The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(163)

And now the enemy congealed on the south, a race of evil crows.

Her mouth hung open on vomit that would not come. The wailing of distant thousands hung, eerie and impossible, feminine in pitch, resonating from the autumnal ribs of Heaven. Tens of thousands calling out, wailing.

Momemn! The Imperial Home! Stronghold of the Anas?rimbor!

Now a choir of lamentation. A smashed necropolis.

A mass grave.

Inner thunder batted her ears. She hissed spit between clenched teeth. There was no doubting anymore. Pretending was no longer possible. Earthquakes were the province of the Hundred. Everyone knew as much!

She was being punished … It was no conceit to think this. Not anymore.

The Gods did this. The Gods hunted her and her children. Hunted.

The Blessed Empress fled after her ministers, crying out for her beloved.



“It is a Sign!” Fanayal roared upon entering his pavilion. “A Miracle!”

The Padirajah’s own Grandees drew up at the threshold of the Harem, for his tone told them he spoke to her. Malowebi nevertheless plunged after the ranting man. Again the gloom. Again the yawing musk, the reek of sheets earthen for the debris of coupling.

Psatma Nannaferi, who sat upon her settee, regarded him without interest or surprise, then turned back to her captive captor.

“Something has been written,” she scoffed, “just not for you!”

“Emissary?” Fanayal asked, his tone as lethally blank as his expression.

“I-I,” Malowebi stammered in response, “f-forgot my, ah …” He blinked and swallowed. “My bread.”

“Tell him, blasphemer!” the Yatwerian witch cried on a chortle. “Tell him, one damned soul to another!”

Malowebi knew nothing of what happened here, save that he was bound to it.

“I … ah …”

But Fanayal had lain his murderous glare upon the woman. “Not this! You will not take this!”

She leaned forward one arm upon her knee, and spat upon his plundered carpets. “A finger cannot steal from a hand. I stand too close to the Mother to take what she gives.”

The Padirajah wiped a hand across his face, blinked twice rapidly. “I know what I know,” he grated, moving to heave his chain coat and its rack from the jumble of luxurious wrack strewn throughout the gloom. “I know what needs be done!”

“You know nothing!” Psatma Nannaferi cawed. “And you feel it as an abscess in your heart!”

“Silence, madwoman!”

“Tell him!” she implored the immobilized Mbimayu Schoolman. “Tell him what he knows!”

“Silence! Silence!”

Psatma Nannaferi fairly shrieked for laughter, an abomination of nubile allure and ancient rot.

“Tell him that the Mother did this! That his miracle is the work of an idolized Demon!”

“Fane names your ki—!”

“Fane?” the woman cried, her incredulity so thoughtless, so complete, that feminine timbre simply blotted all other sound. “Fane is a fraud, what happens when philosophers fall to worshipping their fevers!”

Fanayal loomed over her, his face riven, his moustaches hanging about visible teeth, his warrior’s hand raised. “The Sol-Solitary God!” he roared. “H-h-he wrought this!”

“The Saw-Saw-Solitary God!” she mocked, her laughter scathing. “He-he-he!”

“I will strike you!”

“Then strike!” she cried, her voice raking a pitch that pimpled the Emissary’s skin, rumbled in his ears. “Strike and hear me sing! Let all your kinsmen know it was a God of the Tusk that lowed the walls of Momemn! The God of idolaters!” She was up and pacing now, possessed of a sparking fury, a visceral disgust of all the obscenities she had witnessed and endured. “What is it, again? What is the name you accursed wretches call Her? ‘Bulbous’? You call her Bulbous! Outrage! You, besmirched and as polluted as you are, a raper of wives and children! A murderous thief! Poisoned by the ambition of hate! You? You presume to call our Mother a Demon? An Unclean Spirit?”

Her eyes round for outrage, she threw out her hands to all the overturned and wrecked plunder. A growl seemed to crackle through the earth beneath their feet.

“She! Shall! Eat! You!”

Fanayal held his palms out in warding, for her fury was plainly no longer a thing of this World.

“Lies!” he cried against this bitter knowing. “This is mine! Mine!”

Psatma Nannaferi cawed in another gale of infernal laughter. “Your miracle?” she howled and raved. “You think the Mother—Bulbous!—would wrack her own earth for the likes of you and your misbegotten race! Hunted in this life, damned in the next!”

The ancient damsel stamped her foot and spat once again.

“You are as insignificant as you are damned! Kindling for a far, far greater fire!”

“Nooo!” the Padirajah cried. “I! Am! Destined!”

“Yessss!” she crowed and stamped. “Destined to play the fool!”

“Son of Kascamandri!” Malowebi boomed, seeing Fanayal seize the pommel of his scimitar. The Padirajah stood frozen in an apish hunch, wheezing through a grimace, his blade half drawn from its scabbard.

“She goads you for a reason,” Malowebi said on a measured breath.