Middle-aged veterans were called up. Militias were levied. A dozen small battles were fought across lands famous and obscure. Curfews were extended. The Yatwerian temples were closed, and those priestesses who did not flee were imprisoned and interrogated. Plots and conspiracies were uncovered. In more orderly provinces, the executions were celebrated in garish spectacles. Otherwise, they were carried out in secret, and bodies were buried in ditches. The Slave Laws, which had afforded protections the enslaved had not known since the days of Cenei, were repealed. In a series of emergency sessions, the Greater Congregate passed several laws curtailing congress according to caste. Speaking at public fountains became punishable by immediate execution.
The caste-nobility of all nations suddenly found unity in their general terror of their servants and slaves. Suits were dropped, freeing the courts for more pressing prosecutions. Old and honourable enmities were set aside. The Shriah of the Thousand Temples summoned high-ranking Cultic priests from across the Three Seas for what would be called the Third Pan-Sumni Council, urging them to set aside their parochial worship, to recall the God behind the Gods. Shrial Priests everywhere inveighed on behalf of their Prophet and Sovereign. Those Zaudunyani who had not joined the Great Ordeal raised their voices to harangue their peers and their lessers. Groups of them took to murdering in the dark of night those they deemed unfaithful.
Sons and husbands simply vanished.
And though the New Empire tottered, it did not fall.
—|—
MOMEMN
Anasûrimbor Kelmomas sat where he always sat when attending the Imperial Synod, in the Prince's Box on a bench cushioned with plush red leather: the same place where his older siblings had sat when they were young—even Thelli before she had joined Mother beneath the Circumfix Throne.
"Recall who it is you address, Pansulla," Mother called down in a tight voice.
Though positioned relatively low on the palace heights, the chamber, the Synodine, was one of the more luxurious ones in the palace, and certainly among the most curious. Unlike other council chambers, it possessed no gallery for visiting observers and absolutely no windows. Where airy grandeur was the rule elsewhere, the chamber was long and narrow, with elaborately panelled boxes—the Prince's Box one of them—lining the short walls and with steep benches stepping the entire length of the long walls, as if an amphitheatre had been straightened and then snapped in half, forcing the audience to confront itself.
To accommodate the Circumfix Throne, a deep marble recess shelved the stepped slope to Kelmomas's left, blue-white stone trimmed with bands of black diorite. A scale replica of the Circumfix as it had hung in Caraskand, including his father hanging spread-eagled and upside down, rose in sinuous gold from the throne's back. His mother's chair and Thelli's had been cut into the marble tier immediately below it, their simple design concentrating the glory of the throne above. Some thirty identical seats had been set into the steps rising opposite, one for each of the Great Factions, whose interests governed the New Empire.
The floor lay well below all the seats, forcing those who walked it to continually crane their heads up and around to meet the gaze of their interlocutors. It was a narrow strip of bare floor, no bigger than several prison cells set end to end. Kelmomas had heard several functionaries refer to it—and with no little dread—as the Slot.
Because the man who now paced its length was so fat, Cutias Pansulla, the Nansur Consul, it looked even more narrow than usual. He had been strutting back and forth for several moments now, long enough for dark stains to bloom from his armpits.
"But I must... I must dare speak it!" he cried, his shaved jowls trembling. "The people are saying that the Hundred are against us!"
The Imperial Synod, his mother had told Kelmomas, was a kind of boiled-down version of the Greater Congregate, what other kings in other lands often called a privy council, the place where representatives of the New Empire's most important interests could confer with their divine ruler. Of course, he always pretended to forget this explanation when he spoke to his mother and to always whine as he accompanied her to the sessions, but he secretly adored the Synod and the games within games it invariably revealed—at least when his father failed to attend them. Elsewhere, the words always seemed to be the same, glory this and glory that, and the lofty tone seemed to drone on and on and on. It was like watching men dual with bars of iron. But in the Synodine, both the words and the voices were honed to a cutting edge.
Real disputes instead of pantomime. Real consequences instead of heavenly petitions. Lives, sometimes in the thousands, were decided in this place as in no other. The young Prince-Imperial could almost smell the smoke and blood. This was where real cities were burned, not ones carved of balsa.
"Ask yourself," Mother cried to the assembled men. "Who will you be when the scripture of these days is written? The craven? The weak-kneed doubter? All of you—All of you! As the trial deepens, and the trial always deepens, all of you will be judged. So stop thinking of me as his weaker vessel!"
Kelmomas jammed his mouth into his forearms to conceal his smile. Though his mother angered often, she only rarely expressed it as anger. The boy wondered whether the fat Consul below understood the peril of his situation.
He certainly hoped not.
"Holy Empress, please!" Pansulla exclaimed. "This... this talk... it does not answer our fears! At the very least you must give us something to tell the people!"
The Prince-Imperial sensed the power in these words, even though he did not fully understand their import. He certainly could see the indecision in Mother's eyes, the realization she had erred...
That one, the secret voice whispered.
Pansulla?
Yes. His breathing offends me.
Ever keen to exploit weakness, the round-bellied Consul pressed his advantage. "All we ask, Most Holy Empress, is for the tools to work your will..."
Mother glared at him for a moment, then glanced nervously across the assembly. She seemed to flinch from the gravity of their regard. At last she waved a loose-wristed hand in weariness and capitulation. "Read The Sagas..." she began but without breath. She paused to firm her voice. "Read The Sagas, the history of the First Apocalypse, and ask yourself, Where are the Gods? How can the Hundred allow this?"
And the little boy could see the craft behind his mother's manner and words. Silence had seized the Imperial Synod, such was the force of her question.
"Thelli..." his mother said, gesturing to her daughter who sat gowned in absurd intricacy at her side. Dreadfully thin, she looked like a bird stranded between too many crumbs and the inability to choose. "Tell them what the Mandate Schoolmen say."
"The Gods are-are finite," Theliopa declared in a voice that contradicted the stark angularity of her frame. "They can only apprehend a finite por-portion of existence. They fathom the future-future, certainly, but from a vantage that limits them. The No-God dwells in their blind spots, follows a path-path they are utterly oblivious to..." She turned, looking from man to man with open curiosity. "Because he is oblivion."
Mother rested her hand atop Thelli's in a thoughtless gesture of thanks. Behind the panels of his box, the young Prince-Imperial fairly cut open his palms for balling his fists.
She loves me more! he thought.
Yes, the voice agreed, she loves you more.
The Empress spoke with renewed confidence. "There is a world, my Lords, a world concealed, a world of shadow that the Gods cannot see..." She looked from Consul to Consul. "I fear we now walk that world."
A wall of bewildered looks greeted her. Even Pansulla seemed taken aback. Kelmomas almost chirped in glee, so proud was he of his mother.
"And the Hundred?" old Tûtmor, the Consul for King Hoga Hogrim of Ce Tydonn croaked, his eyes rimmed with real fear. Alarmed voices clamoured in his wake.
Their Empress graced them all with a sour smile. "The Gods chafe, because like all souls, they call evil what they cannot comprehend."
More
astounded silence. Kelmomas found himself squinting in hilarity. Why anyone should fear the Gods was quite beyond him, let alone fools as privileged and powerful as these.
Because they are old and dying, the secret voice whispered.
Pansulla still held the Slot. He now stood directly beneath his Empress.
"So..." he said, looking to the others with a strategically blank face. "So it is true, then? The Gods..."—his gaze wandered—"the almighty Gods... are against us?"
Disaster. It fairly slapped the blood from Mother's painted face. Her lips retreated, the way they always did during such moments, into a thin line.
He offends me... the secret voice cooed. The fat one.
"Now..." she began, only to halt to master the emotion in her voice. "Now... Pansulla, is the time for care. Heretical superstition will be the end of us all. Now is the time to recall the God of Gods and his Prophet."
The threat was clear—enough to trigger another exchange of whispers among the tiered men. Smiling with greasy insincerity, Pansulla knelt to the floor, so big and so floridly gowned that he looked more a heap of laundry than a man.
"But of course, Holy Empress."
For the slightest instant, his mother's hatred lay plain on her face.
"Courage, Pansulla," she said. "And you too, loyal Tûtmor. You must find courage, not in the Hundred, but, as Inri Sejenus and my divine husband have taught, in their sum."
The Nansur Consul struggled back to his feet.
"Indeed, Empress," he said, smoothing his silk robes. "Courage... Of course..." His eyes strayed to the others. "We must remind ourselves that we know better... than the Gods."
Kelmomas grappled with the squeal of joy clawing at his throat. He so loved his mother's fury!
We've never killed someone so fat before.
"Not 'we,' Cutias Pansulla. Not you, and certainly not me. Your Holy Aspect-Emperor. Anasûrimbor Kellhus."
The young Prince-Imperial understood what his mother was trying to achieve with these appeals to his father. Always using him as a goad. Always trying to vanish into the might of his name. But he could also see, with a kind of child-cunning, how this undermined her authority.
Once again the obese Consul nodded in jowl-quivering exaggeration. "Ah, yes-yes... When the Cults fail us, we must turn to the Thousand Temples." He glanced up as if to say, How could I be such a fool? He made of a show of turning to Maithanet's vacant seat, then looked to his Empress with mock confusion. "But when can we hope to hear our Holy Shriah's most wise couns—?"
"Tidings!" a voice pealed. "Tidings, Empress! Most dire tidings!"
All eyes in the Synodine turned to the figure gasping on the chamber's threshold: an Eothic Guardsman, red-faced for exertion.
"Most Holy Empress..." The guardsmen swallowed against his wind. "The Kianene—the loathsome bandit, Fanayal!"
"What of him?" Mother demanded.
"He has struck Shigek."
Kelmomas watched his mother blink in confusion.
"But... he's marching on Nenciphon..." A frantic note climbed into her voice. "Don't you mean Nenciphon?"
The messenger shook his head in sudden terror.
"No, most Holy Empress. Iothiah. Fanayal has taken Iothiah."
—|—
The Andiamine Heights was a city in its own right, albeit one enclosed beneath a welter of rooftops, with gilded concourses instead of processional avenues and mazed dormitories instead of alley-riddled slums. Any number of routes could be taken between any two points, allowing the inhabitants to travel in celebrity or discretion. Unlike his father, Kelmomas's mother almost always chose the most discreet route possible, even if it made the journey twice as lengthy. Though some might think this was yet one more sign of her general insecurity, the young boy knew otherwise. Anasûrimbor Esmenet simply despised the sight of people falling to their faces.
The Imperial Synod dissolved, the Empress led her small retinue down into the Apparatory before turning to climb the rarely used stairs and halls that threaded the palace's eastward reaches. She clutched Kelmomas's hand with the too-tight desperation he so adored, tugging him when his pace faltered. Theliopa followed close behind with Lord Biaxi Sankas breathing hard at her side.
"Will Uncle Maithanet get mad at you again?" Kelmomas asked.
"Why would you say that?"
"Because he blames you for everything that goes wrong! I hate him!"
She ignored him after that, visibly angered.
Glutton, the secret voice reproached. You need to take care.
"Most Holy Empress," Lord Sankas said into the ensuing silence. "I fear the situation with your brother-in-law grows untenable..." Kelmomas glanced back at the man. He almost looked like Thelli's grandfather, he was so tall and slender. Decked in full martial regalia—a ceremonial Kidruhil cuirass and the purple cloak of a retired general—and cleanshaven in the traditional way, he resembled the old Nansur that Kelmomas so often saw engraved or painted in the original parts of the palace.
"Fanayal is in Shigek," she replied testily. "If you haven't noticed, Sankas, I have more pressing concerns."
But the Patridomos was not so easily silenced. "Perhaps if you were to speak with hi—"
"No!" the Empress exclaimed, wheeling around to glare up at the man. The wall to their left had yielded to an open colonnade that overlooked the Imperial Precincts and the east more generally. The Meneanor heaved dark beneath the sun on the horizon beyond.
"He must never see my face," she said more evenly. The shadow of an arch divided her from waist to shoulder so that her lower gown shimmered with light. Kelmomas pressed his face into the warm, scented fabric. She combed his scalp out of maternal reflex. "Do you understand, Sankas? Never."
"Forgive me, Most Holy!" the caste-noble fairly cried. "It-it was not my intent to cause offence..."
He trailed awkwardly, looking as though he had tripped across some disastrous suspicion. "Most Holy Empress..." he said tightly. "May I ask why the Shriah must not see your face?"
Kelmomas almost chortled aloud, saved himself by looking away in the appearance of little-boy boredom. Over a jumble of roof and structure, he glimpsed a formation of distant guardsmen doing drills on one of the seaward campuses. More soldiers were arriving every day, so many it was becoming impossible for him to adventure in the old way.
"Thelli," his mother said from above. "Please, would you assure Lord Sankas that I am not a skin-spy."
The Patridomos blanched. "No... No!" he blurted. "That is certainly no—"
"Mother is not-not a skin-spy," Theliopa interrupted.
His mother's hands and presence slipped away from the boy. Ever conscious of her menial stature, the Empress used the view as an excuse to step clear of the looming Patridomos. She gazed out over the Meneanor. "Our dynasty, Sankas, is a... a complicated one. I say what I say for good reason. I need to know that you have faith enough to trust that."
"Yes—certainly! But..."
"But what, Sankas?"
"Maithanet is the Holy Shriah..."
Kelmomas watched his mother smile her calm, winning smile, the one that told everyone present that she could feel what they felt. Her ability to communicate compassion, he had long since realized, was easily her strongest attribute—as well as the one most likely to send him into jealous rages.
"Indeed, Sankas... He is our Shriah. But the fact remains: my divine husband, his brother, decided to trust me with the fate of the Empire. Why might that be, you wonder?"
The man's pained squint relaxed in sudden comprehension. "Of course, Most Holy! Of course!"
Men cast their lots, the Prince-Imperial realized. They gambled time, riches, even loved ones, on those great personages they thought would carry the day. Once the gambit was made, you need only give them reasons to congratulate themselves.
His mother dismissed both Sankas and Theliopa shortly afterward. Kelmomas's heart cartwheeled for joy. Again and again and again, he was the one she brought with her to her apartments.
He was the one! Again and again. The only one!
As always, they passed the ponderous bronze door to Inrilatas's room with their ears pricked. Kelmomas's older brother had ceased screaming of late—like the seasons he had his tempests and his idylls—leaving the young Prince-Imperial with the troubling sense that he was there, his cheek pressed against the far side of his door, listening to their comings and goings. The fact that he never heard Inrilatas doing this troubled him even more, for he was quite fond of hearing things. Theliopa once told him that of all his brothers and sisters, Inrilatas possessed his father's gifts in the greatest measure, so much so they continually overwhelmed his mortal frame. Though Kelmomas did not begrudge Inrilatas his insanity—he celebrated it, if anything—he did resent his greedy share of Father's blood.
And so he hated Inrilatas as well.
Mother's body-slaves rushed from their antechambers to line the hall to either side, kneeling with their faces to the floor. The Empress brushed past them in distaste, pushed open the bronze doors to her apartments herself. Kelmomas never understood why she disdained using people—Father certainly never hesitated—but he adored the way it gave them more time alone. Again and again, he got to hug her and to kiss her and to cuddle-cuddle...
Ever since he had murdered Samarmas.
Sunlight rafted through the airy interior, setting the white-gossamer sheers aglow. A sycamore stood dark and full in the light beyond the balconies, close enough to glimpse the limbs forking through the shadows behind the bushing leaves. Sandalwood scented the air.
Capering across lavish carpets, the Prince-Imperial breathed deep and smiled. He swept his gaze across the frescoes of Invishi, Carythusal, and Nenciphon. Around a corner's fluted edge, he glimpsed the tall silvered mirror in her dressing-room. He saw the chest with the toys he pretended to play with when she was preoccupied. Through the propped doors to her sleeping chamber, he saw her great bed gleaming in the murk.
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