It had long since become an argument for suffering her husband.
And now, here was another one, wrapped in shining meat. One of the Consult’s most lethal weapons. A skin-spy. A living justification. The threat that forgave her tyranny.
“Black-skinned?” she said, turning to Maithanet. “Have we ever captured a Satyothi before?”
“This is the first,” the Holy Shriah replied, nodding toward Theliopa as he spoke. “We think it might be a test of some kind.”
“A plausible assumption,” Theliopa said, her voice high and cold. “If the threshold of detection were a near thing, it might have been successful. For all the Consult knows, the subtle differences between complexions and bone structure could have rendered this one undetectable. It would explain the seven hundred and thirty-three days that have elapsed since their last attempt to infiltrate the court.”
Esmenet nodded, too unnerved by her daughter’s vacant and all-seeing gaze to work through the implications.
She checked on the boys. On his tiptoes, Kelmomas stared with something resembling rapt indecision, as if trying to decide whether the thing below them was a match for his wilder imaginings. Samarmas had abandoned Lord Sankas to join his twin at the balustrade. He stared between his fingers, his face held partially averted. They seemed wise and imbecilic versions of the same child, one modern, the other antique, almost as though history had folded back on itself. Without warning, Kelmomas turned to gaze into her face: In so many little ways, he was still his father’s son—and it worried her.
“What do you think?” she asked with a forced smile.
“Scary.”
“Yes. Scary.”
As though sensing some kind of permission in this, Samarmas threw his arms around her waist and began blubbering. She held his cheek against her midriff and cooed to him in a soft, shushing voice. When she looked up, Phinersa and Imhailas were watching her intently. She supposed with Theliopa present she had no need to fear their intent, but even still, there always seemed to be a glimpse of malice in their look.
Or a lust that amounted to the same.
“What do you wish, your Glory?” Phinersa asked.
Without Kellhus, there was nothing they could learn from this creature. Skin-spies possessed no souls, nothing for Vem-Mithriti’s sorcerous Cants to compel. And torments simply … aroused them.
“Sound the Plate,” she said with weary decisiveness. “Let the People be reminded.”
Maithanet nodded in sage assent. “A most wise decision.”
Everyone stared at the monstrosity for a wordless moment, as if committing its form to memory. No matter how many skin-spies she saw, they never ceased to unnerve her with their devious impossibility.
Imhailas cleared his throat. “Shall I make preparations for your attendance, your Glory?”
“Yes,” she replied absently. “Of course.” The People needed to be reminded of more than what threatened them, they needed to be reminded of the discipline that kept them safe as well. They needed to recall the disciplinarian.
The tyrant.
She held Samarmas tight, pressed her fingers through his hair, felt his scalp as soft and as warm as a cat beneath her palm. Such a little soul. So defenceless. Her eyes strayed to Kelmomas, who now crouched, his face pressed against the stone spindles, to better study the gasping monstrosity below.
Though it pained her, she knew her duty. She knew what Kellhus would say … By the mere fact of his blood, they would live lives of mortal danger. For their own sakes, they would need to become ruthless … as ruthless as she had failed to become.
“And for my children as well.”
“You’re thinking about yesterday’s recital,” the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples said.
After giving the twins back to Porsi, Esmenet had joined her brother-in-law on the long walk to the palace’s postern entrance, where his bodyguard and carriage awaited. This had become something of a tradition ever since Kellhus had left to lead the Great Ordeal against Sakarpus. Not only did Maithanet’s station make him her social and political equal, his counsel had become a source of comfort—sustenance, even. He was wise in a manner that, although never quite so penetrating as Kellhus, always struck her as more … human.
And, of course, his blood made him her closest ally.
“The way Nel-Saripal begins,” Esmenet replied, staring absently at the figures engraved in marble panels along the walls. “Those first words … ‘Momemn is the fist in our breast, the beating heart …’” She turned to look up at his stern profile. “What do you think?”
“Significant,” Maithanet conceded, “but only as a signal, the way birds tell sailors of unseen land.”
“Hmm. Yet another unfriendly shore.” She studied his expression, watched the smoke tailings of an oil-lamp break about his hair and scalp. She had said this as a joke, but her scrutiny made it seem more of a test.
Maithanet smiled and nodded. “With my brother and his stalwarts gone, all the embers that we failed to stamp out during the Unification will leap back into flame.”
“What Nel-Saripal dares, others will also?”
“There can be no doubt.”
She found herself frowning. “So the Consult should no longer be our first priority? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No. Only that we need to throw our nets wider. Think of the host my brother has assembled. The first sons of a dozen nations. The greatest magi of all the Schools. Short of the No-God’s resurrection, nothing can save Golgotterath. The Consult’s only hope is to fan the embers, to throw the New Empire into turmoil, if not topple it altogether. The Ainoni have a saying, ‘When the hands are strong, attack the feet.’”
“But who, Maitha? After so much blood and fire, who could be so foolish as to raise arms against Kellhus?”
“The well of fools has no bottom, Esmi. You know that. You can assume that for every Fanayal who opposes us openly, there are ten who skulk in the shadows.”
“Just so long as they’re not so canny,” she replied. “I’m not sure we could survive ten of him.”
Twenty years ago, Fanayal had ranked among the most cunning and committed foes of the First Holy War. Though the heathen Empire of Kian had been the first to topple at the Aspect-Emperor’s feet, Fanayal had somehow managed to avoid his nation’s fate. According to Phinersa’s briefings, songs of his exploits had reached as far as Galeoth. The Judges had already burned a dozen or so travelling minstrels at the stake, but the lays seemed to spread and reproduce with the stubbornness of a disease. The “Bandit Padirajah,” they were calling him. By simply drawing breath, the man had immeasurably slowed the conversion of the old Fanim governorates.
The Shriah and the Empress walked in silence for several moments. Their journey had taken them into the Apparatory, where the residences of the palace’s senior functionaries were located. The girth of the halls had narrowed, and the mirror sheen of marble had been replaced with planes of lesser stone. Many of the doors they passed stood ajar, leaking the sounds of simpler, more tranquil existences. A nurse singing to a babe. Mothers gossiping. Those few people they encountered in the hall literally stood slack-jawed before throwing their faces to the ground. One mother viciously yanked her son, an olive-skinned boy perhaps two or three years younger than the twins, to the floor at her side. Esmenet heard his crying more in her belly than in her ears, or so it seemed.
She clutched Maithanet’s arm, drew him to a halt.
“Esmi?”
“Tell me, Maitha,” she said hesitantly. “When”—she paused to bite her lip—“when you … look … into my face, what do you see?”
A gentle smile creased his plaited beard. “Not so far or so deep as my brother.”
Dûnyain. It all came back to this iron ingot of meaning. Maithanet, her children, everyone near to her possessed some measure of Dûnyain blood. Everyone watched with a portion of her husband’s all-seeing eyes. For a heartbeat, she glimpsed Achamian as he had stood twenty years earlie
r, a thousand smoke plumes scoring the sky beyond him. “But you’re not thinking! You see only your love for him. You’re not thinking of what he sees when he gazes upon you …”
And with a blink both he and his heretical words were gone.
“That wasn’t my question,” she said, recovering herself.
“Sorrow …” Maithanet said, probing her face with warm, forgiving eyes. He lifted her small, slack hands in the thick cage of his own. “I see sorrow and confusion. Worry for your first, for Mimara. Shame … shame that you have come to fear your children more than you fear for them. So very much happens, Esmi, both here and in places remote … You fear you are not equal to the task my brother has set for you.”
“And the others?” she heard herself ask. “Can the others see this as well?”
Dûnyain, she thought. Dûnyain blood.
The Shriah squeezed her hands in reassurance. “Some sense it, perhaps, but only in a dim manner. They have their prejudices, of course, but their sovereign and saviour has made you their road to redemption. My brother has built a strong house for you to keep. I hesitate to say as much, but you truly have no cause to fear, Esmi.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason I have no fear. The Aspect-Emperor has chosen you.”
A Dûnyain. A Dûnyain has chosen you.
“No. Why do you hesitate to tell me?”
His eyes unfocused in calculation, then returned to her. “Because if I see your fear, then he has seen it also. And if he has seen it, then he counts it as a strength.”
She tried in vain to blink away the tears. His image sheered and blurred, Maithanet seemed an elusive, predatory presence. A concatenation of liquid shadows. “You mean he’s chosen me because I’m weak?”
The Shriah of the Thousand Temples shook his head in calm contradiction. “Is the man who flees to fight anew weak? Fear is neither strong nor weak until events make it so.”
“Then why wouldn’t he tell me as much.”
“Because, Esmi” he said, drawing her back down the hall, “sometimes ignorance is the greatest strength of all.”
For a thing to seem a miracle, it cannot quite be believed.
The following morning Esmenet awoke thinking of her children, not as the instruments of power they had become, but as babies. She often found herself shying away from thoughts of the early years of her motherhood, so relentless had Kellhus been in his pursuit of progeny. Seven children she had conceived by her husband, of which six had survived. Add to that Mimara, her daughter from her previous life, and Moënghus, the son she had inherited from Kellhus’s first wife, Serwë, and she was the mother of eight …
Eight!
The thought never ceased to surprise and to dizzy her, so certain she had been that she would live and die barren.
Kayûtas had been the first, born close enough to Moënghus that the two had been raised as fraternal twins. She had delivered him in Shimeh upon the Holy Juterum, where the Latter Prophet, Inri Sejenus, had ascended to the Heavens two thousand years previous. Kayûtas had been so perfect, both in form and in temperament, that the Lords of the Holy War had wept upon seeing him. So perfect, like a pearl, she sometimes thought, taking in the world’s shadowy jumble and reflecting only a generic, silvery light. So smooth that no fingers could grasp him, not truly.
It had been Kayûtas who had taught her that love was a kind of imperfection. How could it be otherwise, when he was perfect and could feel no love? Simply holding him had been a heartbreak.
Theliopa had come second, born in Nenciphon while Kellhus waged the first of many wars against the drugged princes of Nilnamesh. After Kayûtas, how could Esmenet not hope against hope? How could she not clutch this new babe and pray to the Gods, please, please, give me but one human-hearted child? But even then, her daughter’s limbs still slick with the waters of passage, she had known she had born another … Another child who could not love. With Kellhus at war, she stumbled into a kind of bottomless melancholy, one that made her envy suicides. If it had not been for her adopted son, little Moënghus, it might have ended then, this queer fever dream that had become her life. He at least had needed her, even if he was not her own.
That was when she began demanding resources, real resources, for her search for Mimara—whom she had sold to slavers in the shadow of starvation so very long ago. She could remember staring at Theliopa in her bassinet, a pale and wane approximation of an infant, thinking that if Kellhus denied her, she would have no choice but to …
Fate truly was a whore, to deliver her to such thoughts.
Of course, she found herself almost immediately pregnant, as though her womb had been a hidden concession in the deal she had struck with her husband. Her third child by Kellhus, Serwa, was born in Carythusal with the smell of the Zaudunyani conquest still on the wind—soot and death. Like Kayûtas, she had seemed perfect, flawless, and yet unlike him she had seemed capable of love. What a joy she had been! But when she was scarce three years old, her tutors realized that she possessed the Gift of the Few. Despite Esmenet’s threats, despite her entreaties, Kellhus sent the girl—still a babe!—to Iothiah to be raised among the Swayal witches.
There had been bitterness in that decision, and no few thoughts of heresy and sedition. In losing Serwa, Esmenet learned that worship could not only survive the loss of love, it possessed room for hatred as well.
Then came the nameless one with eight arms and no eyes, the first to be delivered on the Andiamine Heights. The labour had been hard, life-threatening even. Afterwards would she learn that the physician-priests had drowned it, according to Nansur custom, in unwatered wine.
Then came another son, Inrilatas—and there was no doubt that he could love. But Esmenet had developed instincts for these things, as mothers who bear many children sometimes do. From the very beginning, she had known something was wrong, though she could never name the substance of her misapprehensions. But it became plain to his nurses by his second year. Inrilatas was three when he first began speaking the little treacheries that dwelt in the hearts of those about him. The entire court walked in terror of him. By the age of five he could summon words so honest and injurious that Esmenet had seen hard-hearted warriors blanch and reach for their blades. She would never forget the time when, after singing to him in his bed, he had looked up with his too-nimble face and said, “Don’t hate yourself for hating me, Mommy. Hate yourself for who you are.” Hate yourself for who you are, spoken in the dulcet tones of child adoration. By the time he was six, only Kellhus could fathom, let alone manage, him, and he had not the time for anything more than a cursory relationship. She still shuddered whenever she recalled the rare conversations they shared, father and son. Afterwards, it was as if Inrilatas, who had always walked the perimeter of sanity, simply tripped and tumbled in the wrong direction. The veil of utter madness was drawn down.
She had prayed for the passing of her fertility during this time, for what the Nansur called meseremta, the “dry season.” But Yatwer’s Water continued to flow, and she so dreaded coupling with Kellhus that she actively sought out surrogates for him, women of native intellect like herself. But if his divine seed was a burden she could scarce bear, then it broke all the others. Of the seventeen concubines he impregnated, ten died in childbirth, and the others gave birth to more … nameless ones. Thirteen in sum, all drowned in wine.
Esmenet sometimes wondered how many hapless souls had been assassinated to keep this secret. A hundred? A thousand?
News of Mimara’s discovery arrived shortly after Inrilatas’s final breakdown. For almost ten years Esmenet’s men, soldiers of the Eöthic Guard who had sworn to die before returning to their mistress empty-handed, had scoured the Three Seas. In the end they found Mimara in a brothel, dressed in paste and foil to resemble none other than Esmenet herself, so that low men might couple with their dread Empress. All Esmenet could remember of the news was the cruelty of the floor.
They had found her daughter, her only child sired by a ma
n instead of a god. And if the manner of her discovery had not broken Esmenet’s heart, then the hatred she saw in Mimara’s eyes upon their reunion most certainly had … Mimara, sweet Mimara, who as a child would only hold her mother’s thumb when they walked hand in hand, who would cry inexplicably at the sight of solitary birds, or squeal at the glimpse of rats flitting from crack to crevice. She had come back to her mother broken, another bruised and battered peach, and quite as mad as any of Esmenet’s other more divine daughters and sons.
As it turned out, Mimara also possessed the Cift of the Few. But where Kellhus had turned a deaf ear to Esmenet with Serwa, this time he left the matter in her selfish hands. She would not lose another daughter to the witches, even if it destroyed any chance of mending the tattered history between them. She would not sell Mimara a second time—no matter how vicious the young woman’s rantings. Even the Schoolmen Esmenet consulted had told her that Mimara was too old to master the painstaking meanings sorcery required. But as so often happens in family quarrels, the grounds were entirely incidental to the conflict. Mimara simply needed to punish her, and she in turn had needed to be punished—or so Esmenet had assumed.
The twins arrived during this time, and with them one final spearthrow at Fate.
There had been much cause for despair in the beginning. Though as perfect in form as their eldest brother, Kayûtas, they could not be separated without lunatic squalls of anguish. And when they were left together, all they ever did was stare into each other’s eyes—watch after watch, day after day, month after month. The physician-priests had warned her of the risks of bearing children at her age, so she had prepared herself for … oddities, she supposed, peculiarities over and above what she had already experienced. But this was so strange as to be almost poetic: two children with what seemed a single soul.