The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(169)

He liked to remind him from time to time, his twin.

Remind him what it had been like before.

At last Issiral climbed back into the Upper Palace, this time using the Processional, the grand stair meant to wind dignitaries from fat lands and to overawe dignitaries from lean ones—or so Inrilatas had once told him. Two great silvered mirrors, the finest ever crafted, had hung at angles above the stair so that those climbing could see themselves against the gilded splendour surrounding and understand full well the base and mean truth of their origins. One of the mirrors had shattered, but the other hung intact as before. Kelmomas saw the near-naked man halt on the landing, stand as if arrested by his image hanging above. The Prince-Imperial ducked behind an overturned stone vase some two junctures back. He raised a cheek to gaze over the bevelled rim with a single eye.

The man continued standing with the same immobility that had so taxed the boy’s patience before. Kelmomas cursed, loathe to believe that the Grinning God could be caught by something so crude—so thin!—as reflection. This was part of the game, somehow. It had to be!

Without warning, the man resumed motion as if he had never broken stride. On Issiral’s third step, Kelmomas stood from behind the bulk of the vase. On Issiral’s fourth step his mother appeared from the intersecting halls ahead of him—behind the Narindar. She paused upon a skidding slipper, almost immediately glimpsing Him, the Four-Horned Brother, climbing the Processional ahead. Her grand lavender gowns swung upon her turn to the monumental stair, freighted for soaking so much of her daughter’s blood. Her image burned as a chip of ice in his breast, so delicate, so soft, so … so … dark and beautiful. She made as to call out to the Narindar, but decided against it, and her little boy dropped to a crouch, knowing how she would cast a glance over her shoulder—she was forever glancing over her shoulder—before sprinting after what she thought was her assassin …

Grab her! his brother suddenly erupted. Flee this place!

Or what?

A crazed growl. You remember fu—!

And I don’t care!

Samarmas faded, not so much into darkness as beyond the possibility of sense. He was frightened, Kelmomas knew … weak. The burden was his to shoulder … if not the blame.

So the little boy darted in his Empress mother’s wake, devoid of all thought save cunning, for at long last he understood the game in all its particulars. And there was no way he could reckon that understanding and still play this … whatever it was he played with Ajokli, God of the Gutter.

Mother had always been his stake. The only thing that mattered.



The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas slowed as she climbed the stair beneath the surviving Grand Mirror, unable to believe she at all resembled the girl who had first marvelled at her reflection in a crude copper sheen in a Sumni slum decades since. How many indignities had she survived in the interval?

How many losses?

And yet there it was, that face … the face other whores had raged for …

The eyes just as dark, each perpetually reflecting some pinprick of distant brilliance. The cheeks more severe perhaps, the brow more scored by care, but the lips just as fulsome, the neck as slender, the whole untouched …

Untouched?

Untouched! What kind of madness was this? What kind of World would paint such beauty upon a thing so accursed, so besmirched and polluted as herself! She watched her expression wince inward upon all angles, break upon spasms of shame and grief. She fled the hanging apparition, leapt the stair, her eyes downcast. She chased Issiral to the summit of her cracked and teetering empire, pursued without knowing why, to release him, perhaps, even though he had yet to accept her absurd charge. Or to ask him, perhaps, given the wisdom implicit in the way he spoke and moved—unlike any soul she had known, the way he seemed to … to … stand outside passion, beyond the animal prods of mortal nature. Perhaps he could …

Perhaps he could.

Her city and palace wailed. She crested the Processional just as the Narindar vanished between the great bronze portals of the Imperial Audience Hall. She followed him, uncertain whether she breathed. She was aware of wondering at the man, why he would steal here at such a time, but all was snow otherwise, numb obscurity. She trailed her fingertips across the line of Kyranean Lions stamped into the portal door barricaded by masonry, then stole quietly through the door ajar.

The gloom was disorienting. She peered about the vast, polished hollow, searching for some sign of the Narindar, her eyes tracing gleaming lines about the roots of pillars great and small.

He was nowhere to be seen.

She strode into the Hall’s mighty aisle, making no attempt to conceal herself. She could smell the Meneanor, the sky, even the scented dregs of her morning council …

Her son’s bathwater.

Her daughter’s bowel.

The missing wall shone white before her, a great silver halo about the silhouette of her husband’s Circumfix Throne. She paused in its monochromatic light, unafraid even though she suddenly understood why the Narindar had lured her here.

For that was the Fate the Whore had allotted her … to forever attempt to rule.

To be the plaything of forces … other.

To be the leprous wretch gowned in gold—carrion in the guise of beauty!

She stood, so small upon the expansive floor, dwarfed beneath the great pillars raised by her husband. She even closed her eyes and willed her end to happen. In her soul’s eye she could see the man, Issiral, her Narindar, her Holy Assassin, walking without the least urgency or apprehension, a being beyond effort, his knife floating white and watery before him. And she stood awaiting the plunge, braced both for and against, somehow knowing the ways her body would convulse about the intrusion, the shameful way she would flop upon her own unyielding floor.