The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(38)
The Fanim had delivered their demand to parlay shortly after daybreak. The embassy had been led by no less than Surxacer, the youngest son of Pilaskanda, who had ridden fearlessly within bowshot and cast a spear bearing the missive upon the spot where the table now stood. The message had been terse and to-the-point: the fourth watch past the sun’s summit, the Padirajah of the Kianene Empire would meet with the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas at the Maumurine Gate to discuss the terms of “mutual peace.”
It was a ruse, of course—or so everyone on her warcouncil had assumed. They thought her decision to treat the offer as if it were earnest mad, she knew, more for the incredulous burr in their voices than any seditious comment. No soul dared test her authority anymore, even when they perhaps should.
So she found herself crowded upon the breastwork above the gate and between Maumurine’s towers, dwarfed by sheer faces of stone.
“So what is your stratagem?” her Exalt-General, Caxes Anthirul, murmured at her side.
“Listen to what he has to say …” she replied, wincing at the loudness of her voice. The war-drums were louder, more raw and less surreal beyond the baffles of the city. “Take his measure.”
“And if he’s merely trying to draw you out?”
She had hated Caxes Anthirul while a fugitive in hiding, cursed him for casting his sticks with her brother-in-law. At the time, his defection to the Thousand Temples had broken the back of any hope she might have had of overcoming Maithanet and saving her children. She had even rehearsed all the torments she would visit upon him, once her husband returned to set things aright. It spoke to the perversity of circumstance, so maudlin was the comfort she found in his presence, now. Fate was not so much a whore as a whore-maker, snapping the pious like twigs, warming Herself in the fires that had been honour.
Even festooned in regalia, Caxes Anthirul looked nothing like the champion painted by reputation. He was deceptively dull-eyed, one of those men prone to conceal their cunning in a bleary gaze, and the combination of his girth and clean-shaven jowls made him look more palace eunuch than famed hero of the Unification. Nevertheless, he belonged to that reassuring breed of soldiers who wholly understood their role as instruments of power. House Caxes was a southern Nansur family, with extensive interests in and around Gielgath. And like many bloodlines lacking any commercial or ancestral stake in the Capital, the Caxes were notoriously loyal—to whomever happened to be in power.
“I’ve been told my Imperial duty is to run,” Esmenet finally replied.
Perhaps she simply preferred the company of whores. After all, she had married one.
“In war, the only duty is to prevail, Blessed Empress … All else is calculation.”
“My husband told you that, didn’t he?”
The man shook with silent laughter, shivered with mirrored light.
“Aye,” he replied with a sidelong wink. “More than once.”
“Lord Anthirul? Are you saying you actually approve?”
“It’s good to share in the risks of your men,” Anthirul said. “Their commitment will only reflect as much of your commitment as they can see, Blessed Empress. Your courage is nothing to them barricaded in the palace, but here …” He glanced to the hundreds of Columnaries massed about and above them. “Word will spread.”
She frowned up at the man.
“You said as much yourself in Xothei …” he continued, his tone matched by a peculiar seriousness in his gaze. “He picked you.”
It surprised her always, the assumption that Kellhus could not err …
“The stories of this,” he said, casting his bleary gaze back out toward their enemy, “will serve to remind them.”
Or deceive.
Thick-hewn boards had been lain across the murderholes for her safety, but even still, she had to keep herself raised on her toes to gaze between the battlements with any dignity. To a soul their gazes followed a band of Fanim horsemen wending across the adjacent fields and hacked-down orchards. Thousands more of the heretics stood scattered as mites across the surrounding hilltops, where they had been labouring shirtless on the engines they would use to throw down Momemn’s dark walls. As Esmenet watched, more and more set aside their saws and hammers so they too might observe.
The sun burned bright, but the air possessed the hurried chill belonging to a later season. From the Andiamine Heights, she could almost pretend that everything yet shambled along the same ruts as before. Not so here. She had forgotten what it was like to gaze across perilous regions, to stand upon the verge of her power’s dissolution. Here, within the walls, one was executed for taking her family’s name in vain; and just there, one was murdered for speaking her family’s name in any other way.
Estimates of the size of Fanayal’s host varied. Phinersa insisted that no more than twenty to twenty-five thousand Kianene proper rode with the Bandit Padirajah, as well as a mutinous motley of some fifteen thousand others, ranging from non-Kianene Fanim faithful driven into exile, to bandit desert tribesmen—many of them Khirgwi, bent on little more than plunder. Had Momemn lain on the seaward edge of a plain, their numbers could have been guessed quite handily, but as it stood, the combination of the surrounding hills and their astonishing mobility allowed them to conduct their siege without revealing much about their size or disposition. The Imperial Mathematicians only had rumour and the smoke of obscured fires to go on. Using the ancient method of continually averaging their most recent estimates against the sum of their former counts, they had come to circle a number approaching thirty-thousand … a good deal less than the forty-five thousand her Master-of-Spies insisted.