The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(36)
Naree lay crouched in the corner to the right and opposite, naked save for a rag she clutched beneath her chin. The girl immediately began keening in terror, but not for recognizing her Blessed Empress—that would come later—but for understanding that once the rapists left, the executioner always followed.
One of Ngarau’s runners found his body at daybreak of the seventh day of the siege, at the bottom of an ancillary stair. The victim had chosen anonymous attire, but he was too well known on the Andiamine Heights not to be immediately recognized: Lord Sankas, Consul of Nansur, Patridomos of House Biaxi, and confidante of the Blessed Empress.
Esmenet had hoped the Patridomos would simply reappear, drawn like the others by word of her restoration. And now here he was sprawled across a blackening sheet of blood below the Reverse Gallery of the Apparatory—the path she had directed him to take what seemed a lifetime ago.
“Perhaps-haps he merely tripped,” Theliopa offered, wearing nothing but a smock—scandalous attire for any Princess-Imperial other than her. She looked like those mad Cultic ascetics who confused mortification of flesh for cultivation of spirit, angular with bones, strung with veins.
“And what of his broadsword?” Phinersa asked mildly. “Did it simply fly loose its scabbard?”
The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas could only gawk at the inert form.
Sankas …
He had dressed to travel incognito, bereft of any insignia, wearing a simple white-linen tunic beneath a blue-felt robe that had slipped loose one arm in the fall, and now lay bundled to one side of him. The tunic had wicked the blood, clotting violet and black like bandages about his edges, so that he seemed inked in place, as much an artistic conceit as a corpse …
Sankas was dead!
She had tasked Phinersa with finding him on the day of her restoration. She needed the Patridomos, not simply because of his prestige and prodigious clout within the Congregate, but because he was one of the few independent power brokers she could trust. Sankas had secured the Narindar for her, which meant he had wagered his very soul against the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples—for her!
She would find Phinersa’s subsequent report less than satisfactory. Like so many others, Lord Sankas had gone into hiding following the coup. But where most had been forced to shelter within the city, he had escaped the city altogether, commandeering one of his House’s many grain ships and sailing no one knew where—anywhere across the Three Seas, given the enormous extent of his holdings (not to mention how well he had married off his seven daughters).
She looked to her Exalt-Captain, Saxillas, who continued wearing his Inchaustic accoutrements despite her explicit request. What was it with these men?
“How could something like this happen?”
The Shrial Knight dared meet her gaze, more dismayed than alarmed, more baffled than furious.
Was he going to be a problem?
“Errors, lapses …” she said. “These things are inevitable, Saxillas. This is why I need men who know how to fail, men who know how to cope with mishaps and disasters, and most importantly of all, how to make them right.”
“Forgiveness, my Glory,” he said, falling immediately to his knees.
She rolled furious eyes at Theliopa and Phinersa.
It’s beginning all over again, a treacherous fraction of her soul whispered.
“Oh, get up!” she snapped at the man. She gazed to the top of the stair, squinted at the morning glare. For a long moment she could scarcely breathe. She could feel it kindle in her bowel once again, the cloying terror of intrigue and conspiracy. The conviction that Sankas was coming to see her, that he bore mortal tidings, floated like smoke through a body that seemed nothing but a shell of clothing and skin.
An imperial emptiness.
“Find who did this, Saxillas,” she said. “Regain your honour. Redeem your Lord-and-Prophet’s faith.”
The Nansur caste-noble stood dumbfounded, either realizing he had just been threatened with damnation, or simply witless as to how he should proceed. He was incompetent, Esmenet realized, as so many honourable men were. She squelched the urge to scratch and scream. Why? Why was trust ever the cost of cunning?
“Mother?” Theliopa asked.
As always, the Fanim drums throbbed eternal. Heathens were ever on the horizon, she realized, whetting their knives, plotting her destruction. Heathens were always watching around the corner.
“Dress yourself,” she said to her beloved, misbegotten daughter. “You look a common whore.”
“Wha—?” Vem-Mithriti, her ancient Grand Vizier, coughed out as he hurried down the hallway toward them. His hobbling gait seemed to strike them dry with pity.
“What’s this …” he gasped, “I hear about … murder …”
“Come, old grandfather,” Esmenet said, stepping out to usher him back the way he had come. “We’re finished here.”
Without warning, the sound of distant horns filtered down with the light … Horns of assembly …
Horns of war.
Theliopa made toward Kelmomas the instant she set foot in the Sacral Enclosure, striding from brilliance to cool shadow as she passed beneath the various garden bowers. She paused several paces away, as if at an imaginary threshold of an imaginary room he occupied. The young Prince-Imperial turned to her with a questioning smile, regarded the spectacle of her appearance. Fins—lacquered felt, trimmed with virginal pearls, three to a shoulder. Bodice embroidered in cloth of silver, cinched viciously about her waist. Skirt like a yaksh, turquoise silk stretched across hoops and ribs.