The white-luck warrior

Early Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn

"I gutted a dove in the old way," the long-haired man said, "with a sharpened stone. And when I drew out the entrails, I saw you."

"Then you know."

The Narindar assassin nodded. "Yes… But do you?"

"I have no need of knowing."

The Gift-of-Yatwer leaned against the door he had already entered. The way was not barred.

The room was little more than a cellar, even though it hung some four storeys above the alleyway. The plaster had sloughed from the walls, leaving bare stretches of cracked brick. Near the slot that served as a window, he saw himself speaking with a man, his tunic grimed about the armpits. A cloak of road-beaten leather lay crumpled upon the spare bed. His hair was waist long, a peculiarity among the Ketyai. The only thing extraordinary about his dress was his war-girdle: a wide belt stamped with the images of bulls. A variety of knives and tools gleamed from holsters along the back.

"I gutted a dove in the old way," the long-haired man was saying, "with a sharpened stone. And when I drew out the entrails, I saw you."

"Then you know."

"Yes… But do you?"

"I have no need of knowing."

The Narindar frowned and smiled. "The Four-Horned Brother… Do you know why he is shunned by the others? Why my Cult and my Cult alone is condemned by the Tusk?"

The White-Luck Warrior saw himself shrug.

He glanced back, saw himself climbing stairs that had crumbled into a narrow slope.

He glanced back, saw himself pressing through packed streets, faces hanging like bulbs of garlic in shifting fields of cloth, soldiers watching from raised stoops, slave-girls balancing baskets and urns upon their heads, teamsters driving mules and oxen. He glanced back, saw the immensity of the gate climbing above him, engulfing sun and high blue sky.

He glanced back, one pilgrim among others braiding the roadway, watching Momemn's curtain walls wandering out to parse the hazy distances. A monumental fence.

He looked forward, saw himself rolling the long-haired man through his blood into the black slot beneath the bed rack. He paused to listen through the booming of the streets, heard tomorrow's prayer horns yaw deep across the Home City.

"The Four-Horned Brother…" the long-haired man was saying. "Do you know why he is shunned by the others? Why my Cult and my Cult alone is condemned in the Tusk?"

"Ajokli is the Fool," he heard himself reply.

The long-haired man smiled. "He only seems such because he sees what the others do not see… What you do not see."

"I have no need of seeing."

The Narindar lowered his face in resignation. "The blindness of the sighted," he murmured.

"Are you ready?" the Gift-of-Yatwer asked, not because he was curious, but because this was what he had heard himself say.

"I told you… I gutted a dove in the old way."

The White-Luck Warrior glanced back, saw himself standing upon a distant hill, looking forward.

The blood was as sticky as he remembered.

Like the oranges he would eat fifty-three days from now.

Esmenet felt a refugee, hunted, and yet somehow she also felt free.

Twenty years had passed since she had trod through the slots of a city as great as Momemn. When she married Kellhus, she had exchanged her feet for palanquins borne on the backs of slaves. Now that she walked again, alone save Imhailas, she felt as naked as a slave dragged out for auction. Here she was, easily the most powerful woman in the Three Seas, and she felt every bit as powerless and persecuted as she had as a common whore.

Once Biaxi Sankas had provided him with the time and location, Imhailas had plotted their course with the thoroughness of a military planner-even sending out soldiers, a different one for each leg of the journey, to count paces. She had dressed as the wife of a low Kianene functionary, cloaked in modest grey with a hanging half-veil that rested diagonally across her face, then she and Imhailas, who had disguised himself as a Galeoth caste-merchant, simply slipped out of the Imperial Precincts with the changing of the watches.

And she walked the streets- her streets-the way those she owned and ruled walked.

Sumna, where she had lived as prostitute, should have been a far different city, dominated as it was by the Hagerna, the city within the city that administered all the Thousand Temples. But power was power, whether clothed in the ecclesiastical finery of the Hagerna or the marshal regalia of the Imperial Precincts. Both Sumna and Momemn were ancient administrative centres, overrun with the panoply of peoples that served or seduced power. All that really distinguished them was the stone drawn from their respective quarries. Where Sumna was sandy and tan, as if one of the great Shigeki cities had been transplanted north, Momemn was largely grey and black-"the child of dark Osbeus," the poet Nel-Saripal had called it, referring to the famed basalt quarries that lay inland on the River Phayus.

She walked now the way she had walked then, her step brisk, her eyes shying from every passerby, her hands clutched before her. But where before she had passed through the fog of threat that surrounded every young and beautiful woman in low company, now she traversed the fog of threat that surrounded the powerful when they find themselves stranded among the powerless.

Imhailas had balked at the location Sankas had provided, but the Patridomos had assured him there was nothing to be done, that the kind of man they wanted to contract was as much priest as assassin, and so answered to his own unfathomable obligations. "You must understand, all of this is a kind of prayer for them," Sankas explained. "The penultimate… act… does not stand apart from the acts that feed into it. In their eyes, this very discussion is an integral component of the… the…"

"The assassination," Esmenet said.

For her part, she did not resent the prospect of sneaking across her city. Something had to be given, it seemed to her, for her mad design to have the least chance of succeeding. What was the risk and toil of walking mere streets compared with what she wanted- needed — to accomplish?

They walked side by side where the streets permitted, otherwise she followed Imhailas like a child-or a wife-taking heart in his high, broad shoulders. Even relatively affluent passersby stepped clear of his arm-swinging stature. They followed the Processional toward the Cmiral temple-complex, turned after crossing the Rat Canal. They skirted the River District, then crossed what was called the New Quarter, presumably because it had come to house itinerant communities from across her husband's far-flung empire. The clamour waxed and waned from street to street, corner to corner. Tutors crying out to their classes. Blue-skinned devotees of Jukan, chanting and crashing their cymbals. Beggars, cast-off galley or fuller slaves, calling out Yatwer's name. Violent drunks, raging against the jostle.

Even the smells ebbed and flowed, too pungent and deep, too acrid and sharp, and too many-an endless melange of the noxious and the perfumed. The canals revolted her so much with their flotsam and stench that she resolved to legislate their cleaning when she returned to the palace. When she travelled as Empress, a company of slaves flanked her passage, each bearing blue-steaming censers. Absent them, she found herself alternately holding her breath and gagging. Ever attentive, Imhailas purchased an orange at the first opportunity. Cut in half and held about the mouth and nose, oranges and lemons provided a relatively effective remedy against urban reek.

She saw mule-drawn wains swaying with firewood heaped so high she and Imhailas quickened their step whenever they passed them. She tried hard not to glare at the Columnaries they passed playing number-sticks on the steps of the Custom House they were supposed to be guarding. They passed an endless variety of vendors, some walking the streets bent beneath their wares, others occupying the stalls that slotted the first floor of most buildings. She even saw prostitutes sitting on the sills of second-floor windows, hanging their legs so that passersby could chase glimpses along their inner thighs.

She could not but reflect on the miracle that had raised her from the warp and woof of the sordid lives surrounding her. Nor could she avoid the great wall that years, luxury, and innumerable intermediaries had thrown between her and them. She was one of them, and she was not one of them-the same as with the caste-nobility that showered her with flattery and insolence day in and day out.

She was something in-between-apart. In all the world the only person like her, she realized in a pique of melancholy, the only other member of her lonely, bewildered tribe, was her daughter, Mimara.

Even though she knew that countless thousands made journeys no different from the one she and Imhailas had undertaken, it seemed miraculous they should gain their destination without some kind of challenge. The streets became more narrow, less crowded, and odourless enough for her to finally discard her orange. For the span of a dozen heartbeats she even found herself alone with her Exalt-Captain, fending a sudden, unaccountable suspicion that he and Sankas conspired to kill her. The thought filled her with shame and dismay.

Power, she decided, was a disease of the eyes.

Esmenet studied the ancient tenement while Imhailas consulted the small map Sankas had provided him. The structure had four floors, built in the Ceneian style with long, fired bricks no thicker than three of her fingers. Pigeon droppings positively mortared the ledges above the ground floor. A great crack climbed the centre of the facade, a line where the bricks had been pulled apart by settling foundations. She could tell most of the apartments were abandoned by the absence of shutters on the windows. Given the clamour and hum they had passed through, the place seemed almost malevolent for its silence.

When she glanced back at Imhailas, he was watching her with worried blue eyes.

"Before you go… May I speak, Your Glory? Speak freely."

"Of course, Imhailas."

He seized her hand with the same urgency she allowed him during the deep of night. The act startled her, at once frightened and heartened her.

"I beg you, Your Glory. Please, I beseech! I could have ten thousand soldiers break ten thousand curse-tablets on the morrow! Leave him to the Gods! "

The gleam of tears rimmed his eyes…

He loves me, she realized.

Even still, the most she could say was, "The Gods are against us, Imhailas," before turning to climb the rotted stairs into darkness.

The smell of urine engulfed her.

Another one of her boys was dead. This was simply the skin of the unthinkable, the only thought her soul could countenance when it came to justifying what she was about do. Far darker, more horrifying realizations roiled beneath. The closest she could come to acknowledging them was to think of poor Samarmas, and how his sweet innocence guaranteed him a place in the Heavens.

But Inrilatas… He had been taken too early. Before he could find his way past… himself.

Inrilatas was… was…

It is a strange thing to organize your life about the unthinkable, to make all your motions, all your words, expressions of absence. Sometimes she felt as though her arms and legs did not connect beneath her clothing, that they simply hung about the memory of a body and a heart. Sometimes she felt little more than a cloud of coincidences, face and hands and feet floating in miraculous concert.

A kind of living collapse, with no unifying principle to string her together.

The stairwell had been open to the sky at some point in the structure's past: she could see threads of light between boards high above. The landlord had decided to keep the rain out, she imagined, rather than repair the drainage. The steps had all but crumbled, forcing her to claw the bricked wall to ascend safely. She had known many tenements like this, ancient affairs, raised during glory days that no one save scholars remembered. Once, before Mimara had been born, a catastrophic roar had awakened her in the dead of night. The curious thing was the totality of the ensuing silence, as if the entire world had paused to draw breath. She had stumbled to her window and for a time could see only the dull glow of torches and lanterns through the blackness and dust. Only morning revealed the ruins of the tenement opposite, the heaps, the hanging remains of corner walls. In a twinkling, hundreds of faces she had known-the baker and his slaves, the souper who spent his day bellowing above the street's clamour, the widow who would venture out with her half-starved children to beg in the streets-had simply vanished. Weeks passed before the last of the bodies were recovered.

The stench had been unbearable, toward the end.

She paused on the second floor, peering and blinking. She breathed deep, tasted the earthen rot that soaks into mortar and burnt brick-and felt young, unaccountably young. Of the four doors she could discern, one stood ajar, throwing a lane of grey light across the dirty floor.

She found herself creeping toward it. Despite the crude cloth of her cloak, a kind of fastidious reluctance overcame her, the worry of staining what was fine and beautiful. What was she thinking? She couldn't do this… She had to flee, to race back to the Andiamine Heights. Yes…

She wasn't appropriately dressed.

Yet her legs carried her forward. The door's outer edge drew away like a curtain, revealing the room beyond.

The assassin stood staring out the window, but from the centre of the room, where he could scarce hope to see anything of interest. Indirect light bathed his profile. Aside from a certain solemn density in his manner, nothing about him suggested deceit and murder. The line of his nose and jaw was youthful to the point of appearing effeminate, yet his skin possessed the year-brushed coarseness of someone hard beyond his years. His jet hair was cropped short, which surprised her, since she had thought the assassin-priests always wore their hair long, as long as an Ainoni caste-noble's, but without the braids. His beard was trim, as was the present fashion among certain merchants-something she knew only because fanatical interests in the Ministrate had petitioned her to pass beard laws. His clothing was nondescript. Brown stains marred his earlobes.

She paused at the threshold. When she was a child, she and several other children would often swim in the Sumni harbour. Sometimes they made a game of holding heavy stones underwater and walking across the mud and debris of the bottom. She had the same sense stepping into the room, as if some onerous weight gave her traction, that she would pop from the floor otherwise, breach the surface of this nightmare…

And breathe.

The man did not turn to regard her, but she knew he scrutinized her nonetheless.

"My Exalt-Captain frets below," she finally said, her voice more timid than she wished. "He fears you will murder me."

"He loves you," the Narindar replied, jarring her with memories of her husband. Kellhus was forever repeating her thoughts.

"Yes…" she replied, surprised by a sudden instinct to be honest. To enter into a conspiracy is to commit a kind of adultery, for nothing fosters intimacy more than a shared will to deceive. What does clothing matter, when all else is shrouded? "I suppose he does."

The Narindar turned to regard her. She found his gaze unnerving. Rather than latching upon her, his focus seemed to float over and through her. The result of some ritual narcotic?

"Do you know what I want?" she asked, joining him in the indeterminate light. Her breath had climbed high and tight in her breast. She was doing this. She was seizing fate.

"Murder. To seek the Narindar is to seek murder."

He smelled of mud… mud cooking in the sun.

"I will be plain with you, assassin. I appreciate the peril I represent. I know that even now you hedge, knowing that only something… something extraordinary, could deliver a woman of my exalted station to a man… a man… such as you. But I want you to know, it is honesty that has brought me here, alone… to you. I am simply not willing to see another damned for sins that are my own. I want you to know that you can trust that honesty. No matter what happens, I appreciate that you have placed your very soul upon the balance. I will make you a prince, assassin."

If her words possessed effect, his gaze and expression betrayed none of it.

"Warm blood is the only gold I would hoard, Your Glory. Sightless eyes the only jewels I would covet."

This had the sound of a catechism believed.

"Maithanet," she said on a pent breath. "The Shriah of the Thousand Temples… Kill him, and I shall compel princes — Do you hear me? Princes! — to kneel before you!"

It seemed utter madness, now that the words hung in the air between them. She almost expected the man to cackle aloud, but he grasped his bearded chin and nodded instead.

"Yes," he said. "An extraordinary sacrifice."

"So you will do it?" she asked in unguarded astonishment.

"It is already done."

She recalled what Lord Sankas had said about the Narindar carving events along different joints-the way this very meeting would be of a piece with raising the knife.

"But…"

"There is nothing more to be said, Your Glory."

"But how will I… I…"

She trailed in flustered indecision. How could the world be so greased, so rounded, that matters this weighty could be discharged with such fugitive ease? The Narindar had turned to gaze through the slotted window. She reflexively followed his gaze, saw pillared smoke rising above the motley roofs to the east. Something was happening…

More riots?

She made to leave, but something intangible hooked her at the battered door, turned the tether of her gaze. He stood as if waiting for this very occurrence. He looked both old and young, as if time had lacked the tools to properly craft the clay of his skin. She wondered how she must look to him, furtive beneath her sack-cloth cloak and hood. An Empress cowering from her own Empire.

"What is your name?"

"Issiral."

"Issiral…" she repeated, struggling to recall the meaning of the Shigeki word. "Fate?" she asked, frowning and smiling. "Who named you this?"

"My mother."

"Your mother was cruel, to curse you with such a name."

"We take such gifts as she gives."

Something about this, and about the man's demeanour more generally, had blown terror into her anxiousness. But she reasoned that men who kill for hire-assassins-should be frightening.

"I thought Narindar were devotees of the Four-Horned Brother…"

"Devotion? The Brother cares not for our cares, only that we murder in His Name."

The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas swallowed. That the World could accommodate such men, such designs. That even murder could become worship…

"The Brother and I have that much in common," she said.

The Unaras Spur

Spaceless space… hanging.

Glimpses of slave-girls, shining black and naked save for a single ostrich feather between their thighs. Towering eunuchs, their ceremonial shackles gleaming in the humid gloom. Great beams of wood and bulbous pillars of marble and diorite. Pillows tossed negligently through the pleasure gardens…

The Palace of Plumes.

Soundless sound. Voiceless voice…

"Tell him, Cousin. Tell the cunning Son of Kascamandri. If he succeeds, High Holy Zeum will be as a brother to Kian. We will strike as he strikes, bleed as he bleeds!"

Even as he replied, Malowebi could feel himself toppling backward, plummeting into himself, so much had he dreaded these words. "Yes, Great Satakhan."

The aging Mbimayu sorcerer blinked and coughed, found the infinite nowhere replaced by the squalid confines of his tent-if the wretched thing the Fanim had given him could be called such. He sat cross-legged, the twin mahogany figurines-the fetishes that made possible the Iswazi Cant-squeezed tight in his knobbed fists. He braced his elbows against his knees, buried his face in his hands.

Tomorrow, he decided. He would tell the Padirajah tomorrow.

Tonight he would groan and complain in his canvas cage, toss and obsess-do everything but sleep.

How Likaro would laugh. The ingrate.

After the Zaudunyani conquest of Nilnamesh, Malowebi and his senior Mbimayu brothers had burned whole urns of lantern oil scrutinizing and arguing the madness that was the Aspect-Emperor and the Great Ordeal. Even if their Satakhan had not demanded it, they would have set aside all things to ponder it. For years they had believed that Anasurimbor Kellhus was simply a kind of contagion. For whatever reason, the Three Seas seemed particularly prone to prophets and their tricks. Where Zeum had remained faithful to the old Kiunnat ways, albeit in their own elliptical fashion, the Ketyai-the Tribe entrusted with the Holy Tusk, no less! — seemed bent on tearing down their ancient truths and replacing them with abstraction and fancy. "To better measure their ages," Wobazul had quipped in one of their discussions. Anasurimbor Kellhus, Malowebi and his fellow Mbimayu had assumed, was simply another Inri Sejenus, another gifted charlatan bent on delivering even more of his kinsmen to damnation.

But the man's successes. And the reports, both from Zeum's spies and the Mbimayu's contact with the Schools. The Aspect-Emperor was more than a gifted demagogue, more than a cunning general or sorcerer or tyrant-far more.

The question was what?

So they debated, and debated, as is the wont of wise men pondering questions without obvious answers. Nganka'kull was often criticized for his patience and leniency, but eventually even he tired of their endless delays and demurrals. Finally he summoned his cousin, demanding to know the substance of their disagreements.

"We have considered everything of note," Malowebi reported on a heavy breath. "There is but one clear lesson…"

The Satakhan had perched his chin on his fist, such was the weight of the battle-wig-an heirloom from his beloved grandfather-that he wore. "And what is that?"

"All those who resist him perish."

Word that Imperial Columnaries had occupied the ruins of Auvangshei arrived later that very night-such was the perversity of Fate. The ancient fortress meant very little to Three Seas Men, Malowebi had since discovered. But for the Zeumi, it was nothing less than the sacred threshold of their nation. The one gate in the great wall the World itself had raised about High Holy Zeum.

The Zaudunyani missionaries began arriving shortly afterward, some of them little more than paupers, others disguised as merchants. Then, of course, there was the infamous Embassy of Suicides. And during all this time, Auvangshei was rebuilt and expanded, the provinces of Nilnamesh reorganized along military lines. Their spies even reported the construction of numerous granaries in Soramipur and other western cities.

A kind of war was being waged against them, they realized. At every point of connection between Zeum and the Three Seas-mercantile, diplomatic, geographical-the Aspect-Emperor was preparing in some way.

"He fights us with pins rather than swords!" Nganka'kull exclaimed.

Malowebi had read The Compendium by this time. The book found its way to High Domyot more by accident than anything-or what amounted to the same, the Whore's whim. An Ainoni spice merchant named Parmerses had been seized under suspicion of spying, and the manuscript was discovered among his belongings. Of course, the man was summarily executed once his captors discovered the falsity of the charges against him, long before the importance of the work was understood, so questions regarding the book's provenance remained unanswered.

But once it was read, it was quickly traded among the wise and mighty. Malowebi had been gratified to learn that he was the sixth person to read The Compendium — no less than seven people before that fool, Likaro!

Drusas Achamian's revelations occasioned more than several sleepless nights. The wry humility of the tome, as well as the numerous references to Ajencis, convinced him the exiled Mandate Schoolman was a kindred intellect. The difficulty lay in the sheer audacity of what the Wizard alleged about the Aspect-Emperor: the idea of a man so quick, so cunning, that he, Malowebi, among the foremost sorcerers of his age-greater than Likaro by far-was nothing but a child in comparison. It was a thing too strange to credit. In all of the Kuburu, the accumulated legends of Zeum, the hero's exalted trait was always strength, skill, or passion-never intellect. A miraculously accurate archer. A miraculously ardent lover…

Never a miraculously penetrating thinker, one who used truth as his primary instrument of deception.

But why? Malowebi found himself asking. It was a puzzle that deepened as more and more of his brothers expressed their skepticism of The Compendium. "A cuckold's fancy," Likaro had sneered, thus confirming its veracity in Malowebi's more discriminating eyes.

Why should the notion of a Thought-dancer rest so uneasy in the souls of Men?

Because, the Mbimayu sorcerer realized, they made what they already believed the measure of what others believed. Not the World, and certainly not Reason. This was what rendered them blind to a being such as Anasurimbor Kellhus, one who could play on innumerable strands of thought and weave that agreement into designs of his making. It reminded him of a passage from Ajencis, a thinker he secretly esteemed more than Memgowa: "The world is a circle that has as many centres as it has men." For someone who assumed he was the centre of his world, the thought of a man who occupied the true centre, who need only walk into a room to displace all those present within it, had to be as odious as it was incomprehensible.

Was the Aspect-Emperor a prophet as he claimed? Was he a demon as Fanayal believed-Kurcifra? Or was he inhuman in a more mundane sense, the harbinger of a new race, the Dunyain, dreadful for the symmetry between their strength and human frailty…

A race of perfect manipulators. Thought-dancers.

If he were a prophet, then he and Mandate Schoolmen were right: the Second Apocalypse, despite what all the oracles and priests claimed, was evident, and Zeum should enter into an alliance with him. If he were a demon, then Zeum should arm for immediate war, now, before he achieved his immediate goals, for demons were simply Hungers from the abyss, insatiable in their pursuit of destruction.

And if he were Dunyain?

Malowebi did not believe in prophets. You must first believe in Men before you could do that, and no serious student of Memgowa or Ajencis could do that. Malowebi most certainly believed in possessing demons-he had seen them with his own eyes. But demons, for all their cunning, were never subtle, certainly not to the degree of the Aspect-Emperor. No demon could have written the magisterial lies told in the Novum Arcanum.

Dunyain… whatever that meant. The Aspect-Emperor had to be Dunyain.

The problem, the Mbimayu sorcerer had realized, was that this conclusion in no way clarified the dilemma facing his nation and his people. Would not a Dunyain bend all his effort and power to prevent his own destruction? Even without Drusas Achamian and his allegations, one could easily argue that Anasurimbor Kellhus was among the greatest intellects to walk the earth. What could induce such a man to tip the bowl of the entire Three Seas, drain it to its dregs, in the name of warring against a nursemaid's cruel tale?

Could these truly be the first days of the Second Apocalypse?

Nonsense. Madness.

But…

When his family first yielded him to the Mbimayu, the Pedagogue of the School had been an ancient soul named Zabwiri, a legendary scholar, and a rare true disciple of Memgowa. For whatever reason, the old man had chosen him to be his body-servant for his final, declining years-a fact that some, like Likaro, begrudged him still. An intimacy had grown between them, one that only those who care for the dying can know. The pain had become increasingly difficult for the old man to manage, toward the end. He would sit in his little garden, shivering in the sunlight, while Malowebi hovered helpless about him. "Question me!" he would bark with amiable fury. "Pester me with your infinite ignorance!"

"Master," Malowebi once asked, "what is the path to truth?"

"Ah, little Malo," old Zabwiri had replied, "the answer is not so difficult as you think. The trick is to learn how to pick out fools. Look for those who think things simple, who abhor uncertainty, and who are incapable of setting aside their summary judgment. And above all, look for those who believe flattering things. They are the true path to wisdom. For the claims they find the most absurd or offensive will be the ones most worthy of your attention."

Without fail the Mbimayu sorcerer's heart caught whenever he recalled these words: because he had loved Zabwiri, because of the way this answer embodied the wry, upside-down wisdom of the man. And now, because of the direction they pointed him…

The Aspect-Emperor a genuine prophet? The myths of the No-God's resurrection true?

These were the claims that Likaro found the most absurd and offensive. And in all the world there was no greater fool.

Horns were clawing the sky by the time she tripped clear of the tenement's gloom. Imhailas stood motionless in the middle of the street, his face raised in the blind way of those who peered after sounds.

The horns did not belong to either the Army or the Guard-yet she knew she had heard them before. They blared, climbed high and long enough to flush her heart with cold.

"What happens?" she asked her Exalt-Captain, who had not seen her, such was the intensity of his concentration.

He turned-looked at her with a fear she had never before seen in his face. A soldier's fear, not a courtier's.

"The horns…" he said, obviously debating his words. "The signals… They belong to the Shrial Knights."

Several heartbeats separated her soul from her dread. At first, all she could do was stare up into the man's beautiful face. She thought of the way his eyebrows arched just before he reached his bliss. "What are you saying?" she finally managed to ask.

He looked to what sky they could see between the dark facades looming to either side of them.

"They sound like they're coming from different parts of the city…"

"What are they signalling?"

He stood rigid. Beyond him, she could see several others down the winding length of the street, mulling and listening the same as they did.

"Imhailas! What are they signalling?"

He looked to her, sucked his lips tight to his teeth in an expression of deliberation.

"Attack," he said. "They're coordinating some kind of attack."

Running simply seized her, threw her back the way they had come.

But Imhailas was upon her in a matter of strides, clutching her shoulders, begging her to stop, to think, in hushed and hurried tones.

"Smoke!" she heard herself cry. "From the room! I saw smoke to the east! The palace, Imhailas! They attack the palace!"

But he had known this already. "We have to think," he said firmly. "Calculation is what sorts rash acts from bold."

Another proverb he had memorized. Her hands fairly floated with the urge to scratch out his eyes. Such a fool! How could she conspire, let alone couple, with such a fool?

"Unhand me!" she gasped in fury.

He raised his hands and stepped back. Something in her tone had struck all expression from his face, and a kind of panicked regret joined the terrors flushing through her. Was he deciding where to cast his lots? Would he abandon her? Betray her? Curses spooled through her thoughts. Her foolishness. Fate. The ability of men to so easily slip the leash of feminine comprehension.

"Sweet Seju!" she heard herself cry. " Kelmomas! My boy, Imhailas!"

Suddenly a different horn cawed high above the roaring in her ears, one that she knew from innumerable drills-knew so well that it almost seemed a word shouted across the world. Rally! Guardsmen, Rally!

Then Imhailas was kneeling on the stone before her. "Your Glory!" he said, his voice cast low. "The Imperial Precincts are under attack. What would you have your slave do?"

And at last, reason was returned to her. To act in ignorance was to flail as though falling. Knowledge. They needed to discover what Maithanet was doing and to pray the palace could resist him.

"Keep his Empress safe," she said.

Anasurimbor Kelmomas would never quite understand how he knew. Funny, the way the senses range places the soul cannot follow.

He was playing in his room- pretending to play would be more accurate, since he was far more lost in his plots and fancies than in the crude toys he was supposed to be amused by-when something simply called him out to his balcony onto the Sacral Enclosure…

Where it seemed he could smell whatever it was. His nurse called out after him. He ignored her. He peered about, saw the guardsmen milling as they always milled, the slaves trotting to and fro…

Everything and everyone in their place.

Something bigger had been thrown out of joint, he realized. He turned to gaze down the line of balconies to his right, saw his older sister, Theliopa, wearing a crazed gown with coins hanging heavy from every hem, standing like a bird leaning into the breeze, her senses pricked to the same something he could neither hear nor see.

The sycamores loomed before and above them, each leaf a little whistling kite, forming mops that dipped and murmured in the sunlight. Nothing… He could hear nothing.

Of all his siblings, only Theliopa commanded any fondness in his heart. Kelmomas had never bothered to ponder why this might be. She ignored him for the most part and typically spoke to him only on Mother's behalf. He certainly feared her the least. And despite the time she spent with Mother, he envied her not at all.

She had never seemed quite real, his sister.

Kelmomas gazed at her chipped-porcelain profile, debating whether he should call out to her. He had opened his ears so wide that her gown fairly crashed with sound when she whirled to face him.

"Run-run," she said without any alarm whatsoever. "Find some-some place to hide."

He did not move. He rarely took anything Thelli said seriously, such was his fondness for her. Then he heard it, the first faint shouts breaching the low roar of the sycamores.

The ring and clatter of arms…

"What happens?" he cried, but she had already vanished.

Uncle Holy, the secret voice whispered as he stood witless. He has returned.

Shrial horns continued signalling one another, but, ominously, they heard no more calls from the Eothic Guard aside from the first, single cry. The city seemed deceptively normal, apart from the roofs, which had become packed with onlookers. Traffic filed through the alleys and streets with greater haste, certainly. Momemnites milled here and there, exchanging fears and guesses between eastward glances. But no one panicked-at least not yet. If anything, the city waited, as if it were nothing more than a vast cart, sitting idle while the yoke was bound to a new mule.

For the first time, and with more than a little terror, Esmenet understood the slipperiness of power, the ease with which substitutions could be made, so long as the structure remained intact. When people kissed your knee, it was so easy to think you were the principle that moved them and not the position you happened to occupy. But glancing from face to face-some aged, some poxed, some tender-she realized that she could, if she wished, throw aside her veil, that she had no need whatsoever to disguise herself, simply because she, Esmenet, the Sumni harlot who had lived a life crazed with tumult and detail, literally did not exist for them.

What did it matter, the person hidden behind the palanquin's screens, so long as the bearers were fed?

There was doom in these thoughts, so she shied from them.

The crowds grew, as did the agitation and turmoil. The closer they came to the palace, the more complicated their passage became. Most people fought their way eastward, frantic to escape whatever was happening behind them. Others, the curious and those who, like Esmenet, had kin in the vicinity of the palace, battled their way eastward.

Twice Imhailas stopped to ask aimless Columnaries what happened, and twice he was rebuffed.

No one knew.

Even still, hope wormed ever higher into her throat as they raced, dodged, and shoved. She found herself thinking of her Pillarian and Eothic Guardsmen, how competent, how numerous, and how loyal they seemed. For years she had dwelt among them, thoughtlessly demanding the security they provided but never really appreciating them-until now. They were handpicked, chosen from across the Middle-North for their prowess and fanaticism. They had spent the greater portion of their lives preparing for occasions such as this, she reminded herself. If anything, they lived for just such an eventuality.

They would defend the Imperial Precincts, secure the palace. They would keep her children safe!

Breathless, she imagined them bristling along the walls, arrayed about the gates, glorious in their crimson-and-gold regalia. She saw old Vem-Mithriti standing high upon some parapet, his stooped shoulders pulled back with outrage and indignation, raining down sorcerous destruction. She saw old Ngarau waddling in walrus-armed panic, barking out commands. And her boy-her beautiful boy! — frightened, yet too young not to be exhilarated, not to think this some kind of glorious game.

Yes! The Gods would not heap this calamity upon her. She had paid their bloodthirsty wages!

The World would rally…

But the smoke climbed ever higher as they raced through the ever more raucous streets, until she felt she stared up into a tree for craning her neck. The faces of those fleeing became ever more sealed, more intent. The roaring-shouts from the crowded rooftops, from the seething streets-seemed to grow louder and louder.

"The Palace burns!" one old crone cried immediately next to her. "The Empress-Whore is dead! Dead! "

And in the crash of hope into dismay, she remembered: the Gods hunted her and her children.

The White-Luck had turned against them.

At last they pressed their way free of the slotted streets onto the Processional with its broad views.

Were it not for Imhailas and his strength, the mobs would have defeated her, prevented her from seeing the catastrophe with her own eyes. He pulled her by the wrists, cursing and shoving, and she followed with the pendulum limbs of a doll. Then suddenly they were clear, panting, among the crowd's forward ranks.

A cohort of unmounted Shrial Knights guarded the bridges crossing the Rat Canal-as much to police the mob, it seemed, as to ward against any attempt to retake the Imperial Precincts. The fortifications rising beyond were deserted. She glimpsed pockets of battle here and there across the climbing jumble of structure that composed the Andiamine Heights: distant figures vying, their swords catching the sun. Smoke poured in liquid ribbons from the Allosium Forum. Three other plumes climbed from places unseen beyond the palace.

Imhailas need not say anything. The battle was over. The New Empire had been overthrown in the space of an afternoon.

Planning, she realized. An assault this effective required meticulous planning…

Time.

The Empress of the Three Seas stood breathless, an errant hand held to her veil, gazing at the loss of everything she had known for the past twenty years. The theft of her power. The destruction of her home. The captivity of her children. The overturning of her world.

Fool…

A thought like a cold draft in a crypt.

Such a fool!

Vying against Anasurimbor Maithanet. Crossing swords with a Dunyain-who knew the folly of this better than she?

She turned to Imhailas, who stood as immobile and aghast as she. "We…" she murmured, only to trail. "We have to go back…"

He looked down into her eyes, squinted in confusion.

"We have to go back!" she cried under her breath. "I'll… I'll throw myself at his feet! Beg for mercy! Seju! Seju! I have to do something!"

He cast a wary glance across those packed close about them.

"Yes, Your Glory," he said intently, speaking below the mob's rumble. "You must do something. This is treason. Sacrilege! But if you deliver yourself to him, you will be executed — do you understand? He cannot afford your testimony!"

Threads of light tangled and distorted his face. She was blinking tears. When had she started weeping?

Since coming to Kellhus's bed, it seemed. Since abandoning Akka…

"All the more reason for you to leave me, Imhailas. Flee… while you still can."

A smiling frown creased his face.

"Damnation doesn't agree with me, Holy Empress."

Another one of his quotations… She sobbed and laughed in exasperation.

"I am not asking, Imhailas. I am commanding… Save yourself!"

But he was already shaking his head.

"This I cannot do."

She had always thought him a fop, a thick-fingered dandy. She had always wondered what it was that Kellhus had seen in him, to raise him so high so fast. As a courtier, he could be almost comically timid-always bowing and scraping, stumbling over himself in his haste to execute her wishes. But now… Now she could see Imhailas as he really was…

A warrior. He was-at his pith-a true warrior. Defeat did not break his heart so much as stir his blood.

"You don't know, Imhailas. You don't know… Maithanet… the way I know him."

"I know that he is cunning and treacherous. I know that he pollutes the Holy Office your husband has given to him. Most of all, I know you have already done what you needed to do.

"I… I…" She trailed, wiped her nose, and squinted up at him. "What are you saying?"

"You have loosed the Narindar…"

He was inventing his rationale as he spoke: she could see this in his inward gaze, hear it in his searching tone. He would stand by her side, die for her, not for any tactical or even spiritual reason, but because sacrificing his strength on the altar of higher things was simply what he did.

This was why Kellhus had given him to her.

"All that remains is to wait," he continued, warming to the sense of what he said. "Yes… We must hide and wait. And when the Narindar strikes… All will be chaos. Everyone will be casting about, searching for authority. That's when you reveal yourself, Your Glory!"

She so wanted to believe him. She so wanted to pretend that the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples was not a Dunyain.

"But my boy! My daughter!"

"Are children of your husband… The Aspect-Emperor."

Anasurimbor Kellhus.

Esmenet gasped, so sudden was her understanding. Yes. He was right. Maithanet would not dare to kill them. Not so long as Kellhus lived. Even so far from the northern wastes, they dwelt in the chill shadow of the Holy Aspect-Emperor's power. As did all Men.

"Hide…" she repeated. "But how? Where? They are all against me, Imhailas! Inrithi. Yatwerians…"

And yet, even as she voiced these fears, implications began assembling about the mere fact of her husband. This, she realized. This was why Kellhus had left her the Imperial Mantle.

She did not covet it. How could one covet what one despised?

"Not me, Your Glory. Nor any Guardsmen living, I assure you."

Kellhus would succeed and he would return-he always conquered. Even Moenghus, his father, could not overcome him… Kellhus would return, and when he did, there would be a horrible accounting.

Imhailas clasped her hands in his own. "I know of a place…"

She need only live long enough to see it done.

He will come back for us!

She made a litany of this thought as they fled back into the city proper.

Kellhus will return!

When despair reeled through her, the sense of skidding backward into doom…

He will return!

When she imagined Theliopa, sitting rigid in her room, staring into her hands as Maithanet's shadow darkened the threshold…

He will! He will!

When she saw Maithanet kneel before Kelmomas, grasp his slender shoulders between his hands…

He will kill him with his own hands!

And it seemed she could see him, her glorious husband, stepping from spiking light to stride across the city, calling out his brother's treacherous name. And it pulled her breath sharp, wound her teeth tight, stretched her lips into an animal grin…

The fury of his judgment.

Then she found herself in a lantern-lit foyer, standing and blinking while Imhailas muttered in low tones to an armed man even taller than he was. The tile-work, the frescoed ceiling, everything possessed an air of opulence, but a false one, she quickly realized, seeing the grimed corners and grouting, the myriad chips and cracks-details that shouted an inability to support slaves.

Then Imhailas was leading her up marble stairs. She wanted to ask him where they were, where they were going, but she could not speak around the confusion that bloated through her. At last they gained a gloomy corridor. Her breathlessness-years had passed since she had last travelled such distances on foot-became a sense of floating suffocation.

She stood blinking while he hammered on a broad wooden door. She scarcely glimpsed the face, dark and beautiful, that anxiously greeted him. A room beyond, yellow-painted, dimly illuminated.

"Imma! Sweet Seju! I was wor-"

"Naree! Please!" the Exalt-Captain cried, shouldering the woman back, hustling Esmenet into the dimly lit interior without begging permission.

He shut the door behind them, turned to the two astounded women.

The girl was no taller than Esmenet, but she was darker of complexion, younger. And beautiful. Very beautiful. Despite her appearance and accent, it was actually her costume, a gaudy, glass-beaded affair, that made Esmenet realize this… this Naree… was Nilnameshi.

Naree, for her part, appraised Esmenet with open distaste.

"This will cost you, Imma…" she said skeptically.

And Esmenet understood-the tone as much as anything else. Naree was a whore.

Imhailas had brought her to his whore.

"Stop playing the fool and grab her a bowl of water!" he cried, grabbing Esmenet by the shoulders, guiding her to a battered settee. Her eyes could not make sense of the room relative to the movements of her body-everything whirled. Breathless. Why was she so breathless?

Then she was sitting, and her Exalt-Captain was kneeling before her.

"Who is she?" Naree asked, returning with water.

Imhailas raised the bowl for her to drink. "She's not… not right … The day…"

Naree stared, her face slack in the way of long-time victims assessing threats. Her eyes popped wide, rings of shining white about dark, dark irises. She was a whore: innumerable silver kellics had passed through her hands, each bearing the image of the woman before her.

"Sweet Mother of Birth-it's you!"

A wave crashed through the Andiamine Heights, swirling into the corridors, rising ever higher, foaming blood. It battered down doors. It threw itself howling into braced mobs of Eothic Guardsmen. It clutched welling wounds, grunting and crying out. It slumped dying in the corners of raucous rooms.

Slipping through hollow walls, the young Prince-Imperial tracked its grim progress. He watched men hacking and grappling, murdering in the name of symbol and colour. He saw flames leap from ornament to ornament. He watched astounded slaves beaten-and, in one instance, raped. And it seemed a miracle that he could be alone while witnessing such heroism and atrocity.

Never had the end of the world been so much fun.

He knew full well what he witnessed-a coup, nearly flawless in its execution. The fall of the Andiamine Heights. He knew that his Uncle would rule the Empire ere the day was done and that his mother would either be a captive or a fugitive…

If he did not think of the unthinkable consequence-that she would be executed — it was because he knew he was responsible, and nothing he authored could lead to anything so disastrous.

He had made this happen-there was a clenching glee to this thought, an elation that at times barked as a laugh from his lungs, such was its intensity. And it seemed the Palace itself became his model, the replica he had decided to break and burn. Uncle Holy, for all his danger, was but one more tool…

He was the God here. The Four-Horned Brother.

Wires of smoke coiled beneath the vaults, hazed the gilded corridors. Slaves and costumed functionaries fled. Armoured men rallied, charged, and grappled, as colourful as new toys: the gold on white surcoats of the Shrial Knights, the crimson of the Eothic Guard, the gold on green of the Pillarians. He watched a company of these latter defend the antechambers to the Audience Hall. Time and again they broke the Knights of the Tusk who assailed them, killing so many they began using their bodies as improvised barricades. Only when the Inchausti, the bodyguard of the Holy Shriah himself, assaulted them were the fanatics finally overcome.

Their willingness to die left Kelmomas breathless. For him, he realized. They sacrificed themselves for him and his family…

The fools.

He glimpsed or watched a dozen such melees moving down the Heights, isolated pockets of violence, the Palace's defenders always outnumbered, always fighting to the desperate last. He listened to the curses and catcalls they traded, the Shrial Knights beseeching their foes to surrender, to yield the "Mad Whore," the Pillarians and guardsmen promising doom and damnation for their foe's treachery.

Exploring the Palace's lower tracts, below the rising tide of battle, he saw rooms and corridors strewn with dead, and he witnessed the savagery that so often leaps into the void of power overthrown. He watched one of his mother's Apparati, an Ainoni named Minachasis, rape and strangle a slave-girl-assuming the crime would be attributed to the invaders, the astonished boy supposed.

And then there were the looters, Shrial Knights-pairs usually-who found themselves happily separated from their companies, ranging halls they believed already cleared. Kelmomas found one solitary fool rummaging through a room in the Apparatory, rending the mattress, rifling the wardrobe, hacking open a small chest and kicking the baubles he found in disgust.

The room was windowless, so the boy peered through a ventilation grill tucked high in a corner. He watched with fascination, realizing that he witnessed avarice in its purest, most impatient form. It almost seemed a mummer's act, as if a starving ape had been dressed in Shrial regalia, then sent scavenging for the amusement of unseen patrons.

Even before he realized his intent, Kelmomas began snuffling audibly-weeping the way a frightened little boy might. The Knight of the Tusk fairly jumped clear out of his hauberk and surcoat, such was his surprise. He whirled from side to side. Several heartbeats passed before he mastered his alarm and listened-before he realized it was a child that he heard-someone harmless. A leering smile cracked his beard.

"Shush," he drawled, scanning the high corners, for he had realized the sound came from above. The Prince-Imperial continued weeping, making the sounds of a derelict child. His face ached for the manic ferocity of his grin.

The sounds hooked the man's gaze. He kicked a chair to the corner. Mounted it.

"Moh-moh-mommeeee!" the boy sobbed, hitching his voice into a high whine.

The man's face loomed before the iron fretting, darkened by its own shadow. His breath reeked of cheap liquor…

The crawlspace was so cramped that Kelmomas bungled his strike, driving his skewer through the man's pupil rather than his tear duct. Strange sensation that-like popping the skin of a grape. The man's face clenched about the intrusion, a fist without fingers. He toppled, fell flat on his back, where he jerked in a strange parody of a fool's caper.

Like a beetle flicked onto his back.

Look at him! the secret voice chortled.

"Yes!" Kelmomas cackled. He even clapped his hands, such was his raw delight.

Afterward, when night fell and silence hardened the acrid air, he toured the labyrinth of small battlefields, taking care lest he track bloody footprints across the expansive floors. He had thought he would find glory wandering among the dead, but all he witnessed were its dregs. Nothing remained of the desperation, the shouts and cries of mortal struggle. There was no distinguishing the heroic from the craven. The dead were dead, utterly helpless and invulnerable. The more he counted them, the more they seemed to laugh.

Eventually he stood marooned, silence pricking his ears.

"Mommy?" he finally dared call. The dead did not so much as twitch.

At long last his face-cracking grin faded…

And a weeper's grimace rose to take its place.

There had been a heartbeat, upon awakening, when nothing seemed amiss, where she need only blink and stretch and groan her morning groan to summon her body-slaves and their soothing ministrations. A heartbeat…

But horror, true horror, dwells in the body as much as the soul. She needed only to raise her arms to recall the madness of the previous day. The pinioned breath. The curious mismatch between motion and effort, as if her sinews had become sand, her bones lead. The seashell roar.

Lying prostrate across a narrow cot, the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas plummeted and plummeted, clutching at thoughts too sharp with fingers too cold. Fumbling with knives…

The palace lost.

Her husband betrayed.

Kelmomas…

Sweet little Kelmomas!

She tried curling into a ball, tried weeping, but tears and sobs seemed things too heavy to be moved, so frail had her innards become. A crazed, floating restlessness inhabited her instead, where the most she could do was throw her limbs, flop them this way and that, like things, dead things, continually in the way of themselves. But even this effort defeated her, so she lay motionless, thrashed within, as if she were a greased worm, writhing against appendages too slippery to hold.

"Please…" a girlish voice whispered. "Your Glory…"

Esmenet opened her eyes, blinking. Even though she had yet to weep, she could fell the itch of swollen lids.

Naree knelt next to the cot, her large eyes round with fear, her luxurious hair hanging in sheets about her plump cheeks. The far window shone white over her shoulder, gleamed across the yellow-painted walls. "I n-need you to stay h-here," the girl said, tears spilling down her cheeks. She was terrified, Esmenet realized-as she should be. Imhailas had delivered a burden she could not bear. "Just-just stay here, yes? Keep your face… your face to the wall."

Without a word the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas turned from the girl, toward the cracked paint and plaster. What else was there to do?

Watches passed, and she did not move, not until the need to make water overpowered her. Only her listening roamed…

Between uncertain faces. Beneath damp sheets.

"Who is that?"

"My mother…"

"Mother?"

"Pay her no heed."

"But I will!"

"No… Please… Heed this instead."

Four different men visited the girl, but they seemed one and same creature in Esmenet's ears. The same half-hearted flatteries, carnal witticisms. The same nostril-pinching intakes of breath. The same moans and giggles. The same rasp of grinding hair. The same cries. The same liquid drumbeat.

Only the stench varied.

And it repelled her, even as her inner thighs grew slick. It shamed her. To conjure the miracle of intimacy, to become one breathless creature while still wearing the skin of strangers.

She coupled with them anew that afternoon, all the men she had known as a harlot. She saw them skulking in from the open streets, their eyes clouded with need, offering silver instead of wooing, proving, loving. She laughed as she teased, gagged as she choked, huddled beneath the apish rage of the impotent, gasped beneath the slow stir of the beautiful. She gloated over coins, dreamed of the food she would buy, the cloth.

She wept for the loss of her Empire.

There was a lull after the fourth man departed. The clatter and shout of the street climbed through the unshuttered windows, rang with the stark clarity of plastered walls and tiled floors. A man with a cracked voice bellowed, boasting the curative power of his sulphured cider. A dog snarled and barked, obviously old and frightened.

Esmenet finally turned from the wall, her bladder so full she could scarce contain herself. Even after all this time, the room was a mystery to her. It was far larger than any room Esmenet had been able to afford in Sumna, but then, for all her beauty, she had not been an outlander like Naree, and Sumna had never seen the wealth that had concentrated in Momemn since Kellhus's rise to power. Two windows looked onto the sun-drenched facade of the tenement across the street-one housing more prostitutes, she realized, glimpsing two pale-skinned Norsirai girls sitting on sills. The far window illuminated a small scullery: a water basin upon a wooden counter, a standing amphorae, pottery-stacked shelves, and various herbs hanging to dry. The near window showered light across Naree's bed, which was a broad, extravagant affair constructed of black-lacquered mahogany. Esmenet's cot was set parallel to the bed on the far side of the door.

The girl lay naked across the tangled covers, staring from the ridge of her pillow. The fugitive Empress of the Three Seas gazed back with numb urgency. She knew the exhaustion in Naree's eyes, the dull throb of her sex, the faint pinch of seed drying across bare skin, the peculiar sense of having survived. She knew the disjoint chorus that was the girl's soul: the voice counting coins, the voice fending against despair, the voice flinching from the fact of what had just happened-and the voice urging her to betray her Empress.

Naree was broken-that much was certain. Even the priestesses of Gierra, who sold themselves with the sanction of god and temple, were broken. To sell intimacy is to be turned inside out, to make a cloak of your heart, so that others might be warmed. A soul could only be inverted so many times before it all became confused, inside and outside.

Broken. Esmenet could see the cracks floating in her watery gaze. The only real question was one of how. Selling peaches did not so much rob a soul of trust or dignity or compassion as it robbed these words of their common meaning. Naree believed in trust, jealously guarded her dignity, felt compassion-but in ways utterly peculiar to her.

"I need to pee," Esmenet finally said.

"Sorry-sorry-sorry!" the girl cried, leaping from her bed. She ran to the screen that flanked her settee. She pulled back one of the faded embroidered panels and, with a mummer's flourish, revealed a white porcelain chamber pot. Esmenet thanked her sheepishly.

"Nareeee!" an accented voice cried from out-of-doors-one of the Galeoth girls hanging her thighs from a window opposite. "Nareeee! Who dat you hat wit you?"

"Mind your own sheets!" the Nilnameshi girl cried, hastening to close the shutters on the near window.

The whore cackled the way Esmenet had heard countless times before. "Brooshing rugs, eh?"

Fairly in a terror, Naree explained how they all kept their windows unshuttered when attending to their custom-for safety.

"I know," Esmenet said. "I used to do the same."

Suddenly she realized the impossibility of her circumstance. Naree, like most people of hale heart, knew all her neighbours and was known by them. Esmenet knew first-hand the way city-dwellers roped themselves into small tribes and villages, caring for one another, envying, spying, hating.

More shutters clattered and the room darkened while she attended to her bladder. When she stepped from behind the screen she found Naree in the gloom, still naked, sitting cross-legged on her bed weeping. Without thinking she took the girl's slender shoulders in her arms, pulled her into a mother's embrace.

"Shush," the Holy Empress said.

She thought of the famine, the way Mimara had seemed to retreat further into her bones with every passing day. She thought of the way she had torn in two, walking with her to the slavers in the harbour. The hum of disbelief. The goad of numb necessity. The little fingers clasping hers in anxious trust.

And she wished, with a violence that rolled her eyes, that she had simply held on to those bones, folded them within the squalid circle of her own… and died with her only daughter. Mimara.

The one thing unsold.

"I understand."

How long had it been since she had kept company with her past?

Esmenet sat with the girl until the glaring white lines that etched the shutters paled to grey. Naree did not know her age, only that five years had passed since her flowering. She had been raised a yitarissa, a ritual harem-slave popular among the Nilnameshi caste-nobility. Her owner had possessed estates both in Invishi, where they wintered, and in the Hinayati Mountains, where they spent the plague months of summer. She had loved him fiercely. Apparently he was a gentle, caring man, one who lavished her with gifts to atone for the inevitable injuries he inflicted on her. The great catastrophe in her life-her year zero-came with her first bleeding. Rather than sell her to a brothel, as was the fate of most yitarissa, her owner set her free. Almost immediately she became the mistress of another caste-noble, a trade representative who had been sent to Momemn almost four years ago. He was the one who had purchased the yellow room and its sumptuous furnishings. Naree loved him as well, but when his year-long tenure expired, he simply moved his wife and household back to Invishi without saying a word.

She began selling herself almost immediately.

Esmenet found herself listening with two souls: the one, the old whore, almost contemptuous of the cozened luxury that had characterized so much of the girl's life; the other, the aging mother, horrified at the way she had been used and cast away, only to be used and cast away again.

"I want to help you!" the girl cried. "Imma, he… he… I…"

Thus is cruelty always explained away. A life of suffering. A life where simple survival seems an unaccountable risk. A life too damaged to countenance heroism.

Esmenet tried to imagine what she would have done those years had one of her customers come to her with a fugitive of any description-let alone the Empress of the Three Seas. She wanted to think she would be fearless, generous, but she knew that she would do what Fate demanded all prostitutes do: betray in the name of survival.

Only Akka could have coaxed such a risk from her, she realized.

Only love.

Suddenly she understood the girl's torment. Naree loved Imhailas. She had made him the sum of her simple hopes. Were he just another man, she would have resorted to the grim, guarded manner that prostitutes typically use to distance people they were forced to hurt. But he was not. And he had come to her demanding a mortal favour.

People had died-people were dying — because of her, Anasurimbor Esmenet. From this moment on, she realized, she had become a mortal risk to anyone who so much as glimpsed her without alerting the Shrial Knights. From this moment on, she was the most sought-after fugitive in all the Three Seas.

"Please!" Naree cried, her voice piteous for her accent. " Please! Blessed Empress! You must find some other place! You-you're not-not… safe here! There are too many people!"

But Naree, she knew, wasn't simply asking her to hide elsewhere. The girl was asking her to take responsibility for leaving as well, so that she might salvage her relationship with Imhailas.

And were it not for her children, Esmenet probably would have done exactly as she asked.

"Why?" a masculine voice asked from behind them. Both women gasped, started violently enough to pop some joint in the bed. Imhailas stood by the door, cloaked as before, staring at Naree in naked outrage. The combination of gloom and surprise made him seem an apparition. "Why are we not safe?"

The girl instantly dropped her eyes-some habit from her childhood bondage, Esmenet supposed. Imhailas strode around the bed, glaring in fury. The floorboards creaked beneath his booted feet. The girl continued staring down in submissive immobility.

"What is this?" he snapped, tugging at the blanket she had pulled about her shoulders. The girl caught an exposed breast with a forearm. "You've been taking custom?" he cried in low, incredulous tones.

"Imma!" she called, at last looking up. Tears streamed from her eyes.

The blow was sudden, hard enough to send the slight girl rolling across the mattress. Imhailas hauled her upright, pinned her writhing against the wall before Esmenet could find her voice, let alone her feet. The girl clawed at the hand about her throat, gurgled and gagged. The Exalt-Captain pulled his knife, raised the point before her wide and rolling eyes.

"Should I send you to them now?" he grated. "Should I let the Hundred judge you now, while you still stink for rutting before your Holy Empress! Should I send you to them polluted?"

Esmenet circled behind him as if through a dream. When did I become so slow? a vague portion of her soul wondered. When had the world become so fast?

She raised a palm to the wrist of the choking hand. Imhailas looked to her, his eyes wild and bright and clouded with the madness that is the terror of all women. He blinked, and she watched him catch himself from the murderous brink.

"Shush, Imma," she said, using the diminutive of his name for the first time. She met his astounded gaze with a warm smile. "Your Blessed Empress, remember, happens to be an old whore."

The Exalt-Captain released the naked girl, who slumped to the tiles, gagging and weeping. He stepped back.

Esmenet crouched over the girl, hesitated, her soul caught on the humming threshold of compassion.

Your children! she thought with a kind of inward torsion. No enemy is so relentless as a forgiving nature. Kelmomas! Remember him!

"I'm your Empress, Naree… Do you know what that means?"

Esmenet reached toward Imhailas, gestured for his knife. His palms are hotter than mine, she thought as her fingers closed about the warm leather of the grip.

Even skinned in tears, there was something crisp and vigilant about the girl's eyes, a troubling alacrity in the way they clicked from the shining blade to Esmenet's own gaze. As young as she was, Esmenet realized, Naree was an inveterate survivor.

"It means," Esmenet said, her smile as warm and motherly as the knife's edge was wicked, "that your life-your life, Naree-belongs to me."

The girl swallowed and nodded with the same air of learned submission.

Esmenet pressed the knife's point against the soft curve of her throat.

"Your soul," the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas continued, "belongs to my husband."

"Maithanet has loosed an army of priests across the city," Imhailas said, leaning back in exhaustion across the battered settee. Naree, now robed and almost comically meek, sat cross-legged on the floor at his feet, holding up a bowl of watered wine in yet another pose of ritual subservience. Esmenet sat on the corner of her cot watching them, hunched forward with her elbows on her thighs. The world beyond the shutters had gone black. A single lantern illuminated the room, casting haphazard shadows through ochre gloom.

"Criers," the Exalt-Captain continued, "only decked in full vestments, swinging censers on staffs…" His eyes latched on to Esmenet in the gloom, the lamplight reflected in two shining white dots low on his irises. "He's saying you've gone mad, Your Glory. That you- you! — have betrayed your husband."

The words winded her, even though she was entirely unsurprised. Maithanet need not be Dunyain to understand the importance of legitimacy.

Kellhus had explained nations and polities to her, how they worked like the Cironji automata so prized by the more fashionable caste-nobility. "All states are raised upon the backs of men," he had told her after the final capitulation of High Ainon. "Their actions, the things they do, day in and day out, connect like wheels and cogs, from the stonemason to the tax-farmer to the body-slave. And all actions are raised upon the back of belief. When men turn from their beliefs, they turn from their actions, and the entire mechanism fails."

"So this is why I must lie?" she asked, watching him from her pillow.

He smiled the way he always did when she missed his mark in a penetrating manner. "No. To think in these terms, Esmi, is to think honesty is the decision that confronts you."

"What is the decision, then?"

He shrugged. "Effectiveness. The masses will always be mired in falsehood. Always. Each man will think he believes true, of course. Many will even weep for the strength of their conviction. So if you speak truth to their deception, they will call you liar and cast you from power. The ruler's only recourse is to speak oil, to communicate in ways that facilitate the machine. Sometimes this oil will be truth, perhaps, but more often it will be lies."

Speaking oil. Of all the analogies he used to illustrate the deeper meaning of things, none would trouble her quite so much. None would remind her so much of Achamian and his fateful warning.

"But…"

"How did I rise to power?" he asked, seeing her thoughts as always. A rueful smile, as if remembering escapades best forgotten. "Men make what they already believe the measure of what is true or false. What they call 'reason' is simply apology. The masses will always believe false because the fancy of their forefathers is always their rule. I rose to power by giving them truths, little truths, for which they possessed no rule, one after the other. I chased the unthought implications of what they already believed, gaining ever more legitimacy, until, eventually, men made me their one and only rule. Insurrection, Esmi. I waged a long, hard insurrection. The petty overthrow of petty assumptions precedes all true upheavals of belief."

"So you lied?"

A small smile. "I guided. I guided them to a lesser falsehood."

"Then what is the truth?"

He had laughed, shining as if anointed in oil.

"You would call me a liar if I told you," he had said.

Both Imhailas and Naree stared at her in anxious expectation, and it seemed a miracle to her, that she could be so powerless in fact, and yet hold souls such as these in her thrall-simply because they believed she possessed power over them. The way countless thousands believed, she realized.

Maithanet had removed the New Empire's head-her. Now he was simply doing what any usurper would: speaking oil. He had to give the masses an excuse to continue acting in all the old ways. Otherwise all the wheels and cogs would cease turning in concert, and the entire mechanism would come crashing down. Every palace revolt took this form.

Only the precision and alacrity of his execution distinguished him as Dunyain.

"The people will never believe him!" Imhailas finally cried when she failed to speak. "I am sure of it!"

A wave of resignation washed over her. "Yes," she said, dropping her forehead into her palm. "They will."

His story was simple enough-believable enough. The machine was broken, and he, Maithanet, was the Chosen Tinker.

"How? How could they?"

"Because he has reached them first."

The three of them soaked in the implications of this disastrous fact.

One could not dwell in the presence of Anasurimbor Kellhus as long as she had without developing an acute awareness of one's own soul: the thoughts, the passions, and, most importantly, the patterns. If she lacked insight before, it was simply because she had occupied the centre of power for so long. Nothing so deadens the inner eye as habit.

But now… Maithanet had obliterated everything she had known, and it seemed she could see herself with a peculiar lucidity. The fugitive Empress. The bereaved mother. The cycling of dismay, desolation, hatred, and a curious in-between, a sense as relentless as it was numb. The going-through-the-motions of survival.

Numbness. This was the only strength she possessed, so she strained to hold on to it.

"He's calling himself the Imperial Custodian," Imhailas continued, his eyes tearing for frustration and disgust.

"What of the Army?" Esmenet heard herself ask. Only the pain in her throat told her the importance of this question.

As anxious and solemn as he had appeared before, Imhailas looked to her with outright horror now.

"They say Anthirul has met with him in Temple Xothei," he said, "that the traitor has publicly kissed his knee."

Esmenet wanted to lash out in crazed fury, to punish petty things for the epic injustices she had suffered. She wanted to shriek in imperious outrage, heap loathing and curses upon General Anthirul-everyone who had surrendered their capricious loyalty…

But she found herself looking at Naree upon the floor below Imhailas instead. The girl glanced at her-a bright, almost animal look-only to turn away in terror. The girl was trembling, Esmenet realized. Only the palm and arm she held posed to receive Imhailas's wine-bowl remained motionless.

And the Holy Empress of the Three Seas tasted something she had not known since the crazed day she had led her daughter to the slavers in the harbour so many years before.

Defeat.