Please … Samarmas sobbed from nowhere. Call to her …
Their mother stood upon the nethers of the audience floor, her arms held out, her face tilted to the chill emanation of light, as if awaiting …
Call to her!
It seemed such a dark and delicious moment.
No.
And then he sensed it, the stomach-dandling Mark … and he understood the true prize of this game they played.
Father!
Yes. The Four-Horned Brother hunted Father—the one most feared, most hated!
Kelmomas stood both horrified and astounded, then fairly whooped for the rush of savage vindication. He had been right all along! His impulses had possessed their own Unerring Grace—their own White-Luck! It seemed so clear now, both what had happened, and what was about to …
Mother crossed the expanse of kneeling tiles in a stupor, her gowns swishing as she approached the floor below the Mantle. The Prince-Imperial tracked her progress in the parallel gloom, making cramped faces of joy, malice, and fury. His soul pranced and capered while his body crept.
Of course! Today! Today was the day!
Battlehorns continued to peal in distant, metallic cascades. She paused upon the lowermost step of the dais. The sky painted the vacancy of her look white.
That was why Momemn had been cracked asunder! Why Anas?rimbor blood so flowed!
She saw Father, but chose not to recognize him as such. She awaited his approaching apparition as she would any vassal … then abruptly crumpled at his feet. Father caught her in his arms, knelt in a pose as intimate as the boy had ever seen between them. Her very image seemed warped for the foul proximity of his Mark.
This! This was why the Prince of Hate had come! To attend the coronation of a new and far more generous sovereign. One who could laugh as he shovelled souls into the furnaces of Hell! The boy crooned and cackled at the thought, and in his soul’s eye he could see it, the glory that was his future, the history of what had already happened! Kelmomas I, the Most Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas!
Rimmed in plates of ethereal gold, Father held Mother swooning upon the dais, gazed into the broken cup of her soul …
Suddenly he released her, stood graven in white and shadow as she wailed abject at his feet.
What have you done?
A flicker of motion in his periphery. The boy’s eye caught Issiral turning from behind the fluted bulk of the pillar concealing Him … the Four-Horned Brother preparing …
He would help—Yes! He would distract Father. Yes! That was his role. That was how it had already happened. He could feel it, somehow, like an oracular density in his bones.
A certainty hard as flint, heavy as iron … He need only abide, be the happening of what happened.
“Mommaaaa!” he wailed from his concealment.
Both Father and Mother jerked their faces in his direction. Father took a single step …
The Prince-Imperial looked to his infernal co-conspirator, to the Narindar, expecting … something other than the near-naked man gawking at him … stupefied.
Certainly something more godlike.
The Narindar shook his head, stared down aghast at his hands. His ears wept blood.
And this seemed a calamity greater than any the Prince-Imperial had suffered, an overturning that cast the final contents of his World askew. He had miscalculated, the boy realized. The wrongness lay as a frozen knife held flat across the tender of his throat …
He glanced back to the dais, saw his father striding out toward the Circumfix Throne, peering at the now hapless assassin—and the ground exploded …
A second quake, as mighty as the first. The penultimate vault, the one framing the missing wall, the one bearing the prayer tower that had been raised upon it, simply dropped. It fell as a cudgel wreathed in streamers of dust, a hammer the size of a bastion, crashing upon the very spot where Father had stood. The ground spanked the boy from his feet. Creation clacked and roared, dropped as torrents about every glimpse. Columns spilled into stacked drums, ceilings plummeted as sodden rags. He saw the man he had mistook for Ajokli fall to his knees between tumbling immensities. He saw it then, the terror of ignorance that is the curse of mortality; he apprehended the man’s sickening humanity the instant stone clapped it into oblivion.
And he screamed, shrieked the terror and fury of a child bereft of all he had loved and known.
A child not quite human.