The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(31)
All Creation.
Blaring horns. A black city roiling, bracing.
“Catch.”
The rooves slump, first to one knee, then another. The Mother sheds her tear, gives what has been given. He watches himself cast what is broken, sees the Aspect-Emperor stumble, then vanish beneath the Mother’s heel.
He turns from the Sea, where the sun splints the back of dark waters, and he gazes out to the summer-weary fields of the south; he sees himself standing upon a greener hill, gazing at where he now stands at the Empress’s side.
His Mother gathers him in clacking arms of ruin.
Kellhus would often chide Esmenet for her perpetual misgivings. He would remind her that Men, despite any chest-thumping declaration to the contrary, sought servitude to the simple degree they hungered for power. “If you cannot trust in your station,” he would say, “at least take heart in their greed, Esmi. Dispense your authority as milk, and they will come racing as kittens … Nothing makes Men so meek as ambition.”
And race after her they did.
She had assumed it had been the Inchausti calling after her as she had searched the Andiamine Heights. But as she wandered back down the darkened halls with Kelmomas, she encountered Amarsla, one of her body-slaves, who collapsed wailing at her feet. “I found her!” the old matron began crying to the frescoed ceilings. “Praise Seju, I found her!” And others began to emerge from the gilded maze, first an Eothic Officer whose name she could not recall, then lumbering Keopsis, the Exalt-Counter …
Despite the general panic, word of Maithanet’s death and her de facto restoration had swept through the streets of Momemn, and those souls dispossessed by her brother-in-law’s coup began flocking back to the Imperial Precincts, their erstwhile home. Fairly a dozen trailed her and Kelmomas by the time they reached the Scuari Campus, where dozens more awaited, a motley that cheered with wild abandon. Clutching Kelmomas to her waist, she stood sobbing with disbelief and gratitude …
Then set about seizing the collective reins they offered.
She disengaged the bestial apparition that was Kelmomas, commended him, despite his wailing protestations, to the ministrations of Larsippas, one of the palace physician-priests. He needed to be cleansed, dressed, and fed, certainly, as well as examined for illness or infection. His skin was Zeumi dark, stained as if he had hidden in a vat of dye. He wore nothing more than his bed-time smock, the linen transformed into leather for the laminations of filth. His hair, once flaxen and immaculate, was as black as her own, here matted into manure-like clumps, there twined into rat tails. The expressions of those recognizing him for the first time were universally appalled. Some even went so far as to sign finger charms, as though she had plucked him from death and damnation rather than hiding and squalor.
“Mumma, no!” he blubbered.
“Do you hear those drums?” she asked, clasping his shoulders and kneeling before him. “Do you understand what they mean?”
The boy’s blue eyes seemed even more bright, more canny, shining from blood-swart cheeks.
He isn’t what you think he is …
The small Prince-Imperial nodded reluctantly.
“Finding you safe was simply the beginning, Kel,” she said. “Now I must keep you safe! Do you understand, Sweetling?”
“Yes, Mumma.”
She cupped his cheek and smiled reassurance. Larsippus drew him away, shouting for someone to draw water. She allowed herself three doting heartbeats before setting aside motherhood and taking up the Empire—becoming the very thing that those watching so desperately needed her to be: Anas?rimbor Esmenet, the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas.
The Inchausti comprised the sum of her military. She would later discover that the Pillarians had died to a man defending her home and her children. Apparently some Eothic Guardsmen had surrendered, but shame would delay their appearance. Of the Imperial Apparati she had seen at Xothei, a good number had also followed her to the palace—those who had known her well enough to trust her forgiving nature, she would later realize. The others, those who had fled out of fear of retribution, she would never see again.
She began by embracing Ngarau, the old and indispensable Grand Seneschal she had inherited from the Ikurei Dynasty.
“My House is out of order,” she said, gazing into the eunuch’s pouched eyes.
“No longer, my Glory.”
Dark and lurching, Ngarau began moving among the assembly, bellowing commands. Migrations toward various quarters of the palace and elsewhere immediately began thinning the crowd, leaving only kneeling soldiery and Imperial Apparati behind. Phinersa, her erstwhile Master of Spies, knelt among them, his svelte form clad in the black-silk robes he had made his uniform. When she turned to regard him, the small man proved as nimble at falling to his face as he was at everything else.
“You knew nothing of the coup?” she cried at the maul of black hair.
“I knew nothing,” he said into the cobble. “I failed you, my Glory.”
“Stand up,” she exclaimed, her voice cracking for disgust, not so much at Phinersa as at the tragic toll of the insanity that had seized them all. Chaos and revolt across the Three Seas. Innumerable deaths, near as well as far. Sharacinth. Imhailas. Inrilatas …
Samarmas.
“You heard what Maithanet said at Xothei?”
“Yes,” the man replied, his voice muted, his clean-shaven face blank with care. She had expected him to leap into his old, insinuating manner as much as too his feet, but he remained wary. “That you and he were to be reconciled.”