The white-luck warrior

Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Somewhere South of Gielgath…

That which comes after determines what comes before-in this World.

The Gift-of-Yatwer walked across ordained ground. His skin did not burn, thanks to the swarthiness he had purchased with his seed. His feet did not blister, thanks to the calluses he had purchased with his youth. But he grew weary as other men grew weary, for like them, he was a thing of flesh and blood. But he always tired when he should grow tired. And his every slumber delivered him to the perfect instant of waking. Once to the sound of lutes and to the generosity of travelling mummers. Another time to a fox that bolted, leaving the goose it had been laboriously dragging.

Indeed, his every breath was a Gift.

He crossed the exhausted plantations of Anserca, drawing stares from those slaves who saw him. Though he walked alone, he followed a file of thousands across the fields, for he was always the stranger he pursued, and the back before him was forever his own. He would look up, see himself walking beneath a solitary, windswept tree, vanishing stride by stride over the far side of a hill. And when he turned, he would see that same tree behind him, and the same man descending the same slope. A queue of millions connected him to himself, from the Gift who coupled with the Holy Crone to the Gift who watched the Aspect-Emperor dying in blood and expressionless disbelief.

He was the ripple across dark waters. The bow of force thrown across a length of a child's rope.

He saw the assassin gagging on his own blood. He saw the besieging armies, the hunger in the streets. He saw the Holy Shriah turn oblivious and bare his throat. He saw the Andiamine Heights crashing upon itself, the Empress's eyes flutter about her final breath…

And he walked alone, following a road of fields, stranded in the now of a mortal soul.

Day after day, across mile after mile of tilled earth-the very bosom of his dread Mother. He slept between the rising stalks, the nascent heads, listening to his Mother's soothing whisper, staring at stars that were silver lines.

He followed his footprints across the dust, witnessing more than plotting the murder of the dead.

The River Sempis

At least, Malowebi thought to himself as he swayed in his saddle, he could say he had seen a ziggurat before he died. What could that fool, Likaro, say? There was more to travel than bedding Nilnameshi slave boys, just as there was more to diplomacy than wearing an ambassador's wig.

Cohorts of horsemen fanned across the land, filing along irrigation dikes, filtering through groves and across millet fields. Hills like broken molars fenced the north, marking the arid frontier of Gedea. The River Sempis lay to the immediate south, black and green and placid, broad enough to shroud the South Bank in blue-grey haze. Five plumes of smoke rose from disparate points on the horizon before them.

One of those plumes, Malowebi knew, led the dusty army to Iothiah.

"It is a dangerous thing," Fanayal ab Kascamandri said from his side, a sharp grin drawing wide his elaborate goatee, "to parlay with the enemies of dangerous men. And in the whole wide world, my friend, no man is so dangerous as Kurcifra."

Despite the Padirajah's smile, something shrewd and quite humourless glinted in his eyes.

Second Negotiant Malowebi, Emissary of High Holy Zeum, matched the man's gaze, careful to conceal his frown. "Kurcifra…" he repeated. "Ah… you mean the Aspect-Emperor."

The Mbimayu sorcerer was old enough to remember the days when Kian ruled the Eastern Three Seas. Of all the outland peculiarities to leak into Zeum, few proved more vexing than the Fanim missionaries who trickled across the frontier, bearing their absurd message of fear and damnation. The God was Solitary. The Gods were in fact devils. And all their ancestors had been damned for worshipping them- all of them! You would think that claims so preposterous and repulsive would require no rebuttal, but the very opposite had been the case. Even the Zeumi, it turned out, were quick to embrace tales of their own iniquity, so universal is self-loathing among Men. Not a month passed, it sometimes seemed, without some public flaying.

Even still, when Fanayal's Padirajah father had sent an embassy to attend the coronation of Malowebi's cousin, Nganka'kull, the Kianene Grandees had caused a sensation among the kjineta. High Holy Zeum had always been an inward nation, too distant and too vain to concern itself with events or peoples beyond its sacred frontier. But the Kianene's pale skin, the stark luxury of their dress, their pious reserve-everything about them had hummed with exotic allure. Over night, it seemed, the Zeumi fondness for elaborate image and ornamentation had become dowdy and obsolete. Many caste-nobles even began cultivating goatees-until, that is, his cousin reinstated the ancient Grooming Laws.

Malowebi could scarce imagine these Kianene inspiring an upheaval in fashion. Where the Grandees of Kascamandri's embassy possessed the dress and bearing of heroes, Fanayal's men were little more than desert bandits. He had expected to ride with the likes of Skauras or Cinganjehoi, men terrible in war and gracious in peace, not a ragtag army of horse-thieves and rapists.

Fanayal alone reminded him of those ambassadors from long ago. He wore a helm of shining gold, five spikes rising from the peak, and perhaps the finest coat of mail Malowebi had ever seen-a mesh of inhuman manufacture, he eventually decided. His yellow-silk sleeves hung like pennants from his wrists. His curved sword was obviously a famed heirloom. The instant he had noticed it, Malowebi had known he would say, "That glorious blade-was that your father's?" He even knew the solemn way he would pitch his voice. It was an old diplomat's trick, making a conversational inventory of the items his counterparts wore.

Relationships went much smoother, Malowebi had learned, in the absence of verbal holes.

"Kurcifra…" the Padirajah repeated with a curious smile, as if considering the way the name might sound to an outsider. "The light that blinds."

Fanayal ab Kascamandri was nothing if not impressive. Handsome, in the hard way of desert breeding. His falcon eyes set close about a hooked nose. Arrogant to the point of being impervious to insult and slight-and being quite agreeable as a result.

The Bandit Padirajah he might be, but he was no bandit, at least.

"You said no man is so dangerous," Malowebi pressed, genuinely curious. "Is this what you think? That the Anasurimbor is a man?"

Fanayal laughed. "The Empress is a woman — I know that much. I once spared a Shrial Priest for claiming he had bedded her when she was a whore. The Aspect-Emperor? I know only that he can be killed."

"And how do you know this?"

"Because I am the one doomed to kill him."

Malowebi shook his head in wonder. How the World revolved about the Aspect-Emperor. How many times had he poured himself some unwatered wine just to drink and marvel at the simple fact of the man? A refugee wanders into the Nansurium from the wilderness-with a Scylvendi savage, no less! — and within twenty years, he not only commands the obedience of the entire Three Seas but its worship as well.

It was mad. Too mad for mere history, which was, as far as Malowebi could tell, every bit as mean and as stupid as the men who made it. There was nothing mean or stupid about Anasurimbor Kellhus.

"This is how Men reason in the Three Seas?" he asked. He repented the words even as he spoke them. Malowebi was Second Negotiant for no small reason. He was forever asking blunt questions, forever alienating instead of flattering. He had more teeth than tongue, as the menials would say.

But the Bandit Padirajah showed no outward sign of offence. "Only those who have seen their doom, Malowebi! Only those who have seen their doom!"

Fanayal, the Mbimayu sorcerer noted with no small relief, was a man who relished insolent questions.

"I notice you ride without bodyguards," he ventured.

"Why should that concern you?"

Though horsemen clotted the fields and berms about them, he and the Padirajah rode quite alone-aside from a cowled figure who trailed them by two lengths. Malowebi had assumed the man was a bodyguard of some description, but twice now he had glimpsed-or thought he had glimpsed-something resembling a black tongue within the cowl's dun shadows. Even still, it was remarkable, really, that someone like Fanayal would treat with anyone face to face, let alone an outland sorcerer. Just the previous week the Empress had offered another ten thousand gold kellics for the Bandit Padirajah's head.

Perhaps it spoke to the man's desperation…

"Because," the Mbimayu sorcerer said with a shrug, "your insurrection would not survive your loss… We would be fools to provoke the Aspect-Emperor on the promise of a martyr."

Fanayal managed to rescue his grin before it entirely faltered. He understood the power of belief, Malowebi realized, and the corresponding need to project confidence, both fatuous and unrelenting.

"You need not worry."

"Why?"

"Because I cannot die."

Malowebi was beginning to like the man but in a way that cemented, rather than softened, his skepticism of him. The Second Negotiant always had a weakness for vainglorious fools, even as a child. But unlike the First Negotiant, Likaro, he never let his sympathies make his decisions for him.

Commitments required trust, and trust required demonstrations. The Satakhan had sent him to assess Fanayal ab Kascamandri, not to parlay with him. For all his failings, Nganka'kull was no fool. With the Great Ordeal crawling into the northern wastes, the question was whether the New Empire could survive the absence of its Aspect-Emperor and his most fanatical followers. As the first real threat to the Zeumi people and nation since Near Antiquity, it needed to fail-and decisively.

But wishing ill and doing actual harm were far different beasts. Care had to be taken-extreme care. High Holy Zeum could ill afford any long throws of the number-sticks, not after Nganka'kull had so foolishly yielded his own son as a hostage. Malowebi had always been fond of Zsoronga, had always seen in him the makings of a truly great Satakhan. He needed some real assurance that this desert outlaw and his army of thieves could succeed before recommending the monies and arms they so desperately needed. To take isolated fortresses was one thing. But to assail a garrisoned city — that was quite another.

Iothiah, the ancient capital of Old Dynasty Shigek. Iothiah would be an impressive demonstration. Most assuredly.

"Kurcifra was sent as punishment," Fanayal continued, "an unholy angel of retribution. We had grown fat. We had lost faith with the strict ways of our fathers. So the Solitary God burned the lard from our limbs, drove us back into the wastes where we were born…" He fixed the sorcerer with a gaze that was alarming for its intensity. "I am anointed, Outlander. I am the One."

"But Fate has many whims. How can you be sure?"

Fanayal's laughter revealed the perfect crescent of his teeth. "If I'm wrong, I always have Meppa." He turned to the enigmatic rider trailing them. "Eh, Meppa? Raise your mask."

Malowebi twisted in his saddle to better regard the man. Meppa raised bare hands, pulled back the deep cowl that had obscured his face. The mask Fanayal referred to was not so much a mask as a kind of blindfold: a band of silver as wide as a child's palm lay about his upper face, as if a too-large crown had slipped over his eyes. The sun flashed across its circuit, gleamed across the innumerable lines etched into it: water rushing sideways, around and around in an infinite cataract.

His cowl thrown back, Meppa raised the band from his head. His hair was as white as the peaks of the Atkondras, his skin nut brown. No eyes glinted from the shadow of his sockets…

Malowebi fairly gasped aloud. Suddenly, it seemed absurd that he had missed the hue of ochre in the man's dust-rimmed robes or that he had mistaken the serpent rising from the folds about the man's collar for a black tongue.

Cishaurim.

"Look about you, my friend," Fanayal continued, as if this revelation should settle the Second Negotiant's every misgiving. He gestured to the pillars of smoke bent across the sky before them. "This land simmers with rebellion. All I need do is ride fast. So long as I ride fast, I outnumber the idolaters everywhere!"

But the sorcerer could only think, Cishaurim!

Like every other School, the Mbimayu had assumed the Water-Bearers were extinct-and like every other School, they had been happy for it. The Tribe of Indara-Kishauri was too dangerous to be allowed to live.

Small wonder the Bandit Padirajah had such a talent for survival.

"Then what need do you have of Zeum?" Malowebi asked quickly. He had hoped Fanayal would overlook his obvious fluster, but the sly glint in the man's eye confirmed what the Second Negotiant had already known: very little escaped the claws of Fanayal's acumen. Perhaps he was the first foe worthy of the Aspect-Emperor.

Perhaps…

"Because I am but one," the Padirajah said. "If a second strikes, then a third will join us, and a fourth…" He flung out his arms in an expansive gesture, setting alight the innumerable links of his nimil mail. "The New Empire- all of it, Malowebi! — will collapse into the blood and lies from which it was raised."

The Zeumi Emissary nodded as though acknowledging the logic, if not the attraction, of his argument. But all he really could think was, Cishaurim.

So… the accursed Water still flowed.

Discord is the way of imperial power. Triamis the Great once described empire as the perpetual absence of peace. "If your nation wars," he wrote, "not at the periodic whim of aggressors both internal and external, but always, then your people continually imposes its interests upon other peoples, and your nation is no longer a nation, but an empire." War and empire, for the legendary Near Antique ruler, were simply the same thing glimpsed from different summits, the only measure of power and the only surety of glory.

In the Hoshrut, the Carythusali agora famed for the continuous view it afforded of the Scarlet Spires, the Judges publicly lashed a slave they had apprehended for blasphemy. She was lucky, they reasoned, since they could have charged her with sedition, a capital crime, in which case the dogs would already be lapping her blood from the flagstones. For some reason the unruly temper of the crowds that surrounded them escaped their notice. Perhaps because they were true believers. Or perhaps because the Hoshrut Pole, like the thousands of others scattered across the Three Seas, was so often used for matters of expedited justice. Either way, they were entirely unprepared for the mob's rush. Within a matter of moments they had been beaten, stripped, and hung from the hanging stone gutters of the Imperial Custom House. Within a watch, a greater part of the city rioted, slaves and caste-menials mostly, and the Imperial Garrison found itself engaged in pitched battles in the streets. Thousands died over the days following. Nearly an eighth of the city burned to the ground.

In Oswenta, Hampei Sompas, a high-ranking Imperial Apparati, was found in bed with his throat cut. He was but the first of many-very many-assassinations. As the days passed more and more Shrial and Imperial functionaries, from the lowest tax-farmers to highest judges and assessors, were murdered, either by their body-slaves or by the bands of armed menials that had taken to revenge killings in the streets.

There were more riots. Seleukara burned for seven days. Aoknyssus was only wracked for two, but tens of thousands were killed, so savage were the Imperial reprisals. The wife and children of King Nersei Proyas were removed to Attrempus for safety's sake.

Long-running insurrections flared into renewed violence, for there was no shortage of old and sequestered foes eager to take advantage of the general discord. In the southwest, the Fanim under Fanayal ab Kascamandri stormed and seized the fortress of Gara'gul in the province of Mongilea, and in numbers so alarming that the Empress ordered four Columns rushed to defend Nenciphon, the former capital of the Kianene Empire. In the east, the wilder Famiri tribes from the steppes below the Araxes Mountains overthrew their Imperial administrators and massacred the Zaudunyani converts among them: sons of the families that had ruled them from time immemorial. And the Scylvendi raided the Nansur frontier with a daring and viciousness not seen for a generation.

Middle-aged veterans were called up. Militias were levied. A dozen small battles were fought across lands famous and obscure. Curfews were extended. The Yatwerian temples were closed, and those priestesses who did not flee were imprisoned and interrogated. Plots and conspiracies were uncovered. In more orderly provinces, the executions were celebrated in garish spectacles. Otherwise, they were carried out in secret, and bodies were buried in ditches. The Slave Laws, which had afforded protections the enslaved had not known since the days of Cenei, were repealed. In a series of emergency sessions, the Greater Congregate passed several laws curtailing congress according to caste. Speaking at public fountains became punishable by immediate execution.

The caste-nobility of all nations suddenly found unity in their general terror of their servants and slaves. Suits were dropped, freeing the courts for more pressing prosecutions. Old and honourable enmities were set aside. The Shriah of the Thousand Temples summoned high-ranking Cultic priests from across the Three Seas for what would be called the Third Pan-Sumni Council, urging them to set aside their parochial worship, to recall the God behind the Gods. Shrial Priests everywhere inveighed on behalf of their Prophet and Sovereign. Those Zaudunyani who had not joined the Great Ordeal raised their voices to harangue their peers and their lessers. Groups of them took to murdering in the dark of night those they deemed unfaithful.

Sons and husbands simply vanished.

And though the New Empire tottered, it did not fall.

Momemn

Anasurimbor Kelmomas sat where he always sat when attending the Imperial Synod, in the Prince's Box on a bench cushioned with plush red leather: the same place where his older siblings had sat when they were young-even Thelli before she had joined Mother beneath the Circumfix Throne.

"Recall who it is you address, Pansulla," Mother called down in a tight voice.

Though positioned relatively low on the palace heights, the chamber, the Synodine, was one of the more luxurious ones in the palace, and certainly among the most curious. Unlike other council chambers, it possessed no gallery for visiting observers and absolutely no windows. Where airy grandeur was the rule elsewhere, the chamber was long and narrow, with elaborately panelled boxes-the Prince's Box one of them-lining the short walls and with steep benches stepping the entire length of the long walls, as if an amphitheatre had been straightened and then snapped in half, forcing the audience to confront itself.

To accommodate the Circumfix Throne, a deep marble recess shelved the stepped slope to Kelmomas's left, blue-white stone trimmed with bands of black diorite. A scale replica of the Circumfix as it had hung in Caraskand, including his father hanging spread-eagled and upside down, rose in sinuous gold from the throne's back. His mother's chair and Thelli's had been cut into the marble tier immediately below it, their simple design concentrating the glory of the throne above. Some thirty identical seats had been set into the steps rising opposite, one for each of the Great Factions, whose interests governed the New Empire.

The floor lay well below all the seats, forcing those who walked it to continually crane their heads up and around to meet the gaze of their interlocutors. It was a narrow strip of bare floor, no bigger than several prison cells set end to end. Kelmomas had heard several functionaries refer to it-and with no little dread-as the Slot.

Because the man who now paced its length was so fat, Cutias Pansulla, the Nansur Consul, it looked even more narrow than usual. He had been strutting back and forth for several moments now, long enough for dark stains to bloom from his armpits.

"But I must… I must dare speak it!" he cried, his shaved jowls trembling. "The people are saying that the Hundred are against us!"

The Imperial Synod, his mother had told Kelmomas, was a kind of boiled-down version of the Greater Congregate, what other kings in other lands often called a privy council, the place where representatives of the New Empire's most important interests could confer with their divine ruler. Of course, he always pretended to forget this explanation when he spoke to his mother and to always whine as he accompanied her to the sessions, but he secretly adored the Synod and the games within games it invariably revealed-at least when his father failed to attend them. Elsewhere, the words always seemed to be the same, glory this and glory that, and the lofty tone seemed to drone on and on and on. It was like watching men dual with bars of iron. But in the Synodine, both the words and the voices were honed to a cutting edge.

Real disputes instead of pantomime. Real consequences instead of heavenly petitions. Lives, sometimes in the thousands, were decided in this place as in no other. The young Prince-Imperial could almost smell the smoke and blood. This was where real cities were burned, not ones carved of balsa.

"Ask yourself," Mother cried to the assembled men. "Who will you be when the scripture of these days is written? The craven? The weak-kneed doubter? All of you- All of you! As the trial deepens, and the trial always deepens, all of you will be judged. So stop thinking of me as his weaker vessel!"

Kelmomas jammed his mouth into his forearms to conceal his smile. Though his mother angered often, she only rarely expressed it as anger. The boy wondered whether the fat Consul below understood the peril of his situation.

He certainly hoped not.

"Holy Empress, please!" Pansulla exclaimed. "This… this talk… it does not answer our fears! At the very least you must give us something to tell the people!"

The Prince-Imperial sensed the power in these words, even though he did not fully understand their import. He certainly could see the indecision in Mother's eyes, the realization she had erred…

That one, the secret voice whispered.

Pansulla?

Yes. His breathing offends me.

Ever keen to exploit weakness, the round-bellied Consul pressed his advantage. "All we ask, Most Holy Empress, is for the tools to work your will…"

Mother glared at him for a moment, then glanced nervously across the assembly. She seemed to flinch from the gravity of their regard. At last she waved a loose-wristed hand in weariness and capitulation. "Read The Sagas…" she began but without breath. She paused to firm her voice. "Read The Sagas, the history of the First Apocalypse, and ask yourself, Where are the Gods? How can the Hundred allow this?"

And the little boy could see the craft behind his mother's manner and words. Silence had seized the Imperial Synod, such was the force of her question.

"Thelli…" his mother said, gesturing to her daughter who sat gowned in absurd intricacy at her side. Dreadfully thin, she looked like a bird stranded between too many crumbs and the inability to choose. "Tell them what the Mandate Schoolmen say."

"The Gods are-are finite," Theliopa declared in a voice that contradicted the stark angularity of her frame. "They can only apprehend a finite por-portion of existence. They fathom the future-future, certainly, but from a vantage that limits them. The No-God dwells in their blind spots, follows a path-path they are utterly oblivious to…" She turned, looking from man to man with open curiosity. "Because he is oblivion."

Mother rested her hand atop Thelli's in a thoughtless gesture of thanks. Behind the panels of his box, the young Prince-Imperial fairly cut open his palms for balling his fists.

She loves me more! he thought.

Yes, the voice agreed, she loves you more.

The Empress spoke with renewed confidence. "There is a world, my Lords, a world concealed, a world of shadow that the Gods cannot see…" She looked from Consul to Consul. "I fear we now walk that world."

A wall of bewildered looks greeted her. Even Pansulla seemed taken aback. Kelmomas almost chirped in glee, so proud was he of his mother.

"And the Hundred?" old Tutmor, the Consul for King Hoga Hogrim of Ce Tydonn croaked, his eyes rimmed with real fear. Alarmed voices clamoured in his wake.

Their Empress graced them all with a sour smile. "The Gods chafe, because like all souls, they call evil what they cannot comprehend."

More astounded silence. Kelmomas found himself squinting in hilarity. Why anyone should fear the Gods was quite beyond him, let alone fools as privileged and powerful as these.

Because they are old and dying, the secret voice whispered.

Pansulla still held the Slot. He now stood directly beneath his Empress.

"So…" he said, looking to the others with a strategically blank face. "So it is true, then? The Gods…"-his gaze wandered-"the almighty Gods… are against us?"

Disaster. It fairly slapped the blood from Mother's painted face. Her lips retreated, the way they always did during such moments, into a thin line.

He offends me… the secret voice cooed. The fat one.

"Now…" she began, only to halt to master the emotion in her voice. " Now… Pansulla, is the time for care. Heretical superstition will be the end of us all. Now is the time to recall the God of Gods and his Prophet."

The threat was clear-enough to trigger another exchange of whispers among the tiered men. Smiling with greasy insincerity, Pansulla knelt to the floor, so big and so floridly gowned that he looked more a heap of laundry than a man.

"But of course, Holy Empress."

For the slightest instant, his mother's hatred lay plain on her face.

"Courage, Pansulla," she said. "And you too, loyal Tutmor. You must find courage, not in the Hundred, but, as Inri Sejenus and my divine husband have taught, in their sum."

The Nansur Consul struggled back to his feet.

"Indeed, Empress," he said, smoothing his silk robes. " Courage… Of course…" His eyes strayed to the others. "We must remind ourselves that we know better… than the Gods."

Kelmomas grappled with the squeal of joy clawing at his throat. He so loved his mother's fury!

We've never killed someone so fat before.

"Not 'we,' Cutias Pansulla. Not you, and certainly not me. Your Holy Aspect-Emperor. Anasurimbor Kellhus."

The young Prince-Imperial understood what his mother was trying to achieve with these appeals to his father. Always using him as a goad. Always trying to vanish into the might of his name. But he could also see, with a kind of child-cunning, how this undermined her authority.

Once again the obese Consul nodded in jowl-quivering exaggeration. "Ah, yes-yes… When the Cults fail us, we must turn to the Thousand Temples." He glanced up as if to say, How could I be such a fool? He made of a show of turning to Maithanet's vacant seat, then looked to his Empress with mock confusion. "But when can we hope to hear our Holy Shriah's most wise couns-?"

"Tidings!" a voice pealed. "Tidings, Empress! Most dire tidings!"

All eyes in the Synodine turned to the figure gasping on the chamber's threshold: an Eothic Guardsman, red-faced for exertion.

"Most Holy Empress…" The guardsmen swallowed against his wind. "The Kianene-the loathsome bandit, Fanayal!"

"What of him?" Mother demanded.

"He has struck Shigek."

Kelmomas watched his mother blink in confusion.

"But… he's marching on Nenciphon…" A frantic note climbed into her voice. "Don't you mean Nenciphon?"

The messenger shook his head in sudden terror.

"No, most Holy Empress. Iothiah. Fanayal has taken Iothiah."

The Andiamine Heights was a city in its own right, albeit one enclosed beneath a welter of rooftops, with gilded concourses instead of processional avenues and mazed dormitories instead of alley-riddled slums. Any number of routes could be taken between any two points, allowing the inhabitants to travel in celebrity or discretion. Unlike his father, Kelmomas's mother almost always chose the most discreet route possible, even if it made the journey twice as lengthy. Though some might think this was yet one more sign of her general insecurity, the young boy knew otherwise. Anasurimbor Esmenet simply despised the sight of people falling to their faces.

The Imperial Synod dissolved, the Empress led her small retinue down into the Apparatory before turning to climb the rarely used stairs and halls that threaded the palace's eastward reaches. She clutched Kelmomas's hand with the too-tight desperation he so adored, tugging him when his pace faltered. Theliopa followed close behind with Lord Biaxi Sankas breathing hard at her side.

"Will Uncle Maithanet get mad at you again?" Kelmomas asked.

"Why would you say that?"

"Because he blames you for everything that goes wrong! I hate him!"

She ignored him after that, visibly angered.

Glutton, the secret voice reproached. You need to take care.

"Most Holy Empress," Lord Sankas said into the ensuing silence. "I fear the situation with your brother-in-law grows untenable…" Kelmomas glanced back at the man. He almost looked like Thelli's grandfather, he was so tall and slender. Decked in full martial regalia-a ceremonial Kidruhil cuirass and the purple cloak of a retired general-and cleanshaven in the traditional way, he resembled the old Nansur that Kelmomas so often saw engraved or painted in the original parts of the palace.

"Fanayal is in Shigek," she replied testily. "If you haven't noticed, Sankas, I have more pressing concerns."

But the Patridomos was not so easily silenced. "Perhaps if you were to speak with hi-"

"No!" the Empress exclaimed, wheeling around to glare up at the man. The wall to their left had yielded to an open colonnade that overlooked the Imperial Precincts and the east more generally. The Meneanor heaved dark beneath the sun on the horizon beyond.

"He must never see my face," she said more evenly. The shadow of an arch divided her from waist to shoulder so that her lower gown shimmered with light. Kelmomas pressed his face into the warm, scented fabric. She combed his scalp out of maternal reflex. "Do you understand, Sankas? Never. "

"Forgive me, Most Holy!" the caste-noble fairly cried. "It-it was not my intent to cause offence…"

He trailed awkwardly, looking as though he had tripped across some disastrous suspicion. "Most Holy Empress…" he said tightly. "May I ask why the Shriah must not see your face?"

Kelmomas almost chortled aloud, saved himself by looking away in the appearance of little-boy boredom. Over a jumble of roof and structure, he glimpsed a formation of distant guardsmen doing drills on one of the seaward campuses. More soldiers were arriving every day, so many it was becoming impossible for him to adventure in the old way.

"Thelli," his mother said from above. "Please, would you assure Lord Sankas that I am not a skin-spy."

The Patridomos blanched. "No… No!" he blurted. "That is certainly no-"

"Mother is not-not a skin-spy," Theliopa interrupted.

His mother's hands and presence slipped away from the boy. Ever conscious of her menial stature, the Empress used the view as an excuse to step clear of the looming Patridomos. She gazed out over the Meneanor. "Our dynasty, Sankas, is a… a complicated one. I say what I say for good reason. I need to know that you have faith enough to trust that."

"Yes-certainly! But…"

"But what, Sankas?"

" Maithanet is the Holy Shriah…"

Kelmomas watched his mother smile her calm, winning smile, the one that told everyone present that she could feel what they felt. Her ability to communicate compassion, he had long since realized, was easily her strongest attribute-as well as the one most likely to send him into jealous rages.

"Indeed, Sankas… He is our Shriah. But the fact remains: my divine husband, his brother, decided to trust me with the fate of the Empire. Why might that be, you wonder?"

The man's pained squint relaxed in sudden comprehension. "Of course, Most Holy! Of course!"

Men cast their lots, the Prince-Imperial realized. They gambled time, riches, even loved ones, on those great personages they thought would carry the day. Once the gambit was made, you need only give them reasons to congratulate themselves.

His mother dismissed both Sankas and Theliopa shortly afterward. Kelmomas's heart cartwheeled for joy. Again and again and again, he was the one she brought with her to her apartments.

He was the one! Again and again. The only one!

As always, they passed the ponderous bronze door to Inrilatas's room with their ears pricked. Kelmomas's older brother had ceased screaming of late-like the seasons he had his tempests and his idylls-leaving the young Prince-Imperial with the troubling sense that he was there, his cheek pressed against the far side of his door, listening to their comings and goings. The fact that he never heard Inrilatas doing this troubled him even more, for he was quite fond of hearing things. Theliopa once told him that of all his brothers and sisters, Inrilatas possessed his father's gifts in the greatest measure, so much so they continually overwhelmed his mortal frame. Though Kelmomas did not begrudge Inrilatas his insanity-he celebrated it, if anything-he did resent his greedy share of Father's blood.

And so he hated Inrilatas as well.

Mother's body-slaves rushed from their antechambers to line the hall to either side, kneeling with their faces to the floor. The Empress brushed past them in distaste, pushed open the bronze doors to her apartments herself. Kelmomas never understood why she disdained using people-Father certainly never hesitated-but he adored the way it gave them more time alone. Again and again, he got to hug her and to kiss her and to cuddle-cuddle…

Ever since he had murdered Samarmas.

Sunlight rafted through the airy interior, setting the white-gossamer sheers aglow. A sycamore stood dark and full in the light beyond the balconies, close enough to glimpse the limbs forking through the shadows behind the bushing leaves. Sandalwood scented the air.

Capering across lavish carpets, the Prince-Imperial breathed deep and smiled. He swept his gaze across the frescoes of Invishi, Carythusal, and Nenciphon. Around a corner's fluted edge, he glimpsed the tall silvered mirror in her dressing-room. He saw the chest with the toys he pretended to play with when she was preoccupied. Through the propped doors to her sleeping chamber, he saw her great bed gleaming in the murk.

This, he thought as he always thought. This was where he would live forever!

He assumed she would seize him in a hug and spin in a pirouette. A mother finding strength in the need to be strong for a beautiful son. A mother finding respite in the love of a beautiful son. She always held him when she was frightened, and she literally reeked with fear. But instead she wheeled him about by the arm and slapped him hard across the cheek.

"You are never to say such things!"

A tide of murderous hurt and outrage swamped him. Mummy! Mummy had struck him! And for what? The truth? Scenes flickered beneath his soul's eye, strangling her with her own sheets, seizing the Gold Mastodon set upon the mantle and "But I do!" he bawled. "I do hate him!"

Maithanet. Uncle Holy.

She was already holding him in a desperate embrace, shushing and kissing, pressing her tear-slicked cheek against his own.

Mommeee!

"You shouldn't," she said, a thumb's breadth from his ear. "He's your uncle. Even more, he's the Shriah. It's a sin to speak against the Shriah-don't you know that?"

He fought her until she pressed him back.

"But he's against you! Against Father! Isn't that a si-?"

"Enough. Enough. The important thing, Kel, is that you never say these things. You are a Prince-Imperial. An Anasurimbor. Your blood is the very blood that flows in your uncle's veins…"

Dunyain blood… the secret voice whispered. What raises us above the animals.

Like Mother.

"Do you understand what I'm telling you?" the Blessed Empress continued. "Do you realize what others think when they hear you disputing your own blood?"

"No."

"They hear dissension… discord and weakness! You embolden our enemies with this talk-do you understand me, Kel?"

"Yes."

"We have come upon fearful times, Kel. Dangerous times. You must always use your wits. You must always be wary…"

"Because of Fanayal, Mommy?"

She held him tight to her breast, then pressed him back. "Because of many things…" Her gaze became suddenly absent. "Look," she continued. "There's something I need to show you." She stood and with a rustle of silk moved across the bed chamber, paused before the frieze on the far wall, belts of mythic narrative piled one atop the other.

"Your father raised two palaces when he rebuilt the Andiamine Heights," she said, gesturing to the sun slanting through the unshuttered balcony. "A palace of light…" She turned, leaning forward on her toes to peer at the top panel of the marble frieze. She pressed the bottommost star of a constellation Kelmomas had never seen before. Something clicked elsewhere in the room. The Prince-Imperial literally swayed with vertigo, so surprised were his senses. The marble-gilded wall simply dropped away and swooped out, rotating on a perfect central hinge.

Light only filtered several feet into the black passage beyond.

"And a palace of shadow."

| "Your uncle," Mother said. "I don't trust him."

They sat where they always sat when the Empress took her "morning sun," as she termed it: on divans set near the heart of the Sacral Enclosure between two of the taller sycamore trees. A thin procession of clouds rode high in the blue sky above. The Imperial Apartments surrounded them on all sides, colonnaded walkways along the ground, verandas on the upper floors, some with their canopies unfurled, all forming the broad, marmoreal octagon that gave the Enclosure its famous shape.

Theliopa sat immediately next to Mother, a distance that suggested mother-daughter intimacy but was really an artefact of the girl's blindness to the rules that governed proximity. Her face, as always, was pale and sunken-skin stretched across the tent-poles of her bones. She wore what looked like several luxurious gowns sown into a florid motley, as well as dozens of jewelled broaches set end to end along the sleeve of either arm. Tree shadows waved across her, so that she seemed continually ablaze with reflected sunlight.

Wearing only a morning robe, Mother looked plain and dark in comparison-and all the more beautiful for it. Kelmomas played in the adjacent garden. With blackened fingers, he had started forming walls and bastions, a small complex of dirt structures he could strike down, but had quickly stopped when he discovered a stream of ants crawling from the earth to the blue-tiled walkway, hundreds of them. He began executing them, one by one, using his thumbnail to chip off their heads.

"Wha-what do you suspect?" his sister asked, her voice as dry as the air.

A long breath. A hand drawn to the back of her weary neck. "That he is somehow behind this crisis with the Yatwerians," his mother replied. "That he intends to use it as a pretext to seize the Empire."

Of all the games he played, this was the one the young Prince-Imperial relished the most: the game of securing his mother's constant attention while at the same time slipping beneath her notice. On the one hand, he was such a sad little boy, desolate, scarred for the tragic loss of his twin. But he was also just a little boy, too young to understand, too lost in his play to really listen. There was a time, not so long ago, when she would have sent him away for conversations such as this…

The real ones.

"I see," Theliopa said.

"Are you not surprised?"

"I'm not sure surprise-surprise is a passion I can feel, Mother."

Even watching from his periphery, Kelmomas could see his mother's expression dull. It troubled her, the little boy knew, filling in what was missing in her children. Perhaps this was why he didn't despise Theliopa the way he had that bitch, Mimara. Mother's feelings for Thelli would always be stymied by the girl's inability to reciprocate her love. But Mimara…

Some day soon… the secret voice whispered. She will love you as much… More!

"Have you conferred with Father-Father?" Theliopa asked.

His sister was a face reader. She had to see Mother's bewildered heartbreak as easily as he could. Did Thelli lack the heart to grieve this as well? Kelmomas had never been able to read much of anything in his sister. She was like Uncle Maithanet that way-only harmless.

If Mother were to ever look at him with those eyes…

"The Far-callers…" Mother said with the reluctant air of admission. "They've heard nothing for two weeks now."

The merest flicker of horror slackened Theliopa's pale face. Perhaps she could feel surprise after all-as crippled as her heart was. "What?"

"Do not fear," Mother said. "Your father lives. The Great Ordeal continues its march. I am certain of that much at least."

"Then-then what has happened?"

"Your father has declared an Interdiction. He has forbidden every Schoolmen in the Great Ordeal, on pain of execution, from contacting any soul in the Three Seas."

Kelmomas recalled his lessons on Cants of Far-Calling well enough. The primary condition of contacting someone in their dreams was to know, precisely, where they were sleeping. This meant the Great Ordeal had to contact them, since it travelled day by day.

"He suspects spies among the Schools?" Theliopa asked. "Is this some kind of ruse to draw them out?"

"Perhaps."

His sister was generally averse to eye contact, but those rare times she deigned to match someone's gaze, she did so with a peculiar intensity-like a bird spying worms. "You mean Father hasn't told you anything?"

"No."

"He abides by his own embargo? Mother… has Father deserted us?"

The young Prince-Imperial abandoned the pretense of his garden play. He even held his breath, so profound was his hope. For as long he could remember, Kelmomas had feared and hated his divine father. The Warrior-Prophet. The Aspect-Emperor. The one true Dunyain. All the native abilities possessed by his children, only concentrated and refined through a lifetime of training. Were it not for the demands of his station, were he more than just a constantly arriving and departing shadow, Father would have certainly seen the secret Kelmomas had held tight since his infancy. The secret that made him strong.

As things stood, it was only a matter of time. He would grow as his brothers and sisters had grown, and he would drift, as his brothers and sisters had drifted, from Mother's loving tutelage to Father's harsh discipline. And one day Father would peer deep into his eye and see what no one else had seen. And that day, Kelmomas knew, would be his doom…

But what if Father had abandoned them? Even better, what if he were dead?

He has the Strength, the voice whispered. So long as he lives, we are not safe…

Mother raised a finger to scoop tears from either eye. This, the young Prince-Imperial realized. This was why she had struck him the previous day! This was why the fat fool, Pansulla, had so easily goaded her, and why the tidings from Shigek had so dismayed her…

If Father is gone… the secret voice dared whisper.

"It would appear so," she said, speaking about a crack in her voice. "I fear it has something to do with your uncle."

Then we are finally safe.

"Maithanet," Thelli said.

The Empress mastered her feelings with a deep breath. "Maybe this is a… a test of some kind. Like the fable of Gam…"

Kelmomas recalled this from his lessons as well. Gam was the mythical king who faked his own death to test the honour of his four sons. The boy wanted to shout this out, to bask a moment in Mother's pride, but he bit his tongue. For the briefest of instants, he thought he saw his sister glance at him.

"It need not have anything to do with Uncle," Theliopa said. "Maybe the Consult has discovered some way of eavesdropping on our communications…"

"No. It has something to do with Maithanet. I can feel it."

"I can rarely fathom Father," Theliopa admitted.

"You?" the Empress cried with pained hilarity. "Think about your poor mother!"

Kelmomas laughed precisely the way she wanted.

"Ponder it, Thelli. Your father assuredly knows about the strife growing between us, his wife and his brother, so then why would he choose this moment to strand us each with the other?"

"That much is simple-simple, at least," Thelli replied. "Because he believes the best solution will be the one you find on your-your own."

"Exactly," Mother said. "Somehow he thinks my ignorance will serve me in this…" Her voice trailed into pensive thought. For several moments she let her gaze wander across points near and far within the Sacral Enclosure, then shook her head in sudden outrage and disgust.

"Damn your father and his machinations!" she cried, her voice loud enough to draw looks from the nearby Pillarian Guardsmen. She glanced skyward, her eyes rolling with something like panic. "Damn him!"

"Mother?" Theliopa asked.

The Empress lowered her head and sighed. "I am quite all right, Thelli." She spared her daughter a rueful look. "I don't give a damn what you think you see in my face…" She trailed, her mouth hanging on these words. Kelmomas held his breath, so attuned had he become to the wheel of his mother's passion.

"Thelli…" She began, only to hesitate for several heartbeats. "Could… Could you read his face?"

"Uncle's? Only Father has that-that ability. Father and…"

"And who?"

Theliopa paused as if weighing the wisdom of honest answers. " Inrilatas. He could see… Remember Father trained-trained him for a time…"

"Father trained who?" Kelmomas cried, the way a jealous little brother might.

"Kel-please."

"Who?"

Esmenet raised two fingers to Theliopa, turned to Kelmomas, her manner cross and adoring. "Your older brother," she explained. "Your father hoped teaching him to read passions in others would enable him to master his own." She turned back to her daughter. "Treachery?" she asked. "Could Inrilatas see treachery in a soul so subtle as Maithanet's?"

"Perhaps, Mother," the pale girl replied. "But the real-real question, I think, is not so much can he, as will he."

The Holy Empress of all the Three Seas shrugged, her expression betraying the fears that continually mobbed her heart.

"I need to know. What do we have to lose?"

Since Mother had to attend special sessions with her generals, the young Prince-Imperial dined alone that evening-or as alone as possible for a soul such as his. He was outraged even though he understood her reasons, and as always he tormented the slaves who waited on him, blaming his mother for each and every hurt he inflicted.

Later that night he pulled the board from beneath his bed and resumed working on his model. Since his uncle's treachery had loomed so large that day, he decided to work on the Temple Xothei, the monumental heart of the Cmiral temple complex. He began cutting and paring miniature columns, using the little knives that Mother had given him in lieu of a completed model. "What a man makes," she had told him, "he prizes…" Unerringly, without the benefit of any measure, he carved them, not only one identical to another, but in perfect proportion to those structures he had already completed.

He never showed his work to Mother. It would trouble her, he knew, his ability to see places just once, and from angles buried within them, yet to grasp them the way a bird might from far above.

The way Father grasped the world.

But even worse, if he showed his little city to her, it would complicate the day when he finally burned it. She did not like the way he burned things.

Bugs, he thought. He needed to fill the streets of his little city with bugs. Nothing really burned, he decided, unless it moved.

He thought of the ants in the garden.

He thought of the Pillarian Guardsmen patrolling the Sacral Enclosure. He could even hear their voices on the evening breeze as they whiled away the watches with fatuous talk…

He thought about the fun he could have, sneak-sneaking about them, more shadow than little boy.

He thought about his previous murders and the mysterious person he saw trapped in the eyes of the dying. The one person he loved more than his mother-the one and only. Convulsing, bewildered, terrified, and beseeching… beseeching most of all.

Please! Please don't kill me!

"The Worshipper," he declared aloud.

Yes, the secret voice whispered. That's a good name.

"A most strange person, don't you think, Sammi?"

Most strange.

"The Worshipper…" Kelmomas said, testing the sound. "How can he travel like that from body to body?"

Perhaps he's locked in a room. Perhaps dying is that room's only door…

"Locked in a room!" the young Prince-Imperial cried laughing. "Yes! Clever-clever-cunning-clever!"

And so he slipped into the gloom-gloomy hallways, dodging and ducking and scampering. Only the merest shiver in the shining lantern-flames marked his passing.

Finally he arrived at the Door… the high bronze one with seven Kyranean Lions stamped into its greening panels, their manes bent into falcon wings. The one his mother had forbidden the slaves to polish until the day it could be safely opened.

The door to his brother Inrilatas's room.

It stood partially ajar.

Kelmomas had expected, even hoped to find it such. The slaves who attended to his brother generally did so whenever lulls in his tantrums permitted. During his brother's calm seasons, however, they followed an exact schedule, cleansing and feeding Inrilatas the watch before noon and the watch before midnight.

The boy mooned in the corridor for several moments, alternately staring at the stylized dragons stitched in crimson, black, and gold across the corridor's carpet and stealing what glimpses the narrow slot provided of the cell's bare floor interior. Eventually his curiosity mastered his fear-only Father terrified him more than Inrilatas-and he pressed his face to the opening, peering past the belt of brushed leather that had been tacked to the door's outer rim to better seal in the sound and smell of his mad brother.

He could see an Attendant to his left, a harried-looking Nilnameshi man soaping the walls and floor with a rake-mop. He saw his brother sitting hunched like a shaved ape to the right of the room, his edges illuminated in the light of a single brazier. Each of his limbs were shackled to a chain that ran like an elongated tongue from the mouth of a stone lion head, one of four set into the far wall, two with their manes pressed against the ceiling, two with their chins across the floor. A winch-room lay beyond that wall, Kelmomas knew, with wheels and locks for each of the chains, allowing the Attendants to pull his brother spread-eagled against the polished stone, if need be, or to grant him varying degrees of freedom otherwise.

From the look of the links curled across the floor, they had afforded him two lengths or so of mobility-enough both to relieve and to embolden the boy. Inrilatas usually howled and raged without some modicum of slack.

At first, Kelmomas thought him absolutely motionless, but he was not.

He sat making faces… expressions.

Not any faces, but those belonging to the slave who bent to and fro with his mop a mere toss away, scrubbing away urine and feces with a perfumed astringent. Periodically the deaf-mute would cast a terrified glance in his prisoner's direction, only to see his face reflected back to him.

"Most of them flee," Inrilatas said. Kelmomas knew he addressed him even though he did not so much as glance at the boy. "Sooner or later, they choose the whip over my gaze."

"They are simple fools," Kelmomas replied, too timid to press open the door, let alone cross the threshold.

"They are exactly what they appear to be."

The shaggy mane turned. Inrilatas fixed the young Prince-Imperial with wild and laughing blue eyes. "Unlike you, little brother."

Save for his long face, Inrilatas looked utterly unlike the brother Kelmomas remembered from his infancy. His growth had come, gilding his naked form in a golden haze of hair. And years of warring against his iron restraints had strapped his frame in luxurious muscle. A beard stubbed his chin and the line of his jaw but had yet to climb his cheeks.

His voice was deep and beguiling. Not unlike Father's.

"Come, little brother," Inrilatas said with a comradely grin. He leapt toward the entrance so suddenly that the deaf-mute fumbled the handle of his mop and tripped backward. He landed at a point just shy of where the chains would bring him up short.

Kelmomas watched his brother squat and defecate, then retreat to his previous position. Still smiling, Inrilatas waved his little brother forward. He possessed a man's wrists now: the hands of a thick-fingered warrior.

"Come… I want to discuss the shit between us."

With anyone else, Kelmomas would have thought this a mad joke of some kind. Not so with Inrilatas.

The boy pressed the door inward, strode into the stench, pausing but two steps from the coiled feces. The slave glimpsed Kelmomas in his periphery, wheeled in sudden alarm. But the man was quick to resume his cleaning when he recognized him. Like so many palace slaves, terror kept him welded to the task before him.

"You show no revulsion," Inrilatas said, nodding at the feces.

Kelmomas did not know what to say, so he said nothing.

"You are not like the others, are you, little brother? No… You … are like me."

Remember your face, the secret voice warned. Only Father possesses the Strength in greater measure!

"I am nothing like you," the little Prince-Imperial replied.

It seemed strange, standing on the far side of the Door. And wrong

… So very wrong.

"But you are," Inrilatas chuckled. "All of us have inherited our Father's faculties in some mangled measure. Me… I possess his sensitivities, but I utterly lack his unity… his control. My natures blow through me-hungers, glorious hungers! — unfettered by the little armies of shame that hold the souls of others in absolute captivity. Father's reason mystifies me. Mother's compassion makes me howl with laughter. I am the World's only unbound soul…"

He raised his shackled wrists as he said this, gestured to the polluted floor before him.

"I shit when I shit."

A ringing filled the boy's ears, such was the intensity of his older brother's gaze. He began to speak, but his voice caught as though about a hook in his throat.

Inrilatas grinned. "What about you, little brother? Do you shit when you shit?"

He sees me… the secret voice whispered. You have become reckless in Father's abse "Who?" Inrilatas laughed. "The shadow of hearing moves through you-as it so often does when no one is speaking. Who whispers to you, little brother?"

"Mommy says you're mad."

"Ignore the question," his older brother snapped. "State something insulting, something that will preoccupy, and thus evade a prickly question. Come closer, little brother… Come closer and tell me you do not shit when you shit."

"I don't understand what you mean!"

He knows you lie…

"Of course you know… Come closer… Let me peer into your mouth. Let me listen to this whisper that is not your voice. Who? Who speaks inside of you?"

Kelmomas fell backward a step. Inrilatas had managed to creep forward somehow, to steal slack from his chains without the boy noticing.

"Uncle is coming to see you!"

A heartbeat of appraising silence.

"Again you ignore the question. But this time you state a truth, one that you know will intrigue me. You mean Uncle Holy, don't you? Uncle Holy is coming to visit me? I smell Mother in that."

The boy found strength in her mere mention.

"Y-yes. Mother wants you to read his face. She fears that he plots against Father-against us! She thinks only you can see."

"Come closer."

"But Uncle has learned how to fool you."

Even as he spoke the words, Kelmomas cursed them for their clumsiness. This was an Anasurimbor crouched before him. Divinity! Divinity burned in Inrilatas's blood as surely as in his own.

"Kin," Inrilatas crowed. "Blood of my blood. What love you possess for Mother! I see it burn! Burn! Until all else is char and ash. Is she the grudge you bear against Uncle?"

But Kelmomas could think of nothing else to say or do. To answer any of his brother's questions, he knew, was to wander into labyrinths he could not hope to solve. He had to press forward…

"He has learned to disguise his disgust as pity, Uncle Holy. His treachery as concern!"

There was no other way through the monstrous intellect before him.

This is a mistake…

"The whisper warns you!" Inrilatas laughed, his eyes bright, not for the twin flames they reflected, but something more incendiary still: apprehension. "You do not like sharing… Such a peevish, devious little soul! Come closer, little brother."

He sees me!

"You cannot let him fool you!" the boy cried, trying to goad a pride that did not exist.

"I see him — the one you hide, oh yes! The other one, the whisperer. I seeeeeeeee him," Inrilatas crooned. "What does he tell you? Is he the one who wants Uncle Holy dead?"

"You will want to kill him, Brother, when he comes. I can help you!"

More laughter, warm and avuncular, at once teasing and protective. "And now you offer the beast candy. Come closer, little brother. I want to stare into your mouth."

"You will want to kill Uncle Holy," Kelmomas repeated, his thoughts giddy with sudden inspiration. "Think, brother… The sum of sins."

And with that single phrase, the young Prince-Imperial's dogged persistence was rescued-or so he thought.

Where his brother had fairly radiated predatory omniscience before, his manner suddenly collapsed inward. Even his nakedness, which had been that of the rapist-lewd, virile, bestial-lapsed into its chill and vulnerable contrary. He actually seemed to shrink in his chains.

Suddenly Inrilatas seemed as pathetic as the human shit breathing on the floor between them.

The young man's eyes flinched from the boy's gaze, sought melancholy reprieve in the shadowy corners of his cell's ceiling.

"Do you ever wonder, Kel, why it is I do what I do?"

"No," the boy answered honestly.

Inrilatas glanced at his brother, then down to the floor. Breathing deep, he smiled the sad smile of someone lost in a game pursued too far for too long. Too long to abandon. Too long to continue.

"I do it to heap damnation upon myself," he said as if making an absurd admission.

"But why?" the boy asked, genuinely curious now.

Be wary… the secret voice whispered.

"Because I can think of no greater madness."

And what greater madness could there be, exchanging a handful of glorious heartbeats for an eternity of anguish and torment? But the boy shied from this question.

"I… I don't understand," he said. "You could leave this room… anytime you wished! Mother would release you-I know it. You just need to follow the rules."

His brother paused, looked to him as if searching for evidence of kinship beyond the fact of their blood. "Tell me, little brother, what rules the rule?"

Something is wrong… the voice warned.

"The God," the boy said, shrugging.

"And what rules the God?"

"Nothing. No one."

He breaths as you breathe, the secret voice whispered, blinks as you blink-even his heartbeat captures your own! He draws your unthinking soul into the rhythms of his making. He mesmerizes you!

Inrilatas nodded in solemn affirmation. "So the God is… unconstrained."

"Yes."

Inrilatas stood with sudden grace, walked to the limit of chains. He seemed godlike in the gloom, his hair falling in flaxen sheets about his shoulders, his limbs bound in veined muscle, his phallus laying long and violet in a haze of golden down. He placed his foot upon his feces, and using his toes, smeared it in a foul arc across the floor below him.

"So the God is like me."

And just like that, the boy understood. The senseless sense of his brother's acts. The miraculous stakes of his mad exchange. Suddenly this little room, this shit-stained prison cell hidden from the light of shame, seemed a holy place, a temple to a different revelation, the nail of a darker heaven.

"Yes…" the boy murmured, lost in the wisdom-the heartbreaking wisdom! — of his brother's constant gaze.

And it seemed his brother's voice soaked into the surrounding walls, cupped everything that could be seen. "The God punishes us according to the degree we resemble him."

Inrilatas towered before him.

"And you resemble him, little brother. You resemble…"

What was this trap he had set for him? How could understanding, insight, capture?

"No!" the boy cried. "I am not mad! I am not like you!"

Laughter, warm and gentle. So like Mother when she is lazy and wishes only to tease and cuddle her beautiful little son. "Look," Anasurimbor Inrilatas commanded. "Look at this heap of screams you call the world, and tell me you would not add to them-pile them to the sky!"

He has the Strength, the secret voice whispered.

"I would…" Anasurimbor Kelmomas admitted. "I would." His limbs trembled. His heart hung as if plummeting through a void. What was this crashing within him? What was this release?

The Truth!

And his brother's voice resonated, climbed as if communicating up out of his bones. "You think you seek the love of our mother, little brother-Little Knife! You think you murder in her name. But that love is simply cloth thrown over the invisible, what you use to reveal the shape of something so much greater…"

Memories tumbled into his soul's eye. Memories of his Whelming, how he had followed the beetle to the feet of the Grinning God, the Four-horned Brother, how they had laughed when he had maimed the bug-laughed together! Memories of the Yatwerian priestess, how she had shrieked blood while the Mother of Fertility stood helpless…

And the boy could feel it! An assumption of glory. A taking possession of a certainty that had possessed him all along-possessed him in ignorance… Yes!

Godhead.

"Come closer," Inrilatas said in a whisper that seemed to boom across all creation. He nodded to the arc smeared across the floor between them. "Wander across the line others have etched for you…"

The young Prince-Imperial watched his left foot, small and white and bare, step forward But a gnarled hand caught him, held him with gentle insistence. Somehow the deaf-mute Attendant had circled around without the boy noticing. The man wagged his face in alarm and horror.

Inrilatas began laughing.

"Flee, little brother," he said, passion fluting through his voice. "I can feel the…" He dandled his tongue on his lips as if savouring his own sweetness, even as his eyes widened in animal fury. A coital shudder passed through him. "I feel the rage!" he roared to the stone vaults. "The furies!" He seized the slack chains, wrenched them savagely enough to make the links screech for biting one another. Saliva swung from his mouth when he jerked his face back to Kelmomas. "I can feel it come… come upon me…" His phallus climbed into a grinning arc.

"Diviniteeeeeee!"

The boy stood astounded. At last he yielded to the Attendant and his shoulder-tugging hands, allowed the wretch to pull him from his brother's cell…

He knew Inrilatas would find the little gift he had left for him, lying along the seam between floor-stones.

The small file he had stolen from the palace tinker… not so long ago.

| Iothiah

Fire, fierce enough to sting the skin from paces away. Smoke, rolling in oily sheets, acrid enough to prick the eyes, needle the throat. Screams, violent enough to cramp the heart. Screams. Too many screams.

Dizzy and nauseated, Malowebi rode close beside Fanayal ab Kascamandri as the Padirajah toured the streets, some raucous, others abandoned. The Second Negotiant had never witnessed the sacking of a village, let alone a city as vast and mighty as Iothiah. It reminded him that High Holy Zeum, for all its high holy bluster, knew very little about war. The Men of the Three Seas, he had come to realize, warred without mercy or honour. Where the dynastic skirmishes his Zeumi kinsmen called war were bound by ancient code and custom, Fanayal and his men recognized no constraints that he could see, save that of military expediency and exhaustion.

They fought the way Sranc fought.

The Mbimayu sorcerer saw entire streets carpeted in bodies. He saw several rapes, the victims either vacant or shrieking, and more summary executions than he cared to count. He saw a pale-skinned Columnary holding a squalling babe in one arm while trying to battle two laughing Kianene with the other. He saw an old man jumping from a rooftop, his clothing afire.

Perhaps glimpsing something of his dismay, Fanayal was at pains to describe the atrocities suffered by his own people during the First Holy War and the subsequent Wars of Unification. A kind of madness warbled through his outrage as he spoke, condemnation spoken in the tones of divine revelation, as if nothing could be more right and true than the slaughter and rapine about them. The Bloodthirsty Excuse, the sage Memgowa had called it. Retribution.

"But there is more to this than crude vengeance," Fanayal explained, as if suddenly recalling the learning of the man he addressed. The Padirajah was proud of his own youthful education, Malowebi knew, but found the posture difficult to recover after decades of brutality and fugitive insurrection. "You make an example of the first," the man continued, "then you show mercy to the second. First, you teach them to fear you, then you earn their trust. Nirsi shal'tatra, we call it. The Honey and the Goad."

Malowebi could not but reflect on how easily the whip and the honey became confused. Everywhere they rode, the Kianene turned from their sordid labours and called out to their lord in exultation and gratitude-cheered as if famished guests at a sumptuous feast.

Savages, Cousin. You have sent me out among savages.

Something, Malowebi's silence, perhaps, convinced the Bandit Padirajah to cut their tour short. They reversed direction, rode for what seemed an entire watch plagued by the sound of a babe crying-Malowebi could almost believe someone followed them torturing a cat. Silence haunted the empty windows. Smoke sheeted the west in gauze rags, lending an eerie, watery timbre to the sunlight that slanted across the dying city. Finally they returned to the wrack and ruin of the city's northwestern walls-the section brought down by Meppa.

Once again, Malowebi found himself gawking.

"It frightens you, no?" Fanayal said, watching his profile. "The spilling of the Water."

"What do you mean?"

The Padirajah graced him with an upside-down smile. "I've been told that Schoolmen find the Cishaurim Psukhe troubling. You see a violation with your mundane eyes-the glare of sorcery-when your other eye, the one that itches, sees only mundane creation."

Malowebi shrugged, thinking of the brief dual between Meppa and the lone Saik sorcerer-a decrepit and dishevelled old man-who had defended the hapless city. The rogue Cishaurim floating, impervious to the fire of the Schoolman's Anagogic dragonhead, disgorging cataracts of blue-twinkling light as pure as it was beautiful. As awesome as Meppa's power had been-there was no doubting he was a Primary-it had been the beauty that had most astounded, and mortified, the Second Negotiant.

To be a sorcerer was to dwell among deformities.

"It is extraordinary," Malowebi admitted, "to see the Work without the Mark." He smiled the wise and slippery smile of an old diplomat. "But we Schoolmen are accustomed to miracles."

He said this last more in bitter jest than anything. What he witnessed had left many profound impressions. The power of Meppa, certainly. The martial acumen of the Padirajah. The cunning and the bravery of the Fanim, not to mention their barbarity…

But nothing loomed so large as the weakness of the New Empire.

The rumours were absolutely true: the Aspect-Emperor had boned his conquests to pursue his mad invasion of the northern wilds. Disaffected populations. Ill-equipped soldiers, poorly trained and even more poorly led. Infirm and doddering Schoolmen. And perhaps most interestingly, absolutely no Chorae…

Nganka-nay, Zeum — needed to be informed. This night would be filled with far-calling dreams.

"The people call him Stonebreaker," Fanayal said. "Meppa… They say he was sent to us by the Solitary God."

Malowebi turned to him, blinking.

"What do you say?"

"I say he was sent to me!" the hawk-faced Padirajah cried laughing. " I am the Solitary God's gift to his people."

"And what does he say?" the Second Negotiant asked, now genuinely curious.

"Meppa? He does not know who he is."