But how could it be so easy? What of the Unerring Grace?
How could a child dispose of an invading God?
No. This was a trick of some kind …
It had to be!
But … but …
He heard the latch of his door clink, the whistle of the bottommost hinge as the portal swung open. The sound fairly plucked his heart from his chest whole.
The Narindar continued staring as before, his eyes happening upon the newcomer the way his hand had happened upon the rolling apple. The boy need only hear the whisk of battling lace to know who had arrived.
Theliopa.
She appeared silk-luminous beneath the threshold, a scintillant vision compared to the watching assassin. She regarded him without the least fear, and would have owned the space had not the man buzzed with such monstrous horror. Save the archipelago of sodden fabric across her waist, she betrayed no sign of her weeping flight a mere watch prior. She merely gazed in open curiosity …
And seemed so perilously human for it.
The young Prince-Imperial gazed transfixed.
“Am I supposed to know-know that you await me?” she asked, her tone familiar.
“Yes,” the Narindar replied.
His voice was at once mundane and preternatural … like Father’s.
“So you-you will trust your skills against an Anas?rimbor?”
The near-naked man shook his head. “There is no skill in what I do.”
A pause, brief but more than interval enough. The boy saw Theliopa’s point of focus dull and sharpen as she slipped in and out of the Probability Trance.
“Because there is no skill in anything,” she said.
The blue light of the outdoors limned his profile, made his sandstone immobility even more impervious.
“And my death?” Thelli asked.
“Even now I see it.”
The gesture he made was curious, reminiscent of ancient Shigeki engravings, almost as though he placed the space he indicated.
His sister hitched back her skirts, glanced to her feet—to where the assassin pointed. The boy’s heart hammered. Thelli!
“So I am already dead?”
Move!
“What else would you be?”
Move, Thelli! Move!
“And you-you? Who are you?”
“Someone who was there when it happened.”
Afterward, the boy would decide that it had started heartbeats before, while they talked, like a bubble of some kind growing … a shudder riding the knife’s edge of an explosion.
A primordial hammer struck all points underneath at once. The boy bucked, curled like a tossed serpent. All was roaring motion. Issiral crouched into the quake’s bosom, curtains of masonry crashing about him. Theliopa stumbled, looked up in pallid alarm, then vanished in slumping shadows of stone brick debris.
Kelmomas threw his arms about his head, heard the pop of great joists cracking.
Then the ground was still.
He kept his face buried until the roar vanished into hiss and clatter.
All was dun obscurity when he finally dared peer—he could see only that the grill and a section of the wall that had concealed it had collapsed. He coughed and waved his hands, realized that he lay upon the edge of a collapse that had carried his bed to the floor below. The Narindar was nowhere to be seen, even though the portion of floor where he had stood remained intact. He could hear a man shouting, over and over, a paean of some kind. He could hear deeper, more distant calls, the throats of those attempting to restore order.
A woman’s hitching cry filtered from somewhere across the Sacral Enclosure.
Anas?rimbor Kelmomas clambered down the debris to the strewn floor of his room. He turned and stared at the broken remains of his elder sister. She lay face forward where her head had recoiled, one lifeless arm cast out, propped as though in drunken gesture, her hair a scatter of wiry flaxen, chalked white and slicked black. Kelmomas approached, blinking new tears from his eyes with every step. He peered breathless, saw no sign of the Worshipper he had glimpsed in the eyes of the others. How much more a doll she seemed dead. A sob kicked through him on his final step, and he leaned to scoop a slate brick, which he hoisted high upon a child’s grip, then cast down upon her head. The blood gratified him.
He could tell by looking that she was still hot to the touch.
“She’s deeead!” he wailed on the open wind. “Thelli’s dead, Momma! Momma!”
He cradled his sister’s ruined head on his lap, gazed at the collapsed wineskin of her face. He ducked his chin and indulged a gloating smile.
Do you believe? his twin whispered.
Oh, I believe.
The Four-Horned Brother was his friend.
“Mommaaaaa!”