It was Kellhus who purchased the slave who would save them—and her. His name was Hagitatas, famed among the Conriyan caste-nobility as a healer of troubled souls. Somehow, through tenderness, wisdom, and incalculable patience, he managed to pry her two little darlings apart, to give them the interval they required to draw their own breath, and so raise the frame of individual identities. Such was her relief that even the subsequent discovery of Samarmas’s idiocy seemed cause for celebration.
These sons loved—there could be no question that they loved!
At last the Whore of Fate, treacherous Anagkë, who had lifted Esmenet from ignorance and brutality of the Sumni slums to the pitch of more profound torments, had relented. At last Esmenet had found her heart. She was an old mother now, and old mothers knew well the tightfisted ways of the world. They knew how to find largesse in its meagre capitulations.
How to be greedy with small things.
There was hope in her apprehension as her body-slaves dressed and painted her. When Porsi brought Kelmomas and Samarmas to her anteroom festooned like little generals, she laughed with delight. With the two of them in mutinous tow, she descended the stairs and landings to the lower palace, then hurried through the subterranean corridor that ran beneath the Scuari Campus. Periodically she heard the deep clap of the Plate thrumming across the city’s quarters, calling all those who would witness this latest abomination. And at turns she caught hints of a deeper sound, more human in its register, legion in its tones.
By the time they surfaced in the limestone gloom of the Allosium Forum, the roar had become a deafening wash that hummed through the pillars and lintels. They stood motionless as the vestiaries fussed with creases and other unsightly defects in their clothing. Then, following an aisle between dark columns, Esmenet led her sons into light and fury.
The crest of the monumental stair seemed the summit of a mountain, a place so high that it made haze of the world below. The sun was dry and cool. The broad expanse of the Scuari Campus seethed beneath it, a dark sea scarped by the hazy contours of the city. As one, untold thousands cried out in jubilation, with abandon, as though she were the throw of the number-sticks that had saved all of their lives.
Esmenet was always conscious of her unreality at moments such as this. Everything, even the cosmetics smeared across her skin, possessed the weight of fraud. She was not Esmenet, and nor were her children Kelmomas and Samarmas. They were images, semblances drawn to answer the mob and their anxious fantasies. They were Power. They were Justice. They were mortal flesh draped about the dread intent of God.
Authority in all its myriad incarnations.
She stood with a twin to either side, pretending to bask in the thunder of their adulation. Everywhere she looked she saw open mouths, black holes no wider than a woman’s fist, no deeper than a boy’s arm. And though the air quivered with sound, each of them seemed as soundless as a gaping fish, sucking at air too thin not to suffocate.
The silence, when it finally came, tickled her with its abruptness. She hesitated, heard the strange hum of unvoiced expectations, of endless eyes watching. Finally a solitary cough broke the hanging spell, and she started down the monumental stair, led the twins past the mirrored shields of the assembled Eöthic Guardsmen, then around the folds of the great crimson curtain that had been raised about the scaffold.
The swish of her gowns seemed to blot out all other noise. She could smell them now, her people, raw and sour. The uniformity of their faces seemed to dissolve into insulting details. The painted hauteur of the caste-nobility assembled immediately below. The woollen leers of the caste-menials crowding the innumerable distances beyond.
How many of them, she wondered, harboured souls that would see her and her children dead?
She glanced at the twins, trying to smile for their sakes. Kelmomas looked …. blank. Tears silvered Samarmas’s cheeks.
Eight of them, she thought.
Theliopa hid in her soulless apartments, far too fragile for ceremonial carnivals such as this. Moënghus, Kayûtas, and Serwa marched with their father in the Great Ordeal, at a distance appropriate to children who were strangers. Inrilatas screamed from the prison of his room. And Mimara … wandered.
Eight. And only these two boys loved.
Whispering, “Come,” she led them to their gilded and cushioned seats. A call rang out as they sat, and all across the depths of the vista before them, the masses fell to their knees. Unable to reach over the arms of her throne, she relinquished her sons’ hands. The golden claws of twin Kyranean Lions arched above her, signifying the continuity of empires from the present back to the murk of Far Antiquity. Upon her left shoulder, she bore a grand ruby brooch, symbolizing the divine blood of her husband, which had passed through his seed into her, and thence into their children. Across her right shoulder, she wore a sash of felt, blue chased with gold, the sign of her command of the Eöthic Guard, the protectors of the Imperial Precincts, and in the absence of the Aspect-Emperor, her own private army, bound to her by oaths of life and death.
She heard rather than saw the release of the curtains that concealed the scaffold behind her. Shouts like a thunderclap. The mobs surged, not so much forward as outward. Hands were raised in air-pummelling exultation. Lips curled. Teeth flashed with sunlit spittle.
Somehow, through the roar, she could hear Samarmas bawling to her right. When she looked, she saw him huddling, shoulders in and chin down, as though trying to squeeze through some hidden passage within himself. A kind of maternal hatred clamped her jaw tight, a wild urge to order the Guardsmen into the masses, to cut and beat them from her sight. How dare they frighten her child!
But to be a sovereign is to be forever, irrevocably, cut into many. To be a matron, simple and uncompromising. To be a spy, probing and hiding. And to be a general, always calculating weakness and advantage.
She fought the mother-clamouring within, ignored his distress. Even Samarmas—who she was certain would become nothing more than a dear fool—even he had to learn the madness that was his Imperial inheritance.
For him, she told herself. I do this for his sake!
The mobs continued howling, not at her or her sons, but at the sight of the Consult skin-spy, which she knew would be strung like a spitted pig through the centre of the scaffold above and behind her. According to tradition, her eyes were too holy for such a horrific sight, so a lottery was held among the caste-nobility to see who would be granted the honour of bringing her the hand mirror she would use to actually witness the creature’s purification. With some surprise she saw Lord Sankas approach, his elbows pressed together before his cuirass, so that the mirror could lay flat across his inner forearms.
Samarmas flew from his seat and hugged him about the waist. For a moment the old caste-noble teetered. Gales of laughter passed through the crowds. Esmenet hastened to detach him, wiped his cheeks and kissed his forehead, then directed him back to his little throne.
Grinning in embarrassment, Biaxi Sankas knelt so that he might offer up the mirror. Nodding to show Imperial favour, she took it from his arms, raised it so that she saw flashing sky, then her own face. Her beauty surprised her—large dark eyes on an oval face. She could not remember when it happened, when she starting feeling older and uglier than she in fact was. She had always been popular as a whore, even in a city renowned for its white-skinned tastes. She had always been beautiful—and in that down-to-the-bones way that somehow followed certain women even into their decrepitude.
She had never been a match for her face.
A pang made her avert the mirror, and she glimpsed the uppermost timbers of the scaffold hanging in a pool of bald sky. Tilting the handle, she followed beams to where the chains were anchored, then followed the chains until the skin-spy occupied the mirror’s centre. With pinched breaths, she gazed at what she had already seen in the multitude of faces before her: coin for the toll their Aspect-Emperor had exacted from them.
The thing bucked and thrashed, bouncing like a ston
e tied to a bowstring. Perched on separate boarded platforms, two of Phinersa’s understudies ministered to the thing, the one already making the incisions required to peel back the skin, the other flicking the Neuropuncture needles that controlled the abomination’s reaction—the thing would simply cackle and climax otherwise. Like a chorus of burning bulls it screamed, its spine arched, the radial limbs of its face yanked back like the petals of a dying flower.
Both the twins had climbed into their seats to gaze over the back, Kelmomas pale and expressionless, Samarmas with his shining cheeks pressed to the cushion. She wanted to shout at them to turn away, to look back to the shrieking mob, but her voice failed her. Even though the mirror was meant to protect her, holding it the way she did seemed to make it all the more real, into something that rubbed against the soft-skin of her terror.
The brand was drawn from an iron-bowl of coals that had been raised into the scaffold. The thing’s eyes were put out.
With a kind of rapt horror she found herself wondering at her circumstances. What kind of whore was Fate, to throw her into this place, this time, to make her the vessel of cruel godlings and the bar of world-breaking events? She believed in her husband. She believed in the Great Ordeal. She believed in the Second Apocalypse. She believed in all of it.
She just couldn’t believe that any of it happened.
She whispered to herself in that paradoxical voice we all bear within us, the one that speaks the most wretched truths and the most beguiling lies, the one that is most us, and so not quite us at all. She whispered, “This is a dream.”
Sarmarmas wept and Kelmomas, who otherwise seemed so strong for a child his age, trembled like an old man’s dying words. At last she relented. Setting down the mirror, she reached over the arms of her throne to squeeze both their hands. The feel of small fingers closing tight about her own brought tears to her eyes. It was a sensation so primeval, so right, that it almost always daubed the turmoil from her soul.
But this time it felt more like an … admission.
The masses roared in exultation, becoming in some curious way, the iron that burned, the blade that peeled. And Esmenet sat painted and rigid, gazing out across their furious regions.
Thug. Tyrant. Empress of the Three Seas.
A miracle not quite believed.
CHAPTER FOUR
Hûnoreal
For He sees gold in the wretched and excrement in the exalted. Nay, the world is not equal in the eyes of the God.
—SCHOLARS, 7:16, THE TRACTATE
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), southwestern Galeoth
There is no other place. It is as simple as that.
She cannot go back, not to the brothel that is her mother’s palace, nor to the brothel that is a brothel. She was sold so very long ago, and nothing—no one—can buy her back.
She pilfers wood from the shed—little more than a wall cobbled from the debris fallen from the upper tower—and watches his slave curse and scratch his woolly head, then strike out to replace it. She makes fires, even though she has nothing to cook or to burn, and she sits before them, poking them like an anthill or staring at them, as though it were a little baby kicking and clawing at an impossible sky. She lets her mule, whom she calls Foolhardy, wander free, thinking or maybe even hoping that it would run away. Each night, she hugs herself in shame and guilt, certain that Foolhardy will be taken down by the wolves or at least spooked into running by their endless howls. But each morning, the brute is still there, standing close enough to be hit by a stone, flicking its ears at flies, staring off in any direction but hers.
She cries.
She continues to watch her fire, gazes at it with a new mother’s fascination, gazes at it until her eyes are pinched dry. There is something proper about flames, she thinks. They possess a singularity of purpose that can only be called divine …
Flare. Wax. Consume.
Like a human. Only with grace.
One of the children, the youngest of the girls, creeps down to her to explain they have been forbidden to speak or play with her because she is a witch. Was it true she’s a witch?
As a joke Mimara grimaces and croaks, “Yeeaasss!”
After the little girl flees, she sees them from time to time, hiding behind a fence of weeds or the ridged edge of some immense tree trunk, crawling and peering and running with faux-screams whenever they realize that she sees them watching.
She can see the Wards set about the tower, though she can only guess at their purposes. And she notes the scattered signs of more violent, more ephemeral sorceries—a gash in a monstrous elm, scorching across plates of stone, earth cooked to glass—proof that the Wizard has resorted to his prodigious skills. Always and everywhere she sees the ontic plenitude of things—the treeness of trees, the essence of water and stone and mountains—mostly pristine, but sometimes wrecked thanks to Schoolmen and their savage croon. The eyes of the Few were with her always, prodding her onto this path she has chosen, fortifying her resolve.
But more and more the different eye seems to open, one that has perplexed her for many years—that frightens her like an unwanted yen for perversion. Its lid is drowsy, and indeed it slumbers so deep she often forgets its presence. But when it stirs, the very world is transformed.
For moments at a time, she can see them … Good and evil.
Not buried, not hidden, but writ like another colour or texture across the hide of everything. The way good men shine brighter than good women. Or how serpents glow holy, while pigs seem to wallow in polluting shadow. The world is unequal in the eyes of the God—she understands this with intimate profundity. Masters over slaves, men over women, lions over crows: At every turn, the scriptures enumerate the rank of things. But for terrifying moments, the merest of heartbeats, it is unequal in her eyes as well.
It’s a kind of madness, she knows. She has seen too many succumb in the brothels to think she is immune. Their handlers were loath to mark the skin, so they punished the soul. She was no exception.
It has to be madness. Even still, she cannot but wonder how Achamian will appear in the light of this more discerning eye.
The morning sun rears from the bulk of the hill and lances across the trees with their limbs like frozen ropes, spilling pools of bright through the thatched gloom. And she watches and watches, until the colours pale into coral evening.
And she thinks the tower was not so tall. It only seems such because it occupies higher ground.
The world hates you …
The thought comes upon her, not with stealth or clamour, but with the presumption of a slave owner, of one who sees no boundaries save their own.
The suffering follows quick upon the heels of her vigil—she had exhausted the last of her provisions before reaching the tower—and something within her rejoices. The world does hate her—she does not need a small brother’s tearful confession to know that. “It hurts Momma to even look at you! She wishes she would have drowned you instead of sold you …” Here she sits, starving and shivering, staring and croaking at the inscrutable window beneath the tower’s demolished crown. This one thing she wants—to become a witch, to exact what she has paid …
So of course she must be denied.
There is no other place. So why not cast her life across the Whore’s table? Why not press Fate to the very brink? At least she will die knowing.
She weeps twice, though she feels nothing of the sorrow that moves her: once glimpsing one of the little girls crouched peeing beneath sunshot bowers, and again seeing the Wizard’s silhouette pacing back and forth across his open window—back and forth. She literally cannot remember the last time she has been at one with her weeping. In her childhood, she supposes. Before the slavers.
At the very end of the heart’s exhaustion lies a kind of resignation, a point where resolve and surrender become indistinguishable. Wavering requires alternatives, and she has none. The world is in rout. To leave would be to embark on a flight without refuge, to le
ad an itinerant existence, aimless, with nothing to credit one far-flung road over another, since despair has become all directions. She has no choice because all her choices have become the same.
A broken tree, as her brothel-master once told her, can never yield.
Two days become three. Three become four. Hunger makes her dizzy, while the rain makes her clay-cold. The world hates you, she thinks, staring at the broken tower. Even here.
The last place.
And then one night he simply comes out. He looks haggard, not just like an old man who never sleeps, but one who never forgives—himself or others, it does not matter. He bears rank wine and steaming food, which she falls upon like a thankless animal. Then he sits opposite her fire and begins talking. “The Dreams,” he says with the intensity of someone who has waged long war against certain words.
She stares at him, unable to stop fingering food into her mouth, which she swallows against the sob in the back of her throat. The firelight seems to have grown shining porcupine quills. For a moment, she fears she might swoon for relief.
He speaks of the Dreams of the First Apocalypse, the nightmares that all Mandate Schoolmen share thanks to the derelict memories of their ancient founder, Seswatha, and the long dark horror of his war against the Consult. “Over and over,” he mutters, “as if a life can be writ like a poem, torments fashioned into verses …”
“Are they that bad?” she asks in the lame silence. She can scarce see him past the combination of her tears and the fire’s glare: an old and rutted face, one that has seen much—too much—and yet has not forgotten how to be tender or honest.
He winks at her before gazing down to fiddle with his pouch and pipe. He stuffs the bowl, his look both pensive and sealed. He picks up a twig from the fire’s edge; a small flame twirls from the end of it.