The Cishaurim said nothing in reply. The salt-asp, lantern light gleaming along the cross-hatching of its scales, hooked away from her toward a point over her shoulder.
She turned to see Fanayal standing naked in a kind of stationary lurch behind her. He seemed insubstantial for the play of shadow and gloom.
“Do you see now?” Meppa asked. “Her treachery. Her devilry! My Lord, please tell me that you see!”
Fanayal ab Kascamandri wiped his face, breathed deep, his nostrils whistling. “Leave us, Meppa,” he said roughly.
A moment of equipoise followed, the mutual regard of three overbearing souls. Their breathing abraded the silent air. Then with the merest bow, the Cishaurim withdrew.
The Padirajah loomed behind the diminutive woman.
He flung her about, cried, “Witch!” He clamped callused hands about her neck, bent her back, crying, “Accursed witch!”
Groaning, the Mother-Supreme clutched his hard muscled arms, hooked a naked calf about his waist.
Thus he ravished her.
Still huddled between the settees, the doomed body-slave wept for watching …
Soft earth deeply ploughed.
Scant ceremony greeted Uncle Holy’s arrival at the Andiamine Height’s postern gate, only sombre words and unspoken suspicion. Slaves raised embroidered tarps against the rain, forming a tunnel with upraised arms, so Maithanet was spared the indignity of soaking in his own clothes. Kelmomas was careful to observe and mimic the attitude of his mother and her retinue. Children, no matter how oblivious otherwise, are ever keen to their parent’s fear and quick to behave accordingly. Kelmomas was no different.
Something truly momentous was about to happen—even his mother’s fool ministers understood as much. Kelmomas actually glimpsed crooked old Vem-Mithriti shaking his head in disbelief.
The Shriah of the Thousand Temples was about to be interrogated by their God’s most gifted, destructive son.
Uncle Holy paced the dripping gauntlet in the simulacrum of fury. He fairly shouldered aside Imhailas and Lord Sankas to stand before Mother, who even so diminutive seemed imposing for the strangeness of her shining white mask. For not the first time, Kelmomas found himself hating his uncle, not simply because of his stature, but because of the way he occupied it. No matter what the occasion, be it a blessing or a marriage or an exhortation or the Whelming of a child, Anasûrimbor Maithanet cultivated an aura of neck-breaking strength.
“Dispense with the frivolities,” he snapped. “I would be done with this, Esmi.”
He wore a white robe with gold-embroidered hems—stark, even by his staid standards. Aside from the heavy Tusk-and-Circumfix that hung above his sternum, his only concessions to ornament were the golden vambraces that sheathed his forearms in antique Ceneian motifs.
Rather than speak, the Empress lowered her head a degree short of what was demanded by jnan. Kelmomas felt her hand tighten about his shoulder as she did so.
The young Prince-Imperial savoured the way they carried the scent of rain into the closeted halls of the palace. Moist creases of silk and felt. Feet squishing in sandals. Wet hair growing hot.
Neither party spoke a word the entire trek, save Vem-Mithriti, who begged his mother’s pardon as soon as they climbed beyond the Apparatory, asking whether he could continue on his own at a pace more suitable to ancient bones. They left the frail Saik Schoolman behind them, following a path of stairs and corridors cleared in advance and guarded at every turn by stone-faced Eothic Guardsmen. The wall sconces were idle despite the darkness of the day, so they passed through pockets of outright gloom. Despite his mother’s fixed, forward glare, the young Prince-Imperial could not resist craning about, matching the ways he could see with the ways he could not—comparing the two palaces, visible and invisible.
At long last they gained the Imperial Apartments and reached the Door.
It seemed taller and broader than the boy remembered, perhaps because his mother had finally ordered it polished. Normally chalked in green, the Kyranean Lions now gleamed in florid majesty. He wanted to ask Mother whether this meant Inrilatas would be set free, but the secret voice warned him to remain silent.
The Empress stood before them, her masked face lowered as if in prayer. All was silent, save for the creak of Imhailas’s gear. Kelmomas reached about her silk-girdled waist to press his cheek into her side. She ran thoughtless fingers through his hair.
Finally Maithanet asked, “Why is the boy here, Esmi?”
No one could miss his tone, which twisted the question into, What is this morbid fixation?
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Inrilatas refused to speak to you unless he was present.”
“So this is to be a public humiliation?”
“No. Only you and my two sons,” she replied, still gazing at the Door. “Your nephews.”
“Madness …” the Shriah muttered in feigned disgust.
At last she turned her mask toward him. “Yes,” she said. “Dûnyain madness.”
She nodded to Imhailas, who grasped the latch and pushed the great door inward.
The Shriah of the Thousand Temples looked down to Kelmomas, clasped his small white hand in the callused immensity of his own. “Do you fear me as well?” he asked.
Rather than reply, the boy looked to his mother in the appearance of anxious yearning.
“You are a Prince-Imperial,” his mother said. “Go.”
He followed Uncle Holy into the gloom of his brother’s cell.
The cell’s lone window was unshuttered, revealing a slot of dark sky and flooding the room with chill and moist air. Rain was all the boy could hear at first, roaring across complicated rooftops, gurgling and slurping down the course of zigzag gutters. A single brazier warmed the room, pitching an orange glow into the dark. An elaborately carved chair had been set facing the wall where Inrilatas’s chains hung from the four stone lion heads. The brazier had been positioned, the boy noticed, to fully illuminate the chair’s occupant and no one else.
Inrilatas crouched naked some four paces from the chair, his arms about his knees. The dim light did not so much illuminate as polish him, it seemed. The young man watched them with a kind of blank serenity.
We must discover what he wants us to do, the secret voice whispered.
For certainly Inrilatas wanted something from him. Why demand his presence otherwise?
His uncle released his hand the instant the Door creaked shut behind them. Without so much as looking at either brother, he reached into his left sleeve and extracted a wooden wedge from beneath the antique vambrace. He dropped it clattering to the floor, then kicked it beneath the base of the door …
Locking them in.
Inrilatas laughed, flexing arms as smooth and hard as barked branches. “Uncle Holy,” he said, bending his head to press his left cheek against his knees. “Truth shines.”
“Truth shines,” Maithanet replied, taking the seat provided for him.
Kelmomas peered at the wooden butt jammed into the black seam between the floor and the portal. What was happening? It had never occurred to him that Uncle Holy might have plans of his own …
Shout, the secret voice urged. Call for her!
The boy shot a questioning look at his older brother—who simply grinned and winked.
Raw for the rain, distant thunder reverberated through the cell window. But for the little boy, the crazed proportions of the circumstances that seized them rattled louder still. What was happening?
“Do you intend to murder Mother?” Inrilatas asked, still staring at Kelmomas.
“No,” Maithanet replied.
We have missed something! the voice exclaimed. Something has—
“Do you intend to murder Mother?” Inrilatas asked again, this time fixing his uncle in a cart-wheeling gaze.
“No.”
“Uncle Holy. Do you intend to murder Mother?”
“I said, no.”
The boy breathed against the iron rod of alarm that held
him rigid. Everything was explicable, he decided. Inrilatas played as he always played, violating expectations for violation’s sake. His uncle had stopped the door for contingency’s sake … The little boy almost laughed aloud.
They were all Dûnyain here.
“So many years,” Inrilatas continued, “piling plots atop plots—could it be you have simply forgotten how to stop, Uncle?”
“No.”
“So many years surrounded by half-witted peoples. How long have you toiled? How long have you suffered for these malformed children with their stunted intellects? How long have you suffered their ignorance—their absurd vanity? And then Father, that slovenly ingrate, raises one of them above you? Why might that be? Why would Father trust a whore over the pious Shriah of the Thousand Temples?”
“I know not.”
“But you suspect.”
“I fear my brother does not fully trust me.”
“Because he knows, doesn’t he? He knows the secret of our blood.”
“Perhaps.”
“He knows you, knows you better than you know yourself.”
“Perhaps.”
“And he has seen the flicker of sedition, the small flame that awaits the kindling of circumstance.”
“Perhaps.”
“And have the circumstances arrived?”
“No.”
Laughter. “Oh, but Uncle Holy, they have arrived—most certainly!”
“I do not understa—”
“Liar!” the wild-haired figure screeched.
The Shriah did not so much as blink. His face bathed in wavering orange light, Maithanet enveloped Inrilatas in Dûnyain scrutiny, a gaze that seemed to tinkle like coals. It was a profile Kelmomas had seen thousands of times, stitched into banners if not in flesh. High of cheek, virile, the strength of his jaw obvious despite the thickness of his beard.
He is our first true challenge, the voice whispered. We must take care.
Inrilatas’s eyes glittered in the gloom. He crouched the same as before, his chains hanging in arcs across the floor. If their uncle’s scrutiny discomfited him, he betrayed no sign of it.
“Tell me, Uncle Holy. How many children did grandfather sire?”
“Six,” the Shriah replied. There was a toneless brevity to the exchange now, as if they had shed the disguises they used when interacting with normal men.
“Were any of them like me?”
A fraction of a heartbeat.
“I have no way of knowing. He drowned them at the first sign of peculiarities.”
“And you were the only one that expressed … balance?”
“I was the only one.”
“So grandfather … He would have drowned me?”
“Most certainly.”
The stark appraisal of a Dûnyain, directly to the point, careless of pride or injury. In an arena packed with the blind and the beggared, he and his family were the only sighted players. They played as the blind played—goading, commiserating, flattering—simply because these were the moves that moved the blind. Only when they vied one against another, the young Prince-Imperial realized, could they dispense with the empty posturing and play the game in its purest, most rarefied form.
“So why,” Inrilatas asked, “do you think Father has spared me?”
The Shriah of the Thousand Temples shrugged. “Because the eye of the World is upon him.”
“Not because of Mother?”
“She watches with the rest.”
“But you do not believe this.”
“Then enlighten me, Inrilatas. What do I think?”
“You think Mother has compromised Father.”
Another fraction of hesitation. Maithanet’s gaze drifted in and out of focus.
Inrilatas seized the opportunity. “You think Mother has blunted Father’s pursuit of the Shortest Path time and again, that he walks in arcs to appease her heart, when he should cleave to the ruthless lines of the Thousandfold Thought.”
Again the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples hesitated. Perhaps Inrilatas had found the thread. Perhaps Uncle could be unmasked …
Perhaps Maithanet should be counted weak in their small tribe.
“Who has told you these things?” his uncle demanded.
Inrilatas ignored the distraction. “You think Father risks the very world for his Empress’s sake—for the absurdity of love!”
“Was it her? Did she tell you about the Thousandfold Thought?”
“And you see me,” the naked adolescent pressed, “the fact that I have been caged rather than drowned, as the most glaring example of your elder brother’s folly.”
Again Kelmomas watched his uncle’s eyes fall out of focus then return—an outward sign of the Probability Trance. It wasn’t fair, he decided, that he should be born with all these gifts yet be denied the training required to forge true weapons out of them. What use was Father to him, so long as he let him flounder? How could the Aspect-Emperor be anything but his son’s greatest threat, greatest foe, when he always saw more, more deeply?
“I fear that you might be …” the Shriah said. “I admit as much. But if you can see this, Inrilatas, then your father has seen it also—and far more completely. If he sees no sedition in my fearing, why should you?”
Once again his uncle tried to seize the initiative with questions of his own. Once again, Inrilatas simply ignored him and pressed on with his interrogation.
“Tell me, Uncle, how will you have me killed when you seize power?”
“These tricks, Inrilatas. These tactics … They only work when they are hidden. I see these things the same as you.”
“Strange, isn’t it, Uncle? The way we Dûnyain, for all our gifts, can never speak?”
“We are speaking now.”
Inrilatas laughed at this, lowered his beard-hazed cheek to his knees once again. “But how can that be when we mean nothing of what we say?”
“You conf—”
“What would they do, you think, if Men could see us? If they could fathom the way we don and doff them like clothes?”
Maithanet shrugged. “What would any child do, if they could fathom their father?”
Inrilatas smiled. “That depends upon the father … This is the answer you want me to speak.”
“No. That is the answer.”
More laughter, so like the Aspect-Emperor’s that goose-pimples climbed across the boy’s skin.
“You really believe that we Dûnyain differ? That, like fathers, some can be good and some bad?”
“I know so,” Maithanet replied.
There was something coiled about his brother, Kelmomas decided. The way he lolled his head, flexed his wrists, and rocked on his heels created an impression of awkward, effeminate youth—a false impression. The more harmless he seemed, the young Prince-Imperial understood, the more lethal he became.
All of this, the secret voice warned, is simply for show.
And that was the joke, Kelmomas realized: Inrilatas truly meant nothing of what he said.
“Oh, we have our peculiarities, I grant you that,” the adolescent said. “Our hash of strengths and weaknesses. But in the end we all suffer the same miraculous disease: reflection. Where they think, one thought following hard upon the other, tripping forward blindly, we reflect. Each thought grasps the thought before it—like a starving dog chasing an oh-so meaty tail! They stumble before us, reeling like drunks, insensible to their momentary origins, and we unravel them. Play them like instruments, plucking songs of love and adoration that they call their own!”
Something was going to happen.
Kelmomas found himself leaning forward, such was his hanker. When? When?
“We all deceive, Uncle. All of us, all the time. That is the gift of reflection.”
“They make their choices,” Maithanet said in a head-shaking tone.
“Please, Uncle. You must speak before me the way you speak before Father. I see your lies, no matter how banal or cunning. No choices are made in our presence.
Ever. You know this. The only freedom is freedom over.”
“Very well then,” the Holy Shriah replied. “I tire of your philosophy, Inrilatas. I find you abhorrent, and I fear this entire exercise simply speaks to your mother’s failing reason.”
“Mother?” his older brother exclaimed. “You think Mother arranged this?”
A heartbeat of hesitation, the smallest crack in Maithanet’s false demeanour.
Something is wrong, the voice whispered.
“If not her, then who?” the Shriah of the Thousand Temples asked.
Inrilatas at once frowned and smiled, his expression drunk with exaggeration. His eyebrows hooked high, he glanced down at his little brother …
“Kelmomas?” Maithanet asked, not with the incredulity appropriate to a human, but in the featureless voice belonging to the Dûnyain.
Inrilatas gazed at the young Prince-Imperial as if he were a puppy about to be thrown into a river …
Poor boy.
“A thousand words and insinuations batter them day in and day out,” the youth said. “But because they lack the memory to enumerate them, they forget, and find themselves stranded with hopes and suspicions not of their making. Mother has always loved you, Uncle, has always seen you as a more human version of Father—an illusion you have laboured long and hard to cultivate. Now, suddenly, when she most desperately needs your counsel, she fears and hates you.”
“And this is Kelmomas’s work?”
“He isn’t what he seems, Uncle.”
Maithanet glanced at the boy, who stood as rigid as a shield next to him, then turned back to Inrilatas. Kelmomas did not know what he found more terrifying: the unscalable surfaces of his uncle’s face or his brother’s sudden betrayal.
“I have suspected as much,” the Shriah said.
Say something … the voice urged.
Inrilatas nodded as if ruing some tragic fact. “As mad as all of us are, as much heartbreak we have heaped upon our mother, he is, I think, the worst of us.”