Even Mother.
One afternoon the Narindar abruptly turned his head as if to look at someone standing before his chamber door—which he never bolted. Then he was at the door, pausing, looking back to where he had stood moments before. Then he was striding out into the corridor beyond, forcing the young Prince-Imperial to scramble the way he always did, scampering through the black slots, shimming up to the next iron grating to spy his enigmatic quarry. For all his diabolic implication, the assassin was by far the easiest to track of the souls the boy had pursued through the palace. He walked with the measure of a lifelong soldier, his pace welded to some constant and transcendent tempo. No one dared accost him. And he passed through points of congestion with the smoky ease of a phantom.
On this occasion he left the regimented grid of the Apparatory and passed into the chaos of the Lower Palace, into the stores, one of the few places where the network of secret tunnels did not go. The panicked Prince-Imperial found himself stranded at an intersection of hallways, watching the Narindar recede into obscurity, becoming no more than a dimming succession of glimpses in the intermittent lantern-light.
Then, as he strode upon the very limit of visibility, Kelmomas thought he saw him step sideways, vanish into an alcove of some kind. The boy lay at the grill for some time, peering to no avail and debating what he should do. After weeks of shadowing the man with no problem, what did it mean to lose him here and now?
Was this how it happened?
He’s known all along! Samarmas cried. I told you!
Was this how Grinning Ajokli would avenge his sacrilege?
I told you!
Was this how everything had already happened?
He lay shaking in terror, all but immobilized when the great train of bearers—caste-menials by the look of them—began filing immediately below him, talking in hushed murmurs, huffing for the great baskets of apples they bore upon their shoulders. The smell filled the deep halls, crisp and sour. Nothing shouted the impotence of the Fanim and their siege more loudly than the streams of soldiers and provisions arriving by sea. They laboured past, dim, dark Men, bearing apples as swollen as Mother’s lips, crimson unto purple and green. The gossamer hairs across the boy’s body fixed him as surely as nails. He lay watching the head of the train climb the hallway toward the alcove where the assassin lay hidden. But the flotilla of intervening baskets obscured the lead bearer, leaving only the absence of turmoil to indicate that the Narindar merely observed the same as he. The passage of so many bodies had whipped the lanterns into momentary brilliance, and so Kelmomas clearly saw the last man pass the point where he thought the assassin lay concealed. The bearer toiled on unaware and unmolested, save that he stumbled, and sent an apple from his basket. The fruit hung waxen red and green for a moment, before spinning to the floor and kicking back down the corridor, gleaming as it bounced.
A hand reached out and snatched it.
And the Narindar was striding back the way he came, glowering into emptiness, taking vacant bites of the apple as he approached. The white of the apple’s flesh bobbed overbright in the murk. Kelmomas lay as stiff as a dead cat. He did not breathe for the entirety of the assassin’s transit.
Only at that moment did he truly understand the dread proportion of his circumstance.
Everything has already happened …
The young Prince-Imperial took to hand-wringing in his mother’s chambers that night. Even Mother, for all her preoccupation, glimpsed his agitation through the veneer he typically wore to court her adoration.
“There’s no cause to fear,” she said, sitting next to him on the bed, cupping his cheek and pulling his head to her bosom. “I told you, remember? I killed their Waterbearer. Me!”
Hands on either shoulder, she pressed him back to display her marvelling smile.
“Your mother killed the Last Cishaurim!”
She had wanted him to clap his hands and cheer, and perhaps he would have, were it not for the swollen urge to chew out her tongue …
There was so much he had to teach her!