He flipped back to his feet when he reached the summit. All was shadows. He could only see the airy hollows of the Hall by looking through the slot between the pillars and the immense tapestries that hung between. For some reason, it seemed both more vast and smaller when seen from this vantage. When he reached the final pillar, it unnerved him to see that he could look down on the Mantle and his mother’s seat. It dawned on him that no matter how great, no matter how pure and concentrated one’s Strength, it was always possible that someone unseen looked down.
He secured his hands and hooked his feet along the edge of the immediate tapestry, slid like a bronze weight to the polished expanse of the floor. The grand pillars astonished him—or so he pretended in the name of his epic feat. Laughing, he climbed the steps to the Mantle, the great throne of ivory and gold from which his father passed dread judgment upon the Known World.
“Skuh-skuh-skin spies!” he whispered to himself. How long would it be before they showed themselves?
He couldn’t wait!
He climbed onto the throne’s hard seat, sat swinging his feet for several moments, hoping for the onset of absolute power, becoming bored when it failed to arrive. A sparrow caught in the netting above cried tweet-tweet-tweet in forlorn tedium. He craned his neck up and back to stare at its shadow. It periodically thrashed, a rustle like a dog’s hind leg scratching. The stars beyond twinkled without sound.
He wished he had a stone, but all he had was the skewer.
The world he walked was far different from the world walked by others. He did not need the voice to tell him that. He could hear more, see more, know more—everything more than everybody save his father and maybe his uncle. His sense of smell, in particular …
He pressed himself from the throne, from the residual aura of his mother, and trotted down the steps to the Auditory floor. The smell of his uncle, the Shriah, he could recognize readily enough, but the smell of the other, the stranger, was pungent with unfamiliarity. He squatted, bent his face to the smear of evaporated urine—a fuzzy patch of grease in the moonlit gleam.
He breathed deep the Matriarch’s rank odour. It transported him, enlightened him in the manner of petty things followed deep.
Then he stood and turned, leapt the stair to the dais in a single, effortless bound. He wandered onto the balcony behind the thrones, stared out across the moon-silvered distances of the Meneanor Sea.
There was something ominous about the Sea at night, the unseen heaving, the black curling beneath the booming surf, the sunless hissing. Only in the dark, it seemed, could the trackless extent of its menace be perceived. Vast. Impenetrable. All-embalming. Every struggle wrapped in a fizzing haze. Every death a dropping into the fathomless unseen …
Ever did Men drown in blackness, even in sun-spliced waters.
The young Prince-Imperial leapt over the balustrade.
The sorcerous Wards he need not worry about. He could see them easily enough. And the Pillarian Guards, who endlessly prowled the halls of the Andiamine Heights, he could hear around corners. Even if they were to catch him, something that still happened despite the years he had spent perfecting his game, the consequences of discovery would consist of little more than a lecture from Mother.
The Eöthic Guards, on the other hand, were a different matter. A relic of the old Ikurei Dynasty, they patrolled the grounds beyond the Holy Palace, the Imperial Precincts. Kelmomas imagined they would recognize him close up, his face held to torchlight; the problem lay in the inordinate skill and number of their bowmen. Every summer, Coithus Saubon, one of his father’s two Exalt-Generals, sponsored archery contests across the Middle-North, with purses awarded to the runners-up and a tenure as a Guardsman granted to the winners. With the exception of the Galeoth Agmundrmen, they were the most celebrated archers in the Three Seas. And though the risk of being stuck like some quail or straw-stuffed target appealed to Kelmomas, the possibility most certainly did not.
It was no easy task, culling risks from possibilities.
Slinking from rooftop to rooftop, the Prince-Imperial climbed down the seaward faces of the Andiamine Heights, careful to always eel his way along interior corners and abutments, wherever fortune and architecture piled the shadows deep. He kept his belly snake-low. He avoided windows tumescent with light.
He warred against the savagery of his grin the entire way.
But how could he not exult? Here and there he passed solitary Guardsmen, creeping on fingers and toes with nary a sound, gliding on a dark benediction, with a grace malevolent and unseen. He watched them, the men he eluded, studied their armoured forms in the moonlight, all the while riven with a duping glee. Here I am! he cackled in his thoughts. Here I am in the dark behind you!
One sentry almost saw him, a restive Pillarian who paced back and forth and sent routine looks sliding to the shadows. Kelmomas was forced to hang motionlessness no less than five times, to trust utterly the dark line that he followed. It was a curious, bodily faith, an intoxicating rush of terror and certainty, something animal and original, as alive as anything could be. He shook with excitement afterwards, had to bite his lip to keep from howling aloud.
But the rest of the Guardsmen, Pillarian or Eöthic, stared out in utter ignorance of their ignorance, their expressions flattened by a hapless indifference to the oblivion that encircled them. It was as though they guarded a world where Kelmomas didn’t exist and so could act with reckless abandon. It was good, the Prince-Imperial decided, that he tested them the way he did. What if he were a skin-spy? What then? In a moment of pious fury, he even settled on the lesson they had failed to learn. The darkness, he wanted to tell them, was not empty.
It was never empty.
He spent some time huddled in the crook formed by the chimney on the roof of the Lesser Stables, staring across the Batrial Campus at the monumental facade of the Guest Compound. No shafts had come whistling out of the darkness, no alarums had been raised, and it seemed that this was at once impossible and inevitable, as though he had cracked the world in two with his subterfuge. One capricious, the other to be disposed with as he pleased.
And on this night, only the latter was to be believed.
Immediately below him, in the light of poled torches, several slaves harnessed a horse to a wain loaded with what appeared to be empty casks and bushels. A group of drunken cavalrymen, Kidruhil, heckled them from a table that had been dragged into the cobbled yard. “Do you hear thunder?” one of them called out, raising a storm of laughter from his fellows.
Kelmomas lowered himself over the roof’s edge, then dropped as softly as silken rope. He circled behind the ridge of freshly heaped hay that the slaves, according to the soldier’s catcalls, were clearing room for in the stables. He burrowed into the loose thatch at the pile’s terminus, several paces down from the wain, then waited for the slaves to embark. He breathed deep the smell of chaff and the dust of dried-out life.
Peering through a straw skein, he watched one of the slaves, a balding man with a panicked face, climb the bench and urge the harnessed horse, a sturdy black, forward with a low whistle and flick of the reins. The Kidruhil paused in their laughter, as though struck by this moment of common mastery. Wielding pitchforks, the other slaves were already heaving great manes of hay into the air. The torches coughed and sputtered.
Kelmomas focused on the horse, timed the clopping tempo of his legs, closer, closer, until its bobbing head blotted the image of the driver. Shod hooves falling like hammers. Knuckled legs trotting, bending stiff and tensile like unstrung bows. Closer.
Kelmomas leapt into the thundering clatter, reached—
His hands hooked to the harness’s nethers, he pressed himself against the veined belly, willed himself into the animal’s torpid heat. The whole world rumbled. The great body floating above him, flexing to and fro. The cobbles rushing beneath, falling into the rapping wheels. The young Prince-Imperial laughed aloud, knowing the racket would swallow his every sound.
They rattled acros
s the Batrial Campus, and as they passed the Guest Compound at a tangent, Kelmomas released and twisted, landing face down on his palms and toes. He was sprinting the instant the wain’s box cleared him, a shadow flitting toward the succession of arches along the ground-floor portico.
Then he was in the Guest Compound.
Her scent was clear now, a bitter old woman smear, like the trail a worm might make. He followed it up to the third floor, paused before turning down the hall that led to her suites. He heard yet another guard’s heartbeat.
He looked then hid in a single motion, one eye daring the wall’s edge. A blink was all he needed. The details he could safely consider in the light of his soul’s eye: a lantern-lit corridor ornate with a faux colonnade and marble mouldings. A long length of carpet, trimmed with white vining, the blue so deep that most would think it black. A single sentry, neither Pillarian or Eöthic, standing rigid before the smell of her door.
No noise, save the lanterns and their endless glowing exhalation.
Kelmomas turned the corner and began stomping down the hall, sobcrooked lips, a peevish, mucus-filled moan, tears and a look of ruinous self-pity. The sentry smiled in a manner that confirmed his fatherhood, and so his familiarity with little-boy-tantrums. He leaned in tsk-tsk commiseration, the Golden Sickle of Yatwer emblazoned on his blackleather cuirass.
Kelmomas stepped into the fan of his multiple shadows.
“Come, now, little man—”
The motion was singular, abrupt with elegance. The skewer tip entered the sentry’s right tear duct and slipped into the centre of his head. The ease of penetration was almost alarming, like poking a nail into soft garden soil. Using the bone along the inner eye socket for leverage, Kelmomas wrenched the buried point in a precise circle. There was no need, he thought, to mutilate geometry as well.
He stepped to the side, his arm held high while the man toppled. The sentry’s face lolled to the left and turned almost upright as his weight yanked his skull clear the gleaming skewer. He twitched opened-eyed on the carpet, his fingers pawing the fabric like a purr-drunk kitten—but only for a heartbeat or two.
Kelmomas tugged the man’s knife from its sheaf.
The brass-strapped door was unlocked.
Cloth had been drawn over the windows, so that the light creaking in from the hallway was the room’s only illumination. “Hello?” somebody called—one of the body-slaves sleeping on the floor of the antechamber. The others awoke, leaned forward into the bar of light. Four altogether, blinking. At first, they seemed little more than disembodied faces, then, when he stepped among them, levitating howls. He hacked at them, striking along the interstices between flailing shadow-limbs. No game, it seemed, had ever been so thrilling. To not be tagged by skin or soiled by blood. To walk the cracks between heartbeats. To kill as though a wind, without any trace of passing.
The faces fell one by one, gushing like slashed wineskins.
The Matriarch was quite awake by the time the little boy slipped into her bedroom. “Tweet!” he trilled. “Tweet-tweet!” His giggling was uncontrollable …
Almost as much as her shrieking.
Anasûrimbor Esmenet casually dismissed the four Shrial Knights they found standing rigid in the hallway, looked around sourly at the ostentatious decor—anything but the dead Yatwerian sentry slumped across the carpet. In the Ikurei days, guests had been housed within the Andiamine Heights, something that simply wasn’t possible given the greater administrative demands of the New Empire. The Guest Compound was one of the Holy Dynasty’s first works, raised in the heady days before the fall of Nilnamesh and High Ainon, when Kellhus seemed to hold the world’s own reins within his haloed fists. The marble, with its distinctive blue bruising, had been transported all the way from quarries in Ce Tydonn. The towering panels, each depicting heroic scenes from the Unification Wars in relief, had been drafted by Niminian himself and carved by the most renowned Nansur stonemasons.
All to the glory of the Aspect-Emperor.
She had no desire to revisit the carnage beyond the threshold. Esmenet had witnessed her fair share of death, perhaps more than any woman in the Three Seas, but she had no stomach for murdered faces.
“We’ll wait here,” she told the two men who had taken up positions on either side of her. As always, Phinersa’s look seemed to flitter about the outskirts of her form. Captain Imhailas, on the other hand, was a study in contrast. He could stare with decisive constancy—too decisive, Esmenet sometimes thought. The man always seemed to be communicating urges he scarcely knew he possessed. Sometimes an arrogant curiosity would creep into his look, and he would press his manner to the very brink of transgression, standing almost too close, speaking in a way that was almost too familiar, and smiling at thoughts to which only he was privy. And as every prostitute knew, the only thing more threatening than eyes that had too many qualms were eyes that had too few. What had the strength to seize also had the strength to choke.
Moments afterwards, Maithanet appeared in the doorway, stepping carefully to avoid the clotted threads and buttons of blood. He was dressed plainly: no felt-shouldered vestments, no hems swaying with stitched gold, only a tunic possessing the satin gloss of a horse on parade. Ochre-coloured, it etched the contours of his limbs and torso in detail, revealing the kind of chest and shoulders that stirred some feminine instinct to climb. For the first time, it seemed, Esmenet realized how much the intimation of sheer physical strength contributed to his sometimes overawing presence.
The Shriah of the Thousand Temples was a man who could break necks with ease.
Both Phinersa and Imhailas fell to their knees, bowed as low as jnan required of them.
“I came as soon as I heard,” he said. To better cultivate the distinction between the political and the spiritual organs of the Empire, Maithanet always resided in the Cmiral temple-complex, never the Imperial Precincts, when he stayed in Momemn.
“I knew you would,” Esmenet replied.
“My brother—”
“Gone,” she snapped. “Shortly before word of . . . of this . . . arrived. I ordered the area sealed as soon as I heard of it. I knew you would want to see for yourself.”
His look was long and penetrating. It seemed to concede her worst fears.
“How, Maitha? How could they reach so deep? A mere Cult. The Mother of Birth, no less!”
The Shriah scratched his beard, glanced at the two men flanking her. “The Narindar, perhaps. They possess the skills … perhaps.”
The Narindar. The famed Cultic assassins of yore.
“But you don’t believe as much, do you?”
“I don’t know what to believe. It was a shrewd move, that much is certain. Figurehead or not, Sharacinth was our royal road, our means of seizing control of the Yatwerians from within, or at the very least setting them at war from within …”
Phinersa nodded appreciatively. “She has become their weapon now.”
Esmenet had concluded as much almost the instant she had stepped into the blood-spattered antechamber earlier that night. She was going to be blamed for this. First the rumours of the White-Luck Warrior, then the Yatwerian Matriarch herself assassinated while a guest of the Empress. The bumbling preposterousness of it mattered not at all. For the masses, the outrageousness of the act would simply indicate her fear, and her fear would suggest that she believed the rumours, which in turn would mean the Aspect-Emperor had to be a demon …
This had all the makings of a disaster.
“We must make sure no word of this gets out,” she heard herself saying.
Each of the men save the Shriah averted their gaze.
She nodded, tried to press her snort of disgust into a long exhalation. “I suppose that’s too late …”
“The Imperial Precincts,” Phinersa said apologetically, “are simply too large, your Glory.”
“Then we must go on the offensive!” Imhailas exclaimed. Until this moment, the handsome Exalt-Captain had done his best to slip between the cracks o
f her Imperial notice, his eyes wired open by the certainty that he would be held accountable. The security of the Imperial Precincts was his sole responsibility.
“That is true in any event,” Maithanet said gravely. “But we have another possibility to consider …”
Esmenet found herself studying Sharacinth’s ash-grey bodyguard, quite numb to what she was seeing. The smell of corruption was already wafting through the hall, like sediment kicked up in water. How absurd was it for them to have this discussion—this council of war—here in the presence of the very circumstantial debris they hoped to bury? People were dead, whole lives had been extinguished, and yet here they stood, plotting …
But then, she realized, the living had to forever look past the dead—on the pain of joining them.
“We must ensure this crime is decried for what it is,” she said. “Few will believe us, but still, it’s imperative that an Inquiry be called, and that someone renowned for his integrity be made Exalt-Inquisitor.”
“One of the Patriarchs of the other Cults,” Maithanet said, studying the carpets meditatively. “Perhaps Yagthrûta …” He raised his eyes to her own. “The man is every bit as rabid as his Patron God when it comes to matters of ritual legality.”
Esmenet found herself nodding in approval. Yagthrûta was the Momian Patriarch, famed not only because he was the first Thunyeri to reach such an exalted rank, but because of his reputed piety and candour. Apparently, he had journeyed across the Meneanor from Tenryer to Sumna in naught but a skiff—a supreme gesture of faith if there ever was one. Best of all, his barbaric origins insulated him against the taint of the Shrial or Imperial Apparati.
“Excellent,” she said. “In the meantime, it is absolutely crucial we find this Psatma Nannaferi …”
“Indeed, your Glory,” Imhailas said, nodding with almost comic grandiloquence. “As the Khirgwi say, the headless snake has no fangs.”