“Now they have no hope of overcoming our walls, Sweetling. We grow fat, fed by the sea, while the whole Empire rallies across the Three Seas! Fanayal. Was. A. Great. Fool. He thought he would reveal our weakness, but in sooth he has only shown the savages who would rule in our stead!”
Kelmomas had heard it all before of course, how Father, for all the demands he made of the provinces, “smashed no idols.” But the boy had never considered the Fanim an actual threat. If anything he had come to see them as allies in his war against his sister—and imbecilic ones at that. The only fear they instilled was the fear they would simply melt away, for the day they decamped was also the day his hag-cunt-sister would betray him—Thelli! Even if Mother refused to believe her at first, sooner or later she would. Despite her peculiarities, despite her inability to emote, let alone love, Theliopa was the one soul Mother trusted above all others.
Kelmomas could feel his body retreat into a weeping cage for pondering the consequences. It was too much … too much …
Necessity impaled him. Necessity piled upon mad necessity.
Never, it seemed, not even in the darkest of the dark cannibal days following Uncle Holy’s coup, had he been so oppressed, so maliciously and monstrously abused. Even Mother had become an affliction! Taking Thelli’s word over his! Over his!
There was so much Father had failed to teach her. There was so much she had yet to learn.
The Postern Terrace deserted, Esmenet leaned against the balustrade, her eyes closed to the evening glare, her face alive to the mellow heat. The last of her Exalt-Ministers and their Apparati had dissolved into the solution of the city. Ngarau, perhaps sensing her humour, had withdrawn with all the slaves in tow. She had even kicked off her slippers so she might savour the dwindling of day through the soles of her bare feet. Only her Inchausti remained, discrete and motionless sentinels, men who would die, as Caxes Anthirul had died, to keep her safe.
And it seemed miraculous what she had accomplished …
Would that she understood any of it.
Rehearsing events, she had found, simply made them more baffling. But word of these atrocities and miracles—overthrowing Maithanet, killing the Last Cishaurim—had spread, sparking an even more profound wonder. The minstrels were singing of her, the caste-menials had shrugged away the Yatwerian foment and were claiming her as their own. Zaudunyani across the Three Seas now made her their example, testimony of the divinity of their cause. Pamphlets were distributed. Numberless bless-tablets were stamped and fired with her name. She became Esmenet’arumot, Esmenet-unbroken … Mother of the Empire.
“‘The dogs besiege our mother!’” Phinersa had told her the other morning. “This is what they cry in the streets. ‘Our mother is in peril! Our mother!’ They pull their hair and beat their breasts for you!” The Water, it seemed, had burned away whatever reserve of arrogance Phinersa had possessed with his arm. Her Master-of-Spies, she had come to realize, was the kind of man who gave in proportion to his sacrifice—this was likely why Kellhus had chosen him to serve her. The more Phinersa lost in her name, the more he would commit to her next throw. That same night she discovered that he had sent an array of palm-sized tablets—different blessings—to her apartments. Years ago, seeing her face upon what the faithful called “silver empresses” and the apostates “shiny harlots” had left her numb, devoid of shame or pride. But she wept for seeing these crude plates, for seeing her name wedged as something prized, something holy …
Something unconquerable.
And how could she not, when she was a harlot in a land that held them accursed? A Sumni whore, no less, a bright beacon of Thousand Temples hypocrisy …
How could she be anything but broken?
In the histories she had read, the authors always attributed events to will, if not that belonging to the principles, then to the Hundred. The stories were stories of power: caprice was something she always had to read into accounts. The great Casidas, of course, was the sole exception. As a onetime galley slave, he understood both sides of power, and so possessed a keen eye for the conceits of the powerful. His Annals of Cenei had knotted her innards night after night for this very reason: Casidas understood the truth of power in times of strife, how history was a blind thresher. He himself described it as, “a perpetual battle fought in the pitch of an eternal night, shadowy Men hacking at hints in the gloom and all too often”—she would never forget the phrase—“reaping their beloved.”
Esmenet also understood the sordid tangle of immunity and vulnerability that comes with power—well enough to be interminably stranded upon their divide. She was no fool. She had lost too much to trust to any consequence, let alone her ability to command the hearts of Men. The name the mob called may now be hers but the woman they invoked simply did not exist. She had made this reversal possible, it was true, but more as a wheel makes a chariot possible, and not as a charioteer. She had provided her Empire with a name to focus their belief, and scarce more.