The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(106)

On and on, forking through the deeps, wheezing in the dark, shaking matted, black-bison manes …

Waiting.





CHAPTER ELEVEN


Momemn


I. The Game enacts the form of Creation. To be is to be for the Game.

II. The parts of the Game are the whole of the Game, given the rules that compel them. The parts and the rules comprise the Elements of the Game.

III. There are no moves [acts] in the Game, only the changing permutations of Elements.

—Opening Cantos of the Abenjukala

Bonfires shed no daylight.

—SCYLVENDI PROVERB





Mid-Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn

So long as he watched, the little boy reasoned. So long as he continued spying on the Narindar, he would be safe.

Anas?rimbor Kelmomas had become a solitary sentinel, charged with a vigil he dare not explain to anyone, and which only he could keep. What had begun as a mere diversion, a distraction from far more pressing concerns like his sister, had now become a mortal mission. The Four-Horned Brother walked the palatial corridors, bent on some dark design the boy could not fathom—save that it somehow involved him.

So he continued, even expanded his campaign of secret observation. Day after day, he lay motionless, peering at the man standing motionless in his dark chamber, or, those rare times the assassin elected to roam the palace, he scurried after him through the mazed bones of the Andiamine Heights. And when exhaustion finally forced him back to his mother’s bed, he curled riven with terror, convinced the Narindar somehow watched him. Day after day, he did this, matching the man in his every particular, a step to shadow his every step, a breath to shadow his every breath, until they came to seem a tandem soul, a singular thing divided between light and shadow, evil and good.

Just why watching the assassin should keep him safe, Kelmomas could not say. He had boggled himself innumerable times trying to reckon his circumstances, particularly what it meant to always and only do what had already been done—what the Librarian had called the “Unerring Grace.” Since he belonged to what happened as much as anything else, what difference did it make whether he watched the man hidden or not? Kelmomas possessed a keen appreciation of the impunity intrinsic to acts committed outside the knowledge of others. To spy as he spied was, in some strange and elusive sense, to own the one spied upon. It sometimes seemed they were bugs, the people he watched, clicking through routines so blind they could be mechanical. He had often thought that watching the inhabitants of the palace as he did was like watching the great gears and armatures of the Emaunum Mill, a vast contraption that endlessly groaned and clacked onward, chasing tooth and socket and groove, utterly blind to the mischief dwelling within it. A rock was all that he needed, or perhaps a pocket filled with sand, to bring the entirety to a cracking halt.

This was what it meant to spy, these were the wages. The power of life and death and all the plunder that lay between. Were the Narindar a man like any other he would have been hapless, vulnerable to whatever stratagem the Prince-Imperial might concoct. To spy on another was to seize what was blind from the unseen margins, to lure and to dupe, to rule …

The way he ruled Mother.

But the Narindar was not a man like any other. In fact he was scarcely a man at all. The recognition would descend upon the boy from time to time, tease goose-pimples from his skin, bully his breath into a cringe: the Four-Horned Brother stood in the shadows immediately below him, the wicked Father of Hate.

The puzzles fairly drove him mad: What were the wages of spying on a God?

The assassin possessed the Unerring Grace. How else explain the string of impossibilities he had observed? The boy wanted to believe he possessed a Grace all his own, but the secret voice was always quick to remind him that he possessed the Strength and that this was a far different thing than Grace. They endlessly bickered points such as these in the carapace of his skull …

But if there’s no hiding from Him, why doesn’t He simply kill me?

Because He plays you!

But how could a God play at anything?

Because that is what he feeds upon ‘ere you die, the grain of your experience.

Fool! I asked how, not why!

Who can say how the Gods do what they do?

Maybe because they can’t!

And when the ground shakes, when mountains explode, or the seas rise up?

Pfah. The Gods do these things? Or do they simply know they will happen before they happen?

Perhaps there’s no difference.

And this was the rub, he came to realize. What did it mean to act without willing? What could it mean? When Kelmomas reflected on his own actions, he always found himself steered to the incontrovertible fact of his soul. He fathered his actions. He was the primal source, the indisputable origin …

The problem was that everyone thought as much, to varying degrees. Even slaves …

Even Mother.

One afternoon the Narindar abruptly turned his head as if to look at someone standing before his chamber door—which he never bolted. Then he was at the door, pausing, looking back to where he had stood moments before. Then he was striding out into the corridor beyond, forcing the young Prince-Imperial to scramble the way he always did, scampering through the black slots, shimming up to the next iron grating to spy his enigmatic quarry. For all his diabolic implication, the assassin was by far the easiest to track of the souls the boy had pursued through the palace. He walked with the measure of a lifelong soldier, his pace welded to some constant and transcendent tempo. No one dared accost him. And he passed through points of congestion with the smoky ease of a phantom.