The white-luck warrior

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

Some journeys required immobility.

He took a room and waited weeks he had already endured. He did not prepare so much as tarry while the world grew ripe. He was the White-Luck Warrior…

His harvest would come as it came.

Every morning, he watched himself rise and leave the room for the final time. He chased his back about corners, between the intersecting crowds. An apple found him. A coin. A priest of Jukan, who gave him bread smudged with blue. He heard the people talking in the streets, voice piled upon voice, and he had difficulty sorting reasons from conclusions. He listened, and listened to his listening. Most people were oblivious, but some saw him with different eyes. A little girl shrieked and shrieked. A blind beggar clasped him about the knees, blubbering.

"You must give! Give!"

Sometimes he gazed out the lone window, where he could see the Cmiral Temple-complex in the near distance, the black monuments grey in the morning haze. Sometimes the stone reaches were empty, sometimes they were packed with rioting multitudes.

Sometimes he simply watched himself gaze out the window.

He saw the Andiamine Heights, the gleaming rooftops rising in a welter, the walls, sometimes white in the sun, sometimes smeared black for burning. He heard the horns call, realized what he had always known.

The woman he had murdered had been overthrown.

He saw a spider skitter across the floorboards, knew that the world was its web. He almost stepped upon it ten thousand times. Almost, again and again…

He awoke and saw himself dressing at the foot of his rack. He watched himself rise and leave the room for the final time. He did not prepare so much as tarry while the world grew ripe.

A prostitute accosted him, and the band of naked skin from her armpit to her thigh drew the eye of the Shrial Knight who had singled him out for questioning. She caught something in his look and became instantly disinterested-called out to a gang of four young men instead. He passed into the Cmiral unnoticed. Looking about, he glimpsed his back climbing the monumental steps beneath the Temple Xothei. He saw the unwitting assembly, heard the howls of horror and disbelief. He wiped the blood already wiped from his blade, then stood gazing at the Empress, who was both dead and alive, triumphant and condemned.

He heard the drums of the enemy, pounding from beyond the great curtain walls.

He saw the world roar and shake.

A prostitute accosted him…

If he were to pause and think about it, young Anasurimbor Kelmomas would understand that his knowledge of the Palace was as intimate as imaginable. Only places that puzzled could be truly solved-which is to say, truly understood. Other places were merely known through the brute fact of their familiarity.

The Andiamine Heights had many ways… secret, sneaky ways.

Like the mirrors hidden throughout the Audience Hall, or the way he need only move his head the span of a hand to overhear conversations in different rooms of the Apparatory-such was the ingenuity of the passages that passed over and between them. Once he became adept at picking the locks that barred so much of the maze's extent, he truly came to appreciate the cunning that animated its design-his father's cunning. Many passages linked to others, allowing for rapid movements so that one could seem to be in two places at the same time. Some of the barred slots and chutes and tunnels allowed parts of the labyrinth to be itself observed, so that one could fool another into speaking confidences for the benefit of a third. And some allowed the same room to be observed from secondary vantages unknown to the first, so that one could pretend to be ignorant of a transaction and so test the veracity of another. Together the myriad ways combined and combined to create untold permutations. Were the Shrial Knights to discover him, flood the tunnels, they would require a hundred companies to flush him in a direction not of his choosing. And he would be able to prey upon them as a spider upon beetles.

He had become a creature of the darkness.

Even in the days of the Nansurium, the Andiamine Heights had been a piling of ascending powers, a place where blood and might became ever more concentrated as one neared the summit. From the temples and the campuses to the Apparatory, to the myriad chambers pertaining to the Congregate and the Remonstrata, to the Imperial Audience Hall and the adjacent apartments where he and his family dwelt. Since he could remember, Kelmomas had always prided himself on the height of his footing, the way he always looked down upon the teeming city. But that had been nothing more than a vain farce. Power, he now understood, turned more upon the penetration of places seen by places invisible. Inside and outside, rather than high and low.

The reconstruction, Mother once told him, had required a thousand slaves labouring for more than five years. She had never explained what had happened to the workmen, which suggested that she knew but was loathe to tell him. Kelmomas sometimes regaled himself with tales of their death, how they had been herded onto ships that were then scuttled on the high Meneanor, or how they had been dragged to the auction and sold to Father's confederates, who then had them strangled on their various plantation estates. Sometimes it was not enough to simply skulk in the shadows. Sometimes eyes had to be put out to remain hidden.

Father had managed to contain the secret of his labyrinth: the fact that no one so much as sounded the hidden halls after the Palace's fall proved that even Uncle Holy knew nothing of them (or that if he did, he wished to keep the secret of their existence as his own). Almost as soon as the assault was concluded, the boy began waiting for the inevitable charge into the tunnels, the raucous surge of torch-bearing men. A charge that never came…

No one so much as called for him.

The Shrial Knights returned the following day and began clearing the dead.

Then the slaves came, scrubbing blood from marble floors and walls. Sopped carpets were rolled into tree trunks and dragged away. Fire- and smoke-damaged furnishings were carried out in antlike trains. Censers were set throughout the halls, billowing violet-grey smoke: a haphazard collection of incenses that spoke more of availability than design. Soon the reek of offal-Kelmomas would have never guessed that shit would be the primary smell of battle-receded into his sensory background.

In a matter of days, it seemed the coup had never happened. And it began to seem a game, playing fugitive in the hollow bones of his own home. Everything was pretend. All he need do, he told himself, is cry out and his mother would come soothing and laughing…

"Let's just play," he would tell the secret voice.

A little while longer…

The lower, administrative portions of the Palace resumed their previous functions. At first Kelmomas crept through the glare and boom of these precincts, his whole body prickling for fear of discovery. But soon he became so bold as to run through these passages, listening to the wax and wane of voices. A mere company of Shrial Knights had been assigned to guard and patrol the abandoned upper levels. He passed through their very midst, watching, hearing, even smelling. He saw them gamble, spit, or blow snot across the grand rugs. He watched one abuse himself in his mother's wardrobe. He silently cackled at their stupidity, poked their images in hate. When he retreated to safer depths, he would mimic their voices, then laugh at the echoes.

He scuttled and he scuttled, stealing glimpses through white slits, catching conversations on drafts. And after a time the darkness became what seemed real, and the illuminated world became naught but a congregation of impotent phantoms. He would exult, revel in the joy that is secrecy and deceit.

But no matter how hard-hard-hard he tried, he could only hold on to the fun for so long. Sometimes it would slip away drip by drip, boredom accumulating like knotted hair in a brush. He would bump around feeling hollow, doing his best to battle his stinging eyes and quivering lips. Other times it would drop from him entire, and he would find himself stranded where he stood, hands clenching air, throat cramping, face aching.

And he would cry like a little boy for real…

Mommeeee!

He had overheard enough to know that his mother had not been captured-and there was a time when he had wandered the labyrinth looking for some sign of her.

The realization that she was nowhere within the Palace was hard in coming.

How? How could she abandon him? After all his work, his toil, isolating her from distractions, infiltrating her, possessing hermaking her love…

How could she leave without her little-boy?

Some nights, he even dared creep into her bed. He would breath through her pillows and his head would spin for her scent… Mommy.

She was missing… He could not think this without gasping in terror, so he thought it rarely. He had always been able to sort his inner parts, to keep them one from the other. But within a week of the coup, the merest thought of her, or even a whiff of her favourite incense or perfume, would be enough to undo this sorting, to seize his face with grimaces, to draw his lip down trembling. He would curl into his own arms, imagine her cooing warmth, and fall asleep sobbing.

But he did not grow lonely-not for real real. Even though he was but one, isolate boy, he was not alone. Sammi was with him-the secret Samarmas-and they played as they always played.

You're filthy. Your skin and clothing are soiled.

"I am disguised."

They stole food at will, baffled the slaves with their pilfering.

Uncle knows about us…

"He thinks I have fled, that someone shelters me."

And they pondered the great game that had caught them, endlessly debated moves both possible and actual.

Uncle has her… He lies to deceive Father.

"She will be executed."

And they cried together, the two brothers, shuddering within the cage of the same small boy.

But they knew, with a cunning not so different from that of mundane children, that he who covets his brother's power also covets his things. They knew that sooner or later Uncle Holy would take up residence in their Palace, thinking it his own. Sooner or later he would sleep…

And for all the alacrity of his senses, for all the profundity of his Strength, the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples would eventually err in his assumptions and fall to their childish knife.

They were as much Dunyain as he. And they had time.

Food. Secrecy.

All they were missing was meat.

Fugitive days became fugitive weeks.

Imhailas would vanish for days at a time. When he returned it was usually with dismaying news carefully wrapped in false hopes or, even worse, the absence of tidings. Maithanet, the Imperial Custodian, continued to consolidate his position, exacting declarations of allegiance from this or that personage, concocting yet more evidence of her Imperial malfeasance.

No word on Theliopa. No word on Kelmomas.

And her children, she had come to realize, were really all that mattered. Despite the black moods, the endless anxious watches, the restlessness that seemed to perpetually threaten madness, she had found reprieve in her forced seclusion. When it came to titles and powers and privileges, she felt far more liberated than deprived. She had forgotten what it was like to live a life focused only upon the most basic needs and passions. She had forgotten the slow-beating heart that was simplicity.

Let the Empress die and the Whore live, she sometimes caught herself thinking. So long as her children could live free and safe, what did she care for the cloud of curses that was the Empire?

Only Naree prevented her from owning this sentiment outright. The girl continued taking custom, despite Imhailas and his violent prohibition, and despite the pricked eyes and ears of the Holy Empress.

"You do not know," she once said to Esmenet in tearful explanation. "You do not know the… the insolence of my neighbours. If I were to stop, they would think I had a patron, that someone great had taken me as a mistress… They would become jealous-you have no idea how jealous they would be!"

But Esmenet did know. In her previous life, one of her neighbours had actually pushed her down her tenement stairs out of jealousy for her custom. So she contented herself with being the ailing mother, laying in her cot behind the screen while Naree gasped and keened, pinioned beneath grunting men. A caste-noble woman, one born to the privileges Kellhus had delivered to her, would have died in some way, she imagined. A portion of her pride would have been stamped out. But she was not a caste-noble. She was what she had always been-an old whore. Unlike so many, she did not need Anasurimbor Kellhus to show her around the barricades of vanity and conceit. Her pride had been stamped to mud long, long ago.

What troubled her was not her pride, it was her fear.

To listen to Naree pleasure strangers was to listen to herself as she once was, to once again be made a scabbard for edge after cutting edge. And she knew it all, remembered it with rank clarity. The liquid instant of insertion, the breath pent, then released, far too quick to be caught in a passion so clumsy as regret. The grinding tickle of the little, and the thrusting ache of the great. To be a flint struck, never knowing what fire would be stoked within her, be it disgust or tenderness or gasping pleasure. To make a tool of her turmoil, to make theatre of the wincing, flinching line that so inflamed men.

But what she had not known, not truly, was the danger.

She had respected her custom-to be sure. She had her rules, precautions. No drunks, unless she knew them well. No white-skinned teamsters or black-skinned mercenaries. No ulcers. But she had always-and she found this thought difficult to think-believed herself greater than the sum of the men who used her. She was at least as embittered as other whores and perhaps more inclined to self-pity. But she had never seen herself as a victim — not truly. Not the way Naree so obviously was…

She did not think herself a lonely child used and traded between lewd and dangerous men.

Sometimes, peering through the narrow slots between the screen's panels, she watched their faces as they toiled upon the girl, and she balled her fists for terror, so certain was she that whoever it was would break Naree's neck for simple domination's sake. Sometimes, after the tall shadow had left, she would peer at the girl lying naked across mussed and soiled blankets, raising a hand as about to speak to someone, only to lower it in indecision. And the deposed Empress of the Three Seas would lie riven with thoughts of gods and animals, of heartbreak and pollution, and the purity that hides in the bewildering in-betweens. The World would seem a place of rutting hungers and Men no more than Sranc tied into more complicated knots.

She would yearn for her Palace and her adoring slaves, for the sunlight lancing through scented steam, and hidden choirs singing. And she would cry, as silently as she could manage, for want of her little son.

"I am… shamed," the girl said to her once.

"Why should you be?"

"Because… You could have me damned to Hell."

The Empress nodded in indulgence. "So you're afraid, then… not ashamed."

"You are his vessel!" Naree cried. "I've been to the Scuari-I've seen Him at your side. The Holy Aspect-Emperor. He is a god-I am certain of it!"

These words left a breach that only shallow breathing could fill.

Then Esmenet said, "What if he were simply a man, Naree?"

She would never understand the dark whim that overcame her in saying this, though she would come to regret it.

"I don't understand."

"What if he were simply a man pretending to be more-a prophet, or even as you say, a god-simply to manipulate you and countless others?"

"But why would he do such a thing?" the girl cried, seeming at once thrilled, confused, and appalled.

"To save your life."

Naree, for all her beauty, looked plain in her moments of unguarded sorrow. Esmenet watched her blink two tears before trying to find shelter beneath the false roof that was her smile.

"Why would he do such a thing?"

They took their meals in silence, usually. At first Esmenet attributed the girl's silence to her childhood slavery-slaves were universally trained to remain quiet and unobtrusive in the presence of their betters. But the girl's boldness otherwise led her to reconsider. In her darker moods, Esmenet thought she might be protecting herself, doing all she could to ease the betrayal to come. When her humour was lighter, she thought the girl was simply oblivious to the meanings that forever soak silence and so was unnaturally content with it.

At first there had been a certain comfort to their cohabitation, one borne out of an alignment between Esmenet's bottomless exhaustion and Naree's subservient wilfulness. Indeed, it was the neighbours, the constellation of sordid lives about them, across the street, above and below them, that generated most of the conflict. Usually, Esmenet thought Naree was simply using something incidental, like a random catcall from the women across the way, as an excuse to vent unspoken passion. The girl was always careful to use her meek, slave voice to be sure. But otherwise she hectored Esmenet as though she really were an ailing grandmother.

"You need to walk slower in case they see your shadow through the shutters! You need to be more sick!"

The complaints were nothing short of ridiculous at times, and yet she played along. Nothing is so incendiary as anxious fright.

"You need bend your back-hunch like an old woman!"

And so more and more terror came to own the air between them.

The Shrial Knight watched with eyes that could only blink.

A young boy with shaggy blond hair played alone on the parapet before him. When he stepped out of the shadow, his mane flashed near-white in the sun. But he was filthy otherwise, as though he had only animal wilderness to rear him.

"So what happens with the Ordeal?" the boy said, speaking to someone the Knight could not see.

"War," the boy replied as if answering his own question. "But not just any war. Skinny War."

He laughed at an unheard reply.

"Imagine there, at the top of that tree, there's a man standing, just standing, while below him, the skinnies run raging, a great mass of them, as big as the city, even bigger, unto the ends of what can be seen. Imagine the man singing in voices that shake through the bones of things, soaking the living ground below them with buckets of light-yes, light! — boiling the skinnies in their skin! Now imagine a necklace of such men, a hanging line of them, walking across the wastes, blasting the hordes shrieking about them."

The boy did a whimsical cartwheel, his limbs arcing with acrobatic precision. He grinned at his unearned expertise.

" Father told me. In his own words, he said, 'This is how it will happen, Kel.'"

The Shrial Knight tried to scream.

"Well, mostly in his words. Some of my words too."

He paused as if listening to an inaudible answer.

"Secret words-he even said so. Words that no one- no one — can hear."

He walked like an acrobat following a rope, heel to toe, heel to toe. Despite his diminutive frame, he seemed to tower above the ink pool of his shadow.

"No. He never told me to kill anyone. But then, why would he have to? The words were secret…"

For the first time the boy turned to look at the watching Knight.

" Of course he would expect me to kill anyone listening."

The boy skipped toward the paralyzed man, careful to avoid the pooling blood. He paused to peer down at him, hands on knees. His woolly head blotted out the sun's glare.

At last he addressed the Knight directly. "You heard everything, didn't you?"

He leaned low before his face, reached into his eye-almost.

Again, the Shrial Knight tried to scream-but his eyes could only blink.

Somehow, impossibly, the boy pulled a silver skewer from beneath his left eye, as if the Knight's head were a sheath. He dandled the thing against his face, left bird-tracks of blood high on his cheek.

"That was supposed to be secret…"

And the little boy grinned, an angel with the face of a demon.

Naree had to stifle a scream when she saw him darkening her door-both women had fretted his latest absence.

Imhailas had become increasingly more furtive in his visits. Few women had as much reason to despise men as Esmenet, to think them vain, cruel, even ridiculous, and yet she found herself yearning, not simply for him, Imhailas, the man who had sacrificed all in her name, but for the simple aura of his strength. When it was just her and Naree, it somehow seemed as if anything might happen, and they would be helpless. They were refugees. But when he came to them, bearing the scent of public exertions, they almost seemed a small army.

As rude, as apish, as it could be, masculine strength promised as much as it threatened. Men, she reasoned, were a good tonic against Men.

He had dyed his hair and beard black, which probably explained Naree's almost scream. And he had changed his clothes: he now wore an iron-ringed leather jerkin over a blue-cotton tunic. His armpits were black, and his thighs were slicked in sweat. His height always surprised her, no matter how many times she saw him. She could not look at his arms without feeling the ghost of their embrace. His face looked stronger for the blackness of his beard. His blue eyes more wintry, and if it was possible, more moist with devotion. He had come to seem the very incarnation of refuge, the single soul she could trust, and she loved him deeply.

Esmenet froze where she stood. She need only see his expression to know that he had found some answer to her most desperate question.

Imhailas pressed a dismayed Naree aside. He strode forward and fell immediately to his knees at his Empress's feet. He knew her. He knew she would not forgive specious delays. So he spoke the very thing she had glimpsed in his eye.

"Everyone, Your Glory…" He paused to swallow. "Everyone believes that Kelmomas is hiding with you. Maithanet does not have him."

The words did not so much explode within her as explode her, as if Being could be palmed and tingling Absence slipped into its place. First Samarmas and now… now…

For so long Kelmomas had been her strongest, surest limb, and her heart had been its socket. Now that it had been wrenched from her frame, she could only fall back, bleeding.

Kelmomas… Her dear, sensitive, sweet…

"Your Glory!" Imhailas was calling. Somehow he had managed to catch her mid-swoon. "Your Glory-Please! You must believe me! Maithanet genuinely does not know where Kelmomas is… He lives, Your Glory- he lives! The only question is who? Who could have smuggled him out of the Palace? Who has hidden him?"

And so, because Imhailas was a dutiful soul, one of those servants who truly placed the desires of his masters before his own, he began listing all those who might have taken her son into their protection: the Exalt-Ministers, the body-slaves, the officers of the Army and the Guard. He had known his news would dismay her, so he had rehearsed his encouragements, his arguments against abject despair.

She recovered some measure of herself in the strength of his ardour, in the beauty of his earnest declarations. But she did not truly listen. Instead she thought of the Palace, of the labyrinth hidden within the Andiamine Heights' labyrinthine halls.

And it seemed a second mother to her… the subtleties of her Home.

Please keep him safe.

Dragging, huffing because grown-ups are so big. Mopping, scrubbing blood, because grown-ups become keen when one of them goes missing. Then dragging more, down into the dark where only memory could see.

Dropping, grinning as the dead knight plummeted down the well.

Then carving, cutting.

Biting, chewing-he must be quicker next time, so the meat does not grow so cool.

Chewing and chewing and crying…

Missing Mommy.

"So what are you saying?"

"We can trust this man, Your Glory. I am sure of it."

Esmenet sat, as had become their custom, on the settee with Imhailas cross-legged at her feet. Naree lay curled on her bed, watching them with a kind of envious disinterest. An oil lantern set upon the floor provided illumination, deepening the yellow of the walls, inking the grooves between the tiles, and throwing their bloated shadows across the far regions of the apartment.

"You're saying I should flee Momemn! And on a slave ship, no less!"

Imhailas became cautious, the way he always did when speaking around her wilder hopes.

"I'm not saying you should flee, Your Glory. I'm saying you have no choice."

"How can I hope to recover the Mantle if-?"

"You are imprisoned or dead?" the Exalt-Captain interrupted. She forgave him these small transgressions, not simply because she had no choice, but because she knew how sovereigns who censored their subordinates quickly became their own worst enemies. History had heaped their corpses high.

"Please…" Imhailas persisted. "Few know the ways of Empire better than you, Your Glory. Here, Maithanet's rule is absolute-but not so elsewhere! Many of the Great Factions clamour-fairly half the Empire teeters on the edge of open rebellion… You need only seize that half!"

She understood the force of his argument-not a day passed where she failed to inventory all those she thought she could trust. House Nersei, in particular, in Aoknyssus. Surely she could depend on Queen Miramis-Saubon's niece and Proyas's wife-to at least give her sanctuary, if not prosecute the interests of her family. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, it seemed she could hear the laughter of her children, Xinemus and Thaila, smell Conriya's saline winds…

"All you need do is find some place safe," her Exalt-Captain pressed. "Some place where you can plant your Standard and call on those who remain faithful. They will come to you, Your Glory. In their thousands they will come to you, lay their lives at your feet. Trust me, please, Your Glory! Maithanet fears this possibility more than all others!"

She stared at him, her eyes pinned open to avoid blinking tears.

"But…" she heard herself say in a small, pathetic voice.

Imhailas seemed to blink her tears for her. He looked down, and a part of her bubbled in panic. He knew that she had surrendered all want for power, that she had been truly defeated, not by Maithanet, but by the loss of her little boy…

To leave Momemn would be to leave Kelmomas-and that was something she could not do.

Yield another child.

The girl did it, Esmenet knew, as much to spite her as to win him.

The coos in the dark. The creak of dowelled wood. The groan of dowelled loins. The breaths stolen, as though every thrust were a sudden fall.

He was a man, she told herself: you could no more ask a fox to resist a rabbit. But Naree, she was a woman-even more, she was a whore — and so commanded her desire the way carpenters commanded their hammers. If Esmenet had heard Imhailas cajole her, bully her with the cruel singularity of purpose that distinguished lust from love, then she might have understood. But instead, she heard Naree seducing him — in the very same tones she used to ply her daily custom, no less. The girlish pouting. The coy teasing. The restlessness of limbs impatient for carnal struggle.

She heard a woman, a rival, making love to the man between them for her sake.

Leave him to me, the girl was saying. You are old. Your peach is bruised and rotten. Your passion is flabby and desperate… Leave him to me.

Esmenet told herself it was nothing, merely the coupling of shadows in the dark, something that was scarcely real because it could scarcely be seen. She told herself it was his real motive, the primary reason why Imhailas wanted her to flee the city and abandon her son, so that he could plumb Naree with abandon. She told herself it was simply punishment, the way Fate chastised old whores so conceited as to think themselves queens.

She told herself many things as her ears roared for listening: the pluck of lips clasping about gasps, the cotton sweep of hot dry skin against hot dry skin… the pasty peal of wet from wet.

And when he began groaning, the Holy Empress of the Three Seas could feel him hard and beautiful upon her, as he was meant to be, the reverence in his flower-petal touch. And she began weeping, her sobs stifled, lost between the gusts of their passion. What had happened? What rite had she foreshortened? What deity had she offended? What had she done to be wronged so, again and again and again?

The bed cracked with pent tensions. What was languorous became rugged with pitched passion. Naree cried out, rose upon Esmenet's lover like the white on the forward curl of wave…

Leave him to me!

And the door exploded open on lances of torchlight. Armoured men burst upon its astonished wake. Naree gagged more than screamed. The screen was kicked aside even as Esmenet bolted from her blankets. Tear-spliced torchlight. Grinning faces, beards greasy in the uncertain light. Strapping figures, draped in impregnable chain. Gleaming blades. Golden Tusks stamped everywhere across the floating madness.

And Imhailas, nude and howling, his beautiful face cramped in wanton savagery.

A shadow clenched her hair, heaved her to the floor, yanked her to her knees.

"Imagine!" some leering voice cackled. "A whore hiding among whores!"

And her Exalt-Captain battled, solitary, his broadsword whooping through the close air. An armoured man fell clutching his throat. "Apostate!" Imhailas bellowed, suddenly the pale-skinned barbarian he had always been. "Trait-!"

One of the Knights tackled him about the waist, carried him hard to the floor.

They fell upon him, hammering, stomping. One heaved him to his knees. Three others began striking his face with iron-girded fists. She watched his beauty disintegrate as if it were nothing more than leather wrapped about pottery. She felt something primal climb from her throat, heard it fly…

The Shrial Knight gripping his hair let him flop to the floor, where his skull drained. It seemed she could not look away from the socket that had been his face, so violent was its impossibility.

This could not be happening.

Naree's shrieking scarcely seemed human. It hung high, warbled with insanity.

And for the longest time it seemed the World's only noise.

The Knights of the Tusk looked to one another and laughed. One silenced Naree with a vicious backhand. The girl toppled from the far side of the bed.

Esmenet had forgotten the carelessness of men who kill-the danger of their dark and turbulent whims. But the old instincts were quick in returning: the sudden vigilance, the slack body, the numbness that passed for cold concentration…

The ability to see past the death of someone beloved.

The party consisted of some eight or nine Shrial Knights, but not from any company she could identify. Their breaths reeked for wine and liquor. A cloaked priest, whom she now recognized as a Collegian, walked to where Naree had retreated, curled naked beneath one of the shuttered windows. He bent above her, clutched her wrist with careless force, and as the girl wept and shook her head in negation, he counted out five gold kellics into her palm.

"And here's a silver," he said, holding the coin to the light. He spun it between thumb and forefinger, and Esmenet glimpsed the grey of her outline in the white reflecting across it. "To remember her by," the Collegian said, nodding in Esmenet's direction, grinning. It fell with a crack to the floor between them.

Naree slumped at his feet. The Holy Empress of the Three Seas watched the girl's eyes follow the blood-tacked floors to where the Shrial Knights held Esmenet on her knees. Imhailas lay between them, grisly and unnatural.

"Please!" she cried to Esmenet, her expression a braid of anguish and vacancy. "Please don't tell your husband! Don't- doooon't…" She wagged her head about a piteous grimace. "Please… I didn't meeeean to!"

Even as they dragged Esmenet into the staring streets, she could still hear the girl wailing, a crazed immaturity to her voice, as if everything in her past the age of five had been murdered…

Instead of enslaved.

She was not brought directly before Maithanet, as Esmenet had expected. Instead she was delivered to a commandeered watch garrison for the remainder of the night. She was beaten, almost raped, and generally suffered the leering absence of pathos that often belongs to servants who hold their master's enemy. She did not sleep, nor was she unchained. She was forced to make water in her own clothes.

Within a watch of dawn, a second company of Shrial Knights arrived, these belonging to the Inchausti, the Shriah's own elite bodyguard. A dispute broke out, and somehow shouts turned into a summary execution-as well as the hasty flight of three of the men watching her. Resplendent in their golden mail, the Inchausti took her back into the streets. They, at least, treated her with decorum and respect, even if they failed to remove the chains. She had not the heart to beseech them, let alone speak at all, and so found her way to the accidental dignity that belongs to shock and exhaustion.

She shuffled and stumbled in her ankle-chains, a woman dwarfed in a shining column of armoured men. It was still early morning, so that the sun touched naught but the sky, leaving the streets chill and grey. Despite this, more and more people gathered as they made their way toward Cmiral, craning and sometimes jumping for a glimpse of her. "The Holy Empress!" she heard shouted in random, broken choruses-and periodically, "The Whore!"

The cries obviously outran their small formation, for every turn revealed more people, crowding the stoops, jostling with the Inchausti in the streets, hanging their heads from windows and roofs, their eyes bleary with sleep and wonder. She saw all castes and callings, glimpsed faces that mourned, that celebrated, that exhorted her to be strong. They neither heartened nor repelled her. The Knights of the Tusk shoved their way forward, bellowing warnings, cuffing or punching the insolent. More and more frustration and alarm replaced their expressions of studied concentration. The Inchausti's Captain, a tall, silver-bearded man the Empress thought she recognized, finally commanded his company to unfasten their sheathed swords and use them as clubs.

She witnessed first-hand how violence begets violence-and found that she did not care.

Those behind them followed. Those before them called out, waking whole swathes of the city along their path, drawing more and more into the streets. The march had become a running battle by the time they turned on the Processional, just to the west of the Rat Canal. The Momemnites continued to accumulate, their gall growing in proportion to their numbers. She saw many of them raising clay tablets that they broke as she was hustled past, but whether they were curses or blessings, she did not know.

Freed of the slotted streets, the Inchausti formed a ring about her. The Cmiral opened before them, its expanses already hazy. It seemed all the world thronged within it, spread across the plazas, packed about the monumental bases. The black-basalt facade of the Temple Xothei loomed beyond the sea of faces and brandished fists, bathing in the morning heat. Pigeons took flight across the neighbouring tenements.

The Inchausti pressed forward without hesitation, perhaps buoyed by the sight of their fellows arrayed shining across the first landing beneath Xothei. Their progress was haphazard at best, despite the clubbing fury of the Knights. Esmenet found herself looking across the mobs to their right, the obelisks of their past rulers rising like spear-points from their seething midst. She glimpsed the face of Ikurei Xerius III raised to the climbing sun, suffered a bizarre, almost nightmarish pang of nostalgia.

She saw bands of men with Yatwer's Sickle inked across their cheeks. She saw innumerable Circumfixes, clutched in hands manicured, callused, even poxed. The shouts resounded to the Heavens, a kind of cackling roar borne of contradictory cries. Every other heartbeat, it seemed, she caught some fragment of "Whore!" or "Empress!" Every other blink she glimpsed some Momemnite howling in adulation or spitting hate. She saw men tangled in battling mobs, striking each other over shoulders, reaching out to grab hair or tear clothes. She glimpsed a man stab another in the throat.

The mobs surged against the company, and for several moments they were overcome, broken into battling clots. Esmenet even felt hands clawing at her. Her gown was ripped from her shoulder to her elbow. The nameless Captain bawled out, his battle-trained voice ringing through the din, commanding the Inchausti to draw their swords. Held fast in gauntleted hands, she saw the sunlight shimmer across the first raised blades, saw the blood rise in crimson-winking strings and beads…

Shouts became screams.

The beleaguered company resumed its advance, now skidding on blood. Xothei climbed black and immovable above them. And somehow she knew that her brother-in-law awaited her in the cool gloom beyond the gilded doors…

The Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples… Her son's murderer.

The entire time, from Imhailas's unceremonious murder to the stairs of Xothei, she had existed in a kind trance. Somehow she had floated while her body had walked. Even the riotous tumult, which had torn her clothes and thrown her to her knees on several occasions, happened as if seen from afar.

None of it seemed real, somehow.

But now… Nothing could be more real than Maithanet.

She thought of her husband's treatment of the Orthodox Kings who fell into his power: Earl Osfringa of Nangael, whom he had blinded, then staked naked beneath Meigeiri's southernmost gate. Xinoyas of Anplei, whom he had disembowelled before his shrieking children. Mercy meant nothing to Kellhus apart from its convoluted uses. And given the rigours of Empire, cruelty was generally the more effective tool.

Her brother-in-law was also Dunyain… What happened next depended entirely on her uses, and empresses, especially those who had to be discredited for power's sake, rarely found mercy.

Palpable horror. Her body clamoured as if seeking to shake free of itself.

She was about to die. After all she had witnessed and survived… She thought of her children, each in succession, but she could only conjure their faces as little children and not as they were.

Only Kelmomas stood fast in her soul's eye.

She struggled to climb the steps: her manacled feet were scarce able to clear each rise. She could feel as much as hear the rioting tracts behind her, the ardour of those who loved or hated, and the lechery of the curious. She stumbled, and her left arm slipped from the flanking Knight's grasp. She chipped free and fell face forward, her wrists chained to her waist. Her shins skidded along unbevelled edges. Stone bludgeoned her ear and temple. But she did not so much feel her misstep as hear it reflected in the mobs behind her: a thousand lungs gasping, a thousand throats chortling in glee-Momemn and all its roaring vagaries, passing judgment on her humiliation.

She tasted blood.

The two Inchausti who had let her fall pulled her back to her feet with dreadful ease. With gauntlets jammed into her armpits, they carried her the remaining way. Something slumped within her, something as profound as life.

And those watching could see that the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas was at last deposed.

Xothei's iron portals slowly ground shut behind her. She watched the oblong of light thrown across the floor shrink about her frail shadow, then the doors shuttered all in gloom.

Ringing ears. Airy darkness. A kind of perfume dank, like flowers hung in a cellar. Clamour hummed out from the immense stonework hanging about her, an endless crashing. She knew the world dawned bright beyond the cyclopean walls, but she had the sense of standing in an ocean cavern, a place deeper than light.

She began shuffling from the antechamber out across the prayer floor, toward the great space beneath the central dome. The weight of her shackles bowed her, made burning effort out of mere walking. Pillars soared. Lantern wheels hung from chains throughout the interior, creating a false ceiling of circular lights. A fan of faint shadows followed her as she hobbled rattling with every step.

A dais the size of small barge dominated the floor beneath the high dome. She numbly gazed at the arc of idols arrayed upon it: wane Onkhis, fierce Gilgaol, lewd Gierra, bulbous Yatwer, and others, a tenth of the Hundred, the eldest and the most powerful, cast in gold, shining and lifeless. She had learned their names with her mother's face, the souls that joined all souls. Her whole life she had known them, feared and adored them. And she had prayed to them. She had clutched her knees sobbing their names…

The broad-shouldered man who knelt in prayer beneath them, she had known for less than half her life-if indeed she had known him at all. She knew him enough only to know that he never prayed. Not truly.

Anasurimbor Maithanet, the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples. He turned the instant she came to a pause below, held her in his monolithic regard. He was dressed in full ceremonial splendour, with elaborate vestments hooding his shoulders, draping down in two long, gold-tasselled tongues. He had allowed his beard to grow, so that the plaits fanned across his ritual chest plate. They seemed to have stained the white felt of his vestments where they touched, as if he had used a cheaper dye than usual to conceal the blond that was his true colour. His hair gleamed with oils, making him seem of apiece with the idols framing him.

She flinched at the deep bass of his voice.

"The officers who beat you," he said. "They are being flayed even as we speak. Several others will be executed as well."

He seemed genuinely apologetic, genuinely furious…

Which was how she knew he lied.

"Apparently," he continued, "they thought apprehending you without the knowledge of their betters would earn them more glory in this World." His look was at once mild and merciless. "I have invited them to try the next."

She neither spoke nor breathed for several long blinking moments. She wanted to scream, "My husband! Don't you realize? Kellhus will see you gutted!" only to find her outrage robbed of voice by some perverse reflex.

"My-my chil…" she began instead, coughing and blinking tears. "Where are my children?"

Her face crumpled about a sob. So long… So long she had toiled… feared…

The Shriah of the Thousand Temples loomed above her, his manner cold and absolute.

"The Empire is falling apart," he said in a voice fairly bottomless for its wisdom. "Why, Esmi? Why have you done this?"

"You killed my son!" she heard herself shriek.

" You killed your son, Esmi, not me. When you directed his attempt on my life."

"I did not!" she cried, her limbs thrown to the impotent limit of her chains. "I only needed to know if you were hiding anything! Nothing more. Nothing less! You killed my son. You made this into a war! You! "

Maithanet's face remained perfectly blank, though his eyes glittered with what seemed a wary cunning. "You believe what you're saying," he finally said.

"Of course!"

Her voice peeled high and raw beneath the airy gloom of the domes, faded into the white hiss of the mob's roar.

He gazed at her, and she had this curious sense of throwing herself open, as though her face had been a shuttered window.

"Esmi…" he said far more softly. "I was mistaken. Both in what I assumed to be your intentions and in your capacity."

She almost coughed for shock. Was this some kind of game? She thought she laughed when in fact she wept.

"You thought me mad-is that it?"

"I feared…" he said.

The Shriah of the Thousand Temples descended the steps, then-impossibly- knelt before her, raised a hand to her bloodied cheek. He smelled of sandalwood and myrrh. He produced a small key from his girdle, crudely cast.

Esmenet reeled. She had assumed this audience would be nothing more than a pantomime, a ceremony required to stamp her inevitable execution with the semblance of legitimacy. She had hoped only to throw her defiance and her righteousness into the air between them, where memory could not deny it.

She had forgotten that pride and vanity meant nothing to him, that he would never merely covet power for its own sake…

That he was Dunyain.

"Long nights, Esmi…" he said as he worked the lock on her manacles. And it seemed madness, the absence of embarrassment or contrition-or any other recognition of the absurdity between them. In a way, it seemed almost as terrifying as the doom she had originally expected.

"Long nights have I pondered the events of the past months. And the question is always the same…"

One by one he cracked open the locks, beginning with her wrists, then bending to free her ankles. She found herself flinching from his powerful proximity, not bodily, but in her soul, which had feared him for too long to so quickly relinquish its aversion.

"What?" he asked as he worked. "What is my brother's plan?" The Holy Shriah looked up from the posture of a penitent. "He must have known that the Gods would begin clamouring against him, that one by one their far-off whispers would take root in the Cults. He must have known his Empire would crumble in his absence… So then why? Why would he entrust it all to someone with no Dunyain blood?"

"To me," she said with more bitterness than she intended.

A roaring swell rose from the rioters beyond the walls, a reminder that for all the temple's immensity, it was but a small pocket of gloom in a world of sunlit war.

A reminder of the people they would command.

"Please, Esmi," he said, standing to gaze down into her eyes. "I beg you. Set aside your pride. Listen as your husband would listen, without-"

"Prejudice," she interrupted, drawing her lips into a sour line. "Continue."

She gingerly rubbed her wrists, blinking in the manner of those with sand in their eyes. She could not see her way past her shock and incredulity. A simple misunderstanding? Was that it? How many people had died? How many men like… like Imhailas?

"Out of all his tools," Maithanet said, "I have long known that ignorance is the one he finds most useful. Even still, I succumbed to the vanity that bedevils all men: I thought I was the lone exception. Me, another son of Anasurimbor Moenghus, one who knows the treacherous ways of conviction… the way certainty is simply an illusion born of ignorance. I convinced myself that my brother chose your hands, which were both weak and unwilling, because he had deemed me a threat. Because he did not trust where the Logos might lead me."

For all the disorder of her soul, these words burned with peculiar clarity-probably because she had rehearsed them with such morbid frequency.

"The way he did not trust your father," she said.

A grave nod, steeped in admission. "Yes. Like my father… Perhaps even because of my father. I thought he might have suspected I possessed residual filial passions."

"That you would betray him to avenge your father?"

"No. Nothing so crude as that. You would be dismayed, Esmi, to know the way caprice and vanity distort the intellect. Men ever cast themselves into labyrinths of thinking, not to lose themselves in the pursuit of truth, but to hide their self-interest in subtleties and so make noble their crassest desires. Thus does avarice become charity, and vengeance, justice."

It was as if a drawstring had been yanked tight about her breast.

"You convinced yourself that Kellhus feared the same of you?"

"Yes…" he said. "And why not, when Men so regularly yoke their intelligence to self-serving stupidity? I am half a man. But the Interdiction… The questions it raised plagued me, even as I acted in ways I thought my brother would demand of me. Why? Why would he forbid all communication between the Great Ordeal and the New Empire?"

She glanced at the shackles discarded at her feet, noticed a bead of blood welling from one of her toes.

"Because he feared that tidings of discord would weaken the Ordeal's resolve."

This, at least, had been what she told herself… What she needed to believe.

"But then why would he cease communicating?" Maithanet asked. "Why would he personally refuse to answer our pleas? From his brother. From his wife…"

She did not know. The Holy Empress of the Three Seas wiped at the tears burning in the creases of her eyes, but the filth on her fingers only made them sting more.

"Then it dawned on me," Maithanet continued, looking out to the recesses of the shuttered Temple. "What if he foresaw the inevitability of his empire's collapse? What if the Three Seas were doomed to unravel no matter who ruled them? You. Me. Thelli…"

His blue eyes fairly bored through her. He seemed apiece with the great weights soaring about him, so broad did he appear in his white-and-gold vestments, so impressive were the accoutrements of his exalted station. She felt a rag-bound whore standing in his Dunyain shadow…

Another childish human.

"If the Empire was doomed to perish," he said, "what would his reasoning be then?"

The mob's roar heaved across the background the same as before, only marred with pitches that warbled across the limits of hearing.

"What are you saying?" she heard herself cry. "That he wanted me to fail? That he wanted the world, his home, to come crashing down upon his wife? His children?"

"No. I'm saying he understood that such a crash would happen regardless, and so he chose one evil from among many."

"I don't believe it. I… I cannot!"

What kind of man made oil of his children? What kind of Saviour?

"Ask yourself, Esmi. What is the purpose of the New Empire?"

She had the sense of retreating from his words as before a sword-point. "To pre-prevent the Second Apocalypse," she stammered.

"So if the Great Ordeal succeeds? What of the Empire then?"

"It has no… no…" She swallowed, so painful was the word. "Purpose."

"And if the Great Ordeal fails?" Maithanet asked, his woollen tone wrapped tight about the bruising iron of fact and reason.

She found herself looking down to her feet, to the charcoal grime between her toes. "Then… then the No-God walks… and… and…"

"All eyes can feel him on the horizon. Every child is stillborn. Every man living knows that the Aspect-Emperor, Anasurimbor Kellhus, spoke true…"

The world warred and rioted about them.

She looked up without breath or volition. "And Men are… are… united regardless."

The sense of what he said struck her numb, even as the greater part of her balked. The Great Ordeal. The New Empire. The Second Apocalypse. It all seemed some vast joke, a farce of monumental proportions. Mimara missing. Samarmas dead. Inrilatas dead. Kelmomas missing. These were the things that mattered. The enormities that preoccupied Maithanet possessed no rule that her heart could fathom. They were simply too immense, too distant to be thrown on the balance with something as utterly immediate as a child. They seemed little more than smoke before the fire of her children.

Smoke that choked, that blinded, that led astray. Inescapable smoke. Killing.

Maithanet stood clear and bright before her, at once her enemy and her champion. And her only hope, she suddenly realized, of understanding the ruthless madness of her husband.

He killed him… He killed my "I made the exact same mistake you yourself made, Esmi," he said. "I thought of the New Empire as an end, something to be saved for its own sake, when really it's nothing more than a tool."

The boom of strife and discord. The Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples graced her with a lingering look, as if satisfying himself that she had grasped the dire import of his ruminations. Then he turned his face to the high-hanging gloom, called out to invisible ears…

"We are finished!" he boomed. "The Tusk and the Mantle are reconciled!"

"He has abandoned us," Esmenet murmured into the ringing wake. When she blinked, it seemed she glimpsed the entire Three Seas burning: Nenciphon, Invishi, Seleukara, Carythusal…

Maithanet nodded. "For now… Yes."

She could hear a gathering of footfalls and hushed voices in the galleries.

"And after… after he destroys Golgotterath?"

The Holy Shriah glanced down at his palms. "I don't know. Perhaps he will leave us to our own purposes."

Her breath caught upon a pang. What would that be like?

The first sobs blew through her as a breeze, soft, soothing even as they tousled her thought and vision. But the tempest was not long in coming. She found herself weeping in his expansive embrace, wailing at all the losses she had endured, all the uncertainties…

How many revelations? she thought as the final gusts passed through her. How many revelations can one soul bear?

For she had suffered far too many.

She looked up into her Shriah's bearded face, breathed deep the sweet bitter of his Shigeki myrrh. It seemed impossible that she had once seen malice in the gentle blue of his eyes.

They kissed-not as lovers, but as a brother and a sister. She tasted tenderness on his lips. They gazed into each other's eyes, close enough to breath the other's exhalations.

"Forgive me," the Shriah of the Thousand Temples said.

The Empire roared and rioted unseen.

She blinked, saw Imhailas's face unmade beneath pounding fists.

"Maitha…"

A glimpse was all he needed to fathom her question, so open was her face.

"Thelli is safe," he said with a reassuring smile. "Kelmomas hides yet in the palace."

Terror hooked her throat-terror and crashing relief. "What? Alone? "

His eyes seemed to lose focus, but even before she had registered it, he was there, before her, as immediate as her husband had ever been. "He isn't what you think he is, Esmi."

"What do you mean?"

He gestured to the floors behind her. "In due time…"

She turned to the small crowd of Shrial and Imperial Apparati gathering about them, men she had known and trusted for many long years. Ngarau stood among them, Phinersa, and even ancient Vem-Mithriti. Some watched with expressions of hope-even joy-and some with apprehension.

She was not surprised to see so many loyalties overturned. Maithanet was her husband's brother. In some dark corner of her soul she had prepared for this encounter, but the curses, the cat-spitting declarations of outrage, were nowhere to be found. Instead, she felt only exhaustion and relief.

Few things are as inexplicable as the concatenation of souls. Kellhus had often told her how Men glimpsed but a sliver of the intercourse that passed between them, how passions and rivalries and understandings they could scarce fathom drove their intercourse like galleys before a storm. Perhaps they were all exhausted. Perhaps they simply yearned for the life they had known before Maithanet and his coup. Perhaps they were frightened by the battling multitudes surrounding the Temple. Perhaps they truly believed…

"He isn't what you think he is…"

Whatever the reason, something happened as she regarded them. Despite the embroidered fanfare of their robes, despite their cosmetics and jewelled rings, despite the pride and ambition belonging to their exalted stations, they became mere men, bewildered and embattled equals, standing together in the absence of judgment that was their Prophet's most beautiful gift. It did not matter who had erred, or who had betrayed or who had injured. It did not matter who had died…

They were simply disciples of Anasurimbor Kellhus-and the world clamoured around them.

Maithanet resumed his position on the dais, and Esmenet found herself watching him with a worshipper's simple wonder, blinking tears that did not sting. He seemed luminous, not simply with the overlapping rings of light shed by the hanging lantern wheels, but with renewal.

And suddenly Esmenet realized that she could see her way past her losses and her hate. Somehow she knew they would find some way to hold the Empire together, whether her accursed husband believed in them or not.

"We will stage an official reconciliation," Maithanet said in warm, informal tones, "something for the masses. But for the nons, I want all of you to witness what we sa-"

Then there he was, clad only in a loincloth, stepping between the golden idols of War and Birth, stepping from where he had always been standing, in the one place that had escaped the notice of all-the one place overlooked, which exists in the world's every room.

Her assassin.

He stepped from the gloom. He looked hard, like something between brown flesh and grey stone. Three noiseless steps. Maithanet heard and turned. His face was emotionless, devoid of shock or surprise or any expression. Somehow Esmenet knew he turned with little more than curiosity, so certain was he of his security. He turned just as the man dropped the knife between his neck and clavicle. There was nothing remarkable about the assault, no display of inhuman speed or ability, only a step from the one place overlooked to the one place unguarded. A kind of discharging of the inevitable.

The figure instantly released the pommel…

The Holy Shriah of Thousand Temples gazed down at the knife as if it were a hornet or bee, teetered…

Esmenet could only blink as Maithanet sputtered and died before her.

"Sister!" he gasped. "You must tell my broth-!"

He slumped to his knees, his eyes rounding about an emblematic emptiness, then crumpled to his side. His chest-plate clattered against the polished tile. He died at her assassin's feet.

Out of reflex, Esmenet turned to the abject faces, held out her hands to still the cries of cracked disbelief and the charge of the more warlike among the Apparati. In the far pockets of gloom, she could see the Inchausti gathering into a golden rush…

She could feel the Narindar motionless behind her. Why didn't he run?

"Hold!" she cried out. "I said, Hold! "

All those near fell silent and still. Some fairly flinched out of obedience.

"Vem-Mithriti! Does your fire still serve your Empress?"

The old man hobbled to her side without hesitation. Sorcerous words seemed to cough out of the surrounding air. White light spilled from his puckered mouth and perforated eyes, made him seem an ancient baby for the vanishing of the rutted lines. Wards flickered to life about them.

The nearest of the Inchausti began slowing to a wary trot, their broadswords still held on high.

"What you have witnessed is the work of our Holy Aspect-Emperor!" she cried out, her voice strong for the iron of her exhaustion. She had no nerves to suffer.

She knew what she must look like: beggared, wild and bloodied, wreathed in pale-glowing tongues of flame. Nevertheless, she posed before them as though gowned in full Imperial splendour, knowing the contradiction between bearing and appearance would smack of scripture.

"The name Maithanet shall be stricken from all scrolls and all stone!" she cried in righteous fury. "For he is naught but a deceiver!"

She would do what her husband had bid her to do.

"The adoration you once felt, the dismay you now feel is the very measure of his deception!"

She would speak oil.

"He!" she shrieked, jerking her open hand to the bundle of fabric bleeding beneath the golden arc of idols. "Anasurimbor Maithanet! He has revolted against his sacred brother! He has murdered our…" Her voice broke about the truth of this last. "Our Holy Prophet's son!"

The Shrial and Imperial Apparati stood aghast, some stupefied, others terrified, a crowd of wisemen and dandies trussed by mad circumstance. Beyond them, the Inchausti continued their clattering accumulation. Cries and moans and hissed conversations rose from them.

One of their captains stepped belligerently forward, began, "Who sa-?"

"Anasurimbor Kellhus!" she cried in scathing dismissal. "Our Holy Aspect-Emperor!" She could see the man's example leaping like contagion, emboldening others throughout the assembly. "To whom do you think he sends his holy dreams?" And though she could not sense them, she knew the Inchausti possessed Chorae…

She had to strike the will to fight from them. It was her only hope.

"Think!" she fairly screeched. " Who else could strike down the Shriah of the Thousand Temples with such ease? With! Such! Ease! "

This, she knew, would open a wedge…

"On your knees!" she cried, as if she had conjured as much as invoked her divine husband. "On your knees!"

Because acting and being were one and the same for Men.

She had no choice. She had to own the event. What chances did her assassin have of escape, even if he were Narindar? If captured, he would name her. She had to own the event and own it as justice, as the swift and brutal justice they had come to expect from Anasurimbor Kellhus. The assassin would be spared, would be celebrated as a hero.

As he should, since he had only worked his Empress's will.

This was why he remained standing over his victim. This was why he had chosen this very moment to strike.

Many had fallen to their knees instantly, Phinersa among them, the ghost of a smile upon his nimble face. Some grovelled in abject shame, murmuring prayers to her where she stood beneath the golden idols. But a greater proportion of the Inchausti remained standing, held up by their outrage and the example of their indecisive brothers.

"Kneel! For those who stand now stand with foul Golgotterath!"

She would speak oil, heartbreaking oil. She would drive thousands to the executioner's sword, if need be. She would burn Momemn to the ground the way the minstrels accused her of burning Carythusal…

Anything to see her children safe!

"For eternity itself hangs in the balance about you!"

The last of the Inchausti relented, dropped to their knees, then to their faces. She watched it spread like a disease among them, the miraculous inversion that makes madness out of faith, the transformation of squalid catastrophe into divine revelation. And they could feel Him, she knew. All of them could feel Him emanating from her slight and bloodied figure. And in months and years hence, they would die thinking this the most significant, most glorious moment of their lives…

Grovelling before the Holy Empress.

A feeling of triumph unlike any she had ever experienced steeped her to the merest vein, an elation that transcended her body, an uproarious continuity of self and subjugated world. It seemed she need only yank high her arms and the very earth would be flapped like a blanket. And she looked down with imperious satisfaction, revelled in the fleeting intensity…

For even as she watched, the assembled penitents began looking about in wonder and anxious confusion.

The roaring that had been her pious chorus, her proof of Maithanet's discord, had dwindled, then trailed away altogether. The mobs had fallen miraculously silent…

And for the merest of instants, it seemed that the whole Empire had joined them on their knees.

But something… a kind of rhythmic pulse… had taken its place, rising from the deep temple hollows. She recognized it instantly, though her soul refused to credit the knowledge. For it was a sound that still thrummed through the darkest of her dreams.

Dreams of warring Shigek… of desert wastes and the abject misery that was Caraskand.

Dreams of Holy Shimeh, wrested from heathen hands.

The beating of war-drums. Fanim drums.

The Empress of the Three Seas turned to the idol of Anagke, who by some perversity of angles gleamed golden over the dead Shriah's inert form, the near-naked assassin passionless at her side.

She began laughing-clawing her hair and laughing…

Such a devious whore was Fate.