The Judging eye

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

When Nel-Saripal, the famed Ainoni poet, finished copying the final revised verses of his epic retelling of the Unification Wars, Monius, he had his body-slave run the manuscript to a specially commissioned galley waiting in the harbour. Seventy-three days later it was delivered to his divine patroness, Anasыrimbor Esmenet, the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas, who grasped it the way a barren woman might grasp a foundling babe.

Nel-Saripal's epic cycle would be read aloud the following morning with the entire Imperial Court in attendance. "'Momemn,'" the orator began, "'is the fist in our breast, the beating heart.'"

These words struck Esmenet as surely as a husband's slap. Even the reader, the celebrated mummer Sarpella, faltered at their utterance, they seemed so obviously seditious. Whispers and serpentine glances were traded among those in attendance, and the Blessed Empress fumed behind her painted smile. To say that Momemn was the heart was to say that Momemn was the centre, the capital, something at once factual and laudable. But the word "fist," did that not intimate violence? And to subsequently say that Momemn was the "beating" heart, did that not divide the meaning in troubling ways? Esmenet was no scholar, but after twenty years of rabid reading, she thought she knew something of words and their supernatural logic. Nel-Saripal was saying that Momemn maintained its power through brutality.

That it was a thug.

The poet was playing some kind of game-that much was obvious. Nevertheless, the elegance and imagistic splendour of the ensuing story quickly swept her away, and she decided to overlook what was at most a gesture to impertinence. What great artist failed to punish their patron? Afterwards she would decide that the insult was rather clumsy, no more subtle than the slit gowns worn by the Priestess-Whores of Gierra. Had Nel-Saripal been a greater poet, a rival to Protathis, say, the attack would have been more devious, more cutting-and well nigh impossible to punish. Monius would have been one of those deliciously barbed works, cutting those with the fingers to touch, and baffling the palms of all the others.

But her misgivings continued to plague her. Again and again, during whatever thoughtful lull her schedule permitted, she found herself reciting the line: Momemn is the fist in our breast, the beating heart… Momemn… Momemn… At first she took his reference to Momemn at face value-perhaps because of the way the city and its convolutions encircled her apartments on the Andiamine Heights. Nel-Saripal, she assumed, had restricted his symbolic mischief to the latter half of the formula: The literal Momemn was the metaphoric heart. But the substitutions, she realized, went deeper, the way they always did when it came to poets and their obscure machinations. Momemn wasn't the heart, it was the heart's location. It too was a cipher…

Momemn was her, she finally decided. Now that her divine husband had taken the field against the Consult, she was the fist in her people's breast. She was the heart that beat them. Nel-Saripal, the thankless ingrate, was calling her a thug. A tyrant.

"You…" That was how Monius truly began.

"You are the fist that beats us."

That night, tossing alone on the muslin planes of her bed, she found herself running in the manner of dreams, where distance, the jolt of earth, and rushing movement were little more than an inconsistent jumble. She could hear Mimara calling to her on the wind. Closer and closer, until the cries seemed to fall from the stars. But instead of her daughter, she found an apple tree, its branches bowed into skirts by the weight of crimson-shining fruit.

She fell very still. An aura of whispering sentience enclosed her. The imperceptible sway of branches. The listless flutter of black-green leaves. Sunlight showered down, pressing bright fingertips into the tree's shaded bowers. She could not move. The fallen apples seemed to glare at her, shrunken heads, withered heads, cheeks to the dirt, watching from the shadows with wormhole eyes.

She screamed when the first of the fingers and knuckles broke earth. They were as cautious as caterpillars at first, scabrous, rotted into spear points, tattered flesh wound like sackcloth about bones. Then blackened arms thrust upward, bearing hands like crabs. The meat of the fruit cracked. Branches were yanked down like fishing rods, then snapped up swishing.

The dead and their harvest.

She stood breathless, motionless, her limbs glassed with horror. And she could only think, Mimara… Mimara… A mumbling thought, nebulous with the confusion that hums through all dreams. Mimara…

Then she was blinking at the grey of night's slow retreat. The tree was gone, as were the arms reaching from earthen pits. But the terrible thought remained, no more clear for the fact of waking.

Mimara.

Esmenet wept as though she were her only child. Found, then lost.

The following afternoon sunlight streamed through the fretted walls behind her, embossing the table and its sheets of parchment with brilliant white squares. The secretaries, deputations from a number of different offices, uniformly squinted as they approached with the documents that required her seal. Brocaded tusks and circumfixes shimmered from their sleeves. Grids of light rolled across their backs as they bent to kiss the polished wood of the kneeling floor.

As bored as she was, Esmenet listened attentively to their petitions, typically this or that minor legislative declaration: a clarification of the Slaver Protocols, a revised order of precedence for the Chamber of Excises, and on and on. The New Empire, she had long since learned, was a kind of enormous mechanism, one that used men as gears, thousands upon thousands of them, their functions determined by the language of law. The inevitable maintenance required ever more language, all of it underwritten by the authority of her voice.

As always, she relied heavily on Ngarau, who had been Grand Seneschal since the days of the extinct Ikurei Dynasty, to interpret the import of the requests. They had developed a comfortable rapport over the years, eunuch and Empress. She would ask brief questions, and he would respond either by answering to the best of his ability or by interrogating the petitioning functionary in his turn. If the request was granted-and the vetting process required to reach her penultimate level assured that most of them were-he would dip his ladle in the bowl of molten lead that continually warmed her left side and pour the flashing metal for her to stamp with her Seal. If, as was sometimes the case, some kind of influence peddling or bureaucratic infighting was suspected, the petitioners would be directed to the Judges down the hall. The New Empire tolerated no corruption, no matter how petty.

Mankind was at war.

Several emergency funding requests from Shigek, "tokens of the Empress's generosity," proved tricky to parse. For whatever reason, the rumours that Fanayal ab Kascamandri and his renegade Coyauri prowled the deserts about the River Sempis refused to die. Aside from this, the session had proved uneventful-thankfully. The chill air carried the promise of renewal, and the repetitive nature of the suits made her decisions seem trivial. Though she knew full well that lives turned on her every breath, she welcomed the opportunity to pretend otherwise.

For twenty years she had been Empress. For almost as long as she could read.

Sometimes the unmapped immensity of it all would come crashing through the tedium. The mundane circuit would peel open, the matter of course would evaporate into the hollow of a million mortal obligations. Women. Children. Wilful men. A crazed anxiousness would seize her. If she were walking, she would reel like a drunk, clutch at her vertigo with outstretched hands. If she were talking, she would trail into silence, avert her face and simply breathe, as though that were the endangered thread. I am Empress, she would think, Empress, and the title would speak not to the glory, but to the horror and the horror alone.

But typically the combination of routine and abstractions kept her afloat. To condense all the administrative details into the "Ministrate" or all the ecclesiastical confusion into the "Thousand Temples" was a powerful and a comforting thing. She would consult the appropriate officials and that was that. Yes, I understand. Do your best. Sometimes it even felt simple, like a library with all the books inventoried and titled-all she need do was make the proper entries. Of course, some crisis would quickly remind her otherwise, that she was simply confusing the handle for the pot, as the caste-menials would say. The details would always come leaking through-in their multitudes.

Part of her would even laugh, convinced that it was simply too absurd to be real. She, Esmenet, a battered peach from the slums of Sumna, wielding an authority that only Triamis, the greatest of the Ceneian Emperors, had known. Souls in the millions traded coins with her profile. Oh what was that, you say? Thousands are starving in Eumarna. Yes-yes, but I have an insurrection to deal with. Armies, you see, simply must be fed. People? Well, they tend to suffer in silence, sell their children and whatnot. So long as the lies are told well.

At such a remove, so far from the gutters of living truth, how could she not be a tyrant? Not matter how balanced, thoughtful, or sincerely considered her judgments, how could they not crack like clubs or pierce like spears?

Exactly as Nel-Saripal had implied, the wretch.

Without warning, a small voice piped through the officious murmur. "Thelli! Thelli! Theliopa found another one!" Esmenet saw her youngest, Kelmomas, barrelling through the secretaries, then around the grand table. He ran across his reflection to throw his arms around her waist. She hugged him, laughing.

"Sweetling… What do you mean?"

At times his beauty struck her breathless, his features avid beneath a mop of lavish blond curls. But when he surprised her like this, the bouncing perfection of him fairly hummed through her, made her throat thicken for pride. With Kelmomas she could almost believe the Gods had relented.

"A skin-spy, Momma. Among the new slaves for the stables-Theliopa found another one!"

Esmenet involuntarily stiffened. Captain Imhailas appeared on the heel of these words, fairly swinging through the entrance to fall onto his knees. "Your Glory!"

"Leave us," Esmenet commanded Ngarau. The old Imperial Seneschal clapped his hands in dismissal, and a retreating commotion descended on the chambers.

"How is it my son bears this news to me?" she asked, gesturing for the Exalt-Captain to take his feet.

"I beg mercy, your Glory." Imhailas was extraordinarily attractive in a way that only Norsirai men could be. It seemed to render his embarrassment all the more ludicrous. "I set out to inform you immediately! I have no idea how-!"

"Can I seeee, Momma? Please!"

"No, Kel. You certainly may not!"

"But I need to see these things, Momma. I need to know. Someday I'll need to know!"

Scowling, she looked from the boy to the Captain, who stood armour agleam in the broken light. Through the propped doors, she could see the last of the functionaries fleeing into the palace's polished depths. One of the laggards stumbled on the hem of his robes, and for an instant, she glimpsed the tar-black bottoms of his silk slippers.

She blinked, focused on the Exalt-Captain. "What do you think?"

Imhailas hesitated for a moment, then with an air of quotation said, "Calloused hands suffer no tender eyes, your Glory."

Esmenet frowned at the hackneyed quote. Only an idiot, she found herself thinking, asks an idiot for advice. But her dismissal caught in her throat when she looked at Kelmomas. Squares of light graphed his clothes and skin, bright and oblong where not undone entirely by the compact curves of his body. For an instant, he seemed so very soft, the world's most vulnerable thing, and her heart heaved with the dwarfing confusion that mothers call love. Mere months had passed since his Whelming-since the assassination attempt on the Scuari Campus. All she wanted was to protect him. She would will herself into a cocoon if she could, an impervious and eternal shield…

But she knew that she could not. And she was wise enough not to confuse her want for her world.

"Please, Momma," he said, his blue eyes glittering with teary eagerness. The sun seemed to shine through his flaxen curls. "Please."

She composed her face and looked back to Imhailas. "I think…" she said with a heavy sigh. "I think you're quite right, Captain. The time has come. Both my sweet cherries should see Thelli's latest discovery."

Another skin-spy in the court. Why now, after so many years?

"Both boys, your Glory?"

She ignored this, the way she ignored all the tonal differences that seemed to colour references to Kelmomas's twin, Samarmas. In this one thing, she would refuse the world its inroads.

With Kelmomas in tow-he had become much more reluctant at the mention of his brother-Esmenet set off in search of her other darling, Samarmas. The galleries at the summit of the Andiamine Heights were not so very large, but they had the habit of becoming labyrinthine whenever she needed to find someone or something. Of course she could have dispatched slaves to search for him-even now her train of attendants followed at a discrete distance-but she was wary of delegating too much in the way of trivial tasks: It seemed madness enough to be dressed by strange hands in the morning, let alone never having to hunt for her own children. Power, she had come to realize, had the insidious habit of inserting others between you and your tasks, rendering your limbs little more than decorative mementoes of a more human past. Her only organs remaining, it sometimes seemed, were those belonging to statecraft: a tongue attached to a devious soul.

She paused at the juncture of every corridor, the instinctive way parents do not so much look for their children as make themselves visible. Each time figures fell to their faces down the length of the marble shafts, the slaves like hairless dogs, the functionaries like piles of lavish fabric. Gilded corbels gleamed. Decorative columns shone with lines curved to the positioning of lanterns or ceiling apertures.

Not much had changed since the days when the Ikurei Dynasty had presided over the Andiamine Heights. Certainly, the palace had grown in measure with the Empire-or her hips, as it sometimes seemed. Momemn had been one of the few Three Seas cities with wisdom enough to throw itself upon the mercy of her husband. There had been no smoke on the wind, no blood on the flagstones, when she had first walked these halls. And what a wonder it had seemed then, that people could encase themselves in such glorious luxury. Marbles looted from Shigeki ruins. Gold beaten into foils, cast into figures both human and divine. The famed frescoes, such as the Blue Hubris by the suicide, Anchilas, or the anonymous Chorus of the Seas in the Mirullian Foyer. The white-jade censers. The Zeьmi tapestries. The carpets so long, so ornate, that lifetimes had been spent weaving them…

All it had lacked was power.

A kind of mute inattention dogged her as she walked. She found herself turning down the hall almost without realizing, though she had been able to hear the screams for some time. His screams, Inrilatas. One of her middle children, youngest save for the twins.

She paused before the great bronze door to his room, stared with distaste at the Kyranean Lions stamped into its panels. Even though she passed it several times every day, it always seemed larger than she remembered. She ran her fingertips along the greening rims. She could feel nothing of his cries in the cool metal. No warmth. No hum. The frantic sound seemed to rise more from the cold floor at her feet.

Kelmomas leaned against her thigh, mooning for her attention. "Uncle Maithanet thinks you should have him sent away," he said.

"Your uncle said that?" An itch always accompanied references to Maithanet, a premonition too indistinct to be called a worry. Because he was so much like Kellhus, she supposed.

"They're frightened of us, aren't they, Mommy?"

"Them?"

"Everybody. They're all afraid of our family…"

"Why would that be?"

"Because they think we're mad. They think father's seed is too strong."

Too strong for the vessel. Too strong for me.

"You've heard… them… talking?"

"Is that what happened to Inrilatas?"

"It's the God, Kel. The God burns strongly in all of you. With Inrilatas he burns strongest of all."

"Is that why he's mad?"

"Yes."

"Is that why you keep him here?"

"He is my child, Kel, as much as you. I will never abandon my children."

"Like Mimara?"

An unearthly sound burrowed from the polished stone, a shriek meant to pass sharp, cutting things. Esmenet flinched, certain he was there, Inrilatas, just on the other side of the door, his lips mashed against the portal's marmoreal frame. She thought she could hear teeth gnawing at the stone. She looked from the door to the slender cherub that was her other son. Kelmomas. Godlike Kelmomas. Healthy, loving, devoted to the point of comedy…

So unlike the others.

Please let it be.

Her smile seemed proper to the tears in her eyes. "Like Mimara," she said.

She couldn't even think the name without a series of inner cringings, as though it were a weight that could be drawn only with ill-used muscles. Even now she had her men scouring the Three Seas, searching-searching everywhere except the one place where she knew Mimara would be.

Keep her safe, Akka. Please keep her safe.

Inrilatas's shriek trailed into a series of masturbatory grunts. On and on they continued, each sucking on the one prior, all possessing a hairless animality that made her clutch Kelmomas's shoulder. She knew this was something no child should hear, especially one as impressionable as Kelmomas, but her honor immobilized her. There was something… personal in the jerking sounds-or so it seemed. Something meant for her and her alone.

The cry of "Momma!" snapped her from her trance.

It was Samarmas. He burst from his nursemaid's grasp, identical to Kelmomas in every respect, save for the slack pose of his face and the outward bulge of his eyes, so like those on ancient Kyranean statuary.

"My boy!" Esmenet cried, scooping the boy into her arms. With an "Ooof!" she swung him onto her hip-he was getting too big! — beamed mother-love into his idiot gaze.

My broken boy.

The nursemaid, Porsi, had followed in his stomping wake, eyes to the ground. The young Nansur slave knelt, face to the floor. Esmenet should have thanked the girl, she knew, but she had wanted to find Sammi herself, perhaps even to spy for a bit, in the way of simpler parents watching through simpler windows.

Inrilatas continued screaming through polished stone-forgotten.

Stairs. Endless stairs and corridors, from the reserved splendour of the summit, to the monumental spectacle of the palace's lower, more public reaches, thence to the raw stone of the dungeons, with troughs worn into the floor stones for the passage of innumerable prisoners. In one courtyard they crossed, Samarmas hugged the backs of everyone who fell to their faces. He was always indiscriminate with his loving gestures, particularly when it came to slaves. He even kissed one old woman on her nut-brown cheek-Esmenet's skin pimpled at the sound of her joyous sobbing. Kelmomas babbled the entire way, reminding Samarmas in his stern big brother way that they must be warriors, that they must be strong, that only honour and courage would earn the love and praise of their father. Listening, Esmenet found herself wondering at the Princes-Imperial they would become. She found herself fearing for them-the way she always feared when her thoughts were bent to the future.

As they descended the final stair, Kelmomas began describing skin-spies. "Their bones are soft like a shark's," he said, his voice lilting in wonder. "And they have claws for faces, claws they can squeeze into any face. They could be you. They could be me. At any second they could strike you down!"

"Monsters, Mommy?" Samarmas asked, his eyes aglow with tears. "Sharks?" Of course he already knew what skin-spies were: She herself had regaled him with innumerable stories about their sinister role in the First Holy War. But it was part of his innocence to respond to everything as though encountering it for the very first time. Repetition, as she had discovered on many cross-eyed occasions, was a kind of drug for Samarmas.

"Kel, that's quite enough."

"But he needs to know too!"

She had to remind herself that his cleverness was that of a normal child, and not like that of his siblings. Inrilatas, in particular, had possessed his father's… gifts.

She wished she could put these worries to rest. For all her love, she could never lose herself in Kelmomas the way she could Samarmas, whose idiocy had become a kind of perverse sanctuary for her. For all her love, she could not bring herself to trust the way a mother should.

Not after so many… experiences.

As she feared, a carnival of personages great and small clotted the corridors leading to the Truth Room. The whole palace, it seemed, had found some excuse to see their latest captive. She even saw her cook, a diminutive old Nilnameshi named Bompothur, pressing toward the door with the others. The voice of Biaxi Sankas, one of the more powerful members of the Congregate, reverberated across the hooded stone spaces. "Let me pass, you caste-menial fool!"

The scene troubled her perhaps more than it should. To be Empress of the Three Seas was one thing, to be the wife of the Aspect-Emperor was quite another. In his absence, absolute authority fell to her-but how could it not bruise and break when the fall was so far? Even where one would expect her rule to be absolute-such as her own palace-it was anything but. In Kellhus's absence, the Andiamine Heights seemed nothing so much as a squabbling mountain of bowing, scraping, insinuating thieves. The Exalt-Ministers. The caste-nobles of the High Congregate. The Imperial Apparati. The visiting dignitaries. Even the slaves. It sickened her the way they all lined up moist-eyed with awe and devotion whenever Kellhus walked the halls, only to resume their cannibalistic rivalries the instant he departed-when she walked the gilded halls. Word has it, Blessed Empress, that so-and-so is questioning the slave reforms, and in the most troubling manner… On and on, back and forth, the long dance of tongues as knives. She had learned to ignore most of it, the palace would be on the brink of revolt if even a fraction of what was said was true. But it meant that she would never know if the palace were about to revolt, and she had read enough history to know that this was every sovereign's most mortal concern.

She cried out, "Imhailas!"

Whether it was her or some perverse trick of the stone, the ringing of her voice had the character of a screech. A herd of apprehensive faces turned to her and the twins. There was a comical scuffle as they all struggled to kneel in the absence of floor space. She could not but wonder at what Kellhus would say about this lack of discipline. Who would be punished and how? There was always punishment where the Aspect-Emperor was involved…

Or as he pretended to call it, education.

"Imhailas!" she cried again. She squeezed Samarmas's hand in reassurance, smiled at him. He had a tendency to cry whenever she raised her voice.

"Yes, your Glory," the Exalt-Captain called from the blockaded threshold.

"What are all these people doing here?"

"It's been some time, your Glory. Almost two years since the last-"

"This is foolish! Clear everyone out save your guards and the pertinent ministers."

"At once, your Glory."

Of course Imhailas scarce needed to utter a word: Everyone had heard her anger and her rebuke.

"They're more afraid of Father," young Kelmomas whispered at her side.

"Yes," Esmenet replied, at a loss as to how to respond otherwise. The insights of children were too immediate, too unfiltered not to be unwelcome. "Yes, they are."

Even a child can see it.

She drew the boys to the wall to make way for the file of men-a parade of seditious souls draped in ingratiating skins, or so it seemed. She acknowledged their anxious and perfunctory bows as they scurried past, wondering how she could possibly rule when her instruments so sickened her. But she had been too political for far too long not to recognize an opportunity when she saw one. She stopped Lord Sankas as he made to pass, asked him if he would assist her with the twins. "They've never seen a skin-spy before," she explained. She wondered how she could have forgotten how tall he was-even for a caste-noble. Her own height had always been a source of shame for her, given the way it shouted her caste-menial origins.

"Indeed," he said with a gloating smile. Most men were only too eager to embrace evidence of their importance, but when they were as old as Sankas, it seemed more unseemly for some reason. He looked down, winked at her sons. "The horrors of the world are what make us men."

Esmenet smiled up at the Lord, knowing this little piece of advice to her sons would endear them to him. Kellhus was forever reminding her to seek the counsel of those whose friendship could be advantageous. Men, he was always saying, liked to see their words proved right.

"Are we going to see the monster now, Momma?" Samarmas asked in a voice as small as his eyes were wide. She looked to the child, grateful for the excuse to ignore the mob. Over the past year, ever since deciding the twins were not like the others, she had found herself retreating from the mad polity around her into the realm of maternal cares. It was more instinctive, and certainly more gratifying.

"There's no need for you to fear," she said, smiling. "Come. Lord Sankas will protect you."

Though the name was the same, the Truth Room was one of the palace chambers, subterranean or otherwise, that had been drastically expanded in the years since Kellhus's uncontested march into Momemn. The original Truth Room had been little more than the personal torture chamber of the old Ikurei Emperors, and every bit as dark and closeted as their peevish souls. The enormous chamber she now entered with her children was nothing less than an organ of state, a pit with walls tiered by walkways, some possessing cages for prisoners, others lined with various instruments of interrogation, and one, the uppermost, adorned with columns and marble veneers-a gallery for observers from the land of light. It was, the architect had told her, an inverted replica of the Great Ziggurat of Xijoser, carved so that the mighty monument on the Sempis Delta would fit if tipped into its hollow. Esmenet could remember Proyas quipping something to the effect that "sometimes Men must reach down" when seeking the Truth.

She led the children to the ornate balustrade of the highest tier, where the others awaited her. Her Master-of-Spies, Phinersa, and her Vizier, Vem-Mithriti, knelt with their faces to the floor, while Maithanet and Theliopa stood with their faces lowered in greeting. Imhailas was ushering out the last of the stragglers, his humour at once officious and curiously apologetic, the air of someone executing the irrational demands of another.

Theliopa, her eldest daughter by Kellhus, bowed in a stiff curtsy as they approached. Perhaps she was the strangest of her children, even moreso than Inrilatas, but curiously all the more safe for it. Theliopa was a woman with an unearthly hollow where human sentiment should be. Even as an infant she had never cried, never gurgled with laughter, never reached out to finger the image of her mother's face. Esmenet had once overheard her nursemaids whispering that she would happily starve rather than call out for food, and even now she was thin in the extreme, tall and angular like the God-her-father, but emaciated, to the point where her skin seemed tented over the woodwork of her bones. The clothes she wore were ridiculously elaborate-despite her godlike intellect, the subtleties of style and fashion utterly eluded her-a gold-brocaded gown fairly armoured in black pearls.

"Mother," the sallow blonde girl said in a tone that Esmenet could now recognize for attachment, or the guttering approximation of it. As always the girl flinched at her touch, like a skittish cat or steed, but as always Esmenet refused to draw back, and held Theliopa's cheek until she felt the tremors calm.

"You've done well," she said, gazing into her pale eyes. "Very well." It was strange, loving children who could see the movements of her soul through her face. It forced a kind of bitter honesty on her, the resignation of those who know they cannot hide-not ever-from the people they needed to hide from the most.

"I live to please you, Mother."

They were what they were, her children. Bits and pieces of their father. The truth of him-perhaps. Only Samarmas was the exception. She could see it in his every stitch, in the ardent affection with which he clung to Lord Sankas's hand, in the round way his eyes probed the shadows beyond the rail, in the anxiousness that warbled through his limbs. Only Samarmas could be…

Trusted.

Recoiling from these thoughts, she turned to the others and pronounced the customary greeting, "Reap the morrow." She felt Kelmomas's small fingers squeeze her palm.

"Reap the morrow," they intoned in response. Phinersa jumped to his feet with bandy-legged alacrity. He was a brilliant but nervous man, one who could bloom and wilt in the course of speaking a single sentence. He was one of those men who were far too conscious of their own eyes. They had the habit of darting around the point of your own, but more ritually than randomly, as though they followed some formal rule of avoidance, rather than any instinctive antipathy to the prick of contact. Those rare times he did manage a level gaze, it was with a penetration and intensity that boiled away to nothing in a matter of heartbeats and left you feeling at once superior and strangely exposed.

She found herself bending to assist old Vem-Mithriti, the Grandmaster of the Imperial Saik, to his feet. He smiled and murmured shamefaced thanks, more like a shrinking-voiced adolescent than one of the most powerful Exalt-Ministers in the New Empire. Sometimes Kellhus chose people for their wit and strength, as was the case with Phinersa, and sometimes for their weakness. She often wondered whether old Vem was his Gift to her, since Kellhus himself had no difficulty handling the wilful and ambitious.

Maithanet, her brother-in-law and the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, towered next to the two Exalt-Ministers, dressed in a plain white tunic. The oiled plaits of his beard gleamed like jet in the lantern light. His height and force of presence never failed to remind Esmenet of her husband-the same light, only burning through the sackcloth of a human mother.

"Thelli found it during a surprise inspection of the new slaves," he said, his voice so deep and resonant that it somehow blotted out the memory of the others. With a broad gesture, he drew her eyes out over the balustrade to the iron apparatus several lengths below…

Where it hung naked in a pose reminiscent of the Circumfix: the skin-spy.

Slicked in perspiration, its black limbs flexed against the iron brackets that clamped each of its joints-wrists, elbows, shoulders, waist. Even so immobilized, it seemed to seethe somehow, as though reflexively testing various points of leverage. The rusty grind and creak of the apparatus spoke to its ominous strength. Muscle twined like braided snakes.

A single gold pin had been driven into its skull, which, according to the arcane principles of Neuropuncture, had forced the thing to unclench its face. Masticating limbs waved where features should have been. They hooked the air like a dying crab, some flanged with disconnected lips, others bearing a flaccid eyelid, a hanging nostril, a furred swatch of brow. Perpetually shocked eyes glared from the pulpy shadows between. Teeth glistened from bared gums.

Esmenet clenched her teeth against the bile rising into her throat. Even after so many years, there was something about the creatures, some violation of fundamentals, that struck her to the visceral quick. As a reminder of the threat that loomed over her and her family, she kept one of their skulls in her personal apartments. It had a great hole where the eyes of a human would hang over the bridge of the nose. The rim of the hole possessed sockets for each unnatural finger. And the fingers, which some artisan had wired into a semblance of their natural pose, folded together in elaborate counterpoise, some curved and interlocking across the forehead, others bent into complex signs about the eyes, mouth, and nose. Every morning she glanced at it-and found herself not so much afraid as convinced.

It had long since become an argument for suffering her husband.

And now, here was another one, wrapped in shining meat. One of the Consults most lethal weapons. A skin-spy. A living justification. The threat that forgave her tyranny.

"Black-skinned?" she said, turning to Maithanet. "Have we ever captured a Satyothi before?"

"This is the first," the Holy Shriah replied, nodding toward Theliopa as he spoke. "We think it might be a test of some kind."

"A plausible assumption," Theliopa said, her voice high and cold. "If the threshold of detection were a near thing, it might have been successful. For all the Consult knows, the subtle differences between complexions and bone structure could have rendered this one undetectable. It would explain the seven hundred and thirty-three days that have elapsed since their last attempt to infiltrate the court."

Esmenet nodded, too unnerved by her daughter's vacant and all-seeing gaze to work through the implications.

She checked on the boys. On his tiptoes, Kelmomas stared with something resembling rapt indecision, as if trying to decide whether the thing below them was a match for his wilder imaginings. Samarmas had abandoned Lord Sankas to join his twin at the balustrade. He stared between his fingers, his face held partially averted. They seemed wise and imbecilic versions of the same child, one modern, the other antique, almost as though history had folded back on itself. Without warning, Kelmomas turned to gaze into her face: In so many little ways, he was still his father's son-and it worried her.

"What do you think?" she asked with a forced smile.

"Scary."

"Yes. Scary."

As though sensing some kind of permission in this, Samarmas threw his arms around her waist and began blubbering. She held his cheek against her midriff and cooed to him in a soft, shushing voice. When she looked up, Phinersa and Imhailas were watching her intently. She supposed with Theliopa present she had no need to fear their intent, but even still, there always seemed to be a glimpse of malice in their look.

Or a lust that amounted to the same.

"What do you wish, your Glory?" Phinersa asked.

Without Kellhus, there was nothing they could learn from this creature. Skin-spies possessed no souls, nothing for Vem-Mithriti's sorcerous Cants to compel. And torments simply… aroused them.

"Sound the Plate," she said with weary decisiveness. "Let the People be reminded."

Maithanet nodded in sage assent. "A most wise decision."

Everyone stared at the monstrosity for a wordless moment, as if committing its form to memory. No matter how many skin-spies she saw, they never ceased to unnerve her with their devious impossibility.

Imhailas cleared his throat. "Shall I make preparations for your attendance, your Glory?"

"Yes," she replied absently. "Of course." The People needed to be reminded of more than what threatened them, they needed to be reminded of the discipline that kept them safe as well. They needed to recall the disciplinarian.

The tyrant.

She held Samarmas tight, pressed her fingers through his hair, felt his scalp as soft and as warm as a cat beneath her palm. Such a little soul. So defenceless. Her eyes strayed to Kelmomas, who now crouched, his face pressed against the stone spindles, to better study the gasping monstrosity below.

Though it pained her, she knew her duty. She knew what Kellhus would say… By the mere fact of his blood, they would live lives of mortal danger. For their own sakes, they would need to become ruthless… as ruthless as she had failed to become.

"And for my children as well."

"You're thinking about yesterday's recital," the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples said.

After giving the twins back to Porsi, Esmenet had joined her brother-in-law on the long walk to the palace's postern entrance, where his bodyguard and carriage awaited. This had become something of a tradition ever since Kellhus had left to lead the Great Ordeal against Sakarpus. Not only did Maithanet's station make him her social and political equal, his counsel had become a source of comfort-sustenance, even. He was wise in a manner that, although never quite so penetrating as Kellhus, always struck her as more… human.

And, of course, his blood made him her closest ally.

"The way Nel-Saripal begins," Esmenet replied, staring absently at the figures engraved in marble panels along the walls. "Those first words… 'Momemn is the fist in our breast, the beating heart…" She turned to look up at his stern profile. "What do you think?"

"Significant," Maithanet conceded, "but only as a signal, the way birds tell sailors of unseen land."

"Hmm. Yet another unfriendly shore." She studied his expression, watched the smoke tailings of an oil-lamp break about his hair and scalp. She had said this as a joke, but her scrutiny made it seem more of a test.

Maithanet smiled and nodded. "With my brother and his stalwarts gone, all the embers that we failed to stamp out during the Unification will leap back into flame."

"What Nel-Saripal dares, others will also?"

"There can be no doubt."

She found herself frowning. "So the Consult should no longer be our first priority? Is that what you're saying?"

"No. Only that we need to throw our nets wider. Think of the host my brother has assembled. The first sons of a dozen nations. The greatest magi of all the Schools. Short of the No-God's resurrection, nothing can save Golgotterath. The Consult's only hope is to fan the embers, to throw the New Empire into turmoil, if not topple it altogether. The Ainoni have a saying, 'When the hands are strong, attack the feet.'"

"But who, Maitha? After so much blood and fire, who could be so foolish as to raise arms against Kellhus?"

"The well of fools has no bottom, Esmi. You know that. You can assume that for every Fanayal who opposes us openly, there are ten who skulk in the shadows."

"Just so long as they're not so canny," she replied. "I'm not sure we could survive ten of him."

Twenty years ago, Fanayal had ranked among the most cunning and committed foes of the First Holy War. Though the heathen Empire of Kian had been the first to topple at the Aspect-Emperor's feet, Fanayal had somehow managed to avoid his nation's fate. According to Phinersa's briefings, songs of his exploits had reached as far as Galeoth. The Judges had already burned a dozen or so travelling minstrels at the stake, but the lays seemed to spread and reproduce with the stubbornness of a disease. The "Bandit Padirajah," they were calling him. By simply drawing breath, the man had immeasurably slowed the conversion of the old Fanim governorates.

The Shriah and the Empress walked in silence for several moments. Their journey had taken them into the Apparatory, where the residences of the palace's senior functionaries were located. The girth of the halls had narrowed, and the mirror sheen of marble had been replaced with planes of lesser stone. Many of the doors they passed stood ajar, leaking the sounds of simpler, more tranquil existences. A nurse singing to a babe. Mothers gossiping. Those few people they encountered in the hall literally stood slack-jawed before throwing their faces to the ground. One mother viciously yanked her son, an olive-skinned boy perhaps two or three years younger than the twins, to the floor at her side. Esmenet heard his crying more in her belly than in her ears, or so it seemed.

She clutched Maithanet's arm, drew him to a halt.

"Esmi?"

"Tell me, Maitha," she said hesitantly. "When"-she paused to bite her lip-"when you… look… into my face, what do you see?"

A gentle smile creased his plaited beard. "Not so far or so deep as my brother."

Dыnyain. It all came back to this iron ingot of meaning. Maithanet, her children, everyone near to her possessed some measure of Dыnyain blood. Everyone watched with a portion of her husband's all-seeing eyes. For a heartbeat, she glimpsed Achamian as he had stood twenty years earlier, a thousand smoke plumes scoring the sky beyond him. "But you're not thinking! You see only your love for him. You're not thinking of what he sees when he gazes upon you…"

And with a blink both he and his heretical words were gone.

"That wasn't my question," she said, recovering herself.

"Sorrow…" Maithanet said, probing her face with warm, forgiving eyes. He lifted her small, slack hands in the thick cage of his own. "I see sorrow and confusion. Worry for your first, for Mimara. Shame… shame that you have come to fear your children more than you fear for them. So very much happens, Esmi, both here and in places remote… You fear you are not equal to the task my brother has set for you."

"And the others?" she heard herself ask. "Can the others see this as well?"

Dыnyain, she thought. Dыnyain blood.

The Shriah squeezed her hands in reassurance. "Some sense it, perhaps, but only in a dim manner. They have their prejudices, of course, but their sovereign and saviour has made you their road to redemption. My brother has built a strong house for you to keep. I hesitate to say as much, but you truly have no cause to fear, Esmi."

"Why?"

"For the same reason I have no fear. The Aspect-Emperor has chosen you."

A Dыnyain. A Dыnyain has chosen you.

"No. Why do you hesitate to tell me?"

His eyes unfocused in calculation, then returned to her. "Because if I see your fear, then he has seen it also. And if he has seen it, then he counts it as a strength."

She tried in vain to blink away the tears. His image sheered and blurred, Maithanet seemed an elusive, predatory presence. A concatenation of liquid shadows. "You mean he's chosen me because I'm weak?"

The Shriah of the Thousand Temples shook his head in calm contradiction. "Is the man who flees to fight anew weak? Fear is neither strong nor weak until events make it so."

"Then why wouldn't he tell me as much."

"Because, Esmi" he said, drawing her back down the hall, "sometimes ignorance is the greatest strength of all."

For a thing to seem a miracle, it cannot quite be believed.

The following morning Esmenet awoke thinking of her children, not as the instruments of power they had become, but as babies. She often found herself shying away from thoughts of the early years of her motherhood, so relentless had Kellhus been in his pursuit of progeny. Seven children she had conceived by her husband, of which six had survived. Add to that Mimara, her daughter from her previous life, and Moлnghus, the son she had inherited from Kellhus's first wife, Serwл, and she was the mother of eight…

Eight!

The thought never ceased to surprise and to dizzy her, so certain she had been that she would live and die barren.

Kayыtas had been the first, born close enough to Moлnghus that the two had been raised as fraternal twins. She had delivered him in Shimeh upon the Holy Juterum, where the Latter Prophet, Inri Sejenus, had ascended to the Heavens two thousand years previous. Kayыtas had been so perfect, both in form and in temperament, that the Lords of the Holy War had wept upon seeing him. So perfect, like a pearl, she sometimes thought, taking in the world's shadowy jumble and reflecting only a generic, silvery light. So smooth that no fingers could grasp him, not truly.

It had been Kayыtas who had taught her that love was a kind of imperfection. How could it be otherwise, when he was perfect and could feel no love? Simply holding him had been a heartbreak.

Theliopa had come second, born in Nenciphon while Kellhus waged the first of many wars against the drugged princes of Nilnamesh. After Kayыtas, how could Esmenet not hope against hope? How could she not clutch this new babe and pray to the Gods, please, please, give me but one human-hearted child? But even then, her daughter's limbs still slick with the waters of passage, she had known she had born another… Another child who could not love. With Kellhus at war, she stumbled into a kind of bottomless melancholy, one that made her envy suicides. If it had not been for her adopted son, little Moлnghus, it might have ended then, this queer fever dream that had become her life. He at least had needed her, even if he was not her own.

That was when she began demanding resources, real resources, for her search for Mimara-whom she had sold to slavers in the shadow of starvation so very long ago. She could remember staring at Theliopa in her bassinet, a pale and wane approximation of an infant, thinking that if Kellhus denied her, she would have no choice but to…

Fate truly was a whore, to deliver her to such thoughts.

Of course, she found herself almost immediately pregnant, as though her womb had been a hidden concession in the deal she had struck with her husband. Her third child by Kellhus, Serwa, was born in Carythusal with the smell of the Zaudunyani conquest still on the wind-soot and death. Like Kayыtas, she had seemed perfect, flawless, and yet unlike him she had seemed capable of love. What a joy she had been! But when she was scarce three years old, her tutors realized that she possessed the Gift of the Few. Despite Esmenet's threats, despite her entreaties, Kellhus sent the girl-still a babe! — to Iothiah to be raised among the Swayal witches.

There had been bitterness in that decision, and no few thoughts of heresy and sedition. In losing Serwa, Esmenet learned that worship could not only survive the loss of love, it possessed room for hatred as well.

Then came the nameless one with eight arms and no eyes, the first to be delivered on the Andiamine Heights. The labour had been hard, life-threatening even. Afterwards would she learn that the physician-priests had drowned it, according to Nansur custom, in unwatered wine.

Then came another son, Inrilatas-and there was no doubt that he could love. But Esmenet had developed instincts for these things, as mothers who bear many children sometimes do. From the very beginning, she had known something was wrong, though she could never name the substance of her misapprehensions. But it became plain to his nurses by his second year. Inrilatas was three when he first began speaking the little treacheries that dwelt in the hearts of those about him. The entire court walked in terror of him. By the age of five he could summon words so honest and injurious that Esmenet had seen hard-hearted warriors blanch and reach for their blades. She would never forget the time when, after singing to him in his bed, he had looked up with his too-nimble face and said, "Don't hate yourself for hating me, Mommy. Hate yourself for who you are." Hate yourself for who you are, spoken in the dulcet tones of child adoration. By the time he was six, only Kellhus could fathom, let alone manage, him, and he had not the time for anything more than a cursory relationship. She still shuddered whenever she recalled the rare conversations they shared, father and son. Afterwards, it was as if Inrilatas, who had always walked the perimeter of sanity, simply tripped and tumbled in the wrong direction. The veil of utter madness was drawn down.

She had prayed for the passing of her fertility during this time, for what the Nansur called meseremta, the "dry season." But Yatwer's Water continued to flow, and she so dreaded coupling with Kellhus that she actively sought out surrogates for him, women of native intellect like herself. But if his divine seed was a burden she could scarce bear, then it broke all the others. Of the seventeen concubines he impregnated, ten died in childbirth, and the others gave birth to more… nameless ones. Thirteen in sum, all drowned in wine.

Esmenet sometimes wondered how many hapless souls had been assassinated to keep this secret. A hundred? A thousand?

News of Mimara's discovery arrived shortly after Inrilatas's final breakdown. For almost ten years Esmenet's men, soldiers of the Eцthic Guard who had sworn to die before returning to their mistress empty-handed, had scoured the Three Seas. In the end they found Mimara in a brothel, dressed in paste and foil to resemble none other than Esmenet herself, so that low men might couple with their dread Empress. All Esmenet could remember of the news was the cruelty of the floor.

They had found her daughter, her only child sired by a man instead of a god. And if the manner of her discovery had not broken Esmenet's heart, then the hatred she saw in Mimara's eyes upon their reunion most certainly had… Mimara, sweet Mimara, who as a child would only hold her mother's thumb when they walked hand in hand, who would cry inexplicably at the sight of solitary birds, or squeal at the glimpse of rats flitting from crack to crevice. She had come back to her mother broken, another bruised and battered peach, and quite as mad as any of Esmenet's other more divine daughters and sons.

As it turned out, Mimara also possessed the Gift of the Few. But where Kellhus had turned a deaf ear to Esmenet with Serwa, this time he left the matter in her selfish hands. She would not lose another daughter to the witches, even if it destroyed any chance of mending the tattered history between them. She would not sell Mimara a second time-no matter how vicious the young woman's rantings. Even the Schoolmen Esmenet consulted had told her that Mimara was too old to master the painstaking meanings sorcery required. But as so often happens in family quarrels, the grounds were entirely incidental to the conflict. Mimara simply needed to punish her, and she in turn had needed to be punished-or so Esmenet had assumed.

The twins arrived during this time, and with them one final spear-throw at Fate.

There had been much cause for despair in the beginning. Though as perfect in form as their eldest brother, Kayыtas, they could not be separated without lunatic squalls of anguish. And when they were left together, all they ever did was stare into each other's eyes-watch after watch, day after day, month after month. The physician-priests had warned her of the risks of bearing children at her age, so she had prepared herself for… oddities, she supposed, peculiarities over and above what she had already experienced. But this was so strange as to be almost poetic: two children with what seemed a single soul.

It was Kellhus who purchased the slave who would save them-and her. His name was Hagitatas, famed among the Conriyan caste-nobility as a healer of troubled souls. Somehow, through tenderness, wisdom, and incalculable patience, he managed to pry her two little darlings apart, to give them the interval they required to draw their own breath, and so raise the frame of individual identities. Such was her relief that even the subsequent discovery of Samarmas's idiocy seemed cause for celebration.

These sons loved-there could be no question that they loved!

At last the Whore of Fate, treacherous Anagkл, who had lifted Esmenet from ignorance and brutality of the Sumni slums to the pitch of more profound torments, had relented. At last Esmenet had found her heart. She was an old mother now, and old mothers knew well the tight-fisted ways of the world. They knew how to find largesse in its meagre capitulations.

How to be greedy with small things.

There was hope in her apprehension as her body-slaves dressed and painted her. When Porsi brought Kelmomas and Samarmas to her anteroom festooned like little generals, she laughed with delight. With the two of them in mutinous tow, she descended the stairs and landings to the lower palace, then hurried through the subterranean corridor that ran beneath the Scuari Campus. Periodically she heard the deep clap of the Plate thrumming across the city's quarters, calling all those who would witness this latest abomination. And at turns she caught hints of a deeper sound, more human in its register, legion in its tones.

By the time they surfaced in the limestone gloom of the Allosium Forum, the roar had become a deafening wash that hummed through the pillars and lintels. They stood motionless as the vestiaries fussed with creases and other unsightly defects in their clothing. Then, following an aisle between dark columns, Esmenet led her sons into light and fury.

The crest of the monumental stair seemed the summit of a mountain, a place so high that it made haze of the world below. The sun was dry and cool. The broad expanse of the Scuari Campus seethed beneath it, a dark sea scarped by the hazy contours of the city. As one, untold thousands cried out in jubilation, with abandon, as though she were the throw of the number-sticks that had saved all of their lives.

Esmenet was always conscious of her unreality at moments such as this. Everything, even the cosmetics smeared across her skin, possessed the weight of fraud. She was not Esmenet, and nor were her children Kelmomas and Samarmas. They were images, semblances drawn to answer the mob and their anxious fantasies. They were Power. They were Justice. They were mortal flesh draped about the dread intent of God.

Authority in all its myriad incarnations.

She stood with a twin to either side, pretending to bask in the thunder of their adulation. Everywhere she looked she saw open mouths, black holes no wider than a woman's fist, no deeper than a boy's arm. And though the air quivered with sound, each of them seemed as soundless as a gaping fish, sucking at air too thin not to suffocate.

The silence, when it finally came, tickled her with its abruptness. She hesitated, heard the strange hum of unvoiced expectations, of endless eyes watching. Finally a solitary cough broke the hanging spell, and she started down the monumental stair, led the twins past the mirrored shields of the assembled Eцthic Guardsmen, then around the folds of the great crimson curtain that had been raised about the scaffold.

The swish of her gowns seemed to blot out all other noise. She could smell them now, her people, raw and sour. The uniformity of their faces seemed to dissolve into insulting details. The painted hauteur of the caste-nobility assembled immediately below. The woollen leers of the caste-menials crowding the innumerable distances beyond.

How many of them, she wondered, harboured souls that would see her and her children dead?

She glanced at the twins, trying to smile for their sakes. Kelmomas looked… blank. Tears silvered Samarmas's cheeks.

Eight of them, she thought.

Theliopa hid in her soulless apartments, far too fragile for ceremonial carnivals such as this. Moлnghus, Kayыtas, and Serwa marched with their father in the Great Ordeal, at a distance appropriate to children who were strangers. Inrilatas screamed from the prison of his room. And Mimara… wandered.

Eight. And only these two boys loved.

Whispering, "Come," she led them to their gilded and cushioned seats. A call rang out as they sat, and all across the depths of the vista before them, the masses fell to their knees. Unable to reach over the arms of her throne, she relinquished her sons' hands. The golden claws of twin Kyranean Lions arched above her, signifying the continuity of empires from the present back to the murk of Far Antiquity. Upon her left shoulder, she bore a grand ruby brooch, symbolizing the divine blood of her husband, which had passed through his seed into her, and thence into their children. Across her right shoulder, she wore a sash of felt, blue chased with gold, the sign of her command of the Eцthic Guard, the protectors of the Imperial Precincts, and in the absence of the Aspect-Emperor, her own private army, bound to her by oaths of life and death.

She heard rather than saw the release of the curtains that concealed the scaffold behind her. Shouts like a thunderclap. The mobs surged, not so much forward as outward. Hands were raised in air-pummelling exultation. Lips curled. Teeth flashed with sunlit spittle.

Somehow, through the roar, she could hear Samarmas bawling to her right. When she looked, she saw him huddling, shoulders in and chin down, as though trying to squeeze through some hidden passage within himself. A kind of maternal hatred clamped her jaw tight, a wild urge to order the Guardsmen into the masses, to cut and beat them from her sight. How dare they frighten her child!

But to be a sovereign is to be forever, irrevocably, cut into many. To be a matron, simple and uncompromising. To be a spy, probing and hiding. And to be a general, always calculating weakness and advantage.

She fought the mother-clamouring within, ignored his distress. Even Samarmas-who she was certain would become nothing more than a dear fool-even he had to learn the madness that was his Imperial inheritance.

For him, she told herself. I do this for his sake!

The mobs continued howling, not at her or her sons, but at the sight of the Consult skin-spy, which she knew would be strung like a spitted pig through the centre of the scaffold above and behind her. According to tradition, her eyes were too holy for such a horrific sight, so a lottery was held among the caste-nobility to see who would be granted the honour of bringing her the hand mirror she would use to actually witness the creature's purification. With some surprise she saw Lord Sankas approach, his elbows pressed together before his cuirass, so that the mirror could lay flat across his inner forearms.

Samarmas flew from his seat and hugged him about the waist. For a moment the old caste-noble teetered. Gales of laughter passed through the crowds. Esmenet hastened to detach him, wiped his cheeks and kissed his forehead, then directed him back to his little throne.

Grinning in embarrassment, Biaxi Sankas knelt so that he might offer up the mirror. Nodding to show Imperial favour, she took it from his arms, raised it so that she saw flashing sky, then her own face. Her beauty surprised her-large dark eyes on an oval face. She could not remember when it happened, when she starting feeling older and uglier than she in fact was. She had always been popular as a whore, even in a city renowned for its white-skinned tastes. She had always been beautiful-and in that down-to-the-bones way that somehow followed certain women even into their decrepitude.

She had never been a match for her face.

A pang made her avert the mirror, and she glimpsed the uppermost timbers of the scaffold hanging in a pool of bald sky. Tilting the handle, she followed beams to where the chains were anchored, then followed the chains until the skin-spy occupied the mirror's centre. With pinched breaths, she gazed at what she had already seen in the multitude of faces before her: coin for the toll their Aspect-Emperor had exacted from them.

The thing bucked and thrashed, bouncing like a stone tied to a bowstring. Perched on separate boarded platforms, two of Phinersa's understudies ministered to the thing, the one already making the incisions required to peel back the skin, the other flicking the Neuropuncture needles that controlled the abomination's reaction-the thing would simply cackle and climax otherwise. Like a chorus of burning bulls it screamed, its spine arched, the radial limbs of its face yanked back like the petals of a dying flower.

Both the twins had climbed into their seats to gaze over the back, Kelmomas pale and expressionless, Samarmas with his shining cheeks pressed to the cushion. She wanted to shout at them to turn away, to look back to the shrieking mob, but her voice failed her. Even though the mirror was meant to protect her, holding it the way she did seemed to make it all the more real, into something that rubbed against the soft-skin of her terror.

The brand was drawn from an iron-bowl of coals that had been raised into the scaffold. The thing's eyes were put out.

With a kind of rapt horror she found herself wondering at her circumstances. What kind of whore was Fate, to throw her into this place, this time, to make her the vessel of cruel godlings and the bar of world-breaking events? She believed in her husband. She believed in the Great Ordeal. She believed in the Second Apocalypse. She believed in all of it.

She just couldn't believe that any of it happened.

She whispered to herself in that paradoxical voice we all bear within us, the one that speaks the most wretched truths and the most beguiling lies, the one that is most us, and so not quite us at all. She whispered, "This is a dream."

Sarmarmas wept and Kelmomas, who otherwise seemed so strong for a child his age, trembled like an old man's dying words. At last she relented. Setting down the mirror, she reached over the arms of her throne to squeeze both their hands. The feel of small fingers closing tight about her own brought tears to her eyes. It was a sensation so primeval, so right, that it almost always daubed the turmoil from her soul.

But this time it felt more like an… admission.

The masses roared in exultation, becoming in some curious way, the iron that burned, the blade that peeled. And Esmenet sat painted and rigid, gazing out across their furious regions.

Thug. Tyrant. Empress of the Three Seas.

A miracle not quite believed.