She shook her head in the groggy manner of drunks.
Kelmomas detached himself, swatted his cheeks and eyes while watching her.
“M-momma—?”
“There’s so many monsters!” Esmenet shrieked with her bones, her hair and her skin. “Wh-hy Th-Thelli?” she gasped on hitching breaths. “When-when there are so many monsters?”
Kelmomas moved to embrace her, but she was already exploding to her feet …
“He doesn’t even care!” she roared into emptiness, her fists balled to either side. “He has no heart to break! No will to weaken! No fury to provoke! Don’t you see? You take nothing from him when you take his children! Nothing!” She fell to her knees gagging, raised a wrist to her mouth.
“You only take … take … from me …”
The palace swung as if upon hooks about her axis, a revolving motley of gleaming splendour and chalk destruction. She thrummed as a string breaking, from skin to pit and beyond. All spears! All spears were aimed at her. A spite that dwarfed the Ages!
The Gods! The Gods hunted her and her children! Leering, coiling, burning, shaming, murdering, watching and watching and sometimes touching too, ever since she was a terrified little girl, sobbing into her terrified mother’s arms, saying, “I saw eyes, Momma! Eyes!” and her mother saying, “Shush … I did too …”
“Tomorrow we will kill a bird.”
Sundry glories lay crashed into ruin all about her. Her gaze roamed the wreckage, fell to the simple, idiot enumeration of what exists. Her little boy had lived in this room once—her youngest. She picked items from the dreck: the leather rocking horse that had sparked so many brawls with Sammi; the Cheribi cherry wardrobe stoved in the collapse that had killed Thelli; the five porcelain Kidruhil figurines given to him by Kay?tus, miraculously intact; and there, his silver Whelming Seal tipped against a ramp of bricked debris, reflecting the image of Kelmomas himself standing behind her to the right, his face framed in a flaxen maul. A dimple in the metal collapsed one cheek into his eyebrow—otherwise his expression one of malice and … joy?
Her eyes simply hung upon the image, awaiting the arrival of her teetering soul.
“Kel!”
The reflection’s eyes fastened on her gaze—jubilation slumped into grief.
Her heart cramped about the jagged stone of that transformation. She whirled to confront him, floating for the heat flushing through her limbs, once again crying, “Kel!” She reached out to seize him, possessed by a savagery she could not feel. But he leapt backward, into the air, and landed crouching on the far side of his dead sister’s body. She stumbled hard onto her knees, skinned her right palm.
No-no-no-no-no …
“Kel …” she called sobbing. “No … please.”
I can pretend!
But the Prince-Imperial turned and fled.
Remnants of Psatma Nannaferi oiled the curve of the Muzz? Chalice in smoking blood.
“Declare!” the Aspect-Emperor boomed.
The Mbimayu Schoolman pressed himself to his feet, confronted the soul that had roused the Gods. Anas?rimbor Kellhus—the great and terrible Aspect-Emperor.
But what was he forsooth? Prophetic redeemer or demonic tyrant?
Or was he the inhuman Thought-dancer described by Drusus Achamian?
“Declare yourself, Zeumi!”
The D?nyain paused tall and savage before the Mbimayu Schoolman, his edges fluttering like wildfire for the sorcerous whirlwind. Golden discs shimmered about a head and hands noxious for their Mark. He stood glaring just beyond the circuit of the Chalice, near enough that Malowebi had to lean into the virulent aura to remain upright.
“Un-under …” the Second Negotiant croaked, coughed at the panic crowding his lungs. “Under th-the provisions of the Blue Lotus Treaty struck between y-you and the Great Satakhan of High Holy Zeum …”
There was no thought of surviving a contest with this man. The Anagogic fetish sorcery of the Iswazi was no match for the Gnosis, let alone the Metagnosis. Even still, across the limit of his arcane sensitivity, Malowebi could feel the Fanim amassing Chorae beyond the whisking cyclone. Delaying was his only hope …
“Fanayal was no nation,” the dread figure snapped, the judgment in his voice as absolute as geometry. “You stand in contempt of the very Treaty you invoke.”
Time! He just needed more ti—
The Aspect-Emperor barked laughing, stepped so as to place Malowebi between himself and two of the dozen or so Chorae now surrounding the whirlwind. Even the husked demon-heads upon his hip seemed to howl.
Malowebi stood, mouth hanging, bowel churning, knowing he was doomed, and it cut him, pierced him through, thinking how Likaro would laugh. Curse his miscre—!