The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(71)

“Any price …” she murmured to some unidentified soul. But whom? She only resorted to meetings in her chambers when she required utter secrecy …

“So …” she continued, her voice urgent, bound as tight as a sacrificial goat, “what does the Four-Horned Brother say?”

Kelmomas stopped.

He had drawn past the marble post set into the scalloped corner. He could see her, dressed in her evening habitual, reclined backward on her gold-stitched, Invitic divan, bathed in the white of whale-oil, staring at a point toward the middle of the room. Her beauty fairly struck him breathless, the twinkle of Kutnarmi diamonds across her headdress, the brushed gleam etching her curls, the flawless caramel of her skin, the rose-silk folds of her gown, the dimpled gleam chasing the seams …

So perfect.

He stood as a wraith in the shadowy margin, his pallor more that of desolation than the blood of ancient northern kings. He had wandered into the house of Hate; he had maimed a beetle presuming to teach a lesson. And now Hate had wandered into his house presuming to teach in turn.

He’s here … the voice murmured. We delivered Him to Mother.

Issiral. The Four-Horned Brother stalked the halls of the Andiamine Heights.

And in his soul’s eye he could see Him standing opposite, Immortal Malice, smoking with the density of Creation …

Her face snapped toward him—the shock fairly knocked him from his skin. But she looked through him—for an instant it seemed the horror of his dream had been made real, that he hung as vision only, something incorporeal … Insubstantial. But she squinted, her eyes baffled by the lantern glare, and he realized that she saw nothing for limits that were all her own.

Kelmomas shrank into the blackness, slipped about the corner.

“Drafts,” Mother explained absently.

The boy fled back into the frame of the palace. He hid in the deepest marrow, where he wept and wailed for the imagery that shrieked beneath his soul’s eye, the torrid glimpses of Mother penetrated, violated time and again, her beauty battered from her face, her skin perforated, bleeding like gills, maps of blood cast across her precious urban frescoes …

What was he to do? He was just a little boy!

But she’s the only one!

Shut-up-shut-up-shut-up!

Rocking in his own arms. Wheezing and snuffling.

Only her! No one else!

Nooooo!

Clutching and clutching, grasping void …

Who will love us now?



But Mother lay on the bed slumbering as she always did when he finally returned, curled on her side, the knuckle of her index finger drawn to her lips. He stared at her for the better part of a watch, an eight-year-old wisp rendered smoke from murk, his gaze more fixed than was human.

Then at last he rooted into the circuit of her embrace. She was so much more than warm.

She exhaled and she smiled. “This isn’t right …” she murmured on the thick edge of slumber. “Letting you … run wild as a beast …”

He clutched her left hand in both of his own, squeezed with the desperation of the real. He lay larval in her embrace. With every breath he hewed nearer oblivion, face numb, head thick with recent sobs, his eyes two scratches soothed. Gratitude held him …

His own Unerring Grace.

That night he dreamed the same dream of the Narindar. This time the man took two instant strides to stand immediately below the grill, leapt, and skewered his eye.





CHAPTER SEVEN


Ishterebinth


Lies are but clouds, giants that blow and rage only to pass, always to pass. But the Truth is the sky, everlasting and elusive, a shelter in the day, an abyss in the night.

—The Limping Pilgrim, ASANSIUS





Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Ishterebinth

Anas?rimbor Serwa was no more than three when she realized that it all gave way, the World. She would find her eye drawn to the threads of white knotted across all things illuminated, and she would know, This is not real. And since her memories began at three, it had always been thus. The Unreality, as she called it, had forever sapped her surroundings. “See, Mama?” she would cry, “Look-look! None of it is real!” Sometimes she would even dance and traipse, singing, “Everything is False! Everything! Only! Seems!”

Such displays had terrified her mother, who begrudged her children her husband’s rapacious gifts. The fact that her daughter could care so little for her fear meant that she possessed her husband’s heart as well.

It had been unfathomable then, The Unreality, more an ethereal assemblage of inkling and intuition than anything explicable. A certainty of breakneck plummets across flat ground. An intimation of perspectives hidden in the creases of what could be perceived. A profound incompleteness in the warp and weft of whatness, making smoke of the ground, paper of the sky, lazy scarves of whole horizons. It would strike her in the gleam of things in particular, the wires of white that looped about everything illuminated: the pools of shining marble beneath the sun wells, the afternoon radiance that dazzled their dinners on the Postern Terrace throughout the summer. The glint of reflections while bathing.

She was six when it began infecting people as well. Her mother had been the first to succumb, but only because she was the nearest, the most damaged. The Empress’s periodic furies were famous among the siblings. Father terrified them, but like a God, his perpetual absence made that terror easy to ignore. Mother, on the other hand, had afflicted them. She would tolerate no “little Ikureis”, she continually said, her term for children spoiled for luxury and the fawning of others. And so she harried them for minutiae, small failures in expression or demeanour that she alone could perceive. “What child speaks thus?” became her refrain.