She did look beautiful, for an old hag. A headdress of wings worked in mother-of-pearl adorned her dyed hair, with a veil of tiny silver chains hanging just past her painted brows. Bound tight against her figure with golden ribbon, her gown was both simple and traditional, though the printed blue silk, he imagined, had cost him a war galley. He knew he needed to blink the wine from his eyes, but she seemed more supple than wiry …
How long had it been?
“God-of-Men,” she said, cresting the last step. She lowered her head in perfect jnanic form.
For a moment Xerius stood speechless, quite disarmed by this uncharacteristic display of respect. “Mother,” he said carefully. When a vicious dog nuzzled one’s hand, it meant it was hungry—very hungry.
“The Saik have been here to see you.”
“Thassius, yes … He must have passed you on his way out.”
“Not Cememketri?”
Xerius snorted. “What is it, Mother?”
“You’ve heard something,” she said stridently. “Conphas has sent a message.”
“Bah!” He smacked his lips, turning from her. Bitch. Always yelping over her bowl.
“I raised him, Xerius! He was my ward—far more than he was ever yours! I deserve to know what happens. I deserve.”
Xerius paused, keeping her figure in his periphery. It was strange, he thought, the way the same words could infuriate him at one moment yet strike a tender chord at another. But that was what it all came down to in the end, wasn’t it? His whims. He looked her full in the face, struck by how luminous, how young her eyes seemed in the lantern light. He liked this whim …
“They know,” he said. “This imposter, this … Warrior-Prophet or whatever they’re calling him, accused Conphas—accused me!—of plotting to betray the Holy War. Can you imagine?”
For some reason, she seemed unsurprised. It occurred to Xerius that she could be the one who had betrayed their plans. Why not? Hers was an unnatural commingling of the masculine and the feminine intellect, driven by both an excessive need for approval and an equally excessive obsession with security. As a result, she saw rashness and cowardice everywhere she looked. In her son most of all.
“What has happened?” she asked, her tone lilting in concern.
Oh yes, one mustn’t forget her precious nephew’s skin.
“Conphas has been turned out. He and what remains of his Columns are to be interned at Joktha to await transport back to the Nansurium.”
“Good,” she said, nodding. “So your madness ends.”
Xerius laughed. “My madness, Mother?” He graced her with a smile all the more cutting for its genuineness. “Or Conphas’s?”
The Empress sneered. “And what’s that supposed to mean, hmm, my dear son?”
The ravages of age. He had watched it happen to his father’s contemporaries, watched their skulls scraped as hollow as clam shells, until their decrepit bodies seemed positively virile compared with their addled souls. Xerius found himself suppressing a shudder. These games of word and wit, they were her legacy. When had she fallen so many steps behind?
And yet …
“It means, Mother, that Conphas has the field.” He shrugged amiably. “I haven’t recalled him.”
“What are you saying, Xerius? They know now … know what you intend! It would be madness!”
He stared at her, wondering how she managed it after so many years.
“Indeed. I’m sure the Great Names think much the same.”
How could a crone look so … so virginal?
She closed her long-lashed eyes, smirking in her coquettish way. For once, it didn’t seem a vain travesty. “I see,” she said, sighing in the manner of a world-weary lover.
Even still, after all this time, he could remember her hand that first night, like ice stroking his baffled fire. That first night …
Sweet Sejenus, but he was hard—so pulsing hard!
He set down his bowl and turned to her. Suddenly he found himself pressing her back toward his canopied bed. She didn’t melt into compliance beneath his clasp, like a slave might, but neither did she resist. She smelled young … Tonight would be a night of desserts!
“Please, Mother,” he heard himself murmuring. “It’s been so long. I’ve been so lonely … Only you, Mother. Only you understand.”
He laid her across the great Black Sun embroidered into his coverings. His hands trembled as he fussed with her gowns. His groin throbbed so sweetly he feared he might soil his robes.
“You do love me,” he gasped. “You do love …”
Her painted eyes had become drowsy, delirious. Her flat chest heaved beneath the fabric. Somehow he could see through the skein of wrinkles that made a mask of her face, down to the serpentine truth of her beauty. Somehow he could see the woman who had driven his father mad with jealousy, who had shown her son the ecstasy of secrets bundled between sheets.
“My sweet son,” she gasped. “My sweet …”
His fingers and palm found warm skin. His heart became a thunderclap. He ran his hand along her calves, which she shaved in the fashion of the Ainoni, then across her still-smooth thighs. Could it be? He clutched at her groin, squeezed the haft of her erection—
There was no air for shouting. He toppled back across the floor and worked his mouth soundlessly, and she stood and smoothed her gowns and he scrambled backward, somehow managing to scream for his guards.
The first to arrive were too dumbfounded to do much more than die. A face imploded. A throat torn and gushing. It all seemed so ridiculous. Pisathulas, her giant eunuch, tried to restrain her, bawling out in some incomprehensible tongue. She broke his neck as easily as twisting a melon on the vine.
Then she had a sword.
She seemed a spider, her two limbs becoming eight with flashing grace. She danced and twirled. Men crumpled and cried out. Boots skidded across blood. Blue-tattooed limbs slapped against the floor, bruising dead bone.
Xerius turned, scrambling toward the door. There was no fear—that required comprehension—only an all-encompassing urgency, a primal need to remove himself from such sights, such circumstances.
He fought his way past two Guardsmen. His limbs floated. He ran shrieking down the gilded corridor. Slippers! Slippers! How could anyone run in fucking slippers?
Steaming censers whipped past him, but he could smell only the rank of his own bowel. How his mother would cackle! Her boy shitting his Imperial Regalia …
Run! Run!
Somewhere he could hear Skala bawling commands. He vaulted downstairs only to tumble, thrashing like a dog sewn into a sack. Moaning, blubbering, he found his feet, lurched back into a run. What happened? Where were his Guardsmen? Tapestries and gilded panels swam about him. There was shit on his knuckles! Then something bore him face-first into the marmoreal tiles. A shadow upon his back, a dozen hyenas laughing through its throat.
Iron hands about his face. Nails scoring his cheek. A meaty pop in his neck. An impossible glimpse of her—Mother—blood-spattered and dishevelled. There was no—
Early Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Sumna
Sol looked up, blinking and scowling. How early was it?
“Come-come!” Hertata cried from the mouth of the alley. “Maithanet comes! They say Maithanet comes to the stone quays!”
There was something in Hertata’s eyes when he said this, a hope or a longing that had grown too great. Though Sol was only eleven, he saw this, even without words to comprehend it. “But the slavers …”
The slavers were always a worry, especially at the stone quays where they held their markets. For slavers, finding a young orphan was like finding a coin dropped in the street.
“They wouldn’t dare-dare! Not with Maithanet coming! They would be damned-damned!”
Hertata always said things twice, even though the others so harshly teased him for it. They called him Hertata-tata or, more cruel still, Echo.
Hertata was strange.
“It’s Maithanet, Sol!” The
re were tears in his eyes. “They say he’s leave-leaving, that he’s sailing across the sea-sea!”
“But the winds—”
“Started this morn! They’ve come, and now he’s sailing across the sea, across the sea-sea!”
Why should he care for Maithanet? Men with gold rings gave no copper, unless they wanted to stick them. Why should he care for Maithanet, who would just try to stick him if he could? Fucking priests, anyway.
But the tears in Hertata’s eyes … Sol could see he was afraid to go alone.
Groaning, Sol stood and kicked about his rag bedding. He tried his best to sneer at Hertata’s beaming face. He’d seen Hertata’s ilk before. Always whimpering “Mommy” in the middle of the night. Always crying. Always getting sticked for food because he was too afraid to steal. They never survived. None of them. Just like his little brother …
But not Sol! His feet were rabbit-quick.
Not far from their alley lay a large fullery, and they stopped to piss in the giant bowls arrayed before it. The façade was always crowded, especially in the morning. They did their best to avoid looking at the beggars with “fuller’s feet”—the rot that resulted from years of mashing laundry—though they could hear their curses and catcalls. Even cripples despised those poorer than themselves. Finishing, the boys cut across the sulphurous reek of the fullers’ yard, laughing at the rows of men stomping up and down in cement basins arranged in batteries. The air fairly thundered with the slap of wet fabric across the drying-stones. They darted past the drovers who crowded the far entranceway with their donkeys and laundry-carts.
“Will there be food?” Sol asked Hertata.
“Petals,” the younger boy assured him. “They always throw petals when the Shriah walks-walks.”
“I said food,” Sol snapped, even though he knew he would eat petals if he could.
The boy’s brown eyes remained fixed on his feet. He had no idea. “It’s him, Sol … Maithanet …”
Sol shook his head in disgust. Fucking Hertata-tata. Fucking Echo.
They passed through the more affluent, porticoed streets immediately adjacent to the Hagerna. Vendors opened their shops, joking with their slaves as they drew heavy wooden shutters from grooves in the burnt-brick thresholds. Periodically the two boys glimpsed the great monuments of the Holy Precincts between the posh tenements fencing the sky. Every glimpse of the Junriüma’s turrets set them to pointing and whistling with wonder.
Even orphans could hope.
They dared not enter the Hagerna itself for fear of the Shrial Knights, so they followed the surrounding streets toward the harbour. For a time they walked along the wall itself, gawking at its immensity. Vines sheeted most of it in leafy green, and they took turns guessing what the other thought the patches of bare and ancient stone most resembled: rabbits, owls, or dogs. In the Porampas Market they overheard two women say that Maithanet’s ship was berthed in the Xatantian Basin—the hexagonal harbour some old emperor had excavated from the shores of Sumna’s natural harbour long, long ago.
They made their way to the warehouse district, amazed that even as far out as the Milleries Street the way was crowded with people walking in the same direction. They paused to savour the smell of fresh bread and to chortle at the mules they could see in the shadowy interiors all about them, plodding round and round their millstones. The air had taken on a carnival atmosphere, rumbling with laughter and animated discussion, punctuated by the squeal of children and the bawling of infants. Despite himself, Sol scowled less and less at Hertata’s ridiculous comments. He even laughed at the boy’s jokes.
Though he would never admit it, Sol was happy he had listened to Hertata. Being surrounded by glad-hearted people all walking the same direction made him feel as though he belonged to something, as if through some inarticulate miracle he had found his way back inside from the filth and cold and contempt.
How long had it been since his father’s murder?
A band of musicians joined their impromptu migration, and Sol and Hertata danced their way past the storehouses with their ramped entrances and slitted windows. They paused in the shadow of the Great Warehouse, which Hertata had never seen, and Sol explained how his dear friend, the Emperor Ikurei Xerius III, used it to hoard grain for him against times of famine. Hertata howled with laughter.
With the crowds thickening about them, they decided to run so they might beat the crush. As quick as he was, Sol took the lead, and Hertata chased him, laughing. They darted about families, dodged along the narrow ways that drifted and twined through crowds of people. Sol allowed Hertata to almost catch him twice, and the boy squealed in a way that made Sol both cringe and laugh. Finally, he let Hertata tackle him.
They wrestled for a moment, cursed each other with mock insults. After easily pinning him, Sol pulled Hertata to his feet. They were close to the harbour now. Gulls screeched through the sky above them. The air smelled of water and swollen wood. They wandered about, suddenly anxious. Walking vendors—old harbour men, mostly—were selling halved oranges to mask the stink, and the boys were lucky enough to find a few discarded rinds, which they gobbled, savouring the bitter.
“I told you,” Hertata said, chewing, “there was food-food.”
Sol closed his eyes and smiled. Yes, Hertata had spoken true.
Without warning, the sonorous peal of the Summoning Horns rang across the city, at once so familiar and strangely threatening, as though a besieging army signalled its assault.
“Come-come!” Hertata cried. He grabbed Sol by the hand, began pulling him deeper into the milling crowds. Sol frowned—only babies and stickers held hands—but he let the boy lead him through the labyrinth of waists and elbows nonetheless. He found himself studying Hertata, who continually looked back, smiling with manic encouragement. From where had his sudden courage come? Everyone knew Hertata was a cringer, yet here he was, barging toward an almost certain beating. Why would he risk such a thing? For Maithanet? As far as Sol was concerned, nothing was worth getting a beating—or even worse, getting clapped by slavers. He would sooner be sticked.
And yet there was something in the air, something that made Sol feel uncertain in a way he had never felt uncertain before. Something that made him feel small, not in the way of orphans or beggars or children, but in a good way. In the way of souls.
He could remember his mother praying the night his father had died. Crying and praying. Was that what drove Hertata? Could he remember his mother praying?
They pressed through limbs and curses, and despite several swats suddenly found themselves staring about the armoured flanks of a Shrial Knight. Sol had never been so close to a Knight of the Tusk before, and he fairly trembled with dread. The white of the man’s surcoat was so clean, the gold embroidery so brilliant. He wore a hauberk of silvered mail, beneath which he seemed impossibly solid, rooted like a tree. Like most boys he knew, Sol feared warlike men as much as he envied them. But Hertata seemed entirely unimpressed; he poked his head past the Knight as though staring around a stone column.
Plucking up his courage, Sol followed Hertata’s lead and leaned forward to look up and down the street. Hundreds of Shrial Knights held the gathering masses in check. Others on horseback rode slowly along their lines, scanning the crowds as though expecting unwanted relatives. He was about to ask Hertata if he could see any sign of the Shriah when, without a word, the Knight gently pressed the two of them back into the midst of the other onlookers.
Hertata chattered endlessly about all the things his mother had told him about Maithanet. How he had cleansed the Thousand Temples, how he had smashed the heathen with his Holy War, how he slept on a mat beneath the Tusk-Tusk. How the God himself blessed his every word-word, his every glance-glance, and his every foot-fall-fall. “He need only see me, Sol! He need only look-look!”
“And then what?”
But Hertata would not say.
Suddenly they were hooting and cheering. They had both turned to the sound of a distant roar striated wi
th faint cries of “Maithanet!” Then, for no reason Sol could fathom, they were roaring themselves. Hertata actually bounced up and down—that is, until the crowds pressed them forward into the Shrial Knight, who had locked arms with his holy brothers to either side. The cacophony seemed to go on and on, and for a time Sol feared his heart might burst for excitement. The Shriah! The Shriah was coming! Never had he stood so close to the Outside.
The shouts waxed on and on, slowly leached of their fervour by fatigue. Then, just as Sol decided all their commotion was stupid—who cheered the invisible?—he glimpsed sunlight flashing across jewelled rings …
The Shrial Procession.
His heart hammered in his chest. The sun seemed to spin in the sky above. Though breathless, he cried out, and it seemed his lungs, his mouth, his voice were innumerable.
Three lavishly garbed priests crossed the narrow slot of their view. Then he stepped into sight. Younger. Taller. Paler. A full beard. Wearing only a simple vestment, so white it pained the eyes to look. A thousand pleading hands reached out toward him, to greet, to implore, to touch. Hertata was fairly shrieking, trying to gain his majestic attention. He merely walked, but it seemed he moved so fast, as though the ground itself pulled him forward. For some reason, Sol raised his hands and reached out, not to touch the luminous image before him but to jab his fingers at his friend—to point at the one soul that needed to be seen more than any other.
Perhaps it was that Sol alone, of all those lining the avenue, gestured to another. Perhaps it was that Maithanet somehow knew. Whatever the reason, the bright eyes flickered toward him. Saw.
It was the first total moment in his entire life. Perhaps the only.
As Sol watched, Maithanet’s eyes were drawn by his pointing fingers to Hertata, wailing and jumping beside him. The Shriah of the Thousand Temples smiled.
For a breathless moment he held the boy’s gaze, then the Knight’s form swallowed his hallowed image.