The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(67)

The Mother-Supreme continued daubing lamp-black across her lids.

“So you believe.”

Malowebi nodded warily. “Zeum respects the ancient ways. We alone worship the Gods as they are.”

A grin that could only belong to an old and wicked heart.

“And now you wish to know your part in this?”

His heart rapped his breastbone for racing.

“Yes!”

The lamp-black, combined with the ancient age of the mirror, made empty sockets of her eyes. A brown skull watched him now, one graced with a maiden’s lips.

“Your doom,” the hollow said, “is to bear witness.”

“B-bear? Witness? You mean this? What happens?”

A girlish shrug. “Everything.”

“Everything?”

She swivelled about on one buttock to face him, and despite the pace between them, her near nudity pressed sweaty and flat against his yearning, her sable lines became cliffs for the extent of his desire. Never had he so yearned to fall!

The Yatwerian Priestess smiled coyly.

“He will kill you, you know.”

Horror and compulsion. She emanated the heat of plowed earth in hot sun.

Malowebi fairly sputtered. “Kill-kill me? Why?”

“For taking,” she said as if cradling candy on her tongue, “what was given.”

He stumbled backward, fought her allure as though caught in laundered veils …

The Emissary of High Holy Zeum fled.

Laughter, like sand scoured against sunburned skin. It nipped all his edges as he bounced hip and shin against the intervening clutter.

“Witness!” an old crone shrieked. “Witnessss!”



His pulse slowed until beaten by a different heart. His breath deepened until drawn by different lungs. Watching with the constancy of the dead, Anas?rimbor Kelmomas settled into the grooves of another soul …

If it could be called such.

The man his mother called Issiral stood in the heart of his unlit chamber, watch upon watch, motionless, dark eyes lost in some bleak nowhere. The Prince-Imperial, meanwhile, kept secret vigil above, staring down through the louvres. He lowered his avian vitality to the same deep rung, made his every twitch a noon shadow.

And he waited.

Kelmomas had watched many people through the spyholes of the Apparatory, and their comic diversity had never ceased to surprise him. The lovers, the tedious loners, the weepers, the insufferable grinners: it seemed an endless parade of newfound deformities. Watching them step from their doors to consort with the Imperial Court had been like watching slaves bind brambles into sheaves. Only now could he see how wrong he had been—that this diversity had been apparent only, an illusion of his ignorance. How could he not think Men various and strange when Men were his only measure?

Now the boy knew better. Now he knew that every human excess, every bloom of manner or passion, radiated from a single, blind stem. For this man—the assassin that had somehow surprised Uncle Holy—had paced out the true beam of possible and impossible acts.

And it was not human …

Not at all.

The spying had started as a game—a mischievous trifle. Mother’s guilt and preoccupation assured that Kelmomas had his run of the palace. The vagrant suspicions that darkened her look from time to time meant he could no longer risk tormenting any of the slaves or menials. So what else was he supposed to do? Play with dirt and dolls in the Sacral Enclosure? Spying on the Narindar would be his hobby, the boy had decided, a diverting way to squander watches while plotting the murder of his older sister.

The first afternoon had alone convinced him something was amiss with the man—something more than the fact of his red-stained earlobes, trim beard, or short-cropped hair. By the second day it had become a game within a game, proving he could match the man’s preternatural feats of immobility.

After the third day there was no question of not spying.

The matter of his sister had become an open sore by this time. If Theliopa told Mother then …

Neither of them could bear think what might happen!

Anas?rimbor Theliopa was the threat he simply could not ignore. The Narindar, on the other hand, was nothing less than his saviour, the man who had rescued him from his uncle. And yet, day after day, every time opportunity afforded, he found himself prowling the hollow bones of the Andiamine Heights searching for the man, spinning rationale after rationale.

She had not fully fathomed the extent of his intellect, Thelli. She had been witless of her peril, yes. And so long as that remained the case, she had no cause to carry through on her evil threat. Like all idiots, she preferred her cobble deeply grooved. Momemn needed a strong Empress, especially now that the Exalt-Cow, Anthirul, was dead. So long as the siege continued, he and his brother should be secure enough …

Besides, saviour or not, something was wrong about this man.

His reasons marshalled, bright before his soul’s eye, his hackles would settle, and he would hang as a hidden moon about the planet of this impossible man.

Time would pass, perhaps a watch or so, then some itinerant terror would shout, Thelli knows!

He would blink away images of those he had eaten.

Crazed cunt!

He had initially approached the challenge she represented with calm, even elation, like a boy set to climb a dangerous yet well-known and beloved tree. He certainly knew the bough and branch of Imperial intrigue well enough. Two of his brothers and his uncle lay dead by his hand—two Princes-Imperial and the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples! How much difficulty could a stuttering skinny like Anas?rimbor Theliopa pose?