Now he was accustomed to it, of course. The beast that was his brother.
The dog.
“Hey, Sammi,” he said, wearing his mother’s mouth-watering smile. “Watch …”
Bending over, he placed a single palm on the floor and raised his feet in the air. Grinning upside down, he bounced one-handed toward him, from indifferent carpet to cold marble.
Samarmas gurgled with delight, covered his mouth and pointed. “Bum-bum!” he cried. “I see your bum-bum!”
“Can’t you do this, Sammi?”
Samarmas pressed his cheek to his shoulder, smiled bashfully down. “Nothing,” he conceded.
“The Gods did not see the First Apocalypse,” Uncle Maithanet was saying, “so why would they see the Second? They are blind to the No-God. They are blind to any intelligence without soul.”
Again the imperceptible pause before Mother’s reply. “But Kellhus is a Prophet … How—?”
“How could he be hunted by the Gods?”
Kelmomas lingered upside-down next to his brother, his heels swaying above.
“Isn’t there anything you can do, Sammi?”
Samarmas shook his head, still doing his gurgle-laugh-gurgle at his brother’s ridiculous pose.
“Lord Sejenus,” Maithanet was saying, “taught us to see the Gods not as entities unto themselves, but as fragments of the God. This is what my brother hears, the Voice-Absolute. This is what has renewed the Covenant of Gods and Men. You know this, Esmi.”
“So you’re saying the Hundred could very well be at war with the God’s designs—with their very own sum?”
“Yes-yes,” Theliopa interjected. “There are one hundred and eighty-nine references referring to the disparate ends of the Gods and the God of Gods, two from the Holy Tractate itself. ‘For they are like Men, hemmed in by darkness, making war on the shadows of they know not what.’ Schol-Scholars, thirtyfour, twenty. ‘For I am the God, the rule of all things …’”
Kelmomas swung his feet down to sit cross-legged before Samarmas, shimmied close enough to touch knees. “I know,” he whispered. “I know something you can do …”
Samarmas flinched and jerked his head, as though hearing something too remarkable to be believed.
“What? What? What?”
“Think of your own soul,” Uncle Maithanet was saying. “Think of the war within, the way the parts continually betray the whole. We are not so different from the world we live in, Esmi …”
“I know—I know all this!”
“How about balance?” Kelmomas said. “You know how to balance, don’t you?”
Moments later, Samarmas was perched tottering on the balcony’s broad stone rail, deep spaces yawing out beyond and beneath him. Kelmomas watched from the playroom, standing just behind the line of sunlight across the floor, grinning as though astonished by his skill and daring. The distance-filtered voices of his uncle and mother seemed to fall from the sky.
“The White-Luck Warrior,” his uncle was saying, “need not be real. The rumours alone constitute a dire threat.”
“Yes, I agree. But how do you battle rumours?”
Kelmomas could almost see his uncle’s simulated frown.
“How else? With more rumours.”
Samarmas whooped in whispering triumph. Cotton-white arms out and waving. Toes flexed across a marmoreal line. The sycamores rearing behind, dark beneath sunlit caps, reaching up as though to catch some higher fall.
“And the Yatwerians?” Mother asked.
“Call a council. Invite the Matriarch herself here to the Andiamine Heights.”
The sudden dip and lean. The stabilizing twitches. The small looks of bodily panic.
“Yes, but you and I both know she isn’t the real leader of the Cult.”
“Which might work to our advantage. Sharacinth is a proud and ambitious woman, one who chafes at being a figurehead.”
Quick recovery steps. Feet swishing over polished stone. A gurgling laugh caught in an anxious, reflexive swallow.
“What? Are you suggesting we bribe her? Offer to make her Mother-Supreme?”
“That’s one possibility.”
The slender body bent about an invisible point, one which seemed to roll from side to side.
The surrounding air deep with the promise of gravity.
“As Shriah you hold the power of life and death over her.”
“Which is why I suspect she knows little or nothing of these rumours, or what her sisters plan.”
Eyes avid and exultant. Hands cycling air. A breathless grinning.
“That’s something we can use.”
“Indeed, Esmi. As I said, she is a proud woman. If we could induce a schism in the Cult …”
Samarmas tottering. A bare foot, ivory bright in the glare, swinging out from behind the heel of the other, around and forward, sole descending, pressing like a damp cloth across the stone. A sound like a sip.
“A schism …”
The shadow of a boy foreshortened by the high angle of the sun. Outstretched hands yanked into empty-air clutches. Feet and legs flickering out. A silhouette, loose and tight-bundled, falling through the barred shadow of the balustrade. A gasp flecked with spittle.
Then nothing.
Kelmomas stood blinking at the empty balcony, oblivious to the uproar rising from below.
Just like his father, he was able to hold so much more in the light of his soul’s eye than the people around him. It had been this way ever since Hagitatas had taught him the difference between beast, man, and god—ever since he first had looked away from his brother’s face. Beasts move, the old man had said.
Men reflect.
So he knew the love and worship Samarmas bore him, knew that he would do anything to close the abyss of insight and ability between them. And he knew precisely where the Pillarian Guards fixed their sandalled feet, where they planted the butt of their long spears …
Alarums rang through the Enclosure, clawed up to the sky. Soldiers, their martial voices hoarse with grief and terror. The guarded babble of slaves.
As though stunned, Kelmomas walked to the marble railing, leaned over the point where his brother had fallen. He looked down, saw his brother in an armoured circle of guardsmen, his eyes rolled back, his right arm coiled like rope, his torso twitching about the spear-shaft that pierced his flank.
The young Prince-Imperial was careful to wipe the olive oil from the rail. Then he howled the way a little boy should.
Why? the voice asked. The secret voice.
Why didn’t you kill me sooner?
He saw his mother beat her way through the Pillarian Guards, heard her inconsolable scream. He watched his uncle, the Holy Shriah, grasp her shoulders as she fell upon her beloved son. He saw his sister Theliopa, absurd in her black gowns, approach in fey curiosity. He glimpsed one of his own tears falling, a liquid bead, falling, breaking upon his twin’s slack cheek.
A thing so tragic. So much love would be required to heal.
“Mommy!” he cried. “Mommeeeeeeee!”
Gods make real.
There was such love in the touch of a son.
The funerary room was narrow and tall, plated with lines of blue-patterned Ainoni tile, but otherwise unadorned. Light showered through air like steam. Idols glared from small niches, almost, but never quite forgotten. Gold-gleaming censers wheezed in the corners, puffing faint ribbons of smoke. The Empress leaned against the marble pedestal in the room’s centre, looking down, staring at the inert lines of her littlest.
She began with his fingers, humming an old song that made her slaves weep for recognition. Sometimes they forgot she shared their humble origins. Smiling, she looked at them as though to say, Yes, I’ve been you all along …
Just another slave.
She raised a forearm, cleansed it with long gentle strokes, elbow to wrist, elbow to wrist.
He was cold like clay. He was grey like clay. Yet, no matter how hard she pressed, she could not rob him of his form. He
insisted on remaining her son.
She paused to cry. After a time she swallowed away the ache, cleared her throat with a gentle cough. She resumed her work and her humming. It almost seemed that she carved him more than she cleansed, that with every stroke he somehow became more real. The flawless lines and moist divets. The porcelain gleam of skin. The little mole beneath his left nipple. The constellation of freckles that reached like a shawl from shoulder to slender shoulder.
She absorbed all of it, traced and daubed and rinsed it, with movements that seemed indistinguishable from devotion.
There was such love in the touch of a son.
His chest. The low curve of his abdomen. And of course his face. Sometimes something urged her to prod and to shake, to punish him for this cruel little game. But her strokes remained unperturbed, slow and sure, as if the fact of ritual were some kind of proof against disordered souls.
She wrung the sponge, listened to the rattle of water. She smiled at her little boy, wondered at his beauty.
His hair was golden.
He smelled, she thought, as though he had been drowned in wine.
Kelmomas pretended to weep.
She bundled him tight against her breast, and he squirmed clear of the blankets crowded between them. He pressed himself against her shuddering length. Her every sob welled through him like waves of lazy heat, washed him with bliss and vindication.
“Don’t let go!” she gasped, pressing her cheek back from his damp hair. “Never-never-please!”
Her face was his scripture, written with looms of skin, muscle, and tendon. And the truths he read there were holy.
He knew it so intimately he could tell whenever a mole had darkened or a lash had fallen from her eyelids. He had heard the priests prattle about their Heavens, but the truth was that paradise lay so much nearer—and tasted of salt.
Her face eclipsed him, the ligaments of anguish, the trembling lips, the diamonds streaming from her eyes.
“Kel,” she sobbed. “Poor baby …”
He keened, squashed the urge to kick his feet in laughter. Yes! he cried in silent glee, the limb-wagging exultation of a child redeemed. Yes!
And it had been so easy.
You are, the secret voice said, her only love remaining.
CHAPTER SIX
Marrow
Ask the dead and they will tell you. All roads are not equal. Verily, even maps can sin.
—EKYANNUS I, 44 EPISTLES
What the world merely kills, Men murder.
—SCYLVENDI PROVERB
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), the River Rohil
The Wizard picked his way through the cool forest deeps, his bones as old as his thoughts were young. He huffed and grimaced, but there was a knowing cadence to his hobble, proof of prior years spent travelling. Four days he had trudged, wending between the pillar trees, squinting at the sun’s glare through the spring-thin canopy, using the slow crawl of distant landmarks to guide him to his destination …
Marrow.
All Achamian knew of this place was what his Galeoth slave, Geraus, had told him. It was a Scalpoi entrepôt located at the westward end of the long navigable stretch of the River Rohil, a place where the companies of scalpers who worked the hinterland could collect their bounties and purchase supplies. As the nearest centre of any description to the tower, this was where Geraus would come, three or four times a year, to sell his pelts and, with the gold Achamian gave him, secure those goods they could not improvise for themselves. An even-tempered, slow-speaking man, Geraus had always taken wary delight in telling them the stories of his visits. Perhaps because the journey was both arduous and perilous—Tisthanna rarely forgave Achamian the weeks of Geraus’s absence—or perhaps because they simply marked a deviation from the routine of his life, Geraus was given to foot-stomping airs for the days immediately following his return. Only when his tales were completed would he retreat to the borders of his gentle and dependable self. They had always been his time to shine, for the slave of the great Wizard to be “world-shouldered,” as the Galeoth say.
For the most part, the visits seemed to be skulking, secretive affairs, transactions made between trusted men and trusted men only. A bag of beans, to hear Geraus speak of it, was as valuable and fraught with complication as a purse of gold or a bale of scalps. He made no secret of his discretion—in fact, he seemed to take great pride in it. Even when his children were infants, Geraus seemed bent on impressing them with the inestimable survival value of humility. The greatest virtue of any slave, he always seemed to be saying, was the ability to pass unnoticed.
No different than a spy, Achamian could not help reflecting.
To think he had believed those days dead and gone, wandering the Three Seas, passing from court to court, holding his head high before sneering kings and potentates—a Schoolman still. Even though he had shed the fat, even though he wore wool and animal skins instead of muslin and myrrh, the simple fact of striking for unseen horizons had brought his past back to prickling life. Sometimes, when he glanced up through greening limbs, he would see the turquoise skies of Kian, or when he knelt to refill his waterskin, the heaving black of the northern Meneanor. Blinks had become glimpses, each with its own history, its own peculiar sense and beauty. Caste-noble courtiers laughing, their faces painted white. Steaming delicacies served by oiled slaves. Fortifications sheathed in enamelled tiles, gleaming beneath arid suns. A black-skinned prostitute drawing high her knees.
Twenty years had slipped away, and not a day had passed.
He already found himself mourning Geraus and his family, far more than he would have imagined. Slaves were funny that way. It was as though the fact of ownership shrouded certain obvious and essential human connections. You assumed it would be the conveniences you would miss, not the slaves who provided them. Now, Achamian could care less about the comforts—they seemed contemptible. And something inner shook whenever he thought of their faces—laughing or crying, it did not matter—something jarred loose by the knowledge he would never sit with them again.
It made him feel like a weepy grandfather.
Perhaps it was good, this suicidal turn his life had taken.
He paused, savoured the gilded granduer of the evening wilderness seen from afar. The escarpment scrawled along the horizon, a longwandering band of vertical stone mellowing in the dusk, buttressed by scree-and-boulder-choked ramps that descended into the forests below. He could see the Long-Braid Falls, so named because of the way the River Rohil divided about a great head of stone on the scarp’s edge, twisting down in two thundering cataracts.
Marrow lay immediately below, soaked in the waterfall’s rose-powder haze. The original town, according to Geraus, had been built downriver but had crept like a caterpillar to the escarpment’s base as scalp broker after scalp broker vied to be the first to greet the westward-bound Scalpoi. Now, hacked out of the surrounding forest, it looked like a sore scabbed in pitch and wood, huts piled upon shanties, all clapped together using logs and orphaned materials, packed along the riverbank, encrusting the lower terraces of the cliff.
It was fully dark before Achamian reached the town’s derelict outskirts. Timber posts were all that remained of the original Marrow. He could see them standing in the surrounding bracken, as silent as the moonlight that illuminated them, some rotted, some leaning, all of them possessing a funereal solitude that he found unnerving. Various characters and random marks scored those nearest the track, the residue of uncounted travellers with their innumerable vanities and frustrations. Shining between gaps in the darkling clouds, the Nail of Heaven allowed him to decipher several. “I FUCK SRANC,” one said in fresh-cut Gallish. “HORJON FORGOT TO SLEEP WITH HIS ASS TO THE WALL,” another claimed in Ainoni pictograms—beside a blot that could have been suncooked blood.
The roar of the falls climbed high into the night, and the first of the mists beaded his skin. A sense of menace ringed the lights of habitation before him. How long
had it been since he had last braved a place like this? The carnival of strangers.
His mule in tow, Achamian trudged into what appeared to be the main thoroughfare. He was half-breathless by this time, his body suffused with the falling-forward hum of slogging through distances of mud. His cloak seemed lined with ingots of lead, so pendulous it had become. The town’s name was appropriate, he decided. Marrow. He could almost imagine that he tramped through the muck of halved bones.
Shadowy men reeled through the ruts around and beside him, some alone, their eyes hollow and alert, others in cackling groups, their lips and looks relaxed by a consciousness of numbers. Everyone was sodden. Everyone shouted over the thunder of the falls. Most were armed and armoured. Many were caked in blood, either because they were wounded or because they were unwashed.
These were the Scalpoi, sanctioned by the writ of the Aspect-Emperor, drawn from the four corners of the New Empire: wild-haired Galeoth, smooth-cheeked Nansur, great-bearded Tydonni, even lazy-lidded Nilnameshi—they were all here, trading scalps for Imperial kellics and shrial remissions.
Feeling harried by a succession of long looks, Achamian hunched deeper into the hood of his cloak. He knew he was anything but conspicuous, that part of him had simply forgotten how to trust in anonymity. Even still he found himself shrinking from the touch of other eyes, belligerent or curious, it did not matter. There was an unruliness in the air, a whiff of some profound lawlessness, which he initially ascribed to the release of pent urgencies. The Scalpoi spent months far from any hearth, warring and hunting Sranc through the trackless Wilds. He could scarce imagine a more savage calling, or a greater warrant for excess.
But as the mad parade thickened, he realized that the abandon was more than simply a matter of glutting frustrated lusts. There were too many men from too many different castes, creeds, and nations. Caste-nobles from Cingulat. Runaway slaves from Ce Tydonn. Fanim heretics from Girgash. It was as though common origins were all that guaranteed civilization, a shared language of life, and that everything was fury and miscommunication otherwise. Hungers—that was all these men had in common. Instincts. What had made these men wild wasn’t the wilderness, or even the mad savagery of the Sranc, it was the inability to trust anything more than the bestial in one another.
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