She began selling herself almost immediately.
Esmenet found herself listening with two souls: the one, the old whore, almost contemptuous of the cozened luxury that had characterized so much of the girl’s life; the other, the aging mother, horrified at the way she had been used and cast away, only to be used and cast away again.
“I want to help you!” the girl cried. “Imma, he … he … I …”
Thus is cruelty always explained away. A life of suffering. A life where simple survival seems an unaccountable risk. A life too damaged to countenance heroism.
Esmenet tried to imagine what she would have done those years had one of her customers come to her with a fugitive of any description—let alone the Empress of the Three Seas. She wanted to think she would be fearless, generous, but she knew that she would do what Fate demanded all prostitutes do: betray in the name of survival.
Only Akka could have coaxed such a risk from her, she realized.
Only love.
Suddenly she understood the girl’s torment. Naree loved Imhailas. She had made him the sum of her simple hopes. Were he just another man, she would have resorted to the grim, guarded manner that prostitutes typically use to distance people they were forced to hurt. But he was not. And he had come to her demanding a mortal favour.
People had died—people were dying—because of her, Anasûrimbor Esmenet. From this moment on, she realized, she had become a mortal risk to anyone who so much as glimpsed her without alerting the Shrial Knights. From this moment on, she was the most sought-after fugitive in all the Three Seas.
“Please!” Naree cried, her voice piteous for her accent. “Please! Blessed Empress! You must find some other place! You-you’re not-not … safe here! There are too many people!”
But Naree, she knew, wasn’t simply asking her to hide elsewhere. The girl was asking her to take responsibility for leaving as well, so that she might salvage her relationship with Imhailas.
And were it not for her children, Esmenet probably would have done exactly as she asked.
“Why?” a masculine voice asked from behind them. Both women gasped, started violently enough to pop some joint in the bed. Imhailas stood by the door, cloaked as before, staring at Naree in naked outrage. The combination of gloom and surprise made him seem an apparition. “Why are we not safe?”
The girl instantly dropped her eyes—some habit from her childhood bondage, Esmenet supposed. Imhailas strode around the bed, glaring in fury. The floorboards creaked beneath his booted feet. The girl continued staring down in submissive immobility.
“What is this?” he snapped, tugging at the blanket she had pulled about her shoulders. The girl caught an exposed breast with a forearm. “You’ve been taking custom?” he cried in low, incredulous tones.
“Imma!” she called, at last looking up. Tears streamed from her eyes.
The blow was sudden, hard enough to send the slight girl rolling across the mattress. Imhailas hauled her upright, pinned her writhing against the wall before Esmenet could find her voice, let alone her feet. The girl clawed at the hand about her throat, gurgled and gagged. The Exalt-Captain pulled his knife, raised the point before her wide and rolling eyes.
“Should I send you to them now?” he grated. “Should I let the Hundred judge you now, while you still stink for rutting before your Holy Empress! Should I send you to them polluted?”
Esmenet circled behind him as if through a dream. When did I become so slow? a vague portion of her soul wondered. When had the world become so fast?
She raised a palm to the wrist of the choking hand. Imhailas looked to her, his eyes wild and bright and clouded with the madness that is the terror of all women. He blinked, and she watched him catch himself from the murderous brink.
“Shush, Imma,” she said, using the diminutive of his name for the first time. She met his astounded gaze with a warm smile. “Your Blessed Empress, remember, happens to be an old whore.”
The Exalt-Captain released the naked girl, who slumped to the tiles, gagging and weeping. He stepped back.
Esmenet crouched over the girl, hesitated, her soul caught on the humming threshold of compassion.
Your children! she thought with a kind of inward torsion. No enemy is so relentless as a forgiving nature. Kelmomas! Remember him!
“I’m your Empress, Naree … Do you know what that means?”
Esmenet reached toward Imhailas, gestured for his knife. His palms are hotter than mine, she thought as her fingers closed about the warm leather of the grip.
Even skinned in tears, there was something crisp and vigilant about the girl’s eyes, a troubling alacrity in the way they clicked from the shining blade to Esmenet’s own gaze. As young as she was, Esmenet realized, Naree was an inveterate survivor.
“It means,” Esmenet said, her smile as warm and motherly as the knife’s edge was wicked, “that your life—your life, Naree—belongs to me.”
The girl swallowed and nodded with the same air of learned submission.
Esmenet pressed the knife’s point against the soft curve of her throat.
“Your soul,” the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas continued, “belongs to my husband.”
“Maithanet has loosed an army of priests across the city,” Imhailas said, leaning back in exhaustion across the battered settee. Naree, now robed and almost comically meek, sat cross-legged on the floor at his feet, holding up a bowl of watered wine in yet another pose of ritual subservience. Esmenet sat on the corner of her cot watching them, hunched forward with her elbows on her thighs. The world beyond the shutters had gone black. A single lantern illuminated the room, casting haphazard shadows through ochre gloom.
“Criers,” the Exalt-Captain continued, “only decked in full vestments, swinging censers on staffs …” His eyes latched on to Esmenet in the gloom, the lamplight reflected in two shining white dots low on his irises. “He’s saying you’ve gone mad, Your Glory. That you—you!—have betrayed your husband.”
The words winded her, even though she was entirely unsurprised. Maithanet need not be Dûnyain to understand the importance of legitimacy.
Kellhus had explained nations and polities to her, how they worked like the Cironji automata so prized by the more fashionable caste-nobility. “All states are raised upon the backs of men,” he had told her after the final capitulation of High Ainon. “Their actions, the things they do, day in and day out, connect like wheels and cogs, from the stonemason to the tax-farmer to the body-slave. And all actions are raised upon the back of belief. When men turn from their beliefs, they turn from their actions, and the entire mechanism fails.”
“So this is why I must lie?” she asked, watching him from her pillow.
He smiled the way he always did when she missed his mark in a penetrating manner. “No. To think in these terms, Esmi, is to think honesty is the decision that confronts you.”
“What is the decision, then?”
He shrugged. “Effectiveness. The masses will always be mired in falsehood. Always. Each man will think he believes true, of course. Many will even weep for the strength of their conviction. So if you speak truth to their deception, they will call you liar and cast you from power. The ruler’s only recourse is to speak oil, to communicate in ways that facilitate the machine. Sometimes this oil will be truth, perhaps, but more often it will be lies.”
Speaking oil. Of all the analogies he used to illustrate the deeper meaning of things, none would trouble her quite so much. None would remind her so much of Achamian and his fateful warning.
“But …”
“How did I rise to power?” he asked, seeing her thoughts as always. A rueful smile, as if remembering escapades best forgotten. “Men make what they already believe the measure of what is true or false. What they call ‘reason’ is simply apology. The masses will always believe false because the fancy of their forefathers is always their rule. I rose to power by giving them truths, little truths, for which they possessed no rule, one after the ot
her. I chased the unthought implications of what they already believed, gaining ever more legitimacy, until, eventually, men made me their one and only rule. Insurrection, Esmi. I waged a long, hard insurrection. The petty overthrow of petty assumptions precedes all true upheavals of belief.”
“So you lied?”
A small smile. “I guided. I guided them to a lesser falsehood.”
“Then what is the truth?”
He had laughed, shining as if anointed in oil.
“You would call me a liar if I told you,” he had said.
Both Imhailas and Naree stared at her in anxious expectation, and it seemed a miracle to her, that she could be so powerless in fact, and yet hold souls such as these in her thrall—simply because they believed she possessed power over them. The way countless thousands believed, she realized.
Maithanet had removed the New Empire’s head—her. Now he was simply doing what any usurper would: speaking oil. He had to give the masses an excuse to continue acting in all the old ways. Otherwise all the wheels and cogs would cease turning in concert, and the entire mechanism would come crashing down. Every palace revolt took this form.
Only the precision and alacrity of his execution distinguished him as Dûnyain.
“The people will never believe him!” Imhailas finally cried when she failed to speak. “I am sure of it!”
A wave of resignation washed over her. “Yes,” she said, dropping her forehead into her palm. “They will.”
His story was simple enough—believable enough. The machine was broken, and he, Maithanet, was the Chosen Tinker.
“How? How could they?”
“Because he has reached them first.”
The three of them soaked in the implications of this disastrous fact.
One could not dwell in the presence of Anasûrimbor Kellhus as long as she had without developing an acute awareness of one’s own soul: the thoughts, the passions, and, most importantly, the patterns. If she lacked insight before, it was simply because she had occupied the centre of power for so long. Nothing so deadens the inner eye as habit.
But now … Maithanet had obliterated everything she had known, and it seemed she could see herself with a peculiar lucidity. The fugitive Empress. The bereaved mother. The cycling of dismay, desolation, hatred, and a curious in-between, a sense as relentless as it was numb. The going-through-the-motions of survival.
Numbness. This was the only strength she possessed, so she strained to hold on to it.
“He’s calling himself the Imperial Custodian,” Imhailas continued, his eyes tearing for frustration and disgust.
“What of the Army?” Esmenet heard herself ask. Only the pain in her throat told her the importance of this question.
As anxious and solemn as he had appeared before, Imhailas looked to her with outright horror now.
“They say Anthirul has met with him in Temple Xothei,” he said, “that the traitor has publicly kissed his knee.”
Esmenet wanted to lash out in crazed fury, to punish petty things for the epic injustices she had suffered. She wanted to shriek in imperious outrage, heap loathing and curses upon General Anthirul—everyone who had surrendered their capricious loyalty …
But she found herself looking at Naree upon the floor below Imhailas instead. The girl glanced at her—a bright, almost animal look—only to turn away in terror. The girl was trembling, Esmenet realized. Only the palm and arm she held posed to receive Imhailas’s wine-bowl remained motionless.
And the Holy Empress of the Three Seas tasted something she had not known since the crazed day she had led her daughter to the slavers in the harbour so many years before.
Defeat.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
Kûniüri
Skies are upended, poured as milk into the tar of night. Cities become pits for fire. The last of the wicked stand with the last of the righteous, lamenting the same woe. One Hundred and Forty-Four Thousand, they shall be called, for this is their tally, the very number of doom.
—ANONYMOUS, THE THIRD REVELATION OF GANUS THE BLIND
Know what your slaves believe, and you will always be their master.
—AINONI PROVERB
Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), the Istyuli Plains
She made love to him, draping her famed hair, which was so blonde as to be white.
They despised each other, but their passion was oblivious and so did not suffer. Her final cries brought the servants scurrying in alarm, even as her thrashing cracked his loins asunder. Afterward they even laughed at the commotion. And as the drowsiness overcame him, he thought it was not such a bad thing for a man to sound a woman without heart or scruple, so long as she was his wife.
He did not pause to ask why she had seduced him. Perhaps there will be peace between us, he thought, slipping into sleep …
Except that he remained awake—somehow, impossibly.
Through closed eyes he watched her, Ieva, his wife of seven years, scurry naked to the cabinet across their spare room and produce a philtre, which she considered with an expression hung between terror and gloating. She turned to him, her face thin and cruel.
“How she will weep,” she growled, “the filthy whore … And I will see it, and savour it, the breaking of her heart when she learns her beloved Prince has died in his wife’s arms!”
He tried to call out as she leaned above him, holding the black tube with medicinal care. But he was sleeping and could not move.
“But you will not die, my heroic husband. Oh no! For I will fall upon your corpse, and I will wail-wail-wail, claiming to the Bull Heavens that you demanded to be buried rather than burned—like a Nonman!”
He tried to spit the foul liquid she poured between his teeth. He tried to reach up and out, seize her pale neck …
“Oh my husband!” she cried in a whisper. “My dear-dear husband! How could you not see the grudge I hold against thee? But you will know it, soon enough. When you are delivered, when you are beaten and broken—then you will know the compass of my spite!”
Cold trickled into the back of his throat—and burned.
And at last his slumbering form answered the alarums screeching through his soul. Drusas Achamian shot upright, gasping and sputtering … swatting at the afterimage of another man’s treacherous wife.
Gone was the ancient bedroom. Gone was the drowsy light of afternoon …
But he could taste the poison all the same.
He spat across the dead grasses, sat clutching his temples, incredulous and reeling.
Nau-Cayûti. He had dreamed he was Anasûrimbor Nau-Cayûti … and more.
He had dreamed not the experience, but the fact of his ancient assassination.
What was happening?
He turned to Mimara, who lay motionless beside him, beautiful despite the squalor of her skin and clothing. He recalled her fateful declaration the first and only night they had lain together.
“You have become a prophet … A prophet of the past.”
Never had he seen the like, not even in the darkest of Seswatha’s Dreams.
They had crossed paths worn by herds of elk, vast swathes of grassland veined by innumerable trails, diverging, crossing, forking out to the limits of their vision. As gouged as they were, the scalpers could not but whistle, their souls’ eyes straining to conjure a herd whose mere passing could so mark the earth. “The ground moans at their approach,” Xonghis told them that evening. Apparently he had seen the elk herds during his days as an Imperial Tracker. “Even the skinnies flee.”
But this …
They had spent the morning climbing long lobes of land piled one atop the other—a range of flattened hills. They paused to recover their wind when they finally crested the summit, only to find it stolen by the vista before them.
The Wizard’s first thoughts were of the Great Carathay, that the drought had transformed the Istyuli into a northern desert. But as his aging eyes sorted through the distances he realized
that he was gazing across another trail, one far greater than the braided immensities left by the elk …
“The Great Ordeal,” he called out to the others. Something clutched his throat, thinned his voice, a horror or wonder he could not feel.
That was when his eyes began picking out the points of black scattered all across the landscape that bowled out before them in swirls of dun and ochre. The dead.
A battleground, Achamian realized. They had happened upon a battleground, one so vast it would take more than a day to cross, even with their quickened limbs.
“A battle of some kind?” Galian called as if reading his thoughts.
“Not a pitched one,” Xonghis said, his almond eyes little more than slits as he peered northward. “A running battle, I think … There’re dead skinnies along the entire length of the trail.”
“The true contest was to the north,” Cleric said, peering.
Images from his dreams assailed the old Wizard. In the early days of the First Apocalypse, before the coming of Mog-Pharau, the ancient hosts of Kûniüri and Aörsi had left trails such as this whenever they marched through Sranc lands. “A Hording,” he heard himself say. He turned to address the small crowd of curious looks. “A mobbing like no other. This is what happens when you fight your way through an endless accumulation of Sranc.”
“Now we know where all the skinnies went,” Pokwas said, a great hand raised to the back of his neck.
“Aye,” Galian said nodding. “Why chase scraps when a feast marches across your land.”
The company passed the first clutch of Sranc within a watch of its downward trek, at least a hundred of them, their skin withered to hide, their limbs jutting like sticks. Xonghis had difficulty estimating when they had been killed because of the drought. “Dried to jerky,” he said, gazing across the blackened remains with a practised eye.
Soon they were in the midst of the battlefield, a thin file wandering across trammelled dust that was barely whiskered with grass—a barren as vast as the horizon. They saw vultures feuding, crows probing eye sockets, wolves and jackals loping in wary circles. They saw figures burned to charcoal, little more than stumps jutting from sand blasted to glass. They saw bodies hacked to the ground, tangled lines and arcs of them, and in his soul’s eye the old Wizard saw the battle formations that had shaped them, the hard-armoured men fighting beneath banners drawn from across the Three Seas. They saw what looked like the remains of pyres, broad circles of gutted black. Mimara crouched to the dust, fetched a wire Circumfix from the sand. The old Wizard watched her tie the leather string, then loop the thing over her neck. By some perverse coincidence, the symbol fell directly across the Chorae that lay hidden against her breast.