The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(40)

Riven, she watched the desert warriors resolve from their lean silhouettes. She had planned to greet them with jnanic decorum, disarm them with feminine solicitation. She found herself peering from man to man instead, searching for him …

He was easy to find, given that he looked so much like his brother, Massar, who had been Whelmed, and even now marched with her husband toward Golgotterath. The elaborate goatee, the narrow, hooked-nose virility, the sharp, deep-set eyes: these immediately marked him as a Son of Kascamandri. Otherwise he alone dressed in a way that recalled his father’s glory, wearing a golden helm crowned with five quills, and a corselet of shimmering nimil over a yellow-silk Coyauri tunic.

Her fury overcame her. “Trespasser!” she screeched. “Flee to your wasted homes! Or I shall litter the desert with your people’s bones!”

A moment of astounded silence.

The Fanim began laughing.

“You must forgive my men,” the Padirajah called through the huffing remnants of his own hilarity. “We Fanim let women rule our hearths and”—he wobbled his head in mock indecision—“our beds.” More gales of laughter erupted from around and behind him. He looked about with a sly and boyish open-mouthed smile. “You sound … ridiculous to them.”

Esmenet could feel her entourage clench in embarrassment and outrage around her, but she was too old a whore to be rattled by this kind of contempt or derision. Her shame, after all, was at once their shame. Where wives were left guessing, whores knew: the harder the laughter, the more pathetic the weeping.

“What is it Fane says?” she called back in mock agreement. “Cursed are those who mock their mothers?”

A single guffaw from some fool high on the eastward tower. Otherwise, the Padirajah’s very own war-drums counted out the beats of his speechlessness.

“You are no mother to me,” he finally said.

“And yet you act my son, nonetheless,” she called down in inspiration, “a son bearing grievances.”

Fanayal regained a wary version of his previous smile.

“I suspect you are accustomed to such grievances,” he replied. “You are a hard mother. But not to my people, Empress. Ours is not a house any idolater can set back in order.”

Where the derision from earlier had simply passed over her, this bruised for some reason.

“Then why bother parlay?”

A pained squint, as if suffering her had already become something inevitable.

“The Ciphrang, Empress Mother. Kucifra, the demon who lies with you in angelic guise, who begets monsters in your womb—your husband! Yes … He has forced such cunning on me as you could not believe. I can scarce fathom it myself, forsooth! The indignities I’ve suffered, the accursed acts I have seen with mine eyes! I fear your husband has been an affliction …”

He had paced his magnificent white charger westward about the table and its golden burdens as he spoke. Now he wheeled the horse about with a mere flick of the reins.

“Each lesson has cut us, aye! But we have learned, Empress, learned to pack ruses inside of ruses, to forever think, ‘What will they think?’ before thinking anything at all!”

Esmenet frowned. She glanced at Phinersa, his counsel plain in the urgency of his look.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” she called out.

Fanayal’s smile was as thin as his moustaches.

“But I have Empress.”

And Anas?rimbor Esmenet found herself staring at a face that was no longer the Padirajah’s … but had become, rather, the face of someone altogether different, someone whose chin, cheeks, and scalp had been shaven—and who inexplicably wore a band of graven silver over his eyes …

Skin-spy?

An asp bent into a gleaming black hook. Blue flaring light. She threw hands across her eyes.

“Water!” someone was bellowing. “He bears the Wat—!”

Bowstrings thrummed in panicked seriatim.

Cishaurim?

Caxes Anthirul scooped her in his great arms, bore her backward and down.

Axes of movement and light, bald sky and black-stone expanses swung on a pendulum, blotted by searing brilliance. Sounds too spastic, too brief to be shrieks, air bursting from flesh.

The shielding bulk of the Exalt-General was wracked as though a bull gored him. Vem-Mithriti was singing, his voice bassooned with age. And Theliopa was dragging her from the rent and ruined bodies, fire swinging like capuchins up across the girl’s gown into her hair.

“Kill him!” someone was screaming. “Kill the devil!”

A Columnary bearing a cloak tackled the burning girl to the floor. Esmenet rolled back into her daughter’s sudden absence, cracked her skull. She scrambled to her hands and knees, saw arrows flitting across open space, raking the tracts below.

Vem-Mithriti stepped from the ruined breastwork into open air, phantom bastions hanging before him. He looked as frail as sticks beneath the voluminous lung that was his black-silk gown—frail and unconquerable, for as he stepped out he turned, and she saw the lightning kindled in his palms, forehead, and heart. For all the years that winded his voice, his speech hewed true, clipping great and terrible Analogies raw from the aether.

“Kill the devil!”

She saw Caxes Anthirul’s bulk on the ragged edge.

She saw Phinersa standing dumbstruck, realized he had but one arm.