You played too! You shared in the fun!
But finding the Narindar’s chamber empty had fairly stopped his small heart. For a long while he simply lay prone at the iron grilled vent, sapped of all strength, gouged of all thought, just peering at the shadowy corner where the Narindar should be … breathing. For those first moments, the thought of the Grinning God moving in the blackness, acting outside his observation, simply exceeded his grasp.
What were the chances? Was it simply happenstance that he would find the Narindar missing immediately after goading Thelli—the woman who clasped his doom in her long-fingered hands? Did the man merely roam the halls on another of his inexplicable errands? Or … or had all this already happened?
And yet again it defeated him, how he could be freer than free, and yet damned to repeat the memories of the Blasted God! Solving was doing, pulling the threads that unravelled the whole—driving skewers into tear ducts! But his every thought, his soul’s merest movement, had already happened, which meant he had never solved anything! Ever! Which meant …
He gagged for the impossibility. The hopelessness of the riddle became the hopelessness of his straits.
He wept for a time. Anyone hidden in Issiral’s chamber would have heard no more than a faraway keening punctuated by sniffles, delicate and near.
He lay like a sack.
How? his twin wailed. How could you be such an idiot?
It was her fault!
There has to be somethi—
There’s nothing! Don’t you get it?
The Prince of Hate! Ajokli hunts us!
A moment of roiling horror.
Then let him find us! Kelmomas resolved with rekindled savagery.
And he was racing through the shadow palace once again, his face burning, his tunic slick as flayed skin. A fury unlike any he had ever known animated him, sent his limbs slapping into the darkness. Images of wild violence exploded beneath his soul’s eye.
This was his House …
This was his House!
He would sooner die than cower within it.
He flew through the narrow slots, high wells, and crooked tunnels, scrambling like a monkey from the Apparatory back to the ingrown summit of the Upper Palace. He was nearly upon his bedchamber before the manic inkling that drove him faded into sober insight. He need only ask himself where a young Prince-Imperial would be found dead to begin guessing where his murder was going to take place. And in so many lays and histories, or so it seemed, the babes of Kings and Emperors were found strangled in their beds.
And like an axe swung, this realization struck him in two. The bull of outrage within him continued lunging forward, but the little boy had already begun snivelling and shrinking back in renewed terror. The throat of the tunnel closed as he neared, forcing him to his hands and knees. His passage forward, which had already possessed the ethereal character of dreams, became nightmarish, an ordeal of palms. He could see the luminous print of the bronze grill across the brickwork ahead of him, and it seemed both strange and appropriate that his room be both empty and bright. His throat and chest burned. Fear compelled him to crawl forward on his belly. He began mumbling voiceless prayers to no God in particular as he shimmed forward …
Please, his twin whispered.
Please …
Life rarely affords us the luxury of spying on our terrors. Typically they come upon us unawares, bat us about bewildered before leaving us wrecked or intact according to our doom. His breath a convulsive knife held fast in his breast, Anas?rimbor Kelmomas crept to the shining grill … peered around its edge the way a less divine child might peek above their covers. So certain was he that he would see the Narindar in his room that he had become equally certain that he would not, that this entire misadventure would simply show him up for the foolish child he was. All the familiar features swivelled into soundless view, the marmoreal walls, white with shadowy veins of blue, the pinkish marble of the trim and corbelling, the sumptuous bed, the tigers prancing across the crimson carpet, the scattered furnishings, the unshuttered balcony …
No.
The Prince-Imperial gaped breathless, utterly insensate for horror …
His eyes rolled for impossibility. Issiral stood near the heart of his room, as motionless as always, atavistic for his near nakedness, peering through the broad threshold into the antechamber where the door lay obscured. His earlobes seemed drops of blood, they were so red. The very World shuddered, rumbled like distant thunder.
No-no-no-no! his twin gibbered.
The Four-Horned Brother. The Grinning God. The Prince of Hate.
Ajokli stood in his room, awaiting his return …
Except that he now watched Him.
Confusion crimped his horror.
All he need do was … was … slink away … never return to his room …
Or better yet, alert the Pillarians or the Inchausti, tell them the Narindar had invaded his chambers without permission, insinuate … insinuate …