So even now, as she glared at Fanayal, it seemed something reptilian peered through her peering, the look of something vicious and remorseless with age, flashing from the gaze of a woman, flushed and breathless and so very inviting.
“We take such gifts that come,” she crooned. “We suffer this worldly trifle, and She will save us! From oblivion! From those demons our iniquities have awakened! This is but the arena where souls settle eternity. Our suffering is dross compared to the glory to come!”
Fanayal laughed, genuinely amused. But his humour cut against the obvious unease of his court.
“So even your captivity … You think this a gift?”
“Yes.”
“And if I were to deliver you to the lust of my men?”
“You will not.”
“And why is that?”
In a twinkling, she became coy and whorish. She even glanced down at her breasts, which were firm with improbable youth. “Because I have been reborn as black earth, as rain and sweating sun,” she said. “The Goddess has cast me in Her image, as sweet, sweet Fertility. You will not allow other men to trade me, so long as your loins bur—”
“My loins?” Fanayal cried out with forced incredulity.
Malowebi gazed and blinked. She literally tingled with nubile promise, yet still she carried the air of old stone. Something … Something was wrong …
“Even now,” she said, “your seed rises to the promise of soft earth deeply ploughed.”
Masculine laughter rumbled through the chamber, only to falter for want of breath. Even old Malowebi could feel a tightness in his chest and a matching thickness crawling across his thighs …
With no little horror the Mbimayu sorcerer realized the Goddess was among them. There was peril, here—great peril. This woman walked with one foot on the Outside …
He opened his mouth to call out in warning but caught himself on the very hinge of his voice.
He was no friend to these savage people. He was an observer, interpreter. The question was whether Zeüm’s interests would be served if Fanayal were alerted. Ally or not, the fact remained that the man was a fanatic of the worst kind, a believer in a creed, Fanimry, that made devils out of the Gods and hells out of the Heavens. To strike an alliance that earned the enmity of the Mother of Birth would be a fool’s exchange. The Zeümi might not pray to the Hundred, given their intercessory faith, but they certainly revered and respected them.
“‘Soft earth deeply ploughed,’” Fanayal repeated, gazing upon her form with frank hunger. He turned to the lean and warlike men of his court. “Such are the temptations of evil, my friends!” he called, shaking his head. “Such are the temptations!”
More laughter greeted these words.
“Your sisters are dead,” the Padirajah continued as if immune to her wiles. “Your temples are pulled down. If these are gifts, as you say, then I am in a most generous mood.” He paused to make room for a few frail guffaws from his assembled men. “I could give you a noose, say, or a thousand lashes. Perhaps I will have Meppa show you what kind of prison your body can be.”
Malowebi found himself wondering whether the woman had even blinked, so relentless was her gaze. The fact that Fanayal weathered it with such thoughtless ease actually troubled the Mbimayu sorcerer. Was the man simply oblivious or did he possess a heart every bit as hard as her own?
Either possibility would not bode an alliance well.
“My soul has already left and returned to this body,” she said, her girlish voice scratched with the harsh intonations of a crone. “There is no torment you could inflict upon me.”
“So hard!” Fanayal cried laughing. “Stubborn! Devil-worshipping witch!”
Again the desert court rumbled with laughter.
“I would not ply your body,” Meppa said without warning. So far he had stood silent and motionless at his sovereign’s side, his face directed forward as always. Only the asp, which curved like a onyx bow across his left cheek, faced the lone woman.
Psatma Nannaferi regarded the Cishaurim with a sneer. “My soul is beyond your devilry, Snakehead. I worship the Dread Mother.”
Never had Malowebi witnessed an exchange more uncanny, the blinded man speaking as if to a void, the shackled woman as if she were a mad queen among hereditary slaves.
“You worship a demon.”
The Mother-Supreme laughed with the bitter hilarity. The cackle rang across distant walls, echoed through the high crypt hollows, gelding all the humour that had come before it. Suddenly the assembled men were nothing but ridiculous boys, their pride swatted from them by the palm of a shrewd and exacting mother.
“Call her what you will!” Psatma Nannaferi exclaimed. “Demon? Yes! I worship a demon!—if it pleases you to call her such! You think we worship the Hundred because they are good? Madness governs the Outside, Snakehead, not gods or demons—or even the God! Fool! We worship them because they have power over us. And we—we Yatwerians—worship the one with the most power of all!”
Malowebi squelched another urge to call out, to urge the Fanim to spare her, to set her free, then to burn a hundred bulls in Yatwer’s honour. The Mother was here! Here!
“Gods are naught but greater demons,” the Cishaurim said, “hungers across the surface of eternity, wanting only to taste the clarity of our souls. Can you not see this?”
The woman’s laughter trailed into a cunning smile. “Hungers indeed! The fat will be eaten, of course. But the high holy? The faithful? They shall be celebrated!”
Meppa’s voice was no mean one, yet its timbre paled in the wake of the Mother-Supreme’s clawing rasp. Even still he pressed, a tone of urgent sincerity the only finger he had to balance the scales. “We are a narcotic to them. They eat our smoke. They make jewellery of our thoughts and passions. They are beguiled by our torment, our ecstasy, so they collect us, pluck us like strings, make chords of nations, play the music of our anguish over endless ages. We have seen this, woman. We have seen this with our missing eyes!”
Malowebi scowled. Fanim madness … It had to be.
“Then you know,” Psatma Nannaferi said in a growl that crawled across Malowebi’s skin. “There will be no end to your eating, when She takes you. Your blood, your flesh—they are inexhaustible in death. Taste what little air you can breathe, Snakehead. You presume your Solitary God resembles you. You make your image the form of the One. You think you can trace lines, borders, through the Outside, like that fool, Sejenus, say what belongs to the God of Gods and what does not—errant abstractions! Hubris! The Goddess waits, Snakehead, and you are but a mote before her patience! Birth and War alone can seize—and seize She does!”
The Mbimayu sorcerer glanced out over the festooned court, his attention drawn by gasps and murmurs of outrage. The desert men watched, their faces caught between fury and horror. Several of them even signed small folk charms with their fingers. The oddities had been piled too high for them not to realize something profound was amiss.
“Stay your curses!” Fanayal cried, his humour finally beaten into fury.
She cackled in a manner far too savage for lips as young as hers. Dust plumed through a rare shaft of sunlight, star-scapes rolling on temple drafts. “Yes, Mother!” she shouted to the air the way Meppa might. “Seizing him would be a delight! Yes!”
“Demoness!” the Last Cishaurim bellowed. He descended the steps toward her, his face held forward as stiff as a doll’s. “I know the true compass of your power. You are written across ages and yet you need tools—Men. And all Men can fail. It is the foundation of what we are! You will be broken with your tools! And you will starve in your pit!”
“Yes!” Psatma Nannaferi cackled once again. “All Men save one!”
Meppa lowered his face, as if only now seeing her through the etched silver of his band. “The White-Luck,” he said.
“White-Luck?” Fanayal asked.
Malowebi stood breathless in the wake of the question. These Fanim barbarians could not fathom the disaster th
ey courted. The Hundred. The Hundred rode to war!
“There are infinite paths through the tumble of events,” Meppa explained to his sovereign. “The White-Luck, the idolaters believe, is that perfect line of action and happenstance that can see any outcome come to pass. The White-Luck Warrior is the man who walks that line. Everything that he needs, happens, not because he wills it but because his need is identical to what happens. Every step, every toss of the number-sticks, is a …” He turned back to the fierce glare of the Yatwerian Mother-Supreme.
“Is a what?” Fanayal demanded.
Meppa shrugged. “A gift.”
The diminutive woman cackled and rattled her chains for stamping her feet. “You are but a temporary blight! A trial that sorts the faithful from the thieves. A far greater war has seized the Three Seas. The Goddess has broken the yoke of the Thousand Temples. The Cults arm themselves for battle. Ride, Fanim fool! Ride! Conquer what you can! Death and horror will eat you all ere this ends!”
Fanayal ab Kascamandri raised his hand as if trying to snatch words she had tossed aside. “So this White-Luck Warrior of yours,” he snapped, “he hunts the Aspect-Emperor?”
“The Goddess hunts the Demon.”
Fanayal turned to his Cishaurim and grinned. “Tell me, Meppa. Do you like her?”
“Like her?” the blind man responded, obviously too accustomed to his jokes to be incredulous. “No.”
“Well I do,” the Padirajah said. “Even her curses please me.”
“So she is to be spared?”
“She knows things, Meppa. Things we need to know.”
But Malowebi, his skin crawling with gooseflesh, understood, as did every man present save perhaps the Cishaurim: the Bandit Padirajah simply made excuses. For all her provocations, for all her deadliness, Psatma Nannaferi remained, as she had said, soft earth deeply ploughed …
And the dread Mother of Birth would work her inscrutable will.
Momemn
Grief had crippled her. Grief for the death of her youngest, her sweetest and most vulnerable, Samarmas. Grief for the loss of her oldest, her bitterest and most wronged, Mimara.
Anger had saved her. Anger at her husband for stranding her. Anger at her servants for failing her and for doubting her—doubting her most of all.
Anger and the love of dear little Kelmomas.
She had taken to stalking the palace halls those nights that sleep eluded her. Twice now she had caught guardsmen throwing number-sticks, and once, slaves making love in the Hepatine Gardens—sins she knew her husband would have punished but that she feigned to overlook. Almost inevitably, she found herself padding alone through the cavernous heart of the Imperial Audience Hall. She would gawk as she walked, crane her neck like the caste-menial she was, thinking of all the peoples behind the panoply of symbols hanging between the polished pillars. She would climb the dais, run her fingers across the arm of her husband’s great throne, then sashay out onto the veranda beyond, where she would gaze across the labyrinthine expanse of her capital.
How? How did a low and mean whore, the kind who would sell her daughter in times of famine, become the Blessed Empress of all the Three Seas? This, she had always thought, was the great question of her life, the remarkable fact that historians would ponder in future generations.
She had been the rut, the track long mudded, and now she found herself the charioteer.
There was a mystery and a beauty in great inversions. This was the genius and the power of the Circumfix, the paradox of the God Almighty hanging naked from an iron ring. All men are born helpless, and most men simply grow into more complicated forms of infancy. And yet, since they are the only summit they know, they constantly find themselves looking down even as they grovel at the knees of the mighty. “All slaves become emperors,” Protathis had written with canny cynicism, “the instant the slaver looks away.”
Her rise—as impossible, as miraculous, as it had been—expressed a conceit native to all men. And so the wild anomaly of her life had become a kind of human beacon. For the caste-nobility, long used to beating aspiration from their slaves, her mere existence triggered an instinct to punish. For slaves and menials, long accustomed to eating their imperious judgments, her rise reminded them of their daily indignity.
But their question was essentially the same. Who was she to be exalted so?
This. This was the real question of her life, the one the historians would never think to ask. Not how could a whore become Empress, but how could a whore be an Empress.
Who was she to be exalted so?
She would show them.
She had laboured tirelessly since word of Iothiah’s fall had reached her. Emergency sessions with Caxes Anthirul, her Home Exalt-General, as well as the ever-irascible Werjau, Prime Nascenti of the Ministrate. Apparently activity along the Scylvendi frontier, which had surged in previous weeks, had now dwindled to nothing, a fact that at once heartened her, because of the redeployment it allowed, and troubled her. She had read The Annals, and though Casidas had died long before the Scylvendi sacked Cenei, she could not but recall throughout that reading how all the far-flung glory he described had been swept away by the People of War.
Mercurial. Merciless. Cunning. These were the words that best described the Scylvendi. She knew this because she had known Cnaiür urs Skiötha, and because she had raised his son, Moënghus, as her own.
Though her generals had eyes only for the prospect of avenging their fellows in Shigek, she knew stripping the Scylvendi frontier was a risk—a mad risk. Despite denuding the Empire otherwise, Kellhus had left three crack Columns to guard the Gap, and for no small reason.
But Fanayal and the cursed Yatwerians had left her no choice. The plan was to garrison Gedea as best as they could while the Imperial Army of the West assembled at Asgilioch. Hinnereth could be supplied by sea. General Anthirul assured her that they would have five full Columns ready to retake Shigek by summer’s end. Though everyone present understood what Fanayal intended, none dared speak it in her presence. The Bandit Padirajah had not so much attacked the Empire as her legitimacy.
He would suffer for that. For the first time in Esmenet’s life, she actually found herself gloating over the prospect of destroying another. And it did not trouble her in the slightest, even though she knew her former self would recoil in horror from such malevolent passions. Fanayal ab Kascamandri would scream for her mercy before all was said and done. Nothing could be more simple.
She also met regularly with both her Master of Spies, Phinersa, and her Vizier-in-Proxy, Vem-Mithriti. She had feared that Phinersa, who always seemed brittle for his nervous intensity, would fold under the extraordinary demands she made of him. But if anything the man thrived. Within a week of Iothiah’s fall, Phinersa had almost entirely rebuilt their network of spies throughout Shigek. When she asked him for pretexts she could use to arrest Cutias Pansulla, he had the man imprisoned by the following evening, allowing her to install Biaxi Sankas in his place in the Imperial Synod.
Likewise, she had feared that Vem-Mithriti would literally die, so feeble did he seem. But he too flourished, organizing cadres of Schoolmen, students, and those, like Vem-Mithriti, too frail to participate in the Great Ordeal, for the defence of the Empire. All the world had thought the Cishaurim exterminated by the First Holy War. The stories of their return had sparked a new, almost fanatical, resolve in those Schoolmen who remained.
It seemed miraculous, when she paused to think about it, the way her husband’s ministers rallied about her. From the outset, she had understood that the greatest strength of an empire, its size, was at once its greatest weakness. So long as its population believed in its power and purpose, an empire could bring almost limitless resources to bear against its foes, be they internal or external. But when that belief waned, its tendency was to dissolve into warring tribes. The very resources that had been its strength became its enemy.
This was what made the fall of Iothiah so disastrous. Yes, Fanayal had cast all of Sh
igek into lawless turmoil. Yes, he had cut the western Empire in half. But Shigek was but one province out of many, and the links between north and south had always been maritime thanks to the Great Carathay. Strategically, the loss of Iothiah was little more than a nuisance.
Symbolically, however …
The crisis she faced was a crisis in confidence, nothing more, nothing less. The less her subjects believed in the Empire, the less some would sacrifice, the more others would resist. It was almost arithmetic. The balance was wobbling, and all the world watched to see which way the sand would spill. Anasûrimbor Esmenet had made a resolution to act as if she believed to spite all those who doubted her as much as anything else, and paradoxically, they had all started believing with her. It was a lesson Kellhus had drummed into her countless times and one she resolved never to forget again.
To know is to have power over the world; to believe is to have power over men.
With belief then, belief and craft, she would heave on the great chain of empire and haul the balance to the benefit of her children. Esmenet had no more illusions. She understood that if she failed, her sons and daughters would all be doomed.
And she simply would not—could not!—tolerate another …
Another Samarmas.
As always, her Seneschal, Ngarau, proved indispensable. The longer she had been involved in the New Empire’s administration, the more she had come to realize that it possessed its own codes and dialects—and the more she had understood not only why men such as Ngarau were so indispensable, but also why Kellhus, no matter how bloody his conquests, never failed to spare the functionaries of each nation he conquered. Everything required translation. The more fluent the Apparati, the fewer the misinterpretations, the quicker the findings, the more decisive the Empire’s actions.
The only wheel she could not turn in concert with the others was the Thousand Temples. But soon, very soon, she would have a resolution to that dilemma.
The White Luck Warrior Page 28