The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(68)
Sranky, Inrilatas used to call her. Inri was the only one who had ever made her cry.
But that elation soon faded into frustration, for Thelli proved no normal tree. She never left Mother’s side during daylight—never!—which meant the Inchaustic cloud protecting the Empress protected her as well. And she spent every night without exception barricaded in her apartment … Awake as far he could tell.
But before anything, he had begun to worry about his Strength. The more Kelmomas mulled the events of the previous months, the less he seemed to own them, the more glaring his impotence became. He cringed at the lazy way Inrilatas had toyed with him, humoured him for boredom’s sake, or how Uncle Holy had plumbed him to the pith once alerted. The fact was it had been his uncle who had killed Inrilatas, not Kelmomas. And how could he claim credit for his uncle’s assassination when the actual assassin hung stationary upon the shadows just below?
For all his gifts, the young Prince-Imperial had yet to learn the disease that was contemplation, how more often than not it was ignorance of alternatives that made bold action bold. He spied upon the Narindar, matching him immobility for immobility, pulling every corner of his being into the straight line that was the assassin’s soul—every corner, that is, save his intellect, which asked again and again, How can I end her? with the relentlessness of an insect. He lay unblinking, the taste of dust upon his tongue, scarcely breathing, peering between interleaved fronds of iron, raging at his twin, ranting, and even, on occasion, weeping for the unbearable injustice. And so he spun within a motionless frame, pondering, until pondering so polluted his pondering he could bear ponder no more!
He would marvel at it afterward, how the mere act of plotting Thelli’s murder had all but assured her survival. How all the scenarios, all the spitting disputes and aggrandizing declamations, had been a mere pretext for this eerie war of immobility he had undertaken against the Narindar … Issiral.
He was all that mattered here, Fanim siege or no Fanim siege. The boy just knew this somehow.
After endless watches of blank reverie, utter inactivity, the man would simply … do something. Piss. Eat. Take ablution, or on occasion, his leave. Kelmomas would lay watching, his body senseless for being so long inert, suddenly the man would … move. It was as shocking as stone leaping to life, for nothing betrayed any prior will or resolution to move, no restlessness, no impatience borne of anticipation … nothing. The Narindar would just be moving, exiting the door, stalking the frescoed corridors, and Kelmomas would scramble, cursing his prickling limbs. He would fly after him through the very walls …
And then, for no apparent reason, the assassin would simply … stop.
It was narcotic for simply being so strange. Several days passed before Kelmomas realized that no one … no one … ever witnessed the man acting this way. In the presence of others he would be remote, taciturn, act the way a terrifying assassin should, always careful to assure the others of his humanity, if nothing more. Several times it was Mother who encountered him, coming about a corner, through a door. And no matter what she said, if she said anything at all (for in certain company she would rather not encounter the man at all), he would simply nod wordlessly, then return to his room, and stand …
Motionless.
Issiral ate. He slept. He shat. His shit stank. The general terror of the slaves was to be expected, as was the hatred of Uncle Holy’s many intimates at the Imperial Court. But what was more remarkable still was the degree to which the man went unnoticed, how he would sometimes tarry in one spot, unseen, only to inexplicably pace five steps to his left, or his right, where he would stand unseen as a gaggle of scullery slaves passed teasing and whispering.
The enigma soon began to tyrannize the Prince-Imperial’s thoughts. He started dreaming of his vigils, reliving the stark discipline that occupied his days, except that when his body turned about to slip back in the labyrinthine tunnels, his soul would somehow remain fixed by the louvres, and he would simultaneously watch and crawl away, riven by a horror that plucked him to his very vein, the World shrieking as the face in the flint turned and ever so slowly swivelled up to match his incorporeal look—
As the game continued, this became one more thing to fret and dispute in the academy of his skull. Were his dreams warning him of something? Did the Narindar somehow know of his observation? If he did, he betrayed absolutely no discernible sign. But then the man betrayed no sign of anything.
Watching the man simply whetted the edge of this concern, especially as Kelmomas came to fathom just how much the assassin knew. How? How was the man able to so unerringly intercept his mother, to know, not simply where she was going without any communication whatsoever, but the precise path she would take?
How could such a thing be possible?
He was Narindar, the boy reasoned. A famed Missionary of the evil Four-Horned Brother. Perhaps his knowledge was divine. Perhaps that was how he had managed to overcome Uncle Holy!
This sent him to his mother’s Librarian, an eccentric Ainoni slave named Nikussis.
Nikussis was a slight, dark-skinned man—every bit as skinny as Theliopa, in fact. Possessed of some murky ability to spy insincerity, he was one of very few worldborn souls who could somehow see past the boy’s capering glamour. The man had always treated him with an air of reserved suspicion. During one fit of despair, Kelmomas had actually considered murdering the man for this very reason, and he had never quite relinquished the idea of using him to test various poisons.