The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(158)
“No tracks in the snow, eh?”
“Because I was-was always so skinny.”
She lies … the voice said.
Yes, brother, I know …
The young Prince-Imperial pressed aside her wrist to peer at her. It seemed a miracle to be so close to a face so hated, to see the spatter of freckles, the pink rim of her lids, the cant of her teeth. All this time he had assumed that she had been found, only to discover that she had been made, that his brother had bent her—broken her. It seemed he could remember it so much more clearly now …
Her weeping.
“How many times?” he asked her.
A lethargic blink. “Until Father locked him up.”
A deadness had crept into her voice.
“And Mother?”
“What of Mother?”
“Did she ever find out?”
The chirp of dripping water.
“She overheard him once-once. She was-was furious …”
She raised the sponge, but he recoiled in annoyance.
“She-she was the only one-one who never-never feared Inrilatas,” Theliopa said.
He could see it all so clearly now.
“She never found out,” Kelmomas said.
Her head rocked as if at a silent hiccough, only three times in rapid succession.
“Inrilatas …” he continued, watching the name bleach her expression.
“What-what?”
“Did he seduce you?” He grinned. He had seen what the grown do when their blood rose. “Or did he rape?”
Now she was truly blank.
“We are D?nyain,” she murmured.
The young Prince-Imperial chortled, shivered for the glamour of elation. He leaned forward, placed his wet cheek against her sunken one, whispered in her ear in the same grunting manner he knew his older brother had, not so many years ago …
“Sranky …”
She smelled like sour milk.
“Sranky …”
Suddenly he was sputtering soap and water, rubbing eyes that burned so fiercely he could scarcely see Theliopa fleeing, just shadows and hooped shimmering. He made no attempt to call her back …
She had left plenty of tracks in the snow.
Kelmomas dunked his head in the embalming warmth, swatted the soap from his face and hair. He had almost certainly doomed himself, he knew, but he whooped in silent triumph all the same.
Terror had always been his soul’s laggard, where his will was most weak, his heart most strong.
And it was no small feat making an Anas?rimbor cry.
Issiral was not in his chamber.
His jubilation had been short-lived. Seized by a monstrous panic, he had leapt from the tub and dressed without so much as towelling down, stealing sodden and dripping into the arterial depths of the shadow palace. Never, it seemed, had he suffered such paroxysms of dread—such vicious recriminations!
Fool! You’ve killed us! Killed us!
You played too! You shared in the fun!
But finding the Narindar’s chamber empty had fairly stopped his small heart. For a long while he simply lay prone at the iron grilled vent, sapped of all strength, gouged of all thought, just peering at the shadowy corner where the Narindar should be … breathing. For those first moments, the thought of the Grinning God moving in the blackness, acting outside his observation, simply exceeded his grasp.
What were the chances? Was it simply happenstance that he would find the Narindar missing immediately after goading Thelli—the woman who clasped his doom in her long-fingered hands? Did the man merely roam the halls on another of his inexplicable errands? Or … or had all this already happened?
And yet again it defeated him, how he could be freer than free, and yet damned to repeat the memories of the Blasted God! Solving was doing, pulling the threads that unravelled the whole—driving skewers into tear ducts! But his every thought, his soul’s merest movement, had already happened, which meant he had never solved anything! Ever! Which meant …
He gagged for the impossibility. The hopelessness of the riddle became the hopelessness of his straits.
He wept for a time. Anyone hidden in Issiral’s chamber would have heard no more than a faraway keening punctuated by sniffles, delicate and near.
He lay like a sack.
How? his twin wailed. How could you be such an idiot?
It was her fault!
There has to be somethi—
There’s nothing! Don’t you get it?
The Prince of Hate! Ajokli hunts us!
A moment of roiling horror.
Then let him find us! Kelmomas resolved with rekindled savagery.
And he was racing through the shadow palace once again, his face burning, his tunic slick as flayed skin. A fury unlike any he had ever known animated him, sent his limbs slapping into the darkness. Images of wild violence exploded beneath his soul’s eye.
This was his House …
This was his House!
He would sooner die than cower within it.
He flew through the narrow slots, high wells, and crooked tunnels, scrambling like a monkey from the Apparatory back to the ingrown summit of the Upper Palace. He was nearly upon his bedchamber before the manic inkling that drove him faded into sober insight. He need only ask himself where a young Prince-Imperial would be found dead to begin guessing where his murder was going to take place. And in so many lays and histories, or so it seemed, the babes of Kings and Emperors were found strangled in their beds.