajoklian idol. Porsi, her acne scars like dappled wine stains, her fingers resting possessively on his brother's golden maul, immediately began speaking in her now-the-twins-are-together voice. "Would you like to play parasta? Would you like to do that? Or, something different? Oh, yes, how could I forget? Such strong boys-growing too old for parasta, aren't we? Something warlike, then. Would that be better? I know! Kel, you could be sword while Sammi plays shield…"

On and on she would go, while Kelmomas would smile or sulk or shrug and stare into her face and ponder all the small terrors that he saw there. Usually, he would play along, making games of the games she organized for the two of them. While playing parasta, he would modulate his tantrums over the course of successive days, gauging the variables that informed her response. He found that the very same words could make her laugh or grit her teeth in frustration, depending on his tone and expression. He discovered that if he abruptly walked up to her and placed his head on her lap, he could summon mist, even tears to her eyes. Sometimes, while Samarmas drooled and mumbled over some ivory toy, he would turn his cheek from her thigh and stare in a lazy, all-is-safe way into her face, smelling the folds of her crotch through her gown. She would always smile in nervous adoration, thinking-and he knew this because he somehow could see it-that a little god stared up from her lap. And he would say curious, childlike things that filled her heart with awe and wonder.

"You are just like him," she would reply every so often. And Kelmomas would exult, knowing that she meant Father.

Even slaves can see it, the voice would say. It was true. He was able to hold so much more in the light of his soul's eye than the people around him. Names. Nuances. The rate at which various birds beat their wings.

So he knew, for instance, everything about the sickness the physician-priests called Moklot, or the Shudders. He knew how to simulate the symptoms, to the point where he could fool even old Hagitatas, his mother's court physician. All he need do was think about becoming feverish, and he became feverish. The trembly-shake-shake, well, even his halfwit brother could do that. He knew that when he told their Porsi that his calves were cramping she would rush off to fetch his medicine, an obscure and noxious leaf from faraway Cingulat. And he knew that she would not find it in the infirmary, because how could she, when it was hidden beneath her own bed? So he knew she would begin searching…

Leaving him alone with his twin brother, Samarmas.

"But why, Maitha?" Mother was saying. "Are they mad? Can't they see that we're their salvation?"

"But you know the answer to this, Esmi. The Cultists themselves are no more or no less foolish than other Men. They see only what they know, and they argue only to defend what they cherish. Think of the changes my brother has wrought…"

Porsi would be gone for a long time. She would never think to look under her pallet because she had never placed it there. She would search and search, growing ever more bah-bah-teary-eyed, knowing that she would be called to account.

Smiling, Kelmomas sat cross-legged and contemplated his brother, who had his head to the maroon carpets, staring up at a dragon from some miniature perspective. Though his hands dwarfed the dragon's palm-worn head, he seemed diminutive, like a soapstone figurine playing with elaborately carved grains of sand. A toy Prince-Imperial poking toys that were smaller still.

Only the lazy battle of boredom and awe in his expression made him seemed real.

"So this business of the White-Luck?" his mother's distant voice asked.

"White-Luck-White-Luck," Theliopa said. Kelmomas could almost see her rocking on her stool, her joints twitching, her hands climbing from her elbows to her shoulders then back again. "A folk belief with ancient Cultic origins-ancient-old-ancient. According to Pirmees, the White-Luck is an extreme form of providence, a Gift of the Gods against worldly tuh-tuh-tyranny."

"White-Luck-White-Luck," Samarmas chimed in unison, then gurgled in his chin-to-windpipe way. Kelmomas glared him into silence, knowing that their uncle, at least, was entirely capable of hearing him.

As was anyone who shared their father's incendiary blood.

"You think it's nothing more than a self-serving fraud?" his mother asked his uncle.

"The White-Luck? Perhaps."

"What do you mean, 'perhaps'?"

Samarmas had ambled to and from the toy trunk, bearing several more figures, some silver, others mahogany. "Mommy," he murmured in a world-does-not-exist voice, extracting the figurine of a woman cast in aquiline silver. He held her to the hoary dragon so they could kiss. "Kisses!" he exclaimed, eyes lit with gurgling wonder.

Kelmomas had been born staring into the deluge that was his twin's face. For a time, he knew, his mother's physicians had feared for him because it seemed he could do little more than gaze at his brother. All he remembered were the squalls of blowing hurt and wheezing gratification, and a hunger so elemental that it swallowed the space between them, soldered their faces into a single soul. The world was shouldered to the periphery. The tutors and the physicians had droned from the edges, not so much ignored as overlooked by a two-bodied creature who stared endlessly into its own inscrutable eyes.

Only in his third summer, when Hagitatas, with doddering yet implacable patience, made a litany of the difference between beast, man, and god, was Kelmomas able to overcome the tumult that was his brother. "Beasts move," the old physician would rasp. "Men reflect. Gods make real." Over and over. "Beasts move. Men reflect. Gods make real. Beasts move…" Perhaps it was simply the repetition. Perhaps it was the palsied tone, the way his breath undid the substance of his words, allowing them to soak into the between places, the gem-cutting lines. "Beasts move…" Over and over, until finally Kelmomas simply turned to him and said, "Men reflect."

A blink, and what was one had become two.

He just… understood. One moment he was nothing, and another he was staring, not at himself, but at a beast. Samarmas, Kelmomas would later realize, was wholly what he would later see lurking in all faces: an animal, howling, panting, lapping…

An animal that, because of his unschooled sensitivities and its sheer immediacy, had devoured him, made a lair of his skull.

A blink, and what had absorbed suddenly repelled. Afterwards, Kelmomas could scarcely bear looking into the carnival of Samarmas's face. Something about it wrenched him with disgust, not the grimace-and-look-away variety, but the kind that pinched stomach walls together and launched limbs in wild warding. It was as though his brother wore his bowels on the outside. For a time, Kelmomas wanted to cry out in warning whenever Mother showered Samarmas with coos and kisses. How could she not see it, the unsheathing of wet and shiny things? Only some instinct to secrecy had kept him silent, a will, brute and spontaneous, to show only what needed to be shown.

Now he was accustomed to it, of course. The beast that was his brother.

The dog.

"Hey, Sammi," he said, wearing his mother's mouth-watering smile. "Watch…"

Bending over, he placed a single palm on the floor and raised his feet in the air. Grinning upside down, he bounced one-handed toward him, from indifferent carpet to cold marble.

Samarmas gurgled with delight, covered his mouth and pointed. "Bum-bum!" he cried. "I see your bum-bum!"

"Can't you do this, Sammi?"

Samarmas pressed his cheek to his shoulder, smiled bashfully down. "Nothing," he conceded.

"The Gods did not see the First Apocalypse," Uncle Maithanet was saying, "so why would they see the Second? They are blind to the No-God. They are blind to any intelligence without soul."

Again the imperceptible pause before Mother's reply. "But Kellhus is a Prophet… How-?"

"How could he be hunted by the Gods?"

Kelmomas lingered upside-down next to his brother, his heels swaying above.

"Isn't there anything you can do, Sammi?"

Samarmas shook his head, still doing his gurgle-laugh-gurgle at his brother's ridiculous pose.

"Lord Sejenus," Maithanet was saying, "taught us to see the Gods not as entities unto themselves, but as fragments of the God. This is what my brother hears, the Voice-Absolute. This is what has renewed the Covenant of Gods and Men. You know this, Esmi."

"So you're saying the Hundred could very well be at war with the God's designs-with their very own sum?"

"Yes-yes," Theliopa interjected. "There are one hundred and eighty-nine references referring to the disparate ends of the Gods and the God of Gods, two from the Holy Tractate itself. For they are like Men, hemmed in by darkness, making war on the shadows of they know not what.' Schol-Scholars, thirty-four, twenty. 'For I am the God, the rule of all things…' "

Kelmomas swung his feet down to sit cross-legged before Samarmas, shimmied close enough to touch knees. "I know," he whispered. "I know something you can do…"

Samarmas flinched and jerked his head, as though hearing something too remarkable to be believed.

"What? What? What?"

"Think of your own soul," Uncle Maithanet was saying. "Think of the war within, the way the parts continually betray the whole. We are not so different from the world we live in, Esmi…"

"I know-I know all this!"

"How about balance?" Kelmomas said. "You know how to balance, don't you?"

Moments later, Samarmas was perched tottering on the balcony's broad stone rail, deep spaces yawing out beyond and beneath him. Kelmomas watched from the playroom, standing just behind the line of sunlight across the floor, grinning as though astonished by his skill and daring. The distance-filtered voices of his uncle and mother seemed to fall from the sky.

"The White-Luck Warrior," his uncle was saying, "need not be real. The rumours alone constitute a dire threat."

"Yes, I agree. But how do you battle rumours?"

Kelmomas could almost see his uncle's simulated frown.

"How else? With more rumours."

Samarmas whooped in whispering triumph. Cotton-white arms out and waving. Toes flexed across a marmoreal line. The sycamores rearing behind, dark beneath sunlit caps, reaching up as though to catch some higher fall.

"And the Yatwerians?" Mother asked.

"Call a council. Invite the Matriarch herself here to the Andiamine Heights."

The sudden dip and lean. The stabilizing twitches. The small looks of bodily panic.

"Yes, but you and I both know she isn't the real leader of the Cult."

"Which might work to our advantage. Sharacinth is a proud and ambitious woman, one who chafes at being a figurehead."

Quick recovery steps. Feet swishing over polished stone. A gurgling laugh caught in an anxious, reflexive swallow.

"What? Are you suggesting we bribe her? Offer to make her Mother-Supreme?"

"That's one possibility."

The slender body bent about an invisible point, one which seemed to roll from side to side.

The surrounding air deep with the promise of gravity.

"As Shriah you hold the power of life and death over her."

"Which is why I suspect she knows little or nothing of these rumours, or what her sisters plan."

Eyes avid and exultant. Hands cycling air. A breathless grinning.

"That's something we can use."

"Indeed, Esmi. As I said, she is a proud woman. If we could induce a schism in the Cult…"

Samarmas tottering. A bare foot, ivory bright in the glare, swinging out from behind the heel of the other, around and forward, sole descending, pressing like a damp cloth across the stone. A sound like a sip.

"A schism…"

The shadow of a boy foreshortened by the high angle of the sun. Outstretched hands yanked into empty-air clutches. Feet and legs flickering out. A silhouette, loose and tight-bundled, falling through the barred shadow of the balustrade. A gasp flecked with spittle.

Then nothing.

Kelmomas stood blinking at the empty balcony, oblivious to the uproar rising from below.

Just like his father, he was able to hold so much more in the light of his soul's eye than the people around him. It had been this way ever since Hagitatas had taught him the difference between beast, man, and god-ever since he first had looked away from his brother's face. Beasts move, the old man had said.

Men reflect.

So he knew the love and worship Samarmas bore him, knew that he would do anything to close the abyss of insight and ability between them. And he knew precisely where the Pillarian Guards fixed their sandalled feet, where they planted the butt of their long spears…

Alarms rang through the Enclosure, clawed up to the sky. Soldiers, their martial voices hoarse with grief and terror. The guarded babble of slaves.

As though stunned, Kelmomas walked to the marble railing, leaned over the point where his brother had fallen. He looked down, saw his brother in an armoured circle of guardsmen, his eyes rolled back, his right arm coiled like rope, his torso twitching about the spear-shaft that pierced his flank.

The young Prince-Imperial was careful to wipe the olive oil from the rail. Then he howled the way a little boy should.

Why? the voice asked. The secret voice.

Why didn't you kill me sooner?

He saw his mother beat her way through the Pillarian Guards, heard her inconsolable scream. He watched his uncle, the Holy Shriah, grasp her shoulders as she fell upon her beloved son. He saw his sister Theliopa, absurd in her black gowns, approach in fey curiosity. He glimpsed one of his own tears falling, a liquid bead, falling, breaking upon his twin's slack cheek.

A thing so tragic. So much love would be required to heal.

"Mommy!" he cried. "Mommeeeeeeee!"

Gods make real.

There was such love in the touch of a son.

The funerary room was narrow and tall, plated with lines of blue-patterned Ainoni tile, but otherwise unadorned. Light showered through air like steam. Idols glared from small niches, almost, but never quite forgotten. Gold-gleaming censers wheezed in the corners, puffing faint ribbons of smoke. The Empress leaned against the marble pedestal in the room's centre, looking down, staring at the inert lines of her littlest.

She began with his fingers, humming an old song that made her slaves weep for recognition. Sometimes they forgot she shared their humble origins. Smiling, she looked at them as though to say, Yes, I've been you all along…

Just another slave.

She raised a forearm, cleansed it with long gentle strokes, elbow to wrist, elbow to wrist.

He was cold like clay. He was grey like clay. Yet, no matter how hard she pressed, she could not rob him of his form. He insisted on remaining her son.

She paused to cry. After a time she swallowed away the ache, cleared her throat with a gentle cough. She resumed her work and her humming. It almost seemed that she carved him more than she cleansed, that with every stroke he somehow became more real. The flawless lines and moist divets. The porcelain gleam of skin. The little mole beneath his left nipple. The constellation of freckles that reached like a shawl from shoulder to slender shoulder.

She absorbed all of it, traced and daubed and rinsed it, with movements that seemed indistinguishable from devotion.

There was such love in the touch of a son.

His chest. The low curve of his abdomen. And of course his face. Sometimes something urged her to prod and to shake, to punish him for this cruel little game. But her strokes remained unperturbed, slow and sure, as if the fact of ritual were some kind of proof against disordered souls.

She wrung the sponge, listened to the rattle of water. She smiled at her little boy, wondered at his beauty.

His hair was golden.

He smelled, she thought, as though he had been drowned in wine.

Kelmomas pretended to weep.

She bundled him tight against her breast, and he squirmed clear of the blankets crowded between them. He pressed himself against her shuddering length. Her every sob welled through him like waves of lazy heat, washed him with bliss and vindication.

"Don't let go!" she gasped, pressing her cheek back from his damp hair. "Never-never-please!"

Her face was his scripture, written with looms of skin, muscle, and tendon. And the truths he read there were holy.

He knew it so intimately he could tell whenever a mole had darkened or a lash had fallen from her eyelids. He had heard the priests prattle about their Heavens, but the truth was that paradise lay so much nearer-and tasted of salt.

Her face eclipsed him, the ligaments of anguish, the trembling lips, the diamonds streaming from her eyes.

"Kel," she sobbed. "Poor baby…"

He keened, squashed the urge to kick his feet in laughter. Yes! he cried silent glee, the limb-wagging exultation of a child redeemed. Yes!

And it had been so easy.

You are, the secret voice said, her only love remaining.