Was the Aspect-Emperor a prophet as he claimed? Was he a demon as Fanayal believed—Kurcifra? Or was he inhuman in a more mundane sense, the harbinger of a new race, the Dûnyain, dreadful for the symmetry between their strength and human frailty …
A race of perfect manipulators. Thought-dancers.
If he were a prophet, then he and Mandate Schoolmen were right: the Second Apocalypse, despite what all the oracles and priests claimed, was evident, and Zeüm should enter into an alliance with him. If he were a demon, then Zeüm should arm for immediate war, now, before he achieved his immediate goals, for demons were simply Hungers from the abyss, insatiable in their pursuit of destruction.
And if he were Dûnyain?
Malowebi did not believe in prophets. You must first believe in Men before you could do that, and no serious student of Memgowa or Ajencis could do that. Malowebi most certainly believed in possessing demons—he had seen them with his own eyes. But demons, for all their cunning, were never subtle, certainly not to the degree of the Aspect-Emperor. No demon could have written the magisterial lies told in the Novum Arcanum.
Dûnyain … whatever that meant. The Aspect-Emperor had to be Dûnyain.
The problem, the Mbimayu sorcerer had realized, was that this conclusion in no way clarified the dilemma facing his nation and his people. Would not a Dûnyain bend all his effort and power to prevent his own destruction? Even without Drusas Achamian and his allegations, one could easily argue that Anasûrimbor Kellhus was among the greatest intellects to walk the earth. What could induce such a man to tip the bowl of the entire Three Seas, drain it to its dregs, in the name of warring against a nursemaid’s cruel tale?
Could these truly be the first days of the Second Apocalypse?
Nonsense. Madness.
But …
When his family first yielded him to the Mbimayu, the Pedagogue of the School had been an ancient soul named Zabwiri, a legendary scholar, and a rare true disciple of Memgowa. For whatever reason, the old man had chosen him to be his body-servant for his final, declining years—a fact that some, like Likaro, begrudged him still. An intimacy had grown between them, one that only those who care for the dying can know. The pain had become increasingly difficult for the old man to manage, toward the end. He would sit in his little garden, shivering in the sunlight, while Malowebi hovered helpless about him. “Question me!” he would bark with amiable fury. “Pester me with your infinite ignorance!”
“Master,” Malowebi once asked, “what is the path to truth?”
“Ah, little Malo,” old Zabwiri had replied, “the answer is not so difficult as you think. The trick is to learn how to pick out fools. Look for those who think things simple, who abhor uncertainty, and who are incapable of setting aside their summary judgment. And above all, look for those who believe flattering things. They are the true path to wisdom. For the claims they find the most absurd or offensive will be the ones most worthy of your attention.”
Without fail the Mbimayu sorcerer’s heart caught whenever he recalled these words: because he had loved Zabwiri, because of the way this answer embodied the wry, upside-down wisdom of the man. And now, because of the direction they pointed him …
The Aspect-Emperor a genuine prophet? The myths of the No-God’s resurrection true?
These were the claims that Likaro found the most absurd and offensive. And in all the world there was no greater fool.
Horns were clawing the sky by the time she tripped clear of the tenement’s gloom. Imhailas stood motionless in the middle of the street, his face raised in the blind way of those who peered after sounds.
The horns did not belong to either the Army or the Guard—yet she knew she had heard them before. They blared, climbed high and long enough to flush her heart with cold.
“What happens?” she asked her Exalt-Captain, who had not seen her, such was the intensity of his concentration.
He turned—looked at her with a fear she had never before seen in his face. A soldier’s fear, not a courtier’s.
“The horns …” he said, obviously debating his words. “The signals … They belong to the Shrial Knights.”
Several heartbeats separated her soul from her dread. At first, all she could do was stare up into the man’s beautiful face. She thought of the way his eyebrows arched just before he reached his bliss. “What are you saying?” she finally managed to ask.
He looked to what sky they could see between the dark facades looming to either side of them.
“They sound like they’re coming from different parts of the city …”
“What are they signalling?”
He stood rigid. Beyond him, she could see several others down the winding length of the street, mulling and listening the same as they did.
“Imhailas! What are they signalling?”
He looked to her, sucked his lips tight to his teeth in an expression of deliberation.
“Attack,” he said. “They’re coordinating some kind of attack.”
Running simply seized her, threw her back the way they had come.
But Imhailas was upon her in a matter of strides, clutching her shoulders, begging her to stop, to think, in hushed and hurried tones.
“Smoke!” she heard herself cry. “From the room! I saw smoke to the east! The palace, Imhailas! They attack the palace!”
But he had known this already. “We have to think,” he said firmly. “Calculation is what sorts rash acts from bold.”
Another proverb he had memorized. Her hands fairly floated with the urge to scratch out his eyes. Such a fool! How could she conspire, let alone couple, with such a fool?
“Unhand me!” she gasped in fury.
He raised his hands and stepped back. Something in her tone had struck all expression from his face, and a kind of panicked regret joined the terrors flushing through her. Was he deciding where to cast his lots? Would he abandon her? Betray her? Curses spooled through her thoughts. Her foolishness. Fate. The ability of men to so easily slip the leash of feminine comprehension.
“Sweet Seju!” she heard herself cry. “Kelmomas! My boy, Imhailas!”
Suddenly a different horn cawed high above the roaring in her ears, one that she knew from innumerable drills—knew so well that it almost seemed a word shouted across the world. Rally! Guardsmen, Rally!
Then Imhailas was kneeling on the stone before her. “Your Glory!” he said, his voice cast low. “The Imperial Precincts are under attack. What would you have your slave do?”
And at last, reason was returned to her. To act in ignorance was to flail as though falling. Knowledge. They needed to discover what Maithanet was doing and to pray the palace could resist him.
“Keep his Empress safe,” she said.
Anasûrimbor Kelmomas would never quite understand how he knew. Funny, the way the senses range places the soul cannot follow.
He was playing in his room—pretending to play would be more accurate, since he was far more lost in his plots and fancies than in the crude toys he was supposed to be amused by—when something simply called him out to his balcony onto the Sacral Enclosure …
Where it seemed he could smell whatever it was. His nurse called out after him. He ignored her. He peered about, saw the guardsmen milling as they always milled, the slaves trotting to and fro …
Everything and everyone in their place.
Something bigger had been thrown out of joint, he realized. He turned to gaze down the line of balconies to his right, saw his older sister, Theliopa, wearing a crazed gown with coins hanging heavy from every hem, standing like a bird leaning into the breeze, her senses pricked to the same something he could neither hear nor see.
The sycamores loomed before and above them, each leaf a little whistling kite, forming mops that dipped and murmured in the sunlight. Nothing … He could hear nothing.
Of all his siblings, only Theliopa commanded any fondness in his heart. Kelmomas had never bothered to ponder why this might be. She ignored him for the most
part and typically spoke to him only on Mother’s behalf. He certainly feared her the least. And despite the time she spent with Mother, he envied her not at all.
She had never seemed quite real, his sister.
Kelmomas gazed at her chipped-porcelain profile, debating whether he should call out to her. He had opened his ears so wide that her gown fairly crashed with sound when she whirled to face him.
“Run-run,” she said without any alarm whatsoever. “Find some-some place to hide.”
He did not move. He rarely took anything Thelli said seriously, such was his fondness for her. Then he heard it, the first faint shouts breaching the low roar of the sycamores.
The ring and clatter of arms …
“What happens?” he cried, but she had already vanished.
Uncle Holy, the secret voice whispered as he stood witless. He has returned.
Shrial horns continued signalling one another, but, ominously, they heard no more calls from the Eothic Guard aside from the first, single cry. The city seemed deceptively normal, apart from the roofs, which had become packed with onlookers. Traffic filed through the alleys and streets with greater haste, certainly. Momemnites milled here and there, exchanging fears and guesses between eastward glances. But no one panicked—at least not yet. If anything, the city waited, as if it were nothing more than a vast cart, sitting idle while the yoke was bound to a new mule.
For the first time, and with more than a little terror, Esmenet understood the slipperiness of power, the ease with which substitutions could be made, so long as the structure remained intact. When people kissed your knee, it was so easy to think you were the principle that moved them and not the position you happened to occupy. But glancing from face to face—some aged, some poxed, some tender—she realized that she could, if she wished, throw aside her veil, that she had no need whatsoever to disguise herself, simply because she, Esmenet, the Sumni harlot who had lived a life crazed with tumult and detail, literally did not exist for them.
What did it matter, the person hidden behind the palanquin’s screens, so long as the bearers were fed?
There was doom in these thoughts, so she shied from them.
The crowds grew, as did the agitation and turmoil. The closer they came to the palace, the more complicated their passage became. Most people fought their way eastward, frantic to escape whatever was happening behind them. Others, the curious and those who, like Esmenet, had kin in the vicinity of the palace, battled their way eastward.
Twice Imhailas stopped to ask aimless Columnaries what happened, and twice he was rebuffed.
No one knew.
Even still, hope wormed ever higher into her throat as they raced, dodged, and shoved. She found herself thinking of her Pillarian and Eothic Guardsmen, how competent, how numerous, and how loyal they seemed. For years she had dwelt among them, thoughtlessly demanding the security they provided but never really appreciating them—until now. They were handpicked, chosen from across the Middle-North for their prowess and fanaticism. They had spent the greater portion of their lives preparing for occasions such as this, she reminded herself. If anything, they lived for just such an eventuality.
They would defend the Imperial Precincts, secure the palace. They would keep her children safe!
Breathless, she imagined them bristling along the walls, arrayed about the gates, glorious in their crimson-and-gold regalia. She saw old Vem-Mithriti standing high upon some parapet, his stooped shoulders pulled back with outrage and indignation, raining down sorcerous destruction. She saw old Ngarau waddling in walrus-armed panic, barking out commands. And her boy—her beautiful boy!—frightened, yet too young not to be exhilarated, not to think this some kind of glorious game.
Yes! The Gods would not heap this calamity upon her. She had paid their bloodthirsty wages!
The World would rally …
But the smoke climbed ever higher as they raced through the ever more raucous streets, until she felt she stared up into a tree for craning her neck. The faces of those fleeing became ever more sealed, more intent. The roaring—shouts from the crowded rooftops, from the seething streets—seemed to grow louder and louder.
“The Palace burns!” one old crone cried immediately next to her. “The Empress-Whore is dead! Dead!”
And in the crash of hope into dismay, she remembered: the Gods hunted her and her children.
The White-Luck had turned against them.
At last they pressed their way free of the slotted streets onto the Processional with its broad views.
Were it not for Imhailas and his strength, the mobs would have defeated her, prevented her from seeing the catastrophe with her own eyes. He pulled her by the wrists, cursing and shoving, and she followed with the pendulum limbs of a doll. Then suddenly they were clear, panting, among the crowd’s forward ranks.
A cohort of unmounted Shrial Knights guarded the bridges crossing the Rat Canal—as much to police the mob, it seemed, as to ward against any attempt to retake the Imperial Precincts. The fortifications rising beyond were deserted. She glimpsed pockets of battle here and there across the climbing jumble of structure that composed the Andiamine Heights: distant figures vying, their swords catching the sun. Smoke poured in liquid ribbons from the Allosium Forum. Three other plumes climbed from places unseen beyond the palace.
Imhailas need not say anything. The battle was over. The New Empire had been overthrown in the space of an afternoon.
Planning, she realized. An assault this effective required meticulous planning …
Time.
The Empress of the Three Seas stood breathless, an errant hand held to her veil, gazing at the loss of everything she had known for the past twenty years. The theft of her power. The destruction of her home. The captivity of her children. The overturning of her world.
Fool …
A thought like a cold draft in a crypt.
Such a fool!
Vying against Anasûrimbor Maithanet. Crossing swords with a Dûnyain—who knew the folly of this better than she?
She turned to Imhailas, who stood as immobile and aghast as she. “We …” she murmured, only to trail. “We have to go back …”
He looked down into her eyes, squinted in confusion.
“We have to go back!” she cried under her breath. “I’ll … I’ll throw myself at his feet! Beg for mercy! Seju! Seju! I have to do something!”
He cast a wary glance across those packed close about them.
“Yes, Your Glory,” he said intently, speaking below the mob’s rumble. “You must do something. This is treason. Sacrilege! But if you deliver yourself to him, you will be executed—do you understand? He cannot afford your testimony!”
Threads of light tangled and distorted his face. She was blinking tears. When had she started weeping?
Since coming to Kellhus’s bed, it seemed. Since abandoning Akka …
“All the more reason for you to leave me, Imhailas. Flee … while you still can.”
A smiling frown creased his face.
“Damnation doesn’t agree with me, Holy Empress.”
Another one of his quotations … She sobbed and laughed in exasperation.
“I am not asking, Imhailas. I am commanding … Save yourself!”
But he was already shaking his head.
“This I cannot do.”
She had always thought him a fop, a thick-fingered dandy. She had always wondered what it was that Kellhus had seen in him, to raise him so high so fast. As a courtier, he could be almost comically timid—always bowing and scraping, stumbling over himself in his haste to execute her wishes. But now … Now she could see Imhailas as he really was …
A warrior. He was—at his pith—a true warrior. Defeat did not break his heart so much as stir his blood.
“You don’t know, Imhailas. You don’t know … Maithanet … the way I know him.”
“I know that he is cunning and treacherous. I know that he pollutes the Holy Office your husband has given to him. Mo
st of all, I know you have already done what you needed to do.
“I … I …” She trailed, wiped her nose, and squinted up at him. “What are you saying?”
“You have loosed the Narindar …”
He was inventing his rationale as he spoke: she could see this in his inward gaze, hear it in his searching tone. He would stand by her side, die for her, not for any tactical or even spiritual reason, but because sacrificing his strength on the altar of higher things was simply what he did.
This was why Kellhus had given him to her.
“All that remains is to wait,” he continued, warming to the sense of what he said. “Yes … We must hide and wait. And when the Narindar strikes … All will be chaos. Everyone will be casting about, searching for authority. That’s when you reveal yourself, Your Glory!”
She so wanted to believe him. She so wanted to pretend that the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples was not a Dûnyain.
“But my boy! My daughter!”
“Are children of your husband … The Aspect-Emperor.”
Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
Esmenet gasped, so sudden was her understanding. Yes. He was right. Maithanet would not dare to kill them. Not so long as Kellhus lived. Even so far from the northern wastes, they dwelt in the chill shadow of the Holy Aspect-Emperor’s power. As did all Men.
“Hide …” she repeated. “But how? Where? They are all against me, Imhailas! Inrithi. Yatwerians …”
And yet, even as she voiced these fears, implications began assembling about the mere fact of her husband. This, she realized. This was why Kellhus had left her the Imperial Mantle.
She did not covet it. How could one covet what one despised?
“Not me, Your Glory. Nor any Guardsmen living, I assure you.”
Kellhus would succeed and he would return—he always conquered. Even Moënghus, his father, could not overcome him … Kellhus would return, and when he did, there would be a horrible accounting.