Perhaps Disease had fondled the boy’s soul as well.
And how was Mother able to kill him? the Voice asked. She has no Strength!
What does it matter?
There’s more happening here! More than we know!
So? You’re forgetting they’re all dead now, Sammi! All of those who could see!
And it seemed miraculous, the prospect of untainted impunity—glorious invisibility! To cuddle snuggle-warm in Mother’s arms, to whisper knives hot in her ear, to roam unhindered, unrestrained, through the darkling halls, the blind streets. He could play and play and play—
Father can still see.
Father was forever the pall across his jubilation.
“Shush …” Larsippus was saying, his braying voice huffing for the effort of sounding gentle. “Nothing to fear at all …”
So? He’s as good as dead.
How so?
Because dead is just someplace else, someplace too far away to ever come back from …
Golgotterath is not so far. Father will come back …
This lent his false sobs the pang of reality. And how could you know? What makes you so smart?
Because He came back from Hell.
Stories! Rumours!
Mother believes them.
The wraith floated in from the gloom of the Imperial Audience Hall and stepped into shimmering, sunlit materiality: her daughter, Anas?rimbor Theliopa, garbed in a blue, pearl-spangled gown hooped into the shape of an overturned fuller’s basin. Esmenet laughed at the sight of her, not so much for the absurdity of her dress as for the absurdity of finding it so beautiful—so true. She hugged the sallow blond girl tight, breathed deep her earthen scent—Thelli had never ceased smelling like a little girl. Esmenet even savoured the way the woman went rigid rather than reciprocate the embrace.
She cupped Theliopa’s cheeks, blinked tears hot enough for the two of them. “We have much to speak about,” she sighed. “I need you now more than ever.”
And even though Esmenet had expected as much, it stung, the lack of any answering passion in the girl’s angular expression. Theliopa could only miss her the way a geometer would miss his compass, such was the girl’s share of her father’s spoils.
“Mother …”
She had no time for this, for he had caught her eye. Esmenet pressed her daughter aside to consider the second soul the Inchausti had delivered …
Her impossible assassin.
What was it he had called himself? Issiral … the Shigeki word for “fate”. It was easily the most unlucky name she had ever heard … and yet Maithanet was dead. Her boy was avenged.
The Narindar strode into the angular sunlight and halted, stood upon the terrace threshold the way he had stood between the idols of War and Birth in Xothei. He had a strange mauled-beyond-his-years look, perhaps because his trim beard belonged to a younger generation. He was naked save for the grey cloth bound about his loins, and remote in the way of violent and imperturbable men. The short hair that had raised her hackles when she had first contracted the man—priests of Ajokli were forbidden to cut their hair—now occasioned relief. She had no wish for the world to know she harboured a devotee of the Four-Horned Brother. In fact, he would have looked a slave were it not for an unnerving air of relentlessness about him, the sense that absolutely nothing outside his cryptic ends mattered, be it scruple, let alone comfort or security. She thought of what Lord Sankas had said, the way Narindar saw events as wholes. She wondered whether the Consul had managed to flee to Biaxi lands.
Issiral’s right hand was bloodied, a token of the calamity he had wrought mere watches ago.
The calamity she had authored through him.
“You may cleanse your hands in the basin,” she said, nodding at the graven pedestal to his left.
The man wordlessly complied.
“Mother …” Theliopa said from her periphery.
“Join Phinersa and the others,” Esmenet directed the girl, watching the Narindar’s hands vanish beneath shimmering water. “He will tell you what little we know.”