Imhailas clasped her hands in his own. “I know of a place …”
She need only live long enough to see it done.
He will come back for us!
She made a litany of this thought as they fled back into the city proper.
Kellhus will return!
When despair reeled through her, the sense of skidding backward into doom …
He will return!
When she imagined Theliopa, sitting rigid in her room, staring into her hands as Maithanet’s shadow darkened the threshold …
He will! He will!
When she saw Maithanet kneel before Kelmomas, grasp his slender shoulders between his hands …
He will kill him with his own hands!
And it seemed she could see him, her glorious husband, stepping from spiking light to stride across the city, calling out his brother’s treacherous name. And it pulled her breath sharp, wound her teeth tight, stretched her lips into an animal grin …
The fury of his judgment.
Then she found herself in a lantern-lit foyer, standing and blinking while Imhailas muttered in low tones to an armed man even taller than he was. The tile-work, the frescoed ceiling, everything possessed an air of opulence, but a false one, she quickly realized, seeing the grimed corners and grouting, the myriad chips and cracks—details that shouted an inability to support slaves.
Then Imhailas was leading her up marble stairs. She wanted to ask him where they were, where they were going, but she could not speak around the confusion that bloated through her. At last they gained a gloomy corridor. Her breathlessness—years had passed since she had last travelled such distances on foot—became a sense of floating suffocation.
She stood blinking while he hammered on a broad wooden door. She scarcely glimpsed the face, dark and beautiful, that anxiously greeted him. A room beyond, yellow-painted, dimly illuminated.
“Imma! Sweet Seju! I was wor—”
“Naree! Please!” the Exalt-Captain cried, shouldering the woman back, hustling Esmenet into the dimly lit interior without begging permission.
He shut the door behind them, turned to the two astounded women.
The girl was no taller than Esmenet, but she was darker of complexion, younger. And beautiful. Very beautiful. Despite her appearance and accent, it was actually her costume, a gaudy, glass-beaded affair, that made Esmenet realize this … this Naree … was Nilnameshi.
Naree, for her part, appraised Esmenet with open distaste.
“This will cost you, Imma …” she said skeptically.
And Esmenet understood—the tone as much as anything else. Naree was a whore.
Imhailas had brought her to his whore.
“Stop playing the fool and grab her a bowl of water!” he cried, grabbing Esmenet by the shoulders, guiding her to a battered settee. Her eyes could not make sense of the room relative to the movements of her body—everything whirled. Breathless. Why was she so breathless?
Then she was sitting, and her Exalt-Captain was kneeling before her.
“Who is she?” Naree asked, returning with water.
Imhailas raised the bowl for her to drink. “She’s not … not right … The day …”
Naree stared, her face slack in the way of long-time victims assessing threats. Her eyes popped wide, rings of shining white about dark, dark irises. She was a whore: innumerable silver kellics had passed through her hands, each bearing the image of the woman before her.
“Sweet Mother of Birth—it’s you!”
A wave crashed through the Andiamine Heights, swirling into the corridors, rising ever higher, foaming blood. It battered down doors. It threw itself howling into braced mobs of Eothic Guardsmen. It clutched welling wounds, grunting and crying out. It slumped dying in the corners of raucous rooms.
Slipping through hollow walls, the young Prince-Imperial tracked its grim progress. He watched men hacking and grappling, murdering in the name of symbol and colour. He saw flames leap from ornament to ornament. He watched astounded slaves beaten—and, in one instance, raped. And it seemed a miracle that he could be alone while witnessing such heroism and atrocity.
Never had the end of the world been so much fun.
He knew full well what he witnessed—a coup, nearly flawless in its execution. The fall of the Andiamine Heights. He knew that his Uncle would rule the Empire ere the day was done and that his mother would either be a captive or a fugitive …
If he did not think of the unthinkable consequence—that she would be executed—it was because he knew he was responsible, and nothing he authored could lead to anything so disastrous.
He had made this happen—there was a clenching glee to this thought, an elation that at times barked as a laugh from his lungs, such was its intensity. And it seemed the Palace itself became his model, the replica he had decided to break and burn. Uncle Holy, for all his danger, was but one more tool …
He was the God here. The Four-Horned Brother.
Wires of smoke coiled beneath the vaults, hazed the gilded corridors. Slaves and costumed functionaries fled. Armoured men rallied, charged, and grappled, as colourful as new toys: the gold on white surcoats of the Shrial Knights, the crimson of the Eothic Guard, the gold on green of the Pillarians. He watched a company of these latter defend the antechambers to the Audience Hall. Time and again they broke the Knights of the Tusk who assailed them, killing so many they began using their bodies as improvised barricades. Only when the Inchausti, the bodyguard of the Holy Shriah himself, assaulted them were the fanatics finally overcome.
Their willingness to die left Kelmomas breathless. For him, he realized. They sacrificed themselves for him and his family …
The fools.
He glimpsed or watched a dozen such melees moving down the Heights, isolated pockets of violence, the Palace’s defenders always outnumbered, always fighting to the desperate last. He listened to the curses and catcalls they traded, the Shrial Knights beseeching their foes to surrender, to yield the “Mad Whore,” the Pillarians and guardsmen promising doom and damnation for their foe’s treachery.
Exploring the Palace’s lower tracts, below the rising tide of battle, he saw rooms and corridors strewn with dead, and he witnessed the savagery that so often leaps into the void of power overthrown. He watched one of his mother’s Apparati, an Ainoni named Minachasis, rape and strangle a slave-girl—assuming the crime would be attributed to the invaders, the astonished boy supposed.
And then there were the looters, Shrial Knights—pairs usually—who found themselves happily separated from their companies, ranging halls they believed already cleared. Kelmomas found one solitary fool rummaging through a room in the Apparatory, rending the mattress, rifling the wardrobe, hacking open a small chest and kicking the baubles he found in disgust.
The room was windowless, so the boy peered through a ventilation grill tucked high in a corner. He watched with fascination, realizing that he witnessed avarice in its purest, most impatient form. It almost seemed a mummer’s act, as if a starving ape had been dressed in Shrial regalia, then sent scavenging for the amusement of unseen patrons.
Even before he realized his intent, Kelmomas began snuffling audibly—weeping the way a frightened little boy might. The Knight of the Tusk fairly jumped clear out of his hauberk and surcoat, such was his surprise. He whirled from side to side. Several heartbeats passed before he mastered his alarm and listened—before he realized it was a child that he heard—someone harmless. A leering smile cracked his beard.
“Shush,” he drawled, scanning the high corners, for he had realized the sound came from above. The Prince-Imperial continued weeping, making the sounds of a derelict child. His face ached for the manic ferocity of his grin.
The sounds hooked the man’s gaze. He kicked a chair to the corner. Mounted it.
“Moh-moh-mommeeee!” the boy sobbed, hitching his voice into a high whine.
The man’s face loomed before the iron fretting, darkened by its own shadow. His breath ree
ked of cheap liquor …
The crawlspace was so cramped that Kelmomas bungled his strike, driving his skewer through the man’s pupil rather than his tear duct. Strange sensation that—like popping the skin of a grape. The man’s face clenched about the intrusion, a fist without fingers. He toppled, fell flat on his back, where he jerked in a strange parody of a fool’s caper.
Like a beetle flicked onto his back.
Look at him! the secret voice chortled.
“Yes!” Kelmomas cackled. He even clapped his hands, such was his raw delight.
Afterward, when night fell and silence hardened the acrid air, he toured the labyrinth of small battlefields, taking care lest he track bloody footprints across the expansive floors. He had thought he would find glory wandering among the dead, but all he witnessed were its dregs. Nothing remained of the desperation, the shouts and cries of mortal struggle. There was no distinguishing the heroic from the craven. The dead were dead, utterly helpless and invulnerable. The more he counted them, the more they seemed to laugh.
Eventually he stood marooned, silence pricking his ears.
“Mommy?” he finally dared call. The dead did not so much as twitch.
At long last his face-cracking grin faded …
And a weeper’s grimace rose to take its place.
There had been a heartbeat, upon awakening, when nothing seemed amiss, where she need only blink and stretch and groan her morning groan to summon her body-slaves and their soothing ministrations. A heartbeat …
But horror, true horror, dwells in the body as much as the soul. She needed only to raise her arms to recall the madness of the previous day. The pinioned breath. The curious mismatch between motion and effort, as if her sinews had become sand, her bones lead. The seashell roar.
Lying prostrate across a narrow cot, the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas plummeted and plummeted, clutching at thoughts too sharp with fingers too cold. Fumbling with knives …
The palace lost.
Her husband betrayed.
Kelmomas …
Sweet little Kelmomas!
She tried curling into a ball, tried weeping, but tears and sobs seemed things too heavy to be moved, so frail had her innards become. A crazed, floating restlessness inhabited her instead, where the most she could do was throw her limbs, flop them this way and that, like things, dead things, continually in the way of themselves. But even this effort defeated her, so she lay motionless, thrashed within, as if she were a greased worm, writhing against appendages too slippery to hold.
“Please …” a girlish voice whispered. “Your Glory …”
Esmenet opened her eyes, blinking. Even though she had yet to weep, she could fell the itch of swollen lids.
Naree knelt next to the cot, her large eyes round with fear, her luxurious hair hanging in sheets about her plump cheeks. The far window shone white over her shoulder, gleamed across the yellow-painted walls. “I n-need you to stay h-here,” the girl said, tears spilling down her cheeks. She was terrified, Esmenet realized—as she should be. Imhailas had delivered a burden she could not bear. “Just-just stay here, yes? Keep your face … your face to the wall.”
Without a word the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas turned from the girl, toward the cracked paint and plaster. What else was there do?
Watches passed, and she did not move, not until the need to make water overpowered her. Only her listening roamed …
Between uncertain faces. Beneath damp sheets.
“Who is that?”
“My mother …”
“Mother?”
“Pay her no heed.”
“But I will!”
“No … Please … Heed this instead.”
Four different men visited the girl, but they seemed one and same creature in Esmenet’s ears. The same half-hearted flatteries, carnal witticisms. The same nostril-pinching intakes of breath. The same moans and giggles. The same rasp of grinding hair. The same cries. The same liquid drumbeat.
Only the stench varied.
And it repelled her, even as her inner thighs grew slick. It shamed her. To conjure the miracle of intimacy, to become one breathless creature while still wearing the skin of strangers.
She coupled with them anew that afternoon, all the men she had known as a harlot. She saw them skulking in from the open streets, their eyes clouded with need, offering silver instead of wooing, proving, loving. She laughed as she teased, gagged as she choked, huddled beneath the apish rage of the impotent, gasped beneath the slow stir of the beautiful. She gloated over coins, dreamed of the food she would buy, the cloth.
She wept for the loss of her Empire.
There was a lull after the fourth man departed. The clatter and shout of the street climbed through the unshuttered windows, rang with the stark clarity of plastered walls and tiled floors. A man with a cracked voice bellowed, boasting the curative power of his sulphured cider. A dog snarled and barked, obviously old and frightened.
Esmenet finally turned from the wall, her bladder so full she could scarce contain herself. Even after all this time, the room was a mystery to her. It was far larger than any room Esmenet had been able to afford in Sumna, but then, for all her beauty, she had not been an outlander like Naree, and Sumna had never seen the wealth that had concentrated in Momemn since Kellhus’s rise to power. Two windows looked onto the sun-drenched facade of the tenement across the street—one housing more prostitutes, she realized, glimpsing two pale-skinned Norsirai girls sitting on sills. The far window illuminated a small scullery: a water basin upon a wooden counter, a standing amphorae, pottery-stacked shelves, and various herbs hanging to dry. The near window showered light across Naree’s bed, which was a broad, extravagant affair constructed of black-lacquered mahogany. Esmenet’s cot was set parallel to the bed on the far side of the door.
The girl lay naked across the tangled covers, staring from the ridge of her pillow. The fugitive Empress of the Three Seas gazed back with numb urgency. She knew the exhaustion in Naree’s eyes, the dull throb of her sex, the faint pinch of seed drying across bare skin, the peculiar sense of having survived. She knew the disjoint chorus that was the girl’s soul: the voice counting coins, the voice fending against despair, the voice flinching from the fact of what had just happened—and the voice urging her to betray her Empress.
Naree was broken—that much was certain. Even the priestesses of Gierra, who sold themselves with the sanction of god and temple, were broken. To sell intimacy is to be turned inside out, to make a cloak of your heart, so that others might be warmed. A soul could only be inverted so many times before it all became confused, inside and outside.
Broken. Esmenet could see the cracks floating in her watery gaze. The only real question was one of how. Selling peaches did not so much rob a soul of trust or dignity or compassion as it robbed these words of their common meaning. Naree believed in trust, jealously guarded her dignity, felt compassion—but in ways utterly peculiar to her.
“I need to pee,” Esmenet finally said.
“Sorry-sorry-sorry!” the girl cried, leaping from her bed. She ran to the screen that flanked her settee. She pulled back one of the faded embroidered panels and, with a mummer’s flourish, revealed a white porcelain chamber pot. Esmenet thanked her sheepishly.
“Nareeee!” an accented voice cried from out-of-doors—one of the Galeoth girls hanging her thighs from a window opposite. “Nareeee! Who dat you hat wit you?”
“Mind your own sheets!” the Nilnameshi girl cried, hastening to close the shutters on the near window.
The whore cackled the way Esmenet had heard countless times before. “Brooshing rugs, eh?”
Fairly in a terror, Naree explained how they all kept their windows unshuttered when attending to their custom—for safety.
“I know,” Esmenet said. “I used to do the same.”
Suddenly she realized the impossibility of her circumstance. Naree, like most people of hale heart, knew all her neighbours and was known by them. Esm
enet knew first-hand the way city-dwellers roped themselves into small tribes and villages, caring for one another, envying, spying, hating.
More shutters clattered and the room darkened while she attended to her bladder. When she stepped from behind the screen she found Naree in the gloom, still naked, sitting cross-legged on her bed weeping. Without thinking she took the girl’s slender shoulders in her arms, pulled her into a mother’s embrace.
“Shush,” the Holy Empress said.
She thought of the famine, the way Mimara had seemed to retreat further into her bones with every passing day. She thought of the way she had torn in two, walking with her to the slavers in the harbour. The hum of disbelief. The goad of numb necessity. The little fingers clasping hers in anxious trust.
And she wished, with a violence that rolled her eyes, that she had simply held on to those bones, folded them within the squalid circle of her own … and died with her only daughter. Mimara.
The one thing unsold.
“I understand.”
How long had it been since she had kept company with her past?
Esmenet sat with the girl until the glaring white lines that etched the shutters paled to grey. Naree did not know her age, only that five years had passed since her flowering. She had been raised a yitarissa, a ritual harem-slave popular among the Nilnameshi caste-nobility. Her owner had possessed estates both in Invishi, where they wintered, and in the Hinayati Mountains, where they spent the plague months of summer. She had loved him fiercely. Apparently he was a gentle, caring man, one who lavished her with gifts to atone for the inevitable injuries he inflicted on her. The great catastrophe in her life—her year zero—came with her first bleeding. Rather than sell her to a brothel, as was the fate of most yitarissa, her owner set her free. Almost immediately she became the mistress of another caste-noble, a trade representative who had been sent to Momemn almost four years ago. He was the one who had purchased the yellow room and its sumptuous furnishings. Naree loved him as well, but when his year-long tenure expired, he simply moved his wife and household back to Invishi without saying a word.