Fanayal ab Kascamandri raised his hand as if trying to snatch words she had tossed aside. "So this White-Luck Warrior of yours," he snapped, "he hunts the Aspect-Emperor?"
"The Goddess hunts the Demon."
Fanayal turned to his Cishaurim and grinned. "Tell me, Meppa. Do you like her?"
"Like her?" the blind man responded, obviously too accustomed to his jokes to be incredulous. "No."
"Well I do," the Padirajah said. "Even her curses please me."
"So she is to be spared?"
"She knows things, Meppa. Things we need to know."
But Malowebi, his skin crawling with gooseflesh, understood, as did every man present save perhaps the Cishaurim: the Bandit Padirajah simply made excuses. For all her provocations, for all her deadliness, Psatma Nannaferi remained, as she had said, soft earth deeply ploughed...
And the dread Mother of Birth would work her inscrutable will.
—|—
MOMEMN
Grief had crippled her. Grief for the death of her youngest, her sweetest and most vulnerable, Samarmas. Grief for the loss of her oldest, her bitterest and most wronged, Mimara.
Anger had saved her. Anger at her husband for stranding her. Anger at her servants for failing her and for doubting her—doubting her most of all.
Anger and the love of dear little Kelmomas.
She had taken to stalking the palace halls those nights that sleep eluded her. Twice now she had caught guardsmen throwing number-sticks, and once, slaves making love in the Hepatine Gardens—sins she knew her husband would have punished but that she feigned to overlook. Almost inevitably, she found herself padding alone through the cavernous heart of the Imperial Audience Hall. She would gawk as she walked, crane her neck like the caste-menial she was, thinking of all the peoples behind the panoply of symbols hanging between the polished pillars. She would climb the dais, run her fingers across the arm of her husband's great throne, then sashay out onto the veranda beyond, where she would gaze across the labyrinthine expanse of her capital.
How? How did a low and mean whore, the kind who would sell her daughter in times of famine, become the Blessed Empress of all the Three Seas? This, she had always thought, was the great question of her life, the remarkable fact that historians would ponder in future generations.
She had been the rut, the track long mudded, and now she found herself the charioteer.
There was a mystery and a beauty in great inversions. This was the genius and the power of the Circumfix, the paradox of the God Almighty hanging naked from an iron ring. All men are born helpless, and most men simply grow into more complicated forms of infancy. And yet, since they are the only summit they know, they constantly find themselves looking down even as they grovel at the knees of the mighty. "All slaves become emperors," Protathis had written with canny cynicism, "the instant the slaver looks away."
Her rise—as impossible, as miraculous, as it had been—expressed a conceit native to all men. And so the wild anomaly of her life had become a kind of human beacon. For the caste-nobility, long used to beating aspiration from their slaves, her mere existence triggered an instinct to punish. For slaves and menials, long accustomed to eating their imperious judgments, her rise reminded them of their daily indignity.
But their question was essentially the same. Who was she to be exalted so?
This. This was the real question of her life, the one the historians would never think to ask. Not how could a whore become Empress, but how could a whore be an Empress.
Who was she to be exalted so?
She would show them.
She had laboured tirelessly since word of Iothiah's fall had reached her. Emergency sessions with Caxes Anthirul, her Home Exalt-General, as well as the ever-irascible Werjau, Prime Nascenti of the Ministrate. Apparently activity along the Scylvendi frontier, which had surged in previous weeks, had now dwindled to nothing, a fact that at once heartened her, because of the redeployment it allowed, and troubled her. She had read The Annals, and though Casidas had died long before the Scylvendi sacked Cenei, she could not but recall throughout that reading how all the far-flung glory he described had been swept away by the People of War.
Mercurial. Merciless. Cunning. These were the words that best described the Scylvendi. She knew this because she had known Cnaiür urs Skiötha, and because she had raised his son, Moënghus, as her own.
Though her generals had eyes only for the prospect of avenging their fellows in Shigek, she knew stripping the Scylvendi frontier was a risk—a mad risk. Despite denuding the Empire otherwise, Kellhus had left three crack Columns to guard the Gap, and for no small reason.
But Fanayal and the cursed Yatwerians had left her no choice. The plan was to garrison Gedea as best as they could while the Imperial Army of the West assembled at Asgilioch. Hinnereth could be supplied by sea. General Anthirul assured her that they would have five full Columns ready to retake Shigek by summer's end. Though everyone present understood what Fanayal intended, none dared speak it in her presence. The Bandit Padirajah had not so much attacked the Empire as her legitimacy.
He would suffer for that. For the first time in Esmenet's life, she actually found herself gloating over the prospect of destroying another. And it did not trouble her in the slightest, even though she knew her former self would recoil in horror from such malevolent passions. Fanayal ab Kascamandri would scream for her mercy before all was said and done. Nothing could be more simple.
She also met regularly with both her Master of Spies, Phinersa, and her Vizier-in-Proxy, Vem-Mithriti. She had feared that Phinersa, who always seemed brittle for his nervous intensity, would fold under the extraordinary demands she made of him. But if anything the man thrived. Within a week of Iothiah's fall, Phinersa had almost entirely rebuilt their network of spies throughout Shigek. When she asked him for pretexts she could use to arrest Cutias Pansulla, he had the man imprisoned by the following evening, allowing her to install Biaxi Sankas in his place in the Imperial Synod.
Likewise, she had feared that Vem-Mithriti would literally die, so feeble did he seem. But he too flourished, organizing cadres of Schoolmen, students, and those, like Vem-Mithriti, too frail to participate in the Great Ordeal, for the defence of the Empire. All the world had thought the Cishaurim exterminated by the First Holy War. The stories of their return had sparked a new, almost fanatical, resolve in those Schoolmen who remained.
It seemed miraculous, when she paused to think about it, the way her husband's ministers rallied about her. From the outset, she had understood that the greatest strength of an empire, its size, was at once its greatest weakness. So long as its population believed in its power and purpose, an empire could bring almost limitless resources to bear against its foes, be they internal or external. But when that belief waned, its tendency was to dissolve into warring tribes. The very resources that had been its strength became its enemy.
This was what made the fall of Iothiah so disastrous. Yes, Fanayal had cast all of Shigek into lawless turmoil. Yes, he had cut the western Empire in half. But Shigek was but one province out of many, and the links between north and south had always been maritime thanks to the Great Carathay. Strategically, the loss of Iothiah was little more than a nuisance.
Symbolically, however...
The crisis she faced was a crisis in confidence, nothing more, nothing less. The less her subjects believed in the Empire, the less some would sacrifice, the more others would resist. It was almost arithmetic. The balance was wobbling, and all the world watched to see which way the sand would spill. Anasûrimbor Esmenet had made a resolution to act as if she believed to spite all those who doubted her as much as anything else, and paradoxically, they had all started believing with her. It was a lesson Kellhus had drummed into her countless times and one she resolved never to forget again.
To know is to have power over the world; to believe is to have power over men.
With belief then, belief and craft, she would heave on the great chain of empire a
nd haul the balance to the benefit of her children. Esmenet had no more illusions. She understood that if she failed, her sons and daughters would all be doomed.
And she simply would not—could not!—tolerate another...
Another Samarmas.
As always, her Seneschal, Ngarau, proved indispensable. The longer she had been involved in the New Empire's administration, the more she had come to realize that it possessed its own codes and dialects—and the more she had understood not only why men such as Ngarau were so indispensable, but also why Kellhus, no matter how bloody his conquests, never failed to spare the functionaries of each nation he conquered. Everything required translation. The more fluent the Apparati, the fewer the misinterpretations, the quicker the findings, the more decisive the Empire's actions.
The only wheel she could not turn in concert with the others was the Thousand Temples. But soon, very soon, she would have a resolution to that dilemma.
She gazed out across the dark landscape of Momemn, slowly stalking the perimeter of the veranda. She thought about how all the jumbled structures were in fact hollow, how their walls seemed little more than parchment when viewed from so far. She thought of all the thousands slumbering like miniature, innumerable larva, soft in their crisp cocoons. And she plotted their survival.
"We walk the Shortest Path," her divine and heartless husband had told her the last time she had seen him, "the Labyrinth of the Thousandfold Thought. This is the burden the God has laid upon us, and the burden the Gods begrudge..."
Expediency would be her rule. As ruthless as it was holy.
Kelmomas, she knew, would be awake and waiting when she returned—he always was. Simply because she was so busy, she allowed him to sleep with her in her bed.
Save for those nights she called for Sankas or Imhailas to comfort her.
—|—
The day itself seemed daring. The wind was constant and thin. The sky was nearly empty, the horizon scraped clean. The Meneanor Sea was stone-coast dark beneath the sunlight sparking across its perforations.
She sat at a small table with Theliopa at her side, watching the Shriah of the Thousand Temples step from the shadow of the Imperial Audience Hall into the glare of the veranda. Anasûrimbor Maithanet. Because of the innumerable golden slivers—tusks—woven up and down its length, his white robe twinkled gold with every step. His hair piled high and rich upon his head, the same improbable black as his braided beard.
"This is madness, Esmi," he called. "The Empire burns, yet you spurn my counsel?"
She hoped she looked as impressive, with her stark grey gown beneath an ankle-long vest of gold rings. And of course, she had her smoke-hazed city as her mantle, an intricate mottling of white and grey that reached to the horizon. But she was sure it would be her porcelain mask, glazed white with features as fine and as beautiful as her own, that would most weigh against his eyes.
"And now you wear a mask? An Ainoni mask?"
She had long pondered how he would begin. Before conferring with Inrilatas, she had thought he would be conciliatory, that he would use wise and self-effacing words to move her. "Do this, Esmi. Confidence awaits..." But she had reconsidered in the light of what her crazed son had told her. He would affect injury and outrage, she eventually decided, thinking her native doubts would grease his way.
And she had been right.
"This is about Sharacinth..." he continued in the same indignant tones, his voice striking resonances that seemed to warble about her heart. "You think I was involved in her murder!"
She did not reply simply because she did not trust her voice. She could only speak when she felt the "cold" within her—as Theliopa had instructed.
He took the seat waiting for him in apparent fury. Even out of doors the scent of him, myrrh and a kind of musk, bloomed invisible.
"Or has the loss—?"
He paused as if catching himself, but the implication was clear.
"Or has the loss of your son driven you mad..."
He had not meant, she realized, to say this only to halt out of some compassionate instinct. He had meant for her to complete the thought... Her! Then he could commiserate, and slowly pry open her trust the way he had so many times in the past.
But she had already decided the path this conversation would take.
She peeled a section of flat-cake, used it to grasp a pinch of spice-shredded pork. She dipped both into the cinnamon and honey, then passed it to him, searching for any sign of hesitation.
There was none.
He had not extended her any of the traditional greetings or honorifics, so neither would she. "Proyas..." she said, taking heart in the coldness she felt beneath the clarity of her voice. "Shortly after Carythusal fell, he took me hunting kanti, a kind of antelope, on the Famiri... Have I ever told you that story, Maitha?"
He gazed at her with unsettling intensity. "No."
The mask tingled against her cheeks. She found herself wondering if this was how skin-spies felt behind the digits of their false faces. Safe.
"This was after the conquest of Ainon," she said. "We had tracked a mother and her foal for the better part of an afternoon. But when we finally sighted them, we discovered we weren't the only hunters. Wolves. Wolves had tracked them as well. We had climbed a shallow ridge, so we could see it all, the kanti mother and her child watering at a black stream... and the wolves closing about her..." She glimpsed the predators in her soul's eye, sleek as fish, tunnelling through the grasses. "But the cow either heard them or caught their scent on the wind. She bolted before the noose could be knotted—bolted directly toward us! It was astonishing enough to watch from a distance. She backed her foal against the earthen drop—immediately below us—turned to battle her pursuers. The wolves flew at her, but kanti are strong, like vicious horses, and she kicked and stamped and butted, and the wolves veered away. I almost cried out for jubilation, but Proyas clutched my arm and pointed directly down..."
She paused to lick her lips behind the porcelain.
"The wolves, Maitha. The wolves had known what she would do, even where she would run. So even as the cow seemed to frighten off the pack, two others, who had concealed themselves in the thickets at the ridge's base, leapt upon the foal and tore out its throat. The mother shrieked, chased them away, but it was too late. The pack simply waited until she abandoned her child's body."
Esmenet really had no idea how much he could infer from the sliver of her voice. She had rehearsed this story to baffle his penetration. She had struggled to purge all sign of the passions that moved beneath her voice and intent—but how does one conceal what is already hidden?
"Do you understand, Maitha? I need to know you aren't a wolf waiting in the thicket."
For a heartbeat, anger and compassion seemed to war for the high ground of his gaze. "How could you think such a thing?" he exclaimed.
She breathed deep. How had she come by her suspicions? So often the past seemed a cistern sloshing with dissolved voices. Inrilatas had said she feared Maithanet because she despised herself. How could he not try to save the Empire from her incapacity? But something in her balked at the possibility. Her entire life, it seemed, she had fended fears without clear origin.
Just a tactic... she told herself. An attempt to engage me morally—make me defensive. She tapped the Ainoni mask with a lacquered nail—a gesture meant for herself as much as for him.
"How?" she replied. "Because you are Dûnyain."
This occasioned a long silence between them. Watching his pained look lapse into blank scrutiny, Esmenet could not shake the nagging sense that her brother-in-law actually considered murdering her there and then.
"Your husband is Dûnyain," Maithanet finally said.
"Indeed."
She wondered if it would be possible to count all the unspoken truths that hung between them, all the devious grounds for their mistrust. Was there ever a family so deranged as theirs?
"If I condescend to this, this test, it will be only to reassure you
, Esmi," he finally said. His tone was devoid of pride or resentment, a fact that simply made him more inhuman in her eyes. "I am your brother. Even more, I am your husband's willing slave, no different than you. We are bound together by blood and faith."
"Then do this for me, Maitha. I will apologize if I'm wrong. I will wash your feet on the Xothei steps—anything! Wolves pursue me..."
It was all a game for them, she realized. No word, no expression, simply was. Everything was a tool, a tactic meant to further some occult and devious goal.
Even love... Just as Achamian had said.
She had known this for years, of course, but in the way of all threatening knowledge: at angles, in the shadowy corners of her soul. But now, playing that game with one of them, with a Dûnyain, it seemed she understood that knowledge down to its most base implication.
She would be overmatched, she realized, were it not for her mask.
Maithanet had paused in the semblance of a man at his wit's end. His jet beard looked hot in the sunlight—she wondered what dye he used to conceal the Norsirai blond. "And you are willing to trust the judgment of a mad adolescent?"
"I am willing to trust the judgment of my son."
"To read my face?"
He was trying to extend the conversation, she realized. To better scrutinize her voice? Had something in her tone hooked his interest?
"To read your face."
"And you realize the training this requires?"
Esmenet nodded toward her daughter. For all her deficits, Theliopa had been her reprieve. She too was Dûnyain, but as Kelmomas possessed his mother's capacity to love, so too she possessed her mother's need to please. This, Esmenet had decided, was what she could trust: those fractions of her that had found their way into her children.
She would count all the world her enemy otherwise.
"The ability to re-read passions is largely native," Theliopa said, "and save for father-father, none can see so deep as Inrilatas. Inferring thoughts requires training, Uncle, a measure of which Father pro-provided."
"But you know this," Esmenet added, trying to hide the accusation in an air of honest confusion.
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