Strike the Aspect-Emperor!
He hung from this momentous breath.
All he need do …
Indara’s Waterbearer wailed for outrage and incredulity.
And it was too late, for Anas?rimbor Kellhus had thrown out his arms upon his Cant’s completion. Malowebi gasped for wonder at the unfolding of Metagnostic Abstractions, the intricate extent, the searing power, geometries begetting geometries, each twining upward on an antler’s curve, a dozen, all flaring out and closing upon Meppa, wracking him with volcanic lights. The man’s shadow jerked.
Malowebi blinked for the Water’s abrupt absence, the arid gloom of mere sunlight. He glimpsed the Last Cishaurim slump from the low heights, trailing smoke, the black asp wagging as a tassel. And he reeled, thinking how all of it—everything!—had run aground upon the fact of this Man before him—this one impossible Man! The aspirations of a dispossessed race. The final and most brilliant flame of the Ps?khe. The machinations of High Holy Zeum—even the dread Mother of Birth!
Then the Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas was upon him, hauling him like a thief from market. Malowebi’s gaze caught upon the visage of a Decapitant, then Meppa sprawled semi-conscious across the wine-dark crimson of carpet. The man hoisted him by the breast of his robes, lifted him bodily. Black veils roped hypnotic beneath the sky …
And all he could see was the haloed mien of Anas?rimbor Kellhus, the glacial scrutiny in his gaze, a doom that no mortal could fathom …
A doom that was his.
“What?” the Mbimayu Schoolman gasped. “What … are … you?”
The man reached for the pommel jutting above his shoulder. Enshoiya flashed in the embattled light …
“Weary,” the grim visage replied.
The famed sword fell.
It was different now that he could not pass between the walls unseen, but it was the same outrageous game nonetheless: a boy chasing a God through the halls of his House.
The lamentations had dwindled, and battlehorns now cawed from regions not so distant. Kelmomas felt a mouse for the way he darted from blind to blind, never closing on the Narindar, never losing him either, always lingering on some glimpse of his back or shoulders. Always murmuring, Got you … then flitting forward. The man’s route through the half-ruin was too circuitous to be anything but premeditated, and yet it possessed no logic the boy could fathom, and seemed mad for the contradiction of the man’s grim intent and rudderless passage.
Did the Four-Horned Brother play in turn? he began wondering. Could all this be for his sake? Had Hell sent him a teacher … a playmate … a champion?
The question terrified as much as elated him.
So he crept and he sprinted from place to damaged place, through halls both wrecked and intact, mooning upon the thought of the Grinning God’s favour—the chance that he was Hate’s darling! He followed the breadcrumb glimpses around and about, impervious to any ruin or misery, ignoring even the sudden panic that sent so many running from the Andiamine Heights screaming, “Fanim! Fanim!” He cared not because he cared for nothing other than the play before his eyes, beneath his bare feet and naked hands. The silence of his mercurial brother meant that even he understood, even he agreed. Nothing mattered anymore …
Might just as well have one last bit of fun.
Momemn was destroyed. The Fanim were about to stack the survivors with the dead. And Mother …
Mother, she—
Ruined! Samarmas screamed, assailed him, biting deep into his neck before vanishing into his own shadow palace, the hollow bones of the boy’s own thought. Kelmomas scrunched the collar of his tunic—the one he had donned after his altercation with Theliopa—under his jaw and chin to staunch the blood.
He liked to remind him from time to time, his twin.
Remind him what it had been like before.
At last Issiral climbed back into the Upper Palace, this time using the Processional, the grand stair meant to wind dignitaries from fat lands and to overawe dignitaries from lean ones—or so Inrilatas had once told him. Two great silvered mirrors, the finest ever crafted, had hung at angles above the stair so that those climbing could see themselves against the gilded splendour surrounding and understand full well the base and mean truth of their origins. One of the mirrors had shattered, but the other hung intact as before. Kelmomas saw the near-naked man halt on the landing, stand as if arrested by his image hanging above. The Prince-Imperial ducked behind an overturned stone vase some two junctures back. He raised a cheek to gaze over the bevelled rim with a single eye.