She saw his reflection peeking through the silken folds of her hanging gowns, one crimson, the other cerulean blue. He was a shy, furtive shadow, scarcely more substantial than the fabric hanging about him. She knew instantly that all was not well, but something—habit, or perhaps exhaustion—prevented her from acknowledging him. A pang gripped her throat. Not so long ago it had been a game that both Samarmas and he had played, hiding and seeking through her wardrobe while she was dressed. And now …
“Sweetling?” she called. She glimpsed her smile in the mirror: It was so grim that she flushed in shock. Was this how she looked every time she smiled, as though she merely bent her lips?
Kelmomas stared at his toes instead of replying.
She dismissed her body-slaves with a vague flutter of her fingers, turned to look at him directly. Birdsong floated on the cool morning drafts.
“Sweetling … Where’s Porsi?”
She winced at the question, which she had asked out of habit. Porsi had been scourged and turned out for her negligence. When Kelmomas failed to respond, Esmenet found herself looking back into the mirror, pretending to be preoccupied with the twists of muslin about her waist. Her hands automatically hitched and smoothed, hitched and smoothed.
“I c-can be Sammy …”
She heard these words more with her breast it seemed than her ears. A flush of cold about the heart. Even still, she continued to face the mirror.
“What do you mean? Kel, what are saying?”
Our children are so familiar to us that we often forget them, which is why the details of their existence sometimes strike us with discomfiting force. Either because she watched him through the mirror or in spite of it, Esmenet suddenly saw her son as a little stranger, the child of some unknown womb. For a moment, he seemed too beautiful to be …
Believed.
“If you don’t …” Kelmomas began in a pinched voice. He was twisting the fabric of his tunic against his right hip, causing the hem to ride up his thighs.
At last she turned, sighing as if irritated and feeling instantly ashamed for it. “Sweetling. If I don’t what?”
His little shoulders jerked in a soundless gasp. He stared down with the fierce concentration that only injured boys seemed able to summon—as though seeing could choke what was seen.
“If you don’t w-want me … If you don’t want … Kelmomas, I can be Sam-Sammi.”
Heartbreak crashed over her, numbed her to the extremities. In a rush she saw the full compass of her selfishness. Had she even truly mourned for Samarmas, an anguished part of her wondered, or had she simply made him evidence of her own hardship? For whom had she grieved?
She tried to speak, but there was no voice in the sound she made.
Kelmomas warred with his trembling lips. “I l-look … look j-just like …” He fell to his rump, then slumped into a silken bundle onto the floor. He did not sob, nor did he wail; he keened, a noise every bit as small as his frame and yet animal in its intensity, its honesty.
Abandoning her reflection, Esmenet pressed through cool fabric to kneel over him. Now that she could see her crime, it seemed she had known all along. Trapped in circles of self-pity, pinned by the weight of endless duty and obligation, she had never paused to consider what Kelmomas suffered. As devastated and desolate as she had been the past days, she possessed the same vein of flint that tempered the heart of all mothers, the same hereditary knowledge. Children died. They died all the time, such was the cruelty of the world.
But for Kelmomas. He had lost so much more than a sibling or a playmate. He had lost his days. He had lost himself. And he could not comprehend.
I’m all he has left, she thought, stroking his fine, golden hair.
Even still, something dark in her recoiled.
Children. They wept so much.
Save for the long gold-and-white banners depicting the Circumfix, the Imperial Audience Hall on the Andiamine Heights looked much the same as it had during the Ikurei Dynasty. Everything was designed to overawe petitioners and to concentrate the glory and the dignity of those sitting upon the Mantle. The old Nansur Emperors had always aspired to an architectural and decorative opulence at odds with their actual power, perhaps thinking that the illusion, if pursued with enough patience and zeal, could be made manifest.
It was as Kellhus said: Monuments were as much prayers as they were tools, overreaching arrested in dwarfing stone. That the world was littered with their ruins illustrated more than a few uneasy facts regarding the human soul. Men were always inclined to bargain from a position of strength, especially where the Gods were concerned.
Today, Esmenet could not help but reflect, would almost certainly be a case in point.
She had grown quite accustomed to her seat just below the Mantle on the dais, fond of it even. Several paces from her slippered feet, steps descended in broad hemispheric arcs to the Auditory, the main floor where the penitents and courtiers assembled. An arcade of immense pillars soared to either side, diminishing both in perspective and illumination. Ornate tapestries hung motionless between the marble trunks, each a Gift from some province of the New Empire, each featuring the Circumfix as its central motif. Animal totems from Thunyerus. Tigers and twining lotus from Nilnamesh …
Everything, it seemed, had been pinned to her position, as though stone and space had faces that could turn, that could lower in obeisance. She was the windless centre, the intangible point of balance.
But it was the missing rear wall that pleased her most, the sense of natural light showering over her shoulders, the knowledge that everyone gathered across the Auditory saw her against the sky-bright firmament. It rendered what could be the most vulnerable position, the place of the effigy, into something too elusive to serve as a convincing target of curses. She loved nothing more than evening audiences, where petitioners often held their hands against the sun to see. It let her act and speak with the impunity of silhouettes.
She even liked the fact that birds continually became fouled in the nearly invisible netting that had been draped over the opening to prevent them from nesting in the vaults. There was something at once sinister and reassuring to the sense of flutter and battle hanging over her periphery. They relieved her, it seemed, of the need to make threats. On any given day, there would only be one or two trapped, their felt-limbed struggles too small and their cries too shrill to bring about any real compassion.
Today there were four.
Sometimes after sunset, she had allowed Samarmas help the slaves set them free. Eyes miracle wide. Hands trembling. His smile was like fear, it was so intense.
The gentle swell of orisons from the upper galleries announced the Matriarch’s imminent entrance—one of innumerable hymns to the Aspect-Emperor.
Our souls rise from darkness,
at once near and far.
Our souls fall into darkness,
through gates left ajar.
He comes before,
A candle carried into forever after.
He comes before …
Thinking of the twins, Esmenet set her teeth, warred against the pang that threatened to crack her painted face. Kelmomas had been inconsolable, and she had been forced to leave him bawling, begging for her to hold him, promising to become his dead brother for her sake.
“We l-love you, Mom-mommy … So-so m-much …”
We, he had said, his voice small and forlorn. She could scarce think of the episode without blinking the heat from her eyes. She exhaled slow and deep, doing her best to appear motionless. The great bronze doors swung soundlessly open, and she watched Hanamem Sharacinth, the nominal ruler of the Cult of Yatwer, stride into the abandoned Auditory. The Matriarch was supposed to dress in gunny to signify her poverty, but vertical bands gleamed across her earth-coloured gown with her every step. Maithanet accompanied her, resplendent as always in commodious white and gold.
He comes before,
A candle carried into forever after.
He comes before …
The end of the chorus faded into the pitch of ringing stone. The Yatwerian Matriarch stiffly dipped to one knee, then the other. “Your Glory,” she said, before pressing her face to her reflection across the marble floor.
Esmenet nodded to demonstrate Imperial Favour. “Rise, Sharacinth. We are all children of the Ur-Mother.”
The older woman lifted herself, though not without some effort. “Indeed, your Glory.” She looked to Maithanet, as though expecting some kind of assistance, then remembered herself. She was not accustomed, Esmenet realized, to the company of her betters. Esmenet had received many petitioners over the years, long enough to reliably guess the tenor of an audience from the first exchange of words. Sharacinth, she could tell, had made hard habit out of authority, to the point where she could not be trusted to show either grace or deference. Defensiveness hung about the old woman like an odour.
Esmenet cut directly to the point. “What do you know of the White-Luck Warrior?”
“I thought as much,” the Matriarch huffed, her eyes narrow with arrogance. Her face was angular and curiously bent, as though it were a thing of clay left too long on one side.
“And why would that be?” Esmenet asked with mock graciousness.
“Who hasn’t heard the rumours?”
“The treason, you mean.”
“The treason, then.”
For a moment the outrageousness of her tone quite escaped Esmenet. So often, it seemed, she forgot her exalted station and discoursed with others as though they were her equals. She found herself blinking in indignation. She hasn’t even condoled me for the loss of my son!
“And what have you heard?”
A calculated pause. Sharacinth’s eyes seemed bred to bovine insolence, her lips to a sour line. “That the White-Luck has turned against the Aspect-Emperor … Against you.”
Esmenet struggled to draw breath around her outrage. Arrogant ingrate! Treacherous old bitch!
Was this what she had imagined all those years ago, sitting on her sill in Sumna, enticing passers-by with a glimpse of the shadows riding up and down her inner thighs? Knowing nothing of power, Esmenet had confused it with its trappings. Ignorance—few things were so invisible. She could remember staring at the coins she had so coveted, those coins that could ward starvation or clothe bruised skin, and wondering at the profile of the man upon them, the Emperor who seemed to stand astride her every bounty and privation. Not hated. Not feared. Not loved. These were passions better spent on his agents. The Emperor himself had always seemed … far too far.
In the endless reveries between beddings, she would sort through everything she could remember, all the lore, inchoate and humbling, that a citizen affixes to the subject of their sovereign. And in her soul’s eye she would see him, Ikurei Xerius III, sitting in this very place.
How could it be possible?
Once, quite on a whim, she had shown Samarmas a silver kellic. “Do you know,” she had asked, pointing to the apparition of her own profile across its face, “who that is?” He had a way of opening his mouth when astounded, as though trying to shape his lips about a nail. It was at once comical—and heartbreaking in that it so clearly betrayed his idiocy.
My son! she silently cried. Picking wounds had become her path of least resistance, the one effortless thing. But there was no escaping the clamour of her responsibilities, the motions she had to force against the grain of what should be overwhelming grief. She had no choice but to have faith in her painted face.
“But you’ve heard more,” she asked in a hard and steady voice—a voice proper to the Empress of the Three Seas. “Haven’t you?”
“More. More,” Sharacinth muttered. “Of course, I’ve heard more. When does one not always hear more? Rumours are like locusts or slaves or rats. They breed indiscriminately.”
They had known she was a prideful woman. It was the whole reason for summoning the bitch here: Maithanet had hoped the dimensions and reputation of her surroundings would be enough to mellow her hubris into something more malleable, something they could shape to their own purposes.
Apparently not.
“Matriarch, you would do well to recollect the stakes of our conversation.”
A sneer—an open sneer! And for the first time, Esmenet glimpsed it, the look that is the terror of all those who command positions of power: the look that says, You are temporary, no more a passing affliction. Suddenly she understood the staged calculation behind her throne and its position above the auditory floor. With one look, it seemed, the old woman had thrown it all into stark relief: the truth behind the hierarchy of disparate souls. Recognition, Esmenet realized. Power came down to recognition.
It was all naked force otherwise.
“Matriarch!” Maithanet boomed, drawing into his voice and aspect all the magisterial authority of the Thousand Temples.
Sharacinth opened her mouth in retort—not even the Shriah could cow her, it seemed. But whatever breath she possessed was sucked from her lungs …
Instead she wheezed and stumbled back, raised a hand against the sudden, immolating light that had sparked into existence above the floor before her. It danced and spiked outward, so brilliant it rendered everything dim. Crazed shadows swung from her ankles across the far corners of the Auditory. The point grew and sparkled, chattered with incandescences that possessed intensities beyond the gaze’s conception …
Esmenet lowered her forearm, blinked at scalded eyes.
There he stood, tall, magnificent and otherworldly, exactly as she remembered him. A white silk tunic fell loose over his armour, embroidered in countless crimson tusks, each the length of a thorn. His beard was braided gold, his mane was long and free-flowing. The two demon heads hung bound to his right hip, mouthing curses without breath … There was a mad density to his aspect, a hoarding of reality that denied the world the sharpness of its edges and the substance of its weight.
It seemed the earth should groan beneath his feet. Her husband …
The Aspect-Emperor.
Sharacinth stood like a shipwreck survivor leaning to the memory of tossed seas. Two paces behind her and to the right, Maithanet lay supine across the shining floor. The Shriah of the Thousand Temples kneeling.
Esmenet knew enough not to watch Kellhus assume the Mantle to her right. Confidence, which in all complicated situations is nothing more than the pretence of premeditation, is ever the outward marker of power. There could be no appearance of improvisation.
“Hanamem Sharacinth,” he said, his voice at once mild and permeated with the tones of imminent murder, “do you think you merit standing in my presence?”
The Matriach nearly fell over trying to throw herself to the floor. “N-no!” she sobbed in old woman terror. “M-Most Glorious … Pluh-please—”
“Will you,” he interrupted, “take steps to assure that this sedition against me, this blasphemy, comes to an end?”
“Y-yesssh!” she wailed to the floor. She even hooked her fingers behind her head.
“For, make no mistake, I shall war against you and yours.” The grinding savagery of his voice swallowed the entirety of the hall, battered the ear like fists. “Your deeds I shall strike from the stones. Your temples I shall turn into funeral pyres. And those that still dare take up breath or arms against me, I shall hunt, unto death and beyond! And my Sister, whom you worship, shall lament in the dark, her memory no more than a dream of destruction. Men shall spit to cleanse their mouths of her name!”
The old woman shook, arched her back as if gagging in terror.
“Do you understand what I say, Sharacinth?”
“Yessssh!”
“Then this is what you shall do. You shall heed your Empress and your Shriah. You shall put an end to the ignoble sham that is your office. You shall make claim to the truth of your station. You shall make war upon the wickedness within your own temple—you shall cleanse the filth from your own altar!”
Somewhere beyond the vaulted ceiling, a cloud engulfed the sun, and e
verything dimmed save the old woman writhing upon her reflection. Kellhus leaned forward, and it seemed all the world leaned with him, that the pillars themselves tilted, hanging above the Matriach, shivering in catastrophic outrage.
“And you shall hunt this witch you call your mistress, Psatma Nannaferi! You shall put an end to the sacrilege that is your Mother-Supreme!”
Her face averted, her elbows to the floor, she shook two white-palmed hands out in warding.
“No-noooo! Pluh-pluh-pleeeeese—”
“SHARACINTH!” The name crashed through the Hall, boomed through its arched recesses. “WOULD YOU OFFEND ME IN MY OWN HOUSE?”
The Matriarch shrieked something inarticulate. A puddle of urine spread about her knees.
Then, as though exhaling a pent breath, the world resumed its natural lines and proportions. The unseen cloud passed from the unseen sun, and indirect light once again showered blue upon the dais.
“Taste your breath,” Kellhus said as he stood. He stepped out to loom patient and fatherly over the woman blinking up at him from the base of the steps. “Taste it, Sharacinth, for it is the mark of my mercy. Fight the inclination of your heart, conquer your weakness for pride, for spite. Do not make humiliation of truth. I know you can feel it, the promise of release, the bone-shuddering release. Turn from the shrill poison of your conceit, from the hooked fists and knuckled teeth, from the rod of cold iron that holds you rigid when you should sleep. Turn from these things and embrace the truth of the life—the life!—that I offer you.”
Esmenet had heard these words so many times they should have seemed more a recitation than something meant, an incantation that never failed to undo the knots of pride that so bound men. And yet each time, she found herself sinking through the surface, floating utterly submerged. Each time, she heard them for the first time, and she was frightened and renewed.