She gazed out across the dark landscape of Momemn, slowly stalking the perimeter of the veranda. She thought about how all the jumbled structures were in fact hollow, how their walls seemed little more than parchment when viewed from so far. She thought of all the thousands slumbering like miniature, innumerable larva, soft in their crisp cocoons. And she plotted their survival.
“We walk the Shortest Path,” her divine and heartless husband had told her the last time she had seen him, “the Labyrinth of the Thousandfold Thought. This is the burden the God has laid upon us, and the burden the Gods begrudge …”
Expediency would be her rule. As ruthless as it was holy.
Kelmomas, she knew, would be awake and waiting when she returned—he always was. Simply because she was so busy, she allowed him to sleep with her in her bed.
Save for those nights she called for Sankas or Imhailas to comfort her.
The day itself seemed daring. The wind was constant and thin. The sky was nearly empty, the horizon scraped clean. The Meneanor Sea was stone-coast dark beneath the sunlight sparking across its perforations.
She sat at a small table with Theliopa at her side, watching the Shriah of the Thousand Temples step from the shadow of the Imperial Audience Hall into the glare of the veranda. Anasûrimbor Maithanet. Because of the innumerable golden slivers—tusks—woven up and down its length, his white robe twinkled gold with every step. His hair piled high and rich upon his head, the same improbable black as his braided beard.
“This is madness, Esmi,” he called. “The Empire burns, yet you spurn my counsel?”
She hoped she looked as impressive, with her stark grey gown beneath an ankle-long vest of gold rings. And of course, she had her smoke-hazed city as her mantle, an intricate mottling of white and grey that reached to the horizon. But she was sure it would be her porcelain mask, glazed white with features as fine and as beautiful as her own, that would most weigh against his eyes.
“And now you wear a mask? An Ainoni mask?”
She had long pondered how he would begin. Before conferring with Inrilatas, she had thought he would be conciliatory, that he would use wise and self-effacing words to move her. “Do this, Esmi. Confidence awaits …” But she had reconsidered in the light of what her crazed son had told her. He would affect injury and outrage, she eventually decided, thinking her native doubts would grease his way.
And she had been right.
“This is about Sharacinth …” he continued in the same indignant tones, his voice striking resonances that seemed to warble about her heart. “You think I was involved in her murder!”
She did not reply simply because she did not trust her voice. She could only speak when she felt the “cold” within her—as Theliopa had instructed.
He took the seat waiting for him in apparent fury. Even out of doors the scent of him, myrrh and a kind of musk, bloomed invisible.
“Or has the loss—?”
He paused as if catching himself, but the implication was clear.
“Or has the loss of your son driven you mad …”
He had not meant, she realized, to say this only to halt out of some compassionate instinct. He had meant for her to complete the thought … Her! Then he could commiserate, and slowly pry open her trust the way he had so many times in the past.
But she had already decided the path this conversation would take.
She peeled a section of flat-cake, used it to grasp a pinch of spice-shredded pork. She dipped both into the cinnamon and honey, then passed it to him, searching for any sign of hesitation.
There was none.
He had not extended her any of the traditional greetings or honorifics, so neither would she. “Proyas …” she said, taking heart in the coldness she felt beneath the clarity of her voice. “Shortly after Carythusal fell, he took me hunting kanti, a kind of antelope, on the Famiri … Have I ever told you that story, Maitha?”
He gazed at her with unsettling intensity. “No.”
The mask tingled against her cheeks. She found herself wondering if this was how skin-spies felt behind the digits of their false faces. Safe.
“This was after the conquest of Ainon,” she said. “We had tracked a mother and her foal for the better part of an afternoon. But when we finally sighted them, we discovered we weren’t the only hunters. Wolves. Wolves had tracked them as well. We had climbed a shallow ridge, so we could see it all, the kanti mother and her child watering at a black stream … and the wolves closing about her …” She glimpsed the predators in her soul’s eye, sleek as fish, tunnelling through the grasses. “But the cow either heard them or caught their scent on the wind. She bolted before the noose could be knotted—bolted directly toward us! It was astonishing enough to watch from a distance. She backed her foal against the earthen drop—immediately below us—turned to battle her pursuers. The wolves flew at her, but kanti are strong, like vicious horses, and she kicked and stamped and butted, and the wolves veered away. I almost cried out for jubilation, but Proyas clutched my arm and pointed directly down …”
She paused to lick her lips behind the porcelain.
“The wolves, Maitha. The wolves had known what she would do, even where she would run. So even as the cow seemed to frighten off the pack, two others, who had concealed themselves in the thickets at the ridge’s base, leapt upon the foal and tore out its throat. The mother shrieked, chased them away, but it was too late. The pack simply waited until she abandoned her child’s body.”
Esmenet really had no idea how much he could infer from the sliver of her voice. She had rehearsed this story to baffle his penetration. She had struggled to purge all sign of the passions that moved beneath her voice and intent—but how does one conceal what is already hidden?
“Do you understand, Maitha? I need to know you aren’t a wolf waiting in the thicket.”
For a heartbeat, anger and compassion seemed to war for the high ground of his gaze. “How could you think such a thing?” he exclaimed.
She breathed deep. How had she come by her suspicions? So often the past seemed a cistern sloshing with dissolved voices. Inrilatas had said she feared Maithanet because she despised herself. How could he not try to save the Empire from her incapacity? But something in her balked at the possibility. Her entire life, it seemed, she had fended fears without clear origin.
Just a tactic … she told herself. An attempt to engage me morally—make me defensive. She tapped the Ainoni mask with a lacquered nail—a gesture meant for herself as much as for him.
“How?” she replied. “Because you are Dûnyain.”
This occasioned a long silence between them. Watching his pained look lapse into blank scrutiny, Esmenet could not shake the nagging sense that her brother-in-law actually considered murdering her there and then.
“Your husband is Dûnyain,” Maithanet finally said.
“Indeed.”
She wondered if it would be possible to count all the unspoken truths that hung between them, all the devious grounds for their mistrust. Was there ever a family so deranged as theirs?
“If I condescend to this, this test, it will be only to reassure you, Esmi,” he finally said. His tone was devoid of pride or resentment, a fact that simply made him more inhuman in her eyes. “I am your brother. Even more, I am your husband’s willing slave, no different than you. We are bound together by blood and faith.”
“Then do this for me, Maitha. I will apologize if I’m wrong. I will wash your feet on the Xothei steps—anything! Wolves pursue me …”
It was all a game for them, she realized. No word, no expression, simply was. Everything was a tool, a tactic meant to further some occult and devious goal.
Even love … Just as Achamian had said.
She had known this for years, of course, but in the way of all threatening knowledge: at angles, in the shadowy corners of her soul. But now, playing that game with one of them, with a Dûnyain, it seemed she understood that knowledge down to its most base implication.
r /> She would be overmatched, she realized, were it not for her mask.
Maithanet had paused in the semblance of a man at his wit’s end. His jet beard looked hot in the sunlight—she wondered what dye he used to conceal the Norsirai blond. “And you are willing to trust the judgment of a mad adolescent?”
“I am willing to trust the judgment of my son.”
“To read my face?”
He was trying to extend the conversation, she realized. To better scrutinize her voice? Had something in her tone hooked his interest?
“To read your face.”
“And you realize the training this requires?”
Esmenet nodded toward her daughter. For all her deficits, Theliopa had been her reprieve. She too was Dûnyain, but as Kelmomas possessed his mother’s capacity to love, so too she possessed her mother’s need to please. This, Esmenet had decided, was what she could trust: those fractions of her that had found their way into her children.
She would count all the world her enemy otherwise.
“The ability to re-read passions is largely native,” Theliopa said, “and save for father-father, none can see so deep as Inrilatas. Inferring thoughts requires training, Uncle, a measure of which Father pro-provided.”
“But you know this,” Esmenet added, trying to hide the accusation in an air of honest confusion.
Gasping in exasperation, the Shriah of the Thousand Temples fell back in his chair. “Esmi …”
The tone and pose of an innocent bewildered and bullied by another’s irrationality. “If his actions conform to your expectations,” Kellhus had told her, “then he deceives you. The more unthinkable dissembling seems, Esmi, the more he dissembles …” Even though her husband had been referring to their son, the words, she knew, applied all the same to Maithanet. Inrilatas had said it himself: the Dûnyain were not human.
And so she would play her own mummer’s role.
“I don’t understand, Maitha. If you’re innocent, what do you have to lose?”
She already knew what Inrilatas would see in his uncle’s face—what he would say.
“The boy … He could say anything. He is mad.”
All she needed were grounds.
“He loves his mother.”
Before, the young Prince-Imperial had run about the bones of the Andiamine Heights; now he ran through them.
The more Kelmomas thought about it, the more it seemed he always knew that these tunnels existed, that all the subtle discrepancies between dimensions—shortened rooms and too-wide walls—had scratched and whispered at the edges of his notice. He did not like to think that ways had been hidden from him.
He wandered through the dark. He held a small hand about his candle flame to protect against drafts where he could, but he was not so afraid of losing his way as missing something of interest were the light to flicker out. All eyes, he padded through narrow corridors, a bubble of light slipping through black pipes. Everything he saw bore the strict stamp of his father. Bare surfaces. Crude stonework. Simple iron. Here and there he came across walls adorned with chapped paint, and once, an entire hall that had been vaulted and corniced: sections of the old Ikurei palace, he realized, that Father had bent to his own design. He quickly realized the stairs and halls composed but a small fraction of the complex. For every stair there were at least five tubes set with iron rungs, some climbing, others plumbing depths he had yet dared to go. And for every hallway there were at least a dozen chutes, accessing, he imagined, the palace in its entirety.
But there were too many locked doors and grates and hatches. He could almost see Mother or Father sending agents into these halls, using these portals to control how many bones could be explored.
He resolved to teach himself how to pick their locks.
Even though he knew he risked his mother’s wrath, he decided to explore one of the few unbarred chutes—one leading through the Apparatory, he soon discovered. He passed innumerable voices, laughing and gossiping for the most part. He even glimpsed several shadows through tight marble and bronze fretting. He heard a couple making like dogs, and rooting around, he found a crease through which he could watch their sweaty backs heave.
“This is the way you are to me,” he whispered to the secret voice.
This is how I am to you.
“One bright.”
One dark.
His eyes little more than slits, Kelmomas watched the plunging mystery for a time. The smell of it intrigued him, and it seemed he had caught some whiff of it on every man and woman he had met in his entire life. Including Mother. Finally, answering to a rising urgency, he began retracing his steps. He happily let his candle gutter out, knowing the route step for step, rung for rung. The musty darkness blew like a breeze through his hair and across his cheeks, so fleet was his passage back to the Empress’s apartment.
But Mother was waiting for him, her face as immobile as stone for fury.
“Kel! What did I tell you?”
He could duck her strike. He could catch her hand and break any one of her fingers. And while she winced for pain, he could snatch one of the pins fixing her hair and drive it deep into her eye. Death deep.
He could do any of these things …
But it was better to lean his cheek into her swatting palm, allow the blow to crack far harder than she intended, so that he could weep in false misery while she clutched him, and glory in her love and regret and horror.
Psatma Nannaferi rose from him, skin peeling from skin. She stood, savoured the kiss of cool air across her breasts, felt his seed flush her inner thighs—for her womb would have none of it. His post-coital slumber was deep, so deep he did not stir when she spat her contempt upon him. She could strike him dead and he would never know. He would writhe in agony for all eternity, thinking he need only awaken to escape.
Fanayal ab Kascamandri, blasted to charcoal, time and time again.
She barked in laughter.
She wandered the gloom of his pavilion, gazed upon the heirlooms of a destroyed empire. A fire-scorched standard, leaning negligently against a chair panelled in mother-of-pearl. Glittering coats of mail hanging from mahogany busts. The Padirajah’s body-slave, a solemn Nilnameshi as old as she had once been, cowered in a slot between settees, watching her the way a child might watch a wolf.
She paused before the pavilion’s small but sumptuous shrine. “You are one of Her children,” she said without looking at the man. “She loves you despite the wickedness your captors have forced upon you.” She drew a finger along the spine of the book nestled in crimson crushed velvet upon the small altar: the kipfa’aifan, the Witness of Fane.
The leather cracked and pimpled at her touch.
“You give,” she murmured, turning to fix the old man with her gaze. “He takes.”
Tears greased his cheeks.
“She will reach for you when your flesh stumbles, and you are pitched into the Outside. But you must reach for Her in turn. Only then …”
He shrank into his refuge as she stepped toward him.
“Will you? Will you reach for Her?”
He shook his head in affirmation, but she had already turned away, knowing his answer. She sauntered toward the draped entrance, glimpsed herself in the long oval of a standing silver mirror. The Mother-Supreme paused in the lantern gloom, allowed her eyes to roam and linger across the supple lines of her reborn body. She made a tongue of her image, savoured the honey of what she saw …
To be returned, to experience the unfathomable loss, to shrink and wither—and then to bloom anew! Psatma Nannaferi had never suffered the vanities of her sisters. She did not hunger, as the others hungered, for the thieving touch of Men. Only in the execution of the rites would her flesh rise to the promise of congress. Even still, she exulted in this Gift as she had no other. There was glory in middle-youth, the tested limb and will of maturity, clothed in firm silk years away from the sackcloth it would become.
Her temples looted and burned. So many of her sisters raped
and put to the sword, and here she stood, drunk with joy.
“Are you such a dog?” she asked the open air. “Eh, Snakehead?”
She turned to where Meppa stood on the pavilion’s threshold. The ornate flaps swayed into motionlessness behind him. Highland cool wafted through the interior.
“You,” he said with muttering intensity. His face remained directed forward, but the black finger of his salt asp had turned directly toward the cringing body-slave. The Mother-Supreme smiled, knowing the old man would not live to see dawn. He would die for her sake, she knew, and he would reach …
“Always guarding his master’s portal,” she cackled.
“Cover yourself, Concubine.”
“You do not like what you see?”
“I see the withered old crone that is your soul.”
“So you are a man still, eh, Snakehead? You judge my beauty, my worth, according to the youth of my womb … My fertilit—”
“Still your tongue!”
“Bark, dog. Rouse your master. Let us see whose snout he will strike.”
The shining snake finally turned to regard her. The lips beneath the silver band tightened into a line.
Psatma Nannaferi resumed her appraisal of her miraculous twin in the mirror. “You bear the Water within you,” she said to the Last Cishaurim. She drew a palm across the plane of her abdomen. “Like an ocean! You can strike me down with your merest whim! And yet you stand here bandying threats and insults?”
“I serve my Lord Padirajah.”
The Mother-Supreme laughed. This, she realized, was her new temple, a heathen army, flying through lands where even goatherds were loathe to go. And these heathen were her new priests—these Fanim. What did it matter what they believed, so long as they accomplished what needed to be done?
“But you lie,” she croaked in her old voice.
“He has been anoin—”
“He has been anointed!” she cackled. “But not by whom you think!”
“Cease your blasphem—”
“Fool! All of them. All these Men—all these Thieves! All of them think themselves the centre of their worlds. But not you. You have seen. You alone know how small we are … mere specks, motes in the gusting black. And yet you place your faith in errant abstraction—the Solitary God! Pfah! You throw number-sticks for your salvation, when all you need do is kneel!”