But the assault never came. The high-hanging spaces were silent save for a single sparrow battling the nets that hung from the vaults of the absent wall. Her throat burned.
She fixed her gaze upon the silver-white opening, then carried her reflection across floors counted so sacred that Men had been slain for failing to embrace them. The sound of the sparrow’s travail began to scratch and buffet her breast from the inside. She paused on the lowermost step of the grand dais, winded by simple being.
The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas saw him then, a silhouette standing just inside the verge of the missing wall, as though sheltering his skin from the harsh autumn sunlight. She knew him instantly, but a more stubborn fraction of her soul elected to believe he was Issiral. His every step proved an insult to this pretense, the discs of gold about his hands and face, the Decapitants bound to his girdle, the flaxen beard and mane, the looming stature …
“Wha …” Esmenet coughed about sudden horror. “Wha-what are you doing here?”
Her husband held her in his expressionless regard.
“I have come to save you,” he said, “and to salvage what I might.”
“S-save me?”
“Fanayal is dead. His vultures scatter to the fou—”
The belly of her vision blackened, and she collapsed at his knees—as perhaps a dutiful wife should.
“Esmi?” Anas?rimbor Kellhus asked, kneeling to catch her. He held her cupped in the bottomless bowl of his scrutiny. She watched the scowl darken his face. He released her arms, towered over her dismay.
“What have you done?”
She winced at blows that did not come. She clawed at his wool leggings, hooked fingers into the rim of his right boot.
“I …” she began on the urge to vomit.
Let it … a seditious fragment whispered.
“I-I …”
Happen.
And the Gift-of-Yatwer sees himself seeing, as he steps out from where he has always awaited, the column’s marmoreal bulk drawing aside as a curtain, revealing the Demon Emperor standing as he has always stood, forever awaiting. He sees the White-Luck Warrior throw his broken sword …
Mother claps the Rug of the World …
He climbs a stairs in a hall so great that a galley could be dragged through it, oars drawn. He looks up, sees himself standing before the great bronze doors of the Imperial Audience Hall, the one blockaded shut by ruin, the other jarred open on cracked hinges. He watches himself gaze into the stone-girded gloom, the marmoreal heights gleaming, the floor reflecting all in darkling tones. He sees the sky hang white beyond the chamber’s vaulted frame, the ground behind the Mantle where light and dark wars, where the Accursed Aspect-Emperor stands before his shrinking wife. She had hidden her will from herself, but still the Demon can see.
As he has always seen.
The Gift-of-Yatwer sees himself pressed soundless to a great column, hearing, “What have you done?” echo across the polished gloom.
Mother stamps her foot upon the earth.
All of Life stumbles. The ceilings unhitch and come shrugging down.
His sword twirls broken through curtains of debris.
The Tear wells in Mother’s eye. The ground hammers all things terrestrial as a mallet.
The Demon dances clear the ceilings, miraculously stands to regard his teetering wife.
“Esmi?”
His broken sword pitches, end over end, following a miraculous chute through the curtains of debris.
Mother blinks the Tear. The vast ceiling slumps, then crashes, fragments of marmoreal splendour.
“Catch,” the Empress calls.
He crushes the flesh in his hands, drinks deep his Mother’s gift.
“Esmi?”
The Tear misses, leaving a rind of salt along his throat and left cheek.
Mother stamps her foot upon the earth. Seleukaran steel pitches through sheets of ruin, following the miraculous chute it has always followed, plunges into his throat. The wicked abomination gasps, as it has always gasped … the Whore of Momemn cries out for some passion beyond woe or joy.
Her husband gapes, vanishes beneath tumbling piers.
Arms out, the Gift-of-Yatwer looks up to the ragged remnants of the ceiling, embraces what has already happened.
The Empress calls, “Catch.”
See! the Prince-Imperial silently screeched at his twin. See!
The Game. It had been the Game all along!
Play was all that remained.
All that mattered.
He had sprinted up the Processional in his mother’s wake, staring into the surviving Grand Mirror, seeing nothing but an angelic boy smeared and daubed with blood—grinning in a manner some, perhaps, might find odd. Then he crept into the cavernous gloom of the Imperial Audience Hall, where he saw his mother standing bleached swan-white in the light of the Aperture, the missing wall. He crept soundlessly between the columns and through the shadows of the lesser aisle to the west. He spied the Grinning God quite quickly, standing beside a pillar on an angle inaccessible to where she stood. Heat flushed through him, such were the possibilities … the vulnerabilities.