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 Dûnyain … 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 Kni
ght’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 Gilgaöl, 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.
Anasûrimbor 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 Dûnyain.
“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 Dûnyain 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 Anasûrimbor Moënghus, 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 …”