The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(33)
Golgotterath is not so far. Father will come back …
This lent his false sobs the pang of reality. And how could you know? What makes you so smart?
Because He came back from Hell.
Stories! Rumours!
Mother believes them.
The wraith floated in from the gloom of the Imperial Audience Hall and stepped into shimmering, sunlit materiality: her daughter, Anas?rimbor Theliopa, garbed in a blue, pearl-spangled gown hooped into the shape of an overturned fuller’s basin. Esmenet laughed at the sight of her, not so much for the absurdity of her dress as for the absurdity of finding it so beautiful—so true. She hugged the sallow blond girl tight, breathed deep her earthen scent—Thelli had never ceased smelling like a little girl. Esmenet even savoured the way the woman went rigid rather than reciprocate the embrace.
She cupped Theliopa’s cheeks, blinked tears hot enough for the two of them. “We have much to speak about,” she sighed. “I need you now more than ever.”
And even though Esmenet had expected as much, it stung, the lack of any answering passion in the girl’s angular expression. Theliopa could only miss her the way a geometer would miss his compass, such was the girl’s share of her father’s spoils.
“Mother …”
She had no time for this, for he had caught her eye. Esmenet pressed her daughter aside to consider the second soul the Inchausti had delivered …
Her impossible assassin.
What was it he had called himself? Issiral … the Shigeki word for “fate”. It was easily the most unlucky name she had ever heard … and yet Maithanet was dead. Her boy was avenged.
The Narindar strode into the angular sunlight and halted, stood upon the terrace threshold the way he had stood between the idols of War and Birth in Xothei. He had a strange mauled-beyond-his-years look, perhaps because his trim beard belonged to a younger generation. He was naked save for the grey cloth bound about his loins, and remote in the way of violent and imperturbable men. The short hair that had raised her hackles when she had first contracted the man—priests of Ajokli were forbidden to cut their hair—now occasioned relief. She had no wish for the world to know she harboured a devotee of the Four-Horned Brother. In fact, he would have looked a slave were it not for an unnerving air of relentlessness about him, the sense that absolutely nothing outside his cryptic ends mattered, be it scruple, let alone comfort or security. She thought of what Lord Sankas had said, the way Narindar saw events as wholes. She wondered whether the Consul had managed to flee to Biaxi lands.
Issiral’s right hand was bloodied, a token of the calamity he had wrought mere watches ago.
The calamity she had authored through him.
“You may cleanse your hands in the basin,” she said, nodding at the graven pedestal to his left.
The man wordlessly complied.
“Mother …” Theliopa said from her periphery.
“Join Phinersa and the others,” Esmenet directed the girl, watching the Narindar’s hands vanish beneath shimmering water. “He will tell you what little we know.”
All was bustling activity about the mother and daughter, urgent and yet all the more muted for it. She had chosen the Postern Terrace behind the Imperial Audience Hall to establish her command, not simply for the view it afforded of her besieged city, but because it forced everyone she summoned to contemplate her husband’s Holy Chair, the Circumfix Throne, before coming to kneel before her. A small multitude now milled about the balustrade—merchants, officers, spies and advisors—peering out to the surrounding hills, pointing, exchanging questions and observations. A steady stream of messengers passed back and forth from the murk and glister of the Imperial Audience Hall. Harried looks were exchanged with sharp words. Three Kidruhil signallers stood at the ready with their bronze longhorns, one missing his horsehair helm, the other with his arm in a crimson sling. Porters had arrived with the first of the drink and food mere moments before.
The Whore had favoured her—at least so far. They knew very little as of yet, save that Momemn remained inviolate. The streets yet surged, but the campuses of the Cmiral and the Kamposea Agora appeared all but deserted. Smoke rose from the Lesser Ancilline Gate, but she had been told the fire was due to a mishap.
Fanayal, it seemed, had known nothing of the internecine turmoil that engulfed the city. Maithanet had fairly stripped the ramparts to better bully the mob, anticipating that her capture would provoke riots. Had Fanayal stormed Momemn directly, the mat of street and structure below would already be a ruinous battleground. But the Bandit Padirajah had chosen to take Jar?tha as his base and secure the countryside surrounding the Imperial Capital instead—affording her time she desperately needed. As surreal, as horrific, as it was watching bands of wild enemy horsemen scour the distance, the sight flushed her with an almost delirious sense of relief. So long as the heathen filth remained out there, Thelli and Kelmomas were safe.
She watched the Narindar stare at his cleansed hands, then lower his ear as if listening … for some further portent? He was every bit as eerie and unsettling as he had been that fateful day she had contracted him … the day of Maithanet’s coup.
The man finally turned to meet her gaze.
“What you did …” she began, only to trail.
His look was bold in the manner of children.
“What you did,” he repeated, but not as if he were confused by her meaning. His voice was as unremarkable as his appearance, and yet …