The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(14)

She bolted upright on a sharp intake of breath.

Masculine voices filtered up through the barren halls.

Your Glory! Glory!

The Inchausti?

She cast her eyes about the gloom, realized she lay in the vestibule of the Upper Palace.

She stood, exhaustion hard in her limbs. She walked to the battery of oaken shutters that fenced the opposing colonnade, unlatched and drew a section of them aside, squinted at the broad balcony beyond. Sparrows chirped and squabbled about a marble amenity basin. The pastel sky throbbed with the promise of retribution and war. Beneath its perpetual haze, Momemn riddled the distance with street and structure.

Plumes of smoke ribbed the horizon.

Dark clots of horsemen scoured the surrounding fields and orchards.

Refugees mobbed the gates.

Horns peeled, but whether they summoned or warned or rallied, she did not know … or care.

No … a fraction whispered.

Something ruthless dwells within every mother, a capacity borne of plague and tribulation and children buried. She was impervious; the hard realities of the World merely broke their nails for clawing. She turned away, strode back into the shadowy palace with a kind of weary resignation—as though she played at something that had cracked her patience long before. She had not so much abandoned hope as shouldered it aside.

She found the towering doors to the Imperial Audience Hall ajar. She wandered in, walked small beneath the soaring stonework. She pondered all the loads teetering, and the Sumni harlot within her wondered that such a place could be her house, that she lived beneath ceilings impregnated with Chorae, gilded in silver and gold. The sky framed the monumental dais with stages of pale brilliance. Dead birds bellied the netting that had been strung across the opening, as dry as flies. The upper gallery lay in graven shadow, while the polished expanses gleamed below. The tapestries strung between the columns seemed to sway, one for each of her dread husband’s conquests. The scene tapered into gold instead of black in the corners of her eyes.

She considered duty, the way she would have the Shrial Knights who had murdered Imhailas executed. She thought of Naree and the savagery that awaited her. She smirked—a heartless smile—at the timid cruelties that had once hedged her own submissive nature.

No more.

She would speak oil and demand blood. Just like her divine husband.

Glory! Glory!

She walked soundless across the great floor, approached the dais, her eyes fending the brilliance of the sky beyond. The Circumfix Throne was little more than a silhouette …

She did not see him until she was almost upon him.

Her son. Her mighty Prince-Imperial.

Anas?rimbor Kelmomas …

Curled within the arms of her humble, secondary throne. Asleep.

Bestial with filth. Demonic with blood.

Her desperation flung her past her revulsion. She seized him, embraced him, shushed him as he keened and wailed.

Mummeee …

Mum-mummeee …

She drew her cheek across the cold tangle of grease and hair. “Shush …” she gasped, as much for her sake as for his. “I am the only power remaining.”

The sky beyond the Mantle caught her eye, and with it, a consciousness of her city, great Momemn, capital of the New Empire. Faraway drums counted the tandem racing of their hearts, mother and son.

Let it burn.

For this one moment at least.

The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas heaved at the glorious little shoulders and arms, pulled her weeping boy into her very being.

Where he belonged.





CHAPTER ONE


A?rsi


IV. The Game is the part of the whole that reenacts the whole as the whole. It therefore recognizes nothing outside itself, as we recognize nothing outside what we recognize.

—The Fourth Canto of the Abenjukala

We are born of tangled lovers, reared in the snarl of kin. We are ravelled to our desires, roped to our frailties and our sins. We are caught upon the hooks of others as upon the thistle of ourselves, looped and twisted, here brushed into lucent fibres, there bound in woolen obscurities.

And they come to us as combs and scissors.

—Contemplations, SIRRO





Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), the northeast shore of the Nele?st

The living should not haunt the dead.

“The meat …” Mirshoa said to his cousin, Hatturidas. They trudged side-by-side through the sun-spoked dust, Kishyati, vassals of Nurbanu Soter by virtue of their uncle, the ailing Baron of Nemuk, borne here for reasons far more complicated than piety or fervour. Men marched together, as aggregate souls, sons among the sons, fathers among the fathers. They never knew what compelled them, so they fastened on the occasioning words, and so transformed their bondage into artifice, a thing freely chosen.

“What of it?” Hatturidas replied after the jnanic interval indicating disapproval.

He had no desire to think of the meat, let alone discourse upon it.

“My … my soul … It grows more disordered because of it.”

“That, at least, is in order.”

Mirshoa glared at his cousin. “Tell me you don’t feel it!”

Hatturidas continued tramping. Beyond him, thousands of his brother Jaguars toiled, and innumerable others beyond them as well, bent beneath packs and arms and armour. The World seemed to roll as a ball beneath them, so vast was the Great Ordeal.