What troubled her was not her pride, it was her fear.
To listen to Naree pleasure strangers was to listen to herself as she once was, to once again be made a scabbard for edge after cutting edge. And she knew it all, remembered it with rank clarity. The liquid instant of insertion, the breath pent, then released, far too quick to be caught in a passion so clumsy as regret. The grinding tickle of the little, and the thrusting ache of the great. To be a flint struck, never knowing what fire would be stoked within her, be it disgust or tenderness or gasping pleasure. To make a tool of her turmoil, to make theatre of the wincing, flinching line that so inflamed men.
But what she had not known, not truly, was the danger.
She had respected her custom-to be sure. She had her rules, precautions. No drunks, unless she knew them well. No white-skinned teamsters or black-skinned mercenaries. No ulcers. But she had always-and she found this thought difficult to think-believed herself greater than the sum of the men who used her. She was at least as embittered as other whores and perhaps more inclined to self-pity. But she had never seen herself as a victim — not truly. Not the way Naree so obviously was…
She did not think herself a lonely child used and traded between lewd and dangerous men.
Sometimes, peering through the narrow slots between the screen's panels, she watched their faces as they toiled upon the girl, and she balled her fists for terror, so certain was she that whoever it was would break Naree's neck for simple domination's sake. Sometimes, after the tall shadow had left, she would peer at the girl lying naked across mussed and soiled blankets, raising a hand as about to speak to someone, only to lower it in indecision. And the deposed Empress of the Three Seas would lie riven with thoughts of gods and animals, of heartbreak and pollution, and the purity that hides in the bewildering in-betweens. The World would seem a place of rutting hungers and Men no more than Sranc tied into more complicated knots.
She would yearn for her Palace and her adoring slaves, for the sunlight lancing through scented steam, and hidden choirs singing. And she would cry, as silently as she could manage, for want of her little son.
"I am… shamed," the girl said to her once.
"Why should you be?"
"Because… You could have me damned to Hell."
The Empress nodded in indulgence. "So you're afraid, then… not ashamed."
"You are his vessel!" Naree cried. "I've been to the Scuari-I've seen Him at your side. The Holy Aspect-Emperor. He is a god-I am certain of it!"
These words left a breach that only shallow breathing could fill.
Then Esmenet said, "What if he were simply a man, Naree?"
She would never understand the dark whim that overcame her in saying this, though she would come to regret it.
"I don't understand."
"What if he were simply a man pretending to be more-a prophet, or even as you say, a god-simply to manipulate you and countless others?"
"But why would he do such a thing?" the girl cried, seeming at once thrilled, confused, and appalled.
"To save your life."
Naree, for all her beauty, looked plain in her moments of unguarded sorrow. Esmenet watched her blink two tears before trying to find shelter beneath the false roof that was her smile.
"Why would he do such a thing?"
They took their meals in silence, usually. At first Esmenet attributed the girl's silence to her childhood slavery-slaves were universally trained to remain quiet and unobtrusive in the presence of their betters. But the girl's boldness otherwise led her to reconsider. In her darker moods, Esmenet thought she might be protecting herself, doing all she could to ease the betrayal to come. When her humour was lighter, she thought the girl was simply oblivious to the meanings that forever soak silence and so was unnaturally content with it.
At first there had been a certain comfort to their cohabitation, one borne out of an alignment between Esmenet's bottomless exhaustion and Naree's subservient wilfulness. Indeed, it was the neighbours, the constellation of sordid lives about them, across the street, above and below them, that generated most of the conflict. Usually, Esmenet thought Naree was simply using something incidental, like a random catcall from the women across the way, as an excuse to vent unspoken passion. The girl was always careful to use her meek, slave voice to be sure. But otherwise she hectored Esmenet as though she really were an ailing grandmother.
"You need to walk slower in case they see your shadow through the shutters! You need to be more sick!"
The complaints were nothing short of ridiculous at times, and yet she played along. Nothing is so incendiary as anxious fright.
"You need bend your back-hunch like an old woman!"
And so more and more terror came to own the air between them.
The Shrial Knight watched with eyes that could only blink.
A young boy with shaggy blond hair played alone on the parapet before him. When he stepped out of the shadow, his mane flashed near-white in the sun. But he was filthy otherwise, as though he had only animal wilderness to rear him.
"So what happens with the Ordeal?" the boy said, speaking to someone the Knight could not see.
"War," the boy replied as if answering his own question. "But not just any war. Skinny War."
He laughed at an unheard reply.
"Imagine there, at the top of that tree, there's a man standing, just standing, while below him, the skinnies run raging, a great mass of them, as big as the city, even bigger, unto the ends of what can be seen. Imagine the man singing in voices that shake through the bones of things, soaking the living ground below them with buckets of light-yes, light! — boiling the skinnies in their skin! Now imagine a necklace of such men, a hanging line of them, walking across the wastes, blasting the hordes shrieking about them."
The boy did a whimsical cartwheel, his limbs arcing with acrobatic precision. He grinned at his unearned expertise.
" Father told me. In his own words, he said, 'This is how it will happen, Kel.'"
The Shrial Knight tried to scream.
"Well, mostly in his words. Some of my words too."
He paused as if listening to an inaudible answer.
"Secret words-he even said so. Words that no one- no one — can hear."
He walked like an acrobat following a rope, heel to toe, heel to toe. Despite his diminutive frame, he seemed to tower above the ink pool of his shadow.
"No. He never told me to kill anyone. But then, why would he have to? The words were secret…"
For the first time the boy turned to look at the watching Knight.
" Of course he would expect me to kill anyone listening."
The boy skipped toward the paralyzed man, careful to avoid the pooling blood. He paused to peer down at him, hands on knees. His woolly head blotted out the sun's glare.
At last he addressed the Knight directly. "You heard everything, didn't you?"
He leaned low before his face, reached into his eye-almost.
Again, the Shrial Knight tried to scream-but his eyes could only blink.
Somehow, impossibly, the boy pulled a silver skewer from beneath his left eye, as if the Knight's head were a sheath. He dandled the thing against his face, left bird-tracks of blood high on his cheek.
"That was supposed to be secret…"
And the little boy grinned, an angel with the face of a demon.
Naree had to stifle a scream when she saw him darkening her door-both women had fretted his latest absence.
Imhailas had become increasingly more furtive in his visits. Few women had as much reason to despise men as Esmenet, to think them vain, cruel, even ridiculous, and yet she found herself yearning, not simply for him, Imhailas, the man who had sacrificed all in her name, but for the simple aura of his strength. When it was just her and Naree, it somehow seemed as if anything might happen, and they would be helpless. They were refugees. But when he came to them, bearing the scent of public exertions, they almost seemed a small army.
; As rude, as apish, as it could be, masculine strength promised as much as it threatened. Men, she reasoned, were a good tonic against Men.
He had dyed his hair and beard black, which probably explained Naree's almost scream. And he had changed his clothes: he now wore an iron-ringed leather jerkin over a blue-cotton tunic. His armpits were black, and his thighs were slicked in sweat. His height always surprised her, no matter how many times she saw him. She could not look at his arms without feeling the ghost of their embrace. His face looked stronger for the blackness of his beard. His blue eyes more wintry, and if it was possible, more moist with devotion. He had come to seem the very incarnation of refuge, the single soul she could trust, and she loved him deeply.
Esmenet froze where she stood. She need only see his expression to know that he had found some answer to her most desperate question.
Imhailas pressed a dismayed Naree aside. He strode forward and fell immediately to his knees at his Empress's feet. He knew her. He knew she would not forgive specious delays. So he spoke the very thing she had glimpsed in his eye.
"Everyone, Your Glory…" He paused to swallow. "Everyone believes that Kelmomas is hiding with you. Maithanet does not have him."
The words did not so much explode within her as explode her, as if Being could be palmed and tingling Absence slipped into its place. First Samarmas and now… now…
For so long Kelmomas had been her strongest, surest limb, and her heart had been its socket. Now that it had been wrenched from her frame, she could only fall back, bleeding.
Kelmomas… Her dear, sensitive, sweet…
"Your Glory!" Imhailas was calling. Somehow he had managed to catch her mid-swoon. "Your Glory-Please! You must believe me! Maithanet genuinely does not know where Kelmomas is… He lives, Your Glory- he lives! The only question is who? Who could have smuggled him out of the Palace? Who has hidden him?"
And so, because Imhailas was a dutiful soul, one of those servants who truly placed the desires of his masters before his own, he began listing all those who might have taken her son into their protection: the Exalt-Ministers, the body-slaves, the officers of the Army and the Guard. He had known his news would dismay her, so he had rehearsed his encouragements, his arguments against abject despair.
She recovered some measure of herself in the strength of his ardour, in the beauty of his earnest declarations. But she did not truly listen. Instead she thought of the Palace, of the labyrinth hidden within the Andiamine Heights' labyrinthine halls.
And it seemed a second mother to her… the subtleties of her Home.
Please keep him safe.
Dragging, huffing because grown-ups are so big. Mopping, scrubbing blood, because grown-ups become keen when one of them goes missing. Then dragging more, down into the dark where only memory could see.
Dropping, grinning as the dead knight plummeted down the well.
Then carving, cutting.
Biting, chewing-he must be quicker next time, so the meat does not grow so cool.
Chewing and chewing and crying…
Missing Mommy.
"So what are you saying?"
"We can trust this man, Your Glory. I am sure of it."
Esmenet sat, as had become their custom, on the settee with Imhailas cross-legged at her feet. Naree lay curled on her bed, watching them with a kind of envious disinterest. An oil lantern set upon the floor provided illumination, deepening the yellow of the walls, inking the grooves between the tiles, and throwing their bloated shadows across the far regions of the apartment.
"You're saying I should flee Momemn! And on a slave ship, no less!"
Imhailas became cautious, the way he always did when speaking around her wilder hopes.
"I'm not saying you should flee, Your Glory. I'm saying you have no choice."
"How can I hope to recover the Mantle if-?"
"You are imprisoned or dead?" the Exalt-Captain interrupted. She forgave him these small transgressions, not simply because she had no choice, but because she knew how sovereigns who censored their subordinates quickly became their own worst enemies. History had heaped their corpses high.
"Please…" Imhailas persisted. "Few know the ways of Empire better than you, Your Glory. Here, Maithanet's rule is absolute-but not so elsewhere! Many of the Great Factions clamour-fairly half the Empire teeters on the edge of open rebellion… You need only seize that half!"
She understood the force of his argument-not a day passed where she failed to inventory all those she thought she could trust. House Nersei, in particular, in Aoknyssus. Surely she could depend on Queen Miramis-Saubon's niece and Proyas's wife-to at least give her sanctuary, if not prosecute the interests of her family. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, it seemed she could hear the laughter of her children, Xinemus and Thaila, smell Conriya's saline winds…
"All you need do is find some place safe," her Exalt-Captain pressed. "Some place where you can plant your Standard and call on those who remain faithful. They will come to you, Your Glory. In their thousands they will come to you, lay their lives at your feet. Trust me, please, Your Glory! Maithanet fears this possibility more than all others!"
She stared at him, her eyes pinned open to avoid blinking tears.
"But…" she heard herself say in a small, pathetic voice.
Imhailas seemed to blink her tears for her. He looked down, and a part of her bubbled in panic. He knew that she had surrendered all want for power, that she had been truly defeated, not by Maithanet, but by the loss of her little boy…
To leave Momemn would be to leave Kelmomas-and that was something she could not do.
Yield another child.
The girl did it, Esmenet knew, as much to spite her as to win him.
The coos in the dark. The creak of dowelled wood. The groan of dowelled loins. The breaths stolen, as though every thrust were a sudden fall.
He was a man, she told herself: you could no more ask a fox to resist a rabbit. But Naree, she was a woman-even more, she was a whore — and so commanded her desire the way carpenters commanded their hammers. If Esmenet had heard Imhailas cajole her, bully her with the cruel singularity of purpose that distinguished lust from love, then she might have understood. But instead, she heard Naree seducing him — in the very same tones she used to ply her daily custom, no less. The girlish pouting. The coy teasing. The restlessness of limbs impatient for carnal struggle.
She heard a woman, a rival, making love to the man between them for her sake.
Leave him to me, the girl was saying. You are old. Your peach is bruised and rotten. Your passion is flabby and desperate… Leave him to me.
Esmenet told herself it was nothing, merely the coupling of shadows in the dark, something that was scarcely real because it could scarcely be seen. She told herself it was his real motive, the primary reason why Imhailas wanted her to flee the city and abandon her son, so that he could plumb Naree with abandon. She told herself it was simply punishment, the way Fate chastised old whores so conceited as to think themselves queens.
She told herself many things as her ears roared for listening: the pluck of lips clasping about gasps, the cotton sweep of hot dry skin against hot dry skin… the pasty peal of wet from wet.
And when he began groaning, the Holy Empress of the Three Seas could feel him hard and beautiful upon her, as he was meant to be, the reverence in his flower-petal touch. And she began weeping, her sobs stifled, lost between the gusts of their passion. What had happened? What rite had she foreshortened? What deity had she offended? What had she done to be wronged so, again and again and again?
The bed cracked with pent tensions. What was languorous became rugged with pitched passion. Naree cried out, rose upon Esmenet's lover like the white on the forward curl of wave…
Leave him to me!
And the door exploded open on lances of torchlight. Armoured men burst upon its astonished wake. Naree gagged more than screamed. The screen was kicked aside even as Esmenet bolted from her blankets. Tear-sp
liced torchlight. Grinning faces, beards greasy in the uncertain light. Strapping figures, draped in impregnable chain. Gleaming blades. Golden Tusks stamped everywhere across the floating madness.
And Imhailas, nude and howling, his beautiful face cramped in wanton savagery.
A shadow clenched her hair, heaved her to the floor, yanked her to her knees.
"Imagine!" some leering voice cackled. "A whore hiding among whores!"
And her Exalt-Captain battled, solitary, his broadsword whooping through the close air. An armoured man fell clutching his throat. "Apostate!" Imhailas bellowed, suddenly the pale-skinned barbarian he had always been. "Trait-!"
One of the Knights tackled him about the waist, carried him hard to the floor.
They fell upon him, hammering, stomping. One heaved him to his knees. Three others began striking his face with iron-girded fists. She watched his beauty disintegrate as if it were nothing more than leather wrapped about pottery. She felt something primal climb from her throat, heard it fly…
The Shrial Knight gripping his hair let him flop to the floor, where his skull drained. It seemed she could not look away from the socket that had been his face, so violent was its impossibility.
This could not be happening.
Naree's shrieking scarcely seemed human. It hung high, warbled with insanity.
And for the longest time it seemed the World's only noise.
The Knights of the Tusk looked to one another and laughed. One silenced Naree with a vicious backhand. The girl toppled from the far side of the bed.
Esmenet had forgotten the carelessness of men who kill-the danger of their dark and turbulent whims. But the old instincts were quick in returning: the sudden vigilance, the slack body, the numbness that passed for cold concentration…
The ability to see past the death of someone beloved.
The party consisted of some eight or nine Shrial Knights, but not from any company she could identify. Their breaths reeked for wine and liquor. A cloaked priest, whom she now recognized as a Collegian, walked to where Naree had retreated, curled naked beneath one of the shuttered windows. He bent above her, clutched her wrist with careless force, and as the girl wept and shook her head in negation, he counted out five gold kellics into her palm.
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