The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(39)

Given that she scarcely possessed eight thousand trained souls with which to defend the Home City, she found neither number reassuring—even less so given the rumours of Cishaurim pulling down the walls of Iothiah. Her Vizier-in-Proxy, Vem-Mithriti, who stood withered in his voluminous black-silk robes mere paces away, had sputtered for fury claiming she had nothing to fear. The flecks of his spittle, however, had argued otherwise. Excess passion was the perennial vice of gulls, and war, much like gambling, fed upon gulls.

The image of the advancing Fanim war-party hooked her like yarn, and then she saw it, the White Horse on gold hanging below the Twin Scimitars of Faminry … The fabled standard of the Coyauri.

“Such reckless courage,” the Exalt-General said.

And their Lord, Fanayal ab Kascamandri.

“The Padirajah himself comes!” a voice cried from the tower parapets above.

This changed everything.

“So he really means to parlay?” Esmenet asked.

Phinersa replied from her left. “The God has granted us a miraculous opportunity either way, my Glory.”

She turned to Anthirul, who still stared out, his manner meditative and battle-seasoned, his lips pursed as if he cracked seeds between his front teeth.

“I concur,” he finally said, “though my heart repents it.”

“You mean kill him,” she said.

The Home Exalt-General at last looked down, matched her gaze. He approved of her hesitation, she could tell—almost as much as Phinersa disapproved. Was it because she was a woman, a vessel wrought to give what men take?

“Think of how many you might save simply by taking his skin!” Phinersa cried to the back of her neck, speaking, as he often did, like one who takes umbrage for reason’s sake rather than his own.

Either way, he was becoming too familiar.

She turned to her daughter instead, who stood dutifully—too dutifully, it occurred to Esmenet—a pace behind the men that fairly encircled her mother.

The flaxen-haired girl looked at her blandly. The rumble of hooves climbed from the throbbing drums. “I would do what Father would do.”

“Yes!” Phinersa cried, his composure nearly undone.

Her Master-of-Spies was afraid, she realized. Genuinely afraid …

And Esmenet realized that she was not.

This bid to parlay was nothing more than a trap, one that the Fanim themselves expected to fail, or so her timid Imperial stalwarts would have her believe. War had a jnan all its own, an etiquette wherein the failure to afford your enemy the opportunity to be foolish was itself a failure. Fanayal was simply “testing his hook bare,” as the saying went, throwing his line on the off chance he might catch her …

She was a woman after all.

But now it appeared that Fanayal was offering her the opportunity to do the same …

Which meant that the invitation was not simply a ruse to assassinate her.

And since he had most certainly not come to be assassinated in turn, it meant that Fanayal ab Kascamandri, the far-famed Bandit Padirajah, genuinely wanted to parlay …

But why?

“Make preparations,” she told Anthirul. “We kill him after we hear what he has to say …”

The thought of murder pained her, but only momentarily. Smoke still marred points across the entirety of the landward horizon. As yet, no one knew what kind of destruction they had wrought, only that it was both heinous and extensive. She would kill Fanayal, here, then she would hunt his vermin race to the very limit of everywhere. She would clot the Carathay with the blood of their sons, so that her son never need suffer them again …

She would commit this act. She knew this with ruthless certainty. After so many years soaked in the rumours of her husband’s butchery, she was due her own measure.

Her eyes fluttered about the thought of Naree.

“When I say, ‘Truth shines,’” she told her shining Home Exalt-General. She glanced to the Fanim as if seeking totemic verification. Her breath, which had been miraculously relaxed all this time, tightened for realizing the desert horsemen had almost completed their journey … “Kill him then.”

Some thirty riders spilled across a final berm, then jerked their trotting mounts down the road. Most sported the long moustaches and conical helms of their people. Otherwise they looked savage—almost Scylvendi—for their eclectic attire, some shining for plundered hauberks, others dull and dark for their arduous journey. Their horses possessed the many-veined, angular look of malnourishment, ribs tiger-striped for shadow. They had ridden as hard as Anthirul had said, which meant they were exhausted as Anthirul supposed. Their failure to storm and take Momemn when they had the chance was written into them.

The Fanim company fanned as wide as the ditches allowed, then broke into a full gallop—a calculated act of bravado, she was certain, but formidable nonetheless.

A memory of Shimeh passed as a shudder through her, a glimpse of Kidruhil cut down in the brilliant calligraphy of Achamian’s light.

The criminals thundered toward the small table, racing into their shadows, becoming a dark and elongated mass. Dust roiled about flexing legs and haunches. She was so convinced they would bowl the table over that she began cursing them even as they reined to a chaotic and yet collective stop. A great, transparent wing of dust unfurled before them, threatened to swoop over the very breastwork where she stood, before the eternal winds off the Meneanor shrugged it inland.