Maithanet’s own bodyguard, the Inchausti, march Esmenet through the early morning streets to the Temple of Xothei. The frightful passage quickly transforms into a humiliating parade as more and more of Momemn awakens to word of the Empress’s capture. Riot breaks out by the time they finally gain the great three-domed Temple’s gate.
In chains, she is led into the gloom of the interior, to the central dais with its golden idols of the Ten, where she finds Maithanet awaiting her. He demands to know why she had Inrilatas try to assassinate him, and when she replies that she had nothing to do with it, he realizes that she speaks true. To Esmenet’s astonishment, he falls to his knees and begs her forgiveness. Maithanet confesses that Kellhus’s design defeats him as much as her, and that he now thinks that Kellhus had known all along that his Empire would collapse in his absence, and so had abandoned them to their own fates. He calls out to the surrounding lords and ministers, announcing the reconciliation of the Tusk and the Mantle. With wonder Esmenet watches dozens of Shrial and Imperial Apparati stride from the gloom toward her. The Shriah hears a noise, turns toward the idols. Standing in the one place overlooked, the White-Luck Warrior plunges a knife into his breast.
Uproar seizes the assembly, but Esmenet seizes them, decrying Maithanet as a traitor and a heretic—the murderer of the Aspect-Emperor’s son. She speaks oil as Kellhus had taught her, saying not what was true, but what most needed to be believed. She is the only remaining link to their holy Warrior-Prophet, so when she screams at them to kneel, those assembled comply.
They all hear it in the ensuing silence, the throb of Fanim war-drums, and Esmenet realizes …
Fanayal attacks Momemn.
Prologue: Momemn
And naught was known or unknown, and there was no hunger.
All was One in silence, and it was as Death.
Then the Word was spoken, and One became Many.
Doing was struck from the hip of Being.
And the Solitary God said, “Let there be Deceit.
Let there be Desire.”
—The Book of Fane
Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn
For all the tumult of the Unification Wars, for all the rigours of motherhood and imperial station, Anas?rimbor Esmenet had never ceased to read. Of all the palaces her divine husband had seized for her comfort, not one had wanted for material. She had marvelled at the bleak beauty of Sirro in the arid shade of Nenciphon, dozed with the labourious precision of Casidas in the swelter of Invishi, scowled at the profundities of Memgowa in the chill of Oswenta. Smoke often plumed the horizon. Her husband’s Holy Circumfix obscured walls, festooned shields, pinched naked throats. His children would watch her with His omnivorous eyes. The slaves would wash and scrub away the blood, paint, and plaster over the soot. And whenever opportunity afforded, she devoured what she could, the great classics of Early Cenei, the polyglot masterpieces of the Late Ceneian Empire. She smiled at the rollicking lays of Galeoth, sighed for the love poetry of Kian, bristled at the race chants of Ce Tydonn.
But for all the wisdom and diversion these forms possessed, they hung in the aether of fancy. Only history, she discovered, possessed a nature that answered her own. To read history was to read about herself in ways both concrete—Near Antique accounts of the Imperial Ceneian Court often pimpled her skin, so uncanny were the resemblances—and abstract. Every history and chronicle she consumed answered to the same compulsions, the same crimes, same hurts, same jealousies and disasters. The names were different, as were the nations, languages, and ages, and yet the same lessons remained, perpetually unlearned. It was almost musical in a sense, variations playing against ruinous refrains, souls and empires plucked like the strings of a lute. The peril of pride. The contradiction of trust. The necessity of cruelty.
And over time, one lesson in particular came to haunt her, a moral that—for her, at least—could only appal and dismay …
Power does not make safe.
History murders the children of weak rulers.
The crow of battlehorns, so different from the long-drawn yaw of prayer-horns across the city.
Momemn was in uproar. Like a bowl of water set upon the floor of a racing chariot, it quivered and spit and swamped its rim. Anas?rimbor Maithanet, the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples, was dead. Fanim drums throbbed against gaseous hearts, made menace of the west. The Imperial Apparati and Shrial Knights ran to secure the Imperial Capital—to open the armouries, to rally the bewildered, to man the great curtain walls. The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas, however, ran to secure her heart …
Her son.
“Kelmomas hides yet in the palace …” Maithanet had said ere her assassin had struck.