The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(66)

And now he himself was wairo … accursed.

So if he returned uninvited to the Padirajah’s grand pavilion, it was because he had never left …

Days had passed. Meppa was on the mend. Fanayal had emerged unscathed from that monstrous night—at least as much as he. Malowebi had all but hidden in his tent, wracking his soul for some kind of solution, cursing both the Whore of Fate and Likaro—the latter far, far more than the former. Likaro’s posturing, Likaro’s fawning, and most of all Likaro’s deceit—these had brought this calamity down upon him!

But such wounds could be picked for only so long before bandages had to be sought. He was a Disciple of Memgowa; he knew any hope of remedy required the very thing he was missing: knowledge. And as the Whore would have it, the only source of that knowledge was the very source of his peril: Psatma Nannaferi. Only she could tell him what happened. Only she could tell him what he needed to give …

Gaining access to Fanayal’s pavilion was easy enough: no one guarded it anymore.

And she lay within it always, like some kind of holy spider.

Malowebi had always been of the boldest of his brothers, the first to leap into cold or uncertain waters. The way he reckoned, he could die witless like that wairo he found as a boy, or he could die knowing what ensnared him, and most importantly, whether there were any terms of escape. And so on a diver’s breath he struck from his tent and made toward the Padirajic standard, the Twin Scimitars on Black, hanging motionless above the intervening pavilions. “Die knowing,” he muttered to himself, as if still not entirely convinced. He paused on a start, waited out a flurry of some fifty dusty riders. The hillside obscured Momemn, though the toil and incomplete siege towers strung along the heights made the Imperial Capital’s oppressive presence plain. A part of him could scarce believe his embassy had taken him this far—within sight of the Andiamine Heights! It seemed mad to think that the Harlot Empress slumbered mere leagues away.

He imagined delivering Anas?rimbor Esmenet to Nganka’kull in chains, not because he believed it could happen, but because he would much rather imagine Likaro gnashing his teeth than what presently awaited him in the gloom of Fanayal’s pavilion. It almost seemed miraculous, the brevity of his trek. Flapping his arms against the dust in the wake of the riders, marching resolutely through the immobility his sudden appearance occasioned in the dozens who glimpsed him, bearing toward the scrolled awning and gold-embroidered flaps … and then, impossibly, there he was, standing precisely where he had stood that night the accursed Waterbearer should have died.

The air was stuffy, ripe for the smell of a chamber pot. Sunlight gilded the network of bellied seams above, shedding grey light across the thickets of furniture and baggage. Malowebi spent several heart-pounding moments searching the confusion. Where the great oak bed had commanded the interior that night, it was simply more clutter now. Save for misplaced pillows and twisted sheets, the mattress was empty … as was the settee next to it …

Malowebi cursed himself for a fool. Why did Men assume things froze in place when they denied them the grace of their observation?

Then he saw her.

So close that he gasped audibly.

“What do you want, blasphemer?”

She sat no more than four paces to his left, staring into the mirror of a cosmetics table, her back turned against him. He had no clue why he stepped toward her. She could hear him just as well from where he stood.

“How old are you?” he blurted.

A smile creased the delicate brown face in the mirror.

“Men do not sow seed in autumn,” she said.

Her black hair toppled sumptuous about her shoulders. As always, she dressed to whet rather than blunt desire, naked save gauze wrapped about her hips and a hookless turquoise jacket. To simply lay eyes upon her was to be fondled.

“But …”

“I loathed the covetous eyes of Men as a child,” she said, perhaps watching him through the mirror, perhaps not. “I had learned, you see, learned what it was they would take. I would see girls like the one staring at me now, and I would think them nothing more than whipped dogs, creatures beaten until they craved the rod …” She raised a cheek to a waiting pinky, smeared what looked like gold-dust across the outskirts of her plump gaze. “But there’s knowing, and there’s knowing, like all things living. Now I understand how the earth rises to the seed. Now I fathom what is given when Men take …”

Her smoky image puckered purple-stained lips.

“And I am grateful.”

“B-but …” Malowebi fairly sputtered. “She … I mean, She …” He paused upon a bolt of terror, recalling his glimpse of veins flung sodden across all the visible spaces the night the Last Cishaurim should have died. “The Dread Mother … Yatwer has wrought all this!”

Psatma Nannaferi ceased her ministrations, watched him carefully through the reflection.

“And yet none of you fall to your knees,” she said on a coquettish shrug.

She played him the way a dancing girl might, but one who cared nothing for the heft of purses. A bead of sweat slipped from his kinked hair down his temple.

“She has given you the Sight,” the Mbimayu sorcerer pressed. “You know what will happen …” He licked his lips, trying hard not to look as terrified as he was. “Before it happens.”