And there did a Narindar find him and kill him, pricking him with a poison needle behind the ear. Word passed throughout the Empire, and the multitudes were filled with wonder that an Aspect-Emperor could be sorted in his own garden. Within a fortnight, foul assassination had become manifest prophecy, and no action was taken against the Cult of the Four-Horned Brother. All the World wished the matter forgotten.
—The Annals of Cenei, CASIDAS
It is said of the Nansur that they fear their fathers, love their mothers, and trust their siblings, but only so far as they fear their fathers.
The Ten Thousand Day Dynasty, HOMIRRAS
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn
“Noooo …” the Padirajah howled.
Malowebi stood staring across the cluttered gloom of the grand pavilion, stranded three steps inside its threshold by protocol. Fanayal stood at his own bedside, staring down at the death throes of his Cishaurim, Meppa—or as his people knew him, Stonebreaker. The Padirajah, who had always seemed lean and youthful, now seemed fatted with his fifty-plus years. Psatma Nannaferi lounged upon a brocaded settee nearby, her dark eyes glittering like quicksilver on the gloom’s phantom verge. Her gaze never left the ailing Padirajah, who held his face turned from her—deliberately it seemed. She watched and watched, her expression one of genuine expectancy and sly contempt, as though she awaited an adored part of a well-rehearsed tale, one featuring the villain she most despised. It almost made her seem as youthful as she should seem.
Gleaming edges and surfaces cluttered the encircling shadows, glimpses of plunder, the Padirajah’s share of Iothiah. Fired pottery. Heaps of clothing. Brocaded furnishings. From where the Mbimayu Schoolman stood, the scene almost seemed cobbled from these fragments, debris bricked into Creation …
The stage where the fabled Fanayal ab Kascamandri reckoned his doom.
“Nooo!” he cried to the prostrate form. The Twin Scimitars of Fanimry, the gold-on-black banner of his nation and faith, had been kicked across the floor, and now lay neglected beneath his feet, one more looted carpet. The White Horse on Gold, the famed Coyauri flag that Fanayal used as his personal standard yet hung, but scorched and tattered for the very battle that had laid Meppa low …
Malowebi had already overheard Fanayal’s wild desert warriors murmuring and arguing amongst themselves. The Whore Empress had done this, they said. Kucifra’s woman had struck the Last Cishaurim down …
“What will they say?” the Yatwerian witch cooed, still watching him from her settee. “How far can you trust them?”
“Bridle your tongue,” Fanayal murmured. He leaned as if hung from hooks, peering at his fallen Cishaurim. The Padirajah had wagered everything on the man that lay dying on his silk sheets below—every favour his God had afforded him.
The only real question now was what happened next.
Malowebi had known men like Fanayal in Zeum, souls that leaned more on things unseen than seen, that made idols of their ignorance so they might better strut and proclaim whatever court trifle they happened to covet unto obsession. From the very beginning of the man’s insurrection—for more than twenty years!—Fanayal ab Kascamandri had cast himself opposite Anasûrimbor Kellhus. Men cannot but measure themselves against their enemies, and the Aspect-Emperor was nothing if not … formidable. So Fanayal had styled himself the holy antagonist, the Chosen Hero, fated to slay dread Kucifra, the-Light-that-Blinds, the Demon who had broken the back of his faith and his race. He had set himself a task that only the alarming power of his Waterbearer could complete.
Despite his vanity, the eldest son of Kascamandri truly was an inspired leader—of that Malowebi had no doubt. But it was Meppa who had been the miracle, the Second Negotiant realized. The Last Cishaurim. Short of him, Fanayal and his desert horsemen could scarcely do more than hurl insults at the cyclopean walls of their Imperial Zaudunyani foes. Meppa had been the one to conquer Iothiah, not Fanayal. The bellicose son of Kascamandri had sacked a defenceless city, no more.
Without Meppa, Fanayal had no hope of overcoming the Imperial Capital. And so he found himself trapped in a contradiction of fact and ambition. Momemn’s monstrous black walls were all but impregnable. He could tarry, but there was no way to starve a coastal city into submission. Meanwhile, the countryside became ever more resolved against him. For all their grievances, the Nansur had not forgotten their generational hatred of the Kianene. Simply feeding his motley army was becoming ever more difficult, ever more bloody. Desertions, especially among the Khirgwi, were all but inevitable. Even as the Empress mustered and redeployed Columns, the Fanim army was sure to dwindle. Perhaps Fanayal could prevail in an open contest with an Imperial Zaudunyani army. Meppa’s sacrifice had killed the formidable Caxes Anthirul, at least; perhaps some fool would lead the Imperials in the Home Exalt-General’s stead. Perhaps the Bandit Padirajah could, with the dregs of his long-hunted desert people, conjure one of those miraculous victories that had been the glory of his ancestors …
But to what end, if the great cities of the Nansurium remained closed to him?
The circumstances could not be more dire, and yet Malowebi fairly cackled for pondering them. The usefulness of the Fanim only extended as far as their ability to challenge the Empire. Short of Meppa, then, High Holy Zeum had no use for Fanayal ab Kascamandri.
Short of Meppa, Malowebi could go home.
He was free. He had waited upon this growing cancer long enough. Time to forget these pompous and pathetic sausages—to begin plotting his revenge on Likaro!
“Your Grandees think you daring …” Psatma Nannaferi crooned. She reclined with opiate indifference across the settee, wearing a silk shift that clothed her alluring nethers in shadow, nothing more. “But now they see.”
Fanayal wiped a callused hand across the mud of his expression.
“Shut up!”
A screech that blooded throats, pimpled skin … and promised mayhem.
The Yatwerian witch growled in laughter.
Yes … Malowebi silently resolved. Time to leave.
The Dread Mother was here!
But he stood transfixed. The pavilion threshold lay no more than three paces behind him—he was fairly certain he could slip out without notice. Men like Fanayal rarely forgave those insolent enough to witness their weakness and hypocrisy. But they were also prone to punish the merest slights as mortal transgressions. As the son of a cruel father, Malowebi knew well how to be at once present and invisible.
“Yesss …” the Yatwerian witch cooed with lolling contempt. “The White-Luck conceals so very many things … so many frailties …”
She was right. Now that the number-sticks had finally betrayed him, what had seemed inspired audacity, even providence, stood revealed as recklessness. But why would she say such a thing? Why speak any truth at all, when it could only be provocation?
But this was the problem with all matters entangled in the machinations of the Hundred: the advantage was never to be seen.
Only madness.
Yes! Time to leave.
He could use his Cants to fold himself into the night, begin the long trek ho—
“Idolatrous whore!” Fanayal screamed, showering Meppa’s inert form with spittle. It betrayed the profundity of his horror, Malowebi realized, the way he chose to rage at the empty space before him rather than face the malevolent temptress. “This is your doing! Witch! The Solitary God rebukes me! Punishes me for taking you into my bed!”
Malowebi started for the contradiction of seething fertility and stringy, old crone laughter. Even in the shadowy confines of Fanayal’s pavilion, she seemed illuminated, a thing drawn out of chill waters, raw, tasteless for being … so clean.
“Then burn me!” she cried. “The Fanim share that custom with the Inrithi at least! Forever burning those who Give!”
Padirajah finally whirled, his face twisted. “Fire is merely how it ends, witch! First I cast you as a rag to my warriors, let them rut and stamp your sex into mud! Then I hoist you high above the bramble flame, watch you writhe and shriek! burst into a beacon warning of all that is foul and wicked!”
The old woman’s laugh became silent.
“Yes!” she croaked. “Give … me … all … their … seed! All their fury bound to the Mother’s pitiless womb! Let your entire nation lean hard upon me! Groan as grinning dogs! Let them know me as you have known me!”
The Padirajah lunged toward her, only to be hung from his wrists, held as if leashed to opposite corners of the pavilion. He craned his head about, crying out, groaning. At long last his wide, palpating eyes found Malowebi where he stood riven between shadows. For a moment, the Padirajah seemed to implore him—but for things too great for any man to bodily yield.
The look slipped into oblivion. Fanayal collapsed to his knees before the vile seductress.
Psatma Nannaferi wailed her amusement. The nails of her darkling look scratched the Mbimayu Schoolman’s image—for the merest instant only, but it was enough, enough for him to glimpse the crimson filigree of veins, the uterine webs she had sunk as roots into the Reality surrounding.
Flee! Run you old idiot!
But he already understood that it was too late.
“Share me!” she shrieked. “Burn meeee! Do it!” A sound like a dog’s growl, close enough to send the Zeumi’s skin crawling against his foul robes. “Do it! And watch your precious Snakehead die!”
Ice ached in the craw of his bones. Malowebi understood the truth of her infernal hilarity—and the truth of everything that had transpired with it. The Dread Mother had been among them all along. That fateful day in Iothiah, they had been delivered to Psatma Nannaferi, not vice versa.
The time to flee had itself fled long ago.
“What are you saying?” Fanayal asked, his face bereft of dignity, his knees wide across the carpets.
“The black blasphemer knows!” she chortled, throwing her chin in Malowebi’s direction.
“Tell me!” the Padirajah cried, all the more pathetic for attempting to sound imperious.
A black-hearted smirk.
“Yeeeessss. Your every ambition, the whole pathetic empire of your conceit, is bound to me, Son of Kascamandri. What you take from me, you cut from yourself. What you gift to me, you gift to yourself …” Her eyes roamed the shadowy spaces about them. “And,” she said, her voice dropping to a croak, “to your Mother …”
“But can you save him?” Fanayal cried.
A teasing laugh, as though from a girl smitten by a lover’s foibles.
“Of course,” she said, leaning forward to caress his swollen cheek. “My God exists …”
Malowebi had fled that night—eventually.
He watched her bid Fanayal reach two fingers between her thighs. His breath abandoned him. His very heartbeat became entangled on the rapturous violence of her reaction …
He watched the Padirajah withdraw his fingers, stare in abject horror at the blood clotted upon them. Psatma Nannaferi curled as a pampered cat upon the settee, her eyes drowsy.
“Press it into his wound …” she said on a languorous breath. Her eyes were already closed.
Give.
Fanayal stood as a man precarious upon a mountain’s summit, unsteady, astounded, then he turned to the Last Cishaurim.
And Malowebi fled, his gown stained about the thighs. He fairly flew across the encampment, slinking through shadows, cringing from all for shame. In the safety of his tent he tore off all his elaborate accoutrements, stood shivering and naked in his own stink. He would not remember falling asleep.
When he awoke, he found his index and forefinger stained cherry red.
He was no fool. As little as he knew about the Dread Mother of Birth, he knew well enough what perils lay ahead. He was what his people called “wairo”, snared by the Gods. According to the Kûburû, the most ancient lore of his people, the calamity of wairo lay in the caprice of the Hundred. But the Mbimayu had a more nuanced and therefore more frightening explanation. Where Men had to forever toil, forever accumulate the wages of their labour to hope for their descendant’s prayers, the Gods stood outside the very possibility of individual acts. The substance of their limbs was nothing other than the passage of events themselves. They gripped and steered the World through bounty, yes, but through catastrophe far more. Wars. Famines. Earthquakes. Floods.
These were their Hands, both holy and terrible.
Which was why those judged wairo were often driven into the wild. When he was but nine, Malowebi had found a dead woman curled about the base of a great cypress on his grandfather’s estate. Her rot had dried—the Parch had been hard that year—but her ligaments yet held and this, with her clothing, lent her a horrific substance. Weeds surged about her edges, as well as places in-between. His grandfather refused to have her moved when he showed him. “No animal has touched her,” he had said, his eyes wide with urgent wisdom. “She is wairo.”
And now he himself was wairo … accursed.
So if he returned uninvited to the Padirajah’s grand pavilion, it was because he had never left …
Days had passed. Meppa was on the mend. Fanayal had emerged unscathed from that monstrous night—at least as much as he. Malowebi had all but hidden in his tent, wracking his soul for some kind of solution, cursing both the Whore of Fate and Likaro—the latter far, far more than the former. Likaro’s posturing, Likaro’s fawning, and most of all Likaro’s deceit—these had brought this calamity down upon him!
But such wounds could be picked for only so long before bandages had to be sought. He was a Disciple of Memgowa; he knew any hope of remedy required the very thing he was missing: knowledge. And as the Whore would have it, the only source of that knowledge was the very source of his peril: Psatma Nannaferi. Only she could tell him what happened. Only she could tell him what he needed to give …
Gaining access to Fanayal’s pavilion was easy enough: no one guarded it anymore.
And she lay within it always, like some kind of holy spider.
Malowebi had always been of the boldest of his brothers, the first to leap into cold or uncertain waters. The way he reckoned, he could die witless like that wairo he found as a boy, or he could die knowing what ensnared him, and most importantly, whether there were any terms of escape. And so on a diver’s breath he struck from his tent and made toward the Padirajic standard, the Twin Scimitars on Black, hanging motionless above the intervening pavilions. “Die knowing,” he muttered to himself, as if still not entirely convinced. He paused on a start, waited out a flurry of some fifty dusty riders. The hillside obscured Momemn, though the toil and incomplete siege towers strung along the heights made the Imperial Capital’s oppressive presence plain. A part of him could scarce believe his embassy had taken him this far—within sight of the Andiamine Heights! It seemed mad to think that the Harlot Empress slumbered mere leagues away.
He imagined delivering Anasûrimbor Esmenet to Nganka’kull in chains, not because he believed it could happen, but because he would much rather imagine Likaro gnashing his teeth than what presently awaited him in the gloom of Fanayal’s pavilion. It almost seemed miraculous, the brevity of his trek. Flapping his arms against the dust in the wake of the riders, marching resolutely through the immobility his sudden appearance occasioned in the dozens who glimpsed him, bearing toward the scrolled awning and gold-embroidered flaps … and then, impossibly, there he was, standing precisely where he had stood that night the accursed Waterbearer should have died.
The air was stuffy, ripe for the smell of a chamber pot. Sunlight gilded the network of bellied seams above, shedding grey light across the thickets of furniture and baggage. Malowebi spent several heart-pounding moments searching the confusion. Where the great oak bed had commanded the interior that night, it was simply more clutter now. Save for misplaced pillows and twisted sheets, the mattress was empty … as was the settee next to it …
Malowebi cursed himself for a fool. Why did Men assume things froze in place when they denied them the grace of their observation?
Then he saw her.
So close that he gasped audibly.
“What do you want, blasphemer?”
She sat no more than four paces to his left, staring into the mirror of a cosmetics table, her back turned against him. He had no clue why he stepped toward her. She could hear him just as well from where he stood.
“How old are you?” he blurted.
A smile creased the delicate brown face in the mirror.
“Men do not sow seed in autumn,” she said.
Her black hair toppled sumptuous about her shoulders. As always, she dressed to whet rather than blunt desire, naked save gauze wrapped about her hips and a hookless turquoise jacket. To simply lay eyes upon her was to be fondled.
“But …”
“I loathed the covetous eyes of Men as a child,” she said, perhaps watching him through the mirror, perhaps not. “I had learned, you see, learned what it was they would take. I would see girls like the one staring at me now, and I would think them nothing more than whipped dogs, creatures beaten until they craved the rod …” She raised a cheek to a waiting pinky, smeared what looked like gold-dust across the outskirts of her plump gaze. “But there’s knowing, and there’s knowing, like all things living. Now I understand how the earth rises to the seed. Now I fathom what is given when Men take …”
Her smoky image puckered purple-stained lips.
“And I am grateful.”
“B-but …” Malowebi fairly sputtered. “She … I mean, She …” He paused upon a bolt of terror, recalling his glimpse of veins flung sodden across all the visible spaces the night the Last Cishaurim should have died. “The Dread Mother … Yatwer has wrought all this!”
Psatma Nannaferi ceased her ministrations, watched him carefully through the reflection.
“And yet none of you fall to your knees,” she said on a coquettish shrug.
She played him the way a dancing girl might, but one who cared nothing for the heft of purses. A bead of sweat slipped from his kinked hair down his temple.
“She has given you the Sight,” the Mbimayu sorcerer pressed. “You know what will happen …” He licked his lips, trying hard not to look as terrified as he was. “Before it happens.”
The Mother-Supreme continued daubing lamp-black across her lids.
“So you believe.”
Malowebi nodded warily. “Zeum respects the ancient ways. We alone worship the Gods as they are.”
A grin that could only belong to an old and wicked heart.
“And now you wish to know your part in this?”
His heart rapped his breastbone for racing.
“Yes!”
The lamp-black, combined with the ancient age of the mirror, made empty sockets of her eyes. A brown skull watched him now, one graced with a maiden’s lips.
“Your doom,” the hollow said, “is to bear witness.”
“B-bear? Witness? You mean this? What happens?”
A girlish shrug. “Everything.”
“Everything?”
She swivelled about on one buttock to face him, and despite the pace between them, her near nudity pressed sweaty and flat against his yearning, her sable lines became cliffs for the extent of his desire. Never had he so yearned to fall!
The Yatwerian Priestess smiled coyly.
“He will kill you, you know.”
Horror and compulsion. She emanated the heat of plowed earth in hot sun.
Malowebi fairly sputtered. “Kill-kill me? Why?”
“For taking,” she said as if cradling candy on her tongue, “what was given.”
He stumbled backward, fought her allure as though caught in laundered veils …
The Emissary of High Holy Zeum fled.
Laughter, like sand scoured against sunburned skin. It nipped all his edges as he bounced hip and shin against the intervening clutter.
“Witness!” an old crone shrieked. “Witnessss!”
His pulse slowed until beaten by a different heart. His breath deepened until drawn by different lungs. Watching with the constancy of the dead, Anasûrimbor Kelmomas settled into the grooves of another soul …
If it could be called such.
The man his mother called Issiral stood in the heart of his unlit chamber, watch upon watch, motionless, dark eyes lost in some bleak nowhere. The Prince-Imperial, meanwhile, kept secret vigil above, staring down through the louvres. He lowered his avian vitality to the same deep rung, made his every twitch a noon shadow.
Kelmomas had watched many people through the spyholes of the Apparatory, and their comic diversity had never ceased to surprise him. The lovers, the tedious loners, the weepers, the insufferable grinners: it seemed an endless parade of newfound deformities. Watching them step from their doors to consort with the Imperial Court had been like watching slaves bind brambles into sheaves. Only now could he see how wrong he had been—that this diversity had been apparent only, an illusion of his ignorance. How could he not think Men various and strange when Men were his only measure?
Now the boy knew better. Now he knew that every human excess, every bloom of manner or passion, radiated from a single, blind stem. For this man—the assassin that had somehow surprised Uncle Holy—had paced out the true beam of possible and impossible acts.
And it was not human …
Not at all.
The spying had started as a game—a mischievous trifle. Mother’s guilt and preoccupation assured that Kelmomas had his run of the palace. The vagrant suspicions that darkened her look from time to time meant he could no longer risk tormenting any of the slaves or menials. So what else was he supposed to do? Play with dirt and dolls in the Sacral Enclosure? Spying on the Narindar would be his hobby, the boy had decided, a diverting way to squander watches while plotting the murder of his older sister.
The first afternoon had alone convinced him something was amiss with the man—something more than the fact of his red-stained earlobes, trim beard, or short-cropped hair. By the second day it had become a game within a game, proving he could match the man’s preternatural feats of immobility.
After the third day there was no question of not spying.
The matter of his sister had become an open sore by this time. If Theliopa told Mother then …
Neither of them could bear think what might happen!
Anasûrimbor Theliopa was the threat he simply could not ignore. The Narindar, on the other hand, was nothing less than his saviour, the man who had rescued him from his uncle. And yet, day after day, every time opportunity afforded, he found himself prowling the hollow bones of the Andiamine Heights searching for the man, spinning rationale after rationale.
She had not fully fathomed the extent of his intellect, Thelli. She had been witless of her peril, yes. And so long as that remained the case, she had no cause to carry through on her evil threat. Like all idiots, she preferred her cobble deeply grooved. Momemn needed a strong Empress, especially now that the Exalt-Cow, Anthirul, was dead. So long as the siege continued, he and his brother should be secure enough …
Besides, saviour or not, something was wrong about this man.
His reasons marshalled, bright before his soul’s eye, his hackles would settle, and he would hang as a hidden moon about the planet of this impossible man.
Time would pass, perhaps a watch or so, then some itinerant terror would shout, Thelli knows!
He would blink away images of those he had eaten.
Crazed cunt!
He had initially approached the challenge she represented with calm, even elation, like a boy set to climb a dangerous yet well-known and beloved tree. He certainly knew the bough and branch of Imperial intrigue well enough. Two of his brothers and his uncle lay dead by his hand—two Princes-Imperial and the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples! How much difficulty could a stuttering skinny like Anasûrimbor Theliopa pose?
Sranky, Inrilatas used to call her. Inri was the only one who had ever made her cry.
But that elation soon faded into frustration, for Thelli proved no normal tree. She never left Mother’s side during daylight—never!—which meant the Inchaustic cloud protecting the Empress protected her as well. And she spent every night without exception barricaded in her apartment … Awake as far he could tell.
But before anything, he had begun to worry about his Strength. The more Kelmomas mulled the events of the previous months, the less he seemed to own them, the more glaring his impotence became. He cringed at the lazy way Inrilatas had toyed with him, humoured him for boredom’s sake, or how Uncle Holy had plumbed him to the pith once alerted. The fact was it had been his uncle who had killed Inrilatas, not Kelmomas. And how could he claim credit for his uncle’s assassination when the actual assassin hung stationary upon the shadows just below?
For all his gifts, the young Prince-Imperial had yet to learn the disease that was contemplation, how more often than not it was ignorance of alternatives that made bold action bold. He spied upon the Narindar, matching him immobility for immobility, pulling every corner of his being into the straight line that was the assassin’s soul—every corner, that is, save his intellect, which asked again and again, How can I end her? with the relentlessness of an insect. He lay unblinking, the taste of dust upon his tongue, scarcely breathing, peering between interleaved fronds of iron, raging at his twin, ranting, and even, on occasion, weeping for the unbearable injustice. And so he spun within a motionless frame, pondering, until pondering so polluted his pondering he could bear ponder no more!
He would marvel at it afterward, how the mere act of plotting Thelli’s murder had all but assured her survival. How all the scenarios, all the spitting disputes and aggrandizing declamations, had been a mere pretext for this eerie war of immobility he had undertaken against the Narindar … Issiral.
He was all that mattered here, Fanim siege or no Fanim siege. The boy just knew this somehow.
After endless watches of blank reverie, utter inactivity, the man would simply … do something. Piss. Eat. Take ablution, or on occasion, his leave. Kelmomas would lay watching, his body senseless for being so long inert, suddenly the man would … move. It was as shocking as stone leaping to life, for nothing betrayed any prior will or resolution to move, no restlessness, no impatience borne of anticipation … nothing. The Narindar would just be moving, exiting the door, stalking the frescoed corridors, and Kelmomas would scramble, cursing his prickling limbs. He would fly after him through the very walls …
And then, for no apparent reason, the assassin would simply … stop.
It was narcotic for simply being so strange. Several days passed before Kelmomas realized that no one … no one … ever witnessed the man acting this way. In the presence of others he would be remote, taciturn, act the way a terrifying assassin should, always careful to assure the others of his humanity, if nothing more. Several times it was Mother who encountered him, coming about a corner, through a door. And no matter what she said, if she said anything at all (for in certain company she would rather not encounter the man at all), he would simply nod wordlessly, then return to his room, and stand …
Motionless.
Issiral ate. He slept. He shat. His shit stank. The general terror of the slaves was to be expected, as was the hatred of Uncle Holy’s many intimates at the Imperial Court. But what was more remarkable still was the degree to which the man went unnoticed, how he would sometimes tarry in one spot, unseen, only to inexplicably pace five steps to his left, or his right, where he would stand unseen as a gaggle of scullery slaves passed teasing and whispering.
The enigma soon began to tyrannize the Prince-Imperial’s thoughts. He started dreaming of his vigils, reliving the stark discipline that occupied his days, except that when his body turned about to slip back in the labyrinthine tunnels, his soul would somehow remain fixed by the louvres, and he would simultaneously watch and crawl away, riven by a horror that plucked him to his very vein, the World shrieking as the face in the flint turned and ever so slowly swivelled up to match his incorporeal look—
As the game continued, this became one more thing to fret and dispute in the academy of his skull. Were his dreams warning him of something? Did the Narindar somehow know of his observation? If he did, he betrayed absolutely no discernible sign. But then the man betrayed no sign of anything.
Watching the man simply whetted the edge of this concern, especially as Kelmomas came to fathom just how much the assassin knew. How? How was the man able to so unerringly intercept his mother, to know, not simply where she was going without any communication whatsoever, but the precise path she would take?
How could such a thing be possible?
He was Narindar, the boy reasoned. A famed Missionary of the evil Four-Horned Brother. Perhaps his knowledge was divine. Perhaps that was how he had managed to overcome Uncle Holy!
This sent him to his mother’s Librarian, an eccentric Ainoni slave named Nikussis.
Nikussis was a slight, dark-skinned man—every bit as skinny as Theliopa, in fact. Possessed of some murky ability to spy insincerity, he was one of very few worldborn souls who could somehow see past the boy’s capering glamour. The man had always treated him with an air of reserved suspicion. During one fit of despair, Kelmomas had actually considered murdering the man for this very reason, and he had never quite relinquished the idea of using him to test various poisons.
“They say one stalks these very halls, my Prince. Why not ask him?”
“He refused to tell me,” the boy lied glumly.
A squint of approval.
“Yes, that doesn’t surprise me.”
“He told me the ways of Gods do not answer the ways of Men …”
Lips like oiled mahogany, pursing into a smile pained for inversion. Disgust never looked so happy.
“Yes-yes …” Nikussis said with the sonorousness of wisdom correcting youth. “He spoke true.”
“And I said the ways of my Father are the ways of the God.”
Fright never looked so delicious.
“And … ah …” A half-concealed swallow. “What did he say?”
Terror, the boy had long since realized. Fear was his father’s true estate, not adoration or abjection or exaltation. Men did what he, little Anasûrimbor Kelmomas, bid them to do out of terror of his father. All the yammer about love and devotion was simply cotton to conceal the razor.
The Librarian hung pale on his response.
“The assassin said, Let your Father ask then.”
The eyes of skinny people bulged when they were frightened, he realized watching Nikussis. Would Thelli’s eyes bulge? Was she even capable of fear?
“So I cried out, ‘Sedition!’”
He screeched this last word, and was gratified by how the old Librarian started—the fool almost kicked the sandals from his feet!
“Wha-wha-what did he say then?” Nikussis stammered.
The young Prince-Imperial shook his head in false incredulity.
“He shrugged.”
“Shrugged?”
“Shrugged.”
“Well-well it is good then that you came to see me, young Prince.”
The famished idiot fairly babbled everything he knew of the Narindar after that. He spoke of great slums of envy and avarice, hatred and malice, how thieves and murderers marred every congregation of Men, souls as wicked as the soul of Anasûrimbor Kelmomas was noble, as polluted as his was pure. “The Tusk says the Gods answer to our every nature, manly or not. There is no Man saved for virtue, no Man damned for sin, save what dwelleth in the Eye of their God. And just as there are wicked healers, so too are there holy murderers …” He tittered in admiration of his eloquence—and Kelmomas understood instantly why Mother adored him.
“And none are so wicked or so holy as the Narindar.”
“And?” the Prince-Imperial asked.
“And?”
“I already know all this tripe!” the boy cried, openly wroth. What was wrong with the fool?
“Wha-wha-what would you hav—?”
“Their power, you fool! Their strength! How is it they can kill the way they kill?”
Every man was a coward—this had been his great lesson hiding in the bones of the Andiamine Heights. Just as every man was a hero. Every sane man conceded something to fear—the only question was one of how much. Some Men begrudged crumbs, rampaged as lions over the merest trifle. But most—souls like Nikussis—one had to cut to draw out the thrashing hero. Most came by their courage far too late, when only shrieking and raving remained.
“The-they say the Fo-Four-Horned Brother Himself picks them … orphans … alley urchins, younger than even you! They spend their lives traini—”
“Every boy trains! All kjineta are born to war! What makes these boys special?”
Men like Nikussis, bookish souls, had at best a shell of obstinate arrogance. All was pulp beneath. He could be bullied with impunity—so long as his skin remained intact.
“I-I fear I-I don’t und—”
“What lets a mere mortal …” He paused to swallow away the murderous quaver in his voice. “What lets a mere mortal walk into Xothei and stab Anasûrimbor Maithanet, the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples, in the breast? How could such … a thing … be … possible?”
The overstuffed scroll-racks blunted his voice, rendered it deeper and softer than it was. The Librarian gazed at him in false appreciation, nodding as if he at last understood … The Prince-Imperial was bereaved. The boy had loved his uncle—of course!
Nikussis did not truly believe this of course, but the man needed some tale to balm the fact of his capitulation to such a child. Kelmomas chortled, realizing that henceforth the Librarian would like him—or at least tell himself as much—simply to save his dignity from himself.
“You me-mean the Unerring Grace.”
“The what?”
The brown face blinked. “Th-the … uh … luck …”
A measure of fury darkened the Prince-Imperial’s scowl.
“You know the rumours …” Nikussis began, hesitating. “Fr-from before …” he nearly blurted. “The tales of the … of the-the … White-Luck Warrior hunting your father?”
“What of it?”
The Librarian’s eyelids bounced with his chin. “The greatest of the Narindar, those possessing the blackest hearts … those they say become their mission, indistinguishable from Death. They act not of will, but of necessity, never knowing, always doing that which must be done …”
At last! At last the buffoon spoke of something interesting.
“So you’re saying their luck is … is perfect?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Every throw of the sticks?”
“Yes.”
“So the man who murdered my uncle … he’s …”
The Librarian’s eyes narrowed into their old selves. It was his turn to shrug.
“A Vessel of Ajokli.”
The Librarian need tell him nothing of Ajokli. The Thief. The Murderer.
The Grinning God.
Anasûrimbor Kelmomas slipped back into his murky interval, walked unseen, less than a shadow at the limit of all the golden spaces between, back to his Empress mother’s apartment. Breathing came easy.
You remember.
He shimmed and he crept, dashed down the hidden halls, and climbed and climbed. Never, it seemed, had he belonged more to this planar void between vital and stupid things. Never had he been more make-believe.
Why do you refuse to remember?
The boy paused in the black. Remember what?
Your Whelming.
He continued his ascent through the cracks of his hallow house.
I remember.
Then you remember that beetle …
He had wandered from Mother, followed a beetle he had found clicking across the floor into the shadowy reaches of the Allosium forum. He could still see the dwindling gleam of the candlewheel tracking the creature’s carapace as it tipped across the tiles … leading him deeper.
To the Four-Horned Brother rendered in polished diorite.
What about it?
He could see Him in his dark climb heavenward, squatting fat and evil in his socket Godhouse—and watching the beetle the same as he. Both of them had been grinning!
That was an offering, the accursed voice said.
He had spoken to the bulbous figure, then, crouching beneath it, he had used his fingernails to clip off two of the beetle’s legs. Together they had watched it chip round and round.
That was a joke!
His father was a vessel of the God of Gods! He could share jokes with the Grinning God if he pleased! He would pinch Yatwer’s teat if he pleased!
And how He laughed.
The boy froze in the dark—this time absolute—once again ….
Evil Ajokli had laughed.
They had laughed together, he and the Grinning God. He smiled at the recollection.
So? The Gods court us …
He had the Strength! He was every bit as divine!
The Prince-Imperial resumed climbing, his smile a fading bruise upon his face. His twin had fallen silent, perhaps immersed in the self-same hum that made empty bladders of his limbs. Only when he slipped out of the maze and into his mother’s bedchamber did he recognize the extent of his horror.
The stories they told about Ajokli in Temple were always the same. He was the Trickster, the one who, unlike Gilgaöl, took without contest or honour. His escapades would enthrall the young, who loved nothing more than to dupe and prowl about the judgment of their fathers. Each exploit would always seem harmless, always seem comical, and so he and the other children would chortle, sometimes even cheer for the Grinning God.
But this was the trap, the lesson, the moment when the horrific truth of the Four-Horned Brother would yaw bottomless, the moment when the death and damnation of beloved innocents would begin—and when the children realized they too had been seduced, tricked into celebrating the vile and the wicked. What was sleek, what was supple, what was so roguishly human would slip as garments to the floor, revealing a primordial and poisonous God, one grown mountainous for consuming endless ages of grief and hatred.
And they would laugh, the boy and his bodiless twin, laugh at the terrified looks, the tearful remonstrations, the frantic prayers. They would laugh that it was always the same, that the halfwits would always be tricked by the exact same story, let alone similar ones. They would puzzle at the absurdity of cheering a thing one heartbeat and lamenting it the next—at the fact that souls could yearn for contrition, for the judgment of more elder fools. Who cared whether people died? If the stories were ancient, then everyone was dead in them anyway. Why wait huddled on your knees, when you could have fun?
Ajokli, the boy had decided, was by far the most sensible of the Hundred. Perhaps He wasn’t so much evil as … misunderstood.
Only now did the Prince-Imperial understand. Only now could he fathom their terror, the knifing breath of sudden, catastrophic realization. To be gulled in stories is to be armed in life.
Kelmomas often thought of himself as a hero, as the one soul doomed to prevail. The death of his brothers and his uncle had simply confirmed the assumption. Everything spoke to his ascendancy! But stories, he knew, were as treacherous as sisters, luring thought into labyrinths of smoke, coercing it down this perfumed corridor and that, all the while sealing the unseen portals shut. For the sake of simple ignorance, every victim assumed themselves the hero, and without exception, death was their enlightenment, damnation their prize.
The Gods always ate those who failed to feed.
A different boy stood pining for his mother in the Empress’s sumptuous bedchamber, one whose ears had finally been pricked to the faraway rumble of more dreadful things, gale storms hanging upon horizons that parsed him to the yolk.
A guttering lantern cast light as shredded gauze, shining across a bed that was empty save the shadows of snakes tangled through the sheets. Golden illumination filtered from the antechamber and sitting room beyond. Kelmomas found himself walking thoughtlessly toward the sound of his mother’s voice.
“Any price …” she murmured to some unidentified soul. But whom? She only resorted to meetings in her chambers when she required utter secrecy …
“So …” she continued, her voice urgent, bound as tight as a sacrificial goat, “what does the Four-Horned Brother say?”
Kelmomas stopped.
He had drawn past the marble post set into the scalloped corner. He could see her, dressed in her evening habitual, reclined backward on her gold-stitched, Invitic divan, bathed in the white of whale-oil, staring at a point toward the middle of the room. Her beauty fairly struck him breathless, the twinkle of Kutnarmi diamonds across her headdress, the brushed gleam etching her curls, the flawless caramel of her skin, the rose-silk folds of her gown, the dimpled gleam chasing the seams …
So perfect.
He stood as a wraith in the shadowy margin, his pallor more that of desolation than the blood of ancient northern kings. He had wandered into the house of Hate; he had maimed a beetle presuming to teach a lesson. And now Hate had wandered into his house presuming to teach in turn.
He’s here … the voice murmured. We delivered Him to Mother.
Issiral. The Four-Horned Brother stalked the halls of the Andiamine Heights.
And in his soul’s eye he could see Him standing opposite, Immortal Malice, smoking with the density of Creation …
Her face snapped toward him—the shock fairly knocked him from his skin. But she looked through him—for an instant it seemed the horror of his dream had been made real, that he hung as vision only, something incorporeal … Insubstantial. But she squinted, her eyes baffled by the lantern glare, and he realized that she saw nothing for limits that were all her own.
Kelmomas shrank into the blackness, slipped about the corner.
“Drafts,” Mother explained absently.
The boy fled back into the frame of the palace. He hid in the deepest marrow, where he wept and wailed for the imagery that shrieked beneath his soul’s eye, the torrid glimpses of Mother penetrated, violated time and again, her beauty battered from her face, her skin perforated, bleeding like gills, maps of blood cast across her precious urban frescoes …
What was he to do? He was just a little boy!
But she’s the only one!
Shut-up-shut-up-shut-up!
Rocking in his own arms. Wheezing and snuffling.
Only her! No one else!
Nooooo!
Clutching and clutching, grasping void …
Who will love us now?
But Mother lay on the bed slumbering as she always did when he finally returned, curled on her side, the knuckle of her index finger drawn to her lips. He stared at her for the better part of a watch, an eight-year-old wisp rendered smoke from murk, his gaze more fixed than was human.
Then at last he rooted into the circuit of her embrace. She was so much more than warm.
She exhaled and she smiled. “This isn’t right …” she murmured on the thick edge of slumber. “Letting you … run wild as a beast …”
He clutched her left hand in both of his own, squeezed with the desperation of the real. He lay larval in her embrace. With every breath he hewed nearer oblivion, face numb, head thick with recent sobs, his eyes two scratches soothed. Gratitude held him …
His own Unerring Grace.
That night he dreamed the same dream of the Narindar. This time the man took two instant strides to stand immediately below the grill, leapt, and skewered his eye.