They paused to watch Xonghis confer in low tones with Lord Kosoter. Then they entered the Black Halls of Cil-Aujas with nary a commemorating word, let alone the fanfare Men typically attach to fatal endeavours. They simply assembled, leading their mules, then followed Cleric and their Captain in a file some thirty-five souls long. With Mimara at his side, Achamian glanced skyward one final time before joining the string of vanishing figures. In the slot of a hanging ravine, the Nail of Heaven twinkled alone in the endless blue, a beacon of all things high and open…
A final call to those who would dare the nethers of the earth.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Andiamine Heights
Little snake, what poison in your bite!
Little snake, what fear you should strike!
But they don't know, little snake-oh no!
They can't see the tiny places you go…
— Zemi Nursery Song
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-ofthe-Tusk), Momemn
Kelmomas had known his father had returned almost immediately. He saw it in a host of subtle cues that he didn't even know he could read: an imperceptible contraction in the Guards' posture, an alertness of pose and look in the Apparati, and a long-jog breathlessness in the slaves. Even the air assumed a careful taste, as though the drafts themselves had grown wary. Nevertheless, Kelmomas didn't realize he knew until he overheard one of the choir slaves gossiping about the Yatwerian Matriarch pissing herself beneath the Holy Mantle.
He's come to console Mother, the secret voice said.
Alone in the playroom, Kelmomas continued working on his model of Momemn, carving meticulous little obelisks out of balsa, long after darkness draped the Enclosure. A kind of childish indecision had overcome him, a listless need to continue poking at whatever he happened to be doing, to simply exist for a petulant time, thinking and acting stubbornly counter to fact.
It had always been like this with his father. Not fear, just a kind of canny reluctance, rootless and long-winded.
Eventually he had to relent-that too was part of the game-so he made his way to his mother's private apartments. He could hear his older brother, Inrilatas, ranting about the Gods in his locked room. His brother had broken his voice bludgeoning the walls years ago, yet still he croaked, on and on and on, as though flooding his room in some lunatic search for leaks. He never stopped raving, which was why he was always kept locked in his room. Kelmomas had not seen him for more than three years.
His mother's apartments were located down the hallway. He padded across the rug-strewn floor as silently as he could, his ears keen to the sound of his parents' voices filtering through innumerable wheezing cracks and surfaces. He paused outside the iron door, his breath as thin as a cat's.
"I know it pains you," Father was saying, "but you must have Theliopa with you in all your dealings."
"You fear skin-spies?" his mother replied.
Their voices possessed the weary burnish of a long and impassioned conversation. But the roots of his father's exhaustion stopped short of the deeper intonations that warbled in and out of his discourse. A heart-easing hum, and a kind of ursine growl, far too low to be consciously heard by Mother. These spoke from something as unwinded as it was inscrutable, an occluded soul, entirely hidden from lesser ears.
He manages her, the voice said. He sees through her face the way you do, only with far more clarity, and he shapes his voice accordingly.
How do you know? Kelmomas asked angrily, stung by the thought that anyone, even Father, could see further than him. Further into her.
"The nearer the Great Ordeal comes," Father said, "the more desperate the Consult grows, the more likely they will unleash what agents remain. Keep Theliopa with you at all times. Aside from my brother, she's the only one who can reliably see their true faces."
Kelmomas smiled at the thought of the skin-spies. Agents of the Apocalypse. He loved hearing the stories about their wicked depredations during the First Holy War. And he had gurgled with delight watching the black one being flayed-carefully, so that Mother wouldn't see, of course. Somehow, he just knew he would be one of the few who could see past their faces, just as he could see past his father's voice. If he found one, he decided, he would keep it secret, he would simply watch it, spy on it-he so dearly loved spying. What a game it would make!
He wondered who was faster…
"You fear they'll attack the Andiamine Heights?" Real horror shivered through Mother's voice as she said this, the horror of events scarcely survived.
All the more reason to trap it like a bug, Kelmomas decided. He would say things, cryptic things, that would make it wonder. He needed something to tease now that Samarmas was gone.
"What better way to distract me than by striking at my hearth?"
"But nothing distracts you," Mother said, her tone so desolate that only silence could follow. Kelmomas found himself leaning toward the door, such was the ache that emanated from the quiet beyond. It seemed he could hear them breathing, each following their own tangled string of thoughts. It seemed he could smell the absence of contact between them. Tears welled in his eyes.
She knows, the voice said. Someone has told her the truth about Father.
"When must you leave?" Mother asked.
"Tonight."
Kelmomas made ready to push through the door… Mother was hurting! And it was Father-Father! How could he have missed this before?
He'll see you, the voice warned.
Father?
None know how much he sees…
This puzzled the young Prince-Imperial. He stood motionless before the cast door, his hand arrested mid-air…
But she needs me-Mommy! Think of the warm cuddling, the tickles, the kisses on the cheek!
He's the root, the voice replied, and you're but the branch. Remember, the Strength burns brightest in him.
For reasons Kelmomas was entirely unable to fathom, that dropped his hand like lead.
The Strength.
He turned, ran like a loping athlete one-two-three-leap! — down the halls past the bemused Pillarian Guards. As a Prince-Imperial, he had the run of the Andiamine Heights, though he was forbidden to leave its halls and gardens without the express permission of the Empress. So run he did, down the tapestried halls, through the slave barracks and into the kitchens. It was here that he palmed a silver skewer. A couple of the more matronly slaves stopped to ruffle his hair and pinch his cheeks. "Poor boy," they said. "You loved your brother dearly, didn't you?" He looked through their faces, made them blush with compliments. He worked his way to the Atrium, but the great doors to the Imperial Audience Hall had long been shut. No matter, the entrance to one of the second-floor galleries remained propped open. He decided to climb the twining stairs upside down, walking on his hands.
He flipped back to his feet when he reached the summit. All was shadows. He could only see the airy hollows of the Hall by looking through the slot between the pillars and the immense tapestries that hung between. For some reason, it seemed both more vast and smaller when seen from this vantage. When he reached the final pillar, it unnerved him to see that he could look down on the Mantle and his mother's seat. It dawned on him that no matter how great, no matter how pure and concentrated one's Strength, it was always possible that someone unseen looked down.
He secured his hands and hooked his feet along the edge of the immediate tapestry, slid like a bronze weight to the polished expanse of the floor. The grand pillars astonished him-or so he pretended in the name of his epic feat. Laughing, he climbed the steps to the Mantle, the great throne of ivory and gold from which his father passed dread judgment upon the Known World.
"Skuh-skuh-skin spies!" he whispered to himself. How long would it be before they showed themselves?
He couldn't wait!
He climbed onto the throne's hard seat, sat swinging his feet for several moments, hoping for the onset of absolute power, becoming bored when it failed to arrive. A sparrow caught in the netting
above cried tweet-tweet-tweet in forlorn tedium. He craned his neck up and back to stare at its shadow. It periodically thrashed, a rustle like a dog's hind leg scratching. The stars beyond twinkled without sound.
He wished he had a stone, but all he had was the skewer.
The world he walked was far different from the world walked by others. He did not need the voice to tell him that. He could hear more, see more, know more-everything more than everybody save his father and maybe his uncle. His sense of smell, in particular…
He pressed himself from the throne, from the residual aura of his mother, and trotted down the steps to the Auditory floor. The smell of his uncle, the Shriah, he could recognize readily enough, but the smell of the other, the stranger, was pungent with unfamiliarity. He squatted, bent his face to the smear of evaporated urine-a fuzzy patch of grease in the moonlit gleam.
He breathed deep the Matriarch's rank odour. It transported him, enlightened him in the manner of petty things followed deep.
Then he stood and turned, leapt the stair to the dais in a single, effortless bound. He wandered onto the balcony behind the thrones, stared out across the moon-silvered distances of the Meneanor Sea.
There was something ominous about the Sea at night, the unseen heaving, the black curling beneath the booming surf, the sunless hissing. Only in the dark, it seemed, could the trackless extent of its menace be perceived. Vast. Impenetrable. All-embalming. Every struggle wrapped in a fizzing haze. Every death a dropping into the fathomless unseen…
Ever did Men drown in blackness, even in sun-spliced waters.
The young Prince-Imperial leapt over the balustrade.
The sorcerous Wards he need not worry about. He could see them easily enough. And the Pillarian Guards, who endlessly prowled the halls of the Andiamine Heights, he could hear around corners. Even if they were to catch him, something that still happened despite the years he had spent perfecting his game, the consequences of discovery would consist of little more than a lecture from Mother.
The Eцthic Guards, on the other hand, were a different matter. A relic of the old Ikurei Dynasty, they patrolled the grounds beyond the Holy Palace, the Imperial Precincts. Kelmomas imagined they would recognize him close up, his face held to torchlight; the problem lay in the inordinate skill and number of their bowmen. Every summer, Coithus Saubon, one of his father's two Exalt-Generals, sponsored archery contests across the Middle-North, with purses awarded to the runners-up and a tenure as a Guardsman granted to the winners. With the exception of the Galeoth Agmundrmen, they were the most celebrated archers in the Three Seas. And though the risk of being stuck like some quail or straw-stuffed target appealed to Kelmomas, the possibility most certainly did not.
It was no easy task, culling risks from possibilities.
Slinking from rooftop to rooftop, the Prince-Imperial climbed down the seaward faces of the Andiamine Heights, careful to always eel his way along interior corners and abutments, wherever fortune and architecture piled the shadows deep. He kept his belly snake-low. He avoided windows tumescent with light.
He warred against the savagery of his grin the entire way.
But how could he not exult? Here and there he passed solitary Guardsmen, creeping on fingers and toes with nary a sound, gliding on a dark benediction, with a grace malevolent and unseen. He watched them, the men he eluded, studied their armoured forms in the moonlight, all the while riven with a duping glee. Here I am! he cackled in his thoughts. Here I am in the dark behind you!
One sentry almost saw him, a restive Pillarian who paced back and forth and sent routine looks sliding to the shadows. Kelmomas was forced to hang motionlessness no less than five times, to trust utterly the dark line that he followed. It was a curious, bodily faith, an intoxicating rush of terror and certainty, something animal and original, as alive as anything could be. He shook with excitement afterwards, had to bite his lip to keep from howling aloud.
But the rest of the Guardsmen, Pillarian or Eцthic, stared out in utter ignorance of their ignorance, their expressions flattened by a hapless indifference to the oblivion that encircled them. It was as though they guarded a world where Kelmomas didn't exist and so could act with reckless abandon. It was good, the Prince-Imperial decided, that he tested them the way he did. What if he were a skin-spy? What then? In a moment of pious fury, he even settled on the lesson they had failed to learn. The darkness, he wanted to tell them, was not empty.
It was never empty.
He spent some time huddled in the crook formed by the chimney on the roof of the Lesser Stables, staring across the Batrial Campus at the monumental facade of the Guest Compound. No shafts had come whistling out of the darkness, no alarms had been raised, and it seemed that this was at once impossible and inevitable, as though he had cracked the world in two with his subterfuge. One capricious, the other to be disposed with as he pleased.
And on this night, only the latter was to be believed.
Immediately below him, in the light of poled torches, several slaves harnessed a horse to a wain loaded with what appeared to be empty casks and bushels. A group of drunken cavalrymen, Kidruhil, heckled them from a table that had been dragged into the cobbled yard. "Do you hear thunder?" one of them called out, raising a storm of laughter from his fellows.
Kelmomas lowered himself over the roof's edge, then dropped as softly as silken rope. He circled behind the ridge of freshly heaped hay that the slaves, according to the soldier's catcalls, were clearing room for in the stables. He burrowed into the loose thatch at the pile's terminus, several paces down from the wain, then waited for the slaves to embark. He breathed deep the smell of chaff and the dust of dried-out life.
Peering through a straw skein, he watched one of the slaves, a balding man with a panicked face, climb the bench and urge the harnessed horse, a sturdy black, forward with a low whistle and flick of the reins. The Kidruhil paused in their laughter, as though struck by this moment of common mastery. Wielding pitchforks, the other slaves were already heaving great manes of hay into the air. The torches coughed and sputtered.
Kelmomas focused on the horse, timed the clopping tempo of his legs, closer, closer, until its bobbing head blotted the image of the driver. Shod hooves falling like hammers. Knuckled legs trotting, bending stiff and tensile like unstrung bows. Closer.
Kelmomas leapt into the thundering clatter, reached-
His hands hooked to the harness's nethers, he pressed himself against the veined belly, willed himself into the animal's torpid heat. The whole world rumbled. The great body floating above him, flexing to and fro. The cobbles rushing beneath, falling into the rapping wheels. The young Prince-Imperial laughed aloud, knowing the racket would swallow his every sound.
They rattled across the Batrial Campus, and as they passed the Guest Compound at a tangent, Kelmomas released and twisted, landing face down on his palms and toes. He was sprinting the instant the wain's box cleared him, a shadow flitting toward the succession of arches along the ground-floor portico.
Then he was in the Guest Compound.
Her scent was clear now, a bitter old woman smear, like the trail a worm might make. He followed it up to the third floor, paused before turning down the hall that led to her suites. He heard yet another guard's heartbeat.
He looked then hid in a single motion, one eye daring the wall's edge. A blink was all he needed. The details he could safely consider in the light of his soul's eye: a lantern-lit corridor ornate with a faux colonnade and marble mouldings. A long length of carpet, trimmed with white vining, the blue so deep that most would think it black. A single sentry, neither Pillarian or Eцthic, standing rigid before the smell of her door.
No noise, save the lanterns and their endless glowing exhalation.
Kelmomas turned the corner and began stomping down the hall, sob-crooked lips, a peevish, mucus-filled moan, tears and a look of ruinous self-pity. The sentry smiled in a manner that confirmed his fatherhood, and so his familiarity with little-boy-tantrums. H
e leaned in tsk-tsk commiseration, the Golden Sickle of Yatwer emblazoned on his black-leather cuirass.
Kelmomas stepped into the fan of his multiple shadows.
"Come, now, little man-"
The motion was singular, abrupt with elegance. The skewer tip entered the sentry's right tear duct and slipped into the centre of his head. The ease of penetration was almost alarming, like poking a nail into soft garden soil. Using the bone along the inner eye socket for leverage, Kelmomas wrenched the buried point in a precise circle. There was no need, he thought, to mutilate geometry as well.
He stepped to the side, his arm held high while the man toppled. The sentry's face lolled to the left and turned almost upright as his weight yanked his skull clear of the gleaming skewer. He twitched opened-eyed on the carpet, his fingers pawing the fabric like a purr-drunk kitten-but only for a heartbeat or two.
Kelmomas tugged the man's knife from its sheaf.
The brass-strapped door was unlocked.
Cloth had been drawn over the windows, so that the light creaking in from the hallway was the room's only illumination. "Hello?" somebody called-one of the body-slaves sleeping on the floor of the antechamber. The others awoke, leaned forward into the bar of light. Four altogether, blinking. At first, they seemed little more than disembodied faces, then, when he stepped among them, levitating howls. He hacked at them, striking along the interstices between flailing shadow-limbs. No game, it seemed, had ever been so thrilling. To not be tagged by skin or soiled by blood. To walk the cracks between heartbeats. To kill as though a wind, without any trace of passing.
The faces fell one by one, gushing like slashed wineskins.
The Matriarch was quite awake by the time the little boy slipped into her bedroom. "Tweet!" he trilled. "Tweet-tweet!" His giggling was uncontrollable…
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