The Aspect-Emperor swatted Psatma Nannaferi to the ground, hoisted the ailing Padirajah by his throat—held him as if he were no more than a child!
The two old foes regarded each other thus, seeming to fall forward for the sheets of detritus whipping behind. The air howled, a sound like sheets tearing, or wildcats screaming. Smaller gyres of dust had nested within the greater, transforming what had been the Harem into a dun bowl, one kicked into clouds by the phantom shell of the Muzz? Chalice. Fanayal lolled semi-conscious in the fluttering sunlight.
The Aspect-Emperor peered at him, as though willing the man to recognize who had conquered him.
Such a breathtaking demonstration of power! To stand in the heart of his enemy’s host and dictate life and death with impunity …
The Padirajah became conscious on a seizure, an unmanly paroxysm of terror.
“Who conceived this!” the Aspect-Emperor thundered.
Malowebi saw the Padirajah move his lips—
Then drop like rope to the earth. Malowebi swayed for the absolute finality of it, caught himself on a step. Fanayal ab Kascamandri was dead …
Dead!
The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas had turned to the laughing Mother-Supreme, who lay limbs lolling upon the embroidered earth. He yanked her to feet, spared her the indignity he had extended Fanayal.
She stood uncowed, cackled in the shadow of his looming, wind-whipped aspect.
“Mother!” she cried to the skies over his shoulder. The gale tore her costume like dogs growling on towels. “Prepare for me my place! For I come as one who gives—gives without memory! One who dies for tending what is Yours!”
“My sister,” Anas?rimbor Kellhus said, “can no longer save you.”
“And yet you have come!” she cried in exaltation. “Come to collect your doom!”
“The Hundred are blind to the No-God. None more than the Mother of Birth.”
“Then why,” she shrieked laughing, “do I remember this? The White-Luck will eat you ere this day is dead!”
The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas betrayed nothing more than wind-lashed curiosity.
“You can be Everywhere and still be blind,” he said. “You can be Eternal and remember nothing.”
“So says the loosed Demon! So says filth and horror made manifest! Abyssal hunger!”
“Even the Infinite can be surprised.”
The Anas?rimbor seized her and spoke in a single motion, his right hand clamped about her forehead, his voice cracking Reality to the joist. Brilliance consumed the Yatwerian witch. Malowebi raised a hand to shield his eyes, but too late, and so he stood blinking as the tall shadow that was the Aspect-Emperor turned from the whipping mayhem to confront him.
One of the Decapitants upon his thigh mouthed fungal warnings. Psatma Nannaferi was nowhere to be seen.
“What do you think, Mbimayu?” the Aspect-Emperor called, his voice eerie for slipping through the roar. He spoke as if about a dinner table. “Do you think Yatwer allowed her to see this?”
The Mbimayu Schoolman stood paralytic in a manner he had never before known.
“Wh-wh-what?” he stammered.
Then he heard it as an eerie intrusion upon the ripping of winds. “Motherrrrrrrr!”
A faraway call … Nearing?
Malowebi frowned, looked skyward in a panic, saw Psatma Nannaferi pitching and kicking for the merest instant before her image exploded into pulp across the arch of his Muzz? Chalice.
“Her plummet,” the Thought-dancer said.
The Zeumi Emissary coughed, for something he knew not what, then staggered to his knees.
Esmenet had to pet the girl’s hair lightly, lest she make contact with the lack of substance beneath.
“No-no-no-no-no,” she blubbered and sobbed, rocking her daughter’s ruined head.
Her body trembled of its own accord, muscles dancing like coins across porcelain. She could no longer hear her beloved Capital. Her lament for had become wailing with.
“Mommaaaa!” Kelmomas bawled into her side.
The Gods wrought this.
“Mommaaaa!” Kelmomas keened …
Kelmomas. The one that yet lived …
Out of all those who had mattered.
She felt herself divide then, divide as she had cradling the final convulsive breath of Samarmas, broken about the fault line that fissures all mothers, the instinct to bury what was mad for loss beneath what was mad for making safe. She stared at the creviced ceiling, tried to ignore the sheeting heat of her tears. She rallied about her numb core—there was no time for this!
“Sh-sh-shhh …” she managed to coo to her shuddering boy. She had to get him to safety—away from all this horror. Saxillas! What was it Saxillas had said? She leaned from her rump, wiped a furious sleeve across her face. The ships! She must get him to the harbour! She must be strong!
But the image Theliopa so … ruined yanked her back to the shattered bricks.
“Noooooo,” she moaned as though only now happening upon her daughter. “This isn’t …”
She lowered her eye to the heel of her palm, rubbed at the grit that afflicted her.
“This-this isn’t …”