The Judging eye

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

Her face seemed numb for tingling.

"Does he hear us, Mommy? Does he know?"

Esmenet clutched Kelmomas's little hand so tight she feared she might hurt him. "Yes," she heard herself say. The stone of the Ashery snared her words, held them close and warm, as though she spoke into a lover's neck. "Yes. He's the son of an earthly god."

According to Nansur custom, the mother of a dead male child had to mark her face with her son's ashes each full moon after the cremation: two lines, one down each cheek. Thraxami, they were called, tears-of-the-pyre. Only when her tears no longer darkened them could the rite cease. Only when the weeping ended.

Even now, she could feel his residue across her cheeks, burning, accusing, as though transmuted, Samarmas had become antithetical to his mother, a kind of poison that her skin could not abide.

As though he had become wholly his father's.

The tradition was too old, too venerated, to be contradicted. Esmenet had seen engravings of women marked with thraxami dating back to the early days of ancient Cenei, trains of them marching like captives. And in the ritual dramas the temples put on during Cultic festivals, mummers used black lines down a white-painted face to represent desolate women the way they used red horizontal lines, wurrami, to depict rage-maddened men. For the Nansur, thraxami were synonymous with mourning.

But where others kept their child's remains in their household shrine, little Samarmas, as a Prince-Imperial, had been interred in the High Royal Ashery of the Temple Xothei. So once again, what was tender and private for others became rank spectacle for her. Thousands had mobbed the gates of the Imperial Precincts, and thousands more the foundations of mighty Xothei, a seething carnival of mourning and anticipation, mothers casting dust skyward and rending their hair, slaves loafing and gawking, boys jumping to snatch glimpses over grown shoulders, and many more. Even here, deep in the temple's mazed bowel, she thought she could hear their anxious hum.

What would they say when they saw that her cheeks were dry? What would they make of an Empress who could not weep for the loss of her dearest child?

Illuminated only by the rare lamp, the walls of the Ashery seemed to hang in a greater black. Each of the niches spoke to the sensibilities of different ages and families. Some were garish with gilding and ornament, while others, like the adjacent niches of Ikurei Xerius and his nephew Ikurei Conphas, were simply chiselled into the raw stone, bereft of the marble facing that graced so many of the others. She tried not to ponder the irony of her son resting so close to Conphas, who had been the Nansurium's last Emperor before the ascension of Kellhus. She likewise ignored the guttered votives and small bowl of grain that had been left on the sill of his niche.

Someday, she thought, all her children would rest in this immobile gloom. Static. Speechless. Someday, she would reside here, cool dust encased in silver, gold, or perhaps Zeьmi jade-something cold, for all the substances that Men coveted were cold. Someday the heat of her would leach into the world, and she would be as dirt to the warm fingers of the living.

Someday she would be dead.

The relief that accompanied the thought was so sudden, so violent, that she almost audibly gasped. A confusion descended upon her, robbing her of memory and volition. She swayed, raised a hand to her blinking eyes. Then she found herself on the floor, sitting in a way that would have horrified her vestiaries it was so common, so undignified-no better than a whore hanging her legs from a window. She saw Kelmomas watching her, tried to smile reassurance. She leaned her head against the unyielding marble, the image of him lingering in her soul's eye. Small. Defenceless. The very image of his dead twin.

She heard his voice.

"Mommy? Does he hear us?"

She simply could not stop seeing him, Samarmas, his blood clotting the grass, his body as small as a dog, slowly relaxing about the spear that pierced it, slowly drifting asleep. Every time she blinked.

Every time she looked upon this other son.

"I told you…"

"No… I mean when we think." He was crying now, a desperate kind of hitching that made him bare his teeth. "D-does Sammy hear us when we think?"

She opened her knees and he fell into her arms, burned her neck with a muffled wail. And she saw-with grievous clarity, it seemed-that Samarmas's death had sundered her soul in two, the one part numb and wondering, the other clinging to this child, this replica, as though trying to absorb his shudders.

How could she protect him? And if she could not, how could she love?

She laid her head across his scalp, blew at the hairs that stuck to the seal of her lips. Her cheeks were wet, but whether the tears were her own she could not tell. No matter. The mob would be appeased. Her Exalt-Ministers would be relieved, for the Yatwerian matter had become far more than a Cultic nuisance. Who would raise voice or hand against a bereaved mother? And Kellhus…

She was so tired. So weary.

"The dead hear everything, Kel."

Iothiah…

A life lived, now forgotten.

And in its place…

A breeze as dry as hot ash. An airy room, clean with tile and paint, the floor canted to drain storm-waters. A woman in a simple linen shift, wedding young, her hair raven-dark, suckling an infant, smiling, asking something sweet and curious. Her head tipped, almond eyes flashing, poised to laugh at something soon to be said, a warm and gentle wit.

Peach-coloured walls trimmed in vining green.

A life forgotten…

Concern clouding her dark eyes. A quick glance at the infant against her breast, then again the question.

"Love? Are you okay?"

You look like you're dreaming…

A doorway, open onto a vista of tan and blue-pale and soft and oceanic. A blue that does not hang close behind the nodding palms, but opens and opens to the white ribs of heaven. A blue like billowing cotton.

The threshold crossed. Then a courtyard where gnarled old slaves chase chickens. A young scullery girl staring, immovable save for her tracking gaze, her skin as brown as her broom handle.

The gate. The street.

The infant wailing now, swung from a frantic hip, the woman scolding, weeping, crying out: "What are you doing? What has happened?"

Wake up, please! You're scaring me!

A slender clutch knocked aside by a strong, wide-waving arm. Steps taken. Distances rolled up into oblivion. A tugging from spaces unseen. The woman shrieking, "My love! My love, please!"

What have I done?

Two hundred and fifty-seven years before, a Shigeki builder had saved twenty-eight silver talents by purchasing burnt brick from farther up the River Sempis, where the clay was riddled with sand. Aside from the tan hue, the tenement he raised was indistinguishable from the others. Over the course of the following centuries, the flood-waters had twice risen high enough to lave the southernmost pylons. Though the damage appeared minimal, sheets of material had fallen from the base of the outermost support, lending it a gnawed look, which for some reason, seemed to attract urinating dogs.

It toppled exactly when it should, drawing with it an entire quadrant, collapsing four floors of apartments and crushing all the unfortunates within. There was a roar, a collective peal of screams punched into silence. Afterwards, dust sweeping out and up. The earthen clap and tinkle of raining bricks. Then streets packed with shouting passers-by.

The woman and the infant were gone.

A life forgotten…

The streets. Miraculous numbers. Miraculous movement, like threads of sand falling into and through one another without collision or redirection.

The alleyways. The rainbow awnings, cooling the dust, shielding the walking files, dimming the sun to a threaded glare.

The great agora.

A peacock walking holy and unmolested through a parting crowd, iridescent eyes shimmering from its plumage, blessing all those who took care not to match them. A man barking, his face bent low and dangerous, then slapping the boy who walked with him. The click of teeth in paste. Two old men scratching their heads and laughing, lips drawn across gums, over teeth like pieces of broken pottery. A distempered dog limping up the temple steps, crooning low through half-open jaws.

A life…

She sat in the dust with the other wretches, a listless row of them in the shade of a temple wall, palms raised to catch rain, infirmities folded beneath tattered cloth or festering in the haze of dust. Indecent with age, threshed of all compassion, she sat begging. She did not look at the passing to and fro of miserly shadows.

One thousand four hundred and twenty-two years before, a Scylvendi marauder had raped a Ceneian woman who had not the courage to take her life as was the tradition. She fled her family, fearing they would kill her to preserve their honour, and bore her child, a son, on the banks of the Great River Sempis. Now a descendant of that son tossed a halved coin exactly when he should, but carelessly, so that the bitten point spun from the outer edge of her thumb, causing her to look out and up…

An old woman's paper blink.

Bent knees. The ground rising tidal. Strong hands reaching out for her wrist, drawing it up. Unseen lips against the heat of her palm. The smell of copper and skin.

An ancient look suddenly infantile with wonder.

"My name," she whispered, "is Psatma Nannaferi."

The pulse and fork of blood. A voice so close the speaker could not be seen. The pulse and fork of blood behind this place…

"I am the White-Luck… I walk. I breathe."

"Yes," she gasped, shaking her wizened head in affirmation. A soul, wrought of iron and cruelty, quivering like a maiden in the flower of her first bleeding. "W-we are siblings, you and I."

Praise be our Mother.

"Siblings…"

A trembling hand held out to an unseen cheek. The pads of calloused fingers, touching nothing, spanning out as though across grease or paint. Tears cleansing an old woman's eyes.

Tears for a life forgotten.

"So beautiful."

Tears for what stood in its place.

Momemn…

Esmenet was standing before her great silvered mirror when she first glimpsed Kelmomas mooning in the shadowy corners of her dressing room, almost small enough to go unnoticed.

Morning light showered through the unshuttered balcony, so bright it seemed to render her apartments blinking dim beyond the glare it cast across the floor. She appraised her image with the negligent attention of those who spend too much time before mirrors, her thoughts far too occupied with points of strategy to care about her appearance. Maithanet and Phinersa had withdrawn but moments earlier, leaving her with innumerable "suggestions" on how to best disarm, overawe, or even intimidate Hanamem Sharacinth. She was due to meet with the Yatwerian Matriarch within the watch.

She saw his reflection peeking through the silken folds of her hanging gowns, one crimson, the other cerulean blue. He was a shy, furtive shadow, scarcely more substantial than the fabric hanging about him. She knew instantly that all was not well, but something-habit, or perhaps exhaustion-prevented her from acknowledging him. A pang gripped her throat. Not so long ago it had been a game that both Samarmas and he had played, hiding and seeking through her wardrobe while she was dressed. And now…

"Sweetling?" she called. She glimpsed her smile in the mirror: It was so grim that she flushed in shock. Was this how she looked every time she smiled, as though she merely bent her lips?

Kelmomas stared at his toes instead of replying.

She dismissed her body-slaves with a vague flutter of her fingers, turned to look at him directly. Birdsong floated on the cool morning drafts.

"Sweetling… Where's Porsi?"

She winced at the question, which she had asked out of habit. Porsi had been scourged and turned out for her negligence. When Kelmomas failed to respond, Esmenet found herself looking back into the mirror, pretending to be preoccupied with the twists of muslin about her waist. Her hands automatically hitched and smoothed, hitched and smoothed.

"I c-can be Sammy…"

She heard these words more with her breast it seemed than her ears. A flush of cold about the heart. Even still, she continued to face the mirror.

"What do you mean? Kel, what are saying?"

Our children are so familiar to us that we often forget them, which is why the details of their existence sometimes strike us with discomfiting force. Either because she watched him through the mirror or in spite of it, Esmenet suddenly saw her son as a little stranger, the child of some unknown womb. For a moment, he seemed too beautiful to be…

Believed.

"If you don't…" Kelmomas began in a pinched voice. He was twisting the fabric of his tunic against his right hip, causing the hem to ride up his thighs.

At last she turned, sighing as if irritated and feeling instantly ashamed for it. "Sweetling. If I don't what?"

His little shoulders jerked in a soundless gasp. He stared down with the fierce concentration that only injured boys seemed able to summon-as though seeing could choke what was seen.

"If you don't w-want me… If you don't want… Kelmomas, I can be Sam-Sammi."

Heartbreak crashed over her, numbed her to the extremities. In a rush she saw the full compass of her selfishness. Had she even truly mourned for Samarmas, an anguished part of her wondered, or had she simply made him evidence of her own hardship? For whom had she grieved?

She tried to speak, but there was no voice in the sound she made.

Kelmomas warred with his trembling lips. "I l-look… look j-just like…" He fell to his rump, then slumped into a silken bundle onto the floor. He did not sob, nor did he wail; he keened, a noise every bit as small as his frame and yet animal in its intensity, its honesty.

Abandoning her reflection, Esmenet pressed through cool fabric to kneel over him. Now that she could see her crime, it seemed she had known all along. Trapped in circles of self-pity, pinned by the weight of endless duty and obligation, she had never paused to consider what Kelmomas suffered. As devastated and desolate as she had been the past days, she possessed the same vein of flint that tempered the heart of all mothers, the same hereditary knowledge. Children died. They died all the time, such was the cruelty of the world.

But for Kelmomas. He had lost so much more than a sibling or a playmate. He had lost his days. He had lost himself. And he could not comprehend.

I'm all he has left, she thought, stroking his fine, golden hair.

Even still, something dark in her recoiled.

Children. They wept so much.

Save for the long gold-and-white banners depicting the Circumfix, the Imperial Audience Hall on the Andiamine Heights looked much the same as it had during the Ikurei Dynasty. Everything was designed to overawe petitioners and to concentrate the glory and the dignity of those sitting upon the Mantle. The old Nansur Emperors had always aspired to an architectural and decorative opulence at odds with their actual power, perhaps thinking that the illusion, if pursued with enough patience and zeal, could be made manifest.

It was as Kellhus said: Monuments were as much prayers as they were tools, overreaching arrested in dwarfing stone. That the world was littered with their ruins illustrated more than a few uneasy facts regarding the human soul. Men were always inclined to bargain from a position of strength, especially where the Gods were concerned.

Today, Esmenet could not help but reflect, would almost certainly be a case in point.

She had grown quite accustomed to her seat just below the Mantle on the dais, fond of it even. Several paces from her slippered feet, steps descended in broad hemispheric arcs to the Auditory, the main floor where the penitents and courtiers assembled. An arcade of immense pillars soared to either side, diminishing both in perspective and illumination. Ornate tapestries hung motionless between the marble trunks, each a Gift from some province of the New Empire, each featuring the Circumfix as its central motif. Animal totems from Thunyerus. Tigers and twining lotus from Nilnamesh…

Everything, it seemed, had been pinned to her position, as though stone and space had faces that could turn, that could lower in obeisance. She was the windless centre, the intangible point of balance.

But it was the missing rear wall that pleased her most, the sense of natural light showering over her shoulders, the knowledge that everyone gathered across the Auditory saw her against the sky-bright firmament. It rendered what could be the most vulnerable position, the place of the effigy, into something too elusive to serve as a convincing target of curses. She loved nothing more than evening audiences, where petitioners often held their hands against the sun to see. It let her act and speak with the impunity of silhouettes.

She even liked the fact that birds continually became fouled in the nearly invisible netting that had been draped over the opening to prevent them from nesting in the vaults. There was something at once sinister and reassuring to the sense of flutter and battle hanging over her periphery. They relieved her, it seemed, of the need to make threats. On any given day, there would only be one or two trapped, their felt-limbed struggles too small and their cries too shrill to bring about any real compassion.

Today there were four.

Sometimes after sunset, she had allowed Samarmas help the slaves set them tree. Eyes miracle wide. Hands trembling. His smile was like tear, it was so intense.

The gentle swell of orisons from the upper galleries announced the Matriarch's imminent entrance-one of innumerable hymns to the Aspect-Emperor.

Our souls rise from darkness, at once near and far.

Our souls fall into darkness, through gates left ajar.

He comes before,

A candle carried into forever after.

He comes before…

Thinking of the twins, Esmenet set her teeth, warred against the pang that threatened to crack her painted face. Kelmomas had been inconsolable, and she had been forced to leave him bawling, begging for her to hold him, promising to become his dead brother for her sake.

"We l-love you, Mom-mommy… So-so m-much…"

We, he had said, his voice small and forlorn. She could scarce think of the episode without blinking the heat from her eyes. She exhaled slow and deep, doing her best to appear motionless. The great bronze doors swung soundlessly open, and she watched Hanamem Sharacinth, the nominal ruler of the Cult of Yatwer, stride into the abandoned Auditory. The Matriarch was supposed to dress in gunny to signify her poverty, but vertical bands gleamed across her earth-coloured gown with her every step. Maithanet accompanied her, resplendent as always in commodious white and gold.

He comes before,

A candle carried into forever after.

He comes before…

The end of the chorus faded into the pitch of ringing stone. The Yatwerian Matriarch stiffly dipped to one knee, then the other. "Your Glory," she said, before pressing her face to her reflection across the marble floor.

Esmenet nodded to demonstrate Imperial Favour. "Rise, Sharacinth. We are all children of the Ur-Mother."

The older woman lifted herself, though not without some effort. "Indeed, your Glory." She looked to Maithanet, as though expecting some kind of assistance, then remembered herself. She was not accustomed, Esmenet realized, to the company of her betters. Esmenet had received many petitioners over the years, long enough to reliably guess the tenor of an audience from the first exchange of words. Sharacinth, she could tell, had made hard habit out of authority, to the point where she could not be trusted to show either grace or deference. Defensiveness hung about the old woman like an odour.

Esmenet cut directly to the point. "What do you know of the White-Luck Warrior?"

"I thought as much," the Matriarch huffed, her eyes narrow with arrogance. Her face was angular and curiously bent, as though it were a thing of clay left too long on one side.

"And why would that be?" Esmenet asked with mock graciousness.

"Who hasn't heard the rumours?"

"The treason, you mean."

"The treason, then."

For a moment the outrageousness of her tone quite escaped Esmenet. So often, it seemed, she forgot her exalted station and discoursed with others as though they were her equals. She found herself blinking in indignation. She hasn't even condoled me for the loss of my son!

"And what have you heard?"

A calculated pause. Sharacinth's eyes seemed bred to bovine insolence, her lips to a sour line. "That the White-Luck has turned against the Aspect-Emperor… Against you."

Esmenet struggled to draw breath around her outrage. Arrogant ingrate! Treacherous old bitch!

Was this what she had imagined all those years ago, sitting on her sill in Sumna, enticing passers-by with a glimpse of the shadows riding up and down her inner thighs? Knowing nothing of power, Esmenet had confused it with its trappings. Ignorance-few things were so invisible. She could remember staring at the coins she had so coveted, those coins that could ward starvation or clothe bruised skin, and wondering at the profile of the man upon them, the Emperor who seemed to stand astride her every bounty and privation. Not hated. Not feared. Not loved. These were passions better spent on his agents. The Emperor himself had always seemed… far too far.

In the endless reveries between beddings, she would sort through everything she could remember, all the lore, inchoate and humbling, that a citizen affixes to the subject of their sovereign. And in her soul's eye she would see him, Ikurei Xerius III, sitting in this very place.

How could it be possible?

Once, quite on a whim, she had shown Samarmas a silver kellic. "Do you know," she had asked, pointing to the apparition of her own profile across its face, "who that is?" He had a way of opening his mouth when astounded, as though trying to shape his lips about a nail. It was at once comical-and heartbreaking in that it so clearly betrayed his idiocy.

My son! she silently cried. Picking wounds had become her path of least resistance, the one effortless thing. But there was no escaping the clamour of her responsibilities, the motions she had to force against the grain of what should be overwhelming grief. She had no choice but to have faith in her painted face.

"But you've heard more," she asked in a hard and steady voice-a voice proper to the Empress of the Three Seas. "Haven't you?"

"More. More," Sharacinth muttered. "Of course, I've heard more. When does one not always hear more? Rumours are like locusts or slaves or rats. They breed indiscriminately."

They had known she was a prideful woman. It was the whole reason for summoning the bitch here: Maithanet had hoped the dimensions and reputation of her surroundings would be enough to mellow her hubris into something more malleable, something they could shape to their own purposes.

Apparently not.

"Matriarch, you would do well to recollect the stakes of our conversation."

A sneer-an open sneer! And for the first time, Esmenet glimpsed it, the look that is the terror of all those who command positions of power: the look that says, You are temporary, no more a passing affliction. Suddenly she understood the staged calculation behind her throne and its position above the auditory floor. With one look, it seemed, the old woman had thrown it all into stark relief: the truth behind the hierarchy of disparate souls. Recognition, Esmenet realized. Power came down to recognition.

It was all naked force otherwise.

"Matriarch!" Maithanet boomed, drawing into his voice and aspect all the magisterial authority of the Thousand Temples.

Sharacinth opened her mouth in retort-not even the Shriah could cow her, it seemed. But whatever breath she possessed was sucked from her lungs…

Instead she wheezed and stumbled back, raised a hand against the sudden, immolating light that had sparked into existence above the floor before her. It danced and spiked outward, so brilliant it rendered everything dim. Crazed shadows swung from her ankles across the far corners of the Auditory. The point grew and sparkled, chattered with incandescences that possessed intensities beyond the gaze's conception…

Esmenet lowered her forearm, blinked at scalded eyes.

There he stood, tall, magnificent and otherworldly, exactly as she remembered him. A white silk tunic fell loose over his armour, embroidered in countless crimson tusks, each the length of a thorn. His beard was braided gold, his mane was long and free-flowing. The two demon heads hung bound to his right hip, mouthing curses without breath… There was a mad density to his aspect, a hoarding of reality that denied the world the sharpness of its edges and the substance of its weight.

It seemed the earth should groan beneath his feet. Her husband…

The Aspect-Emperor.

Sharacinth stood like a shipwreck survivor leaning to the memory of tossed seas. Two paces behind her and to the right, Maithanet lay supine across the shining floor. The Shriah of the Thousand Temples kneeling.

Esmenet knew enough not to watch Kellhus assume the Mantle to her right. Confidence, which in all complicated situations is nothing more than the pretence of premeditation, is ever the outward marker of power. There could be no appearance of improvisation.

"Hanamem Sharacinth," he said, his voice at once mild and permeated with the tones of imminent murder, "do you think you merit standing in my presence?"

The Matriach nearly fell over trying to throw herself to the floor. "N-no!" she sobbed in old woman terror. "M-Most Glorious… Pluh-please-"

"Will you," he interrupted, "take steps to assure that this sedition against me, this blasphemy, comes to an end?"

"Y-yesssh!" she wailed to the floor. She even hooked her fingers behind her head.

"For, make no mistake, I shall war against you and yours." The grinding savagery of his voice swallowed the entirety of the hall, battered the ear like fists. "Your deeds I shall strike from the stones. Your temples I shall turn into funeral pyres. And those that still dare take up breath or arms against me, I shall hunt, unto death and beyond! And my Sister, whom you worship, shall lament in the dark, her memory no more than a dream of destruction. Men shall spit to cleanse their mouths of her name!"

The old woman shook, arched her back as if gagging in terror.

"Do you understand what I say, Sharacinth?"

"Yessssh!"

"Then this is what you shall do. You shall heed your Empress and your Shriah. You shall put an end to the ignoble sham that is your office. You shall make claim to the truth of your station. You shall make war upon the wickedness within your own temple-you shall cleanse the filth from your own altar!"

Somewhere beyond the vaulted ceiling, a cloud engulfed the sun, and everything dimmed save the old woman writhing upon her reflection. Kellhus leaned forward, and it seemed all the world leaned with him, that the pillars themselves tilted, hanging above the Matriach, shivering in catastrophic outrage.

"And you shall hunt this witch you call your mistress, Psatma Nannaferi! You shall put an end to the sacrilege that is your Mother-Supreme!"

Her face averted, her elbows to the floor, she shook two white-palmed hands out in warding.

"No-noooo! Pluh-pluh-pleeeeese-"

"Sharacinth!" The name crashed through the Hall, boomed through its arched recesses. "Would you offend me in my own house?"

The Matriarch shrieked something inarticulate. A puddle of urine spread about her knees.

Then, as though exhaling a pent breath, the world resumed its natural lines and proportions. The unseen cloud passed from the unseen sun, and indirect light once again showered blue upon the dais.

"Taste your breath," Kellhus said as he stood. He stepped out to loom patient and fatherly over the woman blinking up at him from the base of the steps. "Taste it, Sharacinth, for it is the mark of my mercy. Fight the inclination of your heart, conquer your weakness for pride, for spite. Do not make humiliation of truth. I know you can feel it, the promise of release, the bone-shuddering release. Turn from the shrill poison of your conceit, from the hooked fists and knuckled teeth, from the rod of cold iron that holds you rigid when you should sleep. Turn from these things and embrace the truth of the life-the life! — that I offer you."

Esmenet had heard these words so many times they should have seemed more a recitation than something meant, an incantation that never failed to undo the knots of pride that so bound men. And yet each time, she found herself sinking through the surface, floating utterly submerged. Each time, she heard them for the first time, and she was frightened and renewed.

Over the years, her husband had ceased being many things to Esmenet. But he was a miracle still.

The Matriarch of the Cult of Yatwer wept as a child might, snuffling and mumbling, "F-f-forgive… F-f-forgive meeeee…" Over and over.

"Comfort her," Kellhus said to his half-brother. Nodding in obeisance, Maithanet stood and crouched at the wailing woman's side.

Smiling, the Aspect-Emperor turned to Esmenet and reached out his hand. He spoke the sun-fiery words. She clutched two of his outstretched fingers, fell into his pulsing embrace. She felt the open spaces about them collapsing, dropping in sheets of ethereal fabric, falling away.

His light consumed her…

…and they were alone together, in the cool gloom of their private apartments. His legs crumpled, and he leaned and lurched against her. Grunting, Esmenet helped him stagger to their bed.

"Wife…" was all he said, rolling onto his back even though he still wore his sword, Certainty, sheathed across his shoulder blades. He raised a heavy hand to his forehead.

More air than light filtered in from the seaward balconies. The rooms were broad and surprisingly low-ceilinged, articulated by a series of steps that divided the bedroom proper from the lower regions. The furnishings were elegant and, with the exception of the crimson-cushioned bed, spare. She often wondered if her antipathy to ornament was more a result of the maddening complexities of her new life or a pining for the simple squalour of her old.

"How many?" she asked, knowing that he could only translocate the space of a horizon, and only then to places he had long studied from a distance or to places he had actually been. He had literally travelled all the way from the Istyuli Plains horizon by horizon.

"Many."

She found herself looking away, blinking. The profile of various cities frescoed the walls, creating the pale illusion that the room occupied some impossible space over Invishi, Nenciphon, Carythusal, Aцknyssus, and Oswenta. Esmenet had commissioned them several years previous-as a physical reminder of her position in political space. It was a decision she had long since regretted.

Simple, her soul whispered. I must make things simple.

"You came…" she began, shocked to find she was already crying. "You came as s-soon as you heard?" She knew this could not be true. Each and every night Mandate Far-Callers spoke with him in his dreams, apprised him of all that happened on the Andiamine Heights and elsewhere. He had come because of the situation with the Yatwerians, because of Sharacinth. Not because of his idiot son.

There were no accidents with Anasыrimbor Kellhus.

He sat up on the edge of the bed, and somehow she found herself in his arms, immersed in his wide-world husband smell, wracked with sobs.

"We've been cursed!" she gasped. "Cursed!"

Kellhus gently pressed her back into his gaze and somehow above the surface of her immediate grief. She found herself drawing cool and soothing air.

"Misfortune," he said. "Nothing more, Esmi."

When had his voice become a drug?

"But isn't that what the White-Luck means? Mimara has fled, and no one can find her, Kellhus! I have this-this terrible feeling-such a terrible feeling! And now Samarmas! Sweet-sweet Samarmas! Do you know what they're saying in the streets? Do you know that some of them actually celebrate! That-"

"You must take no action against them," he said with stern compassion-the perfect tone. He always spoke in the perfect tone, words like cool plaster trowelled across the cracks of desire and confusion. "Not the Yatwerians. They are not a people that we can massacre or uproot like the Mongilean Kianene. They are too widespread, too diffuse. The Great Ordeal is all that matters, Esmi. It has taken us too long as it stands. Golgotterath must be overcome before the No-God is resurrected. The immediate ever clouds the far, and desire ever twists reason to its own ends. I know these concerns seem to blot out all other considerations-"

"Seem? Seem? Kellhus! Kellhus! Our son is dead!"

Her voice pealed raw across the polished stone hollows.

Silence. Where for others the lack of response augured wounds scored or truths too burdensome to ignore or dismiss, for her husband it meant something altogether different. His silence was always one with the world about it, monolithic in the way of framing things. Without exception it said, Hear the words you have spoken. You. It was never, ever, the mark of error or incapacity.

Which was why, perhaps, she found him so easy to worship and so difficult to love.

Then he uttered her name, "Esmi…"

"Esmi," spoken in a voice so warm, so laced with compassion, that she found herself once again crying freely. He kissed her scalp and hair, a divine monster. "Shhhh… I'm not asking you to take comfort in abstractions, for there is none. Even still, the Great Ordeal remains the end that maps all others. We cannot allow anything, anyone, to take precedence over it. Not riots. Not the collapse of the New Empire…" It was as if she stared into her own eyes, his look was so canny-save that he knew her so much better than she knew herself.

"Not even the death of our son."

She had understood this all along. His tone had told her so.

A breeze bellied the dust-violet sheers, drawing them over the hard line of the Meneanor Sea. A finger of light flickered across the mural of Carythusal.

"How much misfortune must there be?" she heard herself crying.

The White-Luck hunt us… Hunts us…

"All of the woe the world has to offer, if need be. So long as we overcome the only one that is fatal."

The Second Apocalypse.

She was beating his chest softly, pressing her forehead into the jasmine-scented silk. She could feel the reptilian imprint of the nimil-mail beneath. Looking up through tears, he seemed a towering glow and shadow both. "But it's you they hunt! What? Do the Gods want a Second Apocalypse? Do they want the world shut against them?"

She had chosen Kellhus over Achamian. Kellhus! She had chosen her womb. She had chosen power and sumptuous ease. She had chosen to lay her hand upon the arm of a living god… Not this! Not this!

"Come, Esmi. I know Maithanet has explained this to you."

"B-but it seems… it s-s-seems…"

"Most live on the edge of heartbeats, trusting their betters and the blind eyes of habit to see them further. A rare few can apprehend the span of entire lives. But you and I do not possess either luxury, Esmi. We must act according to the dictates of the ages, or there will be no ages for anyone to live. And this makes us appear cold, merciless, even monstrous, not only to others and ourselves, but to the Hundred as well. We walk the Shortest Path, the labyrinth of the Thousandfold Thought. This is the burden the God has laid upon us, and the burden that the Gods begrudge."

She found herself on the surface of his voice, for once hearing it with a musician's cold ear: the tunnelling harmonics, the resonance that forced it into unheard immediacy, the papery rasp that raised it outside the circle of the world.

The voice that had conquered the First Holy War, then all the Three Seas. The voice of the King of Kings, the mortal echo of the God of Gods… The voice that had conquered first her thighs and then her heart.

She thought of that final afternoon with Achamian, the day that Holy Shimeh fell.

"I haven't the strength! I ca-can't b-bear losing any-any-m-more…"

"You have the strength."

"Let Maithanet rule! He's your brother. He shares your gifts. He should rule…"

"He is Shriah. He cannot be more."

"But why? Why?"

"Esmi, you have my love, my trust. I know that you have the strength to do this."

A gust from over the dark sea. The violet sheers roiled and billowed, parted like gossamer lips.

"The White-Luck," he whispered in a voice that was the sky, the curve of all horizons, "shall break against you."

She gazed up at his face through sting and tears, and it seemed that in it she could see every face, the mien of all those who had bent upon her in Sumna, when she had kept a whore's bed.

"How? How can you know?"

"Because the anguish that makes mud of all your thoughts, because the fear that stains your days, because all your regret and anger and loneliness…" A haloed hand cupped her cheek. Blue eyes sounded her to the bottommost fathoms.

"All this makes you pure."

Iothiah…

"Cursed!" Nannaferi cried. "Cursed be he who misleads the blind man on the road!"

All old voices failed in some manner; they cracked or they quavered, or they dwindled with the loss of the wind that once empowered them. But for Psatma Nannaferi, the breaking of her voice, which had once made her family weep for its melodic purity, seemed to reveal more than it marred, as though it were but paint, hoary and moulted, covering something furious and elemental. It struck over the surrounding clamour, reached deep into the packed recesses of the Catacombs.

Hundreds had gathered, filling the Charnal Hall with sweat and exertion, crowding the adjacent tunnels, stamping the detritus across the floors. Torches bobbed like buoys at sea, casting ovals of illumination across the bowed ceilings, revealing pockets of expression in the shadowy masses: smiles and howls, mouths fixed about wonder-disbelieving wonder. Smoke pooled in the dark gaps between the lintels. Fingers of light probed the niche-pocked walls and the innumerable urns packed within, cracked and leaning, limned in ages of dust.

"Cursed be the thief!" Nannaferi shrieked. "For he who dines on the fortune of others is a bringer of famine!"

She stood naked before them, wearing her skin like a beggar's rags. White-painted sigils sheathed her arms to the pit and her legs to the crotch, but her torso and genitals gleamed, adorned only in sweat. She stood withered and diminutive before them, and yet she towered, so that it seemed that her blood-soaked hair should brush the low ceilings.

And he sat before her, naked and immobile on a beaten chair. A slave's chair.

The White-Luck Warrior.

"Cursed be the homicide, the murderer, he who lies in wait to slay his brother!"

She parted her hairless legs, paused so that all could see slick lines of blood running from her shining pudenda. And she grinned a proud and vicious grin, as though to say, Yes! Witness the strength that is my womb! The Great Giver, the Son Bearer, the gluttonous Phallus Eater!

Yes! The Blood of my Fertility flows still!

The ecstatics immediately before her wept at the miracle, stared with the eyes of the strangled, tore their hair and gnashed their teeth. And their rapture became grounds for the rapture of the cohort behind them, and so on, through tunnel after forking tunnel, until a thousand voices roared through the closeted deeps.

"Cursed be whore!" she cried, not needing to read the text, the Sinyatwa, on the scuffed stone at her feet. "Cursed be she who lies with men for gold over seed, for power over obedience, for lust over love!"

She bent as though to abuse herself. With the blade of her right palm, she scraped a line of blood, drawing it up to the creases of her swollen sex. She huffed in pleasure, then raised her bloody palm for all to see.

"Cursed be the false-the deceivers of men! Cursed be the Aspect-Emperor!"

There are pitches of passion that are holy simply for the intensity of their expression. There is worship beyond the caged world of words. Psatma Nannaferi's hatred had long ago burned away the impurities, the pathetic pageant of rancour and resentment that so often make fools of the great. Hers was the grinding hatred, the homicidal outrage of the betrayed, the unwavering fury of the degraded and the dispossessed. The hatred that draws tendons sharp, that cleanses only the way murder and fire can cleanse.

And at long last she had found her knife.

She stepped over the scriptures, pressed the slack pouches of her breasts against the sweat of his neck and shoulders. She reached around him with her arms. Holding her right palm like a palette, she dipped the third finger of her left hand into her issue, then marked him: a horizontal line along each of his cheeks.

They gleamed menstrual crimson. Wurrami, the ancient counterpart of the thraxami, the lines of ash used by mourning mothers.

"Ever!" she cried. "Ever have we dwelt in the shadow of the Whip and Club. Ever have we been despised-we, the Givers! We, the weak! But the Goddess knows! Knows why they beat us, why they leash us, why they starve and violate us! Why they do everything save kill!"

She prowled around him, raised her buttocks across his hips. With a shrill cry, she thrust down, encompassed him to his grunting foundation. A broken chorus of cries passed through the congregation, as the penetration was multiplied in heart and eye.

"Because without Givers," she shouted in a voice hoarse for passion-doubly broken, "there is nothing for them to take! Because without slaves, there can be no masters! Because we are the wine that they imbibe, the bread that they eat, the cloth that they soil, the walls that they defend! Because we are the truth of their power! The prize they would conquer!"

And she could feel it: he the centre of her, and she the circumference of him-an ache encircled by fire. Hoe and Earth! Hoe and Earth! She was an old crone splayed across a boy, her eyes the red of blood, his the white of seed. The crowd before them bucked and heaved, a cauldron of avid faces and sweat-slicked limbs.

"We shall stoke!" she moaned and roared. "We shall foment! We shall teach those who give what it means to take!"

And she slid, drawing her loose buttocks across the plate of his abdomen. His was the body of a man newly wed-a father of but one child. Slender, golden for the perfection of its skin. Not yet bent to the harshness of the world, to the toil that all giving exacts.

Not yet strong.

"There is the knife that cuts," she croaked, "and there is the sea that drowns. Always we have been the latter. But now! Now that the White-Luck has come to us, we are both, my Sisters! On our seas they shall founder! And on our knife they shall fall!"

She rode the hook of him harder and harder, until he convulsed and screamed. The earth shook-the unborn kicking at the Mother's womb. Gravel streamed from the ceilings. And she could feel the hot flood him, the outward thrust. And then, with his slumping, a kind of inward breath-and it was her turn to jerk rigid and scream. She could feel her strength fill him, the knitting of muscle across his frame, the scarring, the aging strong of a body wracked by years in the world. The soft hands that clawed her chest became horned with calluses, thick with throttling strength, even as her scrotal breasts rounded, lifted in the memory of a more tender youth. The smooth cheek against her neck became leathery with unlived seasons, gravelly with the memory of another's pox.

And as youth washed through her, drawing a thousand thousand wrinkles into smooth swales of skin, the mad faces encircling her surged forward, clutching at the sodden floor beneath their feet…

Beaten and battered she had been tipped in libation. And now the dread Goddess raised her, a bowl cast of gold.

A vessel. A grail. A cup filled with the Waters-Most-Holy. The Blood and the Seed.

"Cursed!" she shrieked in a singer's heart-cutting voice, high and pure, yet warmed by the memory of her authoritarian rasp. She watched as the Blood of her Fertility was passed among the throngs, a never-diminishing pool that was passed from palm to palm. She watched the Ur-Mother's children mark their cheeks with the red line of hatred…

"Cursed be he who misleads the blind man on the road!"