All was bustling activity about the mother and daughter, urgent and yet all the more muted for it. She had chosen the Postern Terrace behind the Imperial Audience Hall to establish her command, not simply for the view it afforded of her besieged city, but because it forced everyone she summoned to contemplate her husband’s Holy Chair, the Circumfix Throne, before coming to kneel before her. A small multitude now milled about the balustrade—merchants, officers, spies and advisors—peering out to the surrounding hills, pointing, exchanging questions and observations. A steady stream of messengers passed back and forth from the murk and glister of the Imperial Audience Hall. Harried looks were exchanged with sharp words. Three Kidruhil signallers stood at the ready with their bronze longhorns, one missing his horsehair helm, the other with his arm in a crimson sling. Porters had arrived with the first of the drink and food mere moments before.
The Whore had favoured her—at least so far. They knew very little as of yet, save that Momemn remained inviolate. The streets yet surged, but the campuses of the Cmiral and the Kamposea Agora appeared all but deserted. Smoke rose from the Lesser Ancilline Gate, but she had been told the fire was due to a mishap.
Fanayal, it seemed, had known nothing of the internecine turmoil that engulfed the city. Maithanet had fairly stripped the ramparts to better bully the mob, anticipating that her capture would provoke riots. Had Fanayal stormed Momemn directly, the mat of street and structure below would already be a ruinous battleground. But the Bandit Padirajah had chosen to take Jar?tha as his base and secure the countryside surrounding the Imperial Capital instead—affording her time she desperately needed. As surreal, as horrific, as it was watching bands of wild enemy horsemen scour the distance, the sight flushed her with an almost delirious sense of relief. So long as the heathen filth remained out there, Thelli and Kelmomas were safe.
She watched the Narindar stare at his cleansed hands, then lower his ear as if listening … for some further portent? He was every bit as eerie and unsettling as he had been that fateful day she had contracted him … the day of Maithanet’s coup.
The man finally turned to meet her gaze.
“What you did …” she began, only to trail.
His look was bold in the manner of children.
“What you did,” he repeated, but not as if he were confused by her meaning. His voice was as unremarkable as his appearance, and yet …
“How?” she asked. “How could it be possible?”
How could a mere man murder a D?nyain?
He pursed his lips in lieu of shrugging.
“I am but a vessel.”
And it pimpled her skin, this answer. Were she a caste-noble, she would have been oblivious. Only a soul reared in slums and gutters, a caste-menial or a slave, could understand the dread import of what he meant, for only such souls understood the horror of the Four-Horned Brother … Ajokli.
Only the most desperate turned to the Prince of Hate.
The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas signed a charm that only Sumni harlots would know. By happenstance a slave scurried between them bearing a shallow basket stacked with peaches. She plucked one from the man’s passage, whether to allay or to conceal her anxiety she did not know. “Catch,” she called, tossing it to the Narindar.
The man picked it from the sky. Then, closing both of his hands about it, he raised it above his open mouth and violently squeezed, so that he might drink its nectar directly, in the uncouth Shigeki manner.
Esmenet watched with a kind of appalled fascination.
“I want you to remain here in the palace,” she said as he lowered the pulped fruit. Sunlight limned the runnels of juice across his shaved chin.
At first she thought he looked at her, but then she realized that he looked beyond, as if spying something on the distant hills …
“With me,” the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas said, biting a pensive lower lip.
The man continued staring around her edges. Shouting rose up through the Imperial Audience Hall, fractured for the accumulation of echoes. At last they had found him, Caxes Anthirul, her Home Exalt-General, the man who had capitulated to Maithanet—who would have assured her doom, had the Whore been less generous.
The Narindar, Issiral, lowered his head in cryptic obeisance.
“I will consult my God,” he said.
Kelmomas breathed like a child asleep, lay motionless like one, his limbs akimbo above tangled sheets, his eyes shut in the slack manner of dreaming souls, but his ears were pricked to the mazed darkness, and his skin tingled, alive to the promise of her touch.
She stalked the apartments beyond, exhausted, he knew, yet restless with the alarums of her day. He heard her clasp the decanter on the Seolian side-board, the one stamped with the serpentine dragons that so fascinated him from time to time. He heard her sigh in gratitude—gratitude!—that the thing had been filled.
He heard the silken gurgle of a bowl deeply filled. The gasp between compulsive swallows.
He heard her staring out into vertigo, the wine-bowl clink to the floor.
Inwardly, he clucked for glee, imagining her acrid smell and her embrace, at first timid, then growing more fierce with the waxing of her desperation. He was clean, his skin scrubbed pink with cinnamon-scented soaps, then rinsed in dilute tinctures of myrrh and lavender. She would hold him, tighter and tighter, and then she would weep, for fear, for loss, but for gratitude far, far more. She would clutch him and sob, her lips pursed against any audible wail, and she would exult in the beatific glory of her living son … she would tremble and she would gloat and she would think, So long as I have him …