The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(159)
And like an axe swung, this realization struck him in two. The bull of outrage within him continued lunging forward, but the little boy had already begun snivelling and shrinking back in renewed terror. The throat of the tunnel closed as he neared, forcing him to his hands and knees. His passage forward, which had already possessed the ethereal character of dreams, became nightmarish, an ordeal of palms. He could see the luminous print of the bronze grill across the brickwork ahead of him, and it seemed both strange and appropriate that his room be both empty and bright. His throat and chest burned. Fear compelled him to crawl forward on his belly. He began mumbling voiceless prayers to no God in particular as he shimmed forward …
Please, his twin whispered.
Please …
Life rarely affords us the luxury of spying on our terrors. Typically they come upon us unawares, bat us about bewildered before leaving us wrecked or intact according to our doom. His breath a convulsive knife held fast in his breast, Anas?rimbor Kelmomas crept to the shining grill … peered around its edge the way a less divine child might peek above their covers. So certain was he that he would see the Narindar in his room that he had become equally certain that he would not, that this entire misadventure would simply show him up for the foolish child he was. All the familiar features swivelled into soundless view, the marmoreal walls, white with shadowy veins of blue, the pinkish marble of the trim and corbelling, the sumptuous bed, the tigers prancing across the crimson carpet, the scattered furnishings, the unshuttered balcony …
No.
The Prince-Imperial gaped breathless, utterly insensate for horror …
His eyes rolled for impossibility. Issiral stood near the heart of his room, as motionless as always, atavistic for his near nakedness, peering through the broad threshold into the antechamber where the door lay obscured. His earlobes seemed drops of blood, they were so red. The very World shuddered, rumbled like distant thunder.
No-no-no-no! his twin gibbered.
The Four-Horned Brother. The Grinning God. The Prince of Hate.
Ajokli stood in his room, awaiting his return …
Except that he now watched Him.
Confusion crimped his horror.
All he need do was … was … slink away … never return to his room …
Or better yet, alert the Pillarians or the Inchausti, tell them the Narindar had invaded his chambers without permission, insinuate … insinuate …
But how could it be so easy? What of the Unerring Grace?
How could a child dispose of an invading God?
No. This was a trick of some kind …
It had to be!
But … but …
He heard the latch of his door clink, the whistle of the bottommost hinge as the portal swung open. The sound fairly plucked his heart from his chest whole.
The Narindar continued staring as before, his eyes happening upon the newcomer the way his hand had happened upon the rolling apple. The boy need only hear the whisk of battling lace to know who had arrived.
Theliopa.
She appeared silk-luminous beneath the threshold, a scintillant vision compared to the watching assassin. She regarded him without the least fear, and would have owned the space had not the man buzzed with such monstrous horror. Save the archipelago of sodden fabric across her waist, she betrayed no sign of her weeping flight a mere watch prior. She merely gazed in open curiosity …
And seemed so perilously human for it.
The young Prince-Imperial gazed transfixed.
“Am I supposed to know-know that you await me?” she asked, her tone familiar.
“Yes,” the Narindar replied.
His voice was at once mundane and preternatural … like Father’s.
“So you-you will trust your skills against an Anas?rimbor?”
The near-naked man shook his head. “There is no skill in what I do.”
A pause, brief but more than interval enough. The boy saw Theliopa’s point of focus dull and sharpen as she slipped in and out of the Probability Trance.
“Because there is no skill in anything,” she said.
The blue light of the outdoors limned his profile, made his sandstone immobility even more impervious.
“And my death?” Thelli asked.
“Even now I see it.”
The gesture he made was curious, reminiscent of ancient Shigeki engravings, almost as though he placed the space he indicated.
His sister hitched back her skirts, glanced to her feet—to where the assassin pointed. The boy’s heart hammered. Thelli!
“So I am already dead?”
Move!
“What else would you be?”
Move, Thelli! Move!
“And you-you? Who are you?”
“Someone who was there when it happened.”
Afterward, the boy would decide that it had started heartbeats before, while they talked, like a bubble of some kind growing … a shudder riding the knife’s edge of an explosion.
A primordial hammer struck all points underneath at once. The boy bucked, curled like a tossed serpent. All was roaring motion. Issiral crouched into the quake’s bosom, curtains of masonry crashing about him. Theliopa stumbled, looked up in pallid alarm, then vanished in slumping shadows of stone brick debris.
Kelmomas threw his arms about his head, heard the pop of great joists cracking.
Then the ground was still.
He kept his face buried until the roar vanished into hiss and clatter.