She saw mule-drawn wains swaying with firewood heaped so high she and Imhailas quickened their step whenever they passed them. She tried hard not to glare at the Columnaries they passed playing number-sticks on the steps of the Custom House they were supposed to be guarding. They passed an endless variety of vendors, some walking the streets bent beneath their wares, others occupying the stalls that slotted the first floor of most buildings. She even saw prostitutes sitting on the sills of second-floor windows, hanging their legs so that passersby could chase glimpses along their inner thighs.
She could not but reflect on the miracle that had raised her from the warp and woof of the sordid lives surrounding her. Nor could she avoid the great wall that years, luxury, and innumerable intermediaries had thrown between her and them. She was one of them, and she was not one of them—the same as with the caste-nobility that showered her with flattery and insolence day in and day out.
She was something in-between—apart. In all the world the only person like her, she realized in a pique of melancholy, the only other member of her lonely, bewildered tribe, was her daughter, Mimara.
Even though she knew that countless thousands made journeys no different from the one she and Imhailas had undertaken, it seemed miraculous they should gain their destination without some kind of challenge. The streets became more narrow, less crowded, and odourless enough for her to finally discard her orange. For the span of a dozen heartbeats she even found herself alone with her Exalt-Captain, fending a sudden, unaccountable suspicion that he and Sankas conspired to kill her. The thought filled her with shame and dismay.
Power, she decided, was a disease of the eyes.
Esmenet studied the ancient tenement while Imhailas consulted the small map Sankas had provided him. The structure had four floors, built in the Ceneian style with long, fired bricks no thicker than three of her fingers. Pigeon droppings positively mortared the ledges above the ground floor. A great crack climbed the centre of the facade, a line where the bricks had been pulled apart by settling foundations. She could tell most of the apartments were abandoned by the absence of shutters on the windows. Given the clamour and hum they had passed through, the place seemed almost malevolent for its silence.
When she glanced back at Imhailas, he was watching her with worried blue eyes.
“Before you go … May I speak, Your Glory? Speak freely.”
“Of course, Imhailas.”
He seized her hand with the same urgency she allowed him during the deep of night. The act startled her, at once frightened and heartened her.
“I beg you, Your Glory. Please, I beseech! I could have ten thousand soldiers break ten thousand curse-tablets on the morrow! Leave him to the Gods!”
The gleam of tears rimmed his eyes …
He loves me, she realized.
Even still, the most she could say was, “The Gods are against us, Imhailas,” before turning to climb the rotted stairs into darkness.
The smell of urine engulfed her.
Another one of her boys was dead. This was simply the skin of the unthinkable, the only thought her soul could countenance when it came to justifying what she was about do. Far darker, more horrifying realizations roiled beneath. The closest she could come to acknowledging them was to think of poor Samarmas, and how his sweet innocence guaranteed him a place in the Heavens.
But Inrilatas … He had been taken too early. Before he could find his way past … himself.
Inrilatas was … was …
It is a strange thing to organize your life about the unthinkable, to make all your motions, all your words, expressions of absence. Sometimes she felt as though her arms and legs did not connect beneath her clothing, that they simply hung about the memory of a body and a heart. Sometimes she felt little more than a cloud of coincidences, face and hands and feet floating in miraculous concert.
A kind of living collapse, with no unifying principle to string her together.
The stairwell had been open to the sky at some point in the structure’s past: she could see threads of light between boards high above. The landlord had decided to keep the rain out, she imagined, rather than repair the drainage. The steps had all but crumbled, forcing her to claw the bricked wall to ascend safely. She had known many tenements like this, ancient affairs, raised during glory days that no one save scholars remembered. Once, before Mimara had been born, a catastrophic roar had awakened her in the dead of night. The curious thing was the totality of the ensuing silence, as if the entire world had paused to draw breath. She had stumbled to her window and for a time could see only the dull glow of torches and lanterns through the blackness and dust. Only morning revealed the ruins of the tenement opposite, the heaps, the hanging remains of corner walls. In a twinkling, hundreds of faces she had known—the baker and his slaves, the souper who spent his day bellowing above the street’s clamour, the widow who would venture out with her half-starved children to beg in the streets—had simply vanished. Weeks passed before the last of the bodies were recovered.
The stench had been unbearable, toward the end.
She paused on the second floor, peering and blinking. She breathed deep, tasted the earthen rot that soaks into mortar and burnt brick—and felt young, unaccountably young. Of the four doors she could discern, one stood ajar, throwing a lane of grey light across the dirty floor.
She found herself creeping toward it. Despite the crude cloth of her cloak, a kind of fastidious reluctance overcame her, the worry of staining what was fine and beautiful. What was she thinking? She couldn’t do this … She had to flee, to race back to the Andiamine Heights. Yes …
She wasn’t appropriately dressed.
Yet her legs carried her forward. The door’s outer edge drew away like a curtain, revealing the room beyond.
The assassin stood staring out the window, but from the centre of the room, where he could scarce hope to see anything of interest. Indirect light bathed his profile. Aside from a certain solemn density in his manner, nothing about him suggested deceit and murder. The line of his nose and jaw was youthful to the point of appearing effeminate, yet his skin possessed the year-brushed coarseness of someone hard beyond his years. His jet hair was cropped short, which surprised her, since she had thought the assassin-priests always wore their hair long, as long as an Ainoni caste-noble’s, but without the braids. His beard was trim, as was the present fashion among certain merchants—something she knew only because fanatical interests in the Ministrate had petitioned her to pass beard laws. His clothing was nondescript. Brown stains marred his earlobes.
She paused at the threshold. When she was a child, she and several other children would often swim in the Sumni harbour. Sometimes they made a game of holding heavy stones underwater and walking across the mud and debris of the bottom. She had the same sense stepping into the room, as if some onerous weight gave her traction, that she would pop from the floor otherwise, breach the surface of this nightmare …
And breathe.
The man did not turn to regard her, but she knew he scrutinized her nonetheless.
“My Exalt-Captain frets below,” she finally said, her voice more timid than she wished. “He fears you will murder me.”
“He loves you,” the Narindar replied, jarring her with memories of her husband. Kellhus was forever repeating her thoughts.
“Yes …” she replied, surprised by a sudden instinct to be honest. To enter into a conspiracy is to commit a kind of adultery, for nothing fosters intimacy more than a shared will to deceive. What does clothing matter, when all else is shrouded? “I suppose he does.”
The Narindar turned to regard her. She found his gaze unnerving. Rather than latching upon her, his focus seemed to float over and through her. The result of some ritual narcotic?
“Do you know what I want?” she asked, joining him in the indeterminate light. Her breath had climbed high and tight in her breast. She was doing this. She was seizing fate.
“Murder. To seek the Narindar is to seek
murder.”
He smelled of mud … mud cooking in the sun.
“I will be plain with you, assassin. I appreciate the peril I represent. I know that even now you hedge, knowing that only something … something extraordinary, could deliver a woman of my exalted station to a man … a man … such as you. But I want you to know, it is honesty that has brought me here, alone … to you. I am simply not willing to see another damned for sins that are my own. I want you to know that you can trust that honesty. No matter what happens, I appreciate that you have placed your very soul upon the balance. I will make you a prince, assassin.”
If her words possessed effect, his gaze and expression betrayed none of it.
“Warm blood is the only gold I would hoard, Your Glory. Sightless eyes the only jewels I would covet.”
This had the sound of a catechism believed.
“Maithanet,” she said on a pent breath. “The Shriah of the Thousand Temples … Kill him, and I shall compel princes—Do you hear me? Princes!—to kneel before you!”
It seemed utter madness, now that the words hung in the air between them. She almost expected the man to cackle aloud, but he grasped his bearded chin and nodded instead.
“Yes,” he said. “An extraordinary sacrifice.”
“So you will do it?” she asked in unguarded astonishment.
“It is already done.”
She recalled what Lord Sankas had said about the Narindar carving events along different joints—the way this very meeting would be of a piece with raising the knife.
“But …”
“There is nothing more to be said, Your Glory.”
“But how will I … I …”
She trailed in flustered indecision. How could the world be so greased, so rounded, that matters this weighty could be discharged with such fugitive ease? The Narindar had turned to gaze through the slotted window. She reflexively followed his gaze, saw pillared smoke rising above the motley roofs to the east. Something was happening …
More riots?
She made to leave, but something intangible hooked her at the battered door, turned the tether of her gaze. He stood as if waiting for this very occurrence. He looked both old and young, as if time had lacked the tools to properly craft the clay of his skin. She wondered how she must look to him, furtive beneath her sack-cloth cloak and hood. An Empress cowering from her own Empire.
“What is your name?”
“Issiral.”
“Issiral …” she repeated, struggling to recall the meaning of the Shigeki word. “Fate?” she asked, frowning and smiling. “Who named you this?”
“My mother.”
“Your mother was cruel, to curse you with such a name.”
“We take such gifts as she gives.”
Something about this, and about the man’s demeanour more generally, had blown terror into her anxiousness. But she reasoned that men who kill for hire—assassins—should be frightening.
“I thought Narindar were devotees of the Four-Horned Brother …”
“Devotion? The Brother cares not for our cares, only that we murder in His Name.”
The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas swallowed. That the World could accommodate such men, such designs. That even murder could become worship …
“The Brother and I have that much in common,” she said.
The Unaras Spur
Spaceless space … hanging.
Glimpses of slave-girls, shining black and naked save for a single ostrich feather between their thighs. Towering eunuchs, their ceremonial shackles gleaming in the humid gloom. Great beams of wood and bulbous pillars of marble and diorite. Pillows tossed negligently through the pleasure gardens …
The Palace of Plumes.
Soundless sound. Voiceless voice …
“Tell him, Cousin. Tell the cunning Son of Kascamandri. If he succeeds, High Holy Zeüm will be as a brother to Kian. We will strike as he strikes, bleed as he bleeds!”
Even as he replied, Malowebi could feel himself toppling backward, plummeting into himself, so much had he dreaded these words. “Yes, Great Satakhan.”
The aging Mbimayu sorcerer blinked and coughed, found the infinite nowhere replaced by the squalid confines of his tent—if the wretched thing the Fanim had given him could be called such. He sat cross-legged, the twin mahogany figurines—the fetishes that made possible the Iswazi Cant—squeezed tight in his knobbed fists. He braced his elbows against his knees, buried his face in his hands.
Tomorrow, he decided. He would tell the Padirajah tomorrow.
Tonight he would groan and complain in his canvas cage, toss and obsess—do everything but sleep.
How Likaro would laugh. The ingrate.
After the Zaudunyani conquest of Nilnamesh, Malowebi and his senior Mbimayu brothers had burned whole urns of lantern oil scrutinizing and arguing the madness that was the Aspect-Emperor and the Great Ordeal. Even if their Satakhan had not demanded it, they would have set aside all things to ponder it. For years they had believed that Anasûrimbor Kellhus was simply a kind of contagion. For whatever reason, the Three Seas seemed particularly prone to prophets and their tricks. Where Zeüm had remained faithful to the old Kiünnat ways, albeit in their own elliptical fashion, the Ketyai—the Tribe entrusted with the Holy Tusk, no less!—seemed bent on tearing down their ancient truths and replacing them with abstraction and fancy. “To better measure their ages,” Wobazul had quipped in one of their discussions. Anasûrimbor Kellhus, Malowebi and his fellow Mbimayu had assumed, was simply another Inri Sejenus, another gifted charlatan bent on delivering even more of his kinsmen to damnation.
But the man’s successes. And the reports, both from Zeüm’s spies and the Mbimayu’s contact with the Schools. The Aspect-Emperor was more than a gifted demagogue, more than a cunning general or sorcerer or tyrant—far more.
The question was what?
So they debated, and debated, as is the wont of wise men pondering questions without obvious answers. Nganka’kull was often criticized for his patience and leniency, but eventually even he tired of their endless delays and demurrals. Finally he summoned his cousin, demanding to know the substance of their disagreements.
“We have considered everything of note,” Malowebi reported on a heavy breath. “There is but one clear lesson …”
The Satakhan had perched his chin on his fist, such was the weight of the battle-wig—an heirloom from his beloved grandfather—that he wore. “And what is that?”
“All those who resist him perish.”
Word that Imperial Columnaries had occupied the ruins of Auvangshei arrived later that very night—such was the perversity of Fate. The ancient fortress meant very little to Three Seas Men, Malowebi had since discovered. But for the Zeümi, it was nothing less than the sacred threshold of their nation. The one gate in the great wall the World itself had raised about High Holy Zeüm.
The Zaudunyani missionaries began arriving shortly afterward, some of them little more than paupers, others disguised as merchants. Then, of course, there was the infamous Embassy of Suicides. And during all this time, Auvangshei was rebuilt and expanded, the provinces of Nilnamesh reorganized along military lines. Their spies even reported the construction of numerous granaries in Soramipur and other western cities.
A kind of war was being waged against them, they realized. At every point of connection between Zeüm and the Three Seas—mercantile, diplomatic, geographical—the Aspect-Emperor was preparing in some way.
“He fights us with pins rather than swords!” Nganka’kull exclaimed.
Malowebi had read The Compendium by this time. The book found its way to High Domyot more by accident than anything—or what amounted to the same, the Whore’s whim. An Ainoni spice merchant named Parmerses had been seized under suspicion of spying, and the manuscript was discovered among his belongings. Of course, the man was summarily executed once his captors discovered the falsity of the charges against him, long before the importance of the work was understood, s
o questions regarding the book’s provenance remained unanswered.
But once it was read, it was quickly traded among the wise and mighty. Malowebi had been gratified to learn that he was the sixth person to read The Compendium—no less than seven people before that fool, Likaro!
Drusas Achamian’s revelations occasioned more than several sleepless nights. The wry humility of the tome, as well as the numerous references to Ajencis, convinced him the exiled Mandate Schoolman was a kindred intellect. The difficulty lay in the sheer audacity of what the Wizard alleged about the Aspect-Emperor: the idea of a man so quick, so cunning, that he, Malowebi, among the foremost sorcerers of his age—greater than Likaro by far—was nothing but a child in comparison. It was a thing too strange to credit. In all of the Kuburu, the accumulated legends of Zeüm, the hero’s exalted trait was always strength, skill, or passion—never intellect. A miraculously accurate archer. A miraculously ardent lover …
Never a miraculously penetrating thinker, one who used truth as his primary instrument of deception.
But why? Malowebi found himself asking. It was a puzzle that deepened as more and more of his brothers expressed their skepticism of The Compendium. “A cuckold’s fancy,” Likaro had sneered, thus confirming its veracity in Malowebi’s more discriminating eyes.
Why should the notion of a Thought-dancer rest so uneasy in the souls of Men?
Because, the Mbimayu sorcerer realized, they made what they already believed the measure of what other’s believed. Not the World, and certainly not Reason. This was what rendered them blind to a being such as Anasûrimbor Kellhus, one who could play on innumerable strands of thought and weave that agreement into designs of his making. It reminded him of a passage from Ajencis, a thinker he secretly esteemed more than Memgowa: “The world is a circle that has as many centres as it has men.” For someone who assumed he was the centre of his world, the thought of a man who occupied the true centre, who need only walk into a room to displace all those present within it, had to be as odious as it was incomprehensible.