But just as she turned to signal the slaves to leave, he said, "Father has cut off all communication."
She slumped in her seat, breathing, staring without focus at the floor.
"Yes," she said.
"You are alone, lost in a wilderness of subtleties you cannot fathom."
"Yes…"
At last she raised her gaze to meet his. "Will you do this for me, Inrilatas?"
"Trust. Trust is the one thing you seek."
"Yes… I…" A kind of resignation overwhelmed her. "I need you."
Invisible things boiled through the heartbeats that followed. Portents. Ruminations. Lusts.
"There can only be three of us…" Inrilatas finally said. Once again, unnameable passions creaked through the seams of his voice.
The Blessed Empress blinked more tears, this time for relief. "Of course. Just your uncle and myself."
"No. Not you. My brothers…" A heaving breath swallowed his voice.
"Brothers?" she asked, more alarmed than curious.
"Kel…" he said with a bestial grunt, "and Sammi…"
The Holy Empress stiffened. If Inrilatas had been seeking a fatal chink, he had discovered it. "I don't understand," she replied, swallowing. "Sammi is… Sammi, he…"
But the figure she spoke to was scarce human anymore. Anasurimbor Inrilatas rose with a dancer's slow deliberation, then threw himself forward, his arms and legs outstretched, straining against the limits of his chains. He stood there, all spittle and squint-eyed passion, his naked limbs heaving, trembling with veins and striations. Her shield-bearers, Esmenet could not help but notice, had shrunk behind the wicker screens meant for her.
"Mother!" her son shrieked, his eyes shining with murder. "Mother! Come! Closer!"
Something of her original imperviousness returned. This… This was her son as she knew him best.
The beast.
"Let me see your mouth, Mother!"
Iothiah
The woman called Psatma Nannaferi was brought before the Padirajah and his loutish court the same as all the other notable captives, stripped naked and shackled in iron. But where other attractive women had been greeted with lascivious hoots and calls-humiliation, Malowebi had realized, was as much as part of the proceedings as the Padirajah's judgment-a peculiar silence accompanied Psatma Nannaferi's short march to the floor below Fanayal. Rumours of this woman, the Mbimayu sorcerer decided, had spread quickly among the desert men. The fact that he had not heard these rumours simply served to whet his curiosity, as well as to remind him that he remained an outsider.
Fanayal had seized one of the few temples not burned, a great domed affair that abutted the Agnotum Market-the ironic point of origin for many luxury goods that found their way to Zeum. The altar had been broken down with sledges and hauled away. The tapestries with panels drawn from the Tractate and the Chronicle of the Tusk had been burned. Those representing the First Holy War, Malowebi was told, had been carted out of Iothiah to line the horse stalls seized by Fanayal's growing army. The frescoes had been defaced, and graven images everywhere had been smashed. Several green-and-crimson banners bearing the Twin Scimitars of Fanimry had been roped and tacked across the walls. But the Tusks and Circumfixes were simply too ubiquitous to be completely blotted. No matter where his eye strayed, along the columns, over the cornices and vaults of the flanking architraves, Malowebi glimpsed unscathed evidence of the Aspect-Emperor and his faith.
Nowhere more so than the dome itself-whose height and breadth alone were a kind of miracle to Malowebi, hailing as he did from a nation without arches. A great wheel of frescoes hung in the high gloom above the unbelievers, five panels representing Inri Sejenus in some different pose, his face gentle, his hands haloed in painted gold, his silvered eyes glaring endlessly down.
Fanayal's desert Grandees betrayed no discomfort that the Second Negotiant could see. But then Malowebi always found himself surprised by men's general blindness to irony and contradiction. If the Kianene had looked vicious and impoverished before, they looked positively absurd now, decked in the eclectic spoils of a great imperial city. The desert mob seethed with jarring mixtures of clothing and armour: the high conical helms from Ainon, black Thunyeri hauberks, a couple of silk gowns that Malowebi suspected belonged to a woman's wardrobe, and in one case, the baggy crimson pantaloons typically worn by caste-slave eunuchs. One man even sported a Nilnameshi feather-shield. Most of them, Malowebi knew, had spent the bulk of their lives hunted like animals across the desert wastes. Until now, they had counted sips of water and shelter from sun and wind as luxury, so it made sense they would feast in all ways possible, given the crazed rewards Fate had heaped upon them.
Even still, they looked more a carnival of dangerous fools than a possible ally of High Holy Zeum.
Once again Fanayal alone embodied the elegance and reserve that had once so distinguished his people. A wooden chair had been set behind the forward ridge of the altar's shattered base, where the Padirajah sat, agleam even in temple gloom, wearing a coat of golden mail over a white silk tunic: the armour and uniform of the Coyauri, the famed heavy cavalry he had commanded as a young man during the First Holy War.
Meppa stood at his right hand, his cowl drawn back, his eyes hidden as always behind the silver band about his head. The Cishaurim's serpent rose like a black iron hook from his neck, tasting the air with its tongue, wagging from voice to voice.
Malowebi had been assigned the shadows behind and to the left of the Padirajah, where he had watched perhaps a hundred naked women and men dragged beneath Fanayal and his vengeful whims, a piteous train of them, some proud and defiant, but most abject and broken, wheezing and weeping for a mercy that was never shown. The captive men, no matter what their station, where asked whether they would curse their Aspect-Emperor and embrace the truth of the Prophet Fane. Those who refused were dragged off for immediate execution. Those who agreed were taken away to be auctioned as slaves. As far as the Mbimayu sorcerer could tell, the women-the bereaved wives and orphaned daughters of the caste-nobility-were simply brought out to be divided as spoils.
On and on the proceedings continued, becoming more sordid and more farcical, it seemed, with the passing of every doomed soul, dull enough for an old scholar to ponder the perversities of faith, long enough for an old man's feet to ache and itch.
Something about Psatma Nannaferi, however, instantly dispelled his boredom and discomfort.
The guardsmen threw her to the prayer tiles beneath the Padirajah. But where they had delighted in wicked little flourishes with the others, they did so this time with mechanical reluctance-as if trying to hide behind their function.
Fanayal leaned forward, petted his braided goatee as he studied the captive. This too was unprecedented.
"My Inquisitor has told me a most interesting tale…"
The woman slowly pulled herself upright, graceful despite her iron shackles. She betrayed neither fear for her future nor shame for her captive nudity. She was not without a certain, diminutive beauty, Malowebi thought, but there was a hardness to her that belied the soft brown curves of her skin. And there was something about her posture and her squint that suggested the habits of someone older-far older-than her apparent thirty years.
"He says," Fanayal continued, "that you are Psatma Nannaferi, the Mother-Supreme of the Yatwerian Cult."
A grim and condescending smile. "I am."
"He also says you are the reason we found these lands afire when we arrived."
She nodded. "I am but a vessel. I pour only what has been poured."
Even after so few words, Malowebi knew her for a formidable woman. Here she stood, naked and manacled, yet her gaze and bearing communicated a confidence too profound to be named pride, a majesty that somehow upended the stakes between her and the famed Bandit Padirajah.
"And now that your Goddess has betrayed you?"
"Betrayed?" she snorted. "This is not a sum. This is not a wager of advantages over loss. This is a gift! Our Mo
ther Goddess's will."
"So the Goddess wills the destruction of her temples? The torment and execution of her slaves?"
The longer Malowebi gazed at the woman, the more a weight seemed to press against his brow. Her eyes seemed bright with moist vulnerability, her body fetching in the lean way of peasant virgins. And yet watching her, an impression of something hoary, hard, and old continued to plague him. Even the downy curve of her sex… She seemed a kind of visible contradiction, as if the look and promise of virgin youth had eclipsed the sight of a hag but not the corona of meaning that hung like a haze about it.
So even now, as she glared at Fanayal, it seemed something reptilian peered through her peering, the look of something vicious and remorseless with age, flashing from the gaze of a woman, flushed and breathless and so very inviting.
"We take such gifts that come," she crooned. "We suffer this worldly trifle, and She will save us! From oblivion! From those demons our iniquities have awakened! This is but the arena where souls settle eternity. Our suffering is dross compared to the glory to come!"
Fanayal laughed, genuinely amused. But his humour cut against the obvious unease of his court.
"So even your captivity… You think this a gift?"
"Yes."
"And if I were to deliver you to the lust of my men?"
"You will not."
"And why is that?"
In a twinkling, she became coy and whorish. She even glanced down at her breasts, which were firm with improbable youth. "Because I have been reborn as black earth, as rain and sweating sun," she said. "The Goddess has cast me in Her image, as sweet, sweet Fertility. You will not allow other men to trade me, so long as your loins bur-"
" My loins?" Fanayal cried out with forced incredulity.
Malowebi gazed and blinked. She literally tingled with nubile promise, yet still she carried the air of old stone. Something… Something was wrong…
"Even now," she said, "your seed rises to the promise of soft earth deeply ploughed."
Masculine laughter rumbled through the chamber, only to falter for want of breath. Even old Malowebi could feel a tightness in his chest and a matching thickness crawling across his thighs…
With no little horror the Mbimayu sorcerer realized the Goddess was among them. There was peril, here-great peril. This woman walked with one foot on the Outside…
He opened his mouth to call out in warning but caught himself on the very hinge of his voice.
He was no friend to these savage people. He was an observer, interpreter. The question was whether Zeum's interests would be served if Fanayal were alerted. Ally or not, the fact remained that the man was a fanatic of the worst kind, a believer in a creed, Fanimry, that made devils out of the Gods and hells out of the Heavens. To strike an alliance that earned the enmity of the Mother of Birth would be a fool's exchange. The Zeumi might not pray to the Hundred, given their intercessory faith, but they certainly revered and respected them.
"'Soft earth deeply ploughed,'" Fanayal repeated, gazing upon her form with frank hunger. He turned to the lean and warlike men of his court. "Such are the temptations of evil, my friends!" he called, shaking his head. "Such are the temptations!"
More laughter greeted these words.
"Your sisters are dead," the Padirajah continued as if immune to her wiles. "Your temples are pulled down. If these are gifts, as you say, then I am in a most generous mood." He paused to make room for a few frail guffaws from his assembled men. "I could give you a noose, say, or a thousand lashes. Perhaps I will have Meppa show you what kind of prison your body can be."
Malowebi found himself wondering whether the woman had even blinked, so relentless was her gaze. The fact that Fanayal weathered it with such thoughtless ease actually troubled the Mbimayu sorcerer. Was the man simply oblivious or did he possess a heart every bit as hard as her own?
Either possibility would not bode an alliance well.
"My soul has already left and returned to this body," she said, her girlish voice scratched with the harsh intonations of a crone. "There is no torment you could inflict upon me."
"So hard!" Fanayal cried laughing. "Stubborn! Devil-worshipping witch!"
Again the desert court rumbled with laughter.
"I would not ply your body," Meppa said without warning. So far he had stood silent and motionless at his sovereign's side, his face directed forward as always. Only the asp, which curved like an onyx bow across his left cheek, faced the lone woman.
Psatma Nannaferi regarded the Cishaurim with a sneer. "My soul is beyond your devilry, Snakehead. I worship the Dread Mother."
Never had Malowebi witnessed an exchange more uncanny, the blinded man speaking as if to a void, the shackled woman as if she were a mad queen among hereditary slaves.
"You worship a demon."
The Mother-Supreme laughed with the bitter hilarity. The cackle rang across distant walls, echoed through the high crypt hollows, gelding all the humour that had come before it. Suddenly the assembled men were nothing but ridiculous boys, their pride swatted from them by the palm of a shrewd and exacting mother.
"Call her what you will!" Psatma Nannaferi exclaimed. "Demon? Yes! I worship a demon! — if it pleases you to call her such! You think we worship the Hundred because they are good? Madness governs the Outside, Snakehead, not gods or demons-or even the God! Fool! We worship them because they have power over us. And we-we Yatwerians-worship the one with the most power of all!"
Malowebi squelched another urge to call out, to urge the Fanim to spare her, to set her free, then to burn a hundred bulls in Yatwer's honour. The Mother was here! Here!
"Gods are naught but greater demons," the Cishaurim said, "hungers across the surface of eternity, wanting only to taste the clarity of our souls. Can you not see this?"
The woman's laughter trailed into a cunning smile. "Hungers indeed! The fat will be eaten, of course. But the high holy? The faithful? They shall be celebrated!"
Meppa's voice was no mean one, yet its timbre paled in the wake of the Mother-Supreme's clawing rasp. Even still he pressed, a tone of urgent sincerity the only finger he had to balance the scales. "We are a narcotic to them. They eat our smoke. They make jewellery of our thoughts and passions. They are beguiled by our torment, our ecstasy, so they collect us, pluck us like strings, make chords of nations, play the music of our anguish over endless ages. We have seen this, woman. We have seen this with our missing eyes!"
Malowebi scowled. Fanim madness… It had to be.
"Then you know," Psatma Nannaferi said in a growl that crawled across Malowebi's skin. "There will be no end to your eating, when She takes you. Your blood, your flesh-they are inexhaustible in death. Taste what little air you can breathe, Snakehead. You presume your Solitary God resembles you. You make your image the form of the One. You think you can trace lines, borders, through the Outside, like that fool, Sejenus, say what belongs to the God of Gods and what does not-errant abstractions! Hubris! The Goddess waits, Snakehead, and you are but a mote before her patience! Birth and War alone can seize-and seize She does!"
The Mbimayu sorcerer glanced out over the festooned court, his attention drawn by gasps and murmurs of outrage. The desert men watched, their faces caught between fury and horror. Several of them even signed small folk charms with their fingers. The oddities had been piled too high for them not to realize something profound was amiss.
"Stay your curses!" Fanayal cried, his humour finally beaten into fury.
She cackled in a manner far too savage for lips as young as hers. Dust plumed through a rare shaft of sunlight, star-scapes rolling on temple drafts. "Yes, Mother!" she shouted to the air the way Meppa might. "Seizing him would be a delight! Yes!"
"Demoness!" the Last Cishaurim bellowed. He descended the steps toward her, his face held forward as stiff as a doll's. "I know the true compass of your power. You are written across ages and yet you need tools — Men. And all Men can fail. It is the foundation of what we are! You will be
broken with your tools! And you will starve in your pit!"
"Yes!" Psatma Nannaferi cackled once again. "All Men save one!"
Meppa lowered his face, as if only now seeing her through the etched silver of his band. "The White-Luck," he said.
"White-Luck?" Fanayal asked.
Malowebi stood breathless in the wake of the question. These Fanim barbarians could not fathom the disaster they courted. The Hundred. The Hundred rode to war!
"There are infinite paths through the tumble of events," Meppa explained to his sovereign. "The White-Luck, the idolaters believe, is that perfect line of action and happenstance that can see any outcome come to pass. The White-Luck Warrior is the man who walks that line. Everything that he needs, happens, not because he wills it but because his need is identical to what happens. Every step, every toss of the number-sticks, is a…" He turned back to the fierce glare of the Yatwerian Mother-Supreme.
"Is a what?" Fanayal demanded.
Meppa shrugged. "A gift."
The diminutive woman cackled and rattled her chains for stamping her feet. "You are but a temporary blight! A trial that sorts the faithful from the thieves. A far greater war has seized the Three Seas. The Goddess has broken the yoke of the Thousand Temples. The Cults arm themselves for battle. Ride, Fanim fool! Ride! Conquer what you can! Death and horror will eat you all ere this ends!"
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…
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