She hadn’t even killed the Last Cishaurim … not in sooth.
Perhaps this explained her addiction to the verandah behind her husband’s throne—to standing, as she stood now, in this very place. Lingering here, she could almost believe the legend she had become, this mad myth of herself. Looking out over her city, she could indulge the fancy, the grandest of all the grand conceits, the tale of the hero, the soul that somehow wricks free the thousand hooks of circumstance, that somehow hangs above the fray, ruling without being ruled …
She closed her eyes, greeted the mellow warmth of the sun across her face … the feeling of orange.
With every passing day more and more Columnaries disembarked, swelling the garrison. General Powtha Iskaul had already struck sail with the battle-hardened Twenty-ninth. The three Arcong Columns she and Anthirul had sent to retake Shigek had been recalled, and had travelled at least as far as Asgilioch. Without his Waterbearer, Fanayal hesitated, if not wavered outright, even as his men clotted the southern hilltops with ever more siege engines. To simply eke out his existence, he had no choice but to endlessly provoke the surrounding countryside: thousands of retired Zaudunyani warriors were mustering in the neighbouring provinces, and tens of thousands more across the Three Seas …
It mattered not at all how her fortune had come about, only that it had come about.
The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas dared gaze against the evening glare, peer from point to point across the intricate urban vista, at Momemn, the famed Child of dark Osbeus, seat of Anas?rimbor Kellhus, the mightiest conqueror since Triamis the Great. The River Phayus parsed the northern limit on her right, a vast brown snake scaled in evening brilliance. The Girgallic Gate marked the western limit in the distance before her, squat towers scorched black for proximity to the sinking sun. The Maumurine Gate towered equally conspicuous on the southern limit, if only for the hood of wooden hoardings that had been raised about it following her encounter with the Cishaurim.
The air already possessed the arid evening absence of haze that seemed to strip the sense of distance from otherwise dim landmarks. But even as the sun blinded her to the western core of the city, it inked the regions surrounding with ever-greater clarity. The shadows of the distant siege towers joined the thatched black marking the spine of the hills. The once-dreaded Tower of Ziek cast the boroughs to the east of its square bulk into premature night. So too did the three gilded domes of mighty Xothei enclose more and more of the Cmiral’s campus in shadow.
Leaping from place to place with her look somehow made the dwindling of the light plain. And Esmenet realized that she could see it happen, the coming of night. She saw those final squares and lanes of sun-bright ground we all see, only scattered in countless thousands across her city. Looking about, she could see them dwindle according to the flattening sunlight. And as the edges retreated up the walls, the darkness became as liquid, a flood welling from all points already in shadow, submerging lesser structures and streets, then greater, climbing in counterpoint to the slow plummet of the sun.
Night was the foundation, she realized, the deathless state. The soul had no more than its tongue pressed against the complexity of Creation. She thought of her assassin, her Narindar, and how he had to dwell in the darkest night of all. This was why killing Maithanet had seemed so miraculous, so easy: because it had been no different than any other assassination—because being D?nyain didn’t matter. Being her husband didn’t matter.
Breathing becomes bright when we cease thinking.
As often happens, the hot glare of evening winked into the chill glow of dusk in a heartbeat. What was warm pressure fled into the cool vacancy of night. Esmenet shivered for the cold and the horror … for being a flea upon the back of calamity. She was a reader of Casidas. The ruins of ancient Cenei lay upriver, fields upon fields of fallow stone, the debris of a capital easily as great as her own. The ruins of Mehtsonc lay farther inland still, little more than a network of forested mounds, the legendary glory that was Kyraneas, indistinguishable from the earth … more gravel in the ground.
Momemn lay at the mouth of the Phayus, against the dark immensity of the Meneanor Sea. The Empires of the West had, the scholars said, run out of river.
Esmenet peered out over Momemn, watched the torches and candles and plates ignite across the indigo leagues, each conjuring a small golden world, most within windows, but some on street-corners and rooftops. Lives scattered as coins, she thought, thousands of jewels. A treasury of souls.
She had no idea who would write the history of her and her family. She prayed that it would not be anyone so clear-eyed as Casidas.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Ishterebinth