The white-luck warrior

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

In Gielgath, two thieves assailed him, and the White-Luck Warrior watched them scuffle, drunk and desperate, with the man who was their doom. They lurched out of alleyway shadows, their cries choked to murmurs for fear of being heard. They sprawled dead and dying across cobble and filth, the one inert, the other twitching. He wiped his Seleukaran blade clean across the dead one, even as he raised the sword to counter their manic rush. He stepped clear of the one who stumbled, raised his blade to parry the panicked swing of the other… the swing that would notch the scimitar's honed edge-as thin as an eyelid.

The notch that would shatter his sword, so allowing the broken blade to plunge into the Aspect-Emperor's heart. He could even feel the blood slick his thumb and fingers, as he followed himself into the gloomy peril of the alley.

Unholy blood. Wicked beyond compare.

No one noticed him in the subsequent hue and cry. He watched himself slip unnoticed through gathering crowds of onlookers-for even in these lawless times, the murder of two men was no small thing. He followed himself through an ancient and impoverished maze that was Gielgath. One of the priestess beggars called, "You! You!" as he passed a fullery. He saw her sob for joy a million times.

The slave plantations were more severe in their discipline, more grand in extent, in the lands he subsequently crossed, following his following. He watched himself lean so that he might draw his bloody hands across the crowns of surging millet and wheat. Across the span of ages, the Goddess watched and was pleased, and it was Good.

He came across a cow calving, and he knelt into his kneeling so that he might witness his Mother made manifest. He watched himself draw his fingers through the afterbirth, then redden the lobes of his ears.

He found a fugitive child hiding in an overgrown ditch, watched himself give all that remained of his food. "There is no greater Gift," he overheard himself say to the wide brown eyes, "than to give unto death." And he caressed the dark-tanned cheek that was also a skull decaying between grass and milkweed.

He saw a stork riding invisible gusts across the sky.

He walked, forever trailing the man who walked before him and forever leading the one who walked behind. He watched his form, dark for the brilliance of the sun, sink over cultivated summits, even as he turned to see his form, dark within its own shadow, rising from the crest behind.

And so he stepped into his stepping, walked into his walking, travelled into his journey, a quest that had already ended in the death of the False Prophet.

Until at last he paused upon a hill and for the first time gazed across the walls and streets he had seen innumerable times.

Momemn. The Home City. Great Capital of the New Empire.

He saw all the lanes he had never travelled. He saw the Temple Xothei with its famed domes, heard the riotous cries that would shiver its stone. He saw the Imperial Precincts along the seaward walls, the campuses hazy and deserted. He saw the piling of structure and marble beauty that was the Andiamine Heights, his eyes roaming until they found the famed veranda behind the Aspect-Emperor's throne-room…

Where the Gift-of-Yatwer glimpsed himself peering back, the Holy Empress beside him.

– | Momemn

"Why should it trouble a mother to see her child love himself so?" Inrilatas said from his shadow. He exhaled a breath pent in hungry pleasure. "Fondle himself?"

Sunlight streamed through the cell's one small window, drawing a fan of illuminated surfaces from the smoky gloom. A stretch of her son's hair, the outer lines of his left shoulder and arm. Thankfully, she could not so much see him masturbate as infer it.

She fixed him with a mother's flat gaze. Perhaps it was her old life as a whore, or perhaps he had simply exhausted her with his antics; either way she was unimpressed. There was very little Inrilatas could do that would shock or dismay her anymore.

A small carpet had been laid across the floor, with an oak chair, cushioned and elaborately carved, set upon it for her comfort. White-clad body-slaves stood ready to either side with wicker screens-shields, really-ready to shelter her if her son decided to begin pelting her with feces or any other fluid that caught his fancy. It had happened before. After they were done, she knew, the chains would be drawn to fix her son across the wall, and the Attendants would scour the floor looking for anything dropped or forgotten. The boy-young man, now-was simply too ingenious not to devise tools for some kind of mischief. Once he managed to make a shiv, which he used to kill one of his attendants, using only the fabric of his tunic and his seed.

"I want Maithanet brought here… to you."

She could feel him peering into her face, the strange tickle of being known. She experienced some sense of exposure with almost all her children by Kellhus, but it differed with each one. With Kayutas, it simply seemed to render her irrelevant, a problem easily dismissed or solved. With Serwa, it raised her ire because she knew the girl could see the pain she had caused her mother and yet chose to ignore it. With Theliopa, it was simply a fact of the time they spent together, and a convenience as well, since it allowed the girl to more completely subordinate herself to her mother's wishes.

But with Inrilatas it always seemed more profound, more intrusive, somehow…

Like the way she felt in her husband's eyes, only without the sense of… resignation.

"Uncle Holy," he said.

"Ye-"

"They smell it on you, you know," he interrupted. "Fear."

"Yes," she replied on a long breath. "I know."

Kellhus once told her that Inrilatas's soul had been almost perfectly divided between the two of them, his intellect and her heart. "The Dunyain have not so much mastered passion," he had explained, "as snuffed it out. My intellect is simply not robust enough to leash your heart. Imagine bridling a lion with string."

"You are blackened by Father's light," the adolescent said, his voice straying across resonances only her husband used. "Rendered pathetic and absurd. How could a mere whore presume to rule Men, let alone the Three Seas?"

"Yes… I know, Inrilatas."

What was the power that a mother wielded over her son? She had watched Inrilatas reduce her flint-hearted generals to tears and fury, yet for all the cutting things he had said to her, for all the truths, he managed only to increase her pity for him. And this, it seemed to her, kindled a desperation in him while rendering her a kind of challenge, a summit he must conquer. For all the labyrinthine twists of his madness, he was just an anguished little boy in the end.

It was hard to play God in the eyes of a heartbroken mother.

Inrilatas grunted and huffed air. She tried to ignore the strings of semen that looped across the oblong of sunlit floor several paces from her feet.

He was always doing this, marking the spaces about him with his excretions. Always staining. Always defacing. Always desecrating. Always expressing bodily what he sought to do with his mastery of word and expression. All men gloried in transgression, Kellhus had told her, because all men gloried in power, and no power was more basic than the violation of another's body or desire. "Innumerable rules bind the intercourse of Men, rules they can scarce see, even if they devote their lives to the study of jnan. Our son lives in a world far different than yours, Esmi-a visible world. One knotted and stifled and choked with the thoughtless customs we use to pass judgment one upon another."

"Aren't you curious?" she asked.

Her son raised a finger to his mouth. "You think Father left the Empire to you because he feared the ambition of his brother. So you suspect Uncle Holy of treachery. You want me to interrogate him. Read his face."

"Yes," she said.

"No… This is simply the rationale you use. The truth is, Mother, you know you will fail. Even now, you can feel the New Empire slip from your grasp, topple over the edge. And because you know you fail, you know Maithanet will be forced to wrest the Empire from you, not for his own gratification, but for the sake of his brother…"

And so the game began in earnest. "You must be forever wary in his presence," Kellhus had warned her. "For truth will be his sharpest goad. He will answer questions that you have never asked yet lay aching in your heart nonetheless. He will use enlightenment to enslave you, Esmi. Every insight you have, every revelation you think you have discovered, will be his."

Thus had her husband, in the course of arming her against their mad son, also warned her against himself. As well as confirmed what Achamian had said so very long ago.

She leaned forward, braced her elbows against her knees to watch him the way she had when he was but a babe. "I will not fail, Inrilatas. If Maithanet assumes my eventual failure, then he's mistaken. If he acts on this assumption, then he has broken the Aspect-Emperor's divine law."

Inrilatas's chuckle was soft, forgiving, and so very sane.

"But you will fail," he asserted with a slaver's nonchalance. "So why should I do this for you, Mother? Perhaps I should side with Uncle, for in truth, only he can save Father's Empire."

How could she trust him? Inrilatas, her and her husband's monstrous prodigy…

"Because my heart beats in your breast," she said out of rash maternal reflex. "Because half of your madness is mine…" But she trailed, troubled by the way Inrilatas could, merely by listening, reveal the falsehood of sentiments that seemed so simple and true otherwise.

A jerk and rattle of iron chains. "Things heave in me, Mother. Be. Quick."

"Because I know that you want the Empire to fail."

His laughter was curious, as though crazed forces sheered the humour underpinning it.

"And you will trust… what I tell you?" he said, his voice cracked by inexplicable exertions. "The words… of a madman?"

"Yes. If only because I know that Truth is your madness."

A kind of jubilation accompanied these words-one that she immediately repented, knowing her son had already seen it, and fearing he would deny her for simple perversity's sake. Even as a young child, he had always sought to quash whatever was bright within her.

"Inspired words, Mother." His tone was thin and blank, almost as if he mocked his older sister, Theliopa. "The very kind Father has warned you not to trust. You cannot see the darkness that precedes your thoughts, but unlike most souls you know it exists. You appreciate how rarely you are the author of what you say and do…" He raised his shackled hands for a clap that never came. "I'm impressed, Mother. You understand this trick the world calls a soul."

"A trick that can be saved… or damned."

"What if redemption were simply another form of damnation? What if the only true salvation lay in seeing through the trick and embracing oblivion?"

"And what if," Esmenet replied with more than a little annoyance, "these questions could be debated endlessly without hope of resolution?"

In a wink, Theliopa's manner vanished, replaced by a hunched ape, leering and laughing. "Father has been rubbing off on you!"

Perhaps she should have been amused. Perhaps she would have been, despite the utter absence of trust. But her heart had been bludgeoned, her hope battered beyond the possibility of amusement.

"I tire of your games, Inrilatas," she said, speaking a fury that seemed to gather strength in the sound of her voice. "I understand that you can see my thoughts through my voice and face. I understand your abilities as well as anyone without Dunyain blood can. I even understand the predicaments I face in merely speaking to you!"

More laughter. "No, Mother. You most certainly do not understand. If you did, you would have drowned me years ago."

She fairly leapt to her feet, such was the sudden violence of her anger. But she caught herself. "Remember, Esmi," Kellhus had warned her, "never let your passions rule you. Passions make you simple, easy to master. Only by twisting, reflecting upon your reflections, will you be able to slip his grasp…"

Inrilatas had leaned forward from his hunch, his face avid with a shifting melange of contradictory passions, a face like a pick, sorting through tumblers of her soul.

"You lean heavily on Father's advice…" he said, his voice reaching for intonations that almost matched Kellhus's. "But you should know that I am your husband as he really is. Even Uncle, when he speaks, parses and pitches his words to mimic the way others sound-to conceal the inhumanity I so love to flaunt. We Dunyain… we are not human, Mother. And you… You are children to us. Ridiculous and adorable. And so insufferably stupid."

The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas could only stare in horror.

"But you know this…" Inrilatas continued, his gaze fixed upon her. "Someone else has told you this… And in almost precisely the same words! Who? The Wizard? The legendary Drusas Achamian-yes! He told you this in a final effort to rescue your heart, didn't he? Ah… Mother! I see you so much more clearly now! All the years of regret and recrimination, torn between terror and love, stranded with children-such wicked, gifted children! — ones you can never hope to fathom, never hope to love."

"But I do love you!"

"There is no love without trust, Mother. Only need… hunger. I am a reflex, nothing more, nothing less."

Her throat cramped. The tears welled to her eyes, spilled in hot threads across her cheeks.

He had succeeded. At last he had succeeded…

"Damn you!" she whispered, swatting at her eyes. Battered and exhausted-that was how she felt after mere moments with her son. And the words! What he had said would torment her for nights to come-longer. "This was a mistake," she murmured, refusing to glance at his lurid figure.

But just as she turned to signal the slaves to leave, he said, "Father has cut off all communication."

She slumped in her seat, breathing, staring without focus at the floor.

"Yes," she said.

"You are alone, lost in a wilderness of subtleties you cannot fathom."

"Yes…"

At last she raised her gaze to meet his. "Will you do this for me, Inrilatas?"

"Trust. Trust is the one thing you seek."

"Yes… I…" A kind of resignation overwhelmed her. "I need you."

Invisible things boiled through the heartbeats that followed. Portents. Ruminations. Lusts.

"There can only be three of us…" Inrilatas finally said. Once again, unnameable passions creaked through the seams of his voice.

The Blessed Empress blinked more tears, this time for relief. "Of course. Just your uncle and myself."

"No. Not you. My brothers…" A heaving breath swallowed his voice.

"Brothers?" she asked, more alarmed than curious.

"Kel…" he said with a bestial grunt, "and Sammi…"

The Holy Empress stiffened. If Inrilatas had been seeking a fatal chink, he had discovered it. "I don't understand," she replied, swallowing. "Sammi is… Sammi, he…"

But the figure she spoke to was scarce human anymore. Anasurimbor Inrilatas rose with a dancer's slow deliberation, then threw himself forward, his arms and legs outstretched, straining against the limits of his chains. He stood there, all spittle and squint-eyed passion, his naked limbs heaving, trembling with veins and striations. Her shield-bearers, Esmenet could not help but notice, had shrunk behind the wicker screens meant for her.

"Mother!" her son shrieked, his eyes shining with murder. "Mother! Come! Closer!"

Something of her original imperviousness returned. This… This was her son as she knew him best.

The beast.

"Let me see your mouth, Mother!"

Iothiah

The woman called Psatma Nannaferi was brought before the Padirajah and his loutish court the same as all the other notable captives, stripped naked and shackled in iron. But where other attractive women had been greeted with lascivious hoots and calls-humiliation, Malowebi had realized, was as much as part of the proceedings as the Padirajah's judgment-a peculiar silence accompanied Psatma Nannaferi's short march to the floor below Fanayal. Rumours of this woman, the Mbimayu sorcerer decided, had spread quickly among the desert men. The fact that he had not heard these rumours simply served to whet his curiosity, as well as to remind him that he remained an outsider.

Fanayal had seized one of the few temples not burned, a great domed affair that abutted the Agnotum Market-the ironic point of origin for many luxury goods that found their way to Zeum. The altar had been broken down with sledges and hauled away. The tapestries with panels drawn from the Tractate and the Chronicle of the Tusk had been burned. Those representing the First Holy War, Malowebi was told, had been carted out of Iothiah to line the horse stalls seized by Fanayal's growing army. The frescoes had been defaced, and graven images everywhere had been smashed. Several green-and-crimson banners bearing the Twin Scimitars of Fanimry had been roped and tacked across the walls. But the Tusks and Circumfixes were simply too ubiquitous to be completely blotted. No matter where his eye strayed, along the columns, over the cornices and vaults of the flanking architraves, Malowebi glimpsed unscathed evidence of the Aspect-Emperor and his faith.

Nowhere more so than the dome itself-whose height and breadth alone were a kind of miracle to Malowebi, hailing as he did from a nation without arches. A great wheel of frescoes hung in the high gloom above the unbelievers, five panels representing Inri Sejenus in some different pose, his face gentle, his hands haloed in painted gold, his silvered eyes glaring endlessly down.

Fanayal's desert Grandees betrayed no discomfort that the Second Negotiant could see. But then Malowebi always found himself surprised by men's general blindness to irony and contradiction. If the Kianene had looked vicious and impoverished before, they looked positively absurd now, decked in the eclectic spoils of a great imperial city. The desert mob seethed with jarring mixtures of clothing and armour: the high conical helms from Ainon, black Thunyeri hauberks, a couple of silk gowns that Malowebi suspected belonged to a woman's wardrobe, and in one case, the baggy crimson pantaloons typically worn by caste-slave eunuchs. One man even sported a Nilnameshi feather-shield. Most of them, Malowebi knew, had spent the bulk of their lives hunted like animals across the desert wastes. Until now, they had counted sips of water and shelter from sun and wind as luxury, so it made sense they would feast in all ways possible, given the crazed rewards Fate had heaped upon them.

Even still, they looked more a carnival of dangerous fools than a possible ally of High Holy Zeum.

Once again Fanayal alone embodied the elegance and reserve that had once so distinguished his people. A wooden chair had been set behind the forward ridge of the altar's shattered base, where the Padirajah sat, agleam even in temple gloom, wearing a coat of golden mail over a white silk tunic: the armour and uniform of the Coyauri, the famed heavy cavalry he had commanded as a young man during the First Holy War.

Meppa stood at his right hand, his cowl drawn back, his eyes hidden as always behind the silver band about his head. The Cishaurim's serpent rose like a black iron hook from his neck, tasting the air with its tongue, wagging from voice to voice.

Malowebi had been assigned the shadows behind and to the left of the Padirajah, where he had watched perhaps a hundred naked women and men dragged beneath Fanayal and his vengeful whims, a piteous train of them, some proud and defiant, but most abject and broken, wheezing and weeping for a mercy that was never shown. The captive men, no matter what their station, where asked whether they would curse their Aspect-Emperor and embrace the truth of the Prophet Fane. Those who refused were dragged off for immediate execution. Those who agreed were taken away to be auctioned as slaves. As far as the Mbimayu sorcerer could tell, the women-the bereaved wives and orphaned daughters of the caste-nobility-were simply brought out to be divided as spoils.

On and on the proceedings continued, becoming more sordid and more farcical, it seemed, with the passing of every doomed soul, dull enough for an old scholar to ponder the perversities of faith, long enough for an old man's feet to ache and itch.

Something about Psatma Nannaferi, however, instantly dispelled his boredom and discomfort.

The guardsmen threw her to the prayer tiles beneath the Padirajah. But where they had delighted in wicked little flourishes with the others, they did so this time with mechanical reluctance-as if trying to hide behind their function.

Fanayal leaned forward, petted his braided goatee as he studied the captive. This too was unprecedented.

"My Inquisitor has told me a most interesting tale…"

The woman slowly pulled herself upright, graceful despite her iron shackles. She betrayed neither fear for her future nor shame for her captive nudity. She was not without a certain, diminutive beauty, Malowebi thought, but there was a hardness to her that belied the soft brown curves of her skin. And there was something about her posture and her squint that suggested the habits of someone older-far older-than her apparent thirty years.

"He says," Fanayal continued, "that you are Psatma Nannaferi, the Mother-Supreme of the Yatwerian Cult."

A grim and condescending smile. "I am."

"He also says you are the reason we found these lands afire when we arrived."

She nodded. "I am but a vessel. I pour only what has been poured."

Even after so few words, Malowebi knew her for a formidable woman. Here she stood, naked and manacled, yet her gaze and bearing communicated a confidence too profound to be named pride, a majesty that somehow upended the stakes between her and the famed Bandit Padirajah.

"And now that your Goddess has betrayed you?"

"Betrayed?" she snorted. "This is not a sum. This is not a wager of advantages over loss. This is a gift! Our Mother Goddess's will."

"So the Goddess wills the destruction of her temples? The torment and execution of her slaves?"

The longer Malowebi gazed at the woman, the more a weight seemed to press against his brow. Her eyes seemed bright with moist vulnerability, her body fetching in the lean way of peasant virgins. And yet watching her, an impression of something hoary, hard, and old continued to plague him. Even the downy curve of her sex… She seemed a kind of visible contradiction, as if the look and promise of virgin youth had eclipsed the sight of a hag but not the corona of meaning that hung like a haze about it.

So even now, as she glared at Fanayal, it seemed something reptilian peered through her peering, the look of something vicious and remorseless with age, flashing from the gaze of a woman, flushed and breathless and so very inviting.

"We take such gifts that come," she crooned. "We suffer this worldly trifle, and She will save us! From oblivion! From those demons our iniquities have awakened! This is but the arena where souls settle eternity. Our suffering is dross compared to the glory to come!"

Fanayal laughed, genuinely amused. But his humour cut against the obvious unease of his court.

"So even your captivity… You think this a gift?"

"Yes."

"And if I were to deliver you to the lust of my men?"

"You will not."

"And why is that?"

In a twinkling, she became coy and whorish. She even glanced down at her breasts, which were firm with improbable youth. "Because I have been reborn as black earth, as rain and sweating sun," she said. "The Goddess has cast me in Her image, as sweet, sweet Fertility. You will not allow other men to trade me, so long as your loins bur-"

" My loins?" Fanayal cried out with forced incredulity.

Malowebi gazed and blinked. She literally tingled with nubile promise, yet still she carried the air of old stone. Something… Something was wrong…

"Even now," she said, "your seed rises to the promise of soft earth deeply ploughed."

Masculine laughter rumbled through the chamber, only to falter for want of breath. Even old Malowebi could feel a tightness in his chest and a matching thickness crawling across his thighs…

With no little horror the Mbimayu sorcerer realized the Goddess was among them. There was peril, here-great peril. This woman walked with one foot on the Outside…

He opened his mouth to call out in warning but caught himself on the very hinge of his voice.

He was no friend to these savage people. He was an observer, interpreter. The question was whether Zeum's interests would be served if Fanayal were alerted. Ally or not, the fact remained that the man was a fanatic of the worst kind, a believer in a creed, Fanimry, that made devils out of the Gods and hells out of the Heavens. To strike an alliance that earned the enmity of the Mother of Birth would be a fool's exchange. The Zeumi might not pray to the Hundred, given their intercessory faith, but they certainly revered and respected them.

"'Soft earth deeply ploughed,'" Fanayal repeated, gazing upon her form with frank hunger. He turned to the lean and warlike men of his court. "Such are the temptations of evil, my friends!" he called, shaking his head. "Such are the temptations!"

More laughter greeted these words.

"Your sisters are dead," the Padirajah continued as if immune to her wiles. "Your temples are pulled down. If these are gifts, as you say, then I am in a most generous mood." He paused to make room for a few frail guffaws from his assembled men. "I could give you a noose, say, or a thousand lashes. Perhaps I will have Meppa show you what kind of prison your body can be."

Malowebi found himself wondering whether the woman had even blinked, so relentless was her gaze. The fact that Fanayal weathered it with such thoughtless ease actually troubled the Mbimayu sorcerer. Was the man simply oblivious or did he possess a heart every bit as hard as her own?

Either possibility would not bode an alliance well.

"My soul has already left and returned to this body," she said, her girlish voice scratched with the harsh intonations of a crone. "There is no torment you could inflict upon me."

"So hard!" Fanayal cried laughing. "Stubborn! Devil-worshipping witch!"

Again the desert court rumbled with laughter.

"I would not ply your body," Meppa said without warning. So far he had stood silent and motionless at his sovereign's side, his face directed forward as always. Only the asp, which curved like an onyx bow across his left cheek, faced the lone woman.

Psatma Nannaferi regarded the Cishaurim with a sneer. "My soul is beyond your devilry, Snakehead. I worship the Dread Mother."

Never had Malowebi witnessed an exchange more uncanny, the blinded man speaking as if to a void, the shackled woman as if she were a mad queen among hereditary slaves.

"You worship a demon."

The Mother-Supreme laughed with the bitter hilarity. The cackle rang across distant walls, echoed through the high crypt hollows, gelding all the humour that had come before it. Suddenly the assembled men were nothing but ridiculous boys, their pride swatted from them by the palm of a shrewd and exacting mother.

"Call her what you will!" Psatma Nannaferi exclaimed. "Demon? Yes! I worship a demon! — if it pleases you to call her such! You think we worship the Hundred because they are good? Madness governs the Outside, Snakehead, not gods or demons-or even the God! Fool! We worship them because they have power over us. And we-we Yatwerians-worship the one with the most power of all!"

Malowebi squelched another urge to call out, to urge the Fanim to spare her, to set her free, then to burn a hundred bulls in Yatwer's honour. The Mother was here! Here!

"Gods are naught but greater demons," the Cishaurim said, "hungers across the surface of eternity, wanting only to taste the clarity of our souls. Can you not see this?"

The woman's laughter trailed into a cunning smile. "Hungers indeed! The fat will be eaten, of course. But the high holy? The faithful? They shall be celebrated!"

Meppa's voice was no mean one, yet its timbre paled in the wake of the Mother-Supreme's clawing rasp. Even still he pressed, a tone of urgent sincerity the only finger he had to balance the scales. "We are a narcotic to them. They eat our smoke. They make jewellery of our thoughts and passions. They are beguiled by our torment, our ecstasy, so they collect us, pluck us like strings, make chords of nations, play the music of our anguish over endless ages. We have seen this, woman. We have seen this with our missing eyes!"

Malowebi scowled. Fanim madness… It had to be.

"Then you know," Psatma Nannaferi said in a growl that crawled across Malowebi's skin. "There will be no end to your eating, when She takes you. Your blood, your flesh-they are inexhaustible in death. Taste what little air you can breathe, Snakehead. You presume your Solitary God resembles you. You make your image the form of the One. You think you can trace lines, borders, through the Outside, like that fool, Sejenus, say what belongs to the God of Gods and what does not-errant abstractions! Hubris! The Goddess waits, Snakehead, and you are but a mote before her patience! Birth and War alone can seize-and seize She does!"

The Mbimayu sorcerer glanced out over the festooned court, his attention drawn by gasps and murmurs of outrage. The desert men watched, their faces caught between fury and horror. Several of them even signed small folk charms with their fingers. The oddities had been piled too high for them not to realize something profound was amiss.

"Stay your curses!" Fanayal cried, his humour finally beaten into fury.

She cackled in a manner far too savage for lips as young as hers. Dust plumed through a rare shaft of sunlight, star-scapes rolling on temple drafts. "Yes, Mother!" she shouted to the air the way Meppa might. "Seizing him would be a delight! Yes!"

"Demoness!" the Last Cishaurim bellowed. He descended the steps toward her, his face held forward as stiff as a doll's. "I know the true compass of your power. You are written across ages and yet you need tools — Men. And all Men can fail. It is the foundation of what we are! You will be broken with your tools! And you will starve in your pit!"

"Yes!" Psatma Nannaferi cackled once again. "All Men save one!"

Meppa lowered his face, as if only now seeing her through the etched silver of his band. "The White-Luck," he said.

"White-Luck?" Fanayal asked.

Malowebi stood breathless in the wake of the question. These Fanim barbarians could not fathom the disaster they courted. The Hundred. The Hundred rode to war!

"There are infinite paths through the tumble of events," Meppa explained to his sovereign. "The White-Luck, the idolaters believe, is that perfect line of action and happenstance that can see any outcome come to pass. The White-Luck Warrior is the man who walks that line. Everything that he needs, happens, not because he wills it but because his need is identical to what happens. Every step, every toss of the number-sticks, is a…" He turned back to the fierce glare of the Yatwerian Mother-Supreme.

"Is a what?" Fanayal demanded.

Meppa shrugged. "A gift."

The diminutive woman cackled and rattled her chains for stamping her feet. "You are but a temporary blight! A trial that sorts the faithful from the thieves. A far greater war has seized the Three Seas. The Goddess has broken the yoke of the Thousand Temples. The Cults arm themselves for battle. Ride, Fanim fool! Ride! Conquer what you can! Death and horror will eat you all ere this ends!"

Fanayal ab Kascamandri raised his hand as if trying to snatch words she had tossed aside. "So this White-Luck Warrior of yours," he snapped, "he hunts the Aspect-Emperor?"

"The Goddess hunts the Demon."

Fanayal turned to his Cishaurim and grinned. "Tell me, Meppa. Do you like her?"

"Like her?" the blind man responded, obviously too accustomed to his jokes to be incredulous. "No."

"Well I do," the Padirajah said. "Even her curses please me."

"So she is to be spared?"

"She knows things, Meppa. Things we need to know."

But Malowebi, his skin crawling with gooseflesh, understood, as did every man present save perhaps the Cishaurim: the Bandit Padirajah simply made excuses. For all her provocations, for all her deadliness, Psatma Nannaferi remained, as she had said, soft earth deeply ploughed…

And the dread Mother of Birth would work her inscrutable will.

Momemn

Grief had crippled her. Grief for the death of her youngest, her sweetest and most vulnerable, Samarmas. Grief for the loss of her oldest, her bitterest and most wronged, Mimara.

Anger had saved her. Anger at her husband for stranding her. Anger at her servants for failing her and for doubting her-doubting her most of all.

Anger and the love of dear little Kelmomas.

She had taken to stalking the palace halls those nights that sleep eluded her. Twice now she had caught guardsmen throwing number-sticks, and once, slaves making love in the Hepatine Gardens-sins she knew her husband would have punished but that she feigned to overlook. Almost inevitably, she found herself padding alone through the cavernous heart of the Imperial Audience Hall. She would gawk as she walked, crane her neck like the caste-menial she was, thinking of all the peoples behind the panoply of symbols hanging between the polished pillars. She would climb the dais, run her fingers across the arm of her husband's great throne, then sashay out onto the veranda beyond, where she would gaze across the labyrinthine expanse of her capital.

How? How did a low and mean whore, the kind who would sell her daughter in times of famine, become the Blessed Empress of all the Three Seas? This, she had always thought, was the great question of her life, the remarkable fact that historians would ponder in future generations.

She had been the rut, the track long mudded, and now she found herself the charioteer.

There was a mystery and a beauty in great inversions. This was the genius and the power of the Circumfix, the paradox of the God Almighty hanging naked from an iron ring. All men are born helpless, and most men simply grow into more complicated forms of infancy. And yet, since they are the only summit they know, they constantly find themselves looking down even as they grovel at the knees of the mighty. "All slaves become emperors," Protathis had written with canny cynicism, "the instant the slaver looks away."

Her rise-as impossible, as miraculous, as it had been-expressed a conceit native to all men. And so the wild anomaly of her life had become a kind of human beacon. For the caste-nobility, long used to beating aspiration from their slaves, her mere existence triggered an instinct to punish. For slaves and menials, long accustomed to eating their imperious judgments, her rise reminded them of their daily indignity.

But their question was essentially the same. Who was she to be exalted so?

This. This was the real question of her life, the one the historians would never think to ask. Not how could a whore become Empress, but how could a whore be an Empress.

Who was she to be exalted so?

She would show them.

She had laboured tirelessly since word of Iothiah's fall had reached her. Emergency sessions with Caxes Anthirul, her Home Exalt-General, as well as the ever-irascible Werjau, Prime Nascenti of the Ministrate. Apparently activity along the Scylvendi frontier, which had surged in previous weeks, had now dwindled to nothing, a fact that at once heartened her, because of the redeployment it allowed, and troubled her. She had read The Annals, and though Casidas had died long before the Scylvendi sacked Cenei, she could not but recall throughout that reading how all the far-flung glory he described had been swept away by the People of War.

Mercurial. Merciless. Cunning. These were the words that best described the Scylvendi. She knew this because she had known Cnaiur urs Skiotha, and because she had raised his son, Moenghus, as her own.

Though her generals had eyes only for the prospect of avenging their fellows in Shigek, she knew stripping the Scylvendi frontier was a risk-a mad risk. Despite denuding the Empire otherwise, Kellhus had left three crack Columns to guard the Gap, and for no small reason.

But Fanayal and the cursed Yatwerians had left her no choice. The plan was to garrison Gedea as best as they could while the Imperial Army of the West assembled at Asgilioch. Hinnereth could be supplied by sea. General Anthirul assured her that they would have five full Columns ready to retake Shigek by summer's end. Though everyone present understood what Fanayal intended, none dared speak it in her presence. The Bandit Padirajah had not so much attacked the Empire as her legitimacy.

He would suffer for that. For the first time in Esmenet's life, she actually found herself gloating over the prospect of destroying another. And it did not trouble her in the slightest, even though she knew her former self would recoil in horror from such malevolent passions. Fanayal ab Kascamandri would scream for her mercy before all was said and done. Nothing could be more simple.

She also met regularly with both her Master of Spies, Phinersa, and her Vizier-in-Proxy, Vem-Mithriti. She had feared that Phinersa, who always seemed brittle for his nervous intensity, would fold under the extraordinary demands she made of him. But if anything the man thrived. Within a week of Iothiah's fall, Phinersa had almost entirely rebuilt their network of spies throughout Shigek. When she asked him for pretexts she could use to arrest Cutias Pansulla, he had the man imprisoned by the following evening, allowing her to install Biaxi Sankas in his place in the Imperial Synod.

Likewise, she had feared that Vem-Mithriti would literally die, so feeble did he seem. But he too flourished, organizing cadres of Schoolmen, students, and those, like Vem-Mithriti, too frail to participate in the Great Ordeal, for the defence of the Empire. All the world had thought the Cishaurim exterminated by the First Holy War. The stories of their return had sparked a new, almost fanatical, resolve in those Schoolmen who remained.

It seemed miraculous, when she paused to think about it, the way her husband's ministers rallied about her. From the outset, she had understood that the greatest strength of an empire, its size, was at once its greatest weakness. So long as its population believed in its power and purpose, an empire could bring almost limitless resources to bear against its foes, be they internal or external. But when that belief waned, its tendency was to dissolve into warring tribes. The very resources that had been its strength became its enemy.

This was what made the fall of Iothiah so disastrous. Yes, Fanayal had cast all of Shigek into lawless turmoil. Yes, he had cut the western Empire in half. But Shigek was but one province out of many, and the links between north and south had always been maritime thanks to the Great Carathay. Strategically, the loss of Iothiah was little more than a nuisance.

Symbolically, however…

The crisis she faced was a crisis in confidence, nothing more, nothing less. The less her subjects believed in the Empire, the less some would sacrifice, the more others would resist. It was almost arithmetic. The balance was wobbling, and all the world watched to see which way the sand would spill. Anasurimbor Esmenet had made a resolution to act as if she believed to spite all those who doubted her as much as anything else, and paradoxically, they had all started believing with her. It was a lesson Kellhus had drummed into her countless times and one she resolved never to forget again.

To know is to have power over the world; to believe is to have power over men.

With belief then, belief and craft, she would heave on the great chain of empire and haul the balance to the benefit of her children. Esmenet had no more illusions. She understood that if she failed, her sons and daughters would all be doomed.

And she simply would not-could not! — tolerate another…

Another Samarmas.

As always, her Seneschal, Ngarau, proved indispensable. The longer she had been involved in the New Empire's administration, the more she had come to realize that it possessed its own codes and dialects-and the more she had understood not only why men such as Ngarau were so indispensable, but also why Kellhus, no matter how bloody his conquests, never failed to spare the functionaries of each nation he conquered. Everything required translation. The more fluent the Apparati, the fewer the misinterpretations, the quicker the findings, the more decisive the Empire's actions.

The only wheel she could not turn in concert with the others was the Thousand Temples. But soon, very soon, she would have a resolution to that dilemma.

She gazed out across the dark landscape of Momemn, slowly stalking the perimeter of the veranda. She thought about how all the jumbled structures were in fact hollow, how their walls seemed little more than parchment when viewed from so far. She thought of all the thousands slumbering like miniature, innumerable larva, soft in their crisp cocoons. And she plotted their survival.

"We walk the Shortest Path," her divine and heartless husband had told her the last time she had seen him, "the Labyrinth of the Thousandfold Thought. This is the burden the God has laid upon us, and the burden the Gods begrudge…"

Expediency would be her rule. As ruthless as it was holy.

Kelmomas, she knew, would be awake and waiting when she returned-he always was. Simply because she was so busy, she allowed him to sleep with her in her bed.

Save for those nights she called for Sankas or Imhailas to comfort her.

The day itself seemed daring. The wind was constant and thin. The sky was nearly empty, the horizon scraped clean. The Meneanor Sea was stone-coast dark beneath the sunlight sparking across its perforations.

She sat at a small table with Theliopa at her side, watching the Shriah of the Thousand Temples step from the shadow of the Imperial Audience Hall into the glare of the veranda. Anasurimbor Maithanet. Because of the innumerable golden slivers-tusks-woven up and down its length, his white robe twinkled gold with every step. His hair piled high and rich upon his head, the same improbable black as his braided beard.

"This is madness, Esmi," he called. "The Empire burns, yet you spurn my counsel?"

She hoped she looked as impressive, with her stark grey gown beneath an ankle-long vest of gold rings. And of course, she had her smoke-hazed city as her mantle, an intricate mottling of white and grey that reached to the horizon. But she was sure it would be her porcelain mask, glazed white with features as fine and as beautiful as her own, that would most weigh against his eyes.

"And now you wear a mask? An Ainoni mask?"

She had long pondered how he would begin. Before conferring with Inrilatas, she had thought he would be conciliatory, that he would use wise and self-effacing words to move her. "Do this, Esmi. Confidence awaits…" But she had reconsidered in the light of what her crazed son had told her. He would affect injury and outrage, she eventually decided, thinking her native doubts would grease his way.

And she had been right.

"This is about Sharacinth…" he continued in the same indignant tones, his voice striking resonances that seemed to warble about her heart. "You think I was involved in her murder!"

She did not reply simply because she did not trust her voice. She could only speak when she felt the "cold" within her-as Theliopa had instructed.

He took the seat waiting for him in apparent fury. Even out of doors the scent of him, myrrh and a kind of musk, bloomed invisible.

"Or has the loss-?"

He paused as if catching himself, but the implication was clear.

"Or has the loss of your son driven you mad…"

He had not meant, she realized, to say this only to halt out of some compassionate instinct. He had meant for her to complete the thought… Her! Then he could commiserate, and slowly pry open her trust the way he had so many times in the past.

But she had already decided the path this conversation would take.

She peeled a section of flat-cake, used it to grasp a pinch of spice-shredded pork. She dipped both into the cinnamon and honey, then passed it to him, searching for any sign of hesitation.

There was none.

He had not extended her any of the traditional greetings or honorifics, so neither would she. "Proyas…" she said, taking heart in the coldness she felt beneath the clarity of her voice. "Shortly after Carythusal fell, he took me hunting kanti, a kind of antelope, on the Famiri… Have I ever told you that story, Maitha?"

He gazed at her with unsettling intensity. "No."

The mask tingled against her cheeks. She found herself wondering if this was how skin-spies felt behind the digits of their false faces. Safe.

"This was after the conquest of Ainon," she said. "We had tracked a mother and her foal for the better part of an afternoon. But when we finally sighted them, we discovered we weren't the only hunters. Wolves. Wolves had tracked them as well. We had climbed a shallow ridge, so we could see it all, the kanti mother and her child watering at a black stream… and the wolves closing about her…" She glimpsed the predators in her soul's eye, sleek as fish, tunnelling through the grasses. "But the cow either heard them or caught their scent on the wind. She bolted before the noose could be knotted-bolted directly toward us! It was astonishing enough to watch from a distance. She backed her foal against the earthen drop-immediately below us-turned to battle her pursuers. The wolves flew at her, but kanti are strong, like vicious horses, and she kicked and stamped and butted, and the wolves veered away. I almost cried out for jubilation, but Proyas clutched my arm and pointed directly down…"

She paused to lick her lips behind the porcelain.

"The wolves, Maitha. The wolves had known what she would do, even where she would run. So even as the cow seemed to frighten off the pack, two others, who had concealed themselves in the thickets at the ridge's base, leapt upon the foal and tore out its throat. The mother shrieked, chased them away, but it was too late. The pack simply waited until she abandoned her child's body."

Esmenet really had no idea how much he could infer from the sliver of her voice. She had rehearsed this story to baffle his penetration. She had struggled to purge all sign of the passions that moved beneath her voice and intent-but how does one conceal what is already hidden?

"Do you understand, Maitha? I need to know you aren't a wolf waiting in the thicket."

For a heartbeat, anger and compassion seemed to war for the high ground of his gaze. "How could you think such a thing?" he exclaimed.

She breathed deep. How had she come by her suspicions? So often the past seemed a cistern sloshing with dissolved voices. Inrilatas had said she feared Maithanet because she despised herself. How could he not try to save the Empire from her incapacity? But something in her balked at the possibility. Her entire life, it seemed, she had fended fears without clear origin.

Just a tactic… she told herself. An attempt to engage me morally — make me defensive. She tapped the Ainoni mask with a lacquered nail-a gesture meant for herself as much as for him.

"How?" she replied. "Because you are Dunyain."

This occasioned a long silence between them. Watching his pained look lapse into blank scrutiny, Esmenet could not shake the nagging sense that her brother-in-law actually considered murdering her there and then.

"Your husband is Dunyain," Maithanet finally said.

"Indeed."

She wondered if it would be possible to count all the unspoken truths that hung between them, all the devious grounds for their mistrust. Was there ever a family so deranged as theirs?

"If I condescend to this, this test, it will be only to reassure you, Esmi," he finally said. His tone was devoid of pride or resentment, a fact that simply made him more inhuman in her eyes. "I am your brother. Even more, I am your husband's willing slave, no different than you. We are bound together by blood and faith."

"Then do this for me, Maitha. I will apologize if I'm wrong. I will wash your feet on the Xothei steps-anything! Wolves pursue me…"

It was all a game for them, she realized. No word, no expression, simply was. Everything was a tool, a tactic meant to further some occult and devious goal.

Even love… Just as Achamian had said.

She had known this for years, of course, but in the way of all threatening knowledge: at angles, in the shadowy corners of her soul. But now, playing that game with one of them, with a Dunyain, it seemed she understood that knowledge down to its most base implication.

She would be overmatched, she realized, were it not for her mask.

Maithanet had paused in the semblance of a man at his wit's end. His jet beard looked hot in the sunlight-she wondered what dye he used to conceal the Norsirai blond. "And you are willing to trust the judgment of a mad adolescent?"

"I am willing to trust the judgment of my son."

"To read my face?"

He was trying to extend the conversation, she realized. To better scrutinize her voice? Had something in her tone hooked his interest?

"To read your face."

"And you realize the training this requires?"

Esmenet nodded toward her daughter. For all her deficits, Theliopa had been her reprieve. She too was Dunyain, but as Kelmomas possessed his mother's capacity to love, so too she possessed her mother's need to please. This, Esmenet had decided, was what she could trust: those fractions of her that had found their way into her children.

She would count all the world her enemy otherwise.

"The ability to re-read passions is largely native," Theliopa said, "and save for father-father, none can see so deep as Inrilatas. Inferring thoughts requires training, Uncle, a measure of which Father pro-provided."

"But you know this," Esmenet added, trying to hide the accusation in an air of honest confusion.

Gasping in exasperation, the Shriah of the Thousand Temples fell back in his chair. "Esmi…"

The tone and pose of an innocent bewildered and bullied by another's irrationality. "If his actions conform to your expectations," Kellhus had told her, "then he deceives you. The more unthinkable dissembling seems, Esmi, the more he dissembles…" Even though her husband had been referring to their son, the words, she knew, applied all the same to Maithanet. Inrilatas had said it himself: the Dunyain were not human.

And so she would play her own mummer's role.

"I don't understand, Maitha. If you're innocent, what do you have to lose?"

She already knew what Inrilatas would see in his uncle's face-what he would say.

"The boy… He could say anything. He is mad."

All she needed were grounds.

"He loves his mother."

| Before, the young Prince-Imperial had run about the bones of the Andiamine Heights; now he ran through them.

The more Kelmomas thought about it, the more it seemed he always knew that these tunnels existed, that all the subtle discrepancies between dimensions-shortened rooms and too-wide walls-had scratched and whispered at the edges of his notice. He did not like to think that ways had been hidden from him.

He wandered through the dark. He held a small hand about his candle flame to protect against drafts where he could, but he was not so afraid of losing his way as missing something of interest were the light to flicker out. All eyes, he padded through narrow corridors, a bubble of light slipping through black pipes. Everything he saw bore the strict stamp of his father. Bare surfaces. Crude stonework. Simple iron. Here and there he came across walls adorned with chapped paint, and once, an entire hall that had been vaulted and corniced: sections of the old Ikurei palace, he realized, that Father had bent to his own design. He quickly realized the stairs and halls composed but a small fraction of the complex. For every stair there were at least five tubes set with iron rungs, some climbing, others plumbing depths he had yet dared to go. And for every hallway there were at least a dozen chutes, accessing, he imagined, the palace in its entirety.

But there were too many locked doors and grates and hatches. He could almost see Mother or Father sending agents into these halls, using these portals to control how many bones could be explored.

He resolved to teach himself how to pick their locks.

Even though he knew he risked his mother's wrath, he decided to explore one of the few unbarred chutes-one leading through the Apparatory, he soon discovered. He passed innumerable voices, laughing and gossiping for the most part. He even glimpsed several shadows through tight marble and bronze fretting. He heard a couple making like dogs, and rooting around, he found a crease through which he could watch their sweaty backs heave.

"This is the way you are to me," he whispered to the secret voice.

This is how I am to you.

"One bright."

One dark.

His eyes little more than slits, Kelmomas watched the plunging mystery for a time. The smell of it intrigued him, and it seemed he had caught some whiff of it on every man and woman he had met in his entire life. Including Mother. Finally, answering to a rising urgency, he began retracing his steps. He happily let his candle gutter out, knowing the route step for step, rung for rung. The musty darkness blew like a breeze through his hair and across his cheeks, so fleet was his passage back to the Empress's apartment.

But Mother was waiting for him, her face as immobile as stone for fury.

" Kel! What did I tell you?"

He could duck her strike. He could catch her hand and break any one of her fingers. And while she winced for pain, he could snatch one of the pins fixing her hair and drive it deep into her eye. Death deep.

He could do any of these things…

But it was better to lean his cheek into her swatting palm, allow the blow to crack far harder than she intended, so that he could weep in false misery while she clutched him, and glory in her love and regret and horror.

Psatma Nannaferi rose from him, skin peeling from skin. She stood, savoured the kiss of cool air across her breasts, felt his seed flush her inner thighs-for her womb would have none of it. His post-coital slumber was deep, so deep he did not stir when she spat her contempt upon him. She could strike him dead and he would never know. He would writhe in agony for all eternity, thinking he need only awaken to escape.

Fanayal ab Kascamandri, blasted to charcoal, time and time again.

She barked in laughter.

She wandered the gloom of his pavilion, gazed upon the heirlooms of a destroyed empire. A fire-scorched standard, leaning negligently against a chair panelled in mother-of-pearl. Glittering coats of mail hanging from mahogany busts. The Padirajah's body-slave, a solemn Nilnameshi as old as she had once been, cowered in a slot between settees, watching her the way a child might watch a wolf.

She paused before the pavilion's small but sumptuous shrine. "You are one of Her children," she said without looking at the man. "She loves you despite the wickedness your captors have forced upon you." She drew a finger along the spine of the book nestled in crimson crushed velvet upon the small altar: the kipfa'aifan, the Witness of Fane.

The leather cracked and pimpled at her touch.

"You give," she murmured, turning to fix the old man with her gaze. "He takes."

Tears greased his cheeks.

"She will reach for you when your flesh stumbles, and you are pitched into the Outside. But you must reach for Her in turn. Only then…"

He shrank into his refuge as she stepped toward him.

"Will you? Will you reach for Her?"

He shook his head in affirmation, but she had already turned away, knowing his answer. She sauntered toward the draped entrance, glimpsed herself in the long oval of a standing silver mirror. The Mother-Supreme paused in the lantern gloom, allowed her eyes to roam and linger across the supple lines of her reborn body. She made a tongue of her image, savoured the honey of what she saw…

To be returned, to experience the unfathomable loss, to shrink and wither-and then to bloom anew! Psatma Nannaferi had never suffered the vanities of her sisters. She did not hunger, as the others hungered, for the thieving touch of Men. Only in the execution of the rites would her flesh rise to the promise of congress. Even still, she exulted in this Gift as she had no other. There was glory in middle-youth, the tested limb and will of maturity, clothed in firm silk years away from the sackcloth it would become.

Her temples looted and burned. So many of her sisters raped and put to the sword, and here she stood, drunk with joy.

"Are you such a dog?" she asked the open air. "Eh, Snakehead?"

She turned to where Meppa stood on the pavilion's threshold. The ornate flaps swayed into motionlessness behind him. Highland cool wafted through the interior.

"You," he said with muttering intensity. His face remained directed forward, but the black finger of his salt asp had turned directly toward the cringing body-slave. The Mother-Supreme smiled, knowing the old man would not live to see dawn. He would die for her sake, she knew, and he would reach…

"Always guarding his master's portal," she cackled.

"Cover yourself, Concubine."

"You do not like what you see?"

"I see the withered old crone that is your soul."

"So you are a man still, eh, Snakehead? You judge my beauty, my worth, according to the youth of my womb… My fertilit — "

"Still your tongue!"

" Bark, dog. Rouse your master. Let us see whose snout he will strike."

The shining snake finally turned to regard her. The lips beneath the silver band tightened into a line.

Psatma Nannaferi resumed her appraisal of her miraculous twin in the mirror. "You bear the Water within you," she said to the Last Cishaurim. She drew a palm across the plane of her abdomen. "Like an ocean! You can strike me down with your merest whim! And yet you stand here bandying threats and insults?"

"I serve my Lord Padirajah."

The Mother-Supreme laughed. This, she realized, was her new temple, a heathen army, flying through lands where even goatherds were loathe to go. And these heathen were her new priests-these Fanim. What did it matter what they believed, so long as they accomplished what needed to be done?

"But you lie," she croaked in her old voice.

"He has been anoin-"

"He has been anointed!" she cackled. "But not by whom you think!"

"Cease your blasphem-"

"Fool! All of them. All these Men — all these Thieves! All of them think themselves the centre of their worlds. But not you. You have seen. You alone know how small we are… mere specks, motes in the gusting black. And yet you place your faith in errant abstraction-the Solitary God! Pfah! You throw number-sticks for your salvation, when all you need do is kneel!"

The Cishaurim said nothing in reply. The salt-asp, lantern light gleaming along the cross-hatching of its scales, hooked away from her toward a point over her shoulder.

She turned to see Fanayal standing naked in a kind of stationary lurch behind her. He seemed insubstantial for the play of shadow and gloom.

"Do you see now?" Meppa asked. "Her treachery. Her devilry! My Lord, please tell me that you see!"

Fanayal ab Kascamandri wiped his face, breathed deep, his nostrils whistling. "Leave us, Meppa," he said roughly.

A moment of equipoise followed, the mutual regard of three overbearing souls. Their breathing abraded the silent air. Then with the merest bow, the Cishaurim withdrew.

The Padirajah loomed behind the diminutive woman.

He flung her about, cried, "Witch!" He clamped callused hands about her neck, bent her back, crying, "Accursed witch!"

Groaning, the Mother-Supreme clutched his hard muscled arms, hooked a naked calf about his waist.

Thus he ravished her.

Still huddled between the settees, the doomed body-slave wept for watching…

Soft earth deeply ploughed.

Scant ceremony greeted Uncle Holy's arrival at the Andiamine Heights' postern gate, only sombre words and unspoken suspicion. Slaves raised embroidered tarps against the rain, forming a tunnel with upraised arms, so Maithanet was spared the indignity of soaking in his own clothes. Kelmomas was careful to observe and mimic the attitude of his mother and her retinue. Children, no matter how oblivious otherwise, are ever keen to their parent's fear and quick to behave accordingly. Kelmomas was no different.

Something truly momentous was about to happen-even his mother's fool ministers understood as much. Kelmomas actually glimpsed crooked old Vem-Mithriti shaking his head in disbelief.

The Shriah of the Thousand Temples was about to be interrogated by their God's most gifted, destructive son.

Uncle Holy paced the dripping gauntlet in the simulacrum of fury. He fairly shouldered aside Imhailas and Lord Sankas to stand before Mother, who even so diminutive seemed imposing for the strangeness of her shining white mask. For not the first time, Kelmomas found himself hating his uncle, not simply because of his stature, but because of the way he occupied it. No matter what the occasion, be it a blessing or a marriage or an exhortation or the Whelming of a child, Anasurimbor Maithanet cultivated an aura of neck-breaking strength.

"Dispense with the frivolities," he snapped. "I would be done with this, Esmi."

He wore a white robe with gold-embroidered hems-stark, even by his staid standards. Aside from the heavy Tusk-and-Circumfix that hung above his sternum, his only concessions to ornament were the golden vambraces that sheathed his forearms in antique Ceneian motifs.

Rather than speak, the Empress lowered her head a degree short of what was demanded by jnan. Kelmomas felt her hand tighten about his shoulder as she did so.

The young Prince-Imperial savoured the way they carried the scent of rain into the closeted halls of the palace. Moist creases of silk and felt. Feet squishing in sandals. Wet hair growing hot.

Neither party spoke a word the entire trek, save Vem-Mithriti, who begged his mother's pardon as soon as they climbed beyond the Apparatory, asking whether he could continue on his own at a pace more suitable to ancient bones. They left the frail Saik Schoolman behind them, following a path of stairs and corridors cleared in advance and guarded at every turn by stone-faced Eothic Guardsmen. The wall sconces were idle despite the darkness of the day, so they passed through pockets of outright gloom. Despite his mother's fixed, forward glare, the young Prince-Imperial could not resist craning about, matching the ways he could see with the ways he could not-comparing the two palaces, visible and invisible.

At long last they gained the Imperial Apartments and reached the Door.

It seemed taller and broader than the boy remembered, perhaps because his mother had finally ordered it polished. Normally chalked in green, the Kyranean Lions now gleamed in florid majesty. He wanted to ask Mother whether this meant Inrilatas would be set free, but the secret voice warned him to remain silent.

The Empress stood before them, her masked face lowered as if in prayer. All was silent, save for the creak of Imhailas's gear. Kelmomas reached about her silk-girdled waist to press his cheek into her side. She ran thoughtless fingers through his hair.

Finally Maithanet asked, "Why is the boy here, Esmi?"

No one could miss his tone, which twisted the question into, What is this morbid fixation?

"I don't know," she replied. "Inrilatas refused to speak to you unless he was present."

"So this is to be a public humiliation?"

"No. Only you and my two sons," she replied, still gazing at the Door. "Your nephews."

"Madness…" the Shriah muttered in feigned disgust.

At last she turned her mask toward him. "Yes," she said. " Dunyain madness."

She nodded to Imhailas, who grasped the latch and pushed the great door inward.

The Shriah of the Thousand Temples looked down to Kelmomas, clasped his small white hand in the callused immensity of his own. "Do you fear me as well?" he asked.

Rather than reply, the boy looked to his mother in the appearance of anxious yearning.

"You are a Prince-Imperial," his mother said. "Go."

He followed Uncle Holy into the gloom of his brother's cell.

The cell's lone window was unshuttered, revealing a slot of dark sky and flooding the room with chill and moist air. Rain was all the boy could hear at first, roaring across complicated rooftops, gurgling and slurping down the course of zigzag gutters. A single brazier warmed the room, pitching an orange glow into the dark. An elaborately carved chair had been set facing the wall where Inrilatas's chains hung from the four stone lion heads. The brazier had been positioned, the boy noticed, to fully illuminate the chair's occupant and no one else.

Inrilatas crouched naked some four paces from the chair, his arms about his knees. The dim light did not so much illuminate as polish him, it seemed. The young man watched them with a kind of blank serenity.

We must discover what he wants us to do, the secret voice whispered.

For certainly Inrilatas wanted something from him. Why demand his presence otherwise?

His uncle released his hand the instant the Door creaked shut behind them. Without so much as looking at either brother, he reached into his left sleeve and extracted a wooden wedge from beneath the antique vambrace. He dropped it clattering to the floor, then kicked it beneath the base of the door…

Locking them in.

Inrilatas laughed, flexing arms as smooth and hard as barked branches. "Uncle Holy," he said, bending his head to press his left cheek against his knees. "Truth shines."

"Truth shines," Maithanet replied, taking the seat provided for him.

Kelmomas peered at the wooden butt jammed into the black seam between the floor and the portal. What was happening? It had never occurred to him that Uncle Holy might have plans of his own…

Shout, the secret voice urged. Call for her!

The boy shot a questioning look at his older brother-who simply grinned and winked.

Raw for the rain, distant thunder reverberated through the cell window. But for the little boy, the crazed proportions of the circumstances that seized them rattled louder still. What was happening?

"Do you intend to murder Mother?" Inrilatas asked, still staring at Kelmomas.

"No," Maithanet replied.

We have missed something! the voice exclaimed. Something has "Do you intend to murder Mother?" Inrilatas asked again, this time fixing his uncle in a cart-wheeling gaze.

"No."

"Uncle Holy. Do you intend to murder Mother?"

"I said, no."

The boy breathed against the iron rod of alarm that held him rigid. Everything was explicable, he decided. Inrilatas played as he always played, violating expectations for violation's sake. His uncle had stopped the door for contingency's sake… The little boy almost laughed aloud.

They were all Dunyain here.

"So many years," Inrilatas continued, "piling plots atop plots-could it be you have simply forgotten how to stop, Uncle?"

"No."

"So many years surrounded by half-witted peoples. How long have you toiled? How long have you suffered for these malformed children with their stunted intellects? How long have you suffered their ignorance-their absurd vanity? And then Father, that slovenly ingrate, raises one of them above you? Why might that be? Why would Father trust a whore over the pious Shriah of the Thousand Temples?"

"I know not."

"But you suspect."

"I fear my brother does not fully trust me."

"Because he knows, doesn't he? He knows the secret of our blood."

"Perhaps."

"He knows you, knows you better than you know yourself."

"Perhaps."

"And he has seen the flicker of sedition, the small flame that awaits the kindling of circumstance."

"Perhaps."

"And have the circumstances arrived?"

"No."

Laughter. "Oh, but Uncle Holy, they have arrived-most certainly!"

"I do not understa-"

"Liar!" the wild-haired figure screeched.

The Shriah did not so much as blink. His face bathed in wavering orange light, Maithanet enveloped Inrilatas in Dunyain scrutiny, a gaze that seemed to tinkle like coals. It was a profile Kelmomas had seen thousands of times, stitched into banners if not in flesh. High of cheek, virile, the strength of his jaw obvious despite the thickness of his beard.

He is our first true challenge, the voice whispered. We must take care.

Inrilatas's eyes glittered in the gloom. He crouched the same as before, his chains hanging in arcs across the floor. If their uncle's scrutiny discomfited him, he betrayed no sign of it.

"Tell me, Uncle Holy. How many children did grandfather sire?"

"Six," the Shriah replied. There was a toneless brevity to the exchange now, as if they had shed the disguises they used when interacting with normal men.

"Were any of them like me?"

A fraction of a heartbeat.

"I have no way of knowing. He drowned them at the first sign of peculiarities."

"And you were the only one that expressed… balance?"

"I was the only one."

"So grandfather… He would have drowned me?"

"Most certainly."

The stark appraisal of a Dunyain, directly to the point, careless of pride or injury. In an arena packed with the blind and the beggared, he and his family were the only sighted players. They played as the blind played-goading, commiserating, flattering-simply because these were the moves that moved the blind. Only when they vied one against another, the young Prince-Imperial realized, could they dispense with the empty posturing and play the game in its purest, most rarefied form.

"So why," Inrilatas asked, "do you think Father has spared me?"

The Shriah of the Thousand Temples shrugged. "Because the eye of the World is upon him."

"Not because of Mother?"

"She watches with the rest."

"But you do not believe this."

"Then enlighten me, Inrilatas. What do I think?"

"You think Mother has compromised Father."

Another fraction of hesitation. Maithanet's gaze drifted in and out of focus.

Inrilatas seized the opportunity. "You think Mother has blunted Father's pursuit of the Shortest Path time and again, that he walks in arcs to appease her heart, when he should cleave to the ruthless lines of the Thousandfold Thought."

Again the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples hesitated. Perhaps Inrilatas had found the thread. Perhaps Uncle could be unmasked…

Perhaps Maithanet should be counted weak in their small tribe.

"Who has told you these things?" his uncle demanded.

Inrilatas ignored the distraction. "You think Father risks the very world for his Empress's sake-for the absurdity of love!"

"Was it her? Did she tell you about the Thousandfold Thought?"

"And you see me," the naked adolescent pressed, "the fact that I have been caged rather than drowned, as the most glaring example of your elder brother's folly."

Again Kelmomas watched his uncle's eyes fall out of focus then return-an outward sign of the Probability Trance. It wasn't fair, he decided, that he should be born with all these gifts yet be denied the training required to forge true weapons out of them. What use was Father to him, so long as he let him flounder? How could the Aspect-Emperor be anything but his son's greatest threat, greatest foe, when he always saw more, more deeply?

"I fear that you might be…" the Shriah said. "I admit as much. But if you can see this, Inrilatas, then your father has seen it also-and far more completely. If he sees no sedition in my fearing, why should you?"

Once again his uncle tried to seize the initiative with questions of his own. Once again, Inrilatas simply ignored him and pressed on with his interrogation.

"Tell me, Uncle, how will you have me killed when you seize power?"

"These tricks, Inrilatas. These tactics… They only work when they are hidden. I see these things the same as you."

"Strange, isn't it, Uncle? The way we Dunyain, for all our gifts, can never speak?"

"We are speaking now."

Inrilatas laughed at this, lowered his beard-hazed cheek to his knees once again. "But how can that be when we mean nothing of what we say?"

"You conf-"

"What would they do, you think, if Men could see us? If they could fathom the way we don and doff them like clothes?"

Maithanet shrugged. "What would any child do, if they could fathom their father?"

Inrilatas smiled. "That depends upon the father… This is the answer you want me to speak."

"No. That is the answer."

More laughter, so like the Aspect-Emperor's that goose-pimples climbed across the boy's skin.

"You really believe that we Dunyain differ? That, like fathers, some can be good and some bad?"

"I know so," Maithanet replied.

There was something coiled about his brother, Kelmomas decided. The way he lolled his head, flexed his wrists, and rocked on his heels created an impression of awkward, effeminate youth-a false impression. The more harmless he seemed, the young Prince-Imperial understood, the more lethal he became.

All of this, the secret voice warned, is simply for show.

And that was the joke, Kelmomas realized: Inrilatas truly meant nothing of what he said.

"Oh, we have our peculiarities, I grant you that," the adolescent said. "Our hash of strengths and weaknesses. But in the end we all suffer the same miraculous disease: reflection. Where they think, one thought following hard upon the other, tripping forward blindly, we reflect. Each thought grasps the thought before it-like a starving dog chasing an oh-so meaty tail! They stumble before us, reeling like drunks, insensible to their momentary origins, and we unravel them. Play them like instruments, plucking songs of love and adoration that they call their own!"

Something was going to happen.

Kelmomas found himself leaning forward, such was his hanker. When? When?

"We all deceive, Uncle. All of us, all the time. That is the gift of reflection."

"They make their choices," Maithanet said in a head-shaking tone.

"Please, Uncle. You must speak before me the way you speak before Father. I see your lies, no matter how banal or cunning. No choices are made in our presence. Ever. You know this. The only freedom is freedom over."

"Very well then," the Holy Shriah replied. "I tire of your philosophy, Inrilatas. I find you abhorrent, and I fear this entire exercise simply speaks to your mother's failing reason."

"Mother?" his older brother exclaimed. "You think Mother arranged this?"

A heartbeat of hesitation, the smallest crack in Maithanet's false demeanour.

Something is wrong, the voice whispered.

"If not her, then who?" the Shriah of the Thousand Temples asked.

Inrilatas at once frowned and smiled, his expression drunk with exaggeration. His eyebrows hooked high, he glanced down at his little brother…

"Kelmomas?" Maithanet asked, not with the incredulity appropriate to a human, but in the featureless voice belonging to the Dunyain.

Inrilatas gazed at the young Prince-Imperial as if he were a puppy about to be thrown into a river…

Poor boy.

"A thousand words and insinuations batter them day in and day out," the youth said. "But because they lack the memory to enumerate them, they forget, and find themselves stranded with hopes and suspicions not of their making. Mother has always loved you, Uncle, has always seen you as a more human version of Father-an illusion you have laboured long and hard to cultivate. Now, suddenly, when she most desperately needs your counsel, she fears and hates you."

"And this is Kelmomas's work?"

"He isn't what he seems, Uncle."

Maithanet glanced at the boy, who stood as rigid as a shield next to him, then turned back to Inrilatas. Kelmomas did not know what he found more terrifying: the unscalable surfaces of his uncle's face or his brother's sudden betrayal.

"I have suspected as much," the Shriah said.

Say something… the voice urged.

Inrilatas nodded as if ruing some tragic fact. "As mad as all of us are, as much heartbreak we have heaped upon our mother, he is, I think, the worst of us."

"Surely you-"

"You know he was the one who killed Samarmas."

Another crack in his uncle's once-impervious demeanour.

It was all the young Prince-Imperial could do to simply stand and breathe. All his crimes, he had committed in the shadow of assumption. Were his Uncle to suspect him capable-of murdering Samarmas, Sharacinth-he would have quickly seen his guilt, such were his gifts. But for all their strength, the Dunyain remained as blind to ignorance as the world-born-and as vulnerable.

And now… Never in his short life had Kelmomas experienced the terror he now felt. The sense of flushing looseness, as if he were a pillar of water about to collapse in a thousand liquid directions. The sense of binding tension, as if an inner winch cranked at every thread of his being, throttled him vein by vein…

And he found it curious, just as he found this curiosity curious.

"Samarmas died playing a foolish prank," Maithanet said evenly. "I was there."

"And my little brother. He was there also?"

"Yes."

"And Kelmomas, does he not share our gift for leading fools?"

"He could… in time."

"But what if he were like me, Uncle. What if he were born knowing how to use our gifts?"

Kelmomas could hear all three of their hearts, his beating with rabbit quickness, his uncle's pounding as slow as a bull's-his brother's dancing through the erratic in-between.

"You're saying he murdered his own brother?"

Inrilatas nodded the way Mother nodded when affirming unfortunate truths. "And others…"

"Others?"

Kelmomas stood, immobilized by astonishment. How? How? How could everything turn so quickly?

"Turn to him, Uncle. Use your portion. Gaze into his face and ask him if he is a fratricide."

What was the mad fool doing? His uncle was the one! He was the one who needed to be humiliated- destroyed!

The Shriah of the Thousand Temples turned to the boy, not as a human might, frowning, questioning, but with the glint of void in his eyes. As a Dunyain.

"The sum of sins," Inrilatas continued. "There is nothing more godly than murder. Nothing more absolute."

And for the first time Kelmomas found himself trapped within the dread circuit of his Uncle's scrutiny.

Hide! the secret voice cried. He glimpses… glimpses!

"Come now, Kelmomas," his mad brother cackled. "Show Uncle Holy why you should be chained in my place."

"Liar!" the boy finally shrieked in blubbering denial. "Lies!"

"Kelmomas!" the Shriah shouted, his voice yanking on every string of authority, from parental to religious. "Turn to me! Look to me and tell me: Did you murd-"

Two clicks, almost simultaneous. Two screeches-a noise as small as mice trampled underfoot. The whirr of flying iron. Links snapping. File-weakened links snapping. One chain whooshed over the boy's head, while the other hooked behind his uncle…

They intersected, lashed in opposing directions about the post of Uncle Holy's neck. Wound like whips.

Kelmomas had scarcely torn his eyes away from his uncle, when his brother heaved, throwing his arms out and back like wings, his spine arched like a bow. Maithanet flew headlong to his feet.

Then Inrilatas had him, pulled him, for all his stature, like a child, against his chest. He roared in bestial exultation, wrenched at the chains again and again…

And Kelmomas watched the Shriah of Thousand Temples strangle.

Maithanet was on his knees, his face darkening, frantic hands grubbing at the chains. His silken sleeves had dropped down, revealing the fine-wrought beauty of his vambraces.

Inrilatas screamed and twisted, his arms, chest, and shoulders grooved with exertion. Maithanet surrendered his breath, fought only to protect his carotid artery. Inrilatas wrenched once, twice, violently enough to lift Uncle from his knees. But in a heartbeat of dropping slack, Maithanet's left hand fluttered across the vambrace on the forearm opposite. A blade appeared, jutting a finger's length beyond his elbow. It gleamed as though wet.

The first strike puffed the spark from Inrilatas's eyes. The second, low on his ribs, occasioned no more than a flinch. The chain slipped from the adolescent's grasp. Maithanet fell forward to his hands. He choked for air as would any mortal but recovered far more quickly. In mere heartbeats, it seemed, he had cast aside the chains and whirled to confront his dying nephew.

Inrilatas had staggered back two steps, his mouth gaping, his hand pawing the blood welling from his side. No words needed to be exchanged. Muffled shouts and hammering could already be heard at the door. The Shriah of the Thousand Temples could not trust a madman's dying words. He raised his fist. His strike caught the adolescent utterly unprepared. His left brow and socket collapsed like bread crust.

The Prince-Imperial fell back. The clink of iron accompanied the slap of his nude body across the floor. He jerked as if possessed by fire. Blood chased the creases between floor-stones.

"Soft…" Maithanet said, as if noting a natural curiosity. He turned to the dumbstruck boy, his right sleeve crimson with blood. "And you?" he asked without a whisper of passion.

"Do you have your mother's bones?"

The bronze door burst open. Both uncle and nephew whirled to the faces massed beyond the threshold. Angry and astounded eyes probed the gloom, sorted the living from the dead.

"Mommy-mommy-mommy!" Kelmomas shrieked to the lone porcelain mask in the crowd's midst. "Uncle moves against you! He killed Inri to keep you from knowing!"

But his mother had already caught sight of her prostrate son, had already jostled her way to the fore.

"Esmi…" Maithanet began. "You have to und-"

"I don't care how it happened," she interrupted, drifting more than walking toward the form of her son on the floor, his flushed nakedness becoming ever more grey. She teetered over him as if he were a fatal plummet.

"Did you do this, Esmi?" the Shriah persisted, his voice imperious. "Did you plan this to-"

"Did I do what?" she said in a voice so calm it could only be crazed. "Plan for you to murder my son?"

"Esmi…" he began.

But some sights commanded silence-even from a Dunyain. For several giddy, horrifying moments, Kelmomas did not so much see his mother slump to her knees as he saw the Empress of the Three Seas collapse. A stranger. He told himself it was the mask, but when she pulled it from her face, the profile of cheek and brow did not seem familiar to him.

Holding the thing in ginger fingers, she set it upon Inrilatas's shattered brow.

Low thunder rumbled through the cell. Rain hissed and thrummed.

"Before," she said, her head still down. "Before, I knew I could defeat you…"

The Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples stood imperious and scowling. "How?"

She shrugged like someone weary beyond all suffering. "A story Kellhus once told me about a wager between a god and a hero… a test of courage."

Maithanet watched her with the absolute absence of expression.

She looked up to him, her eyes red and welling. "I sometimes think he was warning me… Against him. Against my children… Against you."

She turned back to her dead son.

"He told me this story revealed the great vulnerability of the Dunyain." She brushed a lock of hair from the mask upon Inrilatas's face. Blood had continued to drain, pooling, chasing the seams, soaking the nethers of her gown. "You need only be willing to sacrifice yourself…"

"Esmi… You have been decei-"

" I was so willing, Maitha. And I knew you would see… see this in me, realize that I would let all the Empire burn to war against you, and that you would capitulate the way all the others have capitulated to my sovereign will."

"Esmenet… Sister, please… Relinquish this madn-"

"But what… what you have done… here…" Her head dropped like a doll's, and her voice faded to a whisper. "Maitha… You have killed my boy… my… my son."

She frowned, as if only now grasping the consequences, then glared at her Exalt-Captain.

"Imhailas… Seize him."

They crowded about the entrance, a small mob of astounded souls. Until now, the statuesque Norsirai officer had stood motionless, watching with a horrified pallor. Now Kelmomas almost giggled, so comic was his shock. "Your Glory?"

"Esmi…" Maithanet said, something dark growling through his voice. "I will not be taken."

He simply turned and began striding down the marmoreal halls.

Silence, stunned and panting.

"Seize him!" the Holy Empress screeched at Imhailas. She turned back to the corpse of her son, hung over him, murmuring, "No-no-no-no-no…" against the shudders that wracked her slender frame.

Not another one, the secret voice whispered, laughing.

Her body-slaves had only attended to a handful of lanterns before she chased them from her apartments. Darkness ruled the clutch of interconnected rooms as a result, punctuated by pools of lonely illumination. In the boy's eyes, the world seemed soft and warm with secrets, all the edges rounded with shadow. The belly of an urn gleaming here, the combed planes of a tapestry hanging there-familiar things, made strange for the scarcity of light.

Yes, he decided. A different world. Better.

They lay together on the broad bed, she with her back partially propped on pillows, he within her sheltering curve. Neither of them spoke. For the longest time, the gauze sheers drawn across the balcony were all that moved, gently teasing the marble shadows.

The Prince-Imperial had set an idle fraction of his soul the task of counting heartbeats so that he might know the measure of his bliss. Three thousand, four hundred and twenty-seven passed before Lord Sankas appeared from the darkened depths, his face drawn for worry.

"He simply walked out of the palace."

The Empress stiffened but did not move otherwise.

" No one would dare raise arms against him?"

"No one."

"Not even Imhailas?"

Sankas nodded. "Imhailas, yes, but none of his men assisted him…"

Kelmomas fairly squirmed for excitement. Please-please-please let him be dead!

Inrilatas gone. Uncle Holy banished from the palace. Imhailas dead would make this a most perfect of perfect days!

But his mother had gone rigid behind him. "Is he… Is he okay?"

"The fool's pride will be splinted for a month, but his body is intact. May I suggest, Your Glory, that he be relieved of his command?"

"No, Sankas."

"His men mutinied, Your Glory-and for all eyes to see. His hold over them, his command, is now broken."

"I said, no… More than his command has been broken. All of us have been damaged this day."

The patrician's eyes widened in acknowledgment. "Of course, Your Glory."

A forlorn moment passed, filled with all the things that rise into the place of hopes dashed. Paroxysms had swept through her, rising and falling with the swells of her grief. She had clutched and released him, clutched and released, as if something had groped through her, making a glove of her skin, fingers of her limbs. Now her hold on him relaxed, and her breathing slowed. Even the rhythm of her heart became thick and swollen.

And somehow the boy just knew that she had found peace in a fatal resolution.

"You're a Patridomos, Sankas," she said. He could feel the heat of her breath on his scalp, so he knew that she stared down at him, melancholy and adoring. "You belong to one of the most ancient houses. You have ways… resources, utterly independent of the Imperial Apparati. I am sure you can provide me with what I need."

"Anything, Your Glory."

Kelmomas closed his eyes, floated in the luxurious sensation of her fingers twining through his curls.

"I need someone, Sankas," she said from the darkness immediately above him. "I need someone… Someone who can kill."

A long, appreciative pause.

"Any man can kill another, Empress."

Words. Like flakes of poison, a mere handful could overturn the World.

"I need someone with skills. Miraculous skills."

The Patridomos went rigid. "Yes," he said tightly. "I see…"

Lord Biaxi Sankas was a son of a different age, possessing sensibilities that never quite fit the new order Father had established. He continually did things that struck the boy as odd-like the way he not only dared approach his Empress but actually sat upon the edge of her bed. He gazed at her with bold candour. The play of dim light and shadow did not flatter him, drawing deep, as it did, the long ruts of his face.

"Narindar," he said with a solemn nod.

The young Prince-Imperial struggled to preserve the drowsy sorrow of his gaze. He had heard no few tales about the Narindar, the Cultic assassins whose name had been synonymous with dread-that is, before Father had unmasked the first of the Consult skin-spies.

Funny, how men had only so much room for their fears.

"I can arrange everything, if you wish, Your Glory."

"No, Sankas. This I must command myself…" She caught her breath by biting her lower lip. "The damnation must be mine alone."

Damned? Did Mother think she would be damned for murdering Uncle Holy?

She doesn't believe this, the secret voice whispered. She doesn't believe a Dunyain can be a true anything, let alone the Holy Shriah…

"I understand, Your Glory." Biaxi Sankas said, nodding and smiling a humourless smile that reminded the boy of Uncle Proyas and his melancholy devotion. "And I admire."

And the boy craned his head up to see the tears at last overwhelm her eyes. It was becoming ever more difficult, finding ways to make her cry…

She clutched her boy tight, as if he were her only limb remaining.

The gaunt Patridomos bowed precisely as low as jnan demanded of him, then withdrew to afford his Empress the privacy that all anguish required.