Not much had changed since the days when the Ikurei Dynasty had presided over the Andiamine Heights. Certainly, the palace had grown in measure with the Empire—or her hips, as it sometimes seemed. Momemn had been one of the few Three Seas cities with wisdom enough to throw itself upon the mercy of her husband. There had been no smoke on the wind, no blood on the flagstones, when she had first walked these halls. And what a wonder it had seemed then, that people could encase themselves in such glorious luxury. Marbles looted from Shigeki ruins. Gold beaten into foils, cast into figures both human and divine. The famed frescoes, such as the Blue Hubris by the suicide, Anchilas, or the anonymous Chorus of the Seas in the Mirullian Foyer. The white-jade censers. The Zeumi tapestries. The carpets so long, so ornate, that lifetimes had been spent weaving them …
All it had lacked was power.
A kind of mute inattention dogged her as she walked. She found herself turning down the hall almost without realizing, though she had been able to hear the screams for some time. His screams, Inrilatas. One of her middle children, youngest save for the twins.
She paused before the great bronze door to his room, stared with distaste at the Kyranean Lions stamped into its panels. Even though she passed it several times every day, it always seemed larger than she remembered. She ran her fingertips along the greening rims. She could feel nothing of his cries in the cool metal. No warmth. No hum. The frantic sound seemed to rise more from the cold floor at her feet.
Kelmomas leaned against her thigh, mooning for her attention. “Uncle Maithanet thinks you should have him sent away,” he said.
“Your uncle said that?” An itch always accompanied references to Maithanet, a premonition too indistinct to be called a worry. Because he was so much like Kellhus, she supposed.
“They’re frightened of us, aren’t they, Mommy?”
“Them?”
“Everybody. They’re all afraid of our family …”
“Why would that be?”
“Because they think we’re mad. They think father’s seed is too strong.”
Too strong for the vessel. Too strong for me.
“You’ve heard … them … talking?”
“Is that what happened to Inrilatas?”
“It’s the God, Kel. The God burns strongly in all of you. With Inrilatas he burns strongest of all.”
“Is that why he’s mad?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you keep him here?”
“He is my child, Kel, as much as you. I will never abandon my children.”
“Like Mimara?”
An unearthly sound burrowed from the polished stone, a shriek meant to pass sharp, cutting things. Esmenet flinched, certain he was there, Inrilatas, just on the other side of the door, his lips mashed against the portal’s marmoreal frame. She thought she could hear teeth gnawing at the stone. She looked from the door to the slender cherub that was her other son. Kelmomas. Godlike Kelmomas. Healthy, loving, devoted to the point of comedy …
So unlike the others.
Please let it be.
Her smile seemed proper to the tears in her eyes. “Like Mimara,” she said.
She couldn’t even think the name without a series of inner cringings, as though it were a weight that could be drawn only with ill-used muscles. Even now she had her men scouring the Three Seas, searching—searching everywhere except the one place where she knew Mimara would be.
Keep her safe, Akka. Please keep her safe.
Inrilatas’s shriek trailed into a series of masturbatory grunts. On and on they continued, each sucking on the one prior, all possessing a hairless animality that made her clutch Kelmomas’s shoulder. She knew this was something no child should hear, especially one as impressionable as Kelmomas, but her horror immobilized her. There was something … personal in the jerking sounds—or so it seemed. Something meant for her and her alone.
The cry of “Momma!” snapped her from her trance.
It was Samarmas. He burst from his nursemaid’s grasp, identical to Kelmomas in every respect, save for the slack pose of his face and the outward bulge of his eyes, so like those on ancient Kyranean statuary.
“My boy!” Esmenet cried, scooping the boy into her arms. With an “Ooof!” she swung him onto her hip—he was getting too big!—beamed mother-love into his idiot gaze.
My broken boy.
The nursemaid, Porsi, had followed in his stomping wake, eyes to the ground. The young Nansur slave knelt, face to the floor. Esmenet should have thanked the girl, she knew, but she had wanted to find Sammi herself, perhaps even to spy for a bit, in the way of simpler parents watching through simpler windows.
Inrilatas continued screaming through polished stone—forgotten.
Stairs. Endless stairs and corridors, from the reserved splendour of the summit, to the monumental spectacle of the palace’s lower, more public reaches, thence to the raw stone of the dungeons, with troughs worn into the floor stones for the passage of innumerable prisoners. In one courtyard they crossed, Samarmas hugged the backs of everyone who fell to their faces. He was always indiscriminate with his loving gestures, particularly when it came to slaves. He even kissed one old woman on her nut-brown cheek—Esmenet’s skin pimpled at the sound of her joyous sobbing. Kelmomas babbled the entire way, reminding Samarmas in his stern big brother way that they must be warriors, that they must be strong, that only honour and courage would earn the love and praise of their father. Listening, Esmenet found herself wondering at the Princes-Imperial they would become. She found herself fearing for them—the way she always feared when her thoughts were bent to the future.
As they descended the final stair, Kelmomas began describing skin-spies. “Their bones are soft like a shark’s,” he said, his voice lilting in wonder. “And they have claws for faces, claws they can squeeze into any face. They could be you. They could be me. At any second they could strike you down!”
“Monsters, Mommy?” Samarmas asked, his eyes aglow with tears. “Sharks?” Of course he already knew what skin-spies were: She herself had regaled him with innumerable stories about their sinister role in the First Holy War. But it was part of his innocence to respond to everything as though encountering it for the very first time. Repetition, as she had discovered on many cross-eyed occasions, was a kind of drug for Samarmas.
“Kel, that’s quite enough.”
“But he needs to know too!”
She had to remind herself that his cleverness was that of a normal child, and not like that of his siblings. Inrilatas, in particular, had possessed his father’s … gifts.
She wished she could put these worries to rest. For all her love, she could never lose herself in Kelmomas the way she could Samarmas, whose idiocy had become a kind of perverse sanctuary for her. For all her love, she could not bring herself to trust the way a mother should.
Not after so many … experiences.
As she feared, a carnival of personages great and small clotted the corridors leading to the Truth Room. The whole palace, it seemed, had found some excuse to see their latest captive. She even saw her cook, a diminutive old Nilnameshi named Bompothur, pressing toward the door with the others. The voice of Biaxi Sankas, one of the more powerful members of the Congregate, reverberated across the hooded stone spaces. “Let me pass, you caste-menial fool!”
The scene troubled her perhaps more than it should. To be Empress of the Three Seas was one thing, to be the wife of the Aspect-Emperor was quite another. In his absence, absolute authority fell to her—but how could it not bruise and break when the fall was so far? Even where one would expect her rule to be absolute—such as her own palace—it was anything but. In Kellhus’s absence, the Andiamine Heights seemed nothing so much as a squabbling mountain of bowing, scraping, insinuating thieves. The Exalt-Ministers. The caste-nobles of the High Congregate. The Imperial Apparati. The visiting dignitaries. Even the slaves. It sickened her the way they all lined up moist-eyed with awe and devotion whenever Kellhus walked the halls, on
ly to resume their cannibalistic rivalries the instant he departed—when she walked the gilded halls. Word has it, Blessed Empress, that so-and-so is questioning the slave reforms, and in the most troubling manner … On and on, back and forth, the long dance of tongues as knives. She had learned to ignore most of it, the palace would be on the brink of revolt if even a fraction of what was said was true. But it meant that she would never know if the palace were about to revolt, and she had read enough history to know that this was every sovereign’s most mortal concern.
She cried out, “Imhailas!”
Whether it was her or some perverse trick of the stone, the ringing of her voice had the character of a screech. A herd of apprehensive faces turned to her and the twins. There was a comical scuffle as they all struggled to kneel in the absence of floor space. She could not but wonder at what Kellhus would say about this lack of discipline. Who would be punished and how? There was always punishment where the Aspect-Emperor was involved …
Or as he pretended to call it, education.
“Imhailas!” she cried again. She squeezed Samarmas’s hand in reassurance, smiled at him. He had a tendency to cry whenever she raised her voice.
“Yes, your Glory,” the Exalt-Captain called from the blockaded threshold.
“What are all these people doing here?”
“It’s been some time, your Glory. Almost two years since the last—”
“This is foolish! Clear everyone out save your guards and the pertinent ministers.”
“At once, your Glory.”
Of course Imhailas scarce needed to utter a word: Everyone had heard her anger and her rebuke.
“They’re more afraid of Father,” young Kelmomas whispered at her side.
“Yes,” Esmenet replied, at a loss as to how to respond otherwise. The insights of children were too immediate, too unfiltered not to be unwelcome. “Yes, they are.”
Even a child can see it.
She drew the boys to the wall to make way for the file of men—a parade of seditious souls draped in ingratiating skins, or so it seemed. She acknowledged their anxious and perfunctory bows as they scurried past, wondering how she could possibly rule when her instruments so sickened her. But she had been too political for far too long not to recognize an opportunity when she saw one. She stopped Lord Sankas as he made to pass, asked him if he would assist her with the twins. “They’ve never seen a skin-spy before,” she explained. She wondered how she could have forgotten how tall he was—even for a caste-noble. Her own height had always been a source of shame for her, given the way it shouted her caste-menial origins.
“Indeed,” he said with a gloating smile. Most men were only too eager to embrace evidence of their importance, but when they were as old as Sankas, it seemed more unseemly for some reason. He looked down, winked at her sons. “The horrors of the world are what make us men.”
Esmenet smiled up at the Lord, knowing this little piece of advice to her sons would endear them to him. Kellhus was forever reminding her to seek the counsel of those whose friendship could be advantageous. Men, he was always saying, liked to see their words proved right.
“Are we going to see the monster now, Momma?” Samarmas asked in a voice as small as his eyes were wide. She looked to the child, grateful for the excuse to ignore the mob. Over the past year, ever since deciding the twins were not like the others, she had found herself retreating from the mad polity around her into the realm of maternal cares. It was more instinctive, and certainly more gratifying.
“There’s no need for you to fear,” she said, smiling. “Come. Lord Sankas will protect you.”
Though the name was the same, the Truth Room was one of the palace chambers, subterranean or otherwise, that had been drastically expanded in the years since Kellhus’s uncontested march into Momemn. The original Truth Room had been little more than the personal torture chamber of the old Ikurei Emperors, and every bit as dark and closeted as their peevish souls. The enormous chamber she now entered with her children was nothing less than an organ of state, a pit with walls tiered by walkways, some possessing cages for prisoners, others lined with various instruments of interrogation, and one, the uppermost, adorned with columns and marble veneers—a gallery for observers from the land of light. It was, the architect had told her, an inverted replica of the Great Ziggurat of Xijoser, carved so that the mighty monument on the Sempis Delta would fit if tipped into its hollow. Esmenet could remember Proyas quipping something to the effect that “sometimes Men must reach down” when seeking the Truth.
She led the children to the ornate balustrade of the highest tier, where the others awaited her. Her Master-of-Spies, Phinersa, and her Vizier, Vem-Mithriti, knelt with their faces to the floor, while Maithanet and Theliopa stood with their faces lowered in greeting. Imhailas was ushering out the last of the stragglers, his humour at once officious and curiously apologetic, the air of someone executing the irrational demands of another.
Theliopa, her eldest daughter by Kellhus, bowed in a stiff curtsy as they approached. Perhaps she was the strangest of her children, even moreso than Inrilatas, but curiously all the more safe for it. Theliopa was a woman with an unearthly hollow where human sentiment should be. Even as an infant she had never cried, never gurgled with laughter, never reached out to finger the image of her mother’s face. Esmenet had once overheard her nursemaids whispering that she would happily starve rather than call out for food, and even now she was thin in the extreme, tall and angular like the God-her-father, but emaciated, to the point where her skin seemed tented over the woodwork of her bones. The clothes she wore were ridiculously elaborate—despite her godlike intellect, the subtleties of style and fashion utterly eluded her—a gold-brocaded gown fairly armoured in black pearls.
“Mother,” the sallow blonde girl said in a tone that Esmenet could now recognize for attachment, or the guttering approximation of it. As always the girl flinched at her touch, like a skittish cat or steed, but as always Esmenet refused to draw back, and held Theliopa’s cheek until she felt the tremors calm.
“You’ve done well,” she said, gazing into her pale eyes. “Very well.” It was strange, loving children who could see the movements of her soul through her face. It forced a kind of bitter honesty on her, the resignation of those who know they cannot hide—not ever—from the people they needed to hide from the most.
“I live to please you, Mother.”
They were what they were, her children. Bits and pieces of their father. The truth of him—perhaps. Only Samarmas was the exception. She could see it in his every stitch, in the ardent affection with which he clung to Lord Sankas’s hand, in the round way his eyes probed the shadows beyond the rail, in the anxiousness that warbled through his limbs. Only Samarmas could be …
Trusted.
Recoiling from these thoughts, she turned to the others and pronounced the customary greeting, “Reap the morrow.” She felt Kelmomas’s small fingers squeeze her palm.
“Reap the morrow,” they intoned in response. Phinersa jumped to his feet with bandy-legged alacrity. He was a brilliant but nervous man, one who could bloom and wilt in the course of speaking a single sentence. He was one of those men who were far too conscious of their own eyes. They had the habit of darting around the point of your own, but more ritually than randomly, as though they followed some formal rule of avoidance, rather than any instinctive antipathy to the prick of contact. Those rare times he did manage a level gaze, it was with a penetration and intensity that boiled away to nothing in a matter of heartbeats and left you feeling at once superior and strangely exposed.
She found herself bending to assist old Vem-Mithriti, the Grandmaster of the Imperial Saik, to his feet. He smiled and murmured shamefaced thanks, more like a shrinking-voiced adolescent than one of the most powerful Exalt-Ministers in the New Empire. Sometimes Kellhus chose people for their wit and strength, as was the case with Phinersa, and sometimes for their weakness. She often wondered whether old Vem was his Gift to her, si
nce Kellhus himself had no difficulty handling the wilful and ambitious.
Maithanet, her brother-in-law and the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, towered next to the two Exalt-Ministers, dressed in a plain white tunic. The oiled plaits of his beard gleamed like jet in the lantern light. His height and force of presence never failed to remind Esmenet of her husband—the same light, only burning through the sackcloth of a human mother.
“Thelli found it during a surprise inspection of the new slaves,” he said, his voice so deep and resonant that it somehow blotted out the memory of the others. With a broad gesture, he drew her eyes out over the balustrade to the iron apparatus several lengths below …
Where it hung naked in a pose reminiscent of the Circumfix: the skin-spy.
Slicked in perspiration, its black limbs flexed against the iron brackets that clamped each of its joints—wrists, elbows, shoulders, waist. Even so immobilized, it seemed to seethe somehow, as though reflexively testing various points of leverage. The rusty grind and creak of the apparatus spoke to its ominous strength. Muscle twined like braided snakes.
A single gold pin had been driven into its skull, which, according to the arcane principles of Neuropuncture, had forced the thing to unclench its face. Masticating limbs waved where features should have been. They hooked the air like a dying crab, some flanged with disconnected lips, others bearing a flaccid eyelid, a hanging nostril, a furred swatch of brow. Perpetually shocked eyes glared from the pulpy shadows between. Teeth glistened from bared gums.
Esmenet clenched her teeth against the bile rising into her throat. Even after so many years, there was something about the creatures, some violation of fundamentals, that struck her to the visceral quick. As a reminder of the threat that loomed over her and her family, she kept one of their skulls in her personal apartments. It had a great hole where the eyes of a human would hang over the bridge of the nose. The rim of the hole possessed sockets for each unnatural finger. And the fingers, which some artisan had wired into a semblance of their natural pose, folded together in elaborate counterpoise, some curved and interlocking across the forehead, others bent into complex signs about the eyes, mouth, and nose. Every morning she glanced at it—and found herself not so much afraid as convinced.